Revelation or Secret Meeting? How the Priesthood and Temple Bans Ended

Introduction to the Series and Episode

John Dehlin 0:01 Hi everyone, this is Dr. John Dehlin of Mormon Stories podcast. I want to thank you for joining us today on this epic 17 part series featuring Dr. Matthew Harris and his amazing book, Second Class Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality. This series has been groundbreaking. We've never had the response so far that we've had in terms of people really valuing our in depth coverage of this groundbreaking book that's talking about the Mormon Church's priesthood and temple ban against black people and then the dynamics, the inner workings, the political machinations of how the sausage gets made in terms of lifting the priesthood ban in the aftermath. So we have some good news and bad news about this series. The good news is thanks to the generous donations of those who have been watching it so far, we've been able to, I believe, more than generously compensate Dr. Harris for his contributions. That's the good news. The bad news is, you know, because we made the promise that 100% of the donations would go to Matt, we have not received any compensation for about the $20,000 of production costs that we incurred to produce this series and that that sort of imbalance would make it so we wouldn't be able to produce series like this going forward. So if you value this series, if you want to see the Open Stories foundation also be compensated for its production cost for this series, and if you want to see series like this with Matt and with other people continue, we kind of need you to step up and donate to cover our production costs. And it's really easy to do that. All you have to do is go to MormonStories.org donate or go to MormonStories.org and click on the donate button and you can do a one time donation, a recurring donation, and if you want to, you can type Second Class Saints or Matt Harris in the description and that will hopefully allow us to cover our production costs for this epic series. Regardless, we want to thank Dr. Matt Harris for his generosity in doing this series. We want to thank all of you who have supported us. Please go buy this book, Second Class Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality. And again, if you're wanting, if you're grateful for this series and you haven't donated and you want to see it continue, please please donate to Mormon Stories Podcast. Thanks again to everyone who donated to make this series possible. Thanks to Matt and we hope you enjoy this next episode in the series. Take care. Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is 7-9-2024 and and today we're going to be conducting one of the most important episodes of all time on Mormon Stories podcast. We're going to be answering the question what were the events and who were the key figures that precipitated or led up to the lifting of the priesthood and temple ban for the LDS Church on you know, people of African descent, people with quote drops of the blood of Cain, however you want to describe it, that's what we're going to be talking about today. It's going to be a groundbreaking episode and of course it is going to be based on this incredible book, Second Class Black Mormons and the Struggle for racial equality by Dr. Matt Harris. This is episode 12 in a multi part series on this book and we strongly recommend that you, if you haven't been watching and or listening to this series, that you do so starting from the beginning. So whether you're on Spotify, whether you're on Apple Podcasts or you're on YouTube, you can go to the podcast and or playlist with the same name, Second Class Saints, Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality and you can get caught up. We also please recommend for your own benefit but also for those you love that you purchase this book. I checked this morning and it's still among the top three in new releases, if not the top in new releases 11 or 12 episodes later and it's still among the top three to five best selling books. I think it was three this morning when I checked number three right now for Amazon on books about Mormonism. So it's a phenomenal book. We want to thank all of you who have all 60 of you who have donated to this series. We do want to remind everyone that while we know tens of thousands of you have enjoyed this series, only 60 of you have donated to help pay Matt. And I'm a tiny bit lovingly frustrated that more of you who are enjoying this series have not stepped up. So I'll give you another chance to do that. If you 100 of your donations will go directly to Matt. No money will be skimmed off. You go to donorbox.org Matt Harris and become a weekly or a monthly or a one time donor. We want to pay Matt fully for his participation and so we please ask you to please do that. I'm also going to say just for fun that I've been buying other books or pamphlets as I've enjoyed the series. Many of you will see that I purchased the Way to Perfection by Joseph Fielding Smith, an old copy of it that's an oldie but goodie. Just last week, Mormonism's Negro Policy Sweet social and historical origins came in the mail. This is the graduate thesis written by Taggart. We talked about that in a previous episode. And of course I have here the Negroes among the Mormons by Sterling McMurran. This was the speech he gave to the NAACP in June of 68. These were all purchased at Benchmark Books. None of this program is brought to you by any by either Matt or Benchmark Books. We're patrons, we're customers. You know, they don't, they don't pay us, but we just believe in sponsoring scholarship, sponsoring books. So please check out Benchmark Books as well when you're in Salt Lake City or if you need any rare books or books at all. They do great work. Now, without any further ado, I want to bring back onto the show Dr. Matt Harris. Hey, Matt, thanks for joining.

Matt Harris 6:48 Yeah, it's good to be back after a week long hiatus over the holiday.

John Dehlin 6:52 Now you spent some time in Salt Lake City and you even did some book signings. Is there anything you want to report either about the book or about feedback about the series?

Matt Harris 7:04 Yeah. Yeah. So I spent some time last week in Utah with family. My wife's family lives there, my sister and her family live there. And I did a signing it Benchmark to a packed audience. And I just want to echo what you said a minute ago. Those are good guys and they have a wonderful inventory of both used and new LDS books. The prices are extremely competitive. And for those of you who are not in the Salt Lake Valley, they're happy to mail books to you. And they're really efficient and prompt about doing that. So I like to recommend them because they're independent booksellers and they just have a wonderful service they do. And I've been hearing a lot of feedback from Latter Day Saints and even non Latter Day Saints about this podcast series. They're really enjoying it. And I think it's inevitable that people reflect back on both the podcasts that we're doing here and also the book that my book that folks are reading and then reflecting back on their own experiences with the church has raised teachings. And it's been really interesting, the response. And so I. Nothing. I, I've been gratified with the, the responses. And I think people process these difficult teachings in different ways. And I'm been listening to their stories and it's been really interesting and in some cases frustrating because I feel, I feel their pain.

John Dehlin 8:28 Yeah, absolutely. Well, you'll also listeners and viewers will be happy to note that today. Well, the sad news is Gerardo is sick. And so we're excusing Gerardo. But the silver lining of that is that Julia Sanders from the LDS discussion series and from analyzing Mormonism on TikTok and Instagram is joining us. Julia, tell us really quickly. Give us 30 seconds about you and why you care about this issue.

Guest Introductions and Personal Backgrounds

Speaker C 8:59 Sure. So I grew up in the church. I am a graduate from byu, Idaho. I served a mission in Salt Lake and then Wyoming and the areas around there. I was married in the temple, came out as gay, got a divorce, and I was excommunicated from the church. But I love studying history. I'm currently about to start my second semester in my master's program at the Missouri State here in Southern Missouri. And I just got this book and this, like, I'm just read this one chapter so far and it's so good. He, Matt has such great writing and it's just, just superb. And I love the all Mormon history topics. Mostly I focus on the old church history, but like, this is like just 50 years ago or so. And like, this is so fascinating to me.

John Dehlin 9:41 Yeah. And I call you a super nerd. Are you a super history nerd, Julie?

Speaker C 9:46 That's what my, that's what my fiance says.

John Dehlin 9:49 And I think, Matt, I think you like history nerds. Is that right?

Matt Harris 9:53 I like history nerds. Welcome to the club, Julia.

Speaker C 9:56 Thanks.

John Dehlin 9:57 Okay, well, let's dive in. So we are going to be covering Chapter 7 of, of the book today. And Matt, if you know, you can, if you want, you can just tell us anything you want to do about where we left off and, and let's dive right in.

Recap of Previous Episodes and the Ban's Context

Matt Harris 10:16 Yeah. So we left off in, in the previous couple of episodes talking about the lead up to the band we've been talking about at BYU. There was a federal investigation over BYU's hiring practices for refusing to admit black students or recruit black students and also black faculty. We talked about how that was resolved. The federal government put pressure on them. And we've been talking about the really, really bad publicity, not just from dozens of universities refusing to play against BYU athletic teams, but also outside groups putting pressure on the church. And we haven't really spent a whole lot of time because we're going to focus on the priesthood revelation today. But I want to say a quick word about the Genesis group. In the early 1970s, there was a support group for black Latter Day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley, and it was led by a guy named Ruffin Bridgeforth Dryas. Gray and Jean Orr. They had pestered the brethren to recognize them and to give them a supplemental group so that they could form a community and reactivate Black Latter Day Saints in the Salt Lake area who had fallen away. And Harold B. Lee, who was the dominant voice in Joseph Hilling Smith's administration, agreed to it. And they assigned three apostolic advisors to help them. And those advisors would be Gordon Hinckley, Tom Monson, Boyd Packer. And they were worried about meeting with these three black men because they feared that these three black men would demand the priesthood. And that's what they didn't want. And so their fear came true. The Genesis group, there were nearly a hundred or more so people when they first Met. November of 1972. Their fear was that there would be a faction within the group that may lobby for the priesthood. And that's in fact what happened. And the upshot is that because the faction threatens to destroy the Genesis group, what happens is that the brethren learn that they cannot keep black people in the church by essentially denying them the church's salvific ordinances. All the public relations, all the positive spin, all of that stuff doesn't matter. Especially when you talk about, ah, you can hold the priesthood in the future, just be patient. They didn't go for that. And so that's what we've been talking about in previous episodes. And now we're at the time in the early 70s where Spencer Kimball will become the president. And this is where the moments leading up to the band and the lifting of the band itself becomes pivotal to not just today's episode, but also my book.

John Dehlin 12:56 It's probably worth mentioning that, you know, Hubie Brown was just so terrified that if he didn't lift the band before David O. McKay died, that the band would last forever in the church because Joseph Fielding Smith and then Harold B. Lee would just continue it. And Harold B. Lee was so young. But, but it providence almost reigns upon the church because Harold B. Lee, who should have been president of the church for 20 plus years, right. He mysteriously dies in his 70s. And I, Matt, I. Has anybody ever looked into whether there was foul play? Because that was one of the first things that came into my mind is was there foul play?

Matt Harris 13:35 Oh no, no, no. Yeah, there's no evidence for any of that. You know, we, we hear some nonsense today about, you know, Taylor murdered Joseph Smith and now, come on, you know, you've got to play by the rules of evidence. And there's so many, I don't know what it is about conspiratorial thinking today, in today's world, it's not just Latter Day Saints, it's a lot of people. But we got to play by the rules of evidence. Harold B. Lee just had rotten luck from Mother Nature and he died unexpectedly. This happens. This is part of the human experience. And when he died, I mean, you know, I'm speculating here just for a moment, but I, I'm certain that Hugh Brown and others would have been somewhat happy because Harold Lee was a dominant voice in the administration and he was the one of the major hold ups to lifting the ban. His daughter said something insightful. She told her friend. So Harold Lee's daughter told her friend, she said, as long as my daddy's alive, the band will never be lifted. And that proved to be the case. Yeah, so, and also about Harold Lee is when he was the president, he did three or four things that really, really signaled where he felt on the band. One was that he had Deseret book republish one of his old sermons from 1945, which is really, really incredibly racist. And so they republished it. During his presidency in the early 70s, he called Bruce R. McConkey into the quorum of the 12, the most aggressive hardliner in preserving the band. So there's another reason. He upheld the excommunication of a major public critic named John Fitzgerald, a one time seminary teacher in the church. So Fitzgerald had been excommunicated and appealed to the office of the First Presidency to overturn his excommunication, and they refused to do it. And then lastly, Lee basically told anybody within earshot in the church and outside of the church that the ban won't be lifted anytime soon because I'm waiting on a revelation. And as we've talked about in previous episodes, revelation is not a moment, it is a process. And Lee was really, really not willing to engage in this process.

John Dehlin 15:56 And there's a really good part in chapter seven. This is a, a little bit of a, a preview. But, but Kimball just says to somebody, man, revelation doesn't happen unless somebody really wants it. You know what I mean? As if, as if Kimball's sort of saying, you have to want this because it's just so hard.

Matt Harris 16:14 Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's, it's building a consensus is what it is. That's the hard work. And when you're, when you have people in your leadership who are so entrenched in their prejudices, it's hard to overcome that. And they need to come on board to lift the ban. And Harold Lee, because he shared their same prejudices, wasn't even willing to try, whereas Spencer Kimball, of course, did the heavy work and was ultimately successful.

Spencer Kimball's Leanings Before Becoming Prophet

John Dehlin 16:42 So there's two quick things I wanted to set the groundwork for before we jump in even more. The first is remind our audience what Kimball's leanings were regarding the lifting of the ban before he became prophet. Even though that'll be a tiny bit of a refresher, just remind our audience the. The ways that he indicated he was okay with lifting the ban even a decade or two before.

Matt Harris 17:09 Yeah. So in previous decades, we talked about Hugh Brown in the first presidency, reaching out to the New York Times. This is in June of 1963. And he told the New York Times reporter Wallace Turner, he said, hey, we're having. And the court of leadership, this ban, it's going to be lifted sometime soon. We're trying to get everybody on board. And he. He made that disclosure to Turner because he wanted Turner to write about it and put pressure on the holdouts. And when that. That was published in early June, Edward Kimball, President Kimball's son, read it, and he wrote his dad a letter, and he said, dad. So Kimball's in Wisconsin as a law professor at the time, and he wrote his dad a letter in Salt Lake, and he said, dad, this is exciting news. I didn't know. We're about ready to lift the ban. And his father wrote back and said two seminal things. He said, one is, we're not ready to lift the band. President Brown misspoke. And two, you want to know my feelings? I think the ban may have been a possible error. And that is a huge admission in private between Apostle Kimball and his son, Edward. Spencer Kimball, also.

John Dehlin 18:20 Two, right. 62.

Matt Harris 18:22 This would have been 63.

John Dehlin 18:23 Oh, 63. Okay.

Matt Harris 18:24 Letter. When he. When he. When Spencer Kimball, as an apostle, admits that the band may have been, quote, a possible error. That's in 63.

John Dehlin 18:32 Okay.

Matt Harris 18:32 Also, I got a hold of Spencer Kimball's scriptures, which might be one of the most interesting things I've read. Researching this books, I talked to a rare book stealer named Reed Moon. I was in a store one day several years ago. I was just looking at some of the wonderful artifacts in his collection, and he said, man, I've got something you may want to see. I just purchased it. I said, okay, how do you turn that down? Right? So what? The Sword of Laban, the Urim and Thummim. What are we talking about here? Come on. That's up. So he went around and he brought back what Mormons recognize as the standard works. This is the four books of scripture that Latter Day Saints believe in. The Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. And they were Spencer Kimball's that he had acquired from the family, I suppose.

Speaker C 19:20 Oh, my gosh.

Matt Harris 19:21 And they were from 1954. And Reid knew exactly why a scholar like me would be interested in seeing them. Because Elder Kimball did what a lot of Latter Day Saints do does. And what people do in general who are engaged readers. They make comments in the margins. I do that. I write all over my books. And so to my kids chagrin, dad, these won't be worth anything when you're dead. And so Elder Kimmel wrote in the margins, and for my interest, when he would read, you know, the Skins of Blackness in the Book of Mormon, he circled it and he put Negro question mark. That is, he's questioning if this applies to black people. Now, Bruce McConkey said that it did, and Harold Lee said that it did, and Joseph Billing Smith said that it did. But Elder Kimball was questioning this. So there are several moments in his scriptures where he's circling things and putting question marks because he doesn't believe it. And so that was 1954. And so to me, that was a moment in time many years before he's the church president. This is a moment in time where he's really, really questioning the veracity of his colleagues and how they interpret scripture vis a vis black people. And so that's 54, 63. You get him writing this letter to his son. This may have been a possible heir. And then by 1969, you get Spencer W. Kimball, as we noted in a previous episode, he supports Hugh Brown's efforts to lift the ban. And so he recognizes that this is not a good thing. He also recognizes from his many visits to South America how the ban is harmful to black Latter Day Saints. And I quote, I'm sure we'll talk about him this hour, but there are a few episodes that I put in my book for instances where Elder Kimball, as an apostle in the 1960s, he's visiting Brazil and Ecuador and other places. And after he gives a sermon in conference, these black and biracial men come to him and they say, elder Kimball, we want to serve a mission. We want to get Mary the temple. Why can't we? And so all of this just weighs on him because he writes in his diary that these are faithful people. They pay tithing, they're loyal to the church, their heart's in the right place. But this odious policy keeps them from fulfilling their. Their life's purpose. So all of these things converge on him when he becomes the president in December of 1973. And I, you know, this just didn't happen in June 1, 1978, decided to take the church in a different direction. All of this was. Had been accumulating over years, and now when he became the president, he was now in a position to do something about it.

John Dehlin 22:12 Excellent. Okay. One last table I wanted to set is, I had no idea until I read your book how Wilford Woodruff's moves to get rid of polygamy and the aftermath of his decision and the way he went about getting rid of polygamy would have significant, lasting effects to make it harder for Kimball to lift the priesthood band. Can you just tell people what I, What I mean by that?

Lessons from the 1890 Polygamy Manifesto

Matt Harris 22:43 Yeah. So Spencer Kimball was a student of history, and he recognized that when Wilford Woodruff, the church president, proclaimed a revelation in 1890 ending polygamy, he didn't get the buy in from the quorum of the 12. And he essentially said, I've received a revelation. God told me we need to end polygamy, and that's what we're going to do. Well, the 12 didn't believe that, or they didn't go along with it. And what their idea, their thought was that this is what God wants of us. He has commanded plural marriage. This is what we're to do. And God's laws are higher than man's laws. And so roughly half of the quorum are in opposition to President Woodruff's revelation. And some of them go rogue. I mean, hugely. So they are told by President Woodruff to quit authorizing plural marriages, even in Canada, in Mexico, which is where they had. Were going. And so they kept doing it. And ultimately, when Senator Reed Smooth, an apostle from Utah, was selected as the, The. The next senator from the region, that all of this came to bear when he was under intense questioning from his fellow senators. They did not want to admit a senator who derived from a tradition that practiced polygamy. And even though Smoot himself was not a polygamist, his colleagues in the 12 were. And so they used Reed Smoot as sort of a fulcrum, if you will, to target the church's recalcitrants on polygamy. So just to recap, by 1890, the church is saying to the government, we've no longer. We're no longer practicing polygamy. Make us a state. We're abiding by the laws. Allow our People to vote, all of that. Well, that wasn't the case. Polygamy was still going on well into the early 20th century. And just to share something personal with your listeners for a moment, my wife, her great grandfather, is one of the last people called into polygamy. He was married in 1904. 1905. This is. Do the math. This is 15 years after Wilfred Rudruff announced a manifesto. He was married in polygamy by Anthony Ivins, who was an apostle and later member of the First Presidency. And what's different from my wife's ancestor, Heber Farr, is that Heber Farr was allowed to. To live with his two wives in the full fellowship of the LDS Church, the mainstream church, up until his death in the mid-1960s.

Speaker C 25:22 Oh, wow.

Matt Harris 25:23 Oh, yeah, It's. It's quite a story. And most of, at this point, most of the folks practicing polygamy were cut off from the church or they left informed schismatic groups or fundamentalist groups, as they would later be called. But my wife's great grandfather stayed mainstream in the church. And the bishop in Provo, where he lived, told the members, you know, Brother Farr is a good man. He has the support from the First Presidency to remain married to his two wives in good standing. Leave him alone. Don't gossip about him. And his first wife died in 1964. I think he died in 65. And the second wife, through whose line my wife hails from, died In, I think, 73. So up until the first wife died in 64, Heber Farr was living with his two wives. And to this day, I can't tell you how they were able to do this when the church was fully trying to separate itself from its polygamous past. But yet this man sort of flew under the radar. And so the church is struggling with. With these schismatic defections. And Spencer Kimball knows this, and some of his own family members are part of these schismatic defections. The Woolly Line. Spencer Woolly Kimball. Is his name Spencer W. Kimball? Well, it's W for Woolie. Some of the Woolies, his and his uncles and his aunts are caught up in this, and they leave the mainstream church.

John Dehlin 26:51 So where they go to the FLDS Church or the predecessor to the FLDS Church?

