A reflection on the fundamental Christian principle that God is no respecter of persons, examining how white Christianity has historically contradicted this doctrine through racial hierarchy, and exploring the tension between scriptural truth and cultural practice.
Posted: 2025-Jul-31
December 2, 2017
Today, as I drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, I find myself wrestling with an issue that has become increasingly difficult to reconcile. The current political climate, particularly the election of Donald Trump, has made painfully obvious that racial bigotry is not an aberration in American white Christianity—it is a feature, not a bug.
Having lived intimately within both white and black cultures, particularly African culture, I have been troubled by the unabashed resurgence of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Whatever people may say about this not reflecting true Christianity or the teachings of Jesus, it undeniably reflects white Christianity both historically and contemporary. This reality has become increasingly difficult for me to reconcile with my personal faith and experiences.
This morning, as I struggled with these contradictions, I was reminded of Joseph Smith's Lectures on Faith. While driving, I couldn't pull up the actual text, but I recalled the three key qualities of God that we must understand to exercise faith sufficient for salvation: first, that God is a loving, merciful Father; second, that He is no respecter of persons; and third, that we are living in harmony with His will.
The second principle—that God is no respecter of persons—struck me with particular force today. Joseph Smith taught that if you don't believe or have confidence that God will accept your sacrifice when you approach Him in faith, then you can never exercise the faith necessary for salvation. If God is variable, rewarding some while rejecting others for no valid reason other than His own will and pleasure, then you can never have confidence that God will accept you.
This principle demolishes the foundation of racial hierarchy that has been built into white Christianity. If we say that God favors some of His children over others, giving them preferential treatment for reasons of His own doing, then we can never know if we are among the preferred. As the Zoramites in Alma 31 demonstrated, when people believe God has elected them by virtue of their traditions and righteousness, blessing them above their separated brethren, they create a theology of divine favoritism that contradicts the very nature of God.
This brings me to one of the most troubling contradictions in white Christian theology: the parallel concepts of blessing and cursing based on lineage rather than individual righteousness. The doctrine teaches that certain of God's children are blessed because of the righteousness of their ancestors, regardless of their personal wickedness or righteousness, while others are cursed and disfavored because of the wickedness of their ancestors, despite their own personal righteousness.
We see this in the theology surrounding Abraham's covenant, where his descendants are promised special favor, and in the contrasting treatment of those descended from Ham, Cain, or, in Mormon theology, Laman and Lemuel. These descendants are marked with dark skin and cursed, not for anything they have done, but because of their parents' actions. This directly contradicts the Article of Faith that states we believe people are punished for their own sins, not for Adam's transgression.
The irony is profound: throughout scripture, those who leave one place for another land consistently explain their departure as being due to their faithfulness rather than simply fleeing persecution. Whether Moses leaving Egypt, Abraham leaving Ur, Lehi leaving Jerusalem, or the Puritans leaving Europe—all construct narratives where God favors them over the "wicked" people from whom they separate.
My personal experience has consistently contradicted these theological constructs. I have known Christians—both LDS and non-LDS, both white and non-white—and consistently, those who exhibit the greatest Christlike love in my life have often been non-white. I have experienced overwhelming love from Muslims, Buddhists, and even atheists. I have found it difficult to reconcile what is baked into white Christianity with my personal experiences of divine love.
When I attended Trinity AME in Atlanta, I experienced greater Christlike love in the black church than in white LDS congregations. Perhaps my second-greatest spiritual experience occurred in another black congregation, the Kingdom Dominion Church in Villa Rica, GA, where my family experienced an overwhelming manifestation of God's spirit and love at a time we desperately needed it. Having been raised Mormon, those realities were contrary to what I had been conditioned to expect.
Today, as I listened to a podcast about early European history, it occurred to me that the biblical account of human origin and dispersal tells essentially the same story as modern anthropological and genetic science, just from different perspectives. Life began in Africa and branched outward. Those who migrated further from the equator evolved to have reduced melanin, needing more vitamin D and less protection from the sun. The natural variations of evolution led from black Africans to white Europeans.
