When You See Racism

What discipleship requires of the people who are standing there

A missionary from Kenya was invited to dinner by a family in his area. His companion was Zimbabwean. The ward they served held members from Chile, Colombia, Portugal, and Ghana, and he had thought of that mix as one of the best things about the place.

Over dinner the conversation turned to members who bore their testimonies in languages other than English. Then it turned to him, and he was told he was of the lineage of Cain. Other things were said that he described afterward as degrading. He answered them calmly. He said he believed a chapel ought to feel like an embassy of heaven, where people of every nation and language could gather and belong.

He went home. Nothing was done. Eventually he was transferred, and eventually he stopped serving, and the thing that stayed with him longest was not the sentence about Cain. It was the silence around it.

The doctrinal question — whether anyone is of the lineage of Cain — is answered elsewhere on this site, and the answer is no. This page is about a different question, and it is the harder one. What does the gospel of Jesus Christ require of everybody else in that room?

Respect of Persons Is Named as Sin

Peter had to be taught this by vision, three times over, because he did not believe it the first two times. He came down off that rooftop having learned something that reorganized his ministry, and he said it out loud the moment he walked into a Gentile’s house.

Acts 10:34–35

“Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.”

In EVERY nation. That was a revelation to the senior Apostle of the Church, and it cost him something to accept, because he had spent his life inside a system that sorted people by blood.

How serious is this? James takes the same principle and gives it a legal name. He imagines a congregation where a man in fine clothing is seated well and a poor man is told to stand, and he does not treat it as bad manners:

James 2:9

“But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.”

Ye commit sin. Not a lapse of taste, not an unfortunate attitude, not a cultural blind spot that will sort itself out in another generation. SIN, with the law cited against the person who does it. Sorting the children of God by category and treating them accordingly is transgression, and James says so in a letter that Latter-day Saints have loved for two centuries because of a different verse in it.

What Was Promised at the Water’s Edge

Every member of this Church made a covenant at baptism, and most could recite the terms if asked. Alma spelled them out at the Waters of Mormon before a single person went into the water.

Mosiah 18:8–9

“Willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death.”

Look at how much of that covenant was live in that dining room and went unexercised. A burden was being laid on a young man, and nobody helped carry it. There was someone present who needed comfort, and none arrived. And the covenant closes with a clause that does not leave the location up to us: to stand as witnesses of God at all times, in all things, and in ALL PLACES that ye may be in.

All places includes a friend’s dinner table. It includes a table where the host is the one talking, and the guests are comfortable, and speaking up would ruin a pleasant evening. That is precisely the kind of place the covenant was written to cover, because the easy rooms never needed a covenant in the first place.

Mourn with those that mourn. Not later, and not privately afterward in the car. There in the room, where the mourning is happening.

The Priest and the Levite Did Nothing at All

Christ told a story about a man beaten and left by the road, and the two men who walked past him were not thieves. They were religious professionals on their way to serve God, and their offense in the parable is entirely an offense of omission. They saw, and they passed by on the other side.

Then the man who stopped was a Samaritan, which is the detail the original audience would have found hardest to swallow. Christ made the despised foreigner the hero and the insiders the failures, and He did it to a crowd that had strong feelings about Samaritans. The parable is aimed exactly where this subject lives.

The law of Moses had already made the duty explicit, and it is stated in a form most members have never noticed:

Leviticus 19:17

“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.”

Not suffer sin upon him. To suffer, in the older English, is to permit. The commandment forbids letting your neighbor go on in his sin unchallenged, and it sits three verses above the one everybody knows about loving your neighbor as yourself. They are the same commandment. Loving a man well enough to correct him is treated as part of loving him at all.

Ezekiel puts the cost of silence in terms that should stop anybody who has ever decided a moment was not worth the trouble. What becomes of the watchman who sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet? He does not simply fail at his post. The blood of the one who is taken is required at his hand.

Is that severe? It is. It is also the consistent scriptural position on what it means to be present while something wrong happens and to say nothing.

If Ye Are Not One, Ye Are Not Mine

The Lord attached this to His own name, which raises the stakes considerably.

Doctrine and Covenants 38:27

“Behold, this I have given unto you as a parable, and it is even as I am. I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.”

The parable just before that verse is about a man with sons who are equal, and who tells them to clothe themselves alike. The Lord then applies it to His church and makes oneness the test of belonging to Him.

What does a people look like when they finally manage it? The Book of Mormon shows the only society in its whole record that got it right, and the description is startling:

4 Nephi 1:17

“There were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.”

Nor any manner of -ites. The ethnic labels that two nations had killed each other over for six hundred years simply stopped being used, and the record treats that as one of the marks of a Zion people, listed alongside the disappearance of murder. Enoch’s city is described the same way, of one heart and one mind, and a congregation sorted by ancestry is the exact opposite of the thing God has said twice that He is building.

What the Prophets Have Said Out Loud

Nobody has to guess at the position of the Church. It has been stated from the pulpit of general conference, in front of the whole membership, in language chosen to leave no room.

President Gordon B. Hinckley, in April 2006, put it in terms of discipleship itself: “I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ.”

President Russell M. Nelson, in October 2020, did not leave it at condemnation. He gave an assignment. “Today I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice,” he said, and then, “I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.”

Lead out. That verb was chosen carefully, and it does not describe someone waiting to see whether anyone else at the table objects first. So what does leading out look like at a dinner table?

What to Do in the Room

Most people who stay quiet in a moment like that are not bigots. Why do they freeze? They are startled, they are guests, they do not want a scene, and they tell themselves that saying something would only make it worse. An hour later they think of exactly what they should have said. That is an ordinary human failure and it deserves to be named gently, because naming it gently is the only way anyone changes.

It is also worth being clear about what speaking up is not. It is not a denunciation of the person, and it is not a claim that they are beyond repentance or unwelcome in the Church. Almost nobody who says something like this has studied it. They inherited it from a parent or a manual or a stray sentence in an old book, and they have never once been contradicted.

A short sentence is usually enough, and it works better than a speech. That is not what the Church teaches, and it is not true. Then turn to the person it was said about and speak to them directly, because the thing that wounds longest is being discussed rather than addressed. Afterward, tell the bishop, and tell him plainly rather than softening it into a personality conflict.

And if you are a leader who receives that report, treat it as FALSE DOCTRINE being taught in your ward, which is what it is. The 2013 essay gives you the language, the Church has already done the disavowing, and your job is simply to say so where it was said otherwise.

The young man in that story kept praying through all of it. He never concluded that God had rejected him, and he was right about that, because God never had. What he lost confidence in was whether the people around him would ever say anything. Every one of us gets to decide that question for somebody, usually without warning, usually at a bad moment.

Christ said the world would identify His disciples by one sign, and He did not name doctrine, or attendance, or correct opinions. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. The love has to be visible, and sometimes the only way it becomes visible is when somebody at the table stops the conversation.

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Sources and Scriptures Cited

Related: Race and the Gospel of Jesus Christ · Interracial Marriage · The Priesthood Restriction on Black Africans · Charity, the Pure Love of Christ