Matt Harris 26:57 They do. Yeah, they do. And so he is well aware that this is going on in his own family line. And he's also well aware, Kimball, of the tension that existed the 1960s during David O. McKay's presidency. Tension between the apostles and the first presidency who were moving into a power vacuum when President McKay became incapacitated. And so he knew intuitively that if you're going to lift this ban, the second most important thing probably in the history of the church, second to polygamy, if you're going to lift the ban, you needed to have consensus among the 12. He just couldn't do it unilaterally. Let me say one last thing about this that I get asked often. In 1890, when Wilford Woodruff announced his Revelation, the president was the sole arbiter of doctrine in the church. He would stand up and he would say, I feel inspired to say thus saith the Lord. And that became the new doctrine. That certainly was the case with Brigham Young. That was the case with John Taylor. That was the case with Wilford Woodruff. But in the course of the 20th century, you see checks and balances that are instituted on the church president. They don't want the president going rogue and announcing some Adam God doctrine or some other doctrine that the church would quickly discard. And so by the early 20th century, the church creates a new layer of theological complexity by stating that it's the provenance of the First Presidency that creates the doctrine. So it's the president, the prophet, and his two counselors. It's not just the president speaking by himself. It's now the first presidency. And by the late or by the early 21st century, there's another layer or checking a balance added. And it now becomes the first presidency with the quorum of the 12. And that's the current church's position today. The doctrine is created by the two highest quorums in the Church, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the twelve. Didn't used to be that way. Used to be the church president, then it evolved into the first presidency, and now it's the first presidency and the quorum of the 12. And so, you know, a lot of Latter Day Saints would get upset when critics of the church would say, your church teaches this or that. And the proper Latter Day Saint response would be, gosh, that's interesting. I never heard that in my Sunday school classes. And then the person would say, well, it's in so and so's book, one of your leaders books. And then the Mormons would respond back. He was just speaking as his own opinion, speaking for himself. Right. And so that's why the church has been putting these safeguards on, because they're trying to let members know more definitively of how doctrine is produced in the church.

John Dehlin 29:43 Got it.

Harold B. Lee and Civil Rights

Speaker C 29:45 So can I ask Questions about Harold Bailey really fast before we move too far away. So you mentioned that how Harold B. Lee, whenever he was the prophet he put in, he did things that were like against the ban, like calling McConkey, supporting the excommunication of this Les Seminary teacher John Fitzgerald. But there was a couple of things that you listed that were sort of like him at least trying to address the race issue or the ban on the priesthood in the temple where he goes to the temple every day or he goes as often as he can to pray about this issue. And then he talks to Marion D. Hanks who is a well known critic of the ban. And then also one thing that was super interesting to me was that he asked his secretary to go and find out what the reorganized Latter Day Saint church was doing to welcome in African Americans. And I just thought that was interesting because it's weird to me to think that the Mormon prophet gets advice from what another organization is doing that's like a branch off of ours. I don't know if you have anything more to say on that. I just thought that was super interesting.

Matt Harris 30:41 That's a secret. Julia. One of the beauties of getting into the archives and seeing things that would not otherwise be revealed to the public. Yeah. Over the race issues. So there had been this. I'll just say a quick word about this. But over on the race issue, I've written an article about RLDS and LDS and civil rights. And so I've been into the RLDS archives in Independence, Missouri and they're really, they're just wonderful folks over there. And I'm also the president elect of the John Whitmer Historical association, which is the most important restorationist conference among all the different restorationist groups. And so I have invested into the Community of Christ is what they're called now. And also the other restorationist groups. I feel strongly about our shared history with those folks. Well, anyway, when I was in the RLDS archives a couple of years ago doing research for an article on RLDS and civil rights and LDS is a comparative piece. I found that there were, there were criticisms in 1963 when George Romney was running, people were newspaper journalists and reporters. They were criticizing the LDS church, you know, in Romney and you know, Romney, Governor Romney, you want to be the president, but how could you be the president of this country when your church is so racist? They have all these anti civil rights views and all that stuff. And the NAACP were prominent critics, as I noted in my book. Well, the RALDS people I found their first presidency, they would write the naacp and they would say, we're not racist. Our people have been holding the priesthood since 1878. And so they didn't have any business writing the NAACP. They just wanted to let them know that not all Mormons are racist. We're not. And so, Harold Lee, there's always been this sort of competition, not so much today between the two faith communities, but certainly back in the mid 20th century, there's always this competition about what the other one was doing. And Harold B. Lee knows that they're racially progressive, at least compared to the Saints in Utah. And so he's instructing some of his underlings to see what they're doing to figure out and navigate racial matters in their church. I don't want your listeners to think for a moment that the rlds, they're called the Community of Christ today, but I don't want you to think for a moment that they're somehow racially progressive because they struggle with racism in their pews like anybody else. They just simply didn't have this ban like the Latter Day Saints in Utah had.

John Dehlin 33:07 Got it. Maybe, maybe a next place to jump is to this really important talk, General Conference talk, that Kimball gives in 1974, almost like state of the Union, like how, how what his priorities are going to be for the administration. Is that an okay place?

Setting the Tone for the Kimball Era

Matt Harris 33:27 Yeah, let's do that. And before we. I want to set the tone a little, just for a quick minute before we jump into that, because I think that's a good place. John, I want to just tell your listeners about who Kimball is. So he came into the apostleship in 1943. He was ordained the same day as Ezra Taft Benson. And the reason why Kimball was the senior of the two was just simply by age. He was a little older than Benson, and he was asked to serve in the 1960s over South America. And this is arguably, in my reading of the sources, the first time that he really comes up close and personal with the church's race policies and he sees how it impacts black Latter Day Saints. And when he became the president in 1973, nobody expected him to be in that role. He had a heart attack a few years earlier. He survived throat cancer. He wasn't in good health. And if you want to do something interesting to your listeners, go back and listen to an old YouTube or talk that somebody put on YouTube where he has a clear voice. It's really remarkable. It's just really a beautiful, malefious voice. But after throat cancer, it became raspy and for your older listeners who may recall him as the church president in the 70s, it's that radio raspy voice. But there was a time where he didn't have that raspy voice. And it's. The contrast between the two is interesting. He was 5 foot 6 inches tall, weighed 170 pounds. And I don't claim to be an expert on personality tests, but if we were to use that silly color code that people often use describing personalities, I would argue that he's a white personality. That is, that he had a temper. He was kind of an even kill guy. Didn't like conflict, but he had a temper. And it could rise to in a matter of seconds if something upset him. And you see that happen in his diary time and time again. He's calm, he's just talking about his day. Then all of a sudden, something angered him and his blood just rises. My father is this way, so maybe I'm reading too much.

John Dehlin 35:33 Julia's laughing. Julia, why are you.

Speaker C 35:35 He has a note about Fawn Brody and how I think Fawn Brody, like, kind of ticked him off one time. I don't. I don't know if he referenced what he was. What article of hers he was referring to, but I thought that was really funny. Funny that. That he was getting upset at Fawn Brody in his. In his journals.

Matt Harris 35:48 Yeah. So I'll just read this. I'm glad you brought that up. An article by Fawn Brody once sent Spencer Kimball into a spasm of anger. I was so angry when I looked through the magazine that I rebuked the editors with all my power. Though my poor relatives had to sit and listen. Reading the article was almost more than I could bear. I, I mean, you know, rebuked with his power.

John Dehlin 36:13 What did he like? Raises arbiter square like the writers.

Matt Harris 36:18 I, I don't know. I didn't. I didn't take the time to look at the article. So I don't know what Brody was writing about. But keep in mind, this is four years after her seminal book no Man Knows My History, in which he. Obviously, it's a critical assessment of the prophet, you know, Joseph Smith. But in my mind's eyes, I'm reading this diary entry. I started laughing because I'm thinking, okay, he's reading it at home, his relatives are around, and he's rebuking the editors in Brody. I mean, you know, he's not very happy what he's reading. And so, and so let me say one other thing about his temperament, just so you're so we Get a sense of who he was. So he's a white personality. He's kind of a calm dude. He's, he's got this. I'm gonna speculate for a moment and my, my Kimball friends out there don't get mad at me for saying this, but he's got this complex of his size. He's fully aware that he's a short person. He's five foot six. And some of his fellow apostles would often tease him, you know, hey shorty. They would call him names and he was sensitive to that. He didn't really respond well to that. And so he, he once called himself a pygmy and his predecessor Harold Lee, a giant. And so I don't know if that's solely in reference to the size of the two, the difference or maybe, you know, could be spiritual matters as well. But that, that was Kimball. Also. Kimball's brother in law was Henry Eyring. So today's first presidency counselor Henry Eyring at the governing first presidency. His father was an acclaimed scientist and he was, the father was Spencer Kimball's son in law. And Henry Eyring was so famous, he taught at Princeton in the chemistry department there. He was so famous that he would have won perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize had he not moved to Utah at the university to become the dean of their graduate studies. And some of his colleagues in chemistry had suspected that Professor Eyring would have won this acclaimed award had he not moved back to a, a lesser university to pursue the rest to go into administration. And the University of Utah by the way is a great school but lesser in their minds compared to Princeton. So but anyway, Spencer Kimball would talk about going to family reunions and he would see his brother in law, Henry Eyring there and his other brother in law, a guy named George Boyd, who was an intellectual as well. And Boyd in and Eyring would be talking at their family reunion about evolution and other scientific matters and they would try to bring Apostle Kimmel into it. He was aloof, was not interested, he was not an intellectual and absolutely refused to engage. And the topic du jour of the day was of course Joseph Fielding Smith's anti evolution book. And not sure if Spencer Kimmel just didn't want to say anything critical about his elder colleague in the church hierarchy or he just simply did not care about evolution. But they, Eyring and Boyd both commented frequently that their brother in law just was not interested in these intellectual things. He was more of a sort of a party man, a church guy and abstract Ideas didn't appeal to him. So that's Spencer Kimball's personality. And in 1974 when he became the church president, as I've mentioned, that he wanted to lift the ban, but he needs buy in from the 12. And one of the things that he does is he gives this landmark address in April of 74. It's an address that I would hear about a decade or two later growing up. It was published in the Church News, it was published in the Ensign, it was frequently referenced over the pulpit and General Conference. And this is a famous talk that Spencer Kimball had given to a group of church leaders comprised of regional representatives, mid level general authorities and apostles. So the, this talk was not given to the church at large. It was given in a private setting in which the church president would lay out his vision for what his administration could accomplish. I'm going to look at it and just read a part of it to you. It's called When Will the World be Converted? And in the talk, Kimball promised that if the leaders in the room listening would lengthen their stride, God would open up new missionary possibilities in the Soviet Union, India, China, other places that were closed off to Mormon missionaries. Keep in mind this is the Cold War and the Iron Curtain was very much alive and real. We need to enlarge our field of operation, Kimball pleaded. We will need to make a full prayerful study of the nations of the world which do not have the gospel at this time, and then bring in the strongest and most able men to assist the 12 to move out into the world and to open up the doors of every nation as fast as as it is ready. Everyone had a role to play in this far reaching vision. Diplomats had to secure access to countries behind the Iron Curtain. Church leaders had to utilize the latest technologies to teach Mormonism. And young men and women had to prepare themselves spiritually, economically and financially to serve church missions. Every member of missionary became Kimball's catchphrase during his administration. So when the leaders heard this, they wrote him letters. Gordon Hinckley, James Faust, Ezra, Jeff Benson, a whole number of them, they wrote him letters and they said, this is brilliant. This is the most spiritual, far reaching guidance that we've ever received from a church leader about where we ought to take the church. And so this gets published, this private meeting of church leaders, it gets published. The saints at large read about it and some of them are foxed. How can you take the gospel to every kindred nation, tongue and people if you have this odious ban? There's this man from Pennsylvania and You'll notice your readers. If you get my book and you look in the footnote, you'll notice that I leave names out. I don't think it's important to list people's names when they're not. They have no intention of being part of history. And so when that happens, these folks could still be alive. So I omit their names, but I know who they are. And so this, this Pennsylvania man wrote the president, and he said, how could you, how could you globalize the church when the church can't get into sub Saharan Africa? It's, it's terrible. You're. So he's criticizing the sermon for, for Kimball not seeing the contradiction here. And he said, he ends the letter. And he said, must a policy rooted only in tradition wait for direct revelation in order to change? When will you act, President Kimball, so that I can in conscience reclaim my Mormon heritage and my Testimony? This is 74, so the ban has not been lifted yet. Well, I think this is a good way, John, if you, unless you guys have questions. Do we want to talk about now, Lester Bush's sizable impact?

John Dehlin 43:27 Yeah. Yeah, that sounds great, Lester.

Kimball's 1974 Address and Missionary Vision

Matt Harris 43:30 All right. So just to set the tone, That's April of 74, where President Kimmel gives this visionary address. It electrifies the saints. Every member a missionary. This is something that I took with, with me to my LDS mission in the late 80s, early 90s when I served in Idaho. We talked about every member of missionary. That was part of our sales pitch. And so it's this really, really important talk. And by 1974, there's something that's going to happen that's going to set the church on fire. And it revolves around hitherto unknown medical doctor named Lester Bush. He lives in Maryland. He works for the US Government, and he's a medical doctor for the government. And Lester Bush, by at least the early 60s, as a younger man in his early 20s, he had, he had questions about the ban. He wondered about the ban. Is it right? Is it just. And so he went along through medical school. He was trained at the University of Virginia. He's in intensely smart. I had lots of interactions with him over the years before he passed away last year. Wonderful man. And he. So he had been questioned about the band. And then by the late 1960s, he read Stephen Taggart's manuscript on the band. This We've talked about Taggart, just to remind your readers Taggart was. Or your listeners. Taggart was a student of Sterling McMurran at the University of Utah. And when Taggart left Utah and began a PhD program at Cornell University in sociology. Taggart himself had questions about the band, decided to research it. He wrote a short book. It was an article first, and then they decided to. After Taggart died of cancer in 1970, his widow decided to publish it as a book. And this is a book that John showed at the front of the hour today. And so Bush read that book and he thought, man, there's got to be more to it. I don't believe that the ban, or he has a hunch that the ban does not begin with Joseph Smith to appease Missourians when the Mormons move in. Missouri is a pro slave state. And the idea that Taggart argued, was that the church created the ban because they wanted to throw a bone to the Missouri government officials to say, hey, look, we're not really proud. Pro racial equality, like maybe you think we are. We're not, because we have this ban. So Bush has questions about Taggart's research, and so he decides that he wants to look into it himself and explore further. This is in. On top of his duties as a husband and a medical doctor. So he starts to research it. And he received notice from his brother at. When his brother was attending byu, I should say. I think Lester was in. I want to say Vietnam at the time. If I recall, he was in Southeast Asia on a government assignment. And his brother contacted him and he said, there is an archive at BYU that you really need to see. It deals with the First Presidency in the quorum of the 12 meeting minutes regarding the Brethren's discussions about the ban. You really need to see this. Now, what do you do if you're in Southeast Asia? Right? You can't just hop on a red eye and get the provo. And so what the brother was referring to was the meeting minutes that Adam S. Bennion, the Apostle, had compiled when he and the rest of the committee were looking into the feasibility of lifting the ban in 1954. We've covered this in an earlier episode. And the Bennion family had defied convention when Apostle Bennion died. And I think 55, they donated the papers, including these valuable meeting minutes, to BYU. Now, a collection of this sort should end up at the church archives, where they are tucked away under lock and key, but not in this instance. And there was a. The archivist who alerted the. The Bush brother to the collection was a guy named Chad Flake. And I know I knew Chad Flake. He's passed now. When I was a student there, I remember noticing him as he Looked like, I'm going to be respectful when I say this, so please nobody send me nasty notes. But Chad Flake looked like a mad scientist. Like he stuck his finger in a light socket and his hair just went. And he was just non conforming in the way he dressed, the way he talked, the way he looked. And I had some personal interactions with him over the years. He was. When I was a student, I was also a graduate student there, so he would help me with some research. I also have friends who knew him well, better than me and worked with him. And all of my impressions from my private interactions with him, they confirmed he was certainly a non conformist and didn't seem to care about protocol, because if he did, he wouldn't have contacted a student, Bush's brother, and said, hey, we've got this archive you should check out. And so that's what he did. And so Chad Flake invited Bush and at least one other student I know had access to it. And so he let Bush's brother see the collection. And that's what prompted him to write his brother Lester, because he knew that Lester had. The brother knew that his brother Lester had an interest in this topic. So Lester Bush made arrangements to visit Provo in which he saw the meeting minutes from 1830 to 1954. That was the collection. These are the Brethren's private meeting minutes from the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency. And Lester Bush made copies of the whole kit and caboodle. And when word leaked out to Boyd Packer, the apostle, and also Spencer Kimball, who is at this point was still an apostle, when word leaked out that these private meeting minutes were being circulated, at least by students or an archivist, Elder Kimball exploded in rage. He wrote Ernest Wilkinson a letter, he said, and then it was actually was Dallin Oaks. He wrote Dallin Oaks, the new president, a letter. And he said, what is going on? Rumor has it that the meeting minutes are being utilized by students. Shut this off immediately. And so recall them to Salt Lake, which has interesting ethical implications if the family donates something, if the church is able just to swoop in and take them. But that's what they did. And the collection is still there, I should add. But the meeting minutes are not. And years ago, just as an aside, years ago, I knew from this letter, Kimball's letter, Dallin Oaks, that in Oaks response, that, yes, we'll remove them to Salt Lake. I knew that that had happened. And so I reached out to the archivist and I said, I'd like to see the Meeting minutes and where that. And nobody could find them. Well, it wasn't until maybe a couple of weeks ago I was reading Michael Quinn's memoir that just that Signature Books had just published. It's a wonderful resource for modern researchers. And it was just published. And Quinn writes in his memoir that the meeting minutes went to the quorum of the 12's vault. That's why the archivists could not locate them a couple of years ago when I asked, because they don't have access to the vault. So that kind of explains, you know, it's not like, whoops, they got lost. I mean, how do you lose something valuable like this? Well, they didn't lose them. They just put them in the vault. And the archivist with whom I corresponded didn't know that. So anyway, they. They removed them from byu and it doesn't really matter. I wanted to see the originals just because I like to do it that way. But I have the copies because I have Lester Bush's copy and or at least a copy of Lester Bush's. So I have all the meeting minutes in a bunch of this book derives from those meeting minutes. And so Bush had access to all of this in one of the startling discoveries that he learns right away from reading these meeting minutes is that there's no revelation tying the band to Joseph Smith. There's nothing, in fact, to the contrary. The brethren in the meeting minutes, they look for a revelation for some instance where he implemented the ban. And Bush realizes that they didn't have one. But yet most of the early leaders believe that the ban originated with Joseph Smith because all of the other major doctrinal policies of the. Of the church began with Joseph Smith. At least they believed, and the ban must have been also. But that wasn't the case. So that's what he. One of the things he learned is that there was no revelation tying it to Joseph Smith. He also learned that there were some early black men who ordained to the priesthood. And that's in spite of what earlier leaders had been saying, that it was just Elijah, Abel, he was the one exception, but there were more. And so if these black men are being ordained to the priesthood in the early days of the church, how could you say the band began with Joseph Smith? That clearly can't be the case. You can't keep adding footnote after footnote after footnote, exception after exception after exception. At some point you have to say, maybe the prophet didn't start the ban. Maybe it was Brigham Young, which now we know is the case, and the church has now admitted that. But in the early 70s. This is all scandalous to think that the ban began with Brigham Young, to think that there are a handful of black men who are deigned to the priesthood, and by implication, to think that the ban began out of antebellum racism. There was nothing divine about any of this stuff. It just began because of the fact that Brigham Young grew up in a racist culture where 4 million Africans were enslaved. And so these are the implications of this work. And Bush being the thorough and methodical guy that he was. I want to just add parenthetically for a quick moment, this guy is not trained in history. And, you know, there are so many armchair historians out there, and some of them do the best that they can with their limited tool set. But there's a reason why you get a PhD in history, because it's a strict, rigorous methodology and source analysis. And Bush isn't trained in this stuff, but he really. It comes easy to him, in my opinion. And anyway, so Bush recognizes that these meeting minutes and the things that he was finding at the church archives and also at the University of Utah, he supplements the meeting minutes with additional research, and he calls it the compilation of the Negro. So he makes this really, really large compilation of all of the minutes and other things, letters, he had been finding in other archives, and he creates this massive database, and he recognizes right away that this story needs to be told. And he thinks that he's going to do the church some good. He's a loyal Latter Day Saint man. He thinks in good faith. He thinks the ban has been misguided. It was more of a policy that never should have happened. It was never rooted in doctrine. The prophet Joseph had never taught it. And, of course, if it's not divine, the implication is that it needs to go. And so Bush thinks he's doing the church some service, but he also recognizes that it's controversial because you're challenging the church narrative. And Bush knows that the brethren don't like to be challenged. And so he decides to write the article, an article that would detail his research findings from the Bennion minutes and also from the other items that he had been finding at the church archives and at the University of Utah. So he writes this massive article, and the article has. Oh, my goodness, I write it in my book. His article has dozens and dozens of footnotes. I mean, it's copiously documented, and it's utilizing, again, first presidency and quorum of the 12 meeting minutes that nobody else has seen. So Bush is the first person who really, really takes readers behind the curtains to see the decision making that lay behind the ban. And this is supposed to be a collection that's, that's private and confidential. And now Bush is bringing it out into the light. And so knowing that it's controversial, he sends his article in draft form that details his findings to general authorities, one of whom he believes will be sensitive to his article and will take the article in the same spirit in which he wrote it, which is to help the church. And that's Marion Hanks, who we've talked about in previous episodes, is one of the racially progressive general authorities. And so Hanks receives a copy of it and he also sends it to Boyd Packer and who is newly called into the quorum of the 12, who is extremely stubborn, who's extremely orthodox, and also he's just sort of a defiant personality. He's really a hard man to like because of his curmudgeonliness. If I can make up a word today. And Elder Hanks wrote Bush a letter and he said, you gave it to Packer. Why would you do that? Why would you do that? You're only making trouble for yourself. You know, why couldn't you give it to Hugh Brown? Brown, by this point in fairness, was 90, I think 90, 91. He was in poor health, but anyway, gave it to Packer. And Packer is just like, oh, my goodness, this is a bombshell. And so Packer, he said, when are you going to be in town again, Brother Bush? I think we should meet and talk about this. So Bush said, hey, I'm going to be in Utah visiting relatives and we can meet. And so that's what they do. And Packer invites a guy named Joseph Anderson to the meeting. Joseph Anderson was one of those guys, you know, we've all read movies or watch movies and read books where there's a character in the movie or the book that is in possession of all of this knowledge, but doesn't really divulge and blab. It'll go to his grave with him. That's Joseph Anderson. Anderson is a first presidency secretary to what, three or four church presidents, maybe five. And he's just, he's in all their meetings and he's note taking and all of this, but he's not one to, to blab. So he's got all of this knowledge about the inner workings of the church, the decision making about not just the race doctrine, but other doctrines. And because of his loyalty, they reward him, becomes a general authority himself. Member of the first quorum of the 70. And that's who Boyd Packer invites to the meeting. I'm not sure why it's Anderson, but that's who comes. And the upshot is they try to convince Packer not to publish it. Don't publish this or Bush.

