Race and the Gospel of Jesus Christ
All are alike unto God — and what to say when someone tells you otherwise
A missionary sat down to dinner in a member’s home. The evening had been offered as fellowship. Partway through, the conversation turned to complaints about members bearing testimony in languages other than English, and then it turned to him. He was told that he came from the lineage of Cain.
He was Kenyan, and his companion was Zimbabwean. The ward around them held members from Chile, Colombia, Portugal, and Ghana. He went home that night carrying something he had not brought with him.
That sentence — you are of the lineage of Cain — still gets spoken in Latter-day Saint homes. It is worth knowing exactly what is wrong with it. The trouble is not that the sentence is unkind, though it is unkind. The trouble is that it is false in Genesis, false in the Book of Mormon, and false according to the Church that the man saying it belongs to.
What Cain Was Actually Cursed With
The curse of Cain has a feature that almost nobody who invokes it seems to know about. Genesis never leaves its terms vague, because God states them Himself, out loud, in two verses that anyone can read.
“And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”
The ground would not yield to him, and he would wander. He would never farm again, and he would never be safe anywhere. That is the curse, stated by God, in God’s own words, at the moment He pronounced it.
Where is the priesthood in that sentence? Where is the skin? Where is the ban on his descendants? NONE of it is there. A man who wants to read a racial doctrine out of Genesis 4 has to bring it with him, because the text hands him agriculture and exile.
Then there is the mark, which is a separate thing entirely, and which almost everyone gets backwards:
“And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
The mark was PROTECTION. Cain had just said that whoever found him would kill him, and God answered that fear by marking him so that no one would. The mark is God shielding a murderer from vengeance. To take the one thing in the chapter that functions as mercy and repurpose it as a badge of inferiority is a reading so backwards it should embarrass anyone who tries it.
Cain’s Own Line Ends at the Flood
Suppose someone grants all of that and still insists the curse ran down through Cain’s children. The Bible closes that particular door.
Everyone alive descends from Noah. Genesis says so without qualification: every living thing outside the ark died, and only Noah and those with him remained. Noah’s genealogy runs through Seth, not Cain. Trace it in Genesis 5 and the line goes Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah. Cain is not in it.
The Genealogy the Claim Requires
- Genesis 7:21–23 — All flesh died; Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark
- Genesis 5:3–29 — Noah’s descent traced through Seth, with Cain nowhere in the line
- Genesis 9:25 — The post-Flood curse falls on Canaan, whose descendants settled the Levant
- Genesis 10:15–19 — Canaan’s sons named: Sidon, Heth, the Jebusite, the Amorite, the Girgasite
So the argument moves, and among Latter-day Saints it moves somewhere specific. Not to Cain’s surviving children, because there are none. It moves to Ham.
And here the Bible on its own is not enough, because we have another book that speaks to exactly this.
But Abraham Says the Curse Was Preserved
Anyone who waves the Flood around as though it settles the whole question has not read Abraham 1. It is our scripture, it is canonized, and it says this:
“And thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land… Now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood, notwithstanding the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham.”
There it is. A curse preserved through Ham, and a lineage that could not hold the right of the priesthood. That text is real and it is ours, and stepping around it would be exactly the kind of dodge this site refuses to make.
So does that settle the matter against us? Not on its own. But before anyone answers it, the argument deserves to be laid out at its full strength, which is more than it usually gets from either side.
The Egyptus Argument, at Full Strength
The reading that carries the curse across the Flood is not folklore somebody invented in Utah. It is assembled out of our own scriptures, and it hangs together. Anyone who intends to answer it should first state it properly.
It runs like this. Enoch is shown two peoples in his own day, and both are described the same way: “there was a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan” in Moses 7:8, and “the seed of Cain were black” in Moses 7:22. Then the Flood comes. Noah descends through Seth, so nothing of Cain reaches the ark through Noah himself. Yet Abraham says the Egyptian kings were “partakers of the blood of the Canaanites by birth,” and that this blood “was preserved in the land.”
