The biggest reason why most of my fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lose their faith and leave the church has to do with issues of church history. So I thought it would be interesting to tackle some of those issues, explaining how I’ve personally wrestled with them and why I still believe.
One of the biggest issues of church history is the priesthood ban, where blacks were not allowed to be ordained to the priesthood, or receive temple ordinances, until the ban was lifted with Official Declaration 2 in 1978. Is God racist? If not, why was His church racist for so long? How can this possibly be God’s true, restored church if it had such a blatanly racist policy for so long?
For a long time, this question sat on my shelf of religious questions that I could not answer. In LDS parlance, it’s common to use the term “shelf” to refer to how we set aside the things that might cause us to doubt or lose our faith, choosing instead to focus on our testimony or spiritual witness. Often, when people leave the church, they say their shelf just got too heavy and broke.
I’ve still got a handful of things on my shelf. I suppose that’s common for all people of faith, not just Latter-day Saints, since who can possibly have an answer for everything? But for me, this particular issue—blacks and the priesthood—is no longer one of them, because I’ve found an answer that fully satisfies me. Whether or not it satisfies you, I don’t know, but if you’ve wrestled with this issue, I think it’s worth considering. And even if you’re not LDS, I think you’ll find it interesting, because it’s made me rethink a lot of things about racism, religion, and American history.
I’ve been reading a lot about Christian Nationalism recently. If you’re conservative, you’re probably bristling a little at that last statement, since “Christian Nationalist” seems mostly to be a polemic term invented by the left to slander their opponents, just like how they call everything “racist” (or “white supremacist,” since the word “racist” has lost its power through overuse). That’s certainly what I used to believe. And while I do think there’s some truth to that criticism—certainly the left will say anything to slander Christian conservatives of any stripe—at the same time, there really is a movement on the right to blend politics with religion. And this Christian Nationalist movement (which also overlaps with the :Seven Mountains Mandate” and the “New Apostolic Reformation”) is supremely anti-Mormon, as we saw in the far-right evangelical response to the Grand Blanc mass shooting of the LDS chapel there. So while yes, we have a common enemy with conservative Christian Nationalists on the woke left, the next big front in the culture wars is going to be all the other Christians vs. the Latter-day Saints. Which is why I’ve been reading up so much on Christian Nationalism, since I want to be prepared.
I will admit, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise, since most of the recent books on Christian Nationalism are attacking the movement from the woke left. But while I do find it hard to take accusations of racism seriously in today’s environment (case in point, all the drama surrounding the recent Karmelo Anthony murder trial), I do think there is a genuine racial element underlying the modern American Christian right. So please hear me out, my fellow conservatives. I’m not coming at this from a woke, white-hating, “everything is racist” approach.
From what I can tell, it all goes back to the colonial era, in the century following the English civil war. The Puritans who settled New England came from Cromwell’s faction, the “roundheads,” and the English settlers who built up Virginia and the southern colonies were mostly unlanded sons of the British gentry, who sided with the “cavaliers.” Because of this, the south was much more aristocratic, with a strong honor culture and class distinctions. Over time, as black chattel slavery replaced indentured servitude, class and race came to be synonymous: if you were black or mulatto, you occupied a much lower place in society than if you were pure white.
The United States was founded with a supreme contradiction, where our Constitution allowed for slavery while our Declaration of Independence declared that “liberty” was a God-given right. From what I can tell, the way the antebellum south rationalized this supreme contradiction was by inventing a theory of race that made blacks essentially subhuman. Yes, all men are created equal, and endowed with a right to liberty, but the darkies aren’t men like us. They’re really more like children, who need a strong, white, Anglo-Saxon pater familias to take care of them.
How does all of this tie in with Christian Nationalism? Because as the early United States experienced a series of Christian revivals (including the Second Great Awakening, which saw the beginning of the Latter Day Saint movement), the racism of the Antebellum South had a profound influence on the development of American Christianity. We can see this in the way that the major denominations split in the mid-1800s into black churches and white churches. This continued through the Civil War and Reconstruction, with the black churches and the white churches developing their own distinct cultures—and in some cases, their own distinct doctrines and practices too.