Lester Bush's Research on the Priesthood Ban

John Dehlin 58:52 Bush. Right.

Matt Harris 58:54 Thank you. They try. Packer and Anderson try to convince Bush not to publish his research. It'll harm the church. And they're not really, really hard about it. They're not really hard about it because Packer knows that Bush has put a lot of time into this, invested a lot of energy, and also wants to honor his agency. We don't want to be, you know, perceived as censoring somebody's work. But on the other hand, this will harm the church. This will disrupt the narrative. And so when Packer realizes that Bush won't back down, they try to switch directions and say, let's have the brethren read it and review it. And then why don't you, after their comments and the revisions, why don't you publish it in the BYU Studies Journal? And Bush responded in really an interesting way. He said, they wouldn't have touched this article with a ten foot pole. Bush tells Packer, and Packer says in passive voice, authority will be brought to bear on them. Authority will be brought to bear on them.

John Dehlin 1:00:10 Oh, my gosh. And you know, we got to get that quoted there. That's like.

Matt Harris 1:00:23 And so Bush, to his credit, he sticks to his guns. And he said, I'm not going to publish with BYU Studies. And I want to just say that I think BYU Studies is a fine publication. It's conservative. That's what you're getting. You know, you're not going to get something really liberal and progressive and earth shattering in BYU Studies. Although over the years they have published things that make your head spin. They did a wonderful piece decade or so ago on Mormon conceptions of the feminine divine. I mean, invocations of Mother in Heaven. I mean, that shocked me when I read that because that's always been a taboo in Mormon studies. Well, byu, the Religious Studies quarterly, did that, the BYU Quarterly, they've gone through different names over the years. So. But mostly it's conservative scholarship. And it's written by in house, a lot of in house people and it's peer edited in house. And so, you know, it is what it is. And so Bush recognizes the politics behind this. And so he tells, you know, Elder Packer, he said, they're not going to publish this. Oh yes they will. Authority will be brought to bear. So Bush sticks to his guns. And what I want to share with your listeners for a quick second is something that I had to cut from the book, which is Bush then turns to dialogue the most. It's this up and coming journal. They started it in 1966. It was supposed to be a form by which liberal Mormons could discuss intellectual ideas, be it articles, culture, poetry, literature. And so he chooses dialogue for it. And the editor, Robert Reese, a man that I have interviewed, he's still alive today. He's in his 80s, sharp. He was a professor of religious studies at the Theological Union in Berkeley. And I think he's retired now. He still writes very active. And anyway, Robert Reese was the editor when Bush approached him. And Reese, of course, recognized right away that, hey, look, this is a journal that's only been around for what, five or six years, seven years at this point. This will put us on the map. This will blow us up. This will be good for our brand. But Rhys also recognizes, as did Bush, as did Packer and Joseph Anderson. This is controversial. And so Bush had submitted the manuscript. He. He waited, by the way. Bush decided to wait, and Packer and his colleagues could review it. Turns out they don't review it. I mean, what are you going to review? He's using meeting minutes. And they recognize they can't censor Bush because he's too stubborn. He's not going to listen to him. So they don't really have anything to offer. And I should tell you, the tone that Lester Bush used in that article was. Was pitch perfect. He had several people review it. Leonard Arrington, the church historian, Davis Bitten, another church historian. I mean, they're reviewing it for accuracy, for tone, all of this. So the Brethren don't have any comments or criticisms, at least that I found. And so after waiting for a while, Packer said, we'll review it and get back to you with comments. He never does and so decides to publish it in dialogue. And Robert Reese knows it's explosive. And at this point, I can't prove this, but I'm certain that this is what happens. Packer. I don't have a direct line to Packer, to Robert Thomas is the academic vice president at BYU in the early 70s. And I'm almost certain that it's Packer. Could be. It could have been another general authority, but it's probably Packer who tells Robert Thomas, why don't you contact Bob Reese and let him know that the Brethren will be highly displeased if you publish this article. It could threaten our tax exemption and it could get Leonard Arrington fired as church historian. Now, why he's reaching out, Packer, to Robert Thomas to then reach out to an organization outside of byu, I don't know. Maybe Robert Thomas. I've gone through his papers at byu. It's a restricted collection. Maybe he and Reese were friends back in the day. There's a connection there. I don't know. But it's Robert Thomas who's the person that's supposed to deliver the bad news to Bob Reese that don't publish this. And Reese thinks about it, mulls it over. He's in consultation with Bush, and he and Bush both decide to say, damn it, torpedoes. They go ahead with it anyway. But they do something that they would hope would soften the blow. They invite other scholars to submit pieces to sort of water down the effect of Bush. They reach out to Hugh Nibley, they reach out to a couple of other scholars. Some of them turn it down. Truman Matson, the esteemed philosopher at byu, he wrote back Rhys, and he said, quote, I don't want to get stuck with this. This is a tar baby. I mean, give me a break. We never use that racist language today. But that's what he. That's what Madsen says. I'm not going to have anything to do with this. This is such a controversial article. It's such a controversial church doctrine. I'm out. And the people that wrote, the three scholars that wrote Nibley was one of them. I mean, they're just puff pieces. They're supposed to be critiquing Bush. But what are you going to do? I mean, he's utilizing sources that nobody's ever seen before. He's shifting the narrative. He's challenging the narrative. He's repudiating the narrative. And so Bush or Nibbly writes this puff piece. It's just kind of, you know, typical Nibbly, you know. Right. So anyway, all right, don't get me going on Nibbly. So he writes this puff piece. And Nibley himself, to his credit, recognizes this is a work of major significance. Significance. So they try to water it down. But in the meantime, the brethren are angry when this article comes out. They're absolutely angry because it's challenging the narrative. It's implying the band did become. Began with Joseph Smith, which is what they've been saying all along. There were black men who held the priesthood, which is not what they had acknowledged. And then, of course, finally this band was. There's nothing about it that was divine. It was just man made. And the implication, of course, is that it can be lifted Elder McConkie. There's a church translation employee who tells the story of going into Elder McConkie's office one day. And Elder McConkey was reading Lester Bush's dialogue article. And the employee noted that when he walked in, McConkey slammed down the article on his desk and he said, this is crap.

Bush's Letter and Its Impact on Church Leaders

Speaker C 1:06:59 I love that part.

Matt Harris 1:07:01 C R A P. This is crap. And so Marion Hanks wrote bush A letter, 1974. And he said, your article is causing a storm at church headquarters, a firestorm. And so Bush is aware of all of this stuff and it's, it's a tragic story because by the early 80s, so this is after the band's been lifted by the early 80s, Marky Peterson of the Quorum of the Twelve decides to take it upon himself to lead a charge against the church's intellectuals and intellectuals in the church that he thought were just too open and too revealing and that were defying counsel when they were told to back off, but didn't. And Lester Bush is one of them. And one of my friends, the late great Armin Moss, was another. And so by 1981, Mark E. Peterson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles contacted Lester Bush's stake president, J. Willard Marriott. Most of your listeners know him as the, the CEO of the Marriott Corporation Hotels. And he told President Marriott, he said, you've gotta, you've got to hold a church court on Brother Bush. And Marriott said, I'm not gonna do it. He's a good man. And so to Marriott's credit, he backs off the apostle. So anyway, Bush becomes Persona non grata, thinks he's helping the church, thinks he's doing the church a favor. And the church repays him by at least one apostle. I shouldn't say the church, but one apostle repays him by targeting him for sanction. Now I want to back up for a moment. This is really instructive. Did Lester Bush's article affect Spencer Kimball's revelation? That's the million dollar question of the hour. And I looked and I looked and I looked and I reached out to the Kimball family and I said, do you know where the Dialogue article is? Because his grandson Jordan, his grandson Jordan apparently found his grandfather's Dialogue article. This is Bush, that when they were cleaning out his house in the late 80s after Camilla died. So Spencer Kimmel died in 85, I think Camilla died maybe, gosh, don't quote me, but maybe 89 or so. And so Jordan, his wife were cleaning out the house and they found this article. And apparently grandfather Kimmel had marked it up. Now I'm dying to see this and other scholars, too. So, anyway, it's never been found, and I don't think that Jordan would have understood the significance perhaps, of that, you know, could have been thrown away for all anyone knows. But I didn't see it in his papers. I was hoping to locate it in the Kimball papers of the church archives, and it wasn't there. He had other articles there that he marked up, and I was hoping to find the dialogue one, but I didn't. So what we have is anecdotal evidence that. That President Kimball did read it, marked it up, certainly knew about it. How much did it affect him? I mean, it's hard to really say because the evidence goes blows cold. He doesn't talk about it in his diaries. But it would be. It would be hard to argue that it didn't affect President Kimball because really, what it. What it's saying is there's no revelatory basis for the ban. And if there's no revelatory basis for the ban, and if it really wasn't doctrinal from the inception of the church, then in my mind's eye, it made it easier for Kimball to go ahead and lift it. And so Lester Bush is one of those heroic, seminal people in the church who helps to educate the church on its history, its doctrine, its policies. And frankly, at least in the early 70s, when he published this pathbreaking article, he wasn't given the credit that he needed. To this day, in my opinion, I think my friends in the scholarly community would agree to this day, it's the most important article that's ever been published in Dialogue.

John Dehlin 1:11:05 So, Matt, I. I've got an important question for me. And then, Julia, you may have questions as well. And Matt, I've kind of asked this question maybe in a few different ways in past episodes, but I want to make sure I ask it again in this episode. And we've talked about it a bit. On the one hand, the narrative, you know, I didn't know anything about what your book covers, you know, prior to the 1970s, related to the priesthood ban. All I knew is that Joseph Smith had ordained Elijah, Abel and a couple other people. And, you know, and then there was a priesthood band. So I've learned so much from chapters one through six. But on the one hand, you know, we're talking. You're talking today about how Lester Bush's 1973 Dialogue article was sort of scandalous. It was shocking, it was seminal, it was groundbreaking that the Brethren freaked out about it as if it was almost new knowledge to them. And so, on the one hand, that's one narrative, but the other narrative that I've pieced together from the piecing together you've done in your book is that, like in the 1910s, both Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith and others, B. H Roberts, were already asking questions about Elijah Abel. They knew about Elijah Abel and his descendants. They knew that Joseph Smith had ordained black men to the priesthood. They had good suspicions that there was no revelation ever given about it, that there was probably not much doctrinal or scriptural support for it. Your book covers Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith, if I recall, asking these questions and coming to these conclusions of the 1910s. And then we've got, of course, you know, the episode that we did on, on Lowry Nelson, Larry Nelson in the 40s, putting the brethren on notice and the first presidency on notice in the late 40s. Thank you, Julia, for that. And then we've got the Bennion Report in 1954, which basically just reiterates most of what Larry Nelson was telling them in the late 40s. And then, of course, we've got, you know, the article that, you know, that I referenced. You know, the Taggart article that, you know, was probably given to Hubie. Brad knew about it, but it was also given to David O. McKay in the late 60s. So on the one hand, I want to think, I want to give the Brethren the benefit of the doubt, kind of Greg Prince's, he kind of planted this idea in my mind that New Mormon history, sort of the Leonard Arrington Camelot years of New Mormon history, educated the Apostles in the First Presidency as much as they did the rest of us. And, you know, somehow everything went down the memory hole. And the Brethren in the 70s and 80s and 90s were learning right along with us all the stuff that had been forgotten. But on the other hand, your book shows the receipts that many of them kind of knew all this all along. So I'm kind of confused about how groundbreaking and revelatory Lester Bush's article really was. And I know that you say that at a minimum, Lester Bush corrected Taggart because Taggart wanted the priesthood band to start with Joseph Smith. And I guess you say that Lester Bush showed that it began with Brigham Young, But I'm stuck trying to figure out just how groundbreaking Lester Bush's article really was in terms of the Brethren being put on notice for the problems with the priesthood ban. And I know I'm asking, this is probably the third or fourth time I've asked it in this series, but I'm going to ask it again.

Internal Church Deliberations on Lifting the Ban

Matt Harris 1:15:01 No, that's okay. I mean, it's really good because we're getting into the meat of all of this today. I mean, this is the central part of this book is how they lift this thing. And I think that, I mean, I agree with Greg Prince that the new Mormon history from the 70s and to this day, I mean, I have general authorities reading my book. They're learning things. They're telling me this. I just received an email last week from a general authority saying, oh my goodness, I had no idea about any of this stuff. And so they read, not all, but some of them read what we write. We're the ones that influence them. We're the ones that see the meeting minutes and go to the many archives we go to. And so I'm, I'm with Greg Prince that that's how it works. And yes, there were discussions from the meeting minutes. Yes, they knew about some of the early black priesthood holders, but they didn't, they didn't know about, I don't think for a moment that somebody knows about Black Pete. And why would they? Because Black Pete was not in the Benyan meeting minutes. That was somewhere else. And so they knew about Elijah Abel because Elijah Abel's everywhere in the meeting minutes, everywhere. But they didn't know about Joseph Ball. Joseph Ball's not in the meeting minutes. So. And also too with Bennion. This is something that I wish I knew more of, but it's, it's. I don't know how many of the Quorum of the twelve read the Bennion meeting minutes or the report that was produced. That is unclear to me. All I know is it wasn't accepted. And I don't know if they debated it, discussed it and rejected it or I don't know. So I, I think it's a tall leap to assume they know things because they don't. Some of them are readers, some of them are not. And I look as a historian, you know, when do they know and when do they know it? And it's not always clear. I would argue that, I mean, I've, I've read more meeting minutes than probably anybody alive in the 20th century. And so I look for clues and I don't see that. I don't think we can impute the knowledge that we think they ought to have. I mean, they're running a global church. Their day to day lives through much of the 20th century is governed by two things. One, the business boards that they're on, like the various business enterprises the church leaders are on, especially when the church has an interest. And two, just the mundane things of calling a new bishop, a new stake president, speaking to a state conference. That's what they're doing. And when they have spare time to read, they're preparing for their next conference talk. I can't tell you how many times I receive or I've seen letters from BYU professors or CES teachers where they wrote a book and they send it to the general authorities. And the general authority always writes back, oh, thank you for this book. I'll get to it if I have the time. And so even sometimes Nibley would do this and they would say, you know, Ezra Taft Benson, thank you, Brother Nibley, can you summarize in two sentences what your book is about? I mean, you know, I'm sure Nibley's thinking, you know, who spent his entire adult life trying to get the Saints to read more. And a senior apostle saying, you know, I'm not going to read this. Can you just summarize it? Give me a little tick tock and. But that's their last, the reality of their lives. So I don't see that they know a whole lot of stuff. And I can just tell you from my limited interactions with some general authorities over the years, especially at conferences, they know very little. In fact, that's why oftentimes I'm not trying to boast, so please forgive me if it sounds this way, but oftentimes when I go to conferences, I'll get general authorities in the room. They'll come hear me speak. They're always the first people up to greet me afterwards and, and they'll just sit there and tell me all the things they learned in my presentation that they didn't know. And of course, I'm not startled by that. Why would you know it? I'm getting this stuff from meeting minutes and private letters that I've accumulated over years at various archives. They're not scholars. So sometimes in the church we, I, you know, really orthodox members, I have to tell them, you know, just because they have a title of as an apostle does not assume new knowledge. Why would they know the history like this, or even how the doctrine has changed over time, or even as something as simple as what I said a minute ago on this podcast, which is the doctrine evolved from the church president to the first presidency to the quorum of the 12, along with the first presidency. A lot of them don't even know that trajectory. So anyway, it's a, it's a. It's just a corporation and it's, it's a large one. And some of them have a lot of knowledge. I think Elder Oaks and Elder Holland keep up with scholarship, but most don't.

John Dehlin 1:19:38 Yeah. Okay, so just to summarize, what for sure, few to none of them knew was about the additional black men ordained to the priesthood beyond Elijah Abel. That something that you're saying most, if not all, didn't know. And you've already told us about Joseph Fielding Smith either having the theory that there were two Elijah Abels, which maybe he really believed that there was a white Elijah Abel and a black Elijah Abel, or that Elijah Abel was a mistake that Joseph made. So we knew that he hid that or explained it away because he didn't write it in. He didn't include Elijah Abel in this book, the Way to Perfection, when he talked about the priesthood ban. But we know he knew it. He knew about some of that. And then we know that the first presidency in the late 40s, including David O. McKay, would have known about what Larry Nelson wrote and. Right. And that would have been George Albert Smith. Right?

Matt Harris 1:20:47 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:20:47 And. And David O. McKay and who the third.

Matt Harris 1:20:51 Reuben Clark.

John Dehlin 1:20:52 So J. Reuben Clark. Now, he would have died by the 60s, and then. So it would have been Joseph Ealing Smith for sure. George Albert Smith, David O. McKay, J. Reuben Clark, then Adam Bennion. Right. And whoever else would have read the Bennion report. Right.

Matt Harris 1:21:10 Yeah. And so I want to be clear on something. So the, the idea that we know that a handful of black men were ordained did not. Some of that you can tease out a little bit from the Ben minutes, but that, that really is a function of other research from other archives. And so keep in mind, it's not just the Bennion minutes that Bush is seeing. He's also supplementing his work from other archives. And I also want to say something that I think I'd be remiss if I didn't. It's not solely Bush doing all this. One of my good, good, good dear friends, Noel Bringhurst, he's still alive. He's in his early 80s. He's as sharp as ever. His work in the 80s. So he, he's the first. He wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Davis, and his was the first real scholarly book on the band. I mean, Taggarts is just a little thing, you know, and it wasn't. It's just a product of a graduate student research paper, essentially that got published by his widow and But. But Bringhurst wrote a dissertation at UC Davis in the early 70s and he worked with Bush. Bush gave him some materials. But Noel is all deserves also credit for uncovering some of these early black priesthood holders in which he writes about in a seminal book called Saints Slaves. What is it called? Saints. Gosh, we've got it right here. Saint slaves and blacks. And it was published in 1981. And that's the. That's the most pivotal point up to that, that time about the. The band. So the Brethren are aware of. Of Newell's research too. In the Spencer Kimball Papers, I found an article that Newell had written in the Utah historical quarterly from 1978. It was a. They got a hold of a draft. So it hadn't been published yet because it wasn't published until December, the winter edition. And Kimball was reading that in draft form in the spring of 1978. And Kimball or Newell had shared it with LDS historians who work for the Church History Department. And I'm assuming I don't know because Newell didn't give President Kimball the article directly, must have been the church historians. So because he had a draft and President Kimball read that article and later on that article, what it talks about is how the band builds on Lester Bush's research and it just says the band's not divine. It starts with Brigham Young, and Newell had revealed some other priesthood holders that Lester didn't know about. And so between Newell and Lester's articles that were published five years apart, the Brethren are reading both of those and they're not happy because it's challenging the church narrative.

John Dehlin 1:23:51 And that's what I was going to ask. Were they mad because A, they thought the history was false or B, because they were just embarrassed, you know, that. That it would challenge the narrative or cause them problems. And then C, why isn't it ever. Oh my gosh, we got it wrong. Let's clear the record and tell everybody we got it wrong. Now we have new knowledge. Hooray. We understand the world better. It's almost never that, right?

