Letting Go of White Heaven
If The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint is going to move forward on race, we need to take an inventory of our past
When I was around 10 to 13 years old (circa 2004–2007), a friend and fellow member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told me that everyone would have white skin in heaven. As part of God’s redemption of his children, he said, every person with non-white skin who made it to heaven would, in God’s grace, be “healed” of the darker pigmentation they had in mortality.
At the time I was a slightly surprised, but not offended. It fit right into place. I had grown up reading in the Book of Mormon that non-white skin was a curse from God given in the very distant past. Additionally, every picture, painting, and video of Jesus Christ I had ever seen from church showed him as a white man. Our living prophet at the time, Gordon B. Hinckley was a white man, as was every single prophet and president of our church before him. Clearly, I assumed, God was white, and so were his most favored people. On top of the “logic” of it, my friend’s mom had taught institute and seminary for years. She was one of the most studied people in our stake in scripture and church doctrine, and I assumed he had heard it from her.
It’s possible I passed this idea on to other people. I really hope I didn’t. I don’t remember speaking or hearing about it again over the next decade. Mostly, on the rare occasions that it crossed my mind, I would wonder what people of color would look like in the next life with my pigmentation.
A couple years after the conversation with my friend, I picked up Doctrines of Salvation by Joseph Fielding Smith. It was on a shelf in my home, part of a series of books with gold covers by past prophets and apostles. As I read it, I encountered an assertion about people of African descent — this time about purported behavior before this life:
There were no neutrals in the war in heaven. All took sides either with Christ or with Satan. Every man had his agency there, and men receive rewards here based upon their actions there, just as they will receive rewards hereafter for deeds done in the body. The Negro, evidently, is receiving the reward he merits. (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954) , 1:65–66.)
Though I felt sick when I read this, I quickly found a compromise in my faithful teenage mind: maybe it wasn’t that black skin itself was a punishment; it was that African Americans and other people of African descent were typically born into more difficult circumstances because of racism. It seemed the only passage between the sentinel truths of “the prophet speaks for God” and “all men are created equal.”
Doctrines of Salvation, Volume 1–3 is still sold on Deseretbook.com. Its description on the website states that it’s “an authoritative work, written by the most outstanding scholar of the gospel in the Church containing a wealth of explanations about a vast array of gospel topics.” Here’s an excerpt from the first user review below this description:
These books will correct and clarify hosts of beliefs and misconceptions. There is everything in here from the truth about the Theory of Evolution to why are there different races of people. (Be careful with that last one, I still don’t feel comfortable explaining it even though its the truth.) Your testimony will grow so much as you prayerfully read these books and your faith will become more potent like the proverbial mustard seed. (From user Ron, dated April 14, 2019.)
These stories are ugly and uncomfortable. But they illustrate an insidious problem that, as a Church, we appear to be hiding from more than addressing.
On June 1, 2018, the Church celebrated the 40th anniversary of the revelation extending priesthood ordination and the highest rites of our faith to people of all color. Stories were shared of early valiant and faithful black Church members, and in an unprecedented performance for the Conference Center, black singers, dancers, and speakers celebrated their culture and history, and testified of God’s love. In the celebration, called “Be One,” the First Presidency made some powerful statements about the equality of all people, God’s love for all of His children, and the need to root out racism and prejudice from our lives. In President Dallin H. Oaks’ opening address for the celebration, he said:
We have realized the eternal significance of God’s prophetic teaching that “one being is as precious in his sight as the other” (Jacob 2:21). In doing so, we have received new impetus to fulfill the command that we are to teach the everlasting gospel unto all — to “all nations, kindreds, tongues and people” (D&C 42:58)… As servants of God who have the knowledge and responsibilities of His great plan of salvation, we should hasten to prepare our attitudes and our actions — institutionally and personally — to abandon all personal prejudices.
While affirming the equal worth of all human beings and the need to leave behind any racist attitudes, he had an invitation for members focused on the Church’s history with race:
Others have wanted to look back, concentrating attention on reexamining the past, including seeking reasons for the now-outdated restrictions… However, most in the Church, including its senior leadership, have concentrated on the opportunities of the future rather than the disappointments of the past. We have trusted the wisdom and timing of the Lord and accepted the directions of His prophet.
He continued,
To concern ourselves with what has not been revealed or with past explanations by those who were operating with limited understanding can only result in speculation and frustration. To all who have such concerns, we extend our love and this special invitation. Let us all look forward in the unity of our faith and trust in the Lord’s promise that ‘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’ (2 Nephi 26:33).
Even in the wake of the racial justice protests of 2020 and increased awareness of modern-day and historical racism in the United States, the Church’s stance has remained the same: love all of God’s children, do away with prejudice — but don’t get all twisted up about troubling things in the Church’s past.
On its face, this is a compelling invitation. But what does that actually, mechanically mean? If I’m going to leave something behind and move forward, what steps do I take? In keeping with Latter-day Saint tradition, let’s turn to an analogy from the Book of Mormon.
The Anti-Nephi-Lehies were a group of Lamanites that converted to Christianity through the preaching of Ammon and his brothers, the sons of the Nephite king Mosiah. With their history of warfare and bloodshed, the Anti-Nephi-Lehies decided to separate themselves from their weapons forever to avoid repeating their past sins of violence.
17 And now it came to pass that when the king had made an end of these sayings, and all the people were assembled together, they took their swords, and all the weapons which were used for the shedding of man’s blood, and they did bury them up deep in the earth.
