Mormon Priesthood and Temple Ban: From Policy to “Doctrine”

Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin 0:00 Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host, John Dehlin. It's June 4, 2024, and we are now in part two of this brand new exciting series that we're launching on what I Believe and many believe is a groundbreaking book on Mormon history. The book is entitled Second Class Black Mormons and the Struggle for racial equality by Dr. Matthew Harris. We just recorded episode one yesterday and what we're doing is like the LDS discussion series. We're planning on a hopefully a 10 to 20 episode series where we're going to be digging in depth into this book. This book not only talks about the Mormon Church's priesthood and temple ban on black people, some black people, for over 150 years, it's also a really important insider look at how Mormon church leaders are influenced, how they make decisions, the political intrigue and just kind of how the sausage gets made. We believe this is a historic book. I've already said it's one of the maybe top three most important books I've ever read about Mormonism. And really quickly, just to remind you all this series continuing is dependent on your support. We want to pay Matt to generously for not only a scholarship, but for his time that he's taking to dig in depth. This is sort of a director's cut podcast to take you behind the scenes of this book because this book, while it was three or four hundred pages long, could have been much, much longer and had to be edited down. And then there's so much that Matt knows that even wasn't included in the early drafts. So this is the director's cut insider view of the inner workings of the Mormon Church as it relates to race. And we need your financial support if you want to see this continue like the LDS discussion series. The way to do that is to go to donorbox.org Matt Harris and become a monthly donor. And as long as, let's just say 50 of you step up to donate 10 bucks a month, maybe 100 because we want to do multiple episodes a month anyway, let's just say a hundred of you step up to $10 a month, we'll be able to pay Matt what he deserves to keep this going. So please, again, donorbox.org math Harris, we'll include that show notes. And without any further ado, let's bring back into our panel Gerardo Simano, the reason I know anything about Matt Harris. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 2:29 Hi.

Matt Harris 2:29 Hi, John.

John Dehlin 2:30 And Gerardo, this is an issue you care about deeply as well, right?

Gerardo Sumano 2:33 Yes. Yeah, for sure.

Matt Harris 2:35 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:35 And Matt, tell us in, in 20 seconds your background. Just for those who are joining us for the first time.

Matt Harris 2:43 I'm a professor of history at Colorado State University, Pueblo. I went to BYU for my grad and undergrad and then I went to get another master's degree and PhD at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public affairs in Syracuse, New York. I specialize in civil rights, race and religion, legal history and the Constitution, all the controversial stuff. And anyway, I've been writing and researching and publishing in Mormon history for, geez, well over a decade now. So it's a privilege to be here and talk about my work.

John Dehlin 3:15 It's our pleasure. Really quickly, if you're listening, you're watching this episode before the release. The release, I believe, is in early July 2024. You can pre order. We'll include a link to Amazon to pre order the book. Please start purchasing this book now. Go to Amazon right now and buy this book. We want to flood the earth with Second Class Saints because it's a really important book and we also welcome our Never Mormon audience. We're going to work really hard to make this episode and the series accessible. And we'll say the series is enjoyed best when you start from the beginning. So whether you go to the playlist on YouTube to watch this in order, or you go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you can watch these episodes as their own podcast and you could binge watch them versus having them intermingled in the Mormham Stories podcast feed. Now, before we jump in, we were talking about our plan from the beginning, Matt, to incorporate black Mormons or black ex Mormons into this discussion. Do you want to talk about that really quickly? Because we know that we're three non black guys right now talking about, you know, the black experience within Mormonism. But that is not how the series is going to end. Correct?

Matt Harris 4:32 Yeah, I think it's critical that we get black voices on the show.

John Dehlin 4:37 Women voices too, but keep going.

Matt Harris 4:39 Yeah, men and women. And the one of the things I did in my book was it was really, really important that I get as many black voices as I could in terms of how they understood Mormon racial theology, how they understood the band, how it affected them. And I'd like to do the same thing for this program to get just a perspective from a different voice about how this theology affected them and also how the ban, the lifting of the ban in 1978 affected them.

John Dehlin 5:06 Yeah. So please be patient with us. We wanted to get the kinks out of our structure and our dynamics before we started adding panelists, but it's coming. All right, so, Matt, do you want to kind of give a quick recap of what we covered last time and how we left it off, and then we'll jump right in?

Joseph Smith's Views on Race and Priesthood

Matt Harris 5:25 Yeah. So yesterday, in our first episode, our debut episode, we talked about the prophet Joseph Smith. He. His views on black people. We talked about how he ordained some black men, or at least people under his direction ordained black men to the priesthood with his consent. And we talked about a black Latter Day Saint woman named Jane Manning James, how she petitioned various church leaders for her temple ordinances and was essentially denied in most of these requests, except for the baptisms for the dead that she and some other black saints were allowed to do. We talked about how priesthood ordination had abruptly shifted with the second prophet president, Brigham Young. In 1852, he publicly announced that there would be a ban on the priesthood. And undergirding that ban was his fear of interracial marriage. There were a couple of black Latter Day Saint men who were engaging in polygamous affairs with white women. That unnerved Brigham Young. And we also talked about an important Latter Day Saint priesthood holder named Elijah Abel, that he served several church missions for the church. He was able to get his washings and anointings done, a limited temple ritual. And he, too, was denied. Like Jane Manning James, he was denied the opportunity to get it sealed to his spouse in the temple, which is a prominent temple ritual that prepares Latter Day Saints for the afterlife. And we left off yesterday, essentially on page six, where we're going to start to talk about interracial marriage in earnest and how that undergirds much of the church's teachings about racial matters.

Interracial Marriage Laws in Utah Territory

John Dehlin 7:06 Yeah. So lots of states in the United States made interracial marriage illegal. How did. How did the Utah legislature or the territorial legislature, whoever it was, how did they handle it?

Matt Harris 7:20 They used fractions. So in 1888, looking at my book here, in 1888, the Utah legislature had passed a law. This is really with Brigham Young's influence as the leader of the state, or the territory, rather. So in 1888, just 10 years after Brigham Young died, they passed the first interracial marriage laws in the state of Utah, which barred black, white, and Asian people from intermarrying. And then by 1939, they expand the law that prevents a mulatto, a quadroon, or an octoroon from marrying a white person. And just to give people a sense of how this plays out, a mulatto. Is anyone in the law that has one White and one black grandparent. A quadroon is one black grandparent and three white grandparents. And an octoroon is one black great grandparent and seven white great grandparents. So one of the things that we left off yesterday was is that race is a construct. These are just fractions that lawmakers had created to define someone who is black. And the church will buy into this. They'll alternate. The state legislature will use the fractions, but the church will even go one step further and they'll use the one drop rule, which is an old slave plantation rule that they created in the 1830s and 40s to prevent interracial sex between slaves and non slaves. And so the one drop rule simply means that if you had 100 people and one of those hundred had African ancestry, or one drop as it were, they would be deemed black. And by 1930, the census codifies the one drop rule into law, which means that if anybody in a household identified had one drop of African ancestry, they would have to click the box that said Negro, as they said in those days, or colored. So anyway, these are very draconian racial constructions. And maybe, John, this is a way to launch into Susie Young Gates from here.

John Dehlin 9:24 I'll just say we covered last time that we all have a drop. Not only do we all have a drop of African blood in us, but like we have drops of, of Neanderthal, I mean blood in us. Like there's no such thing as a human being without drops of African blood. Probably a lot of them, including blonde hair, blue eyed, Aryans or whatever the word would be from, from Western Europe. Right?

Matt Harris 9:51 Yeah, it's, it's really interesting because a point that I made yesterday that I want to emphasize again today is that the priesthood and temple restriction of the church is based on lineage, not black skin. That's hard for a lot of people to imagine. So what that means is if you have one drop of African ancestry, you're deemed black or cursed, as it were. But if you are from Fiji and you have really dark skin, the church didn't believe that Fijians were from dry from Africa, and so they could hold the priesthood even though they had dark skin. So theoretically it's possible that you could have a white looking person, Caucasian looking person with an African American ancestor in their line, their family tree, they could be denied the priesthood, but yet somebody with very dark skin from say, Fiji could hold the priesthood. So it wasn't based on skin color, it was based on lineage. And that's what really made this interesting.

Gerardo Sumano 10:47 I have a question about about that, Matt, do you have a sense whether this was any unintended consequence of the one drop rule? Where obviously, I mean, you talked about yesterday how the ban was imposed by Brigham Young based on his fear of interracial marriage or interracial sex. So. And obviously he had to scare Latter Day Saints away from, from that practice. Right. And that's likely what was behind the ban. So are these all these issues that came later that you're talking about where you would have someone that appeared to be white but that had African ancestry, is that an unintended consequence of the ban?

John Dehlin 11:34 Yeah, we don't want to get much into this because we cover this in a later chapter, but go ahead, go ahead, Matt.

Matt Harris 11:39 Yeah, I was going to say in chapter two, Gerardo, we talk about, it's called racial passing that chapter. And what that means is, is that light skinned Latter Day Saints of African descent, much like Americans in general who have light skinned those days, they call them mulattoes. Today we would use the word mixed race or biracial. But for these biracial Latter Day Saints who are light and skin color, they would pass below the color line. That is, they would pass as white instead of identifying as black because obviously if they pass as white in the church and also in American society, they would get more privileges. And so in chapter two, I talk about at great length how they pass as white, also in how the brethren leaders of the church recognize that this is going on. And we'll talk more about that when we get to chapter two. But they know what's going on. And just to give listeners a teaser that a couple of the church leaders think that it unfairly penalizes light skinned people because they can pass as white and achieve the priesthood, whereas dark skinned people don't have that luxury. And so it leads to a proposal to ordain what they call part Negroes to the priesthood. So anyway, yeah.

Early 20th Century Racial Policies in the Church

John Dehlin 12:52 All right, so interracial marriage in Utah territories is banned. Let's switch to kind of. I, I think we're now getting the kind of early 20th century how, what type of legacy? Practical legacy. Brigham Young's policies leave the functioning church.

