I think there are a few obvious problems with your contention here, Coggins. First, you assume that LDS racism, in order to be racism, must follow exactly the same model as the larger society. I see no reason why, given the fact that a large percentage of membership was not American, and the LDS movement made a concerted effort at distinguishing itself from American society. In some ways, LDS positions on race are a response to American society, not simply a parroting of it.
Second, that the LDS people grappled with racism differently does not mean that they and their ideas were not in any way racist. I think the evidence stands in favor of them operating under racist assumptions with emphasis falling on the race issues that most directly affected them at any given time. In the Book of Mormon era the issue was the origin and destiny of the Indians. As the LDS Church moved South, and accusations of their Abolitionist sympathies were noised abroad, the issue was how to deal with African Americans. When they moved West and Chinese people entered the picture, there was some concern about how the Chinese fit into the LDS schema.
At each turn, however, the revelations addressed issues of race, and the answers provided fit pretty well into the racist assumptions predominant in society at the time. Speculations that never rose to the level of revelation fit the foundation already established. Whether the determinations of 'lineage' are favorable or not, and they were mixed with reference to the Native Americans and Jews, and tending toward more negative with regard to African Americans and the Chinese, lineage is still identified clearly by race. Ergo, LDS lineage concepts operate by racist assumptions.
Coggins7 wrote:
I've already conceded that cultural factors may have played a part, at least in the later doctrinal explanations for the ban, but that just isn't enough for a crusading bigot with an ax to grind is it? Since you clearly have no evidence or rational basis for the kind of certitude you display in your claims of the racial basis of the original ban, it of course follows that most of your disagreement with me will come in the form of statements of opinion and special pleading, as opposed to engaging in sustained, logical argument and providing some compelling rebuttal to my points.
The whole kit'n'kaboodle is informed by the racist views of the day from start to finish, whether the outcome was favorable or unfavorable. I fail to see why this is so objectionable or shocking. And just why am I a bigot? Because I believe that the early LDS Church was very much a creature of its age? Distinctive, yes, but hardly the sui generis construction you make it out to be with regard to 'lineage.' For your information, other Christians had explained race by use of different Biblical lineages. It didn't make their schema any less racist. It simply shows that they used the Bible as a way of understanding race. Racism is more than an insult. It was a way of viewing the world. It was an incorrect and very harmful way of viewing the world, yes, but it is not as though in saying this I am simply aiming at an insult. I am making a simple historical observation.
Man, you are a piece of work. Everything you write drips with a sludge of superiority and disdain that comes from... where? I have no idea. I see nothing especially cogent or persuasive in anything you have written, and yet you act as though I write complete tripe. Simply because you do not agree with me is not a good reason to insult me at every turn. Your insults are unwarranted. I am reasonably educated in these issues, in spite of what you say. If you care to dial it back a notch and continue to discuss this reasonably, I am willing, but if you continue in the current tone, I will simply ignore you.
I also ask, what is it that I have written that is so skewed that I should qualify as a 'bigot with an axe to grind'? Is that how you generally characterize people who disagree with you?
LDS views towards blacks were similar to the abolishionist positions of many non-southern whites of the era, and in many ways, more theologically liberal than those of the Protestant majorities in the country of the day.
A holier-than-thou liberal, strutting back and forth, beating his brest in pursed lipped moral pontification and people of different eras and centuries for there racism, (and other 'isms' in the modern leftist little black bag of post modern ideological sins) is a spectacle ugly and nausiating to behold in and of itself, but the fact of the matter remains the the primary sources within the church do not mention race as a primary factor in any of this, only lineage, and it is lineage, despite all your attempts to coat all of those primary sources with a gloss of modern leftist ideological preoccupations does not change this fundamental reality.
The fact of the matter also remains that you, yourself, had you been born and socialized in the 19th or earlth 20th centuries, would most likely have shared the racial bigotries and received wisdom of your culture in the very same way to unthinkingly accept and regurgitate the recieved politically correct shibboleths of our own age. The primary task of a truely mature intellect a consciousness of a need to transcend the shibboleths and received traditions of one's own era. You are the recipient of an age that has, for the most part, transcended racial stereoptypes, and, like so many like yoruself, strut like a Peacock in high moral rectitude over those of different ages and cultures who do not meet your lofty standards of politically correct worthiness.
What you call LDS "racism" was nothing more nor less that the standard view of Caucasion westerners towards those of different ethinic backgrounds that was common at the time, had been common for centuries, and, in the context in which it occured, was quite liberal for the time. There, but for the grace of God, go you my friend, so get off of your left wing moral high horse and come down out of the heady PC clouds for a moment. You belabor the point that lineage is always identified within the context of race, neve bothering to state the obvious: there is no other conceptual possibility. How could African lineage ever be excerpted from Negroid anatomy and physiology, or how could Jewish ancestry ever be compartmentalized from Semitic DNA and morphological attributes.
You are going in circles attempting to impugn a strawman that no one but yourself has created. Nobody has claimed that early Saints did not hold (as you would have had you been one of them) predjudiced views of people unlike themsleves in appearane and culture. No one is arguing that. What I am saying, based on the writings and explanations of the early GAs themselves, is that the Priesthood ban was about a lineage that was denied the Priesthood with whom black Africans happened to be associated. You have rigorously avoided dealing with the gist of my argument here, that missionary work and Priesthood holding was extended to all other peoples, regardless or skin color of physical appearance, except blacks, based on the lineage restiriction. Claiming that LDS "racism" was somehow so different from that of the white Protestant majority around them that it exempted all other races from the ban while targeting blacks only is just another bare assertion without documentary evidence. That is not what the written records and statemtents of the early GAs indicate.
Further, your expectaton that white, LDS people of the 19th and early to mid 20th centuries should somehow have not absorbed and held to some of the racism inherant in the society around them is, at best, naïve and at worst, the moral grandstanding of a sanctimonious anti-Mormon bigot and self satisfied social critc blessed enough to be born in a cultural environment in which most of those attitudes had already been rejected by a majority of that society. How easy it is to look back into othe ages and times and point the finger of moral superiortiy at societies
in whom we were not socialized and enculturated.
In any case, you and I both know that your moral pontifications regarding the Priesthood ban is in bad faith. It is nothing more than a wedge with which to deligitimate the Church in a broader sense, a Church with which you have far deeper issues that that of the past attitudes of its members, attitudes you were lucky enough to evade by default be being born in the time and place you were.