Matt Harris 1:24:23 Well, you've got to have an open mind. And frankly, these the leaders don't have an open mind. So let me tell you something about Newell, and this is always interesting when you write a book about characters who are still alive. So my good friend Newell is part of this story. And don't think that's not intimidating when you're writing about your friend and he's going to critique it. And it's kind of fun, actually, that you can. So Newell's been so Generous with me. He's given me just all kinds of documents, letters, and his collection is now at the University of Utah. But Newell's a seminal player in this, this story, just like Lester Bush is. And Lester's, by the way, his collections at the University of Utah, along with Newell. So for modern researchers, it's those two collections are indispensable. So Newell had given me letters. And of course when I write about Newell, I mean, he's seeing letters that he wrote 50 years ago. And so, you know, I can't tell you how many phone calls we've had where Newell's gone down memory lane, but from things he's written that I sent him. Well, anyway, with Newell, what happened was that when they read the Utah Historical Quarterly, the managing director of the historical department, he's a political scientist, which in my opinion had no business running the historical department because political science and history, while there are some similarities, they are two different disciplines. And Homer Durham was the former president of Arizona State University. He was a professor of political science before that the U. He was a missionary companion to Gordon Hinckley. Well, he was brought in to manage the historical department to reign in these PhD historians like Leonard Arrington, the first and only PhD to run the historical department. So they brought in Homer Durham to manage him and didn't like the, the work that they were producing. It wasn't faith promoting enough. It was too secular, too many naturalistic explanations and assumptions. So all of that. And Homer Durham was a stubborn, stubborn guy. And he wasn't just the, the missionary companion to Gordon Hinckley. His father in law was the first pregnancy counselor and Eldon Tanner. And so, so Durham has connections. No, I made, made a mistake. Is it, it's, it's John Widzo. I'm sorry, I think his father in law, somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but his, Homer Durham's father was the late John Widzo. And anyway, so Homer Durham went to Ron Esplin of the Church History Department. I write about this in my book. And he said, hey, I read Bringhurst's article and he's trying to pin the ban on Brigham Young. Just like Bush, can you do research to prove him wrong? Now, you know, as an academic, Elder Durham should have said by this point, Durham is a member of the first corps of the 70. I should add, he wasn't just the managing director of the historical department, he's now a general authority. Elder Durham should have said, you know, hey, can you test the validity of Bringhurst and Bush's work, see if they're right on this and if they are right, let's move in a different direction. But instead it was we've got to find evidence to show that, that the band began with Joseph Smith. This is a secret assignment. Don't tell anyone. He tells Esplin. So Espin produces this report and he shares it with a couple of colleagues at the church archives, including Arrington, and shares it to Homer Durham. And there's no evidence for any of this stuff. I mean, Esplin's main logic was most of the doctrines of the Restoration came from Joseph Smith and therefore this has had to have come from him as well. Now, I mean, come on, man, that's faulty logic. That's just talk about drawing assumptions from a faulty premise. And he didn't deal with any of his, their research about black men being ordained, none of that stuff. And finally, Elder Durham wanted to preserve the church narrative. Obviously, the Brethren had spent years telling the church body that the ban began with Joseph Smith and that they have to maintain that. And so they, Homer Durham put some pressure on Drumroll the BYU Studies Quarterly to publish reports. Authority will have been brought to bear or whatever. So maybe it was Packer, who knows? But anyway, it gets published in the BYU Journal and in the early 80s and Lester Bush, Newell, Bringhurst and Armin Moss are furious. And I, I know this. I've talked to all three of them about this. And there's also a paper trail in their archives. And each of those three brilliant scholars wrote James Allen, who was a professor of history, one of my old teachers at BYU is an upstanding man, great man, great thinker, great scholar who was chairing the BYU Journal at the time. And so Bush, Bringhurst, Moss wrote Allen, they said, how could you publish this tripe? This is no good. And Professor Allen wrote back and he said, you can understand the dilemma I'm in when the higher ups in Salt Lake tell me what I have to publish. And so, and then he tells, Allen tells these three scholars he said even Esplin recognized that his argument was fragile, that he didn't have the evidence that he needed. But it was a, it was a political thing and that's what happened. And you know, to this day, it's like when anyone asks, you know, hey, Matt, what should I read about the ban? That's the last thing I would recommend. It's just not a well researched piece. And I'm not here to judge Esplin's significant political or publishing career because he's done some other pieces that are Worthwhile. But this is something that it was an assignment from a higher up that he never should have accepted because there was no evidence to prove that the band began with the prophet.

Speaker C 1:30:29 Can I ask a question about that? So if there had. So, like with thinking of Wilford Woodruff in the manifesto. So Wilford Woodruff. Maybe it's how Wilford Woodruff stopped polygamy and how, like, he was. Like, I think he was saying or implying that it would be practiced in the eternities. But that polygamy, if you believe that polygamy was started by Joseph Smith, it was ended by Wilford Woodruff. And I was just wondering if there was clear evidence. There isn't. I'm just saying. Just speculating or just asking this rhetorical question. Not rhetorical, because I want an answer. If Joseph Smith had started the ban, would that have changed them taking away the ban or because they've taken. They took away polygamy? Like, how would. Does that make sense?

Matt Harris 1:31:07 Yeah, it makes perfect sense, and it's a great counterfactual question. I think it's wonderful, because counterfactual is, even though it didn't play out that way, the history, it still allows us to understand the contingencies, the choices before them. And I think the ban would have been lifted, Julia, to answer your good question, because there's absolutely. It's just unsustainable.

Speaker C 1:31:26 Right? That's what I keep thinking. So I don't really think that it's. That it's that big of a thing, because I think it would have. There's no reason why it wouldn't have been lifted. Polygamy was lifted, and there were several. I feel like there's other things that were lifted, either policy or doctrine that Joseph Smith taught that are no longer taught now. So it makes sense that it would have been lifted.

Matt Harris 1:31:42 I think the question is it would have been lifted because there were just too many societal pressures working against the church that were in conflict with the church's mission to Gloria. I mean, it would have been lifted. There's just. It's just crazy to think it wouldn't be right. But would it have been lifted in 1978? I don't know, because a lot of the. The apostles, over the course of the 20th century, they would frequently talk about, you know, are we the ones to really overturn the prophet of the restoration? This is his main job as the leader, was to start, you know, to create the doctrine that we were to sustain and build upon, frankly. But this is the prophet of the restoration this is what God wanted. And here we are. Who are we to say that Joseph Smith got it wrong? So there's a lot of that going on. Even Spencer Kimball, Julia, in the 1970s he would say, muse to himself and to others, I don't know if I should be doing this, but I think it's the right thing to do. And so Joseph Smith held a lot of weight and certainly more weight than his successors, for sure.

The IRS, Tax Exemption, and Racial Policy

Speaker C 1:32:48 I also have questions about the IRS because you're talking about Robert Thomas and how he was afraid that the church, that this article from Lester Bush would harm the church and it would cause Leonard Arrington to lose his job. And he talks about how it would make the church would lose its tax exempt status. And I know, like, I think you've talked about this before and I'm sure you've covered this in other chapters, but I wanted to ask a little bit more about why Robert Thomas was afraid of that happening with this Lester Bush article. And then I don't know if this, this ties into it, but you talk about President Kimball where he says that because of the civil rights, you know, all this stuff is happening during this time. And he says that our religious practices and doctrines have no bearing on the civil rights. And so like we are allowed to, to discriminate and not give them the priesthood. And it doesn't, it won't affect anything. And so I just wondered, because I had heard that the, that the tax exempt status was like the main reason why that the ban was lifted. And reading this chapter, I think that seems to be not the case. But I just wanted to see if you had more to say on that.

Matt Harris 1:33:47 Yeah, yeah. I think critics of the Church are going to beat me up on this because they have this narrative that the IRS is the one that forced the revelation. And what really that implies is it was lifted out of political expedience, not at any kind of inner pure motive on Kimball's part. And I found zero evidence for any of this. I've read it probably like you, Julia and John, I've read it on the Internet for a very long time that the, that the ban came about because of the irs. And, and I want to tell you how I went about researching this. I think this is really fascinating and at least it was for me. And so first of all, I want to know if it was true. And I think your listeners know by now that I go where the evidence takes me. I'm not an apologist for the LDS Church and frankly, I don't like apologetics. So, but I do follow the evidence. And whatever the evidence says, whether it's, you know, pro church or against the church's position, I don't care. I just go where the evidence takes me. And I try to be respectful about it, of course. And anyway, so with the irs, first of all, I want to know, was it true? And if I found strong evidence, I was going to write about it and try to weigh it out among the myriads of possibilities. We like to think in history, we learn that there are always more variables that lead to change. Some of us like to think there's just one thing, you know, but really there's. There's always. It's more complex than that. And, and we can rank order variables. You know, what was the most important thing that led Kimmel to lift the ban? And I'm happy to notice because it clashed with his globalist vision in the church. That is what's driving this. But there are lesser variables, too. They can't figure out who's got the blood. They can't just, you know, look at somebody and say, oh, they're black. Exclude them. They don't know, and they know that they were dating black men to the priesthood. That's another factor. They're tired of the criticism. There's another factor. And they're getting sued. There's another factor, although it's a lesser one. They just sort of learn to live with these little bumps in the road through the years. And the IRS is a bump. And I want to just take you through briefly about how I know this. And so I've learned, you know, the Internet, you know, the IRS led to the change. And I always look for evidence. There was never any evidence. It was just really a circulating circular argument. And so I wanted to find out, well, where did it start, this rumor? And what I found out was it started by or. The person who first published this notion that the IRS pressured the church was Gerald and Sandra Tanner. And the Tanners were not trained in history, but remarkable, prodigious researchers. And Gerald in particular, had this innate capacity to read documents and to tease out conclusions, many of which arguably the church has accepted today. But because Gerald and Sandra Tanner were disaffected Latter Day Saints, she, by the way, is the what great, great, great great granddaughter Brigham Young. So she's got royal church blood in her and in Gerald, her late husband is connected to some early Mormon pioneers. So I should tell you, I know Sandra personally. She's a nice woman, delightful woman. Came to my book talk last week, really enjoy her sense of humor. Anyway, she's come, she comes to the Mormon History association conferences over the years. And so, so Sandra and Gerald were the ones to publish this in their newsletter in 1979. And so I wrote Sandra an email. I said, sandra, tell me about this. This is really fascinating. And she says that a lawyer who worked for the church, Curtin McConkey, this is the law firm that the church did business with and still does. And she said a lawyer would come over to their, their offices, Utah Light Ministry, I think is their name. And it's no longer. Sandra's retired now, but their offices were not far from the church headquarters. And a lawyer would come over and give them these details, like, hey, the IRS is pressuring the church. I think you should know this now. When Sander's telling me this stuff, my head's about ready to explain, explode. I mean, there's any, any number of problems with this, right? Here's a lawyer who works for the church who's supposed to, you know, this is supposed to be confidential. And he's revealing privileged material to the church's most vociferous critics. Wow. And so this, this lawyer comes over. He's, by the way, works for the law firm that services the church, but he's a disaffected Latter Day Saint. Apparently, he's not a believer or lost his testimony at some point. So he's, he's sharing this privileged information with the Tanners. And the Tanners, I might add, they wrote about it. They just sort of, they stated the facts. He would come over, he would talk about the irs. And as far as I, my, I can recall, I don't think the Tanners really were the ones that were pushing this IRS narrative. I'll stand corrected. But I haven't seen evidence for that. They were just sort of, this is what's going on. They put it in their newsletter. That's at least my reading of it. And also through my correspondence with Sandra. And so there's that. Okay, there's a story there. And then I was going through the Arrington papers, the Utah state Leonard Arrington, the late church historian, wonderful collection. And he wrote a letter to his children In June of 1978, just a couple of weeks after the revelation. And he said, hey, the church is poised to lose its tax exemption in Wisconsin and possibly Hawaii. And I thought, whoa, this is a guy on the inside who's saying this? That's. Wow. And then in 1998, I lived in New York. At the time. I was finishing up my PhD and I got a hold of Leonard Arrington's memoir, published by the University of Illinois press. This is 98. And Arrington repeats that same thing that he told his children 20 years earlier, that the church was poised to lose its tax exemption status in Wisconsin and possibly Hawaii. Now, you know, I suppose if you didn't really have good grounding in archival source analysis, you would just use Sandra Tanner and maybe Leonard Arrington as a footnote and say the IRS was pushing the church. But the truth is you need more than that. And Leonard Arrington, I should tell you, too, in his diary, he talks about a lawyer named Miles Sorensen who. Who's speaking to the LDS Church historians. And he's saying, hey, the church is about ready to lose its tax exemption status. And so I asked Sandra, I said, is Miles Sorensen the guy that was speaking to Leonard Arrington's group of historians, is he the same guy that came to your. Your store? And she said she didn't remember. It likely is, but I don't know. I can't prove that. And sadly, Miles Sorensen died five or six years ago, so I couldn't interview him. So, anyway, we have these interesting sources now. There's a little crumb, if you will, breadcrumb trail. And so what I decided to do was I decided to write Jimmy Carter. And I said to President Carter in a letter, did you pressure the Mormons to lift the ban? Did you use the Department of Justice of the IRS and not the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, which is over the irs. Did you pressure them to lift the ban? And President Carter wrote me back a Lovely letter in 2013. And he said, dear Matt, he said, I certainly was aware of the band, and I made my views known, but I did not pressure them. Sincerely, Jimmy C. I mean, you know, come on, man. How could you not like President Carter? And so. So, okay. Now, being the stubborn guy that I am, I didn't take that as the final answer. And I decided to go to the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia. I have family there, so wasn't a hard trip to make. Stay with my relatives, enjoy time with them. Well, I spent a few days going through the Carter papers on a big, thick file folder that said Mormons. And I thought, well, if there's any evidence of his displeasure with the priesthood band, I'm going to find it in one of these thick folders. Nothing. So, finally, I'll end the story here. I decided to write the folks at Wisconsin, the irs, and the guy that I reached out to, I mean, It's a shot in the dark. The guy that I reached out to was nearing retirement. This is 2013. He's nearing retirement. And he said, oh, yes, I remember this. I worked for the IRS. I started my career out, you know, in the 70s. So I know exactly what you're talking about. About. I'm thinking, yes, I'll get some resolution here. So what this guy said, and it was Mike Wagner, what Mike Wagner told me was he said that by the late 70s, we were. We, meaning the state of Wisconsin, the lawmakers had proposed a law that would revoke the tax exemption of religious organizations that had discriminatory policies. He said the law was passed in 1980, but it didn't go into effect until 1981. And so when he told me all this, it all came together. What Miles Sorensen told Arrington and his crew, what the lawyer told Sandra Tanner and her husband, they knew this law was being talked about in Wisconsin, and they just feared the worst, that somehow the ban was lifted because of the law. But if the law didn't take effect until 1981, it's hard to really argue cause and effect. And in my. In my thinking as a scholar and a historian, there are more pressing issues that led President Kimball to lift the ban. There were less sinister reasons, and we've been talking about that, globalizing the church and other things. So, you know, the IRS is an interesting thing, but it's hard to claim there's strong evidence there when it wasn't. The law didn't go into effect until 1981.

Speaker C 1:43:41 Thank you. That's so fascinating.

John Dehlin 1:43:43 And if I could just follow up on that. So, again, this is one of the points in your book where I'm feeling. I don't want to say mixed messages, but where I'm feeling pulled by two different narratives. Because now, I've heard you tell that story a few times now, Matt, and I think you're. Your scholarship speaks for itself. And I would never, ever dare to second guess you or question you, ever.

Matt Harris 1:44:08 Oh, dare.

John Dehlin 1:44:09 And even if I go to the table of contents or the index of your book, you've got a tax exemption section where you talk about Bob Jones University on multiple pages. You know, we are. We've already talked about the IRS investigating BYU around, you know, it's not allowing black students, black professors, black athletes. And then you've got a section called Threatened, where there's at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pages, you know, under the section Threatened. And I've read enough of the book, your book, to know that Certainly the possibility of the church losing its tax exemption status was on the mind of top leaders for at least a decade, if not two. So I don't think it would be fair to say it had no bearing on the lifting of the priesthood ban. Is that, Is that also fair to say?

Matt Harris 1:45:10 Yeah, John, you're making good points. I mean, I don't. I'm not trying to say that they didn't think about the irs. They didn't think about. Because you're right, the. The examples that I talk about in my book and what you just mentioned, they've been talking about these in private meetings. There's no question about it. So it was the impetus in which he lifts. The prime impetus in which President Kimmel lifts the ban. I don't see it. It's certainly in the background. They certainly know about it. They certainly talk about it. And we've talked about Bob Jones in previous episodes where the IRS had revoked their tax exemption status in 1976. I mean, it's in the air. It's completely plausible. All I'm trying to say is there is no direct smoking gun evidence. I didn't see it in Kimball's diaries. I didn't see it in first pregnancy meeting minutes I looked at. And yeah, it's important. It's there, but I can't make that strong connection because I don't see the evidence.

John Dehlin 1:46:05 Okay, so it's looming. It's talked about.

Matt Harris 1:46:08 Yes.

John Dehlin 1:46:09 It's even feared.

Matt Harris 1:46:11 Yes.

John Dehlin 1:46:11 In terms of, like, direct influences on Kimball that you were able to find, it doesn't emerge there.

Matt Harris 1:46:19 Yeah. And let me say. Let me say, just say one thing, because anyone who knows me and my work, I mean, I am. Whatever you want to say about me, you can disagree with my conclusions, that's fine. But I am thorough and exhausted when I do my work. And I not only went to the Carter Library, talked to Carter himself, and I tracked down IRS leads. And I reached out to a prominent LDS attorney named Sam Brunson, professor of law in Illinois, who writes about the IRS and religious law. I mean, I exhausted everything I could think of. And the other thing I did was I thought, you know, who would be privy to these sort of insider knowledge? And I thought, well, Rex Lee. And Rex Lee was. Most of your folks might know him as the president of byu. He was there, John, when I was there. Probably you, too.

John Dehlin 1:47:08 Yeah.

Matt Harris 1:47:08 And he died of cancer in 1996. And Rex Lee was the founding dean of BYU's law school. And so Rex Lee, incredibly smart guy. But for our purposes, Here today, Rex Lee, when he finished his, his, he was a law dean in the 70s and then he got called in by the Reagan administration to be the Solicitor General, which is the government's lawyer. He represents the US Government before the Supreme Court. Quite a, quite an honor. And then later on he'd become, he believed that post and become the BYU president. So when he was a Solicitor General, he was the guy that was litigating this case during Bob Jones, when Bob Jones's tax exemption was restored in 1981. And I've gone through Rex Lee's papers at BYU. It's a great collection. And I thought if anyone would have any insights into the IRS and the church because of Rex Lee's government service during the Bob Jones era, it'd be Rex Lee. And he had lots of things on the IRS and religion and tax exemption and he's got lots of letters in that collection. But I didn't see any evidence. So, you know, I just want to impress upon your listeners we live in a conspiracy filled world that drives me nuts. And we, we need to ground our views in evidence. We can have opinions, that's fine, we all have them, but it doesn't mean our opinions are valid. And so I'm hoping that, you know, if anything else from this discussion about the irs, it can be a commentary about how we know what we know and how we can back up the claims that we make. And I'm just simply saying there's no evidence to suggest that the IRS was really the prime mover behind this revelation. It was there in the background. They knew about it, they talked about it, they had experience with the irs. Bob Jones was going on during all of this time. But from Kimball's diaries and the first pregnancy meeting minutes that I have, the evidence isn't there.

John Dehlin 1:49:03 And not to, not to belabor the point, but in chapter seven, you also mentioned BYU Law School, fearing that its accreditation would be taken away related to the church's stance on race. Is that true?

Matt Harris 1:49:18 Yeah, that's of course separate from the irs. I mean, they're getting hit from all angles. Right. And so I just want to be clear, I'm not saying that this is not a factor about. Because it is, they're talking about.

John Dehlin 1:49:29 Yeah.

