I recently read (listened to, actually[1]) Joanna Brooks’s book Mormonism and White Supremacy. It was a fascinating book. She covers pieces of Church history with the priesthood/temple ban that I maybe knew the broad strokes of, but that I didn’t know any of the details of.
For example, she traces the reported recollections of men who were actually present at and in some cases participants in the ordination of black men like Elijah Abel in the early years of the Church. Two of them, Abraham Smoot and Zebedee Coltrin, had changed their tune by 1879, when they both told John
Taylor in a meeting that Joseph Smith had always opposed the ordination of black men. Joseph F. Smith disagreed with them in 1879, but by 1908, he had come around to their point of view and reported that Joseph Smith had later declared Abel’s ordination “null and void.” Brooks hypothesizes that Joseph F. Smith’s change of heart might have been related to the recent death of Jane Manning James. She suggests that the presence of prominent black Mormons like James might have actually served as a brake for a while on such editing of recollections. In any case, I was fascinated to read this bit of connecting of dots as to how the Church went from ordaining black men at the beginning to deciding that no, in fact, black people were to be barred from both priesthood and the temple.
Another interesting issue Brooks talks about is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and its role in the Church’s push to integrate itself into the American mainstream in the 1950s and 60s, while at the same time maintaining the priesthood/temple ban. She discusses the fascinating point that the Choir was invited to sing at Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965, where Johnson had just signed the Civil Rights Act the year before, and was in discussions that led to the Voting Rights Act in 1965. How could the all-white choir from a church so determined in its racist exclusionary policies fit in? She offers some reasonable speculations like that Johnson had bigger political battles to concern him, but I think my favorite is the possibility that it was kind of a testament to the Church’s PR success with the Choir, to be seen as standing outside or somehow transcending all the discussion of and upheaval around issues of race at the time[2].
And it’s not just history. Brooks also gets into theoretical frameworks for thinking about the Church’s moves. She discusses the idea of white racial innocence: “white American adults found a way to convince themselves that they were innocent of racist wrongs and bore no responsibility for addressing racist power structures.” White Christian churches more generally, and the LDS Church in particular, she argues, played a role in this, allowing whites to imagine ourselves as somehow transcending questions or issues of race, and therefore not responsible for even considering it. This relates to the explanation I liked for how President Johnson could invite the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing at his inauguration: he perhaps was at least somewhat convinced by the idea that they were somehow outside of race.
Another fascinating connection that had never occurred to me is that she suggests that the Church’s commitment to prophetic infallibility arose at the same time as its commitment to the priesthood/temple ban, and that they were intertwined. I had always kind of thought that infallibility was like an original Church idea, and that it was then used to understand any later issues (e.g., of course polygamy was ended at the right time because Church leaders are always right), so it was interesting to consider that the idea of infallibility actually arose in the context of some teaching like this that Church leaders knew they had changed on and didn’t want to be contradicted on.
I also really liked her discussion of what she calls “undergrounding” that began during the polygamy crisis in the late 19th century. This is where Church leaders say one thing to insiders and another to outsiders, and what they say to outsiders spins or shades the truth or sometimes is just straight up false. This is important in the context of how the Church talks about race, especially since the end of the priesthood/temple ban, because members are much more likely to take seriously something that seems to be insider talk (e.g., said in Conference) than something that seems to be outsider talk (e.g., Gospel Topics essays). The outsider talk, many members will discount, because they figure that GAs are just shading things to make them sound better for outsiders, while withholding the hard truths that only insiders can bear. So even if the Race and the Priesthood Gospel Topics essay says some more progressive things than we’re used to hearing about maybe all the rationalizations for the priesthood/temple ban being nonsense, many members aren’t going to care unless such a thing is said in Conference[3].
Overall, it’s a really interesting book, and a quick read or listen (only about 200 pages). One note is that Brooks uses the first chapter to talk about white American Christianity and its pattern of racism more generally, as a way to motivate the rest of the book as an example case study using Mormonism. I can see how doing this frames the book to make it interesting for a wider audience, but as a reader who’s really only interested in the particular example of Mormonism, I wasn’t interested. So if you’re like me and get bogged down in Chapter 1, maybe just skip ahead to Chapter 2.
Notes
- I did go back and look at the book in print to check to be sure I was explaining some things correctly. I love audiobooks, but they are sure a hassle to browse through.
