ONCE ISOLATED IN THEIR INTERMOUNTAIN GHETTO AND DESPISED BY THE broader American society, the Latter-day Saints by the mid–1970s were becoming established as an accepted element in American life. Ezra Taft Benson had served in the Eisenhower cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture, a Smoot-like apostle-cum-politician. The 1974 dedication of the ostentatious 160,000-square-foot temple outside Washington, D.C., provided visible evidence of the Mormons’ eastward march. In 1976 Donny and Marie Osmond began a three-year network TV run that enhanced the Saints’ image of squeaky-clean respectability. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was as American as, well, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And the church membership was steadily expanding in the United States and around the world.
With one conspicuous exception. Blacks were not a part of the normal Latter-day kingdom. Thus, there was a revolution in the making when the warm-hearted old church President Spencer W. Kimball decided to erect a temple in São Paulo, Brazil. The São Paulo project, as the first temple to serve the surging populations south of the Rio Grande and only the fourth outside the United States and Canada, exemplified Mormon missionary advance. But Kimball’s move also led inexorably to an ideological change that was vital for the church’s prospects in Latin America and Africa, and for its acceptability in a United States that had only recently ended a shameful history of Jim Crow laws.
Kimball’s revelation brought Mormonism into the modern world. In Hugh Hewitt’s 2007 book boosting Mitt Romney’s presidential run, A Mormon in the White House?, John Mark Reynolds of the evangelical Biola University said it is legitimate to bring up a candidate’s religion only when a tenet carries societal implications, and he cited the black ban as a prime example. Prior to 1978, he said, “a Mormon would have been disqualified” for the U.S. presidency, just as Mormon affiliation would have been a barrier back when the LDS Church was practicing plural marriage.
For well over a century, the LDS prophets had taught that God did not allow a person with any black African blood to be admitted to the priesthood. Most major American institutions, churches among them, had struggled to overcome prejudice in their midst. The nation’s religious denominations still tended to be largely segregated by race as a matter of choice and custom. But no other body had instituted such a sharp racial preference or placed it at the level of divine revelation. Apart from the racial offense that priesthood apartheid caused, as a practical matter it was an especially difficult tenet to apply in Brazil, a country of hopelessly complex racial admixtures. In fact, until World War II LDS proselytizing in Brazil was aimed mostly at white German-speaking immigrants. Kimball’s decision to open a Brazilian temple forced the top leadership to reconsider racial theology in the light of worldwide opportunities.
The teaching imposed a severe disability on Saints of black African descent, since in the Mormon system the priesthood is everything. The first level of the priesthood is normally entered by all boys at age twelve as an LDS equivalent of the Jewish bar mitzvah, or by adult male converts shortly after baptism. Without priesthood, even routine forms of church participation are beyond reach, such as distribution of the sacrament. Black men were shut out of mission assignments, an important rite of passage for aspiring LDS lads, much less leadership posts at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Moreover, in Mormon belief the office carries eternal consequences. Priesthood is the necessary condition for men receiving temple endowments and eternal sealings of marriage that admit its holders to the highest tier in heaven and potential godhood.
The long-embedded black priesthood prohibition was suddenly toppled with a dramatic announcement from Kimball’s First Presidency dated June 8, 1978, less than five months before he was to dedicate the São Paulo temple. In 1981 the words became LDS scripture as a “declaration” included along with the anti-polygamy Manifesto at the end of Doctrine and Covenants.
He [God] has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple. Accordingly, all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.
The late Leonard Arrington, then the official historian for the church, heard of the announcement from his secretary. Five minutes later his son called from New York City bursting with the news. “I was in the midst of sobbing with gratitude for this answer to our prayers and could hardly speak with him. I was thrilled and electrified,” Arrington recalled. Merrill Bateman of the Presidency of the Seventy well remembered the day. During several trips to Africa as a Mars candy executive he had learned of people attracted to the Latter-day gospel, but obviously the church could not promote missions in black Africa. In June of 1978 Bateman, then dean of BYU’s business school, was driving in Provo, Utah, when he heard the report on his car radio. “Tears began running down my face. It was a great day. I had many, many friends in Africa, and black friends in this country.”
In the 1950s Kimball had pioneered a controversial but well-meaning program to place American Indian youths with LDS families in order to evangelize them and provide educational opportunities. He had long struggled with the black policy and was perhaps the only General Authority in that period who would have taken the lead in ending it. Shortly after the “long-promised day,” Kimball, in typically low-key fashion, told this book’s coauthor Richard N. Ostling in an interview for Time magazine: “I spent a good deal of time in the temple alone, praying for guidance, and there was a gradual and general development of the whole program, in connection with the Apostles.” Further complexities surrounding the historic revelation have since been filled in by various insiders, providing insight into how the top LDS authorities reach important decisions.
