“My faith is really strong, you know, I believe in God. And just like God says, He says to love your neighbor. So like I’m saying that we have to love each other. With my faith t I don’t hate anyone and I don’t believe anyone should hate anyone else, or anyone should hate me for the way that I look. I feel like if people were to find faith, or to rely on their faith more, they’d realize that hate can’t really live in a person who has faith, who wants to have a loving community. So I think if we relied on faith a little bit more, or just principles, righteous principles, that we’d live in a better community.” -David
“I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ, so obviously that means that I believe that all people should be treated fairly and with love, because we’re all children of the same God. For me, my ancestors were also faithful people. They used their faith to help them gather other people. I try to do the same thing. I use my faith in Jesus Christ as a way to unite people who maybe wouldn’t think the same or talk the same. If we both believe in Jesus Christ, we all would be wanting to fight for people. And something I believe is, if Jesus Christ were here right now, I know that He would be on the side of Black Lives Matter. I know He would, because everything He taught, everything He did was directed to marginalized people. He taught women in the scriptures, He taught people who were widowed, just everyone who society had cast out, these are the ones He sought after and taught. -Rachel
“I’m from Africa, I’m actually Muslim. Faith plays so much in Islam. You are taught you love one another, no matter what color you are, we’re brothers and sisters. And it actually helps a lot with racism because I can’t call you these names if you’re my Muslim brothers and sisters. This same thing goes for other religions too, you know. There’s no religion that teaches you to hate. I feel like whatever you are, if we just look at each other as brothers and sisters, it’ll be a better world." -George
“My faith is what brings me out of the times when I’m feeling really hopeless. Sometimes people use their religion to push forward an agenda to discriminate against someone else. But the God I believe in loves everybody and wants happiness for everybody, even if it’s not what we want for our lives. But I think my faith is pushing me to love everybody and to recognize them as children of God and not just another person but someone that I can connect with. Someone that God sees as valuable and someone that God loves.” -Breanna
“With the church, it’s very hard to be a person of color. It’s very, very hard. Especially when Christlike love is preached so, so much and most of the people within the church don’t practice it towards us. My faith has struggled, but the most important thing that has helped my faith is knowing that Christ has felt the exact same thing that I have felt. Not only with Him experiencing what I’ve felt through the atonement, but also knowing that He went through such a big struggle. Just going through the Atonement, being on the cross, knowing that He has felt the same persecution that I have felt, and that He knows exactly where I am, and He is doing as much as He can for me in this moment, has really helped my faith." -Kami
"Before I even became a member of the church of which I’m a member right now, I was Muslim., So I grew up Muslim. It is a faith that has taught me to respect everybody the same way, Christians, Muslims, everybody else. All the same. White, Black, all the same. There’s a saying back home, if you open everybody’s brain, you would notice that we all have the same brain color. It doesn’t matter what color you are, if you open your brain, it all has the same color as the brains of everybody else What makes a rainbow beautiful? It's not the fact that it has one color, it's the fact that it has many colors. So to me the world is just like the rainbow―it’s just beautiful." -Omar
“It’s definitely hard being a member of the church because so much of the racism that I’ve experienced in Utah has been from members of the church. And so, you have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ that teaches you to love one another, and that all people are equal in the sight of God, and that we’re all children of God. But then you have people who contradict that in their actions in the church. I’m sure every Black person in the church has heard that Black people weren’t or aren’t as faithful, or that we’re cursed, and things like that. That’s really caused me to doubt my faith sometimes because how could I believe in something that is contradictory to who I am, and who I am to my core? That’s been extremely hard. But I think about the faithful Black lLatter-day Saints who were some of the pioneers, and the fact that they had it worse than I have. And they still had such amazing faith, and they still held strong. And that only makes me want to keep going as well. Some people think, “Well, you should just not be LDS anymore. If you have a problem with the way things are, you should just leave the church” Why? What is that going to change? Is that going to improve anything? No, it’s not. It’s just going to let people continue to be comfortable and ignorant. That’s not okay. Black people have a voice in this church. Our voices need to be heard and acknowledged, and improvements need to be made. The gospel has been restored, but the church is not perfect. People think if you question the church you must not have faith, or you must not believe, or you should just find something else. But, no, I know this gospel is true and I’m not just going to abandon it because there are imperfect things in it. I think God led me to this church for a reason, and so I’m bringing my experiences and my knowledge about racism to help improve the gospel of Jesus Christ." -Jessica
“With my faith, I believe that God is the author of diversity and Jesus Christ is the publisher of peace. With those two things being said, ending racism is kind of like our God-given duty, essentially. In order to follow their examples, it’s so crucial to be anti-racist and take action. God created diversity for a reason and I think that’s kind of like our long life mission to act on that and be inclusive and understand that we’re all different and just be accepting of it.” -Kofi
“Specific to mormon culture, telling me and my siblings that if we were baptized than we were white in the eyes of God, that when we died we would be white and the curse would be lifted and that in heaven everyone was white and that’s what perfection means and that’s what it means to be with God is everyone’s white so that was abhorrent to listen to. I was a teenager at the time, and all my siblings were beside me, the youngest was five, and I remember just turning to them and saying “Don’t listen to that, that’s not what that means”. So even though anti-racism is preached and in church we don’t support racism in any form and you need to repent if you have those feelings, there’s just some sort of missing link between what the leadership has said and what trickles down to the wards. Because it’s still very prevalent in the wards and I know a lot of Black students don’t feel safe in their student wards even, and that's one of the places where they should feel the most safe and the closest to God, and that’s where a lot of people feel the farthest away and most distant. The one thing that I keep circling back to is that I believe that the Atonement covers everything. I don’t know how that's gonna work, I don’t know what that’s going to feel like when it works, but everything is made whole again through the Atonement. It’s not just for people repenting of their sins, it’s to make this broken system whole again. I truly believe that through Christ and His atonement, that things will be for the better that way. I wouldn’t say that I’ve lost faith in man and I guess the church’s leadership, but I don’t see huge changes happening. I honestly think people need Jesus, and that’s how things are going to change." -Ashea