Matt Harris 13:13 Yeah. So the legislature, they're influenced by his leadership. Even though he dies in 1877, his influence still is strong. And so they're passing these laws based on his views and the church's views on interracial marriage. This idea that bloodlines are pure and they ought to be unsullied by these interracial marriages. And I should add, just to be really clear, and as a careful scholar that I strive to be, it wasn't just a law that prevented black and white people from marrying. It was also a law that would prevent people of different racial and ethnic grounds from marrying. So in other words, white people were not supposed to marry Chinese people, let's say, or Asian people in general. So it wasn't just black and white. It was a whole number of racial and ethnic groups. And all right, so that goes on in the early 20th century. This is going on all throughout the American South. Interracial marriage laws are in place and they won't be lifted until 1968 by the United States Supreme Court in a famous court case called Loving v. Virginia. Some of the states will get rid of their interracial laws before that, including Utah. We can talk about that later. But anyway, so these interracial marriage laws are in place. And this leads us to an interesting character in Mormon history. Her name is Susan Young Gates. She was a prominent Relief Society member in the early part of the church. She was Brigham Young's outspoken daughter. She had a mind of her own. She was extremely intelligent and didn't like always taking direction from priesthood leaders. She was a leader in the women's suffragette movement when Mormon women in the early 20th century were far more active in political and social causes than they are today, I would argue. Anyway, she wrote a book that the sisters in the Relief Society used that was really, really important. And it's a 600 page book that tries to link the world's genealogy or genealogy to the world's racial history. So she's looking at racial patterns around the world. And much of her book talks about interracial encounters and interracial migrations. And she says something interesting. She says that these groups that were crisscrossing the globe had a distinctive strain or lineage that became blurred over time through interracial marriage. So she acknowledges this in the book, but she doesn't really quite comprehend what that means. That if you have different racial and ethnic groups crisscrossing the globe, that means that they're violating the one drop rule. This is completely lost on her when she writes the book. She has three of the apostles sign off on the book, and one of whom is a rising superstar in church circles. He's the son of LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith. And this, of course, is Joseph Fielding Smith. So Joseph Fielding Smith, Anthon Lund, who would later become Joseph F. Smith's counselor in the First Presidency, and also an apostle named Charles Penrose. They look at Sister Gates book, they Read it, they review it, they make some comments, but it goes completely over their head that this entire book negates the one drop rule that the whole world has been crisscrossing in motion for a number of years. And what's interesting about all of this from these interracial migrations is that it leads to a new nomenclature of how we identify these mixed race marriages and their mixed race offspring. So you get mestizos and mulattoes and a whole number of new names that pop up to describe these mixed race children that, that correspond to their new mixed race identities. So anyway, the point that I want to make is that there is no such thing as a pure white race and there is no such thing as somebody having one drop. Since we've talked about that, each of us, if we go back 200 years, each of us has at least one ancestor with African American and Native American ancestry. And the brethren don't quite know this yet. In the early 20th century, this is scholarship that's unfolding with a German anthropologist named Franz Boas who teaches at Columbia University. He and his students are among the leaders in identifying that race is a construct. It's something that people have constructed to make sense of different peoples around the world. So Mormon leaders in general are stuck with this idea that there's a pure right race, when the fact is it's just something that's built on fiction.

John Dehlin 17:53 Really quick, Matt. One term that I think can be experienced as very offensive, especially to white people, is the term white supremacy. And what I take from this, I mean, it was clear Brigham Young was a white supremacist in any definition of the term. And I don't mean to use a term that's loaded or charged. I'm just trying to be technically accurate. And I think that term would just de facto apply to Brigham Young, but it also applies to these early high level Mormon church leaders in the early 20th century. Correct? This idea of a pure white race, that's by definition white supremacy, is that. Am I overreaching there?

Matt Harris 18:39 No, you're using a modern term to describe something that goes back for a number of years. And just to go back further, European people in the, let's say the medieval era, so the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, they follow this Aristotelian idea. So the philosopher Aristotle had argued that there's a great chain of being in the world and everything was rank ordered, from the plants to animals to people. And in this great chain of being, white people were at the very top. And of course, slaves and black People would be at the very bottom. And Mormons, like other Protestant Christians and other Christian groups, picked up on this racialized hierarchy, as I call it. And there's no question that Latter Day Saints believe that white people were the chosen lineage. And that's, we talked about yesterday, this concept called British Israelism, which is that the lost tribes of Israel were really nestled in Scandinavian countries. And Latter Day Saints looked at that theology that was taught and they argued that the chosen lineages derived from these northern European countries. And of course these are white countries. And so that was part of that great chain of being or that racialized hierarchy. And in the 20th century, early 20th century to mid 20th century, latter day Saints frequently talked about the chosen lineage being essentially white people. And so we would, we tend to equate the white supremacy with, let's say the Ku Klux Klan today. And it is a loaded term. But there's no question that Americans in general in the early 20th century where they believed in white supremacy. They believed that white people ought to run the government, they believe that white people ought to teach schools. They believe that white people ought to be doctors and physicians and ought to play a part leading role in the leading occupations of the country. So Latter Day Saints were not unusual in privileging whiteness at that time.

John Dehlin 20:42 Okay, great. Thank you. If it's okay, let's jump to the part of the book where John Taylor and Joseph F. Smith have some brief interactions with Elijah Abel. And I know that we may have touched on this last time, but just for the sake of the chronology and kind of the story, now that we're getting into post Brigham Young prophets, let's just really quickly talk about John Taylor and Joseph F. Smith's interactions with Elijah Abel. That's okay.

Matt Harris 21:09 Yeah. So Elijah Abel, his, his interactions early on were with Joseph Smith. And it's one of those classic examples or cases in life where a certain leader treats you a certain way. And the expectation is that that leader's successors will follow in that same vein. And that was not the case with Elijah Abel or Jane Manning James for that matter. And so the prophet Joseph Smith had expressed great affection for these two black Latter Day Saints. But that affection was not returned by his successors, particularly Brigham Young, also John Taylor. And as the church, when John Taylor, the third president of the LDS Church, when he was ruling the church in 1877 forward, he was an older man, as most of leaders are when they occupied that position. And the ban had been in place already since 1852. So John Taylor argued that Joseph Smith was the originator of the band, even though there was no revelation that they could find that the prophet, the original founding prophet, had established the van. But yet they clung to that belief because Joseph Smith was the founding prophet who. Who created or restored, if you will, that's a good Mormon term, restored the theology of the church. And so the expectation was that Joseph Smith would have restored the priesthood ban as well. Or at least implemented it, I should say.

John Dehlin 22:37 Is there any way. Oh, go ahead, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 22:39 Can we attribute to John Taylor the. The idea that the band initiated with. With Joseph Smith because Brigham Young never attributed to Joseph, Is that right?

Matt Harris 22:47 That's correct. Yeah. And so John Taylor and his successors, Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, those three church presidents who succeeded Brigham Young, they'll go back to. To Joseph Smith. And what they'll say is, they'll say stuff like, oh, we heard Brigham say that Joseph Smith was the creator of the band. So it's second and third hand. But, Gerardo, you're right. There's no direct evidence linking it back to the. Or at least Brigham Young saying in a sermon that it started with Joseph Smith. It's just second, third hand, heresy, hearsay.

John Dehlin 23:22 Okay.

Matt Harris 23:22 From other leaders.

John Dehlin 23:24 So maybe just normal confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, not necessarily on John Taylor's part. Any attempt to willfully deceive. Right?

Matt Harris 23:35 I don't think so. And I don't. Yeah, I don't think so. But I think a lot of this is just, of course, they're not willing to ask the hard questions. You know, where's the evidence? Okay, you heard him say it, but does that mean he said it?

John Dehlin 23:48 Yeah.

Matt Harris 23:48 And a lot of it's driven by their own racial proclivities at the time.

John Dehlin 23:51 Right. That makes sense. And I. I thought it was interesting, the part about Joseph F. Smith declaring Elijah Abel's ordination a mistake, but he can still have it. I thought that was great.

Matt Harris 24:03 Yeah. And what's extraordinary about Joseph F. Smith saying that his ordination was a mistake was he's already dead. So it's like, what's the point? But

Gerardo Sumano 24:14 didn't Taylor did. Taylor did say that it was. That it was an exception to the rule. Is that right?

Matt Harris 24:21 Other people said that. Other people. Leaders had said that. Later on when it gets out, they'll. They'll talk about he's an exception to the rule. And then Joseph Fielding Smith at one point said to a Latter Day Saint inquisitor, there were two Elijah Abels, one white and one black, in Nauvoo. It was the white guy that was ordained, not the black one. I mean, they're. They're flummoxed by this, and they're trying to create this. This coherent theology that just doesn't work because the prophet ordained or had ordained black men when. During his leadership, and they just didn't know how to make sense of that.

John Dehlin 24:55 Part of what's meaningful to me about that is we, we all observe the apologist dynamic in the, you know, in the modern 21st century of how Mormon apologists try to come up with answers that often don't make sense. And it's interesting to see behind the covers that. That the church prophets and. And apostles, that they lead the way behind the scenes in. In the same types of approaches. Right?

Matt Harris 25:20 Yeah, I think, I think that these are honest brokers. They're doing their very best. They really believe, I think, that Joseph Smith created the ban, even though they don't have evidence, and I don't have any evidence to suggest that they were being deceitful or dishonest about it. They knew the truth, but they didn't want to share it. I just, you know. But, you know, I'm sure Joseph Fielding Smith knew when he said there were two Elijah Abels and Nauvoo. I'm sure he knew that was nonsense. I mean, that's just beyond the pale.

Gerardo Sumano 25:50 But.

Matt Harris 25:51 But anyway. And the reason why I'm confident that he knew it was nonsense is because one is just illogical and absurd. But two, he changes his position. Months later, in another letter to a different Latter Day Saint, he says, yeah, it was an exception to the rule. And so he knew that that wasn't a coherent response.

John Dehlin 26:09 Also, if exceptions are allowed, they could have made a lot of exceptions in the 20th century, in the 21st century or in the 20th century. Right. I mean, that's interesting. Exceptions are allowed.

Matt Harris 26:20 So when we get into. I hate to keep saying this, you guys, but when we get into chapter two, when the church starts to globalize a little bit, this is when they come up close and personal with race construction. They can't tell who's got the blood, who's got the curse. And so they know. They. They say in their. Their minutes, their private minutes, they know that people of African ancestry are getting ordained to the priesthood. They know it, and they just turn the other way.

Gerardo Sumano 26:43 Right?

John Dehlin 26:44 Yeah. Okay, well, what should we. What should we touch. Touch on next, Matt?

Joseph Fielding Smith and Cementing the Priesthood Ban

Matt Harris 26:52 All right, so I think we should move to maybe Joseph Fielding Smith.

John Dehlin 26:56 Okay. Yeah. I've often said he's one of the most important figures in modern Mormon History, I think so. I'm super excited. Let's do it.

Matt Harris 27:06 Yeah. So just a background about Joseph Fielding Smith. He's. He comes from royal Mormon stock, and he's ordained a member of the Council of twelve Apostles. This is the second highest governing body in the church, second to the First Presidency, which is comprised of the prophet and his two counselors, and his father is the church president. When Joseph Fielding is ordained in 1910 at the age of 32, and you can imagine that the pushback that when the president says, hey, announces in General Conference, which is a semiannual gathering of Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake, where they have their main theological sermons, that when they announced the new apostle name, that, you know, Joseph Fielding Smith and the Saints. You know, I think Mormons get a bad rap sometimes that they're just so docile, and they just do whatever they're told, and that is just not true. And Mormons are a loud and cantankerous people when they disagree. And anyway, there were some strong rumors afloat that Joseph F. Smith, the church president, this aging patriarch, he is indulging in nepotism. And so they weren't happy. A lot of Latter Day Saints were vocally protesting the nepotism. And I should add, it wasn't just Joseph Fielding Smith. He'd also called one of his other sons into the quorum, the 12, and I think a nephew as well. So you've got three.

John Dehlin 28:36 Young had done something similar. Correct.

