Perhaps it was the embarrassment of 2012’s Randy Bott debacle. Perhaps it was the intense media attention engendered by the Romney campaign and the “Mormon moment.” Perhaps it was the Church’s extraordinary rates of growth in some African nations. Perhaps it was faithful LDS Church members—Black and white—pressing for a clearer renunciation of the racist past. No one knows exactly what moved LDS Church leadership to publish beginning in 2013 a series of unattributed “Gospel Topics” essays on Mormonism’s most complicated historical subjects, including a two-thousand-word essay on “Race and the
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