How Sara Beysolow Nyanti’s Pilgrimage to Salt Lake City is Enabling a Utah Institution’s Racist “Family Values” to Erode a Generation of Liberian Women’s Gains
BY JOURNALRAGE | INVESTIGATIVE DESK | MONROVIA
There is a photograph that circulates on a Mormon church website. In it, Sara Beysolow Nyanti — Liberia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dean of the Cabinet, ordained Reverend, cancer survivor, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and one of the most accomplished women this country has ever produced — stands smiling inside the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah.
She looks moved. She looks inspired. She looks like a woman who has just discovered something that has blown her mind.
“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
We understand the feeling. The LDS Church’s humanitarian infrastructure is vast, well-organized, and genuinely impressive to encounter. The food warehouse at Welfare Square is real. The hygiene kits are real. The self-reliance programs are real.
What is also real — and what was apparently not discussed during that June 2024 visit — is that the institution behind those warehouses formally taught, for 126 years, that Black people bore a spiritual curse. That it barred Black men and women from its temples and priesthood until 1978. That it only repudiated the theology behind that exclusion in 2013. And that it is now deploying the same institutional machinery — the same certainty about who belongs and who doesn’t, the same capacity to define valid and invalid ways of living — against the women and families of Liberia.
The minister who walked into that building in June 2024 as a feminist and a champion of women’s rights walked out as the person who opened the door.
WHO SARA BEYSOLOW NYANTI IS — AND WHY THAT MAKES THIS MATTER
To understand the weight of what is at stake, you must first understand who this woman is and what she represents.
Sara Frances Beysolow Nyanti was born in 1968, the oldest of seven children. Her mother worked multiple jobs to support her children. That origin story — a woman working multiple jobs, alone, holding a family together — is the story of hundreds of thousands of Liberian women. It is, in a very real sense, the story of Liberia itself.
She has spent nearly three decades in international development, governance, crisis management, and humanitarian response. She directed Liberia’s National AIDS Control Program during the conflict years, wrote the country’s first Global Fund proposal, served as UNICEF Representative in Yemen during its worst humanitarian crisis, coordinated the UN’s response in South Sudan, and was appointed UN Assistant Secretary-General by António Guterres.
She faced the Houthis in Yemen. She underwent cancer surgery three times. She convened emergency meetings in flood-ravaged South Sudan to save lives with no development funding available. She took early retirement from the UN at her peak — not because she had to, but because she said the need for her voice was at home.
She has spoken out against sexual violence in Liberia. She founded an NGO that operates community learning huts for adolescent girls in response to escalating rape cases. She preached from her pulpit in Brewerville against the silence of churches on societal ills.
This is not a passive woman who stumbled into a relationship with a foreign religious institution. This is one of the most intentional, experienced, and capable public servants Liberia has ever had. Which is precisely why her visit to Salt Lake City requires scrutiny. Not because she is weak. But because she is significant — and because the institution that cultivated her is banking on that significance to legitimize what is coming.
WHAT SHE WAS WALKING INTO
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a neutral humanitarian organization. It is a theological institution with specific, documented beliefs about the structure of families, the role of women, and the ordering of society — beliefs that it has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to encode into law across multiple countries.
Its foundational doctrine on the family — the 1995 Family Proclamation, confirmed as current doctrine — states that fathers are divinely designed to “preside” over families and that mothers are “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” It defines valid families as those built around a man, a woman, and children born within matrimony. It has no theological category for the single mother. No framework for the widow. No space for the woman who heads her own household by necessity, by circumstance, or by choice.
When Minister Nyanti visited LDS headquarters, she was presented with a figure of Christ and described the Church’s self-reliance and food security programmes as “what church is intended to be.” She was escorted by Da M. Tarr, Liberia’s Chargé d’Affaires to the DRC — a Church member — and hosted by Elder and Sister David and Annette Wells.
She was not visiting a food bank. She was being cultivated by a global institution — one that, within months, would announce Monrovia as the next host of its Strengthening Families Conference, and that, within two years, would deploy 17 new missions across Africa.
The question is not whether Minister Nyanti knew all of this. The question is whether the Liberian state, with full knowledge, chose to endorse it. And the answer is: it did, through her.
WHAT “WHITE VALUES” ARE BEING IMPORTED — AND WHY THEY ARE ALIEN TO AFRICAN REALITY
Let us call this precisely what it is.
The “family values” being imported through the Strengthening Families Conference are not African values. They are not Liberian values. They are the specific theological and social values of a church founded in 1830 in upstate New York, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, governed overwhelmingly by white American men, and structured around a patriarchal order that has systematically excluded women from authority throughout its entire 195-year history.
This is the institution that, from 1852 to 1978, formally taught that Black people were cursed — descendants of Cain, less valiant in their premortal existence, unworthy of its highest sacraments. The justifications offered by Church leaders included the belief that Black people had been less valiant in their premortal life and that mixed-race marriages were a sin. These were not the views of individual members. They were official, institutionally endorsed doctrine — preached from pulpits, printed in church manuals, taught to children.
It was not until 1978 — under sustained pressure from the Civil Rights Movement and the practical impossibility of missionary expansion in Africa — that the restriction was lifted. And it was not until 2013 — just twelve years ago — that the church publicly disavowed the theology it had used to justify 126 years of racial exclusion.
This is the institution now coming to Monrovia with a conference about African family values.