18 And this they did, it being in their view a testimony to God, and also to men, that they never would use weapons again for the shedding of man’s blood; and this they did, vouching and covenanting with God, that rather than shed the blood of their brethren they would give up their own lives…
This seems to be, in a sense, what President Oaks and the Church is asking of us: bury our weapons of prejudice, and replace them with love.
The Anti-Nephi-Lehies took a critical step that isn’t explicitly stated though: they searched out and gathered up their weapons. They had to carefully look through their belongings and ask, “Is this designed to harm or kill people?” If the answer was yes, it was marked for the pit.
This would not be an inspiring story if they kept having meetings and announcements where they reaffirmed the need to bury all their weapons of war, but no one actually went through their homes and physically gathered up their swords, daggers, and clubs.
The truth is, we literally cannot “look forward” without reexamining the past, because we carry the past with us. The Book of Mormon purports to be a historical record, and we’re told to read it daily. Joseph Smith has been dead for almost 200 years, yet we constantly quote and tell stories of him. In a church that reverences its pioneer heritage and history of persecution; a church that is currently writing a multivolume history of itself (Saints); that is built on the premise that our highest mortal leaders, past and present, are the mouthpiece of God — we only choose what we bring with us from the past, not whether we will do so.
No matter how you slice it, embracing President Oaks’ invitation to “look forward” involves taking a thorough inventory of the Latter-day Saint culture, teachings, and publications, and deciding where, specifically, we’re holding on to prejudice. Otherwise, our modern equivalent to the Anti-Nephi-Lehies’ “weapons of war” aren’t going anywhere, and we’re lying to ourselves.
Just look at what that happened in 2019, when the Book of Mormon teaching on dark skin as a sign of God’s curse made its way into the new Come Follow Me manual. On a personal level, I didn’t first encounter overtly racist theology by searching out Brigham Young’s horrific rhetoric on slavery and race — my childhood friend told me a bit of “deep doctrine” about heaven while we were hanging out in his backyard. I didn’t find Joseph F. Smith’s ugly quote on skin color in an online article picking apart racism in the Church’s history. I found it on my parents’ bookshelf. The prejudice from our past will keep bleeding into our present, on both personal and institutional levels, unless we face it in specific terms.
I don’t think an inquisition or fostering a “cancel culture” in the Church is godly or helpful. But we can reassess and reframe the “classics” and content of the Latter-day Saint tradition. We can print updated editions and write updated summaries for desseretbook.com for books like Doctrines of Salvation, to address racist and or otherwise prejudiced content. Other ways we can “gather up our weapons” include:
- Addressing, rather than excusing or explaining away racist depictions of dark skin and Native Americans in the Book of Mormon.
- Stop consistently depicting Jesus as white in the paintings, videos, and pictures produced and condoned by the Church. Good alternatives include racially diverse depictions of Christ, or sticking with at least attempting to depict the mortal Jesus as a Gallilean of his time.
- Hiring racially diverse actors for any new temple videos, including to play the characters of Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, Eve, and Adam.
- Make a series of training videos for members that break down the specific patterns of racial prejudice that Church members have spoken out about experiencing, and introduce them in special stake conferences or a worldwide address from the leaders of the Church.
These suggestions aren’t fleshed out or perfect. Some will object that they go too far; others, that they don’t go far enough. But the important first step is to least admit that there are weapons among us, and that we need to get specific and serious about getting rid of them.
It was years after reading Doctrines of Salvation and hearing about white heaven before I directly challenged these ideas. When I finally did, my rationalizations for them (which were just as racist as the ideas themselves) gave way to a radical, liberating insight: those teachings were nonsense — even if my friend had gotten it from his scripture-expert mother, and even if a prophet printed it in a book with the word “Doctrines” in the title. It took another several years to identify the teachings as toxic, and to fully process that I grew up with assumptions deeply rooted in American white supremacy.
As an exercise, I recently wrote out the following statement to articulate my theological views on race, particularly as a response to the teachings I grew up with. It was healthy step forward, and I highly recommend it. Here it is:
The differences in human pigmentation are solely the result of very minor and inherently insignificant evolutionary adaptations. No human skin color originated as a divinely appointed consequence of disobedience to God’s will. Skin color does not and has never, ever had any connection to divine favor or disfavor. If God has a skin color, it is extremely likely that he is not Caucasian. Our first human ancestors, and Jesus of Nazareth, did not look like me. Whenever and wherever the scriptures or church leaders, including prophets — including Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the Book of Mormon — have taught otherwise, or instituted policies based on those teachings, they were wrong and the teaching was false.
Looking forward with faith is a real principle. Clinging with anger to wrongs in the past can become unhealthy and counterproductive, as President Oaks points out. But reviewing the past in a repentant spirit is one of the gospel’s core teachings, not a symptom of poor discipleship. I’ve always been taught in the Church that repentance includes specifically identifying our wrongs, asking God’s forgiveness, apologizing to those we’ve wronged, and very intentionally changing our attitudes and behavior.
Until we do that as a church and as individuals, we will never root out racial prejudice — no matter how much we decry it in talks and manuals. We need to explicitly identify the attitudes we cannot take with us, and the images and stories that perpetuate them. When we have begun the earnest effort to either beat those swords into plowshares or throw them into the pit, then we can move forward “in the unity of our faith.”
