This post is lengthier than most. If it’s more than you care to read, jump to the first “-oooOooo-” divider about midway, where you’ll find a summary and eventually the real point of this post.

In 1904, David McKay (father of Church-president-to-be David O. McKay) wrote to a friend:

In our Sunday School Theological class an idea is being advanced and insisted uppon by the (Teacher who is a President of Seventies) that the Negro race has received the Priesthood siting an instance wherein a collered brother who had been a faithfull servant to the Prophet Joseph Smith received Temple ordinances and Blessings which carries with it the Ordination to the Higher Priesthood.

Later in his letter he referred to “doubting members of the class” who questioned this part of the teacher’s lesson.

Analyze that for a moment: Some members of the Church retained a memory of Elijah Abel’s priesthood, but wrongly “remembered” that he had received Temple ordinances; still others, knowing that black members were barred from the temple in 1904, apparently (and incorrectly) assumed that such had always been the case, to the point where they doubted what their teacher “insisted uppon.”

There were so few black members of the Church at the turn of the century that few Latter-day Saints would have been personally concerned with the issue because they were themselves black or knew a black member. That did not prevent a wide interest in the matter, however – I’ve gathered a number of instances where the question of race and the priesthood was hotly debated, or where, like David McKay, Latter-day Saints were unsure or puzzled or curious enough to put their concerns into letters addressed to men who might know what was what.

A good share of the interest, I’m convinced, arose because of the theological dilemma raised by the restriction on priesthood imposed on black men (with the auxiliary restriction on temple ordinances for the mothers and daughters of black men). That dilemma occurred because the only justification for the restriction ever voiced by Brigham Young had to do with identifying modern black people as descendants of the primeval Cain, and as descendants of Cain’s presumed descendant Canaan.

The dilemma was this: According to this folkloric doctrine, modern black men and women inherited curses placed on their ancestors and thus were unworthy of the priesthood. But modern revelation insists that “men will be punished for their own sins,” and not for another’s transgression. Even if we were to apply the Mosaic statement that “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation,” any curse put upon Cain or Canaan expired millennia ago.

So how were Latter-day Saints to reconcile the conflict? The priesthood restriction was real – but how to explain it?

Church members came up with two general resolutions to the dilemma:

1. Black men and women are unworthy as a consequence of their own premortal misbehavior.

2. We don’t know, but it’s always been that way – it’s the will of God.

Under the first attempted resolution fall the discredited ideas that “blacks were neutral/less valiant/fence sitters in the premortal war in heaven.” This “explanation” was a comfortable one to most Latter-day Saints, because it erased the incompatible idea that living men and women were being punished for the actions of a distant ancestor. Under this theory, that punishment was merited by their own actions, not Cain’s; Cain’s lineage was merely a convenient one for providing mortal bodies to these neutral/less valiant spirits, to distinguish between them and everyone else who was more righteous/more valiant.

This idea of a mortal curse for premortal misbehavior has been so often discredited, debunked, and recanted – from Brigham Young’s explicit rejection of that idea, to the disavowal of the 2013 “Race and the Priesthood” essay – that I won’t bother to recite them here. No one has any excuse any longer for attempting to resolve the dilemma this way.

The second attempted resolution is somewhat trickier to debate, because we aren’t privy to the full mind and will of the Lord.

As Latter-day Saints, we have two main ways of coming to an understanding of the Lord:

1. Direct revelation to living prophets, or private inspiration to individual members.

2. Careful study of revelation to past prophets – the scriptures, in other words – for insight from relevant and analogous situations in the past.

The bald fact is that we have no evidence of any revelation from God to either Joseph Smith or Brigham Young restricting any lineage from receiving the priesthood. None. If there were such an explicit revelation which, despite its import, escaped being recorded in the records of the Church or the papers of either prophet, then it also escaped the knowledge and awareness and contemporary papers of any associates of these two men. Such weak evidence as exists – like Zebedee Coltrin’s demonstrably incorrect 1879 claims of statements made 35 years earlier – is utterly unreliable. Well-intentioned men, including later presidents of the Church, echoed the presumption that the restriction had begun by revelation to Joseph Smith, but these statements do not suggest any revelation given to those later presidents themselves, and merely reflect what they had heard or assumed and did not question as they grew up.

