Over forty
years have passed since the 1978 revelation, and I continue to hear
justifications designed to excuse or explain away the restrictions rather than
doing the work it takes to root out racism. What follows is a list of the most
common justifications in circulation among Latter-day Saints today and why I
believe they are incorrect.
Some people
have suggested that the Lord spreads the gospel in stages according to a divine
timeline: First to the Jews and then to the Gentiles as a parallel to first
white people and then to Black people. This justification ignores the fact that
Jesus did not confine His ministry to the Jews. He healed the daughter of a
Greek woman and testified to a Samaritan woman that He was “the Christ.” He
then stayed among the Samaritans two days and as a result “many more believed
because of his own word.” The converted Samaritans soon testified that “this is
indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world” (Mark 7:24-29; John 4:26, 40-42).
As
President J. Reuben Clark explained, Jesus taught Peter through example about
the gospel’s universal message, but it still took “a thrice-repeated vision to convince
him that God is no respecter of persons.” As President Clark noted, the Savior’s
“acceptance of the Samaritans, the race hated by Judah, left Peter untaught. “Instead
of following the Savior’s example, he “kicked against the pricks,” especially “against
the principle of the universal salvation of man—men of all creeds, races, and
colors.” (J. Reuben Clark Jr., On the Way to Immortality and Eternal Life [Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1949], 154) Peter still resisted even after the Lord commanded
His disciples to “go ye into all the world” (Mark 16:15). He thus offers a
lesson in how hard it can be for good people, even prophets, to overcome their
cultural assumptions and biases, even when the Lord gives them very direct
instructions.
In this
last dispensation, there was no divinely appointed timeline for spreading the
good news of the Restoration. The Lord commanded Joseph Smith five times to
preach the gospel ‘unto every creature.” Black Latter-day saints have been a
part of the Church from 1830 to the present, including Black priesthood
holders. Suggesting otherwise erases Black pioneers from Latter-day Saint
history and wipes away their faith.
The second
justification that I sometimes hear is the tribe of Levi example: In the Old
Testament, the tribe of Levi was given priesthood authority while members of
other tribes were not. The reasoning then offered is that this was a divinely sanctioned
pattern that God follows in withholding priesthood from people, first from the
non-Levite tribes anciently and then people of African descent in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The tribe
of Levi analogy, however, begins with a false premise—that only the tribe of Levi
held the priesthood anciently. Book of Mormon peoples were not Levites, and
they held the priesthood, as did other Old Testament leaders such as
Melchizedek and Elijah.
Even if we
confine ourselves to the tribe of Levi’s role in the tabernacle, I still
believe it is a poor analogy. None of the other tribes were prevented from partaking
of the ordinances necessary for their salvation in the way the temple and
priesthood restrictions prevented people of Black African descent from so
doing. The tribe of Levi was given authority to administer tabernacle rituals
for and in behalf of the other tribes. Their function was to welcome the other
tribes into the tabernacle and help them to make their sacrifices as prescribed
by the law (see Numbers 3-5). In contrast, the priesthood and temple
restrictions prevented Black Latter-day Saints from entering the temple and receiving
the ordinances necessary for their salvation. As historian Ardis Parshall succinctly
put it, “Restricting priesthood to one narrow part of the faithful is
not the same as restricting priesthood from one narrow part of the
faithful.” (Ardis Parshall, “A
Stealthy Return to Bad Practices of the Past”)
A third
justification in circulation among Latter-day Saints suggests that the racial
turbulence of the nineteenth and twentieth-was so fraught in the United States
that ordaining Black men to the priesthood would have brought down the Church.
This idea, however, does not consider the fact that some Black men were given
the priesthood in the early decades of the faith and that there was a racially
open perspective of temple admission up through Nauvoo. Although it did cause
trouble in Missouri and helps to account for the ouster of the Saints from Jackson
County, it did not destroy the Church.
This idea
suggests that conforming to American racial prejudices was necessary for the
Church to survive. However, the same year that Brigham Young openly announced a
racial priesthood restriction, 1852, the Church publicly acknowledged that its
members believed in and practiced polygamy. Polygamy brought considerable scorn
from the nation and did not end until the federal government nearly ground the
Church into dust, and yet leaders willfully stood against the rush of derision
for what they believed to be a divine principle. It makes me wonder why
conforming to racial prejudices would be necessary for the Church to survive
but conforming to prevailing marital norms (monogamy) was not necessary.
As
Latter-day Saints, we love to quote Joseph Smith’s Standard of Truth from the
Wentworth Letter, wherein he declares: “The Standard of Truth has been erected;
no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs
may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will
go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every
contingent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear,
till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say
the work is done.” (“Church History,” Times and Seasons [Nauvoo,
Illinois], March 1, 1842, 709) Should we really believe that “no unhallowed
hand can stop the work from progressing” and yet treating Black people equally
would have?
Fourth, I
sometimes hear people suggest that the racial restrictions were merely produces
of an unenlightened past. Everyone was a racist back then. They did not know any
better. We should not impose present-day values on the past, something
historians refer to as “presentism.” I agree that the past is a foreign country
and we should try to understand it on its own terms, not ours, but that is an
invitation to do the work of understanding the past, not an invitation to
excuse its mistakes as if people in the past somehow do not know any better.
People in
the nineteenth century recognized racism as racism by the standards of their
day. It is a misapplication of presentism and a false use of it to try to
justify racism in the past as if no one in the past considered Black people to
be anything other than inferior. Enslaves across the North and some in the
South, for example, responded to the ideals of the American Revolution to free
their slaves. They took Thomas Jefferson at his word when he declared that “all
men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” After the Revolution,
Charles Copland of Virginia freed his enslaved people. He did so, he said,
because “God created all men free; & that all Laws made to subjugate one
part of the human race to the absolute dominion of another are totally repugnant
to the clearest dictates of natural justice.” (Manumission records, quoted in Allan
Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake,
1680-1800 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986], 432-33)
For
Latter-day Saints, Sidney Rigdon was a product of the nineteenth century, and
he believed that the nation’s founders established a “government where every
man should be free; the slave liberated from bondage, and the colored African
enjoy the rights of citizenship.” In Rigdon’s view, the country was founded on
principles designed to ensure that all people enjoyed “equal rights to speak,
to act, to worship, [with] peculiar privileges to none.” (Sidney Rigdon, “To
the Honorable, the Senate and House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, in
Legislative Capacity Assembled,” Times and Seasons [Nauvoo, Illinois],
February 1, 1844, 422)
Joseph
Smith was also a product of the nineteenth century, and he sanctioned the ordination
of Black men to the priesthood. Brigham Young was a product of the nineteenth
century, and he called Q. Walker Lewis “one of the best Elders[,] an African.”
Brigham Young said in 1847, “We don’t care about the color,” but by 1852, he
cared about the color. Apostle Orson Pratt, also a product of the nineteenth
century, advocated for Black male voting rights in 1852 in Utah Territory.
Brigham Young responded to Pratt’s advocacy with a speech filled with racism by
the standards of his day.
African
Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and other
minority groups also lived in the past and recognized the enslavement and racism
they endured as wrong. People in the past were not trapped by historical circumstances
outside of their control that somehow made them incapable of rising above their
racism. I do not believe that God erased people’s agency in the nineteenth
century so that they were only capable of treating Black people and other
minority groups as inferior. If there were people in the past who argued for
full equality for Black people, then it is not an act of presentism to hold
people accountable to the standards of their day. Racism was racism even
in the nineteenth century. (W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk
About Race and the Priesthood [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2023], 114-19)
