All Are Alike unto God

The truth, stated

God does not prefer anyone. Not by race, not by class, not by sex, not by nation — no soul stands closer to his welcome than any other, and no soul stands outside it. The Book of Mormon states it as a single sentence, itemized so that no one can claim an exemption was intended:

"He inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile." (2 Nephi 26:33)

Black and white. Bond and free. Male and female. The believer and the heathen. The chosen people and everyone else. All alike. This essay walks that sentence from its long roots in the Bible, through the centuries that carried the verse and practiced its opposite, to the book that printed the itemized list in 1830 America — while slavery was legal and half the listed categories could not vote — and has been holding every church and every reader to it since.

The standing grain

The equality of souls is planted in the Bible's first chapter and grows through the whole book. Creation: one image, stamped on the whole species — "in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27) — and one family: God "hath made of one blood all nations of men" (Acts 17:26). The covenant with Abraham, so often misread as favoritism, states its own purpose in its founding sentence: "in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 12:3) — chosenness as assignment, a family elected to carry bread to everybody, never a family elected to eat alone. The law of Moses commands love across the line most societies police hardest: "the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). The Messiah's own genealogy is seeded with outsiders — Rahab of Jericho, Ruth the Moabite. Jonah is sent, against his whole will, to the enemy's capital, and the book ends with God defending Nineveh's right to his pity. And Isaiah answers the outsider's anxiety by name, in the temple's own charter: "Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, The Lord hath utterly separated me from his people... for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people" (Isaiah 56:3–7).

The New Testament makes it explicit doctrine. Peter, taught by a thrice-repeated vision to enter a Roman officer's home, states the discovery in the phrase that named the principle forever: "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him" (Acts 10:34–35). Paul writes the great leveling sentence: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). James runs the doctrine into the pews with his gold-ring test — the rich visitor seated well, the poor man told to stand — "are ye not then partial in yourselves...?" (James 2:1–4). And John sees the doctrine's finale: "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues," before one throne (Revelation 7:9).

So the grain stood — planted at creation, chartered to Abraham, legislated at Sinai, revealed to Peter, written by Paul, enforced by James, crowned in Revelation. And the harvest? The church struggled from its first weeks (the Greek-speaking widows neglected in the daily distribution, Acts 6; Peter himself, vision and all, relapsing into separate tables at Antioch until Paul withstood him to the face) — and then the centuries turned struggle into system: Christendom baptizing conquest; slavery defended from pulpits, with the Bible open — a tortured misreading of Noah's curse pressed into service for four hundred years; segregated pews, segregated balconies, segregated communion; missions arriving in the holds of empire. Galatians 3:28 sat printed in the Bibles carried aboard slave ships. And honesty at our own address: the Restoration itself maintained a priesthood restriction by race for over a century — a practice its own church has since ended by revelation and whose justifying folklore it has formally disavowed — while the verse this essay is built on sat in its founding book the entire time. That is the pattern this series keeps finding at its darkest: the grain standing tall in everyone's field, and the harvesters, generation after generation, eating something else.

The plain harvest

Now look closely at what the Book of Mormon actually did — because 2 Nephi 26:33 is not a lone verse but the capstone of a welded passage, and the welding is the revelation. The verse's own opening clause announces this series' whole theme: "the Lord God doeth not anything save it be plain unto the children of men" — plainness declared as divine policy — and then the sentence every reader of this series has already met: this is the same passage as the free-salvation charter of essay one. "He commandeth none that they shall not partake of his salvation... all men are privileged the one like unto the other, and none forbidden" (26:24–28) flows directly into "all are alike unto God" (26:33). The free table and the equal table are one table, in one paragraph: salvation costs nothing, therefore no one can be priced out; the gift is free, therefore no class, race, or sex can claim better seating — the two doctrines are not neighbors but a single truth stated twice, and the counterfeit of both is named between them: priestcraft, men setting "themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain" (26:29) — the manufacture of religious hierarchy, identified as the exact sin that fences free tables and ranks equal souls.

And notice what the itemized list is claiming, because it goes beyond even Paul. Galatians 3:28 describes the baptized — those "in Christ Jesus," one inside the covenant. Nephi's sentence describes God — "all are alike unto God" — a statement about the divine character that covers the whole species, explicitly including those outside every covenant: "and he remembereth the heathen." The equality is not a membership benefit. It is a fact about God, true of every human being who has ever lived, church or no church — which is why the previous essay's without-the-law mercy and this essay's all-alike welcome are the same doctrine from two sides.

Then the book does what no ancient text does: it shows the doctrine institutionalized. The church Alma founded ran on a written equality rule: "the preacher was no better than the hearer, neither was the teacher any better than the learner; and thus they were all equal" (Alma 1:26) — clergy-rank abolished by statute; the priests "did labor with their own hands for their support," and so did the king: Benjamin, the beloved monarch of the book's early pages, tells his people from the tower that he has "labored with mine own hands that I might serve you... that ye should not be laden with taxes" (Mosiah 2:14). Jacob — Nephi's brother — preaches the class-sermon the centuries needed: the people's first drift toward costly apparel and ranked society is met with "think of your brethren like unto yourselves, and be familiar with all and free with your substance" (Jacob 2:17), grounded in the per-soul appraisal that may be the plainest equality sentence in scripture: "the one being is as precious in his sight as the other" (Jacob 2:21). And when the doctrine is tested by its hardest case — the poor of the Zoramites, physically cast out of the synagogues they had built because of their clothes — the book stages the confrontation deliberately: Alma turns from the fine-robed congregation to the excluded crowd on the hill and builds his greatest sermon on their welcome. Printed in 1830 — a book itemizing black and white, bond and free, male and female as alike before God, in a nation where the first pair could be sold, the second pair enslaved, and the third pair silenced — the verse was testifying against its own publication context from the day it left the press, and it has outlasted every arrangement it indicted, including, at last and by revelation, the restriction its own publishers maintained. Scripture's equality clauses are patient. They win.

The truth at the table

Now the table itself — because this doctrine's work is almost entirely local. For the one who feels like an outsider at church — wrong clothes, wrong family shape, wrong past, wrong accent, the quiet certainty that everyone else belongs in a way you don't — Isaiah answered your exact sentence twenty-seven centuries ago: neither let the stranger say, the Lord hath utterly separated me from his people. The feeling is real; the theology behind it is false. The list has your category on it, whatever your category is, because the list was built to have no remainder: he denieth none that come. Come.

For the congregation, the doctrine is a standing self-audit with the test-questions already written: James's gold ring (who gets the eager welcome in our foyer, and who gets the polite distance?), Jacob's costly apparel (what does our unspoken dress code preach?), Alma's statute (does the teacher act better than the learner — does any calling in the building function as rank?). Every congregation drifts; the verse is the plumb line, and the plumb line is in our own book, which removes every excuse.

For the parent, the itemized sentence is the answer to hand a child asking about prejudice — memorizable, concrete, and carrying the only foundation that finally holds: people are equal not because a document says so or a movement won, but because all are alike unto God — the worth is issued at the source, per soul, "the one being as precious in his sight as the other," and no earthly ranking can amend it. And for the wounded — those hurt by the church's own historic failures on exactly this doctrine — the honest word is this: the verse was the standard all along, printed before the betrayals it would eventually correct; institutions repent toward their own scripture, slowly, and this scripture has been pulling the whole time. The free table and the equal table are the same table — one paragraph, one God, no preferred seating, no price of admission, nobody's chair closer to the head. Which is exactly what a table set by the Host of Isaiah's house — a house of prayer for all people — was always going to look like.

---

And he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female... and all are alike unto God.