Matt Harris 28:38 Brigham Young had done something similar. Other leaders had done something similar. So the gene pool in early church leadership is quite small. And anyway, so there are charges of nepotism. Joseph F. Smith was warned, you know, if you call your second son into the 12, that there's going to be pushback. And Joseph F. Smith said, I don't care. And the idea was that the Smiths had an expectation because they had blood, the bloodline that dates back to the prophet Joseph Smith and also his brother, Hyrum Smith, who was murdered in 1844 with Joseph Smith. So those two Smith brothers were murdered. The founding prophet and his brother Hyrum, who's a close confidant to his brother. And so Joseph Fielding Smith and Joseph F. Smith come through Hyrum Smith's bloodline. So they felt that the Smiths had an obligation to run the church. And that's in part why Joseph F. Smith called his two sons into the Quorum of the twelve, is because the expectation was that they would fulfill Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith's wishes to keep this bloodline going in church leadership. So, anyway, prior to Joseph Fielding smith's call in 1910, he was the assistant church historian, which meant that he was in charge of curating manuscripts, organizing them, and in some cases, very limited cases, I might add, allowing outsiders, scholars to look at the manuscripts if they were publishing something. Well, in 1910, Joseph Fielding Smith received his second patriarchal blessing. And so he's 32. Sometimes in those days, Latter Day Saints receive second two patriarchal blessings, and they don't do that as much today. You usually get one when you're a younger person. If you're born into the church, you might get one during your teenage year. Mine, for example, I think I was 16. And it told me that I would go on a church mission, which I did. It said something about my employment, that I would work with my hands, which is interesting. I'm a college professor. Maybe it means I write books. And anyway, at the time, I thought it meant that I was going to be a chiropractor, which was my. Yeah, yeah, I like chiropractic. And our bishop was a chiropractor. So I had an affinity for that line of work at the time. But anyway, if you're a convert, you might get baptized, and then a year later, you might receive your patriarchal blessing. And then your blessing, as we mentioned in yesterday's episode, that you'd have your lineage declared and people who were expected to run the church, priesthood holders, so men, they would be usually from the lineage of Ephraim. And if you were black or biracial, you would be from a lineage of Cain or Ham. And so anyway, with the patriarchal blessing, Joseph Fielding Smith received a second one. And in this blessing, it told him that his job would be to preserve the doctrines of the church. And so he sort of anointed himself the preserver of Mormon orthodoxy, of doctrinal orthodoxy, that is to keep the doctrine pure from maybe radical theologians or radical thinkers who may seek to. And so Joseph Fielding Smith, just to give you a sort of a big line here, he has several different roles he plays in the church. Once he's ordained in 1910 to the Council of the Twelve, he's president of the Salt Lake Temple. At one point, he's the president of the Salt Lake Genealogical Society. At another point, he elevates himself or rises to become president of the quorum of the 12. And then finally, in 1970, he becomes the LDS Church president, where he serves at the age of 91. He serves for two years until he passes at the age of 93. So he has this long and distinguished career in the church and he's known as being the church's best scriptorian. That is, he could just quote scriptures. They would be in a, in a meeting with the First Presidency and the Apostles, they'd be talking about some theological subject and they would turn to Brother Smith and they would say, brother Smith, what scripture supports that? And then Joseph Filling could typically just rattle off a scripture from either the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants or the Pearl of Great Price. Those are the four books of scripture that comprise the Mormon canon. So he really had this grasp of the scriptures and he was very orthodox and fundamental. If it said that God created the earth in seven days or six days and rested in the seventh, that was what happened. If Adam and Eve were the first people on earth, then there were no such thing as pre Adamites as it were. So he had this very literal reading of scripture that would oftentimes conflict with some of his more educated colleagues in the Council the 12. And Joseph Fielding Smith had what we would say today is the equivalent of a high school education, a GE diploma. He never went to college. And some of the people in the quorum of the 12 were extremely educated. Guy named John Widtso was an apostle contemporary of Apostle Smith. And Apostle Widtsoe did his undergraduate degree at Harvard and then did his PhD in chemistry at the University of Nottingham in Germany. Another well trained Mormon apostle was a guy named James E. Talmadge who did his PhD at Lehigh University in geology. So these are scientific minded apostles who believed in evolution, for example, thought that evolution was compatible with the Gospel. But Joseph Fielding Smith was just anti evolution. He was reading fundamentalist writers of anti evolution. And he was always, always and frequently clashing with some of his better educated, more trained, scientifically trained colleagues. And one of the reasons why I like Joseph Fielding Smith is here's a guy with a high school diploma telling the PhDs in science that they don't understand evolution. I mean, it's comical. What's not to like about that? And jokes aside, I think he's known in the church because he writes a lot. He's the church's most prolific author in the 20th century. And often his colleagues in the 12, including the Church president, they would look to Joseph Fielding Smith to write a book about something. And the books were today we might say again, they're just representative of his fundamentalist mind and how he thinks. If the scripture says X, it must mean X. There was no sort of symbology in Scripture or metaphor. He just didn't see it that way. But anyway, they would always refer Latter Day Saints to his writings. And so he becomes really quite popular in not just his views on evolution that make its way into church manuals, but also his views on race and lineage.

John Dehlin 35:24 And really quickly, Matt, can I ask you a question? So we talked, we touched on this last episode, but because it's in the timeline, I want to just touch on it briefly. Again, you talk about a couple things related to Joseph F. And Joseph Fielding that I think are important. One was the fact that both Joseph F. And Joseph Fielding in the early 1900s were trying to find a doctrinal basis for the priesthood ban. And tell me if I'm right. Your book says that neither of them, both of them acknowledged that they could not find a doctrinal basis in terms of like a published revelation or even any type of revelation to justify the priesthood ban. Both Joseph F. And Joseph acknowledged that early. Early in the 20th century. Correct?

Matt Harris 36:11 Yeah. So just to pick up on a thread from yesterday that by the late 19th century, there's another justification for the priesthood ban that the brethren create. And it's this idea that black people were either less valiant or that they were neutral in this premortal war in heaven in which Jesus and Satan had this war. And one theory said that black people chose the side of Satan and as a result they became cursed. They couldn't. They had limitations because of their choosing Satan, this premortal battle and those limitations, including being barred from the priesthood, being barred from the temple and all of that. The other theological part of that was they weren't cursed or they weren't less neutral. Back up. They weren't less valiant. They were actually neutral. They didn't take sides. So you have leaders that were positing those two different theological positions, but they were both based on the Pearl of Great Price, a book within that book of scripture called the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin 37:15 And tell me if I'm right. At one point B.H. roberts, historian, B.H. roberts kind of represented the not valiant side and Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff represented the neutral side. And then Joseph effort, Joseph Fielding, were trying to navigate that. Is that right?

Matt Harris 37:33 Yeah. So, yeah. So there were two competing positions in the 1880s. One was from an article that B.H. roberts, who's like Joseph Hilling Smith, a self made person, didn't have formal training and BH Roberts became this very prominent general authority. So he wrote a piece that was published in a church Magazine in 1886, and he argued that Black people were less valiant in the pre existence where the church president, whereas the church president, Wilford Woodruff, argued that they were astride the fence, they were neutral. And Joseph F. Smith and his son, Joseph Fielding Smith, they argued that the neutral position was nonsense. There was no scriptural justification for it. And as these two theories are playing out in church publications, Latter Day Saints are writing into the brethren. They're saying, all right, are black people neutral? Are they less valiant? What's going on here? And did the band start with Joseph Smith? When did it start? And so Joseph F. Smith and his counselors, they lead this concerted effort to look into some of the church records to see if there was a revelation. Did it start with Joseph Smith? And this had been ongoing for a number of years at this point, because they tried to do that with Elijah abel too, about 15 years earlier, when they were talking about his ordination, if it was valid. And so they couldn't find a revelation at all from the prophet. And so

John Dehlin 38:59 Gerardo thinks it might be a good idea for me to read from your book. Is that okay if I do that? Really quick, please. Okay. So this is page 15, a couple pair, you know, two paragraphs down. I'm just going to read a little bit. It says, in 1907, three years before he was called his church apostle, this is Joseph Fielding Smith expressed discomfort. I believe it's Joseph Fielding. Right. Joseph Fielding Smith expressed discomfort with the rationales justifying the priesthood and temple ban. So he's uncomfortable. Before he's an apostle, he's uncomfortable with the rationales. He had heard them his entire life from his father, Joseph father and other church leaders, and knew that there wasn't a written revelation affirming the ban, which is why he initially believed that it was more a tradition than a fixed doctrine. Quote. And this is so that it says, tradition states that the prophet. Okay, this is Joseph Felix Smith writing now. Right.

Gerardo Sumano 39:55 Quote.

John Dehlin 39:56 Tradition states that the prophet Joseph Smith declared that the reason why the children of Cain cannot receive the priesthood is that Cain cut his brother Abel off from. From the earth before he had seed. Close quote. Smith speculated in a letter to a concerned member. And that's one of the beautiful things about your book. You've got these amazing letters that none of us knew existed. So Joseph Fielding Smith speculated in a letter to a concerned member. But then Smith went on to denounce other rationales for the ban, namely that black people had been, quote, neutral in the war in heaven. This position lacked scriptural support, Smith asserted, echoing his father. He called this teaching quote, the opinion of early leaders. Gerardo, tell us why you think that's so important.

Gerardo Sumano 40:40 Well, I mean, this show, I, I, I mean just the next line and the next paragraph it says by, but by 1924, some 15 years later, he had decidedly new cast, a new tone, you know, and so it just shows that he knew, he knew it didn't existed. He, he felt about wrong, that it was wrong.

John Dehlin 41:02 Yeah, you're right. Let me read it in the church's magazine, the Improvement Era, the Precocious Apostle. So this is, you know, what, 17 years later, is that right?

Matt Harris 41:13 Yeah, he's in his early 40s at

John Dehlin 41:15 this point, so, so now all of a sudden, he's changed his tune. In the church's magazine, the Improvement Era, the Precocious Apostle wrote that Mormon racial teachings were quote, doctrine, close quote. That Joseph Smith Jr. Taught them as doctrine. That's a problem. And that under no circumstances could black members hold the priesthood. Sorry, Gerard, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Gerardo Sumano 41:35 Oh, no, that's great. That's great. Yeah, well, I don't know. That's just pretty significant because it just comes to what we're talking about. Right. Like new. They knew from the beginning that this was, that this was problematic, but they would try to come up with rationales to come to, to church concerned church members. Is that right, Matt?

Matt Harris 41:54 Yeah, it's unsettled, right? It's, I have to tell people that that the, the priesthood ban, it's, it's a lot of things. It's a practice, it's a policy, and it's a doctrine all rolled into one. And at this point it had been a practice, but really not an established doctrine. It's just they have different theories about the ban. Some people, the black people are cursed, some they're neutral, some they're less valiant. So they're all over the place. And one of the things that, that frequently catches my attention when I see some church publications that kind of drive me nuts a little bit, to be honest, is that I've seen this 1907 letter quoted by the church once in a while, and they focus on the idea that the church, the rationales for the ban are opinions or traditions, as Joseph Fielding Smith says in 1907. And the reason why some church publications say that, and the reason why I'm a little unnerved by that is because the message would be that it was never doctrine. That were just, you know, some opinions that a few people taught. And the problem with that line of thinking is, number one, this is in 1907, Joseph Fielding Smith wasn't even an apostle yet, so he's the assistant church historian just writing his private opinion to a private member. And number two, when people use that 1907 letter, the idea of a tradition or an opinion to make this idea that it was never doctrine, they forget what he writes later where he writes books called Doctrines of Salvation in which he talks about the ban. So later on it becomes a doctrine and he's clear about that. But yet, unfortunately, some people who write this in church manuals, they don't understand that and they just fixate on the opinion part because, because they don't want to link it to a doctrine.