Matt Harris 1:49:30 And Julia, to your question earlier, I think is really instructive is that by the mid-70s, Spencer Kimball and his counselors and also Dallin Oaks, the president of byu, they're embarking on this public relations stint in which they're trying to make a distinction between civil rights, which the Government controls and enforces and the First Amendment, which allows religions to teach what they want to teach and believe what they want to believe. And so Dallin Oaks gives this address at BYU in 1975, and he's not speaking to the people in the audience there. He's speaking to folks far beyond the Marriott center in Provo, Utah. And he's essentially saying, look, we have a right to deny black people the priesthood. It's part of our theology. And civil rights doesn't bear on this. Now, I'm going to be a critic for a minute. I'm like, come on. The idea that you're. The theology bears into civil rights because, because of interracial marriage. So to separate the two is just plain erroneous. And also, too, people can make the same distinction with LBGTQ today. And so the government in the 1960s, and this is in my book, the government in the 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that you couldn't hide behind the First Amendment to discriminate against black people. And they gave a lot of legal rationales for that. That I won't go into here. We talk about these kinds of things in my civil rights class, but they said you can't do that. And we recognize you have a right to believe what you want to believe, and we're going to weigh that out. But it must be balanced against federal law, which is the Civil Rights act of 1964. And if the two clash, the Civil Rights act is going to win. And so that's what they say about race. And that's why a lot of the brethren are upset. They're fearful. And with lbgtq, of course, of course, that is the elephant in the room today. That is the government at some point going to tell private religious groups that they have to admit gay people into full fellowship. The church has always been worried about that. And just a couple of years ago, a couple of three years ago, there was a student at BYU who, a gay student who made a complaint to the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice said that they were going to investigate that there was some hostile views towards the LBGTQ community at byu. And they apparently did an investigation and they decided to, they produced a letter that. To the president, Kevin Worthen. And basically they said in the letter that you have a right to keep your. To your theology. And if your theology closes off LBGTQ or makes it less, and makes them less inclusive to the faith, that's okay. That's your right. But of course, five years from now, 10 years from now, the government may change its mind, but right now they're holding the line in LBGTQ issues, particularly with the conservative Supreme Court that we see today. But that wasn't always the case. And we may see it like the race issue from the 60s, but I don't think we're going to see it anytime soon.

Speaker C 1:52:48 That also makes me think, you mentioned a couple times about the era, the Equal Rights Amendment. And it makes me think that because that hasn't been ratified yet or certified into law. But so that makes me think that if that were to ever, because the church is against the Equal Rights Amendment, that makes me think that if they were to ever put that into law, that that might later on affect how the church views women and their rights to be leaders in the church. It just made me think about that.

Matt Harris 1:53:12 Excellent point, Julia. That's the other thing they're worried about. So it's, it's, so it starts with race, of course, and then it's the ERA Amendment. The church is worried that they're going to force the church, the government will force the church to ordain women to the priesthood, and that's it. So it's not just lbgtq. It also deals with women and BYU without going off the rails here, because we probably should come back to the priesthood revelation. But in the 1970s, under Dallin Oaks presidential administration, they're having Title 9 problems. Title IX was passed in 1972, and it essentially said that you can't discriminate against women in employment, college sports if you have, you know, you have to have equitable teams between men and women in, on college campuses when it comes to athletics. So Title IX is important. And they, they go after BYU just like they did on the race issue. And they say with Title nine, they say that you don't have female faculty, or at least you have a couple. Why don't you have more women on your faculty? And Oaks, his administration, they tell the government, look, we have a theology that says that women should be home bearing children with their husbands and being the nurtured. And the government said that's not good enough. You hire secretaries. Aren't they married? Don't they have children? Why aren't you hiring faculty? And of course, that's where the church gets, that's where President Oaks gets caught in a pickle. You can't claim theology that keeps the women home and prevents us from hiring them on our faculty. And then you hire women who are secretaries. Double standard. And so the upshot of all of that is that the Government goes after them on Title IX issues in the 1970s. And just like before with the race issue and hiring black faculty, they compromise. And the government gave him like eight things they wanted BYU to do to recruit more women. And the administration, the Oaks administration, agrees to some of them. Like, for example, you see the first, I think Marilyn Arnold's her name. Professor of English. She was the first person in Oaks's cabinet. So he, he takes a woman and puts her in his cabinet. And, you know, there's some other things they did, but anyway, and then that changes, by the way, they start to hire women on the faculty with children. And then it wasn't until a handful of years ago where they started to allow women with children to teach in the church education system.

John Dehlin 1:55:46 Got it. Okay, so where should we go next, Matt? I. I love the story of the man going rogue and, and trying to, to baptize Wallace. Yeah, tell that story, Matt.

Doug Wallace's Unauthorized Black Ordination

Matt Harris 1:56:01 Yeah. So Doug Wallace is, is an interesting character in history. He's. He's a lawyer. He's a 44 year old lawyer from Vancouver, Washington. He's a convert to the church. And, you know, he's a lawyer, so he's argumentative. Right?

John Dehlin 1:56:21 He's.

Matt Harris 1:56:21 He's not. He's unafraid to put himself out there. So he decided to force the issue on the ban. And this is after he had written the brother in letters over the years saying, hey, look, this ban is wrong. It's incompatible with scripture. It's just. It's just wrong. Lift it. And, you know, they would write him back and give him the same boilerplate, which is we're waiting for God to tell us when to lift it. You know, and Wallace writes back, well, why not now? It's the same thing that Stuart Udall. Udall said back in the day with his 1967 dialogue piece. You know, you keep saying you're gonna do it in the future, let's just do it now. So Wallace decided to force their hand.

Speaker C 1:56:58 And what year was this?

Matt Harris 1:57:00 This would have been 1970. Let's see, four.

Speaker C 1:57:04 And you said Kimball got it in his head to lift the ban in 75. Is that right? This is a little bit before.

Matt Harris 1:57:10 Yes.

Speaker C 1:57:11 Okay.

Matt Harris 1:57:11 Yes. And so I believe it's 74. I'll stand corrected if I look at my own footnotes here. But so. So Wallace decides to press the issue by inviting a black man named Larry Lester to the Travel Lodge Motel in Portland, Oregon, which is not far from Vancouver.

John Dehlin 1:57:35 And I wonder if that's still standing, by the way. It'd Be fun to go visit on, like, a Mormon history tour that nobody

Matt Harris 1:57:44 would have any idea why it's significant except Doug Wallace and Lester. Larry Lester. Anyway, so Doug Wallace, being the clever guy that he was, he invites the media. He said, hey, we're going to ordain a black man to the priesthood. And they haven't really lifted the band yet, but I'm gonna do it anyway because I hold the priesthood myself, and I'm just gonna do it because I can. And so invites the media to come.

Speaker C 1:58:10 Did you mention he was an attorney?

Matt Harris 1:58:11 He's an attorney.

Speaker C 1:58:12 Yeah. That's so funny.

Matt Harris 1:58:14 Yeah. So they invite the media to come, and so he baptizes them by the authority of the Holy Melchizedek priesthood, which he holds. And then the media, of course, they know this is a story, so they write about it. And this is the first hint that the brethren receive in Salt Lake that one of their own priesthood holders from Vancouver, Washington, is going rogue. And so they don't, of course, they respond adversely to the. To the event. And about a week later is General Conference. And I'm certain that Doug Wallace. I never asked Wallace's. I've interviewed him several times. He's now passed. But I never asked him about this. But I'm certain he timed it with General Conference because the following week was General Conference, and he went to Salt Lake, and when the conference started, he walked down the aisle. Allegedly. He denies this, but several people heard him. So he walked down the aisle when the conference started, and he said, quote, make way for the Lord. Don't touch the Lord. I mean, I don't even know what that means. Is he claiming to be God? So obviously, it's a little strange to hear someone walk down the aisle saying, make way for the Lord. Don't touch the Lord. But that's what he's shouting. And so security ushers him out. And then he goes outside of the conference center, the tabernacle, which is where they held it in those days. And he said that he wanted to put Spencer Kimball on trial. Trial for what? He doesn't say. And the brethren are so angry, they get a restraining order against Wallace. They excommunicate Wallace from the church. They disavow the. The baptism of Larry, Lester and Kimball. This is what he wrote in his diary. Totally without authority from anyone. Douglas Wallace baptized a black boy and then proceeded to ordain him to the priesthood. He was determined to come to General Conference, where he hoped to have a confrontation with me. We got a restraining order to keep him out of the conference. He was excommunicated from the church. Wallace was a menace. That's what he wrote in his diary.

John Dehlin 2:00:33 I mean, this idea of no authority from anyone. How about Peter, James and John or John the Baptist? Like, I'm sure that 100 years prior you didn't fill out like a carbon copy piece of paper to get permission to ordain someone to the priesthood. I'm sure you just did it. But then at some point, the church got correlated and what, you had to ask permission? But I mean, he did have the priesthood. I mean, let's not forget that.

Matt Harris 2:00:58 Well, but I think, I mean, the protocol would have been that whenever you baptize somebody within your jurisdiction, the bishop of the branch president has to sign off on it. You know, they have to interview the person, find them worthy. And just like today, when you go to a funeral and you know the bishop, it's, it's their space. So if you want to have the lda. A funeral in an LDS chapel, whether they're a Mormon or not doesn't matter. The bishop or one of his representatives, usually from his counselor, one of his counselors, they have to be there. And, and typically they like to recommend they speak last in case, of course, something erroneous is said or something critical where they have to, you know, correct it or soften it. It's the same thing here. So that's the, that's what the Church does, is the bishop or the branch president has to agree to it. And Douglas Wallace did not get permission from the bishop to baptize and ordain to the Aaronic, to the Melchizedek priests of this. This young black man?

John Dehlin 2:01:55 Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a, that's a fun story. I mean, would you, or would you guess that played little, that had a little. That minimal to no impact on the brethren's concerns or fears or our sense of urgency to lift the ban.

Matt Harris 2:02:13 This is, this is. I mean, again, as a historian, I'm having to weigh out all these things the Church is getting. This stuff is happening all the time. I mean, obviously this is a unique example because. But the church has just been getting bricks thrown at them for years at this point. And anywhere they go in public. The first thing a pesky journalist wants to know is, when are you going to lift the ban? It drives them crazy. They're getting sued. Something I had to take out of my book. They're getting sued in Ecuador because the church is trying to expand and the government doesn't want a racist institution within Their boundaries. I mean, so they're having to live with all this stuff. And, you know, I'm sure it just drives Kimball crazy because, again, he knows he needs to lift the band. But the problem is you've got these stubborn apostles who don't want to do it. And so. So I wouldn't say this is a dry. A prime mover, but it's certainly one factor among many that's just driving Kimball crazy.

John Dehlin 2:03:10 Got it. Okay, so what were some of the other factors that you think really were essential?

Kimball's Reasons for Wanting to End the Ban

Matt Harris 2:03:19 Yeah, so, yeah, so we've mentioned this a little bit in a previous episode, but, you know, Kimmel wants to globalize the church, and he doesn't think the ban was rooted in doctrine. This is probably from Lester Bush. It's other things. Could be Hugh Brown, who always thought it was a policy. And so when he became the president, he inherited the Brazil Temple. It had been announced a year earlier by his predecessor, Harold Lee, and. But yet it hadn't been built yet. I don't. They hadn't even broken ground yet on the temple. And Kimball recognizes the problems with this, which is here. You have a temple in biracial Brazil. You have Brazilian Latter Day Saints who were donating their hard earned time to help build it, their money. They're sacrificing so much. There's stories told of Brazilian Latter Day Saints taking their gold feelings out of their mouths and selling them to raise money for the temple. A black Brazilian named Helvecchio Martins, his wife sells her jewelry. I mean, all of this gets back to Kimball, and he's crushed by this. These are people that are sacrificing so much to build a temple. They won't be permitted to enter. And he also knows that, you know, at this point in the 70s, Brazil is 85% biracial. I mean, give me a break. How do you determine who's got the blood and who doesn't? Kimball is not stupid. He knows that there's no such thing as, you know, let's just target the 15% who are, you know, from these pure bloodlines we've talked about in previous episodes, that that's a fiction anyway. And so he knows that if you build this temple in biracial Brazil, you're going to have people bearing the curse going into the temple. So at this point, he knows it's a foregone conclusion. It has to be lifted. And the genius of Spencer Kimball, in my opinion, is because he recognizes that the priesthood for black men and the salvific ordinances of Mormon temples, the road goes through Brazil. And so he uses Brazil as leverage to convince his hardliner of colleagues to lift the ban. And that's no small thing, because David O. McKay couldn't do it, Hugh Brown couldn't do it. And Spencer Kimball inherits the same problems that they have. And a lot of this is driven by personality. And so in the 60s, when Hugh Brown was trying to get a black man ordained in 1969, you know, there were some formidable holdups. Harold Lee, Joseph Fielding Smith, and then you've got Ezra Taft, Benson, Markey Peterson, and Delbert Stapley. And so while it's true that Kimball didn't have Harold Lee and Joseph Fielding Smith to contend with, they had passed, he now has Bruce McConkey, who Harold Lee had called into the 12 in 72. And so, so what Spencer Kimball does first is he wins his counselors over. He says, hey, guys, Marion Romney, Eldon Tanner, gotta lift this band. It's for the good of the church. I feel like this is what God wants us to do. Are you on board? And both the counselors tell him that we'll hold out to the bitter end if you think that's what we should do. But if you feel like God's telling you to lift the ban, we'll support you. And so he gets, he wins his councils over first. And then he does something that I think deserves to be noted. I mean, Elder McConkie has a reputation, justifiably so, as this authoritarian dogmatist, which he is. But Kimball recognizes that if you're going to convince the 12 to lift the ban, you've got to go after the biggest hold up first and win him over. Because if you can't win McConkey over, you're not going anybody else over. So he goes to Bruce McConkey in the spring of 1977. This is a guy who wrote Mormon doctrine, said some awful things about black people, and he goes to McConkey in the spring of 77, and he said that Elder McConkey, we've got this temple in Brazil. You know about it. Harold Lee, present Lee had announced it to the church, and I feel the need to follow through with it. But yet most of the saints there won't be able to enter. What do you think we should do? Gee, I never thought of it. So he poses the problem to Elder McConkie, and Kimmel knows the solution. But as a good manager of people, he's trying to get McConkey to buy into the solution, to come up with a solution on his own. And so McConkie gives it some thought and he writes President Kimball this lengthy memo. And he said, look, you've been talking about globalizing the church. When will the world be converted? Your famous address that you gave in April of 74, that we've got to bring the gospel to every kindred nation, tongue and people, including our Negro brothers and sisters, as he puts it. He said, we need to lift the ban. People in Brazil need the gospel. Black people in Africa need the gospel. And, you know, Kimball was not prepared for this. He had been talking with them. But Kimball McConkey, you know, it's like he comes up with the idea himself. And his son would later give his father most of the credit for lifting the band, which is complete nonsense. But, yeah, that's what Philly McConkey, Joseph Fieldy McConkey, wrote a memoir of his father, that Desert book, published in 2003. And I read the chapter on the Revelation. I just started laughing, literally out loud. My son's in the other room, like, what are you laughing at, Dad? I said, ah, you don't need to know. But it was about, you know, Joseph McConkey giving his father credit for lifting the band. When the truth is President Kimmel knew all along what needed to be done. He was just trying to get buy in from Elder McConkey. And he did it in such a gentle way by posing it as a problem to Elder McConkey that needed to be solved. And when Elder McConkey said, you know, I know how we can get around biracial Brazil. We can ordain everybody to the priesthood, like, President Kimball didn't know that. So he wins over Elder McConkey, which is huge. And then they start to pick off they.

John Dehlin 2:09:36 And can I. Can I just say, like the, the part of your book where it shows McConkey employing what I would call motivated reasoning to basically

Speaker C 2:09:48 re.

John Dehlin 2:09:49 Re architect his entire theology around adoption and bloodline. That's an entertaining part of the book that maybe we won't have time to go into. But it was just. It was just stunning to see how. How willing McConkey was to just generate an entire new theological framework once he realized that the change needed to be made.

Matt Harris 2:10:13 Yeah, yeah. I mean, this book is a lot of things. It's theology, it's culture, it's history, it's politics, it's law. And I get frustrated sometimes when I read LDS books and there's not theology. I mean, you know, there are books, LDS books that are really focused on theology, which maybe philosophers would write or people in religious studies. But we historians need to focus on theology because it's the theology that makes meaning for the church. It's why people are attracted to the church mostly. Sometimes people come into the church because of the community, but really there's something theological that drives them and then ultimately keeps them in or pushes them out.

John Dehlin 2:10:49 Yeah.

Matt Harris 2:10:50 And the theology is important here because it's not just, you know, what should we do? Elder McConkey, President Kimball says, okay, great. You see the same way that I see it, that we need to lift the ban and globalize so we can globalize the church, but we need new theology. And can you help with this? Elder McConkie, I mean, he is the church's go to guy on the scriptures, just like his late father in law was during his generation. And so Elder McConkie said, I'll do that, president. Whatever you want, I'll do. And so he wrote another memoir, memo to the President. This is again In March of 77, he wrote a memo to the church president. He said, this is how we can justify lifting the band. We will adopt Negroes into the House of Israel. And by virtue of that adoption, they will inherit the blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their Negro blood will be purged out of them when they're baptized and conferred priesthood ordination. I know that sounds jarring to folks who don't understand this lineage theology and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to remind your listeners, those are the temple lineages. Those are the priesthood lineages. So you can't hold the priesthood and go to the temple if you're from this cursed lineage, this lineage that's outside of God's covenant with the House of Israel. You can't do it. And so to get away around this whole curse of Cain and Ham stuff, you've got to be able to adopt them into the covenant lineage. It's Elder McConkie who creates this new theology. And what's really, really striking about this new theology is that in 1972, when Harold Lee was the president, Spencer Kimball himself, when he was president of the Quorum of the twelve, he wrote President Lee a letter and he said, president Lee, is it the doctrine of the church that Negroes can be adopted into the House of Israel? And Lee wrote back and said, no, it's not the doctrine of the church. Even McConkey himself had written about this in the 1960s. It is not the doctrine of the church to adopt Negroes into the House of Israel. So by March of 77, he's flipping this entire script on its Head. And President Kimball is giving him the latitude to do it. There's a new sheriff in town, and President Kimball doesn't feel beholden to whatever his predecessors had said about adoption. And so McConkey is not creating this out of whole cloth. Joseph Smith had talked about Gentiles being adopted into the House of Israel and Gentiles. Just to be clear to your listeners, if you're Jewish, a gentile is anyone who's non Jewish. And for years and years and years, LDS Church leaders had used the word gentile to describe anyone who was not a Mormon. Clearly, that could be problematic if you're a Jew in Utah and you're being told you're a Gentile. But anyway, that's how they use the word Gentile. And so Bruce McConkey had just sort of built upon a core teaching of Joseph Smith by applying it to black people. And that became a church line. That was the new theology that Kimball needed to move the church forward and to help fellow apostles and members understand the theology. And so after 1978, that became the standard line that apostles would use, that black people could be adopted into the House of Israel and enjoy all the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And you'll see that in their patriarchal blessings a lot.

John Dehlin 2:14:23 Got it. You mentioned that the ban was going to go through. The lifting of the ban was going to go through Brazil. Why wasn't it going to go through Africa? You know, it's probably obvious to some, but I just want to hear you say, why wasn't it obvious that if the ban was going to be lifted, it was going to go through Africa, not Brazil?

Brazil's Temple and the Racial Question

Matt Harris 2:14:47 Yeah, a couple reasons. One is the church does not have a presence in Africa, unlike scores of other churches, Protestants, Catholics, who had a presence in Africa for years.

John Dehlin 2:15:00 Well, they had South Africa and they had Kenya. Right.

Matt Harris 2:15:03 Just South Africa. And I don't think they have a strong presence in Kenya.

John Dehlin 2:15:08 Where. Where were the. I mean, they had some members, right? Some.

Matt Harris 2:15:12 Nigeria.

John Dehlin 2:15:13 Oh, Nigeria. Okay.

Matt Harris 2:15:14 Yeah. But remember in an earlier episode we talked about, they tried to have all white missionaries or.

John Dehlin 2:15:21 Yeah.

Matt Harris 2:15:22 Church members from Utah go to Nigeria and run those churches. And it failed miserably because the Nigerians are like, why do we have to have that white dude from Salt Lake, USA running our church? Why can't we run our own churches? And that was, of course, the foundation for Hugh Brown to push to lift the ban at least partially in the early 60s.

John Dehlin 2:15:43 But they had a presence of Brazil. What, because they didn't realize how big the curse of Cain One drop rule was going to become for them in Brazil.