Preserved how, if not through Noah? Through a wife. And Abraham names her:
“The land of Egypt being first discovered by a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, and the daughter of Egyptus, which in the Chaldean signifies Egypt, which signifies that which is forbidden.”
Egyptus is Ham’s wife, and she is named in canonized scripture rather than in commentary. An earlier draft of this page said that name came from a book published in 1931. That was simply wrong, and the correction belongs here in the open. Her daughter carried her name, settled Egypt, and Abraham 1:24 closes the circuit: “thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land.”
That is a coherent reading of canonized text. Pretending it has no foundation would be dishonest, and this page will not pretend it.
Where the Chain Holds and Where It Does Not
Several links in that chain are solid. Two are carrying weight the text never places on them, and they happen to be the two that decide what may be said to a living human being.
The Two Links Scripture Leaves Unstated
- That “Canaanite” means the seed of Cain — Moses 7 uses both phrases fourteen verses apart and keeps them distinct: the children of Canaan in verse 8, the seed of Cain in verse 22. They may be one people. The text never says so, and the whole structure rests on that unstated equation. It was set out at length much later, in Joseph Fielding Smith’s The Way to Perfection in 1931.
- That an Egyptian royal house means the peoples of modern Africa — Abraham is discussing the dynasty of one kingdom on the lower Nile. Extending that to a Kenyan missionary is a step no verse takes.
Genesis is also specific about where Ham’s family actually went, and the specificity matters:
“And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.”
Ham had four sons, and Noah’s curse in Genesis 9 names ONE of them. Cush is Nubia, south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan and Ethiopia. Mizraim is simply the Hebrew word for Egypt. Phut settles west along the north African coast. NOT ONE of those three is named in Genesis 9:25. The son who is named is Canaan, whose children Genesis 10 places “from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah.”
And there is a test of the whole theory sitting in Numbers 12, running the other way. Moses married a Cushite — a woman of Cush, Ham’s son, the very branch that settled Africa. Miriam and Aaron objected to her. God came down in a pillar of cloud, rebuked the objectors, and Miriam left the tent leprous. Was Moses’s house restricted from the priesthood for it? No. His sons are numbered with the tribe of Levi in 1 Chronicles 23:14–15, and no disability of any kind attaches to his posterity anywhere in scripture. If Ham’s line carried a taint a covenant man must avoid, Numbers 12 is unintelligible.
Which uncovers a confusion running underneath this entire subject. Two different curses keep getting merged. Noah’s in Genesis 9 is servitude, a servant of servants unto his brethren, pronounced on Canaan, and the text names its own fulfilment when Israel subdued those cities. Abraham’s is a disqualification from claiming priesthood by inheritance. Different pronouncement, different subject, different consequence. People quote the one and conclude the other.
What Abraham 1 Never Delivers
So give the argument every link it wants, including the two that scripture leaves unstated. Take it at its strongest. Then what does it actually hand you? And what does it never hand you?
It hands you a disqualification from claiming the priesthood by inheritance, attaching to one Egyptian dynasty, in Abraham’s day.
Skin is never mentioned. Not one verse in Abraham 1 refers to color or complexion or appearance.
Neither is Cain. The name appears nowhere in the chapter.
Pharaoh, meanwhile, is called righteous two verses before he is disqualified, the text praising a man who “judged his people wisely and justly all his days.”
And it says nothing whatever about worth, about valiance before birth, about whom a person may marry, or about who may be baptized, hold a calling, enter a temple, or be exalted.
Then came 1978. Whatever the restriction was and however it began, it ended by revelation, and the revelation was canonized as Official Declaration 2. A disqualification that has been lifted cannot be turned around and used to tell a living man what he is.
Which is the whole point. That missionary was not handed a careful reading of Abraham 1 over dinner. He was told his ancestry made him something less, and that conclusion is precisely what the Church disavowed in 2013 — without disavowing one verse of the Book of Abraham to do it.
