Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel
Article Title
Keywords
Lamanite, Book of Mormon, Hispanic, heritage
Document Type
Article
Abstract
In September 1972, the Ensign published a piece called “What Is a Lamanite?” Using an “imaginary conversation” between different individuals of Latin American descent and a Church leader, this article got to the heart of the complexity of Lamanite identification within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When this piece was published in the 1970s—and even long before—some Church leaders strongly encouraged Hispanics to identify as Lamanites, a name referring to a people found in the Church’s founding scripture—the Book of Mormon. Even with the Church’s encouragement, however, not all Hispanics jumped to identify as Lamanites. The “What Is a Lamanite?” piece is one of the only documents during the President Spencer W. Kimball time period that explored the diversity of beliefs about this term among Hispanics; it was “an important, if not overlooked, reminder that not all Saints whom Church leaders such as Kimball saw as Lamanites understood themselves in those same terms.”
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Balli, Tyler. "LDS Hispanic Americans and Lamanite Identity." Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel 19, no. 3 (2018): 93-115. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/re/vol19/iss3/9