- I recently stumbled on another possible explanation. In David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, the authors report that Johnson and McKay were friendly for years, and Johnson occasionally called McKay to use him as a sounding board. It seems possible the Choir was invited just because of their friendship.
- I suspect that undergrounding is also a major reason that conspiracy theories like QAnon have been so popular among Mormons. When we have a history of having the real truth sometimes whispered and carefully hidden from outsiders, it sets the stage nicely for people to believe that the real truth about the political world is also not to be found in official channels, but rather by following secret channels of information that most people either don’t know about or don’t believe.
It is past time for the Church to acknowledge the historic racism in its leadership and ranks. Not only is it the just thing to do, it must be done to retain its younger membership.
Young people have friends and romantic relationships with those of different races at much higher rates than their grandparents did. This has led many to be increasingly distressed by the Church’s failure to apologize for the race-based priesthood exclusion that had no basis in doctrine.
The Church now admits that this policy never was doctrine, but it soft pedals that acknowledgement. What is needed is an actual apology. The Church needs to admit that it’s leaders were wrong, there is no excuse, and the current leaders are sincerely sorry.
Along with this is a need for greater acceptance of global culture. The continued ban on green tea, which is actually healthy and is used by billions or people in Asia, makes no sense to existing members and certainly not to investigators on that continent.
I loved this book. I thought her analysis and her comments were extremely thoughtful and compelling. It was new to me to realize that there was so much evidence suggesting that the black priesthood ban had never been official. I had previously believed that God withdrew the priesthood from Blacks because white culture was too racist to be able to tolerate it. This book paints a very different picture: Black ordination was never officially declared contrary to church doctrine by Brigham Young or John Taylor or any of the early prophets. It’s basically just stopped Being done under Brigham Young, with little or no explanation. Explanations were more or less hearsay and given secondhand. In short, men stopped black ordination, because men were too racist to tolerate it, and God had nothing to do with it.
Obviously this creates huge problems when we consider the ideas of prophetic infallibility. It wasn’t until 1949 that the first presidency officially published a letter declaring that the doctrine of black people being born into their race as punishment for behavior in the pre-existence was firmly established doctrine, even though it was never preached as the word of the Lord in scripture or from the Pulpit by any prophet. But coming in official letter from the first presidency, it creates real problems now that the church is trying to move beyond those doctrines. If the first presidency at that time said it was official doctrine and true, where was the revelation at that moment, if it is now false? Shouldn’t the Lord have stepped in and told the Prophet, “no, that’s not right.”
One thing that impressed me the most when I read this book was to realize that we have a need in our church and in our society for some concept of collective repentance. All of us in the church learn in primary what repentance is supposed to consist of: recognize you did something wrong, apologize, make restitution, and commit to a sincere effort to be better and not repeat the sin. On issues of race, both in our society and in our church, we have perhaps partially managed to do the first step, and we think with that alone the problem needs to be dismissed and no longer dwelt upon. We can never grow beyond our mistakes as a church and as a society unless we first acknowledge them in all their ugly detail, recognizing the harms they caused and the fundamental insincerities that perpetuated them. Only then can we begin the harder effort of repairing those harms and growing to be better. Until we do this, racism will continue to bleed our society, and will remain a lasting stain on our doctrine in the church.
Lee, I wouldn’t say that there was little to no explanation. Brigham Young, Parley Pratt, and other early Church leaders were pretty clear that they believed Blacks should not hold the priesthood because of the curse of Cain and/or the curse of Ham, partly because of how they read Abraham chapter 1’s discussion of pharaoh and the priesthood (particularly when we look at Pratt, in one of the earliest references to the ban in 1847). In a way, however, that highlights the problem even more when it comes to prophetic infallibility–i.e., if the Church today declares that the curse of Cain and the curse of Ham were mistaken beliefs carried over from 19th century American culture’s justifications for slavery and that those beliefs are wrong and repudiated by the Church today (as they do in the Gospel Topics essay on “race and the priesthood” and in Saints, volume 2) and the Church in the 1840s-1850s implemented the ban in the first place because Church leaders at that time believed in those things and taught them over the pulpits, then it follows that the whole thing was a mistake.
I have a theory about Joseph F. Smith’s reversal. I think it had to do with polygamy. He knew his uncle wasn’t behind the ban. But he had gone through the very difficult Smoot hearings and understood how difficult it would be to get past polygamy. So I think he came to the conclusion the church just didn’t have the bandwidth to take on both issues simultaneously and they had no choice about polygamy, so that was the squeaky wheel that got the grease.