They Are Here for Your Women.
A Utah-based church with a 126-year history of racial exclusion is coming to Monrovia to define what your family is — and to punish you if it doesn’t fit their template. What did our Foreign Minister agree to in Salt Lake City?
Listen carefully to the language they will use when they arrive in Monrovia in June 2026. They will talk about children. They will talk about mothers. They will talk about the sanctity of the home and the protection of the family. They will be very warm, very organized, and very well funded.
What they will not tell you is this: under the doctrine they are bringing to your capital, a woman who raises her children alone is a problem to be fixed. A mother who controls her own body is a threat to be managed. A woman who has not submitted to the governance of a man is — by the formal written theology of this institution — living in defiance of God’s eternal plan.
They are not coming for your family. They are coming for your women.
The Conference and Its Sponsors
It is called the Strengthening Families Conference, and Monrovia has been formally selected to host its 8th edition in June 2026. Representatives from Sierra Leone, Liberia and other countries have already been courted, with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hosting African delegates and government officials at its Salt Lake City headquarters.
The concept of a united family that lives and progresses forever is at the core of Latter-day Saint doctrine. Within families led by a father and a mother, children develop virtues such as love, trust, loyalty, cooperation and service.
That sounds benign enough. But read further into the theology and a sharper picture emerges.
“By divine design, according to the Church’s foundational 1995 Family Proclamation — which LDS Apostle Ronald A. Rasband has confirmed is doctrine — fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”
Presiding. A man presides. A woman nurtures. That is the template they are bringing to Liberia. And the conference coming to Monrovia is designed to embed this template into law.
What “Family Values” Actually Means for Liberian Women
Liberia’s women do not live in the theoretical world of an American church pamphlet. They live in a country where widowhood, displacement, poverty, and the aftermath of civil war have produced hundreds of thousands of households headed by women. They live in communities where a woman’s ability to make decisions about her own body, her own children, and her own future is not an abstract philosophical question — it is the difference between survival and collapse.
The Church’s proclamation states that children are “entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother.” What does that mean for the Liberian single mother? For the widow raising four children in Nimba County? For the woman who left a violent marriage to protect herself and her children?
It means, under the values framework this conference promotes, that her family is incomplete. Deficient. A problem requiring correction or, once the legislative phase begins, restriction.
This is not speculation. It is the documented pattern. The Strengthening Families Conference and its sister events have toured the continent — Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria — and everywhere they go, the same legislative agenda follows. The definition of a valid family is narrowed. The autonomy of women over their bodies and households is circumscribed. Laws are passed. Women lose ground.
And when Liberia’s legislators attend this conference in June — as they are expected to do — they will be handed a ready-made legislative template dressed up in the language of child protection and African values.
The Minister Who Went to Utah
Before this conference arrives in Monrovia, someone needed to open the door. That someone was the Dean of the Liberian Cabinet.
On June 27, 2024, Liberia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sara Beysolow Nyanti visited Utah to learn more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its ongoing humanitarian efforts. She was joined by Da M. Tarr, Liberia’s Chargé d’Affaires to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a member of the Church.
During her visit, Minister Nyanti toured Welfare Square in Salt Lake City. She was deeply moved by a video showcasing the Church’s welfare initiatives. She was shocked to learn about the Church’s significant contributions to global humanitarian programs that she had helped initiate and expand during her time at the United Nations.
“I was so inspired. I used to be humanitarian coordinator, huge humanitarian operations, and to see that you are on the other side and some of the food we’re giving, some of the hygiene kits we’re distributing — it came from you! I didn’t know that! And that blew my mind.”
Minister Nyanti, Salt Lake City, June 2024
The diplomat accompanying the Foreign Minister was a church member himself. The Liberian government’s point person for this relationship is embedded inside the very institution cultivating it. Minister Nyanti returned moved, inspired, and connected. Four months later, the Monrovia conference was announced.
In October 2024, the First Lady of Sierra Leone, Fatima Maada Bio, also spent two days in Salt Lake City, meeting Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and touring the same Welfare Square facilities. She was subsequently awarded recognition at the 2025 Freetown conference, which was organized in conjunction with her office.
The sequence is identical: invite senior African officials to Utah, build personal relationships, emotionally bind them through humanitarian awe, award them publicly, announce the next country.
What journalRAGE wants to know — and what the Liberian public deserves to know — is this: Was that visit disclosed? What commitments were made? What did the government of Liberia agree to in exchange for its endorsement of this conference?
Who Is Giving These Lessons? Ask About Their Record on Race.
Here is the question that should be asked loudly and publicly in every parliament, every church, and every market in Liberia before this conference opens:
Who gave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — an institution headquartered in Utah, led overwhelmingly by white Americans — the moral authority to instruct African nations on the structure of the African family?
This is an institution with a documented, century-long history of racial exclusion that it has never fully reckoned with.
From 1852 to 1978 — a span of 126 years — temple and priesthood policies in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formally prohibited both Black women and men from temple ordinances and ordination in the all-male priesthood.
One hundred and twenty-six years. During that entire period, the institution that is now coming to Monrovia to define the African family formally taught that Black people were spiritually inferior — barred from the highest sacraments of the faith.
The justifications offered by Church leaders included the belief that Black people were cursed as descendants of Cain, that they had been less valiant in their premortal life, and that mixed-race marriages were a sin. It was not until 1978 — under pressure from the Civil Rights Movement and the practical impossibility of missionary expansion in Africa — that the ban was lifted.