Kimball had been mulling the policy with American black friends, and when the cornerstone was laid for the São Paulo temple, he met a prominent black Brazilian believer, the late Helvecio Martins. Martins had faithfully saved funds to send his son on a mission, only to learn that the lad could not serve because of his race and consequent lack of priesthood. By one account, Kimball privately advised Martins that he should prepare himself to receive the priesthood. (Martins soon did, and would later be the first Saint of African descent to become a General Authority, serving in the Second Quorum of the Seventy from 1990 to 1995.) Around that time Kimball began a systematic personal plan of prayer and fasting, asking God for change. In the weeks leading up to the revelation, Kimball faithfully went to the Salt Lake Temple each day to pray alone. Meanwhile, Kimball and his two counselors in the First Presidency discussed the issue over several weeks, then informed the Twelve Apostles about their deliberations and asked them to pray over the matter. Apostles provided Kimball with written materials giving their thoughts and background on the policy, and Kimball talked with a number of them individually. On May 30 Kimball drafted a statement about removing the barrier and showed it to his two counselors.
The pivotal day was June 1, when all of the General Authorities held a regularly scheduled meeting in the fourth-floor “upper room” of the Salt Lake Temple where the First Presidency and the Twelve confer each week. When the three-hour session was concluded, Kimball asked the first and second counselors and the apostles to remain behind. (Two apostles were absent.) The thirteen men discussed the priesthood problem for more than two hours. Kimball then suggested that the group form a circle to pray and asked consent to act as their collective “mouth.” But as Kimball began to pray, apparently the words that came forth were not expressed as Kimball’s words to God but as God’s words to the church.
To those in the room, it was like another Pentecost. The late Apostle David B. Haight recalled, “I was there with the outpouring of the Spirit in that room, to such a degree that none of us could speak afterwards…. It’s difficult to even explain.” According to the late Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, a strong exponent of the ban on blacks, Kimball “heard the voice, and we heard the same voice. All doubt and uncertainty fled. He knew the answer, and we knew the answer…. I was there; I heard the voice.” As Apostle (later President) Gordon B. Hinckley remembered it, “no voice audible to our physical ears was heard. But the voice of the Spirit whispered into our minds and our very souls.” McConkie quoted his fellow conservative, the late Apostle (and later president) Ezra Taft Benson, as saying he had never experienced anything of such spiritual power during his half-century in the hierarchy. McConkie quashed rumors circulating among the Saints that God or the Prophet Joseph or an angelic messenger was personally manifest. “These things did not happen.”
On June 7 Kimball told his two counselors he had decided to announce the elimination of the ban and asked three apostles to draft a public statement. At the regular weekly temple meeting on June 8 the First Presidency and the Twelve reaffirmed the inspiration they had received on June 1 and agreed on the wording of the official statement. The next day all the General Authorities who were in town met to give their consent to the announcement, which was made later that day.
To non-Mormons, the leadership’s struggles are perplexing. Why did such a policy ever exist? Why did it take so long to eliminate it, and with such difficulty? The explanation is that the teaching was entangled with the church’s scriptures and the authority of its prior prophets. The Mormon situation was similar to the Catholic Church’s struggle in the 1960s over another widely criticized teaching, that the natural or “rhythm method” is the only licit means of birth control. Catholic scholars were urging liberalization, and a special Vatican study panel agreed, but Pope Paul VI felt bound by precedent. In a 1968 encyclical, he famously proclaimed that the prohibition as defined by predecessor popes still applied in the era of the Pill.
In Joseph Smith’s first scripture, the 1830 Book of Mormon, skin color is a motif, though it pertains to Native Americans (Hebrew “Lamanites” in the LDS understanding) rather than blacks. The book does teach that “all are alike unto God,” who “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female” (II Nephi 26:33). However, passages in five of the fifteen scriptural books (I Nephi 12:22–23; II Nephi 5:21–25 and 30:6; III Nephi 2:14–16; Jacob 3:5–9; Alma 3:6–9) teach that the Lamanites’ dark skin is a direct curse from God for sinfulness, or that dark peoples are shiftless and loathsome, or that white skin is desirable.
The first of the II Nephi 5 passages, for example, teaches that God caused a “cursing” to come upon the American Lamanites, accompanied by a “skin of blackness” so that they were no longer “white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome.” God’s purpose was to make the Lamanites “loathsome unto thy people” and to prevent intermarriage. “Cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done.”
Mormon counsel against race-mixing remained in force. The 1978 package about the black revelation in the weekly Church News supplement of the Deseret News carried a sidebar that quoted three speeches from Kimball admonishing Saints not to “cross racial lines in dating and marrying.” However, the Kimball quotations framed this as practical direction to enhance compatibility and avoid marital stress, not as a scriptural commandment. In 1981, the Kimball administration rewrote II Nephi 30:6 to say that righteous Indians would again become “pure” and delightsome, rather than “white.” But the other scriptural references to blessed whiteness and accursed darkness remain unaltered.
