Interracial Marriage
The Church disavows the idea that it is a sin, and the scriptures never taught it in the first place
For most of the twentieth century a young Latter-day Saint asking about marrying outside his race would have been told to think very hard about it. Sometimes the counsel was framed as practical wisdom about hard marriages. Sometimes it came dressed as doctrine, with verses attached. Either way it was widely spoken, it was printed, and a great many members absorbed it as the mind of God.
It was NOT the mind of God, and the Church has said so in writing.
The more interesting question is the one almost nobody asks. If the scriptures actually forbade marrying across racial lines, what do we do with the fact that the Old Testament’s central prophet did it, and that the genealogy of Jesus Christ runs straight through foreign women?
Moses Married an African Woman, and God Defended Him
Numbers 12 is one of the most direct passages in the Bible on this subject, and it is almost never taught as such. The chapter opens with a family complaint against Moses. The complaint is about his wife.
“And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.”
The verse says it twice. Whoever wrote it down wanted no one to miss the reason for the quarrel. The Hebrew word is Cushite, and Cush is the land south of Egypt, in what we would now call Sudan and Ethiopia. Moses, the prophet who spoke with God face to face, was married to a black African woman, and his brother and sister did not like it.
So God called all three of them to the tabernacle door. He did not ask Moses to explain himself. He came down in a pillar of cloud and rebuked the two who had objected, asking them why they had not been afraid to speak against His servant. Then the cloud departed.
“And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow.”
Sit with the irony for a moment. A woman objects to her brother’s dark-skinned wife, and God turns her WHITE. Whatever else that passage is doing, it is not endorsing her position.
And notice what Moses does next, because it is the part that matters most. He does not gloat. He cries out to God to heal her. The man who was insulted becomes the one who pleads for the person who insulted him, which is the only response to this whole subject that a disciple of Christ has ever been authorized to give.
One more thing, because it decides the question. Was Moses penalized for that marriage? Was his house? No. His sons are numbered with the tribe of Levi in 1 Chronicles 23:14–15, and no restriction of any kind attaches to his posterity anywhere in scripture. The lawgiver of Israel married into the line of Cush, who was Ham’s son, and the priesthood went on through his family exactly as before. Whatever the old counsel claimed about mixed marriages, the Old Testament’s own prophet is the standing counterexample.
The Genealogy of Jesus Christ
Matthew opens his gospel with a list of names, and most readers skim it. That is a mistake, because Matthew put things in that list on purpose. Ancient genealogies named fathers. Matthew stops four times to name a mother, and every one of the women he names is a foreigner or married to one.
The Women in the Line of Christ
- Tamar — a Canaanite daughter-in-law of Judah
- Rahab — a Canaanite of Jericho, from the very nation Israel had been commanded to drive out, who hid the spies and was spared with her whole household
- Ruth — a Moabitess, and great-grandmother of King David
- Bathsheba — named by Matthew only as the wife of Uriah the Hittite
Ruth deserves her own paragraph. She was a Moabite widow with no obligation to stay, and Moab was a nation Israel despised. She stayed anyway, and the sentence she spoke to Naomi is the finest statement of conversion in the Old Testament: “thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Boaz married her. Their son Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David.
So the royal line of Israel, the line of the Messiah Himself, descends from a marriage that a strict racial reading would have forbidden. Would anyone care to tell the Lord that His own ancestry was ill-advised?
There is one more, and for Latter-day Saints it lands closest to home. Joseph, sold into Egypt, was given a wife by Pharaoh:
“And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnath-paaneah; and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On.”
Read plainly, Asenath is Egyptian — the daughter of a priest of On, the city the Greeks called Heliopolis. She bore Manasseh and Ephraim, and nearly every Latter-day Saint who receives a patriarchal blessing is declared of the house of Ephraim.
This one has to be argued carefully, though, because Jewish tradition disputes it. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders the verse with a genealogy the Hebrew does not contain: Asenath was the daughter of Dinah by Shechem, carried into Egypt and raised in Potiphera’s household. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer tells it the same way. On that reading she is Jacob’s granddaughter, of the line of Shem, and no foreign marriage happened at all.
So which reading is right? Genesis itself gives her one description and no other ancestry, calling her simply “the daughter of Potipherah priest of On.” The Dinah genealogy arrives centuries later, in interpretation rather than in the text.
But notice why that tradition needed to exist. Ancient readers looked at Genesis 41:45, saw a patriarch of Israel marrying the daughter of an Egyptian priest, and went to real trouble to solve it. The harmonization is itself a witness to how plainly the verse reads. And whichever way a person lands on Asenath, nothing here depends on her. Moses’ Cushite wife is not ambiguous, and neither are Rahab and Ruth.
What Israel Was Actually Forbidden
Someone will reach for Deuteronomy at this point, because Israel clearly was told not to intermarry with certain nations. That is true. The thing to do with that command is read the next sentence, where God gives His reason, and He gives it in the same breath:
“Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.”
