Interracial marriage still not OK for LDS either…?
Apparently not according to this year’s Aaronic Priesthood manual. Here’s a quote from Aaronic Priesthood Manual 3, Lesson 31:
“We recommend that people marry those who are of the same racial background generally, and of somewhat the same economic and social and educational background (some of those are not an absolute necessity, but preferred), and above all, the same religious background, without question†(“Marriage and Divorce,†in 1976 Devotional Speeches of the Year [Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977], p. 144).
On the bright side, it looks like it isn’t just the Young Women who get lessons like the one BiV’s daughters got.
Big surprise here! (Not really)
Wow! I always thought it was just my own deep seated lower class mentality that made me biased. But it was institutionalized? hmmmm…
The race thing does not surprise me, when my sister married my father commented that she should marry a member of her race; my comment to him was that my brother in law is also human.
To be fair, I think these factors should be taken into consideration when deciding to get married. Marriage is hard enough without having such socioeconomic differences. In this case, race is mostly a placeholder for different cultures. An interracial couple still faces external bigotry in many communities, but if I had to guess, the big difficulty is usually in the cultural differences that those different races imply.
However, I obviously don’t think it’s wrong to marry someone significantly different than yourself, it’s just riskier. Marriages would be more stable if people didn’t believe that love could conquer all.
To be fair, it would be necessary to include the rest of the quote – the part where he explains why he thinks this. (Jonathan, comment #3, sums it up)
Granted, cultural differences do exist, however when you are talking about a black Utah Mormon marrying a white Utah Mormon; those differences are minuscule compared with say: a couple consisting of a North American woman marrying a South American man.
I’m surprised that it mentioned education. I would have thought that they would specify that it’s okay if the man has more education than the woman, but not the other way around.
I linked to the lesson from the manual. I assume that anyone familiar with the Internet who wants more context will know to follow the link.
Jonathan — I agree that people should be go into this with open eyes and not imagine their marriage will be free of obstacles. Yet, really, this is true of any marriage. And — as someone who is married to someone from another culture — I can tell you that it doesn’t take long before you start to “get” the other culture and it starts to seem normal.
Now, you may say “French culture isn’t that different from American culture.” I say: Au contraire !, see my posts on France. You may point out that my husband and I are both white. And yes, that makes a big difference because it means that when we got married we didn’t get a single (supposedly well-meaning) nay-sayer telling us how we should be wary of marrying someone from a different culture. Such excuses form a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as one’s community feels justified in not supporting the couple (like that thing about how gay people shouldn’t raise children because others will ostracize the children).
Geneticists have shown that marrying into another culture is a common and long-standing tradition that dates from humanity’s earliest roots, see Genes, Peoples, and Languages, by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
And in cultures with a high degree of racial integration, interracial couples typically represent a sizeable percentage of the total number of families, as was the case at my kids’ old school in Bordeaux. This increases the family’s support system and corresponding chances of success.
Allow me to close with one of my favorite proverbs: “Those who say it can’t be done should stay out of the way of those who are doing it.”
p.s. The religion part may well be a horse of a different color, in part because of the question of shared values and priorities, see “He has his faults, such as being a perverted-democrat-atheist, but…
Even understanding the full context of the quote, my immediate reaction (and my partner’s, when I read it to her), was WTF?!? And I’m not the swearing type.
I am the product of an interracial, intercultural, international marriage. My dad was a white boy from Kansas who enlisted in the Navy and my mom was a Japanese girl who had just graduated from high school. When they met, they barely spoke one another’s languages, but now my mom swears as good as any English-speaking sailor (pardoning their French) and my dad continues his life-long japanophilia.
I grew up fluent in two languages and with a deep appreciation of my dual culutral heritage. I am well positioned to thrive in an increasingly global economy and culture–something the church took advantage of when they sent me on a mission to Japan. My parents’ marriage made my life richer, not poorer.
I’m in an interracial marriage and cultural differences can lead to some problems that would not otherwise be there. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being cognizant of potential problems. It’s always better to go into marriage with your eyes wide open (and half shut afterwards).
On a different note, I’ve also heard that the speaker gave a similar talk as this around the same time period in Hawaii (where every marriage seems to be interracial to some degree!) and it didn’t go over so well.
I agree, but the lesson doesn’t just say to be aware of potential problems, it actively recommends that you shouldn’t even try — just marry someone of your own race and culture.
Personally, I don’t know of any marriages where the two partners have no difficulty understanding one another’s perspective. At least cultural differences are a big obvious thing, so the resulting problems are easier to pinpoint (hence solve).
Additionally, I’d like to echo what John R. said about the advantages of a bi-cultural family. In our modern, global world, the kids reap a huge benefit from being brought up in more than one culture. Not only are they able to navigate the two cultures they’ve learned, but they also have a good idea from a very early age of how cultures can differ from one another.
So, from my perspective, I think the lesson should say “a mixed-culture marriage is hard but worth the effort” rather than “a mixed-culture marriage is hard so it’s better not to even try.”
It reminds me of Homer’s wise words:
The problem is, there’s what whoever wrote this Priesthood manual passage MEANT – which is probably relatively benign, and what the listeners are going to HEAR – which is much more damaging.
Common sense says that any benign or commonsense read of this passage is going to be lost due to the modern cultural sensibilities of the audience and the wider surrounding culture.
Best to remove the passage altogether. It just causes problems.
The thing is that it’s actually a quote from a devotional by President Kimball from before the priesthood ban was lifted. That’s all the more reason to avoid re-quoting it in 2008 — I had assumed that the LDS understanding of race has officially changed since then.