Black skin as a sign of unrighteousness arose later in the 1830s with the Book of Moses and Book of Abraham, Smith revelations that are part of the scriptural Pearl of Great Price. Moses is a selection from Smith’s own revision of the Old Testament, while Abraham is a miraculous rendition of ancient Egyptian manuscripts Smith believed were written by that ancient biblical patriarch. In Moses 5:24–31, Cain is depicted as “Perdition” and the malevolent Master Mahan who makes a secret pact with Satan. “The seed of Cain were black” and among Cain’s descendants “a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan, that they were despised among all people” (Moses 7:8, 22). Abraham 1:21–27 recounts that the heirs of the Canaanites and Noah’s son Ham “preserved the curse in the land” and that Noah “cursed him [Ham] as pertaining to the Priesthood.” This is the only passage linking the divine curse to the priesthood, but it is important because many Mormons today believe they literally perpetuate the very priesthood line traced back to Noah and Adam.
Defenders of Joseph Smith, and those who argued for black priesthood before 1978, noted that one African American was ordained while Smith was alive, and possibly two. So, they reasoned, he must not have applied the ancient priesthood curse to these latter days, even though he shared the white racial folklore of the time and considered blacks the offspring of the biblical Ham, cursed to servitude.
During a reexamination of the black ban in 1879, two of Smith’s contemporaries claimed that the prophet had told them verbally in the 1830s that Negroes could not hold the priesthood, but the evidence was shaky. Smith and his close associates were expressing pro-slavery views at a time when the Mormons faced dangerous hostility from Missourians who suspected abolitionist sympathies. By 1844, Smith was campaigning for the presidency on an enlightened platform calling on the government to buy slaves their freedom.
Whatever the founder understood his scriptures to teach about race, all of Smith’s prophetic successors until 1978 enforced the black ban as God’s will. The staunchest was the first, Brigham Young. Defenders of the ban contended that Young would not have enunciated the policy unless it expressed the will of his mentor Smith, and Smith’s penchant for secret teachings made that claim plausible. Young and other authorities apparently practiced the priesthood ban as early as 1847. Young’s earliest explicit enunciation came in 1849 when he told Apostle (and later President) Lorenzo Snow that “the Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them from the Priesthood.”
Young legalized black slavery in the Utah of 1852, and his noteworthy racism—alas, not unusual at that time—came to the fore in an 1859 discourse. Young specified that the biblical “mark” God put on Cain was “the flat nose and black skin.” He further characterized descendants of Cain as “black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” The president also said that the line of Cain was cursed with servitude, and that “the Abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.” That curse, and the curse of priesthood denial, would not be lifted “until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the priesthood and the keys thereof.” An 1854 address had clarified that the curse would be ended after “all the other children of Adam…have received their resurrection from the dead.” After 1978, church critics spotted this as a theological inconsistency, since the black priesthood is now permitted prior to the end times.
Young was also Mormonism’s harshest foe of miscegenation: “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.”
The Book of Abraham was added to the LDS scriptures in 1880, thus providing a proof-text for the priesthood ban. A later development was the explanation of the ban in terms of Smith’s teaching that all humans have an unremembered, heavenly preexistence before they are born on earth. Smith himself never drew the connection, but this, for some LDS authorities, especially Apostle (later President) Joseph Fielding Smith, produced what amounted to a racial law of karma, according to which God consigns souls who are spiritually inadequate in the preexistence to be born into the black race.
The black policy was assumed, and consistently applied, but never officially articulated, until a liberal LDS sociologist challenged the authorities to reexamine the basis for the doctrine. An August 17, 1949, statement from President George A. Smith and Counselors J. Reuben Clark and David O. McKay attributed the teaching not only to founder Smith but the explicit will of God: “The attitude of the Church with reference to negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that negroes may become members of the church but they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time.” As for when that time would come, the First Presidency quoted Young’s millennial teaching that those “cursed with a skin of blackness” will be eligible after all other people have received their priesthood.
“Why the Negro was denied the Priesthood from the days of Adam to our day is not known,” the First Presidency declared. But the church’s position “may be understood when another doctrine of the Church is kept in mind, namely, that the conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence has some determining effect upon the conditions and circumstances under which these spirits take on mortality,” although “the details of this principle have not been made known.” Once that is understood, “there is no injustice whatsoever involved.” And since God punishes individuals for their own sins, this “would imply that the Negro is punished or allotted to a certain position on this earth, not because of Cain’s transgression, but came to earth through the loins of Cain because of his failure to achieve other stature in the spirit world.”
