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In a well-meaning Ensign article commemorating the end of the Mormon Temple and Priesthood restriction against Black people, an unattributed author makes a pernicious claim about the origin of the restriction. I do not think the author was lying. The author was repeating a fallacy that has been growing in circulation for years, but is nevertheless wrong. And if the author was even remotely aware of recent years’ scholarship, then the author is engaging in prevarication.

From the mid-1800s, the Church did not ordain men of black African descent to the priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances. No known records exist that explain the origin of the practice, and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has emphasized that any theories given in an attempt to explain the restrictions are “folklore” that must never be perpetuated: “However well-intended the explanations were, I think almost all of them were inadequate and/or wrong. … We simply do not know why that practice … was in place.”

Elder Holland’s quote was from his interview with Helen Whitney that was televised as part of PBS’s 2007 “The Mormons.” At the time, this represented an enormous and important shift in church leader discourse surrounding the topic and, in retrospect, seems like it is was the first step towards the disavowal of these teachings in the Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood. However, in the last twelve years alone there has been a truckload of research and writing on the restriction that renders the antecedent phrase simply and plainly wrong. To reiterate, the idea that “no known records exist that explain the origin of the practice” is a fallacy.

I think that this fallacy probably started getting traction with the 2013 edition of the scriptures. When the intro to Official Declaration 2 was revised for this edition, editors included the following: “During Joseph Smith’s lifetime, a few black male members of the Church were ordained to the priesthood. Early in its history, Church leaders stopped conferring the priesthood on black males of African descent. Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice.” The first two sentences are readily validated. The last is easily controverted.

Let us look at the scholarship. Paul Reeve’s award winning book Religion of a Different Color clearly demonstrates the history of the restriction. It shows how church records do offer clear and precise insights into the origins of the practice. Church leaders ordained black men to priesthood offices during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. After JS’s death, over a protracted period, Brigham Young introduced the restriction and the basis for it. In my recent volume The Power of Godliness, I deal expressly with Brigham Young’s rationale (pp. 20-22):

Young formulated his justification from the common Christian beliefs that black people were descendants of Cain and/ or Ham—ideas that had been used to justify and sustain chattel slavery for generations. Young transformed these ideas into the cosmology of the Nauvoo Temple and in doing so crafted a new Genesis narrative. In a February 13, 1849, meeting, Apostle Lorenzo Snow “presented the case of the African Race for a chance of redemption & unlock the door to them.” Church minutes record Young’s response: he “explained it very lucidly that the curse remains on them bec[ause] Cain cut off the lives of Abel to hedge up his way & take the lead but the L[or]d has given them blackness, so as to give the children of Abel an opportunity to keep his place with his desc[endant]s in the et[erna]l worlds.” [n56] Though the longhand minutes of the meeting are somewhat disjointed, the narrative that Young repeated frequently throughout his life was clear: Cain’s murder of Abel was an attempt to eliminate Abel’s posterity—his kingdom in the cosmological priesthood. As we saw at the beginning of this book, two years before this 1849 meeting Brigham Young had a near- death experience in which he had a vision in which Joseph Smith appeared to him. During this vision Young asked to know more about principles related to adoption sealings, and Smith showed him the organization of the human family before the world was created. A primary implication of the vision was that the human family was intended to be ordered in mortality. [n57] Young concluded that the network that Smith revealed as part of the temple cosmology was to be somehow patterned on a premortal template. Consequently, Young taught that Cain’s murder was not mere fratricide. It was a strike against the material network of heaven, a fracturing of the cosmos. Abel was supposed to be a node in the heavenly network, with vast numbers of descendants and kin. According to this view, black men and women, the purported descendants of Cain, were not to be integrated into the cosmological priesthood until Abel’s posterity was somehow restored—until the breach created by his death was healed. If Abel couldn’t have a kingdom, neither could Cain. Because of the tight association between the cosmological priesthood and the ecclesiastical priesthood of the church, one manifestation of this fractured human network was the ecclesiastical priesthood. n56. Historian’s Office General Church Minutes, February 13, 1849, digital images of manuscript, CR 100 318, Box 2, Folder 8, CHL. n57. Brigham Young, “Pres. B. Young’s dream Feb.y 17, 1847,” Box 75, Folder 34, BYOF. See Stapley, “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” 79– 81.

To reiterate, Brigham Young, from before the official announcement of the restriction in 1852 to his death in 1877, consistently reiterated the reason for the restriction. The documentation is ubiquitous. The framework that supported Young’s narrative declined after his death, and outside of this context Young’s racial narrative made little sense. It eventually became irreconcilable to church members and leaders, who found other explanations, like premortal valiancy, to have greater explanatory power in the twentieth century. See Paul’s book on this.

In order to maintain the fallacy that “no known records exist that explain the origin of the practice” we have to actively forget what Brigham Young taught, which is, as Emily Jensen shows, precisely what the author of the Ensign piece did:

What the 2018 June Ensign said Brigham Young said versus what he actually said. I don't think we should forget what he actually said. https://t.co/KjhPrRRveU pic.twitter.com/mMSMgUsJmq — Emily Jensen (@emmusic) May 9, 2018

An analogical example would be a parent who explicitly explains that they have taken their child’s smartphone away because they were playing too many video games, and reiterates that explaination for decades, refusing to release the phone. It would be odd for someone to later claim that “we don’t know why the smartphone was taken.” We know exactly why the phone was taken. But in the case of the restriction, it was no fault of black members.

We can do better. The church publications department can do better. To assert ignorance is a betrayal of our history, our faithful spiritual progenitors, and our black pioneers. Any assertion of the fallacy during the 40th anniversary of the revelation ending the temple and priesthood restriction is an affront to the revelation and the work it has done in those years.