CULTIC TREND ALERT: June 9, 2008

“Revelation” Still Spreading Deception in Africa

Dear friends,

Thirty years ago, Mormon president Spencer W. Kimball shocked the world by revoking his church’s longstanding ban on ordaining black males to its priesthood. I can still remember my utter disbelief when I heard the news.

Today, the impact of Kimball’s June 9th “revelation” reverberates across Africa and Latin America as Mormon missionaries reap a harvest of souls—even though the church has yet to renounce the hateful teaching behind the original ban.

From the 19th century until the late 1970s, Mormon leaders taught that Africans were cursed by God with the “mark of Cain,” which Brigham Young described as “the flat nose and black skin.” According to Young and succeeding prophets and apostles, people of African descent are not only different in appearance (enabling those of the “chosen seed” to know not to intermarry with them); they are also “cursed as to the priesthood”—meaning that African males were prevented from holding even the lowest positions of authority in the church. Worse, it restricted their access to the highest realms of heaven. (Still, the cult is not afraid to blatantly deny the past. “This folklore is not part of and never was taught as doctrine by the church,” Mormon spokesman Mark Tuttle told the Salt Lake Tribune last week.)

As a result, until June 9, 1978 Mormon missionary efforts in Africa were concentrated in segregated South Africa and Rhodesia. Meanwhile, proselytizing in mixed-race nations like Brazil and Venezuela was hampered by the difficulty of determining the lineage of potential converts (and the potential embarrassment of disclosing the racist doctrine).

Today, the cult has congregations in fully half of Africa’s 54 nations. Its efforts include nineteen missions (with Missionary Training Centers in Ghana and South Africa), temples in three countries (Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa), and ongoing translation work in more than two dozen indigenous languages. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that over a quarter of a million Mormons “hail from Nigeria in the west to Kenya and Ethiopia in the east to Zimbabwe and South Africa in the south.” (And missionary work in Latin America and the Caribbean has exploded, with nearly a million Mormons in Brazil alone.)

According to Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University, Mormon membership is growing dramatically in Africa, outpacing expansion elsewhere in the world and averaging about 15 percent annually. Jenkins foresees that the number of African Mormons will climb to between 3 million and 4 million in the next quarter century.

Christians must rise to this challenge and respond strategically the long-term threat of Mormonism in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. What began as a need for prevention must expand to include evangelism as increasing numbers of nationals embrace the counterfeit gospel of Joseph Smith.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Pray for God to restrain the Mormon missionary move in Africa and strengthen the witness of credible Christian churches there

• Give to help launch the Africa Center for Apologetics Research which will be directed  by John Divito, a former Mormon.

• Provide materials to missionaries to help them warn nationals about Mormonism and other cults imported from the U.S.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

• Mormonism
• 10 Questions and Answers on Mormonism
• Mormon and Black
• LDS Beliefs Help, but Attitude Toward Native Worship Affects, Church Growth in Africa
• Washington Post highlights Mormon growth in Africa
• Changing the Anti-Black Doctrine