Until the civil rights movement, this black policy was unremarkable enough that sociologist Thomas O’Dea’s 1957 classic The Mormons did not even mention it. But the succeeding years brought continual grief for the church, including athletic boycotts of Brigham Young University, picketing of Mormon buildings and conferences, religious brickbats when Governor George Romney ran for president, cancellation of a Mormon Tabernacle Choir tour, a New York City protest over the LDS visitors’ center, an embarrassing public squabble with the Saints’ partner in youth work, the Boy Scouts of America, and a hassle with black members of Congress and the U.S. Bureau of the Census over the church’s use of public genealogical records. A 1966 book by New York Times correspondent Wallace Turner branded the LDS Church “a political and social cancer” and “one of the most influential organs of racial bigotry in the United States.”
In 1969, days before the death of McKay who was by now church president, his two First Presidency counselors issued a softened version of the 1949 teaching, combined with an endorsement of civil rights in the secular realm. But those who know the Mormon hierarchical culture say that, unlike with the polygamy emergency, the church would never have announced a racial revelation under political pressure. It seems that 1978 was the right moment because the public outcry had died down.
After 1978, remembrance of the racial past was soon treated as an embarrassment and a hindrance to multiracial evangelism. A Church Educational System high school “seminary” text on church history tossed ten words about the revelation into a laundry list on the Kimball administration, never mentioning race or the long-standing ban. Brigham Young University’s Jessie L. Embry reported that a missionary to Newark, New Jersey, advised workers in black areas to “razor out” the page dealing with the Lamanite curse of dark skin in a children’s Book of Mormon reader. But the past was not so easily excised. And because the 1978 statement and subsequent instruction have not addressed the theological background, some Mormons believe there is considerable mopping up yet to do.
Consider the Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, who felt the Spirit move through the upper room in 1978 and later advised Saints to “forget everything that I have said” defending the priesthood ban. Nevertheless, the next year the revised version of his Mormon Doctrine—widely influential and still on sale by the LDS publishing house—mingled the words of the new black revelation with the older race theology. McConkie wrote that “the race and nation in which men are born in this world is a direct result of their pre-existent life.” Citing Moses 5, he stated that by God’s infinite wisdom there is a “caste system” involving racial segregation. “Cain, Ham, and the whole negro race have been cursed with a black skin, the mark of Cain, so they can be identified as a caste apart, a people with whom the other descendants of Adam should not intermarry.”
In 1992 McConkie’s book and the scriptures and teachings it cites came to the attention of a black Saint, A. David Jackson of Rancho Santa Margarita, California. Jackson was shaken, and offended. A commercial real estate agent and former Baptist, he had converted in 1990 knowing nothing about the LDS racial issue. He researched the matter, raised his objections with his congregational “home teacher,” lawyer Dennis Gladwell, and finally sent President Hinckley a twelve-page appeal in 1995. That was a remarkable act in such a hierarchical and authoritarian church. Jackson said Hinckley should remove Mormon Doctrine from church stores and libraries. Citing the Book of Moses, Brigham Young, and the First Presidency’s 1949 decree, he asked Hinckley to add a follow-up racial “declaration” to Doctrine and Covenants “repudiating any interpretation of doctrine that ties racial characteristics of any kind to spiritual conditions or spiritual worthiness in this life or in the pre-existence.”
The First Presidency’s office responded to Jackson’s ward bishop, who cautiously recited the letter to Jackson but did not give him the text, apparently so headquarters would not be on the record. Jackson said the letter assured him that current official teaching was free of racism but did not meet his demand to publicly clarify this in the light of past authorities. Gladwell then sought help from fellow attorney, Marlin K. Jensen of the First Quorum of the Seventy. He sent Jensen a detailed survey of LDS racial theology, lamenting that “none of these theories or views have ever been disavowed or qualified officially.” In 1997 Jensen and public affairs staffer William Evans met Jackson, Gladwell, and Armand L. Mauss, a Mormon expert on racial theology then teaching sociology at Washington State University. Mauss provided extensive research on offensive publications and commonplace concepts among Saints.
At Jensen’s request, Jackson, Gladwell, and Mauss wrote a formal proposal, hoping Jensen would raise it with the First Presidency and the Twelve. The paper asserted that white Mormons think the 1978 revelation resolved everything but black Mormons react differently when they learn the details, and that the church cannot ignore the 1949 declaration and related materials. Mormons believe that “almost anything said by a General Authority is quasi-scripture and inspired, especially when expressed as doctrine or principle…. Hence, the absence of any official correcting statement by the Church regarding these issues will perpetuate a belief system in these unfortunate and pejorative views.” The paper again appealed for a scriptural declaration in Doctrine and Covenants explicitly repudiating such beliefs.