Gerardo Sumano 43:42 Well, I didn't know that. That's, this is, this is the letter where this idea of it being folklore or an opinion comes from.

Matt Harris 43:49 And the idea would be that Elder Packer, the late apostle who died in 2015, he, he said something that, that some Latter Day Saints, including my own father, quotes often, which is that doctrines never change. And I've talked to my dad about this, who's a very good bishop in the church and just a good Latter Day Saint man. And anyway, I said, dad, that's just, that's, that's not accepted by all the leaders. Of course, that was Elder Packer's view. But not all leaders believe that doctrines do change. And we talked about the priesthood band being one of them. It was definitely a doctrine. It became a doctrine in, by 1949 that we'll get to, but it became a doctrine and certainly that changed. And I told my dad, I said, you know, the beauty of the church and its teachings is they believe in modern day revelation. So what could be a doctrine in one generation doesn't necessarily have to be a doctrine in another generation if the prophet receives a revelation to make that change. And so that's not a jarring thing to think about. But, but that's why they downplay the, the priesthood ban as doctrine is because of Elder Packer's influence suggesting that doctrines never change.

Gerardo Sumano 45:00 Right. Right.

The Way to Perfection and Racial Theology

John Dehlin 45:03 All right, so is it time to talk about this amazing book that I ordered over the weekend? It's called the Way to Perfection by Joseph Billy Smith. And I'll just say before there was Mormon doctrine and before there was Doctrines of Salvation, Volume 1, 2 and 3, there was the Way to Perfection by Joseph Willy Smith. For me, this is the original Mormon doctrine. But, but take it away. Matt Harris.

Matt Harris 45:32 Yeah, no, there's no doubt about it. I think most people, for your, your audience members who may not know some Best selling LDS books. One of the most prominent books in the LDS Church is a book called Mormon Doctrine. It was written by Joseph Fielding Smith's son in law, a guy named Bruce R. McConkey. It was published in 1958 and it was removed from print in 2010. So Mormon doctrine had a long history and. But the book before that that members used and it was the most influential book in the 20th century, even more than Mormon Doctrine, was a book called the Way to Perfection by Joseph Fielding Smith. And it was published in 1931. It went through at least I think, 15 reprint editions. And it was finally pulled from print at Desert Book, which is a church publishing house. LDS Church publishing house. It was taken out of print in 1989, 1990. So when it was taken out of print in 1989, 1990, it was still selling copies. And I can tell you, if my book is still selling copies decades after I'm dead, I think my children will be happy. But anyway, so it's.

John Dehlin 46:45 You're kind of implying that maybe he made quite a bit of money off this book, right?

Matt Harris 46:49 He did, he did. I mean, whenever you're making, you're selling books over decades, you're going to make money. And when Joseph Fielding Smith's son and a Mormon journalist named John J. Stewart, they had partnered together I think 1972 to write a short book on Joseph Fielding Smith who just had passed or maybe he was still the president and then died that year. I can't remember if the book came out after he died or not. But anyway, so they wrote a book about him. And in that book, in fact, it's right behind on my shelf somewhere. But in that book they talk about the royalties that Joseph Fielding Smith receives and they're quite lucrative and doesn't they don't give dollar amounts. But I mean he's making money because the Saints are buying this book. And what's extraordinary about this book, before we get into the details of it, is that the Church, they ask him to write it. The First Presidency. Right, First Presidency asks him to write it. And it really is a commentary, I think, on two things. One is the church is really interested in lineage and these pure bloodlines. And that's why they supported Susie Young Gates's book and that's why they support this book, is that it's an idea to sort of a more concerted look at where people come from and how they fit into this idea of extended kinships and how people relate to one another. And as part of that book, of course, Joseph Fielding Smith has to deal with black people and biracial people. And so it's also Joseph Fielding Smith's attempt to systematize the church's race theology. We have all these different theories circulating in Mormon public spheres at this point. And so Joseph, feeling Smith certainly has his views. He argues that black people are less valiant. He argues that they're cursed. You know, all of that stuff. And some of his contemporaries don't agree with this, but this is his. His way to make his voice felt in the church. So he writes this book and he creates this theology that black people are denied certain privileges because of this cursing, and it prevents them from going to the temple. It prevents them from fully participating in the church. And I think what's most instructive from this or to this discussion today about this book is that Joseph Fielding Smith is really the first popular Mormon writer to emphasize this idea that Negroes, as he puts it, are from a less favored lineage. We talked about a racialized hierarchy a minute ago. This is what that means, that they're not one of the chosen lineages or the favored lineages, which would be white people. They're at the very bottom of this racialized hierarchy, or as he puts it, a less favored lineage. And he also quotes Brigham Young, and he says that anybody with one drop of African ancestry would be denied the priesthood. And then he says something that's really, really controversial that even the most radical Mormon thinkers at the time would. Wouldn't even accept, and that is that black people have inferior bodies, that they are inferior to white people. Some of the chosen lineage stuff, that's just sort of implied. But he just, lest there be any ambiguity, he clearly states that black people have inferior bodies and that they're inferior to white people. And there's a lot of church leaders I have to. When I talk publicly about these kinds of things, I think a lot of Latter Day Saints are always and also non Latter Day Saints. They tend to think that if one Mormon leader believes, you know, X about black people, they all believe that. That's just simply not the case. There are some church leaders who do not believe that black people are cursed, but they think they're less valiant. And there are some church leaders, including Spencer W. Kimball, the president who will later lift the ban, decades later. I mean, one can imagine him thinking and saying that black people were inferior to white people. He may believe that, but to say that, to articulate that publicly, is another whole animal. So that's what he does. And this becomes the. The standard text

Gerardo Sumano 51:09 can I just read this one sentence in the book. He said, you say, but Smith didn't stop there. And you're talking about way to perfection.

John Dehlin 51:17 He.

Gerardo Sumano 51:18 You say, he claimed that black people were an inferior race, forever doomed to be the servants of God's covenant people. So not just inferior, but also, you know, meant to be serving the white people.

Matt Harris 51:35 Is that, Is that right, Gerardo? Thank you for that. Yeah, that's. That's an important detail.

John Dehlin 51:40 Basically, celestial slavery, right?

Matt Harris 51:43 Yeah. So what he's doing. What he's doing is he's following Brigham Young on this and who's following 19th century Southern slaveholders. And they interpret the Bible to mean that there was. There were two kinds of biblical figures where the curse derives. One would be Cain, who slew his brother Abel. And the. The second one was Ham, who made fun of his father, Noah, the prophet figure Noah, for being drunk. And Ham was. There's one account that says that Ham was poking his father's genitals, naked body genitals, with a prod, a stick, if you will, and just making fun of his father for being drunk. And so God showed his displeasure by cursing Ham and also Ham's son Canaan and his posterity. And as part of this curse, Ham, son and his posterity, Canaan, would be servants to non cursed peoples. And this, of course, is one of the ways in which southern slaveholders derive biblical justification for slavery. And so when Joseph Fielding Smith and Brigham Young are talking about black people being servants to white people, that's what they mean. They're doing it through that racialized biblical framework. But this is really jarring because, I mean, this is the 1930s. And to argue that black people be celestial servants to white people, that's not gonna go over very well, particularly in the 1950s and'60s when the civil rights

Gerardo Sumano 53:05 movement heats up, or 1980s, which the book was selling up until 1980 or the 1980s.

Matt Harris 53:12 Holy cow. I should. I should say something that, that you guys, your listeners, will find interesting. So this book is being sold everywhere. It's. The church asked them to write it. They're. They're studying it at church. It became the basis for Sunday school lessons. So they're studying one of the. The lesson manuals. They give the lesson about the curse of Cain and all that stuff. And then they have study questions that they would typically prompt Latter Day Saint teachers to ask their students. So these would be teenage. The LDS youth and teenage classes and also adults. And one of the questions they would ask is, you know, comment that that Negroes should be that are inferior to. To white people and they should be servants in the hereafter. So they're trying to generate discussion about black people being servants to white people. And I can't imagine how, you know, LDS youth, you know, what'd you learn today? Well, let me tell you, mom and dad. But anyway, so it was really ingrained into the church.

John Dehlin 54:04 And can I read one more passage from the book? Yeah, I just really want to drive it home. So again, this is the way to perfection. This was printed in 1970, so it's 14th printing. Right. And I just have to read this. This is on page 43. And again, think about this as a book commissioned by the Mormon Church, First Presidency, written by an apostle who. The son of the prophet Joseph F. Smith. Right.

Gerardo Sumano 54:34 Used in Sunday school. Used in Sunday School and.

John Dehlin 54:36 Yeah, used churchwide. Yeah, in Sunday school. Okay. For a long time that the Negro race, for instance, have been placed under restrictions because of their attitude in the world of spirits, few will doubt it cannot be looked upon as just that they should be deprived of the power of the priesthood without it being a punishment for some act or acts performed before they were born. So he's saying, hey, if they don't have the priesthood now, they must have been bad in the pre earth life. Reason. That's the only conclusion we could arrive at with reason. Not that the ban is wrong, but that they must have done something bad in the pre earth life. He goes on to say, yet like all other spirits who come into this world, they come innocent before God so far as mortal existence is concerned. And here under certain restrictions, they may work out their second estate goes on. If they prove faithful in this estate, without doubt, our Eternal Father who is just and true will reward them accordingly. And there will be in store for them some blessings of exaltation. Can somebody tell me what some blessings of exaltation means? Exactly? It's not like full, full exaltation. All the blessings that it's like, if they're really good in this life, they may get some of it. I'm sorry I'm acting a little bit sarcastic, but like later, the church is going to issue, you know, a very controversial gospel topics essay, which is something you've covered on Mormon stories, where they're going to basically just say all the, you know, opinions of the past were folklore and they were just the opinions of the leaders. No, this is books commissioned by first presidency members, written by apostles and sons of prophets, established as curriculum and used for half a century in the church. That's not just little rumors and opinions of some men. Matt, did I get any of that right?

