I have found interacting with Mormon’s to be very positive. In fact, I admire their promotion of self-sufficiency and support for their members. My mother is a Mormon. I have good friends locally that are as well. That said I find the tone deafness of the religion outright disappointing.
The Washington Post reported today that the church has just integrated the Mormon Leadership.
SALT LAKE CITY — The Mormon church made history and injected diversity into a top leadership panel on Saturday by selecting the first-ever Latin-American apostle and the first-ever apostle of Asian ancestry. The selections of Ulisses Soares of Brazil and Gerrit W. Gong, a Chinese-American, were announced at the start of a twice-annual conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They join a panel called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles that, before Saturday, was made up entirely of white men from the U.S. with the exception of one German, Dieter Uchtdorf. The all-male panel sits below church President Russell M. Nelson and his two counselors and helps set church policy and oversees the faith’s business interests.
The selections of Soares and Gong are likely to trigger applause from a contingent of Mormons who were anxious to see the faith’s global footprint represented in leadership. More than half of the religion’s 16 million members live outside the United States.
Applauding the integration of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles should not trigger applause. What took so long? Applauding does nothing but to accommodate an organization that is yet to release itself from its white supremacist behavior in the name of God.
It is now the time to expose the church’s racists past for which it is yet to atone for even as it has tried to make its relatively recent acceptance of non-whites, a revelation from God. Of course, that was just an excuse to escape the responsibility of the reality that the members of the church suffered the same evil proclivities of many in the majority population.1