In 1998, however, Jackson told the Los Angeles Times about these behind-the-scenes efforts. Given the hierarchy’s sensitivity about acting under public pressure, Mauss lamented, this disclosure killed any prospect of reform any time soon. The 1978 declaration “continues to speak for itself.” Hinckley told the Times, “I don’t see anything further that we need to do.” He explained, “I don’t hear any complaint from our black brethren and sisters. I hear only appreciation and gratitude wherever I go.” Jackson won little public backing from fellow LDS blacks. He said many simply become inactive, perhaps by the thousands, when they learn about the history.
Catherine Stokes, an African American and executive in the Illinois state health department, buttressed Hinckley’s viewpoint. At the time of the 1978 revelation Stokes, a former Protestant, was a follower of the Unity School of Christianity. That summer she viewed the Hawaii temple and filled out a visitor’s card. Some weeks later “these two little white boys came to my door” and initiated the standard series of proselytizing sessions. Stokes was baptized in April of 1979, and her daughter soon thereafter. Her ex-husband and many black friends thought she was crazy to join a “white” church. “I came to this conclusion, not to let racism—mine, yours, or somebody else’s—get in the way of what I believe is true.” Brigham Young? He “said some harsh words,” but “I don’t think he asked God. He was acting on his own.”
In the late 1980s the oral history program at Brigham Young University compiled a list of 500 American blacks active in the LDS church and persuaded 201 to answer a mail survey. The results lend support to both Jackson’s worry about black dropouts and Hinckley’s contention of contentedness. Embry summarized: “Most black Americans who have joined the LDS church experience genuine and heartfelt acceptance; at the same time they have concerns over the past priesthood exclusion and latent forms of racism and prejudice exhibited by some white members.” A solid 81.5 percent “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they were hopeful about their own future as Mormons. But that left nearly one-fifth who were not, a potentially worrisome statistic since virtually all were recent converts still involved in church life that one would expect to be upbeat. There is the unanswered question of whether the attitudes of the 60 percent who did not participate would have resembled those of the 40 percent who did.
As for opinion among the coming generation of white LDS leaders, the late BYU English Professor Eugene England warned that “false ideas that were invented to rationalize our earlier racist practices are still with us.” From occasional surveys in his classes, England said “a majority of bright, well-educated Mormon students say that they believe that blacks are descendants of Cain and Ham and thereby cursed and that skin color is an indication of righteousness in the premortal life. They tell me these ideas come from their parents or seminary and Sunday school teachers, and they have never questioned them.”
Mauss’s work All Abraham’s Children (2003) provided rich detail on LDS teachings about blacks, Jews and Native Americans. He has lamented that “doctrinal folklore” about blacks “continues to be taught by well-meaning teachers and leaders in the church.” No official explanation for the pre–1978 racial theology has been presented, but he said Mormons should realize that “prophets are not perfect and don’t claim to be; nor do they always act as prophets in what they say and do.” To him, it’s plausible that the teaching had a “strictly human origin” and open admission of this might be the best policy.
Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the priesthood revelation in 2003, Darron Smith, a black Mormon and the coauthor of Black and Mormon, published a controversial piece for Sunstone magazine. He said “the church has not done enough to remake its racist past” and eradicate ideas of black inferiority. Smith said change will only occur if the church formally repudiates “in no uncertain terms” the “folklore” about Cain, blacks’ unworthiness in the pre-mortal existence, and association of light skin with righteousness. Smith was subsequently denied a contract renewal at BYU, where he had been an adjunct sociology teacher and advisor to the administration on diversity.
Conversion and retention of U.S. black converts may be a problem, but the church has taken steps to stress inclusivity, for instance by giving new attention to African-American Saints in denominational publications. A church-sponsored Genesis Group for black members originated years before the priesthood revelation. And in 1998 President Hinckley made a breakthrough speech on race relations at a regional NAACP conference.
Internationally, the church has been attempting to make up for its century-plus of lost time. Weeks after the 1978 revelation, BYU’s Bateman took time off to return to Africa on special assignment, helping to establish pioneer LDS congregations in Nigeria and Ghana. Many others pitched in to reach the formerly untouched black populations overseas. Today there are 237,000 baptized Saints in Africa, 143,000 in the Caribbean, and 929,000 in multiracial Brazil, all impressive totals considering the doctrinal history. In 1998 Hinckley conducted the first African tour outside South Africa by an LDS president. Temples in Ghana and Nigeria have now been added to the one at Johannesburg built during apartheid days.
Otherwise, missionary expansion can be mapped by the geography of temples, whose rituals are essential to the temporal and eternal lives of believers:
1919 The first temple outside the continental United States (Hawaii)
1923 The first temple outside U.S. territory (Alberta, Canada)
1955 The first temple outside North America (Switzerland)
1956 The first U.S. temple outside the traditional Mormon region (Los Angeles) and temples for England and New Zealand
In 1983 Hinckley dedicated temples in Western Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti in the Pacific Islands, the arena for faith’s biggest foreign success story. Much credit belongs to President McKay, the leader from 1951 to 1970. McKay was a mission-minded, forward-looking figure who took a 56,000-mile world mission trip as a young apostle in 1921 and 1922. His administration had quietly settled confusion and decided that skin color and black features were not the criteria for exclusion but rather African parentage, thus opening the priesthood to dark-skinned Fijians, Negritos in the Philippines, New Guinea tribespeople, and Australian Aborigines. McKay also shifted the burden of proof so that dark-hued priesthood applicants were no longer required to prove their lineage; instead, it was up to church officials to raise any questions.
