I checked a sample of a few dozen temples in the US yesterday and found that all (with one exception) were open, even though it was Juneteenth. The one exception, Provo City Center, has been closed all month, presumably for deep cleaning. By contrast, every US temple I checked is set to be closed on July 4th.
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.
President Nelson made a statement about the killing of George Floyd and subsequent violence on his Facebook page on Monday (and it was also published at the Church Newsroom). There is much that I like in the statement. For example, he said in part,
We abhor the reality that some would deny others respect and the most basic of freedoms because of the color of his or her skin.
I’m frustrated at his vagueness, though. Unlike statements made by many other churches and their leaders (many compiled by Sam Brunson at BCC), he doesn’t name Floyd or specifically mention his death. His statement is boilerplate enough that it might have come in response to any unjustified killing of any black man. Or, really, any race-motivated incident of any kind anywhere. Well, except for his explicit calling out of “looting, defacing, or destroying public or private property.” He saved some specificity for that point.
Well sure they do! For example, here’s a picture from New Testament Stories that shows the pre-mortal existence and includes a black boy, and here’s another picture from Doctrine and Covenants Stories that shows people going to the Celestial Kingdom, and they’re not all white.
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Other than those two, though, no.
I imagine I’m not the only one to find myself suffering from what I might call outrage fatigue this year. Every week seems to bring some new preposterous happening, whether just the White House administration and our clown-in-chief doing or saying something else ludicrous, or scarier things coming from so many places. Nuclear threats. Cover-ups in high places of collusion with foreign powers. The health care of millions on a precipice. People being shot by police officers for the color of their skin. Official resistance to combating climate change. The list goes and on and on. And I feel like with every week, my ability to be horrified by something completely awful gets deadened a little more. Read More
In last month’s (August) Ensign, Elder Bruce C. Hafen purports to put the Proclamation on the Family into its historical and cultural context.1 Hafen’s view is that marriage as an institution is collapsing, and the family with it, because society has come to value the individual’s interest at the expense of social interests, one of which is the support and privileging of stable heterosexual nuclear families. He views this as a cultural shift driven by legal changes in the last half decade, before which “laws maintained a workable balance between social interests and individual interests.” In the 60s and 70s, however, the courts “began to interpret family laws in ways that gave individual interests a much higher priority than social interests, which knocked the legal and social system off balance.” (52) Hafen picks out no-fault divorce laws, the availability of child custody and adoption to single people, abortion, and (as always) same-sex marriage as elements of this threat to the family, and mourns how far the family has fallen since the year 1960, to which he makes repeated and regretful reference, as his reference point for a happier time when families were stronger and we better enforced pro-social values.
But here are some other fun things going on in 1960: Read More
My husband Rebelhair and I often talk about the things that make up the culture of Mormondom – its idiosyncrasies, its cultural quirks, its bedrock beliefs and non-negotiable narratives, and especially the processes by which it navigates and establishes its biggest truth claims. We’ve spoken frequently about the concept of truth in Mormonism – not just what Mormonism’s particular truth claims are, but how one arrives at them, and how one both frames and holds onto them, given the inherently shifting nature of continuing revelation.
In other words, we like to talk about the idea of a Mormon epistemology, or the ways that Mormon culture produces and frames knowledge: How do we come to know things? What are our frameworks for establishing theological and doctrinal truths?
We often discuss how, unlike older religious systems, we don’t have an established systematic theology; there aren’t yet agreed-upon hermeneutical frameworks through which we establish what our leaders teach. Instead, it’s far more common for leaders to make a truth claim or suggest a principle, and for the Mormon faithful to find other things in our teachings that seem to make that truth claim make sense. This works well if our leaders are teaching culturally well-established truths or non-controversial ideas. If a leader teaches that we mustn’t abandon our children, for example, we can easily find scriptural accounts and a multiplicity of conference talks about loving one another. But if a leader makes a less intuitive remark, as when Elder Oaks recently stated that the Church neither “seeks for” nor “gives” apologies and that the word “apology” does not appear in the scriptures, many are left a bit bemused. Yes, it’s apparently factually correct, but there are many elements of Mormon teaching, including our most basic teachings of repentance, that advocate for humility and asking forgiveness of others. How is that not an apology, regardless of whether the word is used? Understanding what Elder Oaks was getting at in that moment, and even understanding if such a remark should be taken at face value or if it was more tongue-in-cheek, requires a great deal of familiarity with Mormon systems of knowing (and even then leaves some scratching their heads).
All of this leads up to a question that we’ve batted around throughout our courtship and now newly married life: How can one describe Mormon ways of knowing? Is there a traceable Mormon epistemology; a consistent Mormon system of knowledge production that links together its myriad truth claims in a comprehensible manner?
The other day Rebelhair turned to me and casually mentioned, “You know, I actually think that there are some models of knowledge production that come out of black feminism that are remarkably similar to and could explain Mormon epistemologies.” You can imagine my intrigue. This essay, courtesy of Rebelhair, is the result of that conversation.
Today, by way of celebrating thirty years since the lifting of what’s commonly referred to as the “priesthood ban,” I wonder whether we can come up with a phrase that’s equally economical but more descriptive. To my knowledge, the “priesthood ban” comprised the following policies: Read More
