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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

Utah was a moderately unforgiving desert settled by members of a white church (the majority of members’ families had recently immigrated from Britain or Scandinavia).

That church also was not particularly welcoming to Black people and expressly for as slavery.

You didn’t have Black people moving there to join a pretty culty religious group, and you didn’t have slavery, so there was very little influx of diversity.

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Not to be pedantic about it but there actually was slavery (to your point though, not nearly as widespread as it was in the East) Brigham Young declared it legal right after a black member from Boston made the trek into Utah. As soon as he heard Brigham Young say that he packed up and left. He only stayed for like a month.

Edit: I’m not certain off-hand if it was made legal-legal or if Brigham just said it was doctrinal, imagine the effect would be pretty much the same either way at the time.

Brigham Young believed that slavery was ordained of God, and accepted slaves for tithing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_slavery

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Utah

Edit: Slavery was legal in Utah from 1852 until 1862 when it was banned by Congress.

> Brigham Young believed that slavery was ordained of God, and accepted slaves for tithing.

It’s not like there’s an intellectually honest way of getting a ban on slavery from Christian Scripture. Mohamed was over 600 years later and substantially more liberal with regard to slavery than was the norm before him and his religion didn’t ban slavery either. The Abrahamic scriptures aren’t really ambiguous on this. God does not object to slavery as such.

When one claims to have a direct line to God and receive modern revelation, it would be expected that maybe they would see the writing on the wall, and I dunno, not enslave people?

The problem was that they were actively writing new scripture that supposedly had equal (if not more) weight than both the Old and New Testament.

Brigham did way worse than that to black people. Brigham Young and most other Mormon leaders, believed that the(ir) scriptures justified the subordination of black people because they were descendants of Cain or of other biblical figures who had sinned egregiously.

Slavery in Utah lasted 10 years and included very small number of Afroamerican and Native American people so certainly economic success of Utah is in no significant way connected to slavery.

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