Though LDS work in the Pacific dated from the nineteenth century, once McKay’s First Presidency loosened priesthood policy, regional stakes began sprouting across Polynesia. Today there are 400,000 members in the church’s South Pacific area. The Mormon percentage of the U.S. population is far overshadowed by the percentages in Tonga, American Samoa, Kiribati, Tahiti, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. McKay also replaced the wing-and-a-prayer preparation for young missionaries with a language training school, established in 1961 in Provo, Utah, which developed into the booming Missionary Training Center (MTC). There are now seventeen such training centers worldwide, including one in Ghana.
Kimball, also a missionary strategist, made a shrewd 1974 appointment of the late David M. Kennedy, a suave former Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, as the church’s “special consultant for diplomatic affairs.” D. Michael Quinn interpreted that as a step toward the theocracy of old, reminiscent of Joseph Smith’s 1844 dispatch of foreign ambassadors from his Illinois city-state. But Kennedy’s chief task—one at which he excelled, by all accounts—was to win friends in the Washington diplomatic corps and overseas and smooth the path for missionizing. LDS advances were especially notable in the Communist bloc countries. The church won legal recognition in Poland in 1977 and erected a temple in the former East Germany in 1985. Inroads were notable across the former Soviet bloc with Communism’s collapse. A recalcitrant Russia warily granted registration in 1998. Ukraine became the base for the first stake in Eastern Europe in 2004 and a future temple is planned there.
If Quinn miscast the Kennedy assignment, he and other authors are more on target in depicting the church’s post-theocracy political involvements within the United States. The twentieth-century LDS record has not always been what simple stereotypes might suggest, nor have Mormons automatically followed the leader. The powerful U.S. senator and church Apostle Reed Smoot defied the church president by voting to override President Taft’s veto of an immigration bill. The First Presidency favored the League of Nations while Smoot was vocal on the successful negative side. Smoot opposed Prohibition, which was backed by fellow apostles. In 1933 the teetotaling First Presidency and Twelve Apostles decided the church would not campaign against the repeal of Prohibition because it was a partisan political issue, although they quietly hoped that good Mormons would vote dry. As it turned out, Utah was the state that put the constitutional amendment repealing Prohibition over the top. Since repeal, Mormons in Utah have consistently lobbied for alcoholic beverage controls. Thus there is a 3.2 percent alcohol limit on beer, only state stores that are shut on Sundays are permitted to sell wine and hard liquor, and “liquor by the drink” is available only in clubs that must charge nominal “membership” fees.
Church leaders left little doubt about their opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, but Utah gave him lopsided majorities anyway. In 1940 the General Authorities drafted a joint anti-FDR statement but never issued it. Hostility to Roosevelt’s New Deal as an affront to economic gumption and individualism produced a benign by-product. In 1936, after a survey showed that 88,000 Saints were on welfare, the church turned a Salt Lake stake program into the elaborate, nationwide Church Security Program (later Church Welfare Program) to supply needy believers with food and work. Historian Martin Marty wrote that this system to “take care of their own” caused anti-New Deal Americans to look on the separatist Saints with new respect. There was much mythology; it was hardly true that all Mormon went off the government dole. But neither was the program “fictitious,” as one FDR operative claimed. Rather, church welfare was the most ambitious religious effort to do what could be done to help during the Depression, and it remains in full operation today as a singular achievement of the Latter-day religion.
Senator Smoot lost his longtime seat in the 1932 FDR sweep and never forgave the authorities for not doing more to boost his reelection. But the authorities apparently never quite forgave the Senate candidate who drove Apostle Smoot into retirement. Elbert Thomas, a University of Utah political scientist, was a faithful Mormon, like the majority of Utah politicos. But he was also a liberal, a Democrat, and a New Dealer, so a hierarchical chill set in. It took until 1950, but conservative Mormon Republicans finally whipped Thomas with one of their own, Wallace F. Bennett. He was a central casting Mormon politician, a prominent business executive, son-in-law of deceased church president Heber J. Grant, a longtime Sunday School board member, and author of the 1958 testimonial book Why I Am a Mormon.