Matt Harris 56:51 I mean you're, you're, you're capturing the gravity of it. This is not an ordinary book like you said it was like I write this is commissioned by the church. It's a right high ranking person. And what's even most important is that when people Latter Day Saints, they're again, they've been taught that black people are neutral, they're less value all that stuff. When they write the Brethren in Salt Lake asking for clarification, they recommend the Way to Perfection. I was shocked at how this book was used by the Brother and it was, there was only one person that did not recommend that book. And we'll talk about David O. McKay later. But most of them were always saying, hey, you got a question about the priesthood band look at Brother Smith's book and they would encourage them to read it. And one of the things I want to just quickly say is that as this book is going through multiple reprint editions, as it's being translated into multiple languages to be used in the church around the world, that obviously it's offensive if you're trying to get into countries of color like South Africa or Brazil in particular. And years ago I was at BYU and doing some research and I had a meeting with one of the Church's foremost Latin American experts, a wonderful man named Mark Grover, who's done some really incredible work on the church in Brazil where I believe he was a missionary. And anyway, so I met with Mark one day and I said, mark, how did the Brazil Saints, how did they deal with the Way to Perfection? I mean, this is chapters 15 and 16 were the two chapters where he really articulates some of the most heavy racist thinking of all this. And Mark looked at me and he said, well, I looked at the Portuguese editions and they took them out. Chapters 15 and 16 weren't there and so they recognize it's offensive. I, you know, I didn't have any reason to doubt Mark. I believe them and that's a huge deal. It is a huge deal. And I, I confirm that that what Mark told me I have a friend who served his mission in Brazil and so he's still fluent in Portuguese. And so anyway, I had the friend meet me at the BYU library after I met with Mark and I said, hey, I have reason to believe they took chapters 15 and 16 out. Let's pull some of the Portuguese editions of the Way to Perfection. And you know, I don't speak Portuguese, so it won't Matter to me, but can you help me out? And so we pulled several editions in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. And all of the editions that we pulled, my friend looked through, and 15 and 16 were missing.

Gerardo Sumano 59:25 That's crazy. I have one more point. I'm sorry. I think this is really important because these are other points that he makes in the book that are really, really important to drive home. I think he said, furthermore, and this is in the. In Weight of Perfection, Smith noted that the curse would be lifted in the future after the seed of Adam. White people and non cursed lineages had the chance to receive the priesthood free first. So he gave a date of when, when the. I mean, it's unspecified, but he, he said, you know, all the white people had to receive it first, which was not, of course, 1970, right?

John Dehlin 1:00:08 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:10 And. And then he said, in God's due time, he wrote, black skin would revert back to its primitive state of whiteness, making black people eligible for all of the Church's salvific ordinances. So he also mentioned. And then you said he meant this in a literal, physical way. I'm glad you, you included that sentence there. Why did you include it there, Matt?

Matt Harris 1:00:38 Well, because there's a growing body in the church who argue that the curses in Scripture represent something metaphorical. Your sinful nature, for example, not your skin color, but your sinful nature. And, and I think that's true. I think that you can read responsibly into the scriptures that some of these curses could be metaphorical and refer to your. You know, I don't like these metaph. These racialized metaphors anyway, but could refer to your, your. The darkness of your soul, let's say, which could refer to sin or something. But it also means in a very literal way that you have a change in phenotype if you repent of your sins. And the idea would be that we're all white. The universal human family is white. Some of us made poor decisions. We sinned. God cursed us with black and brown skin. And if we were to abide his presence again, we would have to be purged of that curse. And so Joseph Fielding Smith is caught up in this, this racialized language. It didn't start with Latter Day Saints. This is something that predates. I just finished another big essay on this. But Protestant Christians in particular had been teaching a literal change in skin when they embraced Jesus's love and utilized his atonement to repent of their sins. And Mormons are swept up in this as well. And so Joseph Fielding Smith believes this in a very literal way. And he'll, he won't talk about this in public a lot because he knows this is controversial. But in private, in particular, talking to church leaders and church educators, he'll talk about examples that he knows of where Negroes, their skin color actually changes when they embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is Mormonism. So he believes this stuff. Not all Latter Day Saint apostles will be teaching this, but definitely Joseph Fielding is, because he's certainly one of the more radical thinkers with racial theology. And he's also, as we're finding out, one of the most significant because people are buying his book, they're structuring, they're patterning it after LDS lessons. And I wanted to share one reading, if I don't mind, about this book. And this is like the influence of this book. And so on page 20, I talk about how the book was translated from English into German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish and Japanese and other languages. But also I came across, one of my good friends had alerted me to a book by this Nigerian American author named Top Fullerin. And it was published in 2019. So this young man is, or this man, he's probably, I don't know, in his 30s today maybe, but he's not a Latter Day Saint. He's probably older than that, actually. But anyway, he wrote this book called A Particular Kind of Black Man. And my friend called attention to this great passage where Tope Fuller and this Nigerian American author had lived in Utah as a young man. This is on page 20 of my book. I'm going to read it. It says that in his novel A Particular Kind of Black Man, Folerin recounted how a white Mormon neighbor walked him to school each day and told him that he'd be a servant to her in the next life if he behaved properly. And then here's the exact quote. She would often pat my head as we walked together and a penetrating silence would cancel the morning sounds around us. I felt comfortable, protected somehow in her presence. Her parting words were always the same. Remember, if you were a good boy here on earth, you can serve me in heaven. I was five years old. Her words sounded magical to me, vast and alluring. And he's quoting from, you know, he doesn't know this, of course, but the neighbor that walked into school and patted his, you know, head, this five year old kid walking to school, she's learning this from Joseph Fielding Smith. And it really just speaks. This is 1989, folks, and this just speaks to the staying power of this book.

John Dehlin 1:04:37 And I'll just, because you mention it, I'll jump back really quickly to page 17, because a lot of the, A lot of those who are really trying to understand how the sausage is made, how church leadership works, they just want to know, what did people know? When did they know it? Were there ever instances where there were cover ups? And of course, Joseph Fielding Smith, sort of in some of the circles I run in, is most notorious for ripping out the 1932 version of Joseph Smith's first vision from a specific journal and hiding it once the 1838 account of Joseph Smith's first vision became the official version. So there are some people that feel like Joseph Fielding Smith either had an honesty problem or intentionally hid or misled people. And I'm not coming down on that one way or the other, other than to point out that on page 17 of your book, you note at least two really important things or omissions. One is that reversals. You note that Joseph Fielding Smith. We just read how a couple decades ago, Joseph Fielding Smith acknowledges in a private letter that there was no real written revelation or doctrinal basis for the priesthood ban. You say that Smith's claim that the priesthood restriction began with Joseph Smith was audacious, given that there wasn't a definitive revelation linking the band to his uncle. So we know that he knew there wasn't a definitive revelation, and yet he neglected to say that in the book and instead just doubled down and reversed on saying it was a revelation. But even a little bit more disturbing is we know that Joseph Fielding Smith knew about Elijah Abel and presumably others, other black men receiving the priesthood during Joseph Smith's day. And it has to have been that he intentionally left out that information from the Way to Perfection because it's inconvenient to tell the truth, which is that Joseph Smith ordained likely at least five black men to the priesthood. And that's important because he left that out. And he knowingly left that out.

Matt Harris 1:06:53 Yeah. Did he know about the other men ordained? It's hard to know. I mean, one could argue that, hey, this is a church historian, of course you should know. But the truth is there are, you know, tens of thousands or millions of records in the church archives. And unless you're looking for something in particular, he may not have known that. But the evidence that I have is he certainly knew about Elijah Abel because of his father's experiences with Elijah Abel, because of what Andrew Jensen had written, because of what other Latter Day Saints had written asking about Elijah Abel. So that was. Abel was certainly on his mind. But did he know about Q. Walker Lewis or Joseph Ball or maybe if William McCary held the priesthood, the part Native American, African American, did he know about those characters? I mean, we don't know. It's not evidence for it. But, but he left out Elijah, Abel in the Way to Perfection. And I mean, why would he put Abel in there? It would just cause more grief for him. It would raise more questions to the saints. And so he left him out.

John Dehlin 1:07:50 Well, I guess if, if he were really, really committed to full truth and honesty, he would include it. Right?

Matt Harris 1:07:57 Well, I mean, it's true. I mean it's, it's just, I think the brethren, they're, they're trying to, they're dealing with race issues. They've never dealt with them before. And this is going to be, you know, moved to another whole level when we get to the next chapter and talk about when the church starts to globalize. And this is when you get huge issues from Brazil, South Africa. But they're also dealing with this a little bit at home too in the southern states where you get biracial relationships. And they have no idea what to do because again, you know, they, they can't really figure out who's, who's got the so called curse and who doesn't. So Joseph Fielding Smith is trying to make sense, just to recap, he's trying to make sense of these various theories circulating in church literature. And his book is a way to sort of set it all straight. And he wants to figure out how black people fit into this grand cosmology. So he talks about how they became cursed. And Gerardo, as you mentioned, I think a minute ago, or John, you read a passage, one of you, I guess, but how they became cursed and how they will be redeemed from that curse if they follow God's commandments. So he's trying to help people understand where black people fit into this grand scheme. And, and I should say that, you know, for me, I don't know, I guess cover up's an interesting word, but for me it's, he's, he's just sort of muddling along as it goes. And you mentioned John a minute ago. You read a passage about limited blessings of exaltation, I think is how you worded it from his book. And so he wrote that in 1931 that there'd be limited blessings of exaltation. And in 1939, Joseph Fielding Smith writes a member of the First Presidency, a guy named Reuben Clark. And he tells Reuben Clark, he said that the Negro cannot receive the blessings of exaltation because they don't have the priesthood. And that's really a startling claim, because in Mormon theology, exaltation is like, for your audience who may not know how Mormons think about the afterlife, exaltation would be the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom, one of the highest degrees of glory or power that Mormons can offer. And in order to be exalted, there's a couple of things that have to happen. One, you have to be married and sealed in the temple, and if you're a man, you have to have the priesthood. And so that was the context by which Smith wrote Clark and said, look, they can't be exalted because they don't have the priesthood, and they can't enjoy the sealing power, that important ritual in Mormon temples, without the priesthood. And so in a very real way, they couldn't be exalted because they lacked those privileges.

Church Magazines and the Spread of Racial Doctrine

John Dehlin 1:10:30 Yeah, I mean, there's this idea of the memory hole that things get forgotten. And I just think this is how things get forgotten. When you publish a seminal work, you know, first presidency directs a seminal work like this to get published, and certain really important factors get left out, then they go down the memory hole, and you just, you wait one or two generations and pretty much everyone's forgotten. And I, you know, I think that's what happened with a lot of issues, including the peepstone in the hat with the Book of Mormon translation. You know, Joseph Smith's polygamy. You know, there's so much that modern Mormons don't know about their history. And everybody's like, non Mormons are like, how did you not know Joseph Smith was a polygamist? Or how did you not hear about the heapstone in the hat? It's because when curriculum gets written, important things are left out, and then it goes down the memory hole.

Gerardo Sumano 1:11:26 Right.

Matt Harris 1:11:26 Well, that's why historians like me keep it alive. All right,

John Dehlin 1:11:31 is it worth mentioning, I want to get to some of the important ways that some of these issues are portrayed in church magazines like the Improvement Era, but before we do, I think it's worth noting that at least two apostles disagree pretty significantly with some of what's written in the way to perfection. Do you want to just note that? Because sometimes we think as Mormons, that all the apostles are in agreement, which is obviously silly, but some disagree with it. Right?