This distinction between black Christian churches and white Christian churches continues today, with measurable differences that show up in political polls and studies of both groups. Which completely blows my mind, since within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there really isn’t a distinct white subculture separate from the black subculture. Indeed, the biggest cultural differences for us are between the “Utah Mormon” subculture and the wider church, or perhaps between American LDS and non-American LDS.
Why don’t we have this same undercurrent of racial tensions and divisions that exists within mainstream American Christianity? From what I can tell, it’s largely because of the priesthood ban.
A little history, for those of you who may be unfamiliar. Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all devout men who are in good standing with the church are ordained to the priesthood. It’s entirely a volunteer organization, at least on the local level; bishops (equivalent to pastors/priests) and stake presidents (equivalent to senior/regional pastor and/or bishop) are unpaid, and serve from the local congregation usually for about 3-5 years before being released and returning to the pews. In the 1830s, Joseph Smith ordained several black male converts to the priesthood, but in the 1840s and 1850s, Brigham Young established a policy of denying the priesthood based on the member’s race. This policy, known as the priesthood ban, continued until 1978, when Spencer W. Kimball received the revelation that was canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 2, which extended the priesthood to all male members of the church in good standing, regardless of race.
Why did Brigham Young enact the priesthood ban? Was he racist? Did he make a terrible mistake? Before we judge him too harshly, let’s consider a counterfactual where the priesthood ban never happened, and Brigham Young continued to ordain black converts just like Joseph Smith did.
With racial attitudes being what they were in the United States in the 1840s and 50s, most white members of the church would not have accepted a black bishop to minister over them. Therefore, as more black converts joined the church, they would probably start to form black wards and stakes—just like how all the other Christian churches were splitting into black churches and white churches. Over the course of the next century, these black wards and stakes would form their own distinct subculture, and the racist attitudes of the white wards and stakes would become institutionalized.
Would the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century led to an integration within the church? Perhaps, but the black and white subcultures probably would have endured. And with the race relations have become so heated in the last fifteen years, with the George Floyd riots and the rise of Black Lives Matter that very well could have led to an internal schism within the church—at precisely the time when missionary work in Africa is experiencing such phenomenal growth.
Imagine an alternate universe where the black half of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is splitting off from the white half, because the black members are demanding to have a black prophet and a quorum of black apostles. Or conversely, imagine an alternate universe where the church never fully integrated, and the white membership is splitting off from the main body of the church because of all these black African general authorities that have recently been ordained. It would be an absolute nightmare—and it’s not hard to imagine, because that’s basically the state of mainstream American Christianity today.
Put simply, as unfortunate and as racist as the priesthood ban was, I believe it was a necessary policy, given the racist attitudes common to members of the church at that time. It was unfortunate, but we simply were not ready to embrace our black brothers in that way—even though the Book of Mormon explicitly states that God “inviteth them all to come unto Him… black and white, bond and free, male and female…” (2 Nephi 26:33) But God had the foresight to know what would happen to His church, so He inspired Brigham Young to enact the priesthood ban, even though in an ideal world it would not have been necessary. Thankfully, we’ve repented since then, and are now fully integrated as a church in a way that would not have been possible had we split into a black church and a white church, like so many other denominations.
That’s my own personal take on it, at least. Which isn’t necessarily a comfortable answer, given how it gives rise to other questions like “how could God allow generations of black saints not to receive their temple blessings because of the racism of their brothers and sisters in the church?” and “how was it right that the church accomodated the racism of its members for so long?” Clearly, it’s not as simple as “the church is true, the book is blue, and God’s Mormon.” But neither is it as simple as “Brigham Young was a racist, therefore he wasn’t a true prophet and the church isn’t true.” Which is why I can say with confidence that this is no longer an issue on my personal “shelf.” The answers might not be comfortable, but the truth often isn’t comfortable either. If we had a pat answer to this difficult question, that would be a red flag too.
Of course, all of this leads to some other interesting questions, such as whether the main reason we don’t ordain women or practice gay marriage in the temple is because we’re just not ready for that as a church. But I’ll have to leave my musings on those subjects for some other time.