Matt Harris 2:15:54 Yeah. So Africa. So Africa, of course, is the originator of the curse, Right? African people, all of that, it's lineage that we've talked about. And so they went to South Africa because South Africa was. Was. There were a lot of white people, and so. But they stayed away from sub Saharan Africa, the majority black countries in Africa. So that's. That's why they didn't. They don't grow in the, you know, the continent of Africa is. Because most of it's majority black. Brazil, on the other hand, is biracial. And so when they went in 1928, they wanted to focus on the southern part of Brazil where German people had migrated. And they thought they would target the German transplants in southern Brazil and they would avoid the northern part of Brazil, which was majority black. What the brethren couldn't predict was that the majority black part of Brazil in the north, over time, they would start to migrate to the southern part. And it made it even more difficult to just search out people with those pure bloodlines, as they put it. And so it was one of those things, John, that once they were there, they thought, oh, my goodness, this is harder than we thought, you know, because people didn't stay put. So once the black, black Brazilians moved to the white part of Brazil, that's where it became really complicated. And so they had been there since 1928, and. And then by the 1970s, there's a growing number of black and biracial Brazilians who get baptized. And I want to just say a quick moment, if I can, about one of the most famous converts, a guy named Helvecchio Martins. And Helvecchio Martins is a black Brazilian businessman. He joined the church in the early 70s when he was in his early 40s. And he's. I've met him before. He's. He's a really. I mean, I was impressed by him. I met him in a grocery store in Provo, Utah, when I was a student. Imagine this. And he was called as a general authority. And I saw him walking around, his white shirt and tie, and I was like one of many eager Mormons to go over there and shake his hand and say, you know, I'm so glad that you're a church leader. I support you. And Helvetia Martins, just to subvert the story for a moment, became the first black general authority in the church. So that was why I met him in Food for Less grocery market in Provo, Utah, in 1994. But anyway, so the early 70s, he was. He got baptized, and he was faithful in the church. He obviously accepted the ban, but still went to church. And he and his wife, Ruta, I think is how you say it, I don't speak Portuguese, so forgive me. But Javecio Martins, his wife Ruta, and their son Marcus Martins, he was coming of mission age. He was a teenager, and they wanted him to go on a mission, and they started to save for his mission fund, even though they knew he couldn't go at the time because of the ban. But they saved anyway, hoping and praying that there would be a day where their son Marcus could serve a mission. So Helvecchio in Ruta had contributed a lot to the missionary fund. And word gets back to Spencer Kimball from a guy named Jim Faust, who at this point, is not an apostle. Faust wasn't called into the quorum of the 12 until 1977. So he was a general authority 70 over that area in South America, including Brazil. And he met the Martins. And so he wrote Kimball and Elder McConkie. It was interesting, those two, because he knows Elder McConkie is a big wig on this sort of thing. And so he wrote him a letter. He said, we've got this special Negro couple. They're really, really special. It's a shame they can't have the priest and go to the temple. So Faust is sort of preparing, you know, softening it. These are good people. And so Kimball, as I mentioned earlier, wants to use the temple to break down this racial barrier. And so Kimball starts to tell the brother, and he said, look, this is what I want to do. And they're not on board yet, and all of them anyway. And so he said, why don't you guys go to Brazil? At least check it out, interview these people, associate with them. You know, racial justice begins with relationships. Meet them. And so what happens is, is that a whole string of general authorities, including apostles, will start to trickle into the mission home, which is where they stayed at the time. And the mission home that they largely stand is a guy by the name of Roger Buler. And I asked his wife. I Buer's dead now, but I asked his wife, who's still alive, I said, did you. Did you know why all of these general authorities are coming in over a period of 18 months? She said, we had no idea. We had been in the mission home for a while at that point. They didn't tell us. They were just, you know, they gave us the impression they were just there on a routine church assignment. And she said, do you know why they were there? I said, oh, boy, do I. And I said, they're. They're on a reconnaissance mission. And I said. I said, can you tell me who they were? And she said, yes. I wrote it all down in my journal. I said, can I see your journal? Okay. I'm pretty daring, I know. And so she sent me her journal entries of all the apostles who were coming in, and she would tally them up. President Kimball came four times, and she list the dates, and Apostle McConee came the most. They're doing recon to see if these folks can run their own churches. That's what this is. She had no idea. So I told her. She said, that makes sense. I said, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. You can lift the band all you want, but if you don't have people to run the churches, none of it matters. And so they're. They're interviewing people, you know, these black Brazilians surreptitiously. You know, they're not telling them why they're interviewing them. They're just feeling them out. You know, what's your educational level? Where do you work? What's your income? Are you in debt? I mean, they're really interrogating them. And, you know, at least the black Brazilians that I've talked to over the years, they had no idea why they were being interrogated. Helve Martin certainly didn't. He's got an autobiography that was published in 1994, and so he talks about this. Anyway, so they do target Martins. And there's a. President Kimball flies to Brazil in 19. Let's see, 1975, I think. And they hold the dedication ceremony for the temple. They're going to dedicate the land for the building of the Brazil temple. And Martinez is there, this family. And Kimball's on the stand. He's conducting or presiding over the meeting, but Jim Faust is conducting. And Kimball motions for Hevecchio Martins to come up to the stand as the prelude music is playing. And Martinez is just an average dude. He has no idea that the church presence, you know, beckoning him. He thinks it's somebody behind him, and then he doesn't move. And finally, Jim Faust, whom the Martin who Helvecchio knew, he said, get up here. And so that's when Helvecchio knew that he was being summoned. So he went to the stand. And the president of the church shakes his hand and grabs him with his other hand. So he shakes it in one hand and then grabs his Forearm, which is a extra, you know, intimate embrace. And he says, remember, remember, brother Martins, of all the blessings, be faithful and all of these blessings will be yours. And I'm paraphrasing, that's not an exact quote, but that's what he says, you know, these blessings will be yours. Be faithful. So Martinez goes back to his, his chair, and of course he's befuddled. He has no idea what did that mean? Why would the President summons me up, nobody else summon me up, nobody else, and then give me the special blessing? And so he's contemplating throughout the dedicatory service about what the President told him. And when it was done, Kimball comes down the aisle and stops him again. And he says, remember what I said, and scurries off. I mean, I can only imagine Helvetio Martinez's head is just spinning at this point. And James Faust asked Martins, he said, can you take me to the airport? I need a ride. And Martinez said, of course. And Martinez or Faust reiterates the same thing that the President had told him. Be faithful and all the blessings are yours. What blessings? He doesn't say temple, he doesn't say priesthood. But what. That's what he's referring to. So the President's planting a seed. And the. A year later, Faust follows up with Martinez. He said, I just talked to President Kimball. So this would have been 76. A year later, he follows, I just talked to President Kimball. Just wants me to remind you to remember what he told you at the dedicatory service. Be faithful and all of the blessings will be yours. And so he's really, really preparing Martinez for the change to come. And I know we'll talk about this maybe in a later episode, but when the ban is lifted, Martin's hears about it. It just, he just starts to sob uncontrollably. So he'd been prepared for this for a long time, that the band was coming. But again, Kimball has the holdups, so he knows what needs to be done, but he's got to get buy in from the corporate corn.

Speaker C 2:25:13 I love that story. That was so fun.

Matt Harris 2:25:16 It is a great story because it really shows you the human emotion behind all of this. And I mean, this is a faithful dude who's paying his tithing, he's sacrificing his wife, sells her jewelry, and, you know, to use a Mormon term, they're just exercising faith that, that, you know, this will be, they'll be treated right. And in the end, they are, I

Speaker C 2:25:37 think throughout your whole book you have those great stories of these Missionaries who are these young men who want to serve missions, but they can't. Like Fernandez, you have a few of them, and then even the sister missionary who was currently serving and realized that she had a black grandfather. There's just so many really good stories that really humanize this whole experience for what Kimball is seeing and how he also realizes that he needs to lift the ban. I just love all these stories.

Building Consensus Among the Quorum of the Twelve

Matt Harris 2:26:00 Yeah. I want to share one, if that's okay. This is. This is one in 1975, where at this point, Spencer Kimball's trying to get the Brethren to lift the band. He's working with them in private. He's talking collectively. He. He can't win them over. He's. His counselors are in his corner. Elder McConkey's in his corner at this point. And then soon Gordon Hinckley and Boyd Packer, of all people, will be in his corner. But he's got a whole bunch of other holdouts that refuse to budge. And we'll come back to that in just a second. But by 1975, he's been, you know, talking with the Brethren to lift the band. They can't get them to do it. And there's a great story that occurs in Mexico when the mission president, Tom Fiennes, learns that one of his sister missionaries had learned that she had a cursed ancestry, that she discovered that her grandfather was black. And President Faience now has this moment, this existential moment. What do I do? You know, he's trying to be faithful to the church's teachings, but yet this would be devastating to this missionary, this woman missionary under his purview. And so in desperation, he. He contacted his apostolic advisor, Howard W. Hunter. It was his job over Mexico in the mission region there. So we asked Elder Hunter a letter. He said, look, I've got this sister missionary under my direction, and she just discovered that her grandfather is black. What do I do? And Elder Hunter wrote back, and he said, tell me what kind of a missionary she is and how much time does she have left? And President Finds wrote back, she's an excellent missionary, and she's got four months left. And Elder Hunter wrote back, and he said, well, Tom, I think you should. At least you should take about four months, a minimum of four months, and research the issue. I mean, when I read that, it really just shows you that Elder Hunter and others, too, but Elder Hunter, I mean, they're just tired of this. They've been fielding questions like this for years, some of which we've talked about in this. These podcast episodes. Some of which I talk about in this book. They're tired of it, they're exhausted. I mean, are you really going to send a dutiful, faithful missionary home because of her grandfather and one who doesn't

Speaker C 2:28:30 even hold the priesthood? Like, I'm confused by why this would be an issue. Because as a sister missionary you don't get to baptize anyone. You don't put your hands on anyone's heads to give them the priesthood or the Holy Ghost or anything. But like, and even now, or at least in 2020, I was hearing of missionaries and I think my brother in law even at the time was sent on his mission before he was even endowed. And, and so like people are serving missions without going to the temple. So I don't, I'm confused by why this missionary, especially a sister missionary, I'm confused by why that was in question with her, her black grandfather.

Matt Harris 2:29:02 Yeah, I mean, that's an important question to ask. What does this have to do with the priesthood? Right. It's the same reason why they had segregated policies with the church owned Hotel Utah. What, what is, why do we have a segregated hotel? What does that do with the priesthood? It's the same reason why they don't want black people into byu. What does this have to do with the priesthood? It's the same reason why they don't want black people giving sermons or holding a calling in the primary. If you're a woman, what does this have to do with the priesthood? And the answer is it's all born out of racism. That's all it is. And so byu, you can give a different answer a little bit with interracial marriage. Right. They're afraid of black students coming to BYU and you know, dating white students and that could ultimately end up in marriage. But what does this woman, this black missionary have to do with any of this? It's just born out of racism. And they don't want to normalize the fact that black people could be preaching the gospel. That's really what this is about.

Speaker C 2:29:55 That's really disturbing to think about it that way.

Matt Harris 2:29:58 Yeah, but that's really. I've asked that same question, Julia. You know, you don't have to agree with the reason for maybe keeping BYU students out, obviously, but you can at least understand where they're coming from. Right. With interracial fears. But when you're denying a black person the right to talk over the pulpit. David O. McKay, as much as we'd like to think he's a racial progressive, in 1952, he gets asked by the presiding bishop. Hey, I've got this colored man. Can he talk in this local ward? President McKay writes him back. No, we can't talk. Really. You don't have to hold the priesthood talk, say talk in church. You don't have to hold the priesthood account, church ties, or if you're a woman, to serve in the, you know, release society or the primary. But yet they're denied those. Those rights because of just, you know, racism.

John Dehlin 2:30:44 Got it.

Matt Harris 2:30:47 All right, so if it's okay, I think. What if we jump to how President Kimball gets the rest of the 12 to come on board?

John Dehlin 2:30:54 Yeah. The consensus building.

Matt Harris 2:30:56 The consensus building.

John Dehlin 2:30:57 Yeah.

Matt Harris 2:30:58 So. So by 1977, he's got Elder McConkey on board, his two counselors, and Boyd Packer and Gordon Hinckley. I know that's jarring to hear from people. Boyd Packer, because he, like his friend Bruce McConkey, he's very conservative. But Boyd Packer and Gordon Hinckley were the apostolic advisors in the early 70s to the genesis group. And they saw firsthand how the ban had ripped apart this group and forced these black men and women into exile. They left the church. Some of them even fled to Canada. And so it's not for me. It's not. It wasn't hard to figure out why Elder Packer came on board early on because he recognized up close and personal that the band was incompatible with black membership. And so he came around Hinckley, the two counselors, McConkey. Now you've got other people in the 12 who have not come around yet. And.

John Dehlin 2:32:05 Hey, hey. Can I ask a quick question, Matt?

Matt Harris 2:32:07 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:32:08 Did you have documents that extend. Explained packers coming around and tying that to Genesis, or is that just sort of a dots you connected because.

Matt Harris 2:32:18 No, no, that's good. That's good. No inference for sure.

John Dehlin 2:32:22 Okay.

Matt Harris 2:32:22 Yeah. I wish I had other packers diaries, but, of course, something tells me that if I made a request, they wouldn't give it to me.

John Dehlin 2:32:29 Wait, but you didn't leave them to. To BYU or University of Utah?

Matt Harris 2:32:35 Yeah. You know, jokes aside, Elder Packer was furious at the Bennion family when he found out that years later that the Bennion family had donated the papers of the apostle to the byu. Packer was furious at the George Albert Smith family when they donated their late father's papers to the University of Utah. And in this case, the University of Utah paid the Smith family money for the collection. And Packer fumed. In private, he said they sold their birthright for a mess of potty and you know, now. Now that's all been changed. The Church security, when there's a death among one of the 12, the church security. I'm not exaggerating a little bit. They literally go to the home before even the funeral, and they tape off the home and they take the files, and you name it, they take it.

Speaker C 2:33:32 Wait, can I ask a quick question? I've heard. I've heard from other people that some of the Brethren are not allowed to keep journals, but their wives are fully capable of keeping them. And I don't know if that's true because you're. You're quoting from them, you're pulling from them, and then you're talking about how they secured them really quickly after they pass away. Can you speak on that at all, or do you know the answer to that?

Matt Harris 2:33:50 Yeah, just a quick aside. I can't. Well, they used to keep diaries because I have them. But of course, if. I don't know if that's changed. I've heard conflicting things, Julia. To be honest, I've been asked that by quite a few people over the years, and I would say a couple quick anecdotes about that.

Speaker C 2:34:06 Maybe.

Matt Harris 2:34:06 Maybe they're asked not to keep diaries. I don't know. But I find that hard to believe because it becomes irrelevant if they keep a diary, if the Church security goes in and takes the diary and then puts it under lock and key. So I don't know, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I'll do some more digging into that.

John Dehlin 2:34:26 Julie, I have a quick answer to that. I interviewed Ted Lyon, the son of T. Edgar Lyon that Matt has talked about in his book. Ted Lyon was my professor at byu. I was his ta. We were close friends. And after I spent lots of time with him at byu and before. After I interviewed him for Mormon Stories, there's an episode about this. He suggested to me, either in the interview or privately or both, that during his time in Chile, where he was both a mission president, a temple president, and, I believe, an MTC president, he was also the interpreter for Jeffrey R. Holland. And I believe it was Ted Lyon who told me that Holland told him that the Brethren signed an agreement that they were forbidden to keep a journal. But that. That's more of a modern. In the past several decades sort of thing than. Than, you know, earlier. So.

Speaker C 2:35:31 Okay, so like a recent. A recent thing.

Matt Harris 2:35:33 Okay, well, for whatever it's worth, you guys, Gordon Hinckley and Tom Monson both kept diaries, right?

Speaker C 2:35:40 Wow.

John Dehlin 2:35:41 It would have been either they just. Either they disobeyed or they had a grandfather clause or something to that effect. Yeah. If what. If what Ted Lyon told me is

Matt Harris 2:35:54 true, if I had. If Ezra Tap Benson kept diaries, he died 94. I would say if that is true, I would say it happened in the 90s.

John Dehlin 2:36:04 Okay. Yeah, that would make sense.

Matt Harris 2:36:06 If it is true.

John Dehlin 2:36:07 Yeah.

Matt Harris 2:36:08 So I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it is. And they certainly don't, you know, they want to keep private deliberations private. And that's one of the reasons why Lester Bush was on the hot seat, is because he, you know, revealed this.

John Dehlin 2:36:20 Yeah.

Matt Harris 2:36:20 All right. So back in. So half the quorum has now come on board. The other half has not. President Kimball meets with the 12 in public settings and also in private settings in March of 19. Let me go back to January of 1978 is a pivotal moment, because in January 1978, Spencer Kimball sends out a letter signed by the First Presidency to bishops and stake presidents and branch presidents and mission presidents. And he says, please don't send any more inquiries to the. To headquarters. The genealogy department is overwhelmed with requests to figure out lineage. You figure it out on your own. That is the first visible manifestation that President Kimball is shutting it all down, that Salt Lake will no longer police racial boundaries. It's one of the reasons why they are doing it in the first place is because, of course, the mission presidents and state presidents couldn't do it. So they wanted help with the genealogy from Salt Lake. Well, they're done. So. So that's January 78. But yet. But yet there are still people who are holding out. In March of 78. In March of 78, this is after an intense month of praying and fasting in the temple. This is President Kimball. In fact, it was so intense, his wife was worried about him. She thought he looked sick and haggard. And she called up his secretary, Arthur Haycock, and she said, what's wrong with my. My husband? And she said, did an apostle get excommunicated? And what she meant by that was Francis Lyman. In 1943, that was the first quorum meeting that her husband had attended as a newly called apostle was participating in the church court of a senior apostle who took his secretary on as a polygamous wife. So they excommunicated him for adultery. And this elder, young elder Kimball, had to deal with this. So she. She said, he looks the same now as he did then in 43. And Haycock said, I can assure you that's not the case. You'll just have to be patient. So. So he's praying, he's haggard, he's tired. And In March of 78, he meets with the. This is March. He meets with the. The 12. And he said, I want to lift the band. And they're in the temple, and they give him pushback. Nope, there are people there not wanting to lift the band. And so he can't do it. And he's frustrated. He tells his counselors, I'm frustrated. I want to lift the band. I thought. We thought we could get it done this month. Didn't happen. And so he meets again collectively. And now he starts to intensify his meetings privately. And he meets with the apostles, the holdouts. And he asks them, you know, what's the problem? Why are you holding this out? We've got to grow the church. We've got issues. We can't figure out who's got the blood. We've got patriarchal. Patriarchal blessing issues. We can't. You know, we're. Some of our patriarchs are declaring the lineage of Canaan Ham on their. Their black and biracial members. So he wins over more of these, the apostles, in March and into April and also into May. But he has three apostles that give him fits. He cannot win over Ezra Tap Benson, Delbert Stapley, or Markey Peterson. And so in May, Kimball makes up his mind. I'm tired of waiting. And he writes out a revelation in which he explains that God wants him to lift the ban. This is in May, a full month before it's declared. And so he writes it out in May and decides to do something clever. Decides to send Marky Peterson on a church assignment in Ecuador. If you can't win him over, get him out of the country. And by the way, let me just add parenthetically, this is not the first time Spencer W. Kimball had done this. When he couldn't reach a consensus to overturn something or to make a new doctrinal or policy change, he would just simply take the naysayers, call them on church assignment, and then have a quorum in Salt Lake, whether it's what, seven or eight people, and say, hey, this is what we did while you were away. This is not the first time he's done this. So he calls Elder Peterson to a church assignment, Ecuador. And it just so happens that Delbert Stapley has declining health. And so he gets admitted to the hospital in Salt Lake. He'll later die in August. So that's where he was at. And then you've got one person on June 1, the day that Spencer Kimball is determined to lift the ban. One holdout, Ezra Tap Benson, the same guy that who had been calling Martin King a communist, the same guy who called the NAACP a communist front group, the same guy who associated with white supremacists, who stumped at their rallies, who promoted segregation. So Kimball, they had their meeting on June 1, their typical Thursday meeting in the temple. And after they their meeting, they took communion, which is what they normally do. And then they say a closing prayer, saying, closing him. And off they go. Well, this time around, President Kimball, after they finished their routine business, he said, I'd like you, brother, you brother, and to stay and forego lunch. There's something on my mind. And they knew what it was because he had been trying the previous three months. And so when President Kimball broached the idea of lifting the ban, Elder Benson proposed they table the discussion. That's a nice way of saying, I don't want to talk about this. And President Kimball said, nope, we're going to talk about it today. And so that's when President Kimball said, let's open this up to discussion. And Elder McConkey is the one that comes to the president's aid, and he gives this 10 minute oration of why black people need to hold the priesthood, that Jesus can't come again to claim his kingdom until we preach the gospel to every kindred nation, tongue and people, including Africa, sub Saharan Africa. He talked about that doctrinally, we can make this work, that black people can be adopted into the House of Israel. This is the same thing he wrote the President over a year earlier in his private memo. And so he comes to the president's aid. And in my mind's eye, I can't prove this, but in my mind's eye, I have Elder McConkie just speaking to a party of one. And by that point, it's Elder Benson. And so after Elder McConkie spoke for 10 minutes, Tom Monson gets up next and talks and gives his reasons for lifting the band. And the next person in line was Boyd Packer, who Boyd Packer and Bruce McConkey are close friends. So Boyd Packer gives this 10 minute oration why the ban should be lifted. And really, it's not lost on me that the two people that come to President Kimball's aide are the two people who witnessed the dissension in the Genesis group over the ban. And so that's why they come to the president's aid. So finally, one apostle after another, they're bearing their testimony. This is what God wants. This is what we need to do. I mean, you can just see it one after another. They're just popping. Elder Benson, you know, how dare you hold out. And so anyway, they. They pray. And this is when, you know, President Kimball is, you know, praying. This is. They're in a prayer circle around the altar in the temple. For your listeners who aren't LDs, this is a special prayer circle where they unite in a circle, they put their hands on each other. It's a form of solidarity as a form of intimacy. And after this lengthy prayer, you know, Benson comes around. He says, okay, I think this is what we need to do. And later on, he'll talk about that. He was not going to support this, but he changed his mind. Whether he felt the Holy Spirit during that moment, that intimate moment, or maybe during when Elder McConkie or Packer Monson were speaking or others, I don't know. But he changes his mind about it, and he, too, agrees to lift the ban. That leaves two people left that they felt that they needed consensus on, at least to keep a unified front on something so significant. So President Kimball, after the meeting was over, he called Elder Peterson in Ecuador, and he said. He called him Mark. He said, mark, we met the 12 and I, or the 12 and us. We met today in the. In the temple, as we normally do, and we lifted the band. You did what? Yeah, we lifted the band. Was there a consensus? Yeah, there was. Well, President, if there was a consensus, then I suppose I won't stand in the way. That is hardly a ringing endorsement. But Elder Peterson told the president, he said, do me a favor, would you please? When you publicize the lifting of the ban, when you publicize it in the Deseret News and in the church News, would you post a disclaimer indicating that the church is still opposed to interracial marriage? And that's what President Kimball agrees to. And so if you look at the deseret news from Jan. 9, 1978, that's the first time, a week after the revelation, that's the first time when the world will learn about the ban. Well, they'll learn about it through news reports first, but that's the first time when they read about it in print. And if you go on your phones today, when we hang up, you can see it. The interracial disclaimer is right next to it in the Deseret News. And that's obviously problematic for a lot of black Latter Day Saints because they were told for all these years, you can't go to the temple. You can't marry white People because your. Your seed is cursed, and it will curse their seed. But then when the ban is lifted, it's like, why does it matter? Well, it doesn't matter. It's born out of racism. So Peterson insists that the ban, the interracial strictures, remain in place, and that becomes a huge problem for black and biracial Latter Day Saints. In the meantime, Delbert Stapley, they visit the First Presidency, visit him in the hospitals he lay dying. And he says the same thing he said. He said, well, if it's a consensus, then I won't stand in the way. And so I. What I want to let your readers know or your listeners know is back to evidence. There is no evidence that Elder Peterson, Elder Benson and Elder Stapley saw a place for black men in the church as priesthood holders. None. In the days leading up to the revelation. And to Benson's credit, you know, he listens to what his colleagues in the quorum, you know what they tell him, and he changes course. But it's Revelation is a process. This wasn't some event that happened on June 1st. I mean, Kimball had been working with the apostles for days and weeks and months and even years to get to that point. That's the revelation. It's not June 1st. It's all the hard work. At one point in my book, I quote something that Benson or Kimball had told his son from a letter he had written in the 1960s. He told his son, he said, son, revelation occurs when people are on their tippy toes reaching for the heavens. It doesn't occur when you're on your couch lounging or watching TV or eating. And what he meant by that was, it's an active process in which you have to ask the right questions and speak to the right people and get the consensus that you need. That's the revelation. And Hugh Brown and the late Neal Maxwell, an apostle, and I'm sure, others, but I have Brown and Maxwell's accounts of what the rebel, what revelation looks like. And when it comes to institutional revelation, that's how it works. Works. It's a process. Now, individual Mormons may feel like they God's telling them something right through the Holy Spirit. Or maybe, as Joseph Smith once put it, sudden strokes of ideas come. Come into their heads. That's revelation. God bestowing new knowledge on you. That's a typical Mormon line. And that's fine. That's individual revelation. But institutional revelation requires a consensus among the highest church leaders. And you can't get that consensus unless you work with them.