Matt Harris 1:12:03 Yeah. The apostle that I referenced earlier, one of the scientifically trained apostles, John Widtso, the guy who was a chemist, he was the president of Utah, Logan or Utah Agricultural College at the time, and now it's called Utah State University in northern Utah. But so he was a college president before he became a member of the quorum of the twelve Apostles. And really sort of a gentlemanly guy. He was just very likable, very cerebral, had a huge library, was always reading. He was an academic, he was an intellectual. And so even though he had great respect for Joseph Fielding Smith and even though he called the Way to perfection, quote, a fine piece of work, when it came out, he utterly rejected his views on race and lineage. And John Widtsoe had been struggling himself with race and lineage for a long time. He, he told. I'll just read on page 21 a little quote that he said that he told a friend in 1947, quote, the Negro problem within the church is a puzzling one to me. He fussed. This is what I write. He fussed at the. And this is Whitzell. The old idea that Negroes were neutral in heaven is not supported by anything in the the scriptures. And when John Widtso in the early in the mid-1920s was asked to compile and edit and publish some snippets from the discourses of Brigham Young, he had included a section in there on there would be a time in the future. Brigham Young wrote that black people would receive the priesthood. And the church president, Heber J. Grant, asked him to take it out, didn't want it in the published version because Grant wrote in his diary that it would cause, quote, a great deal of discussion among Latter Day Saints if Widtso kept that in. And so they were uneasy about being pinned down to the time when the ban would be lifted and that black people could be experience the full privileges of the church. Witso was also a person that didn't like this whole one drop stuff. He thought it was nuts. And in a quorum meeting one day, Widtsoe recommended that a sister, quote, having 1-32nd of Negro blood in her veins, be permitted to marry in the temple. And of course this violates the one drop rule that the church had followed. And of course she got voted down on it. But he just didn't like the church's racial theology. And what I found was really interesting. I'm going to say something controversial and I don't mean to be offensive, so please, you know, I hope no one takes this as offensive. But as Widtsoe, Elder Widtsoe is working through the church and he's trying to be loyal to the church's teachings on race. But he has some serious issues with it that he writes this book called Gospel Interpretations, and this is 1940, late 40s, just after the Second World War had ended. And he criticizes Adolf Hitler, this idea that there's a master race. And Widtso just doesn't find any scriptural support for any of this stuff and doesn't think that the Scriptures privilege any sort of group or certain race of people. He calls that sheer poppy cop. And of course, this is really in violation of what Joseph Fielding Smith is teaching, that God does favor certain groups of people, certain races and lineages. And so the brethren called Anglo Saxons God's favored lineage. This is Joseph Fielding Smith and others. And of course, Hitler called them the master race. So there are these ideas of racial superiority that are swirling about in world history at the time. And Joseph Fielding, of course, is imbibing in these. And then people like Widtsoe are pushing back. The second person I'll just briefly mention is somebody that we're going to develop at great length in later episodes, but the apostle, David O. McKay, who had later become a church president. And McKay was, and I'll describe him in more detail, his personality later, but McKay was really, really uneasy about the band.

John Dehlin 1:15:57 And.

Matt Harris 1:15:58 And he never once, in thousands of pages of his diaries, his private correspondence that exist, I've seen hundreds of these pages. And I've worked closely over the years with his biographer, a guy named Gregory Prince, who did a wonderful book in 2005 on President McKay or Elder McKay. So Greg has shared just a lot of material with me over the years, and I've seen materials in other archives about McKay. And anyway, I asked Greg Prince once. I said, greg, I haven't seen any indication that David O. McKay thought that black people were cursed and that he supported Joseph Hilling Smith's book. And Greg wrote back and he said, I've never seen any indication either in which McKay talked about black people deriving from the curse of Cain or the curse of ham. But McKay did believe that there was something about the premortal existence that limited their ability to hold the priest and to attend the temple. And so he believed in the one teaching, but not the other. And so both of these two apostles had a lot of weight at the time, but clearly they were in the minority, and they just quietly went along with the church's raised teachings. And When David O. McKay became the church president, 1951, he starts to push back quietly and subtly on some of these teachings.

Gerardo Sumano 1:17:17 Yeah,

John Dehlin 1:17:19 part of why I think this is really interesting is because the idea of, like, let's just say today, you know, just to kind of think about a modern issue. Like, there are rumors I've heard that not all the members of the Quorum of the twelve or the First Presidency agree on how the church today is dealing with the LGBTQ members. Let's say that there's some, like Boyd K. Packer in the past or donate chokes now who feel one way. But maybe some of the more progressive apostles, like Christopher Sinner or Holland or whoever are, you know, disagree. It's unthinkable in 2024 to have apostles publishing, you know, in. In the Ensign or their own books where they're publicly disagreeing. And I've talked to older, you know, members of the church who really loved that, about the culture of the church in the 30s, 40s, 50s, that apostles actually could publicly disagree. And. And that's just a phenomenon that I think is unthinkable for a modern Mormon that that happened. And I'm trying to just imagine what it was like for the membership to have Widstow disagreeing with Joseph Fielding Smith. And as I understand it, Eyring and Talmadge and Wid Stow all disagreed with Joseph Fielding Smith about evolution as well, publicly. And it's something that used to happen that seems like that would be a healthy thing, that that now is. Is heavily discouraged and would be less common. And I think maybe that's unfortunate, in my opinion.

Matt Harris 1:18:57 I do, too. I mean, we talked yesterday about Orson Pratt, the outspoken intellectual apostle, publicly opposing multiple teachings of the church president, Brigham Young. And I mean, you know, from Adam God, to this idea that God progresses in. In knowledge, to the idea that black people were cursed, to the idea that black people shouldn't be able to vote. I mean, these are. You just wouldn't see this today. And the difference between Orson Pratt and Brigham Young and, say, Talmadge and Widtso and Joseph Hilling Smith and also maybe others. Is that Orson Pratt? In my reading, I mean, he didn't try to be respectful. He's just like, he's wrong, you know, and where the apostles in the 20th century, as you point out, John, they were more respectful in how they couched their differences. Today, I think one can imagine that Quentin L. Cook of the quorum of the 12, who was the stake president in Northern California, and I'm told from people that I've met or known, that people who were in his stake when he was a stake president, I mean, they would frequently talk to him about. They would say, President Cook I'm gay, and the church doesn't seem to have a place for me, you know, and one can imagine that he would be unsympathetic to that kind of pastoral care. And I don't have any proof for this, but in my sense that he would bring those. Those kinds of attitudes into the quorum of the 12. Todd Christofferson, whose brother and the church has talked about this, his brother's gay. And Elder Christofferson, I'm certain, would have affection for his brother. And I know he has affection for his brother, but. But it would be sensitive to the struggle of, you know, remaining in the church and. And identifying as gay.

John Dehlin 1:20:45 Yeah, well, that's just part of why this book is so fascinating. All right, so let's jump back to a really, really important part of your book. And I'm going to just warn people, this for sure is going to be one of the most offensive things that they read from your book or hear about on this podcast. And it's basically the way that black people were characterized in some of the church's publications. So we're talking about page 18 now, the bottom. The bottom paragraph. And we actually have some visuals that are very shocking. They use the N word and they're incredibly offensive. But it would not be. I think it would be a disservice to ignore it. So, Matt, take us through that, if you're comfortable.

Cultural Influences on LDS Racial Attitudes

Matt Harris 1:21:35 Yeah. So as a historian, of course, one of the things that I always try to point out is who influences the church? What influences them? What did they know? When did they know it? What did their teachings say? What impact did it have on members? And also that Latter Day Saints. It's true today and was certainly true then. We're all products of our environment. Right? We're influenced by cultural and political trends. And when Joseph Fielding Smith published the way to perfection, 1931, I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on with race in the world. And I thought that it was really important to talk about in my book briefly, not at length, but just briefly, about some of the cultural context. Just to give you a few examples about this, is that there are Protestant ministers who are members of the Ku Klux Klan, and somehow they read the Bible into supporting white hegemony. They thought that that was okay. There were ministers that were involved in eugenics, trying to sterilize black people from procreating. There were American history textbooks that glorified white supremacy. And these are textbooks across the United States that school children and high school students are studying. There are two best selling books in the 1920s that glorify white supremacy. And really some of the language that you see today that, you know, brown and black people, particularly brown people, immigrants come in, cross the border, they're taking over the country. This is the sort of thing they're Talking about the 1920s with immigration laws that brown people are going to replace white people. So all of this irrational fear and so people are reading this stuff. This is also the time when Hitler's Nuremberg Laws that prove lethal to Jews are about. This is a time when people are framing blackness in American magazines by talking about black children walking around without shoes, portraying like that they're uncivilized or black people gorging themselves on watermelon. Or the happy slave, Aunt Jemima, some of you eat pancakes or waffles and you pour Aunt Jemima syrup on. This is the happy slave who was content to be a slave. These are all racialized tropes. And Latter Day Saints will. Will participate in this racist discourse. And disturbingly, in the 1920s and 30s and even into the 1950s and 60s, Latter Day Saints will publish some of these racist stereotypes of black people. And one of the ones that I found the most disturbing was I'm not even going to say the N word. I don't like using that word. But it's called the Little N Baby and it's a poem that the church published in the Juvenile Instructor, one of the official church magazines. And you can see it here. This is on page 44. I quote part of this poem in my book. It's called Little N Baby and it was by a man named Frank still and talking about the little baby with curly kinky hair. And so this was just standard.

John Dehlin 1:24:35 Is that all right if I read it? Just a little bit? All right, so this is on the screen. Little N word baby with your curly kinky hair and a pair of eyes a looking sad and deep. Two tiny hands a clenching at your mammy's lovin breast and she rocks her little sugar babe to sleep. Little N word baby just arrived from heaven above. My heart is full of tenderness for you. Beneath that dusky skin a guileless heart I see 11. Just like white folks babies do. Little N word baby, rest on your mammy's breast and angels will watch over you while you sleep. And it goes on and on. Now, really quickly, to really drive this point home, where was this poem published and on what date it was published?

Matt Harris 1:25:32 In 1924? I don't know. Frank Steele, the author, I assume he's LDS One would assume that because it was published at a church sponsored publication, but it's possible.

John Dehlin 1:25:43 Juvenile Instructor.

Matt Harris 1:25:44 Right, Juvenile Instructor.

John Dehlin 1:25:46 And just for what was that book? What is the Juvenile Instructor?

Matt Harris 1:25:51 For those who don't know, the Juvenile Instructor was one of the church's main periodicals of the day. There were really two that. Two or three, depending on where you're at. If you were overseas, there would be a different periodical that Latter Day Saints would publish called Latter Day Saint Messenger. But in the United States there were two main periodicals. One was called the Juvenile Instructor, which is where this poem was published, and the other one was called the Improvement Era. And later on, I think the Juvenile Instructor. I don't remember how long that run lasted. I mean, decades for sure. The proven era ended in 1970 and it gave way to the Ensign, which was just discontinued a couple of years ago and called something else now. So the Juvenile Instructor was the main periodical that Latter Day Saints would read. And this is the stuff they're reading. And the reason why I put this in the book is because I wanted the readers to know that Latter Day Saints, as a historian, I'm always interested in context. And Latter Day Saints are. They're imbibing in these larger cultural milieu's that talk about race and denigrating and degrading black people. Like it's just common, it's accepted. And so Latter Day Saints are putting these racist caricatures of black people and talking about black people in unflattering terms in their own periodicals, much as you would see in secular magazines and periodicals in the United States. And so Joseph Hilling Smith, he's part of this culture. This is what he's reading as an apostle. This is what he and his colleagues are approving for publication. Sometimes in General Conference they would use the N word. Heber J. Grant, a church president, when he was the apostle, he would tell ribald jokes over the pulpit in General Conference using the N word. So it was just, you know, it was standard fare of the day. The church leaders today would never ever do, you know, this sort of thing. But in those days, you know, because much of the nation was racist and because much of the nation got away with this, it was just something that nobody questioned. But. And Joseph Hilling Smith wrote this book in this era when people were using this sort of language.