The Book of Mormon Forbids the Very Thing
Critics call the Book of Mormon a racist book. Members sometimes read it that way too, which is worse. Both are reading the Nephites instead of reading the prophets.
Jacob stands at the temple and addresses a congregation of Nephites who considered themselves the better people. What does he tell them?
“Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate because of their filthiness and the cursing which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you… Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins.”
Read that again. A Book of Mormon prophet issues a direct commandment — he calls it the word of God — forbidding his own people from reviling anyone over the color of their skin. And he tells the lighter-skinned congregation that the darker-skinned people they look down on are the more righteous of the two.
The book does not stop there. It ends by destroying the Nephites and preserving the Lamanites. The promised land goes to the darker-skinned people. Which race does the Book of Mormon extol, and which does it condemn? Anyone who has actually finished it knows the answer, and it is not the answer the critics assume.
And the mark in that book works the way it works in Genesis. A mark distinguishes. A curse separates a people from the presence of God, and it lifts the moment they return to Him. When the Lamanites converted, the cursing was taken from them. A thing that repentance removes was never about ancestry to begin with.
Every Tongue in the House of God
The other complaint raised at that dinner table deserves an answer of its own. Members were bearing testimony in languages other than English, and someone found it objectionable.
The Lord settled this one by revelation, in plain words, and He settled it in favor of the other languages:
“For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language, through those who are ordained unto this power.”
In his own tongue. Not in the tongue of the ward council. The first thing that happened when the Church of Jesus Christ was born at Pentecost was that the Spirit fell and the Apostles were heard by Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Cretes, and Arabians, every man in his own language. God’s opening move in the meridian of time was multilingual, and He did it on purpose.
John saw where all of it ends, and he counted the nations in the room:
“After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb.”
If the redeemed of God stand before the throne speaking every tongue on earth, a chapel where four languages are spoken is not a problem to be corrected. It is a rehearsal. The missionary at that table said a chapel should feel like an embassy of heaven. Paul said it first, and said it better: you are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.
One Blood
Paul stood on Mars’ hill in Athens, in front of a crowd that took Greek superiority as a settled fact of nature, and told them their ancestry was the same as everyone else’s.
“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”
ONE blood. Peter learned the same lesson on a rooftop and stated the conclusion as soon as he understood it: God is no respecter of persons. Nephi’s brother put it in the form the Church now quotes most often, and he made it a list of every division human beings invent:
“And he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female… and all are alike unto God.”
He denieth none. That is the doctrine, printed in the book the Church calls the keystone of its religion, available in the pocket of every person who has ever said otherwise at a dinner table.
Then Why Was There a Restriction?
Here the honest answer is uncomfortable, and this site does not hand out comfortable answers that are false.
Black men were ordained in the earliest days of the Church. Elijah Abel was made an elder in 1836 and later a Seventy, and he participated in temple ceremonies at Kirtland. Joseph Smith never announced a racial restriction of any kind. The restriction began with Brigham Young’s announcements to the Utah territorial legislature in 1852, during the territory’s debate over legalizing slavery. It came as policy. No revelation was ever recorded for it, and it was NEVER canonized.
Did God permit something inside His own church that was not His mind and will? He did it before, and Christ named the reason:
“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.”
Divorce sat inside the law of Moses for roughly thirteen centuries, and Christ says plainly that God allowed it because the people were hard, and that from the beginning it was not so. Nobody concludes that Moses was a false prophet over it. Israel was hard toward Gentiles and Samaritans too, and prophets have always had to work with the people they were actually given rather than the people they wished for.
In June 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball and the Twelve received the revelation extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy members without regard to race. It stands in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 2. Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who had defended the old explanations in print, said afterward to forget everything he and others had said in days past that was contrary to the new revelation, because they had spoken with a limited understanding.
For a longer treatment of the history, see The Priesthood Restriction on Black Africans.
