Lamanite identity and the 'skin of blackness'

The book says God darkened Lamanite skin as a curse and prophets applied that to living peoples; the Church now disavows the idea while keeping the verses.

What the Church claims

The Lamanites were cursed for wickedness and marked with dark skin; their descendants are the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and, by extension, the Pacific), who are promised restoration.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The textual meaning and the prophetic record are clear and well sourced; the defense requires saying that generations of prophets misread a plain verse.

The record

  • 2 Nephi 5:21: because the Lamanites had been 'white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome', the Lord 'did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them' so they would not be 'enticing'; verse 23 curses the seed of anyone who mixes with them.
  • Joseph Smith's revelations and letters call the Native Americans of the US frontier 'the Lamanites' and 'the remnant' (1830, 1842).
  • The Church's history essay confirms that missionaries taught indigenous peoples 'in the Americas and in the Pacific' that they descended from Book of Mormon peoples.
  • Apostle Spencer W. Kimball told General Conference in October 1960 that Indian members were becoming 'white and delightsome', that some were 'light as Anglos', and that children in the Church's placement program were 'lighter than their brothers and sisters' on the reservation.
  • The printed 2020 Come, Follow Me manual quoted Joseph Fielding Smith that the dark skin 'was the sign of the curse'. The online text was changed in late 2019, and on 2020-01-21 Elder Gary Stevenson told an NAACP luncheon the paragraph was 'mistakenly included' and that the Church disavows 'any theory advanced that black or dark skin is a sign of a curse'.
  • The 2020 online and 2024 manuals say the 'nature and appearance of this mark are not fully understood' and that 'dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor or cursing'.

The moving target

  • 1830-10: American Indians are the Lamanites.
  • 1960-10: Lamanite converts are literally becoming lighter-skinned in fulfillment of 2 Nephi 30:6.
  • 1981: 2 Nephi 30:6 changed from 'white' to 'pure'; introduction calls Lamanites the 'principal ancestors' of American Indians.
  • 2020-01-21: Disavows any theory that dark skin is a sign of a curse; asks members to disregard the manual paragraph.
  • 2024: The mark is 'not fully understood'; dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor.
  • undated (current): The Church does not 'claim complete knowledge about the origins of any specific modern group'.

The exchange

Brant Gardner; Ethan Sproat ('skins as garments' reading); FAIR; the revised Come, Follow Me manuals

The 'skin of blackness' is metaphorical or cultural: a self-applied mark, animal-skin clothing, or Near Eastern idiom for spiritual state. The curse was separation from God, not skin, and the book's real message is 2 Nephi 26:33, 'all are alike unto God'.

The answer: The metaphorical readings are recent and strained. The text contrasts 'white, and exceedingly fair' with 'a skin of blackness', gives sexual unattractiveness as the purpose, passes the curse to mixed offspring (2 Nephi 5:21-23), and 3 Nephi 2:15 says converted Lamanites' 'skin became white like unto the Nephites'. Every Church president who addressed the passage before the 2010s, and Kimball from the conference pulpit, read it as literal pigmentation, and the 1981 footnotes link it to 2 Nephi 30:6. The Church now calls the mark 'not fully understood' because the plain meaning has become morally unacceptable, not because new evidence about the text has emerged. A nineteenth-century American origin explains the verse easily: it is the then-common theory that Indians were degenerate, darkened Israelites.

What they get right: 2 Nephi 26:33 is genuinely in the book, the curse is formally distinguished from the mark in several passages, and the Church's 2020 disavowal is unambiguous.

Church curriculum revisions; Elder Gary E. Stevenson (2020)

The Church has disavowed the racial reading in the plainest terms available to it, removed the Joseph Fielding Smith passage from Come, Follow Me, and had an apostle apologize publicly for the 2020 manual.

The answer: Those corrections are real and this page credits them. They also leave the text where it was. 2 Nephi 5:21 still says a skin of blackness came upon them so that they would not be enticing, and 3 Nephi 2:15 still has the curse taken away and the skin become white; the Church has revised the manuals, not the scripture, and members read the verses on a four-year cycle. Disavowing an interpretation while continuing to canonize the sentences that generate it is precisely the position the claim under test says is not a problem.

What they get right: Removing the Joseph Fielding Smith passage and apologizing for the manual were not small acts, and the Church did them without being compelled to.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

This is a case where the text, the prophets and the present Church cannot all be right. The verse says God darkened skin as part of a curse; Joseph Smith and his successors identified living peoples as the bearers of that mark; an apostle told the Church in 1960 that placement children were visibly whitening; a 2020 manual repeated the traditional reading and was withdrawn within weeks. The Church now disavows the 'theory' while canonizing the sentence that states it. Combined with the DNA evidence that the identified peoples are not Israelite, the Lamanite doctrine is best explained as nineteenth-century racial folklore about the origin of Native Americans.

The apologetic case

Scripture written by an ancient people can carry its authors' ethnic prejudices without those prejudices being God's view; the book's narrative arc repeatedly makes Lamanites more righteous than Nephites and ends with the Nephites destroyed; and the modern Church has explicitly condemned racism and the curse theory.

What would change this

Early (pre-1900) Church sources reading 'skin of blackness' non-literally would weaken the claim that the metaphorical reading is a modern retreat.

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.