And it was not until 2013 — just twelve years ago — that the Church publicly repudiated the theology it had used to justify 126 years of exclusion.
Forty-seven years since Black people were formally permitted full participation. Twelve years since the theology was repudiated. And now this institution is sending delegations to Liberia to hold conferences defining what constitutes a legitimate African family.
Their Problem With Women — Including Their Own
The racial history is not incidental. It is of a piece with the same institutional logic now being applied to women and to families that do not fit the approved template.
The LDS Church has long articulated clear and restrictive expectations for women. The culture of the church is deeply rooted in patriarchy, with systems and teachings that consistently elevate men. From its earliest days, leadership has been exclusively male, and women are denied priesthood authority or decision-making power in meaningful church governance. The church promotes a narrow ideal in which women are primarily valued as wives and mothers, instructed to stay in the home and raise children rather than pursue professional aspirations or independence.
The principal author of the 1995 Family Proclamation noted that the theological function of women in the church is primarily to bear children — a justification that has long underpinned the tradition of male-only ordained leadership. Women in the LDS Church have no place in the chain of command. Women leaders at every level report to male bishops, who report to male stake presidents, who report to male General Authorities.
In March 2024, when an LDS leader declared at a worldwide devotional that there is no other religious organization in the world that has “so broadly given power and authority to women,” women took to the church’s social media in their thousands feeling unheard and invalidated. The comment generated overwhelming backlash not from dissenters but from frustrated, invested church members who felt the message fell flat — because they did not feel they had authority, unlike members of other churches with practicing female pastors and rabbis.
This is the institution that will arrive in Monrovia in June 2026 to hold conferences about protecting women and strengthening families.
The Liberian Woman They Cannot See
Sara Beysolow Nyanti — who is herself described as a feminist, who has more than 20 years of experience in senior humanitarian roles, who has fought gender-based violence across multiple conflict zones, who is an ordained pastor, and who was appointed Dean of the Cabinet by President Boakai in February 2024 — went to Salt Lake City and was moved to tears by a food warehouse.
We do not question her faith. We do not question her sincerity. But we do question this: Did Minister Nyanti, who has spent her career fighting for women, understand that she was being cultivated by an institution whose formal doctrine places women under male governance? Did she consider what would follow this conference for single mothers in Liberia? For women who head their own households? For women who have exercised — as she has exercised — the full range of their professional and bodily autonomy?
The Liberian woman that the Strengthening Families Conference is designed to produce is not Sara Beysolow Nyanti. She is a woman who stays home. A woman who nurtures. A woman who is — in the explicit language of the LDS Proclamation — under the presiding authority of a man.
That is not a Liberian value. That is not an African value. That is a Utah export, dressed in the language of family protection, funded by one of the wealthiest religious institutions on earth.
The Real Agenda: Bodies, Autonomy, and Who Controls Them
The Strengthening Families Conference, the allied African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family and Sovereignty, and the legislative campaigns they generate are not, at their core, about protecting children. Children in Liberia are protected by mothers — including single mothers, widowed mothers, and mothers who made choices about their own bodies that no foreign church has the right to override.
The agenda is about control. Specifically, it is about reversing the expansion of women’s autonomy that has been one of the most significant social developments in West Africa over the past three decades. Women who can make decisions about their bodies, their households, their families, and their futures are harder to govern by decree. The “Strengthening Families” framework is designed to roll that back — to re-anchor women inside a definition of family that requires male presiding authority, that pathologizes single motherhood, and that treats a woman’s body and reproductive choices as communal or legislative property.
The groups co-sponsoring these conferences include Alliance Defending Freedom and C-Fam — organizations that have fought against reproductive rights for women on multiple continents. They are not coming to Liberia because they love Liberian families. They are coming because Liberia is the next front in a global campaign to reverse the autonomy that women have spent generations earning.
What Needs to Happen Before June
journalRAGE is calling on the Liberian government to answer publicly before this conference opens:
What did Minister Nyanti commit to during her visit to Salt Lake City in June 2024? Was that visit declared in any official government record? What is the nature of the relationship between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Which legislators plan to attend the Monrovia conference, and who is funding their participation?
We are calling on Liberian civil society, women’s organizations, bar associations, medical associations, and community leaders to scrutinize this conference with the same rigor they would apply to any foreign government seeking to influence Liberian legislation.
And we are saying plainly to every single mother in Liberia, every woman who heads a household, every woman who has made choices about her own body and her own future: this conference is not for you. It is about you. And the people running it believe that your family, as it exists, is a problem.
They have spent 126 years telling Black people they were spiritually inferior, only backing down when global pressure became too great. They are now bringing those same institutional instincts — the instinct to define, to exclude, to rank, to restrict — to the African family.
Liberia’s women built this country through war, through Ebola, through poverty, and through every failure of the governments that were supposed to protect them. They do not need an institution from Utah to tell them what their family is.
journalRAGE is Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. Founded in 2019, we report on the communities others choose to ignore. Secure tips: contact@journalrage.org
EDITORIAL BOARD NOTE: This is an opinion and advocacy piece consistent with journalRAGE’s editorial mission. All factual claims are sourced and documented. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Minister Nyanti were not contacted for comment prior to this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.