For they will turn away thy son from following me. The stated danger is apostasy. Not ancestry, not complexion, not blood — IDOLATRY. The concern is that a spouse who worships other gods will pull the covenant child away from the God of Israel, which is a worry about religion and it reads as one.
How do we know that is the right reading? Because of what happened to the people who fell outside it. Rahab was a Canaanite, from a nation on the prohibited list, and she married into Israel and into the Messiah’s genealogy. Ruth was a Moabitess, and Moabites were barred from the congregation by name, and she married Boaz and became David’s great-grandmother. Neither woman changed her ancestry, because ancestry was never the barrier. Both changed their God.
The command was about covenant, and the moment a foreign woman entered the covenant the objection evaporated. That is the pattern every time the Old Testament tests it.
Where the Old Counsel Came From
If the scriptures do not teach it, why did so many Latter-day Saints hear it?
Because the Church grew up inside nineteenth and twentieth century America, and American Christianity had built an entire apparatus of verses to defend slavery and then segregation. The curse of Ham, the mark of Cain, the separation of the nations at Babel. None of it survives contact with the actual text, but all of it was in the air, in the pulpits, and in the law. Most states outlawed interracial marriage outright, and many did so until the Supreme Court struck those laws down in 1967. Latter-day Saints breathed the same air as their neighbors and repeated a good deal of what they heard.
Is there a scriptural way to understand a church carrying counsel that was never God’s mind? There is, and Christ supplied it Himself when the Pharisees asked why Moses had permitted divorce:
“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder… He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.”
God allowed into the law of Moses something that was NOT His will, and Christ names the reason without softening it: the people demanded it, and their hearts were hard. Divorce sat inside that law for thirteen centuries. Nobody concludes that Moses was a false prophet over it. A church made up of people who had grown up inside a segregated America carried some of that hardness in with them, and the Lord worked with the people He actually had, as He always has. That explains the old counsel. It does not baptize it, because from the beginning it was not so.
That is an explanation, and it is not an excuse. The Church does not offer it as one either. Its 2013 essay on race names the teaching and rejects it without qualification, in the same sentence where it rejects the rest of the folk doctrine:
Race and the Priesthood, Gospel Topics Essay, 2013
“Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.”
That mixed-race marriages are a sin. DISAVOWED, by name, by the Church, in a document published on its own website over the signature of its leadership. A member who still teaches it is not conserving something old and precious. He is repeating a thing his own church has formally set down.
What the Church Asks of a Couple Today
There is NO restriction of any kind. A man and a woman of different races who are worthy of a temple recommend may be sealed in any temple of the Church, for time and all eternity, on exactly the same terms as anyone else. No permission is required and no counsel against it is authorized.
What the Church does ask about a marriage has not changed in two hundred years, and it has nothing to do with skin. Does this person keep covenants? Will the two of you kneel at the altar worthily? Will you raise your children in the gospel? Those are the questions, and they are the only questions.
Couples in interracial marriages do sometimes meet real difficulties, though the difficulties come from other people rather than from the marriage. A relative who will not come to the wedding. A ward member with a comment. Children asked which half they are. That is a burden worth naming honestly, and it is a burden created by the prejudice of onlookers, not by any flaw in the union. The remedy is to fix the onlookers.
President Russell M. Nelson put the governing principle in general conference in October 2020: “God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear.” A God who denies none, who made of one blood all nations of men, and who defended His prophet’s Cushite wife from the tabernacle door in a pillar of cloud, is not a God who objects to whom His children marry on the grounds of color.
Sources
Sources and Scriptures Cited
- “Race and the Priesthood” — Gospel Topics Essay, 2013. The disavowal of mixed-race marriage as sin is quoted above in full.
- Russell M. Nelson, “Let God Prevail” — General Conference, October 2020.
- Numbers 12:1–15 — Miriam and Aaron object to Moses’ Cushite wife, and God rebukes them
- 1 Chronicles 23:14–15 — the sons of Moses numbered with the tribe of Levi
- Matthew 19:6–9 — Moses suffered divorce because of the hardness of their hearts; from the beginning it was not so
- Deuteronomy 7:3–4 — the intermarriage command, with the reason God gives for it
- Matthew 1:1–16 — the genealogy of Christ, naming Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah
- Genesis 41:45–52 — Joseph marries Asenath, who bears Manasseh and Ephraim. Genesis gives her no ancestry beyond her father.
- Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 41:45 — the rabbinic tradition that Asenath was Dinah’s daughter, raised in Potiphera’s house; told the same way in Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 38.
- Ruth 1:16 — thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God
- 2 Nephi 26:33 — he denieth none; all are alike unto God
Related: Race and the Gospel of Jesus Christ · When You See Racism · Eternal Marriage · The Family