John Dehlin 1:27:53 Yeah. And should we go ahead and then also just show the other photo from, from an article, maybe tell us what publication this was and around what date and then we'll show the, the image and describe it?

Matt Harris 1:28:09 Yeah, there's another image. So there are dozens of images. I didn't. You know, I only talked about one or two. In my book. I talk about that Mormon publications routinely referred to black people. This is early 20th century, 1920s, and 30s. But Mormon publications referred to black people routinely as darkies, N word and coons. And when I did my research, I was just astonished, frankly, at the number of examples I found of using language like this. And I also found that Latter Day Saints would much like other people in the United States. So this is not unique to Mormons. I want to be very clear on this, that Mormons would put on what's called blackface, that white people would put chalk or charcoal on their faces to pretend that they were black. And they would oftentimes use blackface and put on what are called minstrel shows, where they would put on dancing shows and white people pretending they're black dancing around, essentially making a fool of themselves. The audience, most of whom are white, would be laughing, and they would pay money to go to these shows to watch black Mormons or white Mormons in blackface dancing around. So it was a form of entertainment that Americans at large had done ever since the 19th century, and Mormons are following this practice. And in this image, Sean, that you'll show here, it's a picture of blackface from. I think this was from the Latter Day Saint messenger in Portsmouth, England. And you can see that there are three Latter Day Saints here in black page.

John Dehlin 1:29:47 I'll read the caption. So this is for those who are just listening. It looks like a roadshow, but it's basically three people dressed in what looks like temple clothing, but I'm guessing it's not. But they're doing some sort of art performance in blackface with just white around their eyes and their mouth. But the rest, it's totally black. They're wearing some sort of baker's cap with aprons, which is weird. But the. But the caption says three N word minstrels from the Portsmouth MIA Roadshow, which was supported by members from the Lee park and Gosport Farum branches. And again, what publication is this published in?

Matt Harris 1:30:31 I think this is the Latter Day Saint messenger and Advocate, if I recall. It's. It's a. It's an international church magazine.

John Dehlin 1:30:39 And around what year do you think

Matt Harris 1:30:41 this one right here was? 1963.

John Dehlin 1:30:44 Whoa.

Matt Harris 1:30:45 Yeah. And so this was. This had been going on. I. This had been going on pictures like this ever since the 1920s. And when I. I shared one of my dear friends who passed away a couple of year and a half ago or so. His name is Armand Moss. And for your Mormon listeners who may follow Mormon racial history, they. They'll know his name. Anyway, he was a sociology professor at Washington State University, professor of sociology and religion, and he retired to California. Anyway, so he wrote some great work on race and Mormons and also other topics over the years. Well, I had Armin before he passed. He read about six of the 10 chapters of this book. And when he read this stuff here, he wrote me an email and he said, you know, Matt, I'm afraid to admit this, but I remember in our California ward. So Armin would have been working on his doctorate degree at Berkeley at the time, in the late 60s when he lived in Northern California. And he said, I remember in my California ward that we would do fundraisers with blackface. I am ashamed to admit this. This is 1969, but we did it. And I talked to a relative in my family who's in their 70s now, and they. I'll leave their name out. They might not want their name known. But anyway, my relative said that. I'm afraid that I. When I was a Youth in the 60s, we did blackface all the time. We thought nothing of it. And so this is going on. When they said we did it, they're talking about at church as part of a church function. And so this is common in church circles well into the 1960s.

Gerardo Sumano 1:32:23 I have a question for you, Matt. So you have talked about this being very common on American culture. I do want to ask, since, I mean, this is a part of why you. You teach history of black people in American society. Were there people who were white people and. Or others who were against this type of practices and discourse in America, or was it so widespread that there was nobody thinking this was wrong at the time? Do you have any sense?

Matt Harris 1:33:01 Yeah, it does. So just before I answer your question directly, just want to go back in time just for a quick moment. So some of your listeners, if you recall from history that you may have learned, called Jim Crow, it's just really what it came to mean over time was Jim Crow segregation. So when you say somebody practiced Jim Crow, it just really meant segregation. But Jim Crow was an actual figure that began in the 1830s. And so the idea would be that Jim Crow and his associates, they were black people, and they decided. They decided to put on a minstrel show, a dancing show for white people, and they would just act goofy on the stage. They would jump a lot. That's where the term jumping Jim Crow came from. And so they're kowtowing to white audiences by exaggerating what black people do in their. For entertainment. So they're. They're just taking money from all of this and capitalizing. And so over time, white people start to engage in this practice. They're trying to get on the cut, if you will. So they pretend to be black people by donning charcoal and blackface. And when black people in the 20th century recognize that white people are doing this, they're offended in any number of ways, and they start to try to reclaim sort of this practice. But they do push back on this because it's basically a racist caricature of black people. And by the 1950s and 60s, black people are writing in national publications that white people should not be doing this. And of course, racism is so entrenched in the United States at the time. I mean, most people just dismiss it.

John Dehlin 1:34:35 Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:34:36 And the reason. The only reason I asked this, and I know I. I know I. I wouldn't ask you to comment on it. I. I just. I do want to mention it, though, is because, I mean, growing up Mormon, I was. I was taught that these men, the top leaders, are supposed to see ahead and are supposed to be above these practices. Right. So if there's people at the time calling out the. This practice is problematic. It saddens me that they couldn't see it. And even though they. They try to portray this idea that, that they. They can transcend culture and practice. But.

John Dehlin 1:35:23 Yeah, you know, and if it's okay if I add to that. Matt, add to what Gerardo is saying, like, for those who are never Mormon, Mormons are taught that, you know, the prophet speaks to and for Jesus and God, full stop. It's the. The Mormon prophet is God's mouthpiece on the earth and the only designated mouthpiece on the earth. So in this case, it would have been Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, George Albert smith, David O. McKay. They would have all been God's one chosen spokesperson on the earth. And all the apostles, as I understand it, are sustained as prophets, seers, revelators, and as special witnesses of Christ. And so like you said, Gerardo, the term prophet or seer or revelator, the whole point is that they're ahead that they see before. And when you think about this, you know, just this photo that we just saw 1963, like. Like this, Lyndon B. Johnson passes the Civil Rights act of in 1964. Like, you know, Martin Luther King starts the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s. So obviously, 1978 is not only not early, but or on time, but it's like super late. But, but, but this is, you know, and then if you add to it what you write so eloquently in your book about David O. McKay and, and people like Talmage just not agreeing with. With the way the. The doctrine is taught around black people, you just know they don't agree. And they even have private correspondence. You have private correspondence of, I believe David O. McKay, and I believe it's Lowell Bennion, where David O. McKay is just making it clear he's not fully on board. Two questions come up for me. One is, what does it mean? What does it mean to be a prophet, seer and revelator and an apostle and a special witness of Christ if. If you're not only not ahead and you're not even on time, but you're 10 to 15 years late? That's part one of my question. What does it even mean to be a prophet, seer and revelator and a special witness of Christ? And then the second part is, where's the courage if. If we know that Talmage and. And, you know, McKay, at a minimum, disagreed, the fact that they would stay quiet and not want to really cause a ruckus and kind of keep their opinions to themselves in private letters, I can see a practical nature where they don't want to cause dissension and problems. But we're going to be talking next episode about Lowry Nelson and dissenters that do speak up. And I would just expect people designated as prophetsers and revelators and special witnesses of Christ to show extra courage not to kind of just hide and keep quiet for their moral convictions, especially when we're talking about a decent percentage of God's children. Now, that's me expressing my feelings as someone raised as a devout Mormon and the frustrations and the disparities of what I was taught versus what I learned when I scratched underneath the surface. I don't, Matt, expect you to really even want to say much about that as a historian, but I did need to voice what I think is what many Mormons who learn about this history struggle with is what does it mean to be a prophet, seer and revelator and a special witness of Christ as a Mormon leader? And where's the courage of those who disagreed but stayed silent publicly?

Matt Harris 1:39:14 Well, wow, that's a lot. So in the preface to my book, I write something that I want to just read quickly, and I'm quoting on Roman Numeral 15, the great American Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he noted, quote, that the ideas of the time are in the air and infect all those who breathe it. And I think that Latter Day Saints are. I know that Latter Day Saints are not immune to this. Leaders are not immune to this. Right. If you're growing up in a culture that just that, that, that where these racist tropes are pervasive in American magazines and American visual culture, and you're around something we haven't talked about yet. But a lot of these leaders who grow up in the late 19th, early 20th century, they're not around black people. They're in the Utah territory. Black people are few and far between. And so they're not comfortable with black people. They don't know them, they're not friends with them. And so a lot of their views of race are informed by how they read the scripture and how they hear from Brigham Young and others. And so when John Widtsoe and David O. McKay have problems with the church's race theology, I don't know if it's a matter of being a coward or holding back or. I guess the way that I look at it is a lot of these guys are very pragmatic. I mean, John Widtso didn't hold back. I mean, I have letters where he's talking about his views about race to the church president. And in a quorum of the 12 meeting, not once, but many times, he's promoting this idea that biracial people should be able to experience the full rituals of the church. And I think as a strategist, that John Widtsoe recognizes it would be easier to lift this ban if you could get biracial people ordained first rather than go for the full enchilada. And we're going to learn this in chapter four. One of the. The people who absolutely detest the band. So much so that he'll get dropped from, from his position as a member of the First Presidency, guy named Hubie Brown. I mean, he's one of the, the biggest, most vociferous activists and within the highest echelons of church leadership, he does all kinds of things to make his views known about the band. And we'll, we'll get into that later. But David O. McKay and, and widow, they know they don't have the numbers in order to make these policy changes, there has to be unanimity, according to Mormon scripture. And widow and McKay, they know that they don't have the numbers. And so I guess the. I'm putting thoughts into their head. But, but why push to end something when you know you're not going to succeed? And so what they do is especially Widtso and others will do this too, is they'll push to ordain biracial people, light skinned biracial people to the priesthood and to give them certain privileges within the church. And, but, but the hardliners are in control. They control the church leadership at the time and they're not going to have anything of it. They just, their racial proclivities are too deep to do this. In terms of your other question about what does it mean to be a prophet, seer and a revelator, I mean, those are faith questions, of course, right? And every Latter Day Saint could struggle with these kinds of things about what it means if the church leaders were not at the vanguard of racial progressivism in the 20th century. But my response to that is your expectations of what a prophet is or a church leader in general, not just Mormon leader, but religious leader in general, are really quite high. Because you're asking somebody in the 20th century to buck their culture, to buck the environment in which they were reared. It's just not going to happen. Every religious person that we know of, they're the sum total of their own environment. And I think that these folks are doing the best they can in the environment they grew up in. My, my, if I can be preaching just for 20 seconds, my thing that I say to church leaders and some of whom I have friends who are in church leadership, and I frequently tell them, you know, the biggest issue with the church today is trying to hide these kinds of things, that somebody was a racist. I mean, imagine this, right? You're born in 1899 and you have racist viewers used towards black people. I mean, why is that so hard for people to understand that you're a product of your environment? And I think one of the issues with when Spencer Kimball, his son, published his book on his father and his ministry, they really pushed back on the idea that Edward Kimball said that his father had strong views on race. In other words, that was a nice way of son saying dad was a racist. I mean, imagine that he grew up in the early 20th century when people had such strong racial views. But yet desert book didn't want that in the book. They just refused to allow Ed to say these kinds of things. And Ed and I both just puzzled when we talked about this. We scratched our heads and we thought, you know, it would do the church a better service if they would just openly acknowledge that people are products of their Time. And I think the redemptive story here, particularly with Spencer Kimball, is how he's able to overcome these racist views in order to permit black men and women into the full rituals of the church. And that, that, to me, is the story. And. But creating somebody, this fiction that they're not influenced as much by their culture is just not sustainable.

Gerardo Sumano 1:44:27 Yeah. If I could just speculate just for just one minute or two, I, I think one of the reasons why the they, they do this is because, I mean, just the way you were talking about, about all this. Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, even Spencer W. Kimball. Right. As a product of their time, I wish that's the way Mormons would talk about their prophets today when they go out and speak about LGBT people or, you know, women's issues. But that's not how Mormons speak about their prophets today. And I think that's one of the reasons why the brethren would be concerned about members starting to see that profits are actually a product of their time, because it starts calling into question, well, today, Russell M. Nelson or Dalliant Chokes, how much are they a product of your time and what they're saying?

John Dehlin 1:45:21 Yeah, and, and I love this give and take. And Matt, I love that you're encouraging a more mature or wise or practical or reasonable view of, of human leadership, let alone LDS Church leadership. If I could just give you just a tiny finishing pushback a little bit. If Mormons like myself, like others, have too high of an expectation of Mormon Church leaders, I think we come by it honestly. And I'll just give three brief examples. If we look at Doctrine and Covenants, you know, the very first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, this is Jesus talking, right. In. In Mormon Scripture, you mentioned the four, you know, books of the Canon of Mormon Scripture. This is one of the four Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith's Revelations. And this is Jesus talking in Joseph Smith's first revelation of the Doctrine and Covenants, Section 1, verse 38. What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself. And though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine voice, mine own voice, or by the voice of my servants. This is Jesus talking. Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same. And then if you add to that, you know, the types of quotes we were raised on, which was, when the brethren have spoken, the thinking has been done. The brethren will not lead you astray. That was a common saying that we all learned Growing up Mormon. And there's even the primary hymn that we all learned and taught. Follow the Prophet, Follow the Prophet, Follow the Prophet, don't go astray. That's how we're taught to believe that they speak for Jesus. That's the whole point of them being prophets. So there's gotta be some. Some give and take or some balance between, yes, having pragmatic, temporal, realistic expectations for these men who lead a church and what they all seem to lead the membership to think and feel and believe, which is that we sustain them as special witnesses of Christ and that they literally speak to and for Jesus. Am I being totally unfair, Matt, or can you see that there needs to be some balance? Because in 2024, there's a hemorrhaging in the Mormon Church membership, and I think part of it is the church suffering from the expectations that they helped set up in its membership.

Matt Harris 1:48:09 Well, I think, you know, there's certainly a number of Latter Day Saints who have those expectations about what the church leaders are and what they're not. And when those expectations aren't met, of course they're disappointed and some even leave the church. And my feeling is that lower your expectations for one. And for two, I don't want to be critical, but I've told people within my ear reach, with any influence, the brethren ought to just sort of tone it down a little bit about what they're capable of doing and not doing. And that way people's expectations won't be dashed. I know. One of the questions I asked once to the late Doug Alder is a friend of mine. He was a professor of history at Utah State University for a number of years. And I met him at Dixie State University when I taught there in the early 21st century. And he had just retired as a Dixie State president and he taught some classes in the history department. So I got to know Doug well. And for your audience, he's also a prominent Mormon historian. He wrote a lot about Mormons, particularly Mormons in the West. Anyway, I remember one day we. We went to one summer, we had a lengthy trip, the faculty, to Cambridge and Oxford, England. We had a grant and we. We studied various subjects in Cambridge, at Cambridge and university and Oxford University that summer. And it was really a wonderful experience. I remember sitting with Doug on the airplane and I said, doug, you taught Mark Hoffman, didn't you? And he said, yes, I did. And I knew him well. And I said, did you ever have any idea that he would go on and be a mass forger and murderer? And he said, oh, of course not. And it was sort of a rhetorical question, but he answered it. And anyway, I said, what do you make of the sense that he was able to fool the brethren? You know, what does it mean to be a seer to you? And if he was able to pass these forgeries off to the point where the church would spend, you know, a lot of money purchasing them. And Doug, Doug said, I don't know, I'm not sure. And I think a lot of Latter Day Saints are still trying to figure out what it means to be a prophet, seer and a revelator, particularly in the context where Joseph Smith produced, you know, any number of revelations and then Brigham Young, of course, produced a few, and then they sort of taper off over time. And I think that some Latter Day Saints have the expectation that the church leaders still ought to be producing new revelations that people could read and discuss and analyze, just like early leaders of the church did. And so their expectations are different in terms of what they mean a prophet, seer and a revelator to mean. And I think a lot of saints are like Doug Alder, who's a very. He was a temple sealer. He was a very orthodox Latter Day Saint man. And even in his mind, he didn't have a good answer for, you know, what it meant to be a seer in the modern era.

Wrap-Up and Preview of Next Episode

John Dehlin 1:50:47 Love it. Well, this, this has been a fantastic second episode. I'm really loving our decision to, to do this series. And we're perfectly now teed up for, I think is one of the most inspiring and courageous stories and entertaining stories in all of 20th century Mormon history, which is the story of Lowry Nelson and the Swearing Elders. Right. And, and other dissidents within the church, along with also, you know, the church starting to have to grapple with the implications of these teachings as they start to expand as the missionary work starts to expand across the world. Anything you want to say, Matt? Just as a, as a conclusion to today and as a preview for part three of the series?

Matt Harris 1:51:45 Yeah. So I just to remind people that it's just critically important that Latter Day Saints are not unique in their racial attitudes. I mean, John, you'd posted a couple of really graphic accounts from church magazines. I know that's really graphic, but I'm telling you, if you were to go to your local library or somehow get access to a digitized digital database online with, to look at some old magazines, American magazines, you would see similar things. And so I'm not justifying, I'm not excusing it. I'm just trying to simply say that Mormons are not unique in their racism. And so just to recap, we've been talking about various theories about the ban that are existing. And Joseph Hilling Smith tried to systematize the church's teachings. He was commissioned by the church leadership to do this. And the next episode tomorrow or when we get to it, we're going to talk about a former BYU professor, sociology professor, named Lowry Nelson, who's the first time that I know of, who pushes back in a very massive way on the Church's racial teachings. And it forces them to codify church teachings in a formalized statement. And by 1949, the church's race teachings will move from a policy and a practice to a fixed doctrine. And this is something that most Latter Day Saints don't understand, that it wasn't doctrinal until the mid 20th century. And then once that statement's created, it takes on a life of its own.

John Dehlin 1:53:18 Yeah, so those first President, first Presidency statements become key to future, you know, backtracking or denunciation. So it's all very, very fascinating. And understand, I just didn't know, I knew that there were a couple first Presidency affirmations of the priesthood ban. I had no idea the historical stories that pushed or led to those statements. And that's again, why this book is a must own, a must purchase, and a must read and a must share. It's Second Class Saints, Black Mormons and the Struggle for racial equality by Dr. Matthew Harris. You can pre order it now or purchase it depending on when you're listening to it on Amazon. Benchmark Books. Wherever you like to buy your books, please buy this book. Buy it for friends and family. It's a, it'll make a perfect Christmas gift. Let's and let's learn from this book and let's share it with others. And let's also make sure scholars like Matt are handsomely rewarded for their incredible scholarship. I will also just add again that this series depends on your financial support. And we've done two episodes. We want to do somewhere between 10 and 20. And that's just going to depend on your financial support. So if you go to the link in the description or if you go to donorbox.org Matt Harris and you become a monthly donor, if we can just get 100, you know, 200 people to donate 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford, all that money is going to go to Matt. We're not going to skim any money off of that and it's just going to pay for future episodes. We're going to pay him no matter what, but we want to pay him exactly what he's worth, if not generously. And it's going to depend on your support. So please become a monthly donor to this project. Please know that this podcast series is available as a standalone series on Spotify. We're still trying to finalize our name. We're thinking the name is going to be Inside Mormon Leadership, the Struggle for Racial Equality. We haven't created the logo yet, but we will by the time we release this. But you can get on Spotify, you can get on Apple podcasts and there'll be a YouTube playlist on the Mormon Stories podcast channel where you can just binge watch or listen to these episodes. They're best consumed in sequence and we'll also integrate them into the Mormon Stories podcast feed. Gerardo, any final words?

Gerardo Sumano 1:55:57 No, other than it just, it just gets better. I honestly like the next chapters are end pages are insane.

John Dehlin 1:56:06 Like yeah, it's, it's unbelievable to say you ain't seen nothing yet. Is that fair to say? Matt Harris?

Matt Harris 1:56:14 That is fair to say.

John Dehlin 1:56:16 The blackface and Edward poems and literally you ain't seen nothing yet. Is that right?

Matt Harris 1:56:23 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:56:24 Yeah.

Matt Harris 1:56:24 Especially with the leadership. When we get in the 20th century, we're going to start to see personalities emerge. We just mentioned a little bit today with Elder widtsoe and Elder McKay, but when we get we go forward on, we're going to meet a whole host of new characters who are pivotal to the story.

John Dehlin 1:56:39 Yeah. So thanks and thanks Gerardo for making this possible. Thanks. Thanks Matt for joining us and for giving us your precious time.

Gerardo Sumano 1:56:49 Absolutely.

Matt Harris 1:56:49 I enjoyed it.

John Dehlin 1:56:50 And thanks thanks to Julia and Maven and Brooklyn and our board at the Open Storage Foundation. All of them make all this possible. So a huge thanks to them and thanks to our donors that make Mormon Stories, the Oba Stories foundation, possible as well. Please check back for other episodes. Give us your feedback@mormonstoriesmail.com you can also comment in these episodes. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, our Facebook and Instagram and TikTok channels as well. And please like these episodes, share them because that helps with the algorithms and helps get this stuff published far and wide again. Buy this book and share it. And if you want, I mean you can buy the Way to Perfection and at least it's an interesting read. I don't know, Matt and Gerardo, do you guys recommend that people buy this

Matt Harris 1:57:45 book, at least cut out chapters 15 and 16.

John Dehlin 1:57:50 Buy the Portuguese version of this book. Really enjoy it. Anyway, be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Gerardo Sumano 1:58:03 Thank you.

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