Less obvious, perhaps, than the absence of identifiable revelation for a priesthood restriction is the positive revelatory evidence for the extension of all blessings of the gospel to all people. There is the (now) oft-quoted testimony of the Book of Mormon that the Lord “inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” There is the testimony through Joseph Smith that the fullness of the gospel is intended for everyone in the earth: “The gospel must be preached unto every creature”; “Go ye into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature”; “Go ye into all the world; and unto whatsoever place ye cannot go ye shall send, that the testimony may go from you into all the world, unto every creature”; “Go ye into all the world, and preach my gospel unto every creature who has not received it.” (emphasis added)

If some would claim that preaching the gospel does not necessarily include bestowing the priesthood, at least these quoted admonitions discredit the practice that almost universally accompanied the priesthood restriction: that of not seeking out and teaching potential black converts; of hesitating to send missionaries to Africa because converts there would have had to rely on white leadership; and counsel from one Church leader to another in 1910 that “the obligation resting upon the Elders of Israel is to carry the Gospel to every nation, kindred, tongue and people among the white races, and to perform temple work for the ancestors of the white races first. After that work is completed it may become our duty to carry the gospel to the negroes,” another exchange in 1920 that “we should bear in mind also that our mission is not directly to the negro race” and yet another in 1933 that “there are so many favored sons and daughters who have the blood of Israel (the believing blood) coursing in their veins. We are of the opinion that the gospel message should be taken to them first as there are so many millions of them who have not heard these glad tidings.” But I’m getting carried away …

With no evident modern revelation to support the restriction, Latter-day Saints scoured the scriptures in search of revelation to earlier prophets. What we came up with – and what we taught and believed – is not as careful a study of scripture as we thought:

In the mid-1880s, LDS writers first began to appeal to the Book of Abraham as support for the racial priesthood restriction: Under this theory, Pharaoh was denied the priesthood because he was a son of Egyptus. This theory is dependent upon assuming that Egypt/Egyptus, “which signifies that which is forbidden,” was forbidden because Egyptus was of a black-skinned people and not for any other reason. There is no scriptural justification for that assumption; it smacks of reading into scripture what one needs to find there to justify a pre-existing idea, rather than reading scripture to understand it on its own terms. Other assumptions implicit in this proposed explanation are that “Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood” refers to Pharaoh’s being black. The scripture does not make that claim; it can be read equally plausibly as referring to Pharaoh’s ineligibility because his lineage back to the patriarchal line of priesthood passes through his mother rather than his father, breaking the father-to-son path by which priesthood was bestowed. Finally, “right of the priesthood” as used in the Doctrine and Covenants suggests presidency or direction of the priesthood, but the old interpretation of that phrase in the Book of Abraham assumed it meant any exercise of priesthood, not limited to presidency. In summary, those few lines in the Book of Abraham are made to carry a burden they cannot support.

The use of the Book of Abraham, plus some weak-sauced efforts to connect the “black” skin of the Lamanites with the modern priesthood restriction, are, I think, the only serious attempts to appeal to scriptural precedent prior to 1978.

-oooOooo-

Too long; didn’t read? The short version:

Latter-day Saints of the late 19th and much of the 20th century were aware of the reality of a priesthood restriction applied to men and women of African descent. There is no evidence that the restriction originated during Joseph Smith’s time, and ample evidence that it originated in Brigham Young’s time. The only explanations that Brigham Young gave for the restriction were culturally-rooted assumptions that black men and women were descendants of Cain, and that his descendants inherited the curse placed upon Cain and were therefore ineligible for the priesthood. Brigham Young did not claim a modern revelatory origin for this restriction, nor did he appeal to other scriptures for justification.

The assumption that black men and women inherited a curse from their presumed ancestor created a dilemma for Saints who believed that men were punished for their own sins and not for another’s transgressions. To resolve the paradox, Latter-day Saints developed the idea that black men and women were being punished for their own actions during the premortal existence, where they were assumed to have been neutral or less valiant than others; alternatively, black men and women were an exception to the general rule for reasons known only to God: the reasons for the priesthood restriction were inscrutable, but the restriction itself was a reality that stretched unchanged across the dispensations.

The “less valiant” notion was rejected even by Brigham Young, and has been disavowed yet again more recently. This apparently leaves only “it’s God’s will” as an explanation for past priesthood discrimination. Latter-day Saints have found no trace of a modern revelatory origin for the restriction, so have turned to revelation in other dispensations to justify the assumption that the restriction is God’s will and practice.

