The late Jerry Falwell

Liberty University, founded by Moral Majority leader and evangelical Jerry Falwell, recently invited Mitt Romney to speak at commencement exercises.  Several students boycotted the commencement address by Romney, choosing not to attend.  Christianity Today had an interesting article titled Why Jerry Falwell Sr. Isn’t Rolling In His Grave over Romney’s Liberty Invitation. The subtitle was “And what the university’s invitation to the Mormon candidate says about evangelical political engagement.”  Here are some excerpts I found interesting.

Touting itself as “the world’s largest evangelical university,” the conservative institution has a history of hospitality to speakers from outside the not-so-big evangelical tent, including Democrats such as the late Ted Kennedy and former Virginia Governor and Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine. Joining Romney among the ranks of non-evangelical commencement speakers are Jewish comedian and economist Ben Stein, Episcopalian Karl Rove, and Catholics Dinesh D’Souza and Sean Hannity.

Hosting such speakers falls squarely within the vision of the university’s late founder, Rev. Jerry Falwell, who also founded the Moral Majority. The now-defunct activist organization, long held as central to the rise of the so-called “religious right” was, in fact, a broad coalition of religious, not strictly evangelical, conservatives.

However, since Falwell’s death in 2007, the voting bloc of the “religious right” has been largely replaced by the narrower demographic of “evangelical voters” whose energies lit bright but short-lived sparks for fallen presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. While great momentum is gaining among evangelicals and Catholics working together, the larger interfaith vision of Falwell seems to be fading. As Lucas Wilson, 22, who will graduate from Liberty tomorrow surmised, “I am not sure why we are allowing a Mormon to speak at commencement just because he is conservative; we sure would not invite a conservative Muslim to speak.”

The late Falwell, on the other hand, influenced by Francis Schaeffer’s concept of “co-belligerents” teaming up for battle in the culture wars, pioneered a brand of political activism based on heterogeneous political bedfellows.

In 1980, for example, Falwell dissociated himself from the statement of the then-president of the Southern Baptist Convention who claimed that “God does not hear the prayer of the Jew.” In response, calling America a “pluralistic republic,” Falwell told The New York Times, “This is the time for Catholics, Protestants, Jews,Mormons,and all Americans to rise above every effort to polarize us in our efforts to return the nation to a commitment to the moral values on which America was built.” He also argued, “We may have differing theological positions, but we must never allow this to separate us as Americans who love and respect each other as a united people.” Falwell later told The Washington Post, “I’m a fundamentalist, but I believe in a pluralistic America. This country belongs to the Hebrew Americans, theMormonAmericans, black Americans, white Americans.” Falwell’s political ecumenicism reached even further than these, at least in a tongue-in-cheek way: in mobilizing religious conservatives to elect Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Falwell said they’d support Reagan “Even if he has the devil running with him, and we’ll pray he outlives him.”

As a writer for Time described in a 2007 retrospect of Falwell’s approach in the Moral Majority,

Instead of enlisting just fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants, Falwell opened the Moral Majority up to everyone: Jews, Catholics and Mormons—in short, the very people (and faiths) that fundamentalists had been separating themselves from for generations. That was Falwell’s greatest political discovery: he understood that fundamentalists, orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics and Mormons had so much in common politically that they could overlook their theological differences.

I have to say that of late, the political bigotry of evangelicals is a real turn off to me, and I think this article certainly enhances Jerry Falwell in my eyes.  What about you?

Dan Wotherspoon, Host of Mormon Matters

Dan Wotherspoon, “Oh I love that discussion.  Thank you, you guys. I really appreciate that.  Oh man, you guys are awesome. This is the right panel to have.  Where do we want to go next?”

Brad Kramer - By Common Consent blogger

Brad Kramer, “I wanted to make a quick follow-up point on what Marguerite was saying there at the end.  Well, both Marguerite and Gina were talking about the periphery speaking to the core, you know the outside speaking to the center, and the