(ANALYSIS) Extraordinary.

That’s the word for “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” a 2024 book-of-the-year candidate written by Colorado State University historian Matthew L. Harris. He analyzes the restrictions that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imposed upon members of Black African ancestry between 1852 and 1978, an issue that extended into the 21st century. 

That same adjective applies to a breakthrough book last year, “Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood,” a candid accounting of this theological problem from University of Utah historian W. Paul Reeve, a faithful Latter-day Saint. Reeve praises Harris’ “unprecedented peek behind Mormonism’s administrative curtain” to examine “the faith’s ongoing struggle to transcend its racial past.” As for Reeve’s book, the fact that it comes from the church’s own Deseret Book company represents a healthy reckoning with history.

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Many Americans — both secular and religious — have harbored racial views that are abhorrent in the 21st century. But The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its leaders have been unique in proclaiming racial discrimination to be the will of God and thoroughly incorporating that belief into all aspects of church life for well over a century. 

Church members give their leaders a level of deference and unquestioned authority that popes could envy, believing they are restoring the one true church of Jesus Christ in these latter days, The self-perpetuating highest rank, or the “Brethren,” consists of the president, also named a prophet, his two counselors in the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. 

Here’s what it meant in practice for Black people to be denied the priesthood and consequently temple ceremonies. The church’s system has no trained clergy, so male priesthood holders fulfill all church functions from international leadership on down to each local congregation. The church ordinarily bestows the Aaronic Priesthood upon boys and the Melchizedek Priesthood upon mature teens and young adults. (No females enter the priesthood, an issue left aside here.)

Without priesthood status, those with any degree of African ancestry could not hold any church offices, could not be married in a temple or undergo sacred endowment and other temple rites. They could not give talks at worship, distribute Communion, teach Sunday school, confer special blessings or fill even routine posts in local congregations, They could not volunteer for short-term missionary assignments, a rite of passage for young men (as well as some women). And they were denied the highest exaltation in the church’s concept of the afterlife. 

Harris worked on his project nearly 15 years and is doubtless correct in boasting of “unprecedented access” to personal papers and meeting minutes of the Brethren. He starts from the Black ban’s 1852 origin with church president and Utah Territory Gov. Brigham Young, followed by unbroken continuation by generations of succeeding presidents and apostles. 

Harris’ special focus is detail on leaders’ private thinking  in the decades before and since the 1978 revelation, when the Brethren stated unanimously that it is now God’s will to open “priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members.” This revelation is incorporated into canonical Mormon Scripture.

The First Presidency’s formal 1949 teaching had asserted that the church “always” held to its racial belief as a “direct commandment from the Lord.” It quoted Young’s 1852 teaching that biblical Cain’s murder of his brother Abel led to a curse upon his descendants, a belief that church writers reinforced by interpretations of several race-related passages in their Scriptures that founding Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. added to the Bible. Young said the “curse will be removed from the seed of Cain” when “all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the holy priesthood.” 

The Presidency cited “another doctrine,” based upon the church’s belief that before coming into life on Earth, each human has an unremembered spirit existence with the heavenly Father and Mother. The Presidency said “the conduct of spirits in the premortal existence has some determining effect” on their earthly “conditions and circumstances,” though the details “have not been made known.” In later years, leaders began to say instead that they did not know why God instituted the ban. 

The church’s problem intensified with external pressures during the 1960s civil rights movement. Schools began boycotting athletic games with church-run Brigham Young University. The school feared loss of tax exemption when the Internal Revenue Service in 1970 denied tax exemption to Bob Jones University over its ban on interracial dating. (The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the IRS action in 1983). Would the federal government dare to even deny the church’s tax status? 

Meanwhile, pivotal research by physician Lester Bush, published in 1973, proved beyond doubt that Smith originally ordained Black men to the priesthood, setting precedent to reopen their status. (Smith became a slavery abolitionist before his assassination in 1844).  

Former businessman Spencer W. Kimball, an Apostle since 1943, automatically ascended to the church’s presidency in 1973 due to his seniority in the hierarchy. Against heavy odds, he quietly prayed and maneuvered to unite all 15 Brethren behind abolishing the ban. Kimball especially lamented that it hindered evangelism. A key step was his 1975 decision to build a temple in Brazil, where mixing of the races made consistent application of the ban next to impossible. 

The 1978 revelation set new priesthood and temple access but left the doctrinal aspect unresolved. Thus reform did not fully exist until 2013, with this from the Brethren’s 2,000-word “Race and the Priesthood” policy statement: “Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.”

Reeve’s church-published book is raising interesting questions about how members view their leaders. He notes that Wilford Woodruff, the president from 1889 to 1898, said “the Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.”

Reeve professes belief that church presidents are prophets “called by God” as “special witnesses of Jesus Christ and have a divine mandate to point us to salvation.” But he believes Mormon Scripture promotes humility and provides 21st century believers “a call to learn from the imperfections of our leaders on matters of race and then move forward.”

On a personal note, the present writer considers himself a reasonably knowledgeable journalist who interviewed President Kimball right after the 1978 revelation, and later President Gordon Hinckley, and co-authored “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise” with his late wife Joan — but admits he is simply astonished at the faith’s racial agonies now exposed by Harris.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.