What the Church Says Today
In 2013 the Church published Race and the Priesthood, and it did not hedge. Every folk explanation that had ever been attached to the restriction is named and rejected in a single sentence:
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. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”
Read what that sentence does. The lineage-of-Cain theory: disavowed. The less-valiant-in-the-premortal-life theory: disavowed. The claim that interracial marriage is sinful: disavowed. Any notion that one race is inferior: disavowed. A member who repeats any of those four is not passing on the doctrine of the Church. He is repeating something the Church has publicly and specifically RENOUNCED.
President Russell M. Nelson addressed the whole Church from the pulpit in October 2020 and left nothing to interpretation. “I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice,” he said, and then: “God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear.”
He also said this, which is the direct answer to what that missionary was told over dinner: “I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and His commandments and not the color of your skin.”
What This Asks of You
If you are the person who has heard one of these theories and half believed it, the repair is simple enough. Read Genesis 4 slowly. Read Jacob 3. Read the 2013 essay. The scaffolding comes down quickly once you look at the verses it was supposedly built on.
If you are the person who has been on the receiving end of it, understand what actually happened in that room, and put it in its true perspective. The society that produced the restriction was sick. Slavery was the law of the land when the Church was organized, it was still being debated in the Utah territory when the restriction was announced, and the people demanded a reading of scripture that fit the world they lived in. So God allowed it, exactly as He allowed divorce under Moses — which He still allows today — because the people were hard, and from the beginning it was not so. That is what was handed to you at that table. Not a doctrine of God, but a permission wrung out of Him by a hard-hearted generation, dressed up as scripture, and repeated by a man who never checked.
President Gordon B. Hinckley drew the line in general conference in April 2006, and he drew it at 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.”
All are alike unto God. He denieth none. Those are not slogans the Church adopted when the culture shifted — they were printed in 1830, in the book it was founded on, and they were true the whole time anyone was teaching otherwise.
Scriptures on Race and the Family of God
- 2 Nephi 26:33 — He denieth none; black and white, bond and free, all are alike unto God
- Jacob 3:5–9 — A commandment forbidding reviling anyone over the darkness of their skin
- Abraham 1:21–27 — Egyptus named, the curse preserved through Ham, one dynasty’s priesthood claim, and Pharaoh called a righteous man
- Moses 7:6–22 — The children of Canaan and the seed of Cain in Enoch’s day, before the Flood
- Genesis 10:6–19 — Ham’s four sons, and the border of Canaan from Sidon to Gaza
- Acts 17:26 — God made of one blood all nations of men
- Acts 10:34–35 — Peter: God is no respecter of persons
- Galatians 3:28 — Neither Jew nor Greek; ye are all one in Christ Jesus
- D&C 90:11 — Every man shall hear the gospel in his own tongue and his own language
- Revelation 7:9 — All nations, kindreds, people and tongues before the throne
- Official Declaration 2 — The 1978 revelation extending priesthood to all worthy members
Sources
Official Church Sources Quoted on This Page
- “Race and the Priesthood” — Gospel Topics Essay, 2013. Source of the disavowal quoted above, and of the details on Elijah Abel and on Brigham Young’s 1852 announcements to the Utah territorial legislature.
- Russell M. Nelson, “Let God Prevail” — General Conference, October 2020.
- Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Need for Greater Kindness” — General Conference, April 2006.
- Official Declaration 2 — the 1978 revelation, canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants.
- “Elijah Able” — Church History Topics. Ordained an elder in 1836, later a Seventy.
- Abraham 1:21–27 — the Pearl of Great Price text quoted above, in full context.
- Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1931) — where the Canaanite-as-seed-of-Cain identification is set out at length. Egyptus herself is named in Abraham 1:23; it is the equation of her line with Cain’s that is interpretation rather than scripture.
- Bruce R. McConkie, “All Are Alike unto God,” CES Religious Educators Symposium, 18 August 1978 — the “limited understanding” statement.
Related: When You See Racism · Interracial Marriage · Is the Book of Mormon Racist? · You Are a Child of God