Re:7, that was one of the things that was most surprising to me as a 19 year-old who had never left North America before and threw herself right into France. Although the native French were the same colour as me, they definitely did not share my culture. Call me naive, but I wasn’t expecting it. Contrast this with my experience with a friend from high school who was 2nd generation Chinese Canadian. Most of the time I actually forgot she was Chinese, because from a cultural perspective, there was nothing Chinese about her. So the quote from the original quote is quite silly…
these types of statements are maginfied-amplified by the (general) history that many ppl have been heavy-handed in zealously carrying out what (as they ‘thought’) church doctrine was.
the LDS culture has been ‘undeniably’ ethno-centric, esp. in the IMW.
The rest of the context of this & things like it is that the LDS leaders haven’t ever drawn a line around cultural beliefs/policies-practices; they treat it all as though it’s doctrine.
Divorce stats may be informative as to marriage durability & cross-culture.
This is a good point. It’s very possible for two people to be of different races and still be of the same culture. DPC’s Hawaii example may fit this same model.
Ah, but JohnR, that makes the assumption that the Mormon church hierarchy wants peoples’ lives to be richer, when as far as I can see (and this comes from my own experience, so YMMV) the church wants its members’ lives to be as provincial as possible.
I never went on a mission, but when I traveled to England in the early 1980s to visit friends, I had more than one Mormon warn me about the dangers of leaving the country, and many urged me (with straight faces, mind you) to watch out for the communists and socialists who would try to kidnap and brainwash me.
You can bet I had fun when I got back telling them about the friend of my friends I was visiting, who appointed himself my tour guide for several days and who was a Quaker and a Socialist.
You get away from Mormon culture, you just trade one brand of stupidity for another. No one else in America is particularly more bright, or open-minded about things overall in my experience. They just practice a different variety of close-mindedness.
i am a product of an interracial marriage. my bishop warned me not to marry my girlfriend at the time, a very attractive girl from s. america. i’ve read what b. young and others have said about interracial marriages but my bishop simply said, “when you say ‘i love you’ in her language (or vice versa), the meaning is not fully there, since it’s not in it’s native tongue.”
this line of logic luckily did not override my hormones. i did not adhere to my bishops plea- we got married and we have a great marriage, now 4 years into it.
i can see some things where i would have been grateful for american-born understanding of some issues in our marriage, but also i see other positive things in our marriage that solely come from another culture foreign from my own.
inter-racial marriages may be difficult at times, and it may be more rewarding at times, but all i know is that my bishop has been profoundly wrong so far. i feel fortunate that i did not listen to his authoritative warnings at the time and i have enjoyed an interesting, spicy, multi-cultural relationship with my wife and young family. i wouldn’t trade it for mere cultural familiarity.
When is a bishop’s advice authoritative and when is it just something you should consider?
I agree with that on some level. The problem in Mormon culture is that we cannot discuss our differences openly. You can get punished for speech crimes. Therefore, it is less likely in Mormon culture to discover our errors, which explains to some degree why bigotry remains legitimate in our culture much longer than in mainstream America.
Any advice should only be authoritative if the advisor is actually qualified in the subject area. Relying on ecclesiastical authorities for marriage and family counseling can be dangerous since most Bishops receive neither training nor education in that field.
We need to be more self-reliant instead of burdening priesthood officers with expectations that they cannot possibly meet. It’s up to us to figure out what’s best for us.
Statistical data doesn’t bare this out. Hunsberger and Altemeyer’s book “Atheists” indicates that atheists are, in fact, quite dogmatic. But agnostics and liberal Christians are actually not very dogmatic at all. And none of these groups even comes close to religious fundamentalists. If you want to speak in generalities, Mormons are closer to fundamentalists (on the whole) than they are to moderate or liberal Christians (there are, of course, exceptions). While I don’t have data on Mormon dogmatism compared to agnostics specifically, my hunch would be that Mormons are far more dogmatic than agnostics, and just more dogmatic than moderate and liberal Christians and atheists.
Also, claiming “others are equally dogmatic” doesn’t make it right, even if it were true. This is both a logical fallacy and immoral. Michael Shermer argues that Holocaust deniers use this approach to soften the actions of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. They figure that if they can claim that the Nazi’s actions against the Jews can be compared to the indiscriminate bombing of German cities by the Allies, then the actions don’t seem as bad. While the actions are not actually comparable in the case of Nazi genocide and Allied bombing, it still doesn’t make either action morally right. The same is true of dogmatic prejudice and discrimination. Just because 24% of people in the US wouldn’t vote for a Mormon for president doesn’t mean Mormons are justified in discouraging inter-racial/inter-cultural marriage.
Good post. How unfortunate that 1976 BKP bowl skid mark can make it into a 2008 youth manual. Obviously that racist crap still flouts around the COB, sad.
Just have second chanson’s comment #11 that most marriage participants/life partners do occasionally have difficulty understanding the other person’s perspective. I’ve never met any couples that didn’t occasionally differ – even if it’s just in political perspective.
And it’s hard to tell exactly which culture a person comes from. Initially, it would appear that I am from more of a midwestern/suburban culture, and my husband was raised in a small rural midwestern town. But when you go one generation back, we both have those rural roots.
I also agree that children raised by bi-cultural parents could benefit greatly. I think mutual respect and dialogue are the key.
they should add a verse to the “Hie to Kolob” song….:
“There is no end to church micro-management…”