This appeal to scripture has been most often based on assumption-riddled readings of Abraham 1. That chapter can be read as restricting black men from priesthood only if you read it with the circular presupposition that it restricts black men from priesthood. Appeals to the Book of Mormon as recording curses on those with supposedly black skin also fail, because those verses all refer to Lamanites, not to those of African descent.

-oooOooo-

No justifications for the race-based priesthood restriction prior to 1978 survive even a cursory examination. Yet the restriction existed. Why?

The one consideration that had not been officially considered by the Church prior to 2013 (the date of the “Race and the Priesthood” essay) is that the restriction had neither a revelatory origin nor could be justified by studying records of past dispensations. That essay traces the origin of the restriction not to God, but to the misunderstandings of fallible human beings who, with all sincerity, mistook the cultural prejudices of their day for the will of the Lord. (Whenever you hear anyone say, as I do from time to time in my Sunday School class, that “we know such-and-such is right, or else Jesus would have told the prophets to change it,” you’re listening to a new chorus of the same song: God wants us to do things just the way we do things.)

But if Saints of the 19th century were faced with a dilemma: If men are punished only for their own sins, then why does God curse black people for the sins of their ancient ancestor? then we Saints of the 21st century seem plagued by our own dilemma: How can we trust any prophet, if another prophet made a mistake like that?

For me, that is no dilemma. I believe in continuing revelation, which means not just the adding of new truth but the correction of past error. It’s hard to believe in the necessity for continuing revelation if you’re absolutely certain that everything you think you know is in fact true, and that everything you do is in fact just as God would have it done.

But apparently not everybody takes that view of matters. Instead of strengthening our understanding of revelation, instead of recognizing that “a prophet is only a prophet when he speaks as a prophet” and learning to distinguish those times from the times when he speaks as a man, it has become apparently essential to some members’ faith to double down on the infallibility of prophets, to pull Brigham Young back from under the bus they feel he has been thrown under, and to justify the priesthood restriction by laying it at the feet of God.

There appears to be a stealthy resurgence of the appeal to past dispensations to justify the restriction in this dispensation. This most often takes the form, these days, of an appeal to the Old Testament: Under the Mosaic law, God restricted the exercise of priesthood to members of the tribe of Levi. This is supposed to be analogous to and explanatory of the priesthood restriction under the Restoration.

It’s not at all analogous.

Restricting priesthood to one narrow part of the faithful is not the same as restricting priesthood from one narrow part of the faithful.

Members of the tribe of Levi performed rituals at altars and in temples for all of the congregation of Israel; the priesthood restriction in our dispensation prevented faithful members of the Church from receiving the blessings of the temple, whether in life or after death.

The tribe of Levi exercised priesthood functions as a duty imposed on them by God, not because Levites were worthy and every member of every other tribe was unworthy; black Latter-day Saints, no matter their faithfulness, no matter their works of righteousness, no matter their obedience to commandments, were deemed unworthy, and nothing they could possibly do or be or become would change that, under the restriction.

There is, of course, one more glaring and inescapable difference between the priesthood duties granted to the tribe of Levi and the priesthood restriction suffered by black Latter-day Saints:

Any Bible reader from the date of its compilation to the days of Brigham Young to the greenest seminary teacher of today can point to the revelation by which God directed Moses to assign priesthood practice to the tribe of Levi. No one – not Brigham Young, not you, not the writers of seminary manuals, not your stake conference speaker – can point to anything resembling a divine origin for the priesthood restriction in this dispensation.

The case of the Levites has nothing whatsoever to do with the case of black Latter-day Saints.

I understand the dilemma. I understand the dislike of “blaming” Brigham Young for being a man of his time. I understand the reluctance to believe that the Church could have been so mistaken for so long in a matter that caused (and causes) such pain to so many.

But the resolution of the difficulty does not lie in raising false analogies as if they taught gospel truth. It does not lie in insisting on the infallibility of men. It lies in accepting the fact that good men are subject to human limitations, and in knowing the gospel is still true and the Church is still led by Jesus Christ. It lies in trusting that God “will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God” — including correction, if necessary.

We opened this post with an extract from a 1904 letter. Let’s close it with an extract from another 1904 letter, this one written by a Latter-day Saint in Illinois to one in Florida.