The scriptural account of Noah's sons—Ham, Shem, and Japheth—and their geographical and racial distributions parallels this scientific understanding. Ham's descendants went to Africa (Cush/Ethiopia, Mizraim/Egypt, Phut/Libya), Shem's to the Middle East, and Japheth's to Europe. When Ham and Shem's descendants naturally mixed due to proximity, you get the Arab peoples. The Hebrew word for Arab literally means "mixed."
But here's the crucial difference: the white interpreters of scripture have consistently rationalized their migration out of Africa as divine favor, while characterizing those they left behind or encountered as they traveled as being divinely cursed and disfavored. This pattern repeats throughout history—from the European colonization of the Americas first being justified by bringing "gospel enlightenment to the noble savage," only to morph into the divinely justified extermination of indigenous peoples as "heathens," to the contemporary justification of American military intervention worldwide as bringing "enlightenment to an unenlightened world."
The fundamental problem is this: you cannot say that God cursed people with dark skin because of their ancestors' wickedness while blessing others because of their ancestors' righteousness, and still maintain that God is no respecter of persons. You cannot deny priesthood to black people for 130 years (from the late 1840s until 1978) and claim God shows no favoritism.
You also cannot maintain, as Mormon church leaders have taught, that God would never allow the president of the church to lead the church astray—that He would take the leader's life first—while simultaneously acknowledging that for 130 years, church leaders did deny God's children full access to the restored gospel based on race, only to acknowledge belatedly that the discrimination was based on racism.
This creates an incredible tension in my personal theology. How do we reconcile the principle that criticizing priesthood leaders is analogous to Satan's rebellion in the pre-mortal life with the recognition that the priesthood restriction was, as the church now acknowledges, based on the bigotry of early church members and leaders rather than divine revelation?
I find myself truly a stranger in a strange land. I have no geographic home—Hurricane, Utah has not felt like home since I was fifteen. I have no racial home—while grateful for my heritage on every line, including opportunities to visit Germany, England, and significantly, Borno in Nigeria where my African line originates, and Calabar where my African grandmother was put on a slave ship bound for the Americas.
Most challenging, I have no spiritual home. The doctrines revealed in LDS theology are beautiful and give meaning to my life, but the white LDS culture and its perversion of these doctrines is so distressing that I feel no fellowship. When Paul speaks of being "no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God," this simply hasn't been my experience, nor that of most African and African-American members I know.
As a colleague once told me some years ago, being black is not just genetic—it's cultural, it's a mindset. Since learning genetic evidence of our African lineage in 2001, confirmed by oral family traditions, I have come to appreciate that my worldview is fundamentally African-American. I don't see the world the way I did before, and I realize now that I always felt that disconnect, even growing up in Utah.
In the end, I have only my relationship with God, and I'm grateful for that above all else. I'm grateful for the atonement and for coming to a deeper understanding of God's grace and mercy. Much of this understanding I owe to the members of Trinity AME, who embraced me with the pure love of Christ when I desperately needed it.
The principle remains unshakeable: God is no respecter of persons. This is one of the bedrock principles of faith necessary for salvation, according to Joseph Smith, and Joseph was right. Any theology that creates hierarchies of divine favor based on race, lineage, or cultural identity contradicts this fundamental truth and inhibits the very faith it claims to promote.
The Book of Mormon warns us in Alma 31 about people who justify their exploitation of others by claiming God has blessed them. We see this pattern today as clearly as ever—in tax policies that brutalize the working class while rewarding the wealthy, all while those who support such policies read in the Book of Mormon about the sin of valuing "that which has no life" over ameliorating human suffering.
Until we can honestly confront the ways in which white Christianity has contradicted the principle that God is no respecter of persons, we will continue to struggle with the cognitive dissonance between our professed beliefs and our practiced faith. The truth demands nothing less than complete honesty about our history and complete commitment to the divine principle of equality before God.
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I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom into an essentially all-white, all-Mormon community in Southern Utah. Six decades later, I am no longer Mormon, no longer white, and finally ready to share my story. The map is not yet complete, and new pathways beckon. Shall we see where they lead?
If these words resonate in your own journey, I'd love to know which passages lingered with you. Let's continue the dialogue.