How the Decision to Lift the Ban Was Made

Speaker C 2:48:49 I feel like that's super different than what we hear as members of the church because we hear that the prophet and apostles speak to God, and then it's through revelation, whatever that means. Whether they're seeing Jesus in the temple or it's the good. They all have that good feeling. Like, it's just. That just feels really different. Like, I love that quote from Kimball where he says you have to, like, you have to work really hard. You can't just sit on a couch and receive revelation. Like, but I feel like that's super different than how members are taught. Maybe I'm. I feel like, John, you've talked about that before, too, where members are taught about how they receive revelation. And, like, I've heard this. This too, with the family proclamation. Where. Where you get the language from President Oaks, where he says that the, you know, language was deliberated. And then we. We decided to. We had to decide on things, then we had to send it back up to the First Presidency and it came back down. And like, we. We worked on this for a long time. Like, in my. As an active, believing member, I never thought of revelation that way. And it's just super interesting that you're also putting that out with this, where it's like, this is how revelation works. You have to convince them or you have to show them different evidences and everyone. All 15 have to be on board. I just feel like that's really different than what we hear.

Matt Harris 2:49:54 Yeah. No, I think, Julia, that part of the issue in the church is I think they're not mutually exclusive. Right. You can receive revelation, which is the way the church usually teaches it, that revelation is an event. Right. I was out walking one day and the Spirit whispered to me. Or I was fasting and praying. As I was praying, the Spirit whispered to me. Or I was in the celestial room in the temple and the Spirit spoke to me. I mean, that's all true. That's how Mormons teach it, and that's how church leaders teach it. But the way that the church makes doctrinal changes, it's a collective enterprise. And it doesn't mean that the God can't speak to the church president and say, hey, look, this band needs to go if you're going to universalize the church. I mean, that could happen. Kimball, I think if he were in the room hearing this, he would say, that's absolutely what was happening. God was telling me we had to lift the ban. So that. That's true. But when it comes to getting his colleagues on board, the Doctrine and Covenants talks about that revelation has to be by the unified front of the first presidency in the Quorum of the twelve. That's the consensus part. And, and oftentimes I think the church doesn't. Me being critical for a moment, I'm not usually critical. But the church doesn't tell the story very well because they lead one to believe that the revelation is always an event and less a process. And I wish it would be more of the process because when you read their first pregnancy in quorum of the 12 minutes, you realize it's a process more than its event oftentimes.

Speaker C 2:51:25 Do you think that, that teaching it that way would hurt the church at all to teach that it's a process rather than an event? Because I feel like there could be negative implications with that kind of change?

Matt Harris 2:51:33 No, I, no, I don't think so at all. Because they're not, again, they're not mutually exclusive. You can argue, as President Kimmel probably would, that, yeah, it's a process. And it took time to work with the 12. But also, as I was working with them, God was speaking to us and telling us that we needed to lift the ban. So, I mean, that's, there's nothing that's, that's, that would be detrimental to faith. But, you know, it's, it's just hard sometimes because I think I'm always, I think those, your listeners who know me know how I operate. I think transparency is always the best way to do this. And when I heard something, you know, a few years ago with President Nelson, you know, I had a revelation in the middle of night or something like that about shortening the church from three hours to what, two hours? I, I just, I just wish, you know, maybe he did have some. Maybe he felt like God was telling him that that's what needed to be done. But when he, when I, when I read that, I thought, that's really interesting, you know, because I just talked to a church bureaucrat at a conference recently and they were just saying they did some surveys and nobody was going to church. And the ones who were at church were in the foyer and in the surveys, they said the services are too long. You know, for me, I would say, President Nelson, why don't you just tell the church body, yeah, we've done some surveys. We care about what you have to say. And we've learned that a number of you think that for whatever reason that our three hour block is too long. So we decided to shorten it. And I feel like this is what God wants us to do and we've heard from you and let's do it. But we don't hear about the survey, we don't hear about the reality of it all. And you know, I think transparency is always best and I think people respect and respond well to that. Transparency.

Speaker C 2:53:17 Yeah, I agree with you. I think transparency is really important. I just think that like, maybe if they were very honest about how revelation works, it would take away from the authority of the church or from like the wonder of these men speaking to God. Like, like, I know you're leaving room for believers and I do think there is a place for these things, like with Nelson saying that he had this vision of shortening church. But in reality it's. Yeah. Anyway, I just, it's hard to know which. How to take that or how to present that to the church, I guess.

Matt Harris 2:53:44 Well, in my mind, you know, in my mind they're not, they're not at odds with each other. I mean, you can still produce a faith affirming narrative if that's what you want to do. And, and by talking about the process, I mean the Doctrine and Covenants, when you talk about you need unanimity. That is a process by its very nature. And so it's already built into the Mormon canon. But yet we oftentimes see in the Ensign or the Liahona, as it's called now, and other church utterances, it's always an event to the, to the brethren rather than a process. And I think that they frequently, Julie, don't want to talk about the process because the process can get ugly sometimes. Right. I mean, my whole book is about the process and how Hugh Brown and others had pushed back on the process and they got penalized for it. Hugh Brown was dropped from the governing first presidency over the process.

Speaker C 2:54:38 I also wanted to ask. Sorry to interrupt you, Julie.

John Dehlin 2:54:42 We paused that question.

Speaker C 2:54:43 Oh, sure, sure.

John Dehlin 2:54:44 Make one comment. I, I do think it's fair to say that once you see how the sausage really gets made, it's hard to distinguish between what is just general corporate diplomacy, coalition building and politics. It's almost impossible to distinguish between that and what the church would call revelation. It's kind of like when the church tries to distinguish between emotions and the Holy Ghost. Nobody's ever really been able to define for me the difference between feeling joy and peace and love and patience and whatever the Holy Ghost makes you feel if it's telling you to feel good, like. And so I think, I think there. Julie, I think you have a point. There is institutional value in allowing there to be perceived or even Fostering a sense of divine power and direct inspiration and direct revelation. Because otherwise the members conclude that it's not much different than a corporate boardroom.

Speaker C 2:55:52 Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

John Dehlin 2:55:54 Okay, keep going. I didn't want mean to interrupt.

Speaker C 2:55:57 Oh, no, you're fine. I just wanted to ask. So you seem to imply that if Stapley and Peterson were there with Benson, that this probably would not have been lifted. Because they weren't. Because even afterwards they weren't even supportive. They're just like, well, I won't go against the Brethren if they're united. Or he says, I'll let the Brethren, I'll let it stand. Do you think that if they, all three of them who oppose the lifting of the band, do you think if they were all three in that meeting, do you think the ban would have been lifted when it was?

Matt Harris 2:56:21 I doubt it. I mean, Mark Peterson, there is again, back to the evidence. There was just no evidence whatsoever that he was willing to change. I mean, this is the same guy that insisted that they have this interracial marriage disclaimer. I mean, his racism was so deep rooted and you know, at this point there are a lot of records I don't have. I didn't get access to Mark Peterson's diary. So there's, you know, there's more to it from his perspective, but there's just no evidence that he supported, you know, a place for the church, in the church for black people. And I suspect that after President Kimball had been working with the apostles for so long, and again on June 1st only there were three holdouts. I suspect that they would have had to wait for Elder Peterson to die. And that's usually how these things work when you can't win somebody over. It's kind of a tragic way to approach this, but that's the way that's a reality. And. But ultimately the ban would have been lifted if it wasn't for Kimball. It wouldn't have been Benson, it would have been Peterson, as we've talked about. It certainly would have been from Gordon

Speaker C 2:57:25 Hinckley, because it certainly would have been.

Matt Harris 2:57:29 Hinckley would have been the first to lift the band after because he's. Well, I say that maybe Howard Hunter, but he was only the church president for a short period. But Hunter wasn't a fan that. Of the band. Hinckley certainly wasn't a fan of the band. Tom Monson wasn't either. So it would have been lifted at some point. Probably not Hunter, because again, you have to work and get that Consensus. That's what the revelation is. It's the, the process. And Hunter was too frail for most of his presidency, so he probably didn't have the health and stamina to do it. But certainly Gordon Hinckley would have done it, or, well, there's no war about it. Gordon Hinckley would have done it. That's. If I were a Vegas man, that's where I would have put my money.

John Dehlin 2:58:06 So, yeah, what, what a crazy world it would have been if Ezra Benson had been ordained, you know, 10 minutes before Spencer B. Kim was ordained. What a different church we, we might have had. Right?

Matt Harris 2:58:22 Oh, boy. We'd have to do another whole episode on that just to do a counterfactual. It would have been like the Moral

John Dehlin 2:58:30 Majority, Bizarre World Mormonism Universe edition.

Matt Harris 2:58:34 Oh, wow. We would have been a one party church for sure. More than we already are.

John Dehlin 2:58:40 Yeah. Well, that's fascinating. That's fascinating and heartwarming. I mean, sometimes, you know, people, once they start learning the history, they start getting angry and feeling betrayed and everybody's a villain who's, you know, leading the church. But you, I think you do a really good job of humanizing and, and, and making likable figures like Spence W. Kimball, like Gordon B. Hinckley, like Hubie Brown. You even got me to like Boyd K. Packer and Bruce Armaconki a little more. Matt, that shows, I mean, to your credit, that, that shows a lot of professionalism.

Matt Harris 2:59:31 I don't.

John Dehlin 2:59:32 Probably a little restraint.

Matt Harris 2:59:34 Yeah, I, I, you know, I've said this before. I'm a scholar. I don't write with faith commitments in mind. And what I mean by that is I don't write to criticize the church. I don't write to protect the church. I just write the history as the sources dictate. And I try to be balanced. I try to be fair, but I try to be better, brutally honest. There are no sacred cows. And if, if I found that the IRS had really, really was the motivating factor for President Kimball left the band, I would have written about it. But I'm just driven by evidence. And, but also I learned, you know, I don't like to think that I don't employ literary tropes in my work, you know, good guys and bad guys. But, you know, looking back after I wrote this, it occurred to me that there are some really heroes in this story, more than I would have imagined. Obviously. President Kimball was a hero from the get go because he had the courage and stamina to take on the 12 when his predecessors couldn't. Hugh Brown's certainly a hero because he has the courage early, early on to fight against the band to promote civil rights. Gordon Hinckley is a hero, another person who we'll talk about later in these episodes, why he's a hero. But the short answer is it deals with trying to restore the image of the church after decades of being tarnished for degrading black people. So there are heroes in this story. And even, you know, it's so easy to villainize someone like Joseph Fielding Smith. And, you know, I go through in detail in this book and he doesn't come across very well, but I've written an article on him and which I quote in this book. But it talks about how his evolve towards black people had evolved over time. And I wouldn't say that it softens him, but it certainly gives people another dimension of his views where he's no longer one dimensional. Elder McConkey too, a little bit. Although sometimes it's really, really difficult to get beyond the authoritarian dogmatism, which I think is not good for the church. I wonder in the time that we have left, if we. So we've got one little more important part to the story. And it's how they decide to tell the rest of the general authorities. Because on June 1, it was just the 12 who decided to lift the ban. But now we've got the rest of the general authorities out there. And so what they decide to do is on June 1st, President Kimball appoints a committee. And that actually wasn't June 1st. I'm getting ahead of myself. It was, they decide on June 1st they were going to tell the general authorities, the rest of the general authorities. These would be members of the first quorum of the 70 and the presiding Bishopric, right? Yep. And the Presiding Bishopric at the time.

Heroes in the Story and the Announcement

Speaker C 3:02:20 We have.

Matt Harris 3:02:20 There are several quorums in the church today. First quorum, second quorum, third quorum. But in 1978, there was just one quorum, the first quorum of the 70. And then they had what are called the presidents of the 70. And then they had the Presiding Bishopric. And then they had the church's Presiding Patriarch. This is the Patriarch that gives blessings throughout the church, and he is over the patriarchs in each of the stakes throughout the church. So in this case, the Presiding Patriarch is a guy named Eldritch G. Smith. He comes from the line of Hyrum Smith, who was his great grandfather. And so President Kimball is decides that they're going to tell the rest of the general authorities the following week at A special meeting. And this special meeting, he. In the week. In the interim week, he's. He's. He's once again sick to his stomach. He's not feeling well. He's. He looks haggard. He looks tired. His wife said it's kind of the same thing he'd been feeling back in February that his wife noticed. And once again, she called up Arthur Haycock. She said, my husband won't tell me what's ailing him. Do you know what's ailing him? And Arthur Haycock said, I do, but I can't tell you. I have. I have it. My mind's eye. You know, Camilla's saying, I thought we weren't supposed to keep secrets from. From each other when we got married. Well, when it comes to the church, honey, there are exceptions. Well, anyway, Arthur said, hey, Cox said, I know it's bothering your husband, and you're gonna know soon enough. When? Just trust me. Soon enough. Well, why wasn't that week a moment of joy? He just got the 12 to lift the band, and now he's like his bad office he's ever been, and he's spending even more time in the temple, if that's imaginable. He had before. How is that possible? Well, he didn't know if the rest of the 70 would accept the ban. There were people like Eldridge G. Smith, the church patriarch, who was as racist as anyone in the church leadership. This is the same guy. In 1966, during the height of the Civil Rights movement, when the church was under intense pressure from critics both within and outside of the church to lift the ban, Elder G. Smith gave a devotional assembly talk at BYU, November of 1966. And he said that black people are only fit to be servants to white people in the hereafter.

Speaker C 3:04:53 Really?

Matt Harris 3:04:54 1966? Are you out of your mind? This is the stuff that Joseph Fielding Smith had said in the Way to perfection in 1931. This is the what Mark Peterson said to the BYU Teachers Conference in 1954. And you're saying it in 1966 at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Are you tone deaf? And so Ernest Wilkinson, the BYU president, was in the audience that day, of course, and he was blown away by this. He was so bothered by this. And by the way, Wilkinson's a racist himself. But even Wilkinson recognizes that this is a gone too far. So after the sermon, he asked Eldridge for a copy of the sermon, and he takes it to the president in Salt Lake, and He says, President McKay, can you read these three paragraphs? From Brother Smith's devotional assembly talk. And McKay puts his glasses on, straightens his glasses, just stares at the three paragraphs that Wilkinson had circled. And he looks up at Wilkinson and he said, I can't believe he didn't exercise better judgment. And Wilkinson said, well, President, you know what we normally do? We publish these addresses. What should we do? What do you mean, what should we do? Don't you publish that? And so he tells Wilkinson, tell Eldridge that we're not going to publish this. And so that's what he does. He writes Elder G. Smith a letter, and he said, the president doesn't want this published. And so that's what he says, that black people are going to be servants to white people, the hereafter. This is 1966. Holy cow. That's the guy that shows up on June 8th. One of the general authorities who shows up on June 8th, a person with those kinds of views towards black people. And when the First Presidency instructed the general authorities to come to the meeting, they instructed all of them to come in the area. They did not instruct people overseas to come. They were to stay put. But people who could make it, usually those in the United States, they were to come to the meeting. And it was so confidential that the First Presidency instructed that they not tell even their secretaries, if anyone asks what you're doing, just say, it's a meeting in the temple. Don't tell them what it's about. Don't tell them anything. So as you can imagine, the general authorities had no idea why they were being summoned to a special meeting of the 12 in the First Presidency. It was to begin at 7am and they started to talk among themselves about. About what the meeting could be about. One of them said, quote, is there a particular current problem in the church? Another said, was the second coming near? Are we going to hear today that Jesus is coming soon? Would Negroes get the priesthood? That's what another asks. Well, as they ambled into the temple, Apostle Packer stopped marrying Hanks, this longtime critic of the band. He shook his hand and he whispered, it is good for us to be here today. Then, choking back tears, Packer said, this is an important day. After speaking with Packer, Hanks took a seat. He knew something unusual was about to happen. I'm reading from my own book. Packer, well known at church headquarters for his gruffness, was uncommonly cordial that day, which took Hanks by surprise. He suspected the cause was the lifting of the ban. I knew, Hank said, from looking into Boyd Packer's eyes. He and I having discussed the matter on many occasions and he having hinted periodically that something of the consequence would happen one day before too long. Hanks then went in after encountering a teary eyed Packer. He sat down next to his good friend Paul Dunn and as the prelude music was playing he whispered over to Paul Dunn I think this is about the Negro. As the meeting commenced, the brethren saying we thank thee O God for a prophet. A song that Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency had specifically requested for the occasion. Then Elder, then Ezra Taft Benson, the president of the quorum of the 12 was asked to give the invocation. Marion Hanks called it a beautiful invocation. And he observed in his diary. He observed in his diary that Elder Benson said three times in his prayer this momentous event. I love that detail as a scholar that Hanks would record that in his diary because it only amplifies the the suspicion that something important is about to occur. After the prayer was done and the opening song was sung, the President stood up and he said, quote in the past year I've been struggling with the challenge of the priesthood for all members of the church. Then he broke the news. The decades old ban was going to be lifted. He had had a revelation and he described what had happened the previous week on June 1st with the 12. And as he was talking in the room, of course it becomes eerily silent. The general authorities don't know what to say. Francis Givens, Kimball's secretary had read a prepared statement that they had prepared for the press. We'll say more about that in a minute. And as he got about halfway through it he began to weep and his mind had immediately. This is Marion Hanks began to weep and Gibbons began to weak. I'm sorry I didn't explain that very well. Hanks began to weep. His mind had immediately harked back to the all the black men he knew who had been harmed by the band. And he thought about Monroe Fleming, the man who was going to be ordained to the priesthood. He thought about Ruffin Bridgeforth, a man who was called to preside at the Genesis Group. He and the most critically he thought about his good friend Len Hope, the man from Cincinnati, Ohio whom he had met in 1936 on his mission when the hopes Len and his wife Mary were asked to not participate in their branch in Cincinnati because white members didn't want to sit with them. And so Elder Hoax had. Elder Hanks rather had administered the sacrament with his companion to them and gave them a short little spiritual message. So he thought about all of these people had been harmed by the band, and he wept. Neal Maxwell wept, who was 70 then. He wasn't called into the quorum of the 12 until 1981 at that point. So he wept and he soaked a handkerchief and later on that night, he asked his wife not to wash it because he wanted a safe keep for that special occasion. And then Jim Faust, who had done so much to lay the groundwork in Brazil, he was full of joy. And as they're talking about everything, they expressed themselves, at least some of them did. They bore their testimony that they felt the spirit. This is what God wanted them to do. And then old Franklin Richards, a member of the presidency of the quorum of the 70, who's the most elderly non apostle in the room. He has a long history of genealogy in the church, going all the way back to Joseph Smith. Franklin Richards said, what about women? Are we going to ordain them, too? Oh, man, I wish I knew more about that statement.

