Max Mueller: Has the Mormon Church Truly Left Its Race Problems Behind?

Max Mueller asks “Has the Mormon Church Truly Left Its Race Problems Behind?” in The New Republic.
He begins “It’s looking more and more likely that Barack Obama will be facing Mitt Romney next November. According to recent polls, Romney’s much-debated “Mormon Problem”—considered by some to be a main roadblock to the Republican nomination in 2008—has decreased in salience among the white evangelicals on whom he’ll probably depend in both the primary and general elections. But one element of the Mormon problem that’s yet to be vetted will come into stark relief should this match-up take place: the Mormon Church’s troubling history of racial exclusion.”
Farther down, he wonders if “The Church’s reluctance to directly address this awkward legacy may be contributing to its perpetuation. The author and producer of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, Darius Gray, an African American Mormon since 1964, told me that current Church leaders have not sufficiently distanced themselves from the statements expressed by their predecessors. Instead, Church leaders have insisted simply ‘the revelation continues to speak for itself,’ as the late Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in 1998. More attention, says Gray, needs to be paid to this issue. ‘If you try to sweep the past underneath the carpet, what you end up with is a lumpy carpet.'”
Click into The New Republic for the entire article.