The mid-century’s dominant LDS Republican celebrity, however, was not Bennett but Ezra Taft Benson. He had been an apostle for a decade when he received President McKay’s permission to serve in Eisenhower’s cabinet as agriculture secretary. Inside the LDS community, things got interesting after the fiery right-winger returned from Washington to resume his full-time church work. Addressing a church conference, Benson declared that “no true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist.” He later allowed that it was hard to imagine a Mormon being a Democrat, either. Other church authorities expressed a different view, especially Apostle Hugh B. Brown, one of McKay’s counselors, and that was the pattern throughout the Benson controversies. Benson next endorsed the John Birch Society, an extremist anti-Communist group for which his son Reed was Utah coordinator and later the national spokesman. Robert Welch, the founder of the ultra-right-wing group, then published his notorious book stating that Benson’s former colleague Eisenhower was guilty of “knowingly receiving and abiding by Communist orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all of his adult life.”
In January 1963, McKay’s First Presidency publicly deplored the John Birchers’ attempts to associate the church with their viewpoint, without naming Benson. The apostle thereafter spoke to a large Birch meeting in Los Angeles and praised Welch. Eventually, the First Presidency announced that Benson was being assigned to supervise the European mission, and officials made no effort to hide the fact that he was being sent into exile overseas. Taking no hints, Benson gave yet another talk to a church meeting in New Orleans, praising the John Birch Society and attacking Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for using federal troops to enforce school integration. Just before departing for Europe, Benson told a Utah church audience that the civil rights movement was “part of the pattern for the Communist takeover of America.” The hierarchy’s political infighting went on for years thereafter.
Benson had political ambitions as well as opinions. In 1965 he asked McKay’s permission to run for U.S. president. McKay directed Benson not to campaign actively, but he also did not require that Benson decline a draft. There was then a brief boomlet for an anti-civil rights third party with South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond running for president and Benson for vice president. A more serious effort took hold in early 1968 when Alabama Governor George Wallace wrote McKay asking permission for Benson to be his third-party running mate. McKay wisely refused.
The Benson years told much about the church’s modern sociopolitical role. Despite his apostolic stature and national prominence, Benson never carried the church membership or leadership with him. The First Presidency consistently prevented association of the faith with either partisanship or extremism. And when Benson became church president through automatic seniority succession in 1985, he did not use that powerful estate to push his political opinions. There were probably three reasons. First, the president must foster the good of the entire world church, not partisan American agendas. Second, Benson was aged and lacked vitality by the time he took charge. Third, the collective leadership custom, in which the president usually acts with his two counselors and often with the Twelve Apostles as well, tends to moderate what one person might do alone.
The church opposed Communism in principle and holds the American nation to be a unique part of God’s plan, but contrary to its conservative image has not held a simple militaristic stance over the years. Officialdom discourages conscientious objection to armed service but allows it as an option after consultation with local church authorities. In a significant 1939 policy statement, the First Presidency said the biblical command “thou shalt not kill” applies to political entities as well as individuals and condemned war as an instrument of national policy. In 1940 and 1942 the leadership combined calls for patriotism with disavowal of church support for war as a self-righteous justification for genocide and mass destruction. Apostle J. Reuben Clark, the first Mormon to be a U.S. ambassador, became as extreme on the left as his colleague Benson later was on the right, pleading for an unarmed and neutral United States in World War II and the early Cold War years.
During the Reagan administration, the First Presidency opposed deployment of the MX missile in western Utah and neighboring Nevada and urged the government to seek “viable alternatives” to nuclear conflict. President Gordon Hinckley presented a hawkish church stance in 2003 soon after America invaded Iraq. Though Mormons “are people of peace,” he said, the scriptures teach that “there are times and circumstances when nations are justified, in fact have an obligation, to fight for family, for liberty, and against tyranny, threats and oppression.”
American Mormons in Utah and elsewhere have become an unbalanced loyal element in the conservative Republican coalition. So much so that it created ripples when Marlin Jensen, a Democrat among the General Authorities, told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1998 that the last thing the authorities wanted was “a church party and a non-church party…. It’s not in the best interest to be known as a one-party church.” Senator Harry Reid joked that when he heard about this, “First I picked myself up off the floor” and secondly sent a copy to then-Vice President Al Gore.
During national election cycles, the church regularly issues affirmations of its political neutrality and urges generalized citizenship responsibilities. This is the policy of all U.S. denominations, due to the iron law of the Internal Revenue Service for maintaining tax exemption. A careful policy statement in late 2006, just before Mitt Romney announced for president, said the church sometimes addresses community or moral issues but “in a nonpartisan way” and does not “attempt to direct or dictate to a government leader.”
And this: “Elected officials who are Latter-day Saints make their own decisions and may not necessarily be in agreement with one another or even with a publicly stated church position. While the church may communicate its views to them, as it may to any other elected official, it recognizes that these officials still must make their own choices” based on their best judgment and constituency considerations.
The church elevates as scriptural an 1835 church assembly’s declaration on government (D&C 134) that enshrines the freedoms of conscience and religion and takes a dim view of sedition. It also asserts, “We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.” Critics would say that teaching became submerged in theocratic Nauvoo and pioneer Utah.
