The Book of Mormon, like other religious books, has its origins myths. An integral part of their story is that god punished the bad tribe (the Lamanites) by giving them dark skin while the favored ones (the Nephites) are given light skin. Brian Keith Dalton (aka Mr Deity) is a former Mormon and he explains how this racism is embedded in the Book of Mormon as an integral part of its theology.
Racism of course runs through religions like capillaries in the body. How could it not when you have to distinguish between the select and the damned? Nowadays religious usually find ways to explain away this awful past by ‘reinterpreting’ those inconvenient passages.
In the Mormon case, it turns out to be particularly hard to do. In this video he explains why it is that to eliminate it would be to undermine the entire Book of Mormon.
I had no idea that Mr. Deity was a fellow Ex-Mormon!
It was the anti-women thing that really drove the wedge for me (probably because I saw its results more on a day-to-day basis, though the race stuff is just as bad if not worse), but even when I was young I had major issues swallowing the whole dark-skin/light-skin thing. I would say that the majority of mormons have similar problems with the inherent racism, but tend to gloss over it (in favor of the warm-fuzzy stuff) to avoid confronting the values dissonance.
I still don’t understand how it is that people can wrap their brains around the idea of a god that creates universes on an apparent whim, but cares deeply about melanin ratios in his creations’ skin. It’d be like me building a barn and caring about every single molecule of paint on it.
He works in mysterious ways!*
*Ways that are suspiciously indistinguishable from the prejudices of the person “interpreting” them.