Mormons Excommunicate Indian Leader

SALT LAKE CITY — George P. Lee, the first American Indian appointed to the Mormon Church hierarchy, was excommunicated Friday after telling the leadership that it is spiritually slaughtering his people.

The first excommunication of a major Mormon leader in 46 years was announced in a terse, one-paragraph statement from church headquarters here.

Lee, who was an elder of the church, was expelled for “apostasy and other conduct unbecoming a member of the church,” the statement said.

Lee, a Navajo and former president of the College of Ganado on the Navajo Reservation, was at the meeting when the decision was made, it said.

Church spokesman Don LeFevre said he could not elaborate on the statement on the instructions of church leaders.

But Lee said the action stemmed from basic doctrinal disagreements with church leaders about the role of Indians in the religion and from his contention that the leadership is racist, materialistic and bent on changing the meaning of Mormon scripture.

“It got to the point where I had to follow them or Jesus Christ, and I chose to follow Jesus Christ,” Lee said in an interview Friday afternoon. “I told them they are the ones that are apostatizing--teaching false doctrine.”

Lee, 46, was made a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1975. The First Quorum of the Seventy is responsible for administering the affairs of the 6.7 million-member church under the direction of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and governing First Presidency. Members of the three all-male bodies are known as general authorities.

In an hourlong meeting with church President Ezra Taft Benson, Benson’s two counselors and the Twelve, Lee read a 23-page, handwritten letter in which he accused his fellow churchmen of distorting doctrine to satisfy their own racial bias, relegating Indians to second-class status and denying them their rightful place in the faith’s theology.

“You are slowly causing a silent subtle scriptural and spiritual slaughter of the Indians,” the letter said. “While physical extermination may have been one of (the) federal government’s policies long ago . . . your current scriptural and spiritual extermination . . . is the greater sin and great shall be your condemnation for this.”

Lee’s excommunication was particularly sensitive to a church that believes Indians in the Americas are descendants of ancient peoples described in the Book of Mormon, the faith’s most cherished scripture.

The Lamanites, as the Indian ancestors are known in the book, were themselves described as descendants of a prophet named Lehi who brought his family from Jerusalem to the New World about 600 BC.

Lee said prophesies in the Book of Mormon are clear in defining Indians and Jews as literal descendants of the House of Israel and all others as “Gentiles,” or “adopted Israel.”