Joseph Smith — "And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall …"
And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing.
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Details
Abraham 1:23 (from the Pearl of Great Price, a scripture canonized by the LDS Church)
Date: 1835-1842 (translation period)
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote warns that anyone who intermarries with a cursed people inherits that same divine curse through their offspring. It frames bloodline mixing as a spiritually dangerous act carrying hereditary punishment — condemnation passes not through personal sin but through ancestry. In modern terms: marrying into a condemned group makes your children condemned too, treating ethnic or racial separation as a theological imperative rather than mere social preference.
Relevance to Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith embedded racial hierarchy directly into LDS scripture, presenting skin color as divine punishment for sin. This passage reflects his broader theological framework in the Book of Mormon, where the Lamanites — understood as ancestors of Native Americans — were marked with dark skin as a curse. The LDS Church Smith founded enforced a priesthood ban on Black members until 1978, a policy rooted in such textual foundations from his revelatory writings.
The era
Smith wrote in the 1820s–30s, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act (1830), slavery was legally entrenched, and racial pseudoscience was gaining academic legitimacy. White Protestant America widely framed indigenous and African peoples as spiritually or biologically inferior. Smith's theology didn't merely reflect these views — it sacralized them, giving racial separation a divine mandate at precisely the moment American expansion required moral justification for displacing and subjugating non-white populations.
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