The post-theocratic Mormon Church, like all religious denominations in the American democracy, has lobbied on behalf of its institutional interests and advocated what it regards as the good of society. Some Americans may agree, and others may disagree. On matters relating to religious tradition, individualism, and personal morality, the LDS leadership has taken resolutely conservative stands. Issues that the hierarchs have addressed over the years include right-to-work laws, Sunday closing laws, gambling, abortion, pornography, divorce, the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and legal status for homosexuality. Increasingly in recent decades the Mormon people, with the implicit or explicit sympathy of the leadership, have become proponents of some social issues in the “Religious Right” agenda alongside conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews and also the Evangelical Protestants who were Mormonism’s bitterest foes in polygamy days and remain its most vociferous doctrinal critics. An example was the 1998 U.S. House vote on a constitutional amendment stating that government shall not hamper “people’s right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage or traditions on public property, including schools.” This prayer amendment was backed by conservative Evangelical groups but introduced by then-Congressman Ernest Istook, an Oklahoma Mormon. Every Mormon in the House, at the time Republicans all, voted yes. (The measure fell well short of the required two-thirds majority.)
Within Utah, hardly anything of importance happens without consideration of Mormons’ sensibilities, since they form the dominant population bloc. In Salt Lake City, the church is considered the largest landowner and largest non-government employer and it owns major media outlets. Salt Lake’s Deseret Morning News, one of the three U.S. daily newspapers operated by a religious body (along with the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Times, owned by a Unification Church entity), provides a daily index of the range of acceptable Mormon socio-political thinking.
“Gentile” resentment is unavoidable. A 2001 poll by the Deseret’s rival Salt Lake Tribune, covering six counties, showed that 86 percent of non-Mormons saw a religion-based divide in Utah, compared with only 58 percent of Mormons. In addition, 60 percent of the non-Mormons said they had experienced either uneasiness or downright discrimination because of their religion. The inevitable Mormon domination of state politics was enhanced in 2000 when appointments by Governor Michael Leavitt (himself a Mormon) meant the state Supreme Court had an all-LDS membership. That broke the unwritten tradition since 1926 of having at least one non-LDS justice.
The fact that the Mormons have become important enough to be noticed and commented upon has a downside. Playwright Tony Kushner won lavish media attention, and the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, for his play Angels in America. Kushner mingled fashionable themes of political liberalism, AIDS, and gay pride with an unexpected Mormon element. His treatment of the Saints was “a tourist’s invention, rather quaint and smart-alecky,” said Michael Evenden of Emory University. Broadway’s toleration was carefully limited: Mormons were acceptable if they ceased being Mormon. Pop Buddhists received far fonder treatment from entertainment avatars. Another instance of cultural arrival was ex-Mormon Walter Kirn’s snide New Yorker short story about an LDS teen tour, published just before Time magazine’s benign cover story. In 2007, the four-hour TV documentary “The Mormons” was notably respectful compared with some other PBS treatments of religion. The Deseret Morning News reviewer thought it was neither an “anti-Mormon diatribe” nor “a faith-promoting missionary tool. Although it might turn out to be that for some.” But Mormon readers sent the paper hundreds of negative e-mails. The dominant complaints were that PBS devoted too much airtime to polygamy and Mountain Meadows and not enough on past persecution and Latter-day teachings.
Such is the give-and-take of a free and freewheeling society. The thin-skinned and image-conscious Mormons can still display immature, isolationist, and defensive reactions to outsiders, perhaps because there is no substantive debate and no “loyal opposition” within their kingdom. With some, it almost seems that the wilderness is yet untamed, the federal “polyg” police are on the prowl, and the Illinois lynch mob is oiling muskets and preparing to raid Carthage Jail. All too often Saints use the label “anti-Mormon” as a tactic to forestall serious discussion.
Nor are the Mormons alone in facing cultural despisers. Catholics put up with continual insults without complaint (except from the Catholic League). And the Protestant Evangelicals, who are not organized enough to create their own anti-defamation league, have had to endure the Scopes trial and Inherit the Wind, Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a recent onslaught of books claiming they seek to destroy American democracy in favor of “theocracy,” and the crude stereotypes in the latest made-for-TV movie.
The LDS church has emerged as a slightly exotic but prosperous and perfectly acceptable piece of the multicultural national mosaic. What difference does it make that Mormons eschew coffee and alcohol if yuppies sip herbal tea, or that Mormons wear sacred underwear if Muslim and Hindu robes dot Middle American shopping malls? At the turn of the third millennium, the remaining barriers between Mormonism and the rest of society are no longer political. The uniquely Mormon distinctives are almost wholly theological, in an American culture where theology now carries only modest importance and seems to matter less with each passing year.