Abstract
I found this book hard to put down. Every religious denomination needs one that deals with its major controversies, linking past and present in detailed, readable and ethically honest scholarship. Here, the author, himself a Mormon, doggedly pursues ‘the priesthood ban’ on African Americans, and on most Africans too, which meant that they could not hold priesthood offices in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This gripping narrative begins in the 1830s with Mormonism’s first prophet, Joseph Smith Jr (killed in 1844), when ‘a handful of Black men held the priesthood’ while most white males held one or another of this Church’s Aaronic or Melchizedek priesthoods. His successor, Brigham Young, who led the Saints into the Great Salt Lake Valley, changed this by establishing the priesthood ban in 1852. ‘He cited no direct decree from God nor any revelation from Joseph Smith Jnr.’ (p. 2). Young died in 1877, but the prohibition endured until June 1978, when church members ‘could hardly believe what they had heard’, jamming Utah phonelines in their astonishment. ‘The news was so shocking that some Latter-day Saint travellers pulled off to the side of the road when they heard the news … and quietly sobbed in their cars’ (p. ix).
Eleven highly informed chapters document how Brigham Young-style opinion passed ‘From policy to doctrine (1830–1949)’, ‘Racial passing (1949–1954)’ and ‘Segregation (1954–1962)’, into ‘Civil rights resistance (1962–1967)’, ‘Investigations and protests (1968–1970)’, and then to ‘Lobbying for the priesthood (1970–1973)’, ‘Lifting the ban (1973–1978)’ and the ensuing ‘Debris in the streets (1978–1985)’, while ‘The stigma still goes on (1985–2000)’, along with ‘Hard doctrine (2000–2013)’. A telling Epilogue announces that ‘Black (Mormon) lives matter (2013–2023)’.
Detailed library archive work on formal church announcements, minutes of meetings and material from the author’s personal knowledge from fellow LDS networks all combine to tell this emotionally telling story. It rehearses the Mormon Plan of Salvation, with its roots in the pre-existence when some were ‘valiant’ with Jesus in opposing Satan and others were not. Some of those belonging to a ‘cursed-lineage’ were marked with black skin when born on Earth, albeit with a kind of doctrinal-folklore hope that they would be made white in the resurrection. The narrative tells of division of opinion among leaders, of prejudice, bigotry, secrecy and the dislike of challenge, all within a firm hierarchical organization. It also tells of the tearful joy of some leading white Saints who had longed for the day when direct divine revelation would set a new earthly course for those formerly marginalized. However, there were hardliners within the Church. One of these later switched to firm acceptance, even informally enhancing the revelatory moment among the main Apostles by saying that they ‘heard the voice of God audibly’. This ‘stubborn apostle’, Bruce R. McConkie, ‘never removed the “voice of God” phrasing from his text, despite clear advice from the Prophet-President Kimball himself to do so. McConkie was his own man’ (pp. 253–4).
So much more could be said of white LDS who had served long and hard with Black members and whose joy at the change is palpable in this book. There is much love here, as well as some enduring negative opinion. One reason I found this book hard to put down lies in my 50 and more years of LDS research, contact and friendship, that enabled me to read between many of the book’s lines and to gain some enlightenment over things I did not know but have long pondered. While this might not be the case for all readers, I strongly commend the volume and congratulate Matthew L. Harris on the 15 years taken in its research and writing. Worth waiting for.