The audacity requires a moment of reflection. An institution that spent 126 years teaching that Black people were spiritually inferior is now positioning itself as the custodian of Black African family structures. An institution whose top governing bodies contain no women in positions of final authority is now arriving in a country whose most celebrated daughter is a two-term female president and Nobel Peace Laureate, to hold conferences about the proper role of women in the family.
These are not African values being recovered. They are white American evangelical-conservative values being exported under the language of tradition, faith, and family protection — and they are being delivered through the door that Liberia’s most prominent female diplomat opened in Salt Lake City in June 2024.
THE GAINS THAT ARE NOW AT RISK
Liberia did not arrive at this moment easily. The progress that Liberian women have made — over decades, through civil war, through Ebola, through poverty, through every structure that tried to keep them small — represents one of the most remarkable stories of women’s empowerment on the African continent.
In 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first woman elected head of state in Africa. In 2011, she and Leymah Gbowee — both Liberians — won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on women’s rights and peace. A country that had been devastated by two civil wars produced, within a decade of peace, a female head of state and a Nobel laureate in women’s rights. That is not a coincidence. It is the product of generations of Liberian women refusing to accept the limits placed on them.
The Sirleaf administration established the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Crimes Unit, appointed women to prominent government positions, and supported legislation addressing gender-based violence — changes that helped reshape what was possible for women in Liberian public life.
In 2021, Nyanti herself moderated the Women Political Leaders’ Reykjavik Global Forum, noting the need for gender equality to move from policy to action. She was, at that moment, the highest-ranking Liberian in the United Nations. A Liberian woman at the apex of the world’s most important multilateral institution.
These gains are fragile. They were not given. They were fought for, one generation at a time, by women who refused to accept that their role was to stay home, nurture, and defer. The LDS Church’s doctrine says precisely the opposite. The Strengthening Families Conference’s legislative pipeline — which has moved from conference floor to legislature in Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone — is designed to roll back exactly the kind of autonomy that Liberian women have bled to achieve.
When the definition of a valid family is narrowed by law, it is single mothers who lose custody protections. When women’s bodily autonomy is restricted by legislation inspired by foreign religious doctrine, it is the women who survived Liberia’s civil wars — who made impossible choices in impossible circumstances — whose lives are criminalized retroactively. When a foreign church’s theology about male presiding authority is embedded in Liberian legislation, it is the daughter of a woman who worked multiple jobs alone to raise seven children who is told her mother’s family was deficient.
That is Minister Nyanti’s own mother they are describing. That is the family that produced the woman they invited to Utah.
THE CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF THIS STORY
Sara Beysolow Nyanti is, by any measure, the living refutation of everything the LDS Church’s Strengthening Families doctrine promotes.
She was not raised in a two-parent household with a presiding father. She was raised by a mother who worked multiple jobs. She did not stay home to nurture. She went to war zones — Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria’s Ebola crisis — making decisions that determined whether people lived or died. She did not defer to male authority. She became, for two decades, one of the most senior women in the United Nations system. She did not subordinate her professional life to the demands of domesticity. She took early retirement from the UN’s highest echelons to bring her voice home to Liberia.
She is celebrated for her integrity, her empathy, and her transformative leadership — championing peace, justice, and sustainable development across Africa and beyond.
And yet she is the person who walked into the headquarters of an institution that would theologically classify her own mother’s family as incomplete, her own career path as a deviation from divine design, and her own life as an argument for restriction rather than celebration ,and came out inspired.
This is not a criticism of her faith. She is an ordained Reverend. Her faith is her own. But her faith is not at issue here. Her official capacity as Foreign Minister and Dean of the Cabinet is at issue. And in that capacity, she opened the government of Liberia to a foreign institution whose doctrine, whose legislative agenda, and whose expansion strategy will fall heaviest on the women least equipped to resist it — not women like Sara Beysolow Nyanti, who have the resources, the platform, and the international network to protect themselves, but the women of Nimba County, of Grand Bassa, of West Point, who have nothing between them and a legislature newly inspired by a Utah-based church’s definition of family except the gains that the last generation of Liberian women died to secure.
WHAT MUST NOW BE ANSWERED
Minister Nyanti has a platform that few Liberian women have ever held. She has a UN Security Council seat to steward. She has a relationship with the LDS Church that she built personally, in her official capacity, in 2024.
She can use that platform to demand transparency from the conference organizers. She can insist on public disclosure of the child-directed programming, the data collection, the legislative advocacy plans. She can require that no Liberian legislator attend this conference as a sponsored guest without full public disclosure. She can stand before the Liberian people — the women of Liberia specifically — and explain exactly what she committed to in Salt Lake City, and exactly what she believes the government’s endorsement of this conference means for them.
Or she can remain silent, and allow the institution she helped legitimize to proceed with a conference that, if the documented pattern holds, will be followed by resources, by legislative lobbying, and by a narrowing of the definition of the Liberian family that will erase from legal recognition the very family structure that produced her.
Liberia has come too far. Its women have bled too much. The ground they have gained — in law, in politics, in public life, in the right to head their own households, make decisions about their own bodies, and raise their own children without the presiding authority of a man — is not abstract. It is the accumulated sacrifice of generations.
A Utah church with a 126-year record of racial exclusion does not get to undo that in a two-day conference at the EJS Exhibition Complex. But only if the women and men of Liberia — and the officials they have trusted with power — refuse to let it.
Minister Nyanti has a choice to make. journalRAGE will be watching to see which one she makes.
This is an opinion and advocacy piece consistent with journalRAGE’s editorial mission. All factual claims are sourced and documented. Minister Nyanti was not contacted for comment prior to this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.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.