John Dehlin 3:12:18 Yeah. Was he saying, hey, while we're at it, or was he saying, how bad is this going to get?

Speaker C 3:12:26 Because he doesn't quite word it that way. He says they left out the women. And then you say, was he talking about the priesthood? Yeah. So, like, that's super. I underlined that part, too. That was super interesting to me.

Matt Harris 3:12:37 It is, Julia. Thank you. Yeah, it's. You know, I can't imagine this guy is. Is progressive. Like, this is older guy. I mean, I, I just, I see this as sort of a joke. Oh, we're going to give black men the priesthood. What about the women? And keep in mind, the Equal Rights Amendment is, is roaring in American society at this point, and the state of Utah, the church is going to play a major role in this for reasons we can't get into today. So this is going on during the Equal Rights Amendment. And so I think one way of looking at this is, you know, is this going to be a slippery slope or women will want it too. And make no mistake, we'll talk about in the next chapter when we get to the responses to the revelation, how the saints respond and members of the black community respond. We'll talk about that. But just as a teaser, women are going to write President Kimball and they're going to say, look, you've had a revelation to end race discrimination. How about you end gender discrimination by ordaining us to the priesthood?

Speaker C 3:13:33 And I feel like women, if I, if it's okay for me to say. I feel like I say this a lot, but women holding the Priesthood or using the priesthood, at least in the early days of the church, was. Is a lot better documented. Maybe this is incorrect than black men getting the priesthood in the early days of the church because you just have those few individuals, but then you have these decades of women using the priesthood and being able to give blessings, like just give them the priesthood or let them use it.

Matt Harris 3:13:57 Yeah, yeah. I don't think, Julia, I love to let my imagination think that Franklin D. Richards was being progressive.

Speaker C 3:14:05 Oh, you're probably right though, that he was. That he was joking.

Matt Harris 3:14:09 Yeah. And admittedly I have not, you know, read his views. I have not read any sermons about gender equality. But just given what I know about him, I. I don't think so. I think he's joking. And I think for me, the, the funny part is when I read Elder Hanks, which is I have a few diaries from the men in the room that day, including Elder Hanks. And Elder Hanks's descriptions are rich and thick and you know, they're having this grand spiritual moment and then all of a sudden, you know, when they're bearing their testimony and they're sobbing and then Franklin Richards. What about the women? I mean, you know, I can hear him like Frank sh. So anyway, there's a great moment. I. I was touched by this and I'm sort of, you know, I've been doing this for a long time and. And you know, you never get jaded by racism, especially anti black racism. It just, it bothers me whenever I read this and how intense it was, But I also read it in the larger society too. So not to just associate the church with anti black racism, but there's a. There's a moment here where I was moved by just a little word, where they have a vote after they share their testimonies and they have a vote. And not that President Kimball needed their consent because the revelation just says the Quorum of the twelve and the first Presidency, but he felt that he needed to get buy in from the 70s also because this is such a momentous decision and that's why he stressed out about it over the previous week. He didn't need it to make the doctrinal change, but he felt he needed that. He wanted it. So anyway, he asked for a vote and they give it to him. And it's unanimous, including even old Eldridge G. Smith comes around, which is something. But after they have a vote, Paul Dunn witnessed something that he would remember for the rest of his life. He saw President Kimmel put his hand on N. Eldon Tanner's leg and say softly, eldon, go tell the world. And this is the moment where Kimball. This is the moment where he's like, okay, I can let my hair down now. Both of the highest, the leading quorums of the church are on board with us. And now there could be a moment of joy. But before that, until he knew that they had supported it, he couldn't, you know, celebrate. All right, so couple thoughts, and then maybe I'll say two things as we, as we conclude today, talk about the two dire entries from Hanks and Kimball. I think those are worth reading. And then maybe we'll talk about the statement that they send out to the church. Is that okay?

Was the Ban's End a Revelation or a Policy Decision?

John Dehlin 3:16:46 Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Harris 3:16:48 Yeah. So there's a statement that they made, the church made. There was a committee that President Kimball had asked to. To announce it to the world, and they would call it official declaration number two, which is a playoff from official declaration number one. And that's the announcement that Wilford Woodruff had made ending polygamy. And the fact that they wanted to bookend this priesthood revelation with the polygamy revelation is, in my opinion, not. Not. It's. It's not unsurprising. They recognize that polygamy in the ban are the two most consequential things in the Church's history, and so they put them back to back in the standard works of the church, and they canonize this revelation as sacred scripture. But they try to figure out how they ought to do it. And so President Kimball calls a committee to do this. And on the committee was Apostles McConkie, Packer, and Hinckley. And they were to write up a statement that could be released to the public indicating that they had lifted the ban. And the president would then choose which of the ones that he wanted to use, or maybe he would meld them together. So he left that open. But in the end, President hinckley chose Elder McConkey's. And Elder McConkey, being a proud man, I have my mind's eye, like, yeah, they chose mine, not yours. But anyway, he wrote the statement, and President Kimball was very, very careful. He went over it with a fine tooth comb. He made slight editorial amendments, but otherwise, he let Elder McConkie's statement stand. I have the original, and I have the one that was published. And they're pretty similar. And the next thing it turned to was, when are we going to release the statement? And they talked about doing it in the October 1978 General Conference. And then Elder McConkey said something interesting. He said, no, we can't wait until October, quote, it will leak and we have to beat Satan, end quote. I have no idea what that means. That somehow this mysterious figure called Satan's going to get a hold of official declaration number two and call up Wallace Turner, the New York Times. But anyway, that's what they're afraid, it'll somehow leak and they don't want that. And so they want to get a. Get a whole. Get ahead of the narrative. And they decide to release it on June 9, along with Elder Peterson's interracial marriage disclaimer. So they write that they release it. They send it out to the ap, the Associated Press, and the UPI and other news outlets. And this is the context for how I introduce my book, the Hook, if you will. And so when they release it to the news reports, the phone lines in Salt Lake City get jammed. So many people are calling in to know if the. To inquire if the news is true. They can't believe it. And they want word that the ban has indeed been lifted when they heard it on the news, on the radio. And so they flood Salt Lake with phone calls. And we'll talk more about that in the next episode, about the reactions to it all. But that's what happens. They send it out, the phone lines jam, and it's such a feeling of excitement. Later on that day, Marion Hanks goes home and he records his feelings in his diary. And I want to read that to what he says. He says, make sure I get the right passage here, he says, I have anguished for a lifetime, fasted and prayed a multitude of times, defended the church under harassment on many university campuses, faced people on many fronts in all walks of life, and suffered and wept on my pillow many times, grieved with a few choice souls who had broken. Who had broken hearts over this. Read all I could, written much at the behest of prophets and apostles, and now feel that the matter is done. And I can only weep and rejoice and thank God. This is a man who, like Brown, had incurred lots of bruises and scrapes over the years trying to lift the ban in private. Now that it's been lifted, he feels overwhelmed. Kimball's diary entry that evening was much more subdued. I write. Likely he was exhausted by the day's events. This is an exact quote. This morning at 7 o', clock, by prior arrangement, I, President Kimball, met in the upper room of the Salt Lake Temple with all of the general authorities to reconsider with them the matter of giving the priesthood all worthy male Members of the church. Kimball continued. Immediately following the release of this announcement, the telephone started to ring and rang continuously. The balance of the afternoon people, members and non members called from all around the world to learn if what they had heard like radio and TV was true. Kimmel closest entry noting it was a very busy day then. As I finish out this chapter I want to, I'm sorry to read so much, I want to just finish this out because I think this is the best way I can do it is just to read what I wrote. What the revelation meant for the church and for the general authorities was yet to be determined. Were black people still cursed had they been less valiant in the pre existence? Could faithful black and white Latter Day Saints marry each other with the Church's blessing? Could black people receive the lineage of Ephraim and their patriarchal blessings? The revelation didn't say and the brethren remained tight lipped. There would be plenty of time later to sort out these important questions. For now the brethren wanted to look back on the glorious news. As Gibbons explained, the revelation seemed to relieve them of a subtle sense of guilt they'd felt over the years. So you know, this is in my reading of this especially that Gibbon sense that the brethren, this revelation seemed to relieve them of subtle sense of guilt they had felt over the years. In my reading over Francis Gibbons writing that this isn't, this is a first presidency secretary, so he's witnessing their meetings and seeing how they feel. And when I read that I thought, you know, they knew for a long time at least a number of them, they knew the ban was wrong, they knew it was morally wrong and now that they had the courage to finally lift it, they felt like President Kimball a tremendous sense of relief.

Speaker C 3:23:20 I really like the questions that you posed too in the paragraph just before that where like with, with the lifting of the ban and then even the disclaimer where it's like you we just still don't want black people to marry white people or whatever, where there's still that question of are black people still cursed? Were they less valiant in the pre existence or will if there's interracial marriage, will they be supported by the church? Maybe certainly not in the temple. But like there's just still a lot of questions about, about the, about the Church's theology on this. And I still think the Church hasn't really done a very specific job on, on answering those questions like they tried to in the, in the race, in the priesthood essay. But I still feel like they, they haven't really answered Those questions. But I like that you put those in there.

Matt Harris 3:23:58 Yeah, those are. Those are the questions of the hour. Because in the next segment that we do, Julia, we're going to talk about. There are a lot of astute black and brown and black Latter Day Saints, excuse me, black, brown and white Latter Day Saints. They're going to write into the. The general authorities, and they're going to say, what's the doctrine of the Church now that the ban has been lifted? Do we still believe that black people are cursed? Is interracial marriage still forbidden? And they don't deal with any of this stuff because in official declaration number two, they just merely suggest that they had a revelation. The temple God told him to lift the ban. Worthy male members can now hold the priesthood. All worthy male members could hold the priesthood. They don't mention black people, but that's what they're referring to. And that all worthy families can qualify for the temple. So they don't mention any of the theology. And frankly, it'll come back and bite him in the butt because the racism is still incredibly strong somehow. The fact that the ban has been lifted does not suddenly eradicate racist views towards black people. And throughout the 1980s and into the 90s and into the 21st century, their failure to repudiate this racial theology is going to loom over the church like a thundercloud.

Speaker C 3:25:17 Yeah.

Matt Harris 3:25:19 So a lot going on here today. This is, you know, I want to maybe, maybe the last statement here, John or Julie, unless you have other questions, I want to just comment briefly about what I think this means, where we're at today, if I can, please. And so, you know, sometimes I'm asked, you know, what is it about your book that may be the most challenging for Latter Day Saints? And I suppose it depends on what your perspective is, how open you are to evidence, to scholarship. You know, that's something that I always can't answer because people read different things into my book, just like reading a novel. You know, my favorite part of the book was chapter two, and your favorite part's chapter seven. Well, this is going to be an interesting chapter for members because I'm challenging the entire narrative. And the entire narrative was that, you know, President Kimball showed up on June 1st in the temple and just sort of arbitrarily prayed that day with the 12, and God told him, lift the band. I mean, that's the erroneous part of revelation where it teaches that it's an event. And I've been teaching that it's a process. And so that's going to be really, really challenging for the traditional narrative. The other narrative is, of course, is that President Kimball wanted to lift the ban the minute he became the president. And all members are not taught that. And of course, they won't have any idea that there were holdouts like Elder Peterson and Elder Benson and Elder Stapley. So there's a lot into this that's going to challenge the narrative and the Church. As we speak, they're poised to Release and Publish Volume 4 of the Saints episode. This is the new history of the church. The Church had announced a handful of years ago. They've released three volumes starting with 1830, and the third volume, I can't remember, goes into, I think, the 1950s. And the fourth and final volume will move from the 1950s to, I think, for the modern era. And it will cover the priesthood revelation. And my book came out after they wrote this. It's going to be really, really interesting because anybody who writes about the priesthood ban is going to have to grapple with my evidence and my arguments. And so I suspect that the good folks in Salt Lake writing the priesthood or the Saints volume, I suspect that they're going to realize that the bar is raised and they're going to have to rise to the level of occasion to grapple with the complexity of this story. The old, tired argument that the Church has always put forward is no longer going to be doable. It's not because people in Salt Lake are hiding things, I don't think. It's just simply because I found material they haven't found. And, you know, I mean, I've done my research and I'm not certain that some of these Saints volumes, I think, are decently researched and some of them aren't. So anyway, it's a function of how you see the story. It's a function of the research, the materials. And it remains to be seen how they're going to tell the story in light of my book that just got published. I hope it influences them.

Speaker C 3:28:23 Yeah, hopefully. And you said that one, the Saints one, is already written even though it hasn't been released.

Matt Harris 3:28:28 There's a draft of it written, and I'm told through various channels that they had hoped to release it this year, but they're possibly running up against some issues with, you know, when you're dealing with people who are still alive, you've got to get permissions. And I mean, that could be a challenging thing. So we'll see. Hopefully they can get the permissions they. They need. And. But you have to.

Book Impact, Final Reflections, and Closing Thoughts

Speaker C 3:28:52 I Guess I was wondering if your book. Because it's released already, if your book will have any influence on the final production of volume four.

Matt Harris 3:28:58 I don't. I don't know. I've asked about that, and I. I'm just speculating. I have nothing to base this on, but I'm. I'm certain that the folks in Salt Laker, they're reading chapter seven with a fine tooth comb and. Yeah. Will it. Will it force them to go back and make revisions? I don't know. Because I do know they have a draft done already, and the draft was completed before my book was published a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker C 3:29:25 Yeah. So.

Matt Harris 3:29:25 But I know they're reading it because I've heard that, and they're. I know they're talking about it.

Speaker C 3:29:29 Well, that's good. And your book is. This is, like, groundbreaking stuff, and this is super fascinating.

Matt Harris 3:29:34 Thank you. Yeah, it's a. It's a. Changing the narrative up is. You know, it's an important thing. And this is not. This is not for people who are believers in the church. This is not antithetical to belief. I mean, it's just not. At least, you know, it's not. And I. I've shared this. This whole. The basis of chapter seven, that your father was going to lift the band the minute he became the church president. I shared that with Ed Kimball before he died. And for whatever it's worth, you know, Ed looked me in the eyes and said, you're absolutely right. And then I laid out all the arguments once I gave him the thesis. And so, you know, I feel like I'm on strong ground. And I've shared this story before. And one of President Kimball's grandsons reached out to me, and when I shared this story on a podcast, or I think it was Peggy Fletcher Stack, maybe in her podcast for the Salt Lake Tribune. But anyway, the grandson said, you know, for whatever it's worth, I think you're telling the story the exact way my grandfather would have wanted it to be told. And I thought. I'm flattered by that. That's pretty high praise because I'm trying to be as scrupulous in the sources that I possibly can to tell the most accurate story I can tell.

Speaker C 3:30:41 I love that. That's. So. That's such a good review. Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:30:47 Well. Beautiful. Well, today will probably be the longest episode of the series at three and a half hours, but I think that's fitting because it's kind of the climax, right? It's kind of the climax of the whole deal. Although there's more to come. Right, Matt?

Matt Harris 3:31:03 Oh, well, let me tell you what's more to come. Oh. So next chapter we've got, this is the response to the revelation. We've got apostles who are going to embellish the revelation that President Kimball will have to rebuke them. We've got the church. How does the church body respond? How do fundamentalist groups respond? What happens when you don't really address these core theological questions in official declaration number two, or you don't produce a revelation where God actually talks to you? Well, you make one up yourself. That's what some members do. And then beyond that, that we really get into the 1980s, 90s and into the 2000s, and we see the residual effects of the church not repudiating the racist teachings. And that's what happens. And that is, in my opinion, that's just as gripping and important is the lead up to the revelation, because it's the after effect. Or as I put it in one of the chapters, the debris in the street. Streets. Yeah.

John Dehlin 3:32:05 Well, more to come. I'm super excited and I've. I've taken a peek and I'm excited to read. So I'm reading as we go.

Matt Harris 3:32:14 Yeah. Well, thanks for your support, you guys. I. These are such critical questions. And, and it's. So far I'm gratified with the response to this podcast series. And also, I mean, my book is getting out there. People are promoting it on Facebook, they're doing TikToks, and, and I'm hearing every single day from Latter Day Saints, both current and former, expressing appreciation and gratitude for telling the story. And it tells me, it tells me that this is such a live issue and just had a missionary who served in Germany, former BYU professor, wrote me a note and just said, oh, my goodness. You know, I had no. This really helps make sense of how I felt back in the late 60s. And, and quite frankly, unfortunately, he was angry.

John Dehlin 3:32:59 Yeah.

Matt Harris 3:33:00 And it happens. This is when you deal with these kinds of things, you know, it's hard to swallow.

John Dehlin 3:33:05 Absolutely. Well, Julia, it's been great to have you as a, as a co host today. Thank you so much for all your work and your preparation and for your great questions and insight today.

Speaker C 3:33:17 Yeah, this is a really good book. And even with three and a half hours that we've been talking, there's still a lot we didn't cover. So, like, don't. I don't think that these, these episodes are going to cover the whole book. So just buy the book. It's so good.

John Dehlin 3:33:28 Buy the book. And people are buying the book because it's showing up continually as one of the top books Mormon related books on Amazon. But I'll plug it again. The book is Second Class Saints, Black Mormons in the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew Harris. Buy it. Buy it for loved ones. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your children, grandchildren, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, bishops, church leaders, missionaries. Return missionaries. Buy it for them all and give it as gifts. Also, please, you know we've had about 60 people donate to the series. We know that tens of thousands of you are actually enjoying the series. So Please, just another 20 or 30 of you sign up to become donors so that we can pay Matt all the way through the end what he deserves. Go to donorbox.org Matt Harris to become a monthly donor or a one time donor or a weekly donor. Julia will include the link in the show notes. And yeah, we've got more to come, so please stay tuned. Also remember, you can consume this podcast as a standalone podcast or refer people to it either on Spotify, on Apple podcasts or there's a YouTube playlist where you can just binge watch or listen to all the episodes consecutively. So thanks again, Matt. Thanks again, Julia. We hope Gerardo will be back with us next time. We'll also continue a panel of black Mormons and ex Mormons who will respond. We just released our first panel at the end of episode three, right after episode three. It had Dr. Darren Smith, Summer Rain and and also Nate Bird of the Black Menaces. And it's been received very well. So we've got a good panel. Matt, responding to these episodes as well so that we get plenty of black voices responding.

Matt Harris 3:35:30 Love it. Those are, those are three great people. I'm delighted that you selected them.

John Dehlin 3:35:34 All right. All right, Matt, take care. Thanks, Julia. Thanks everyone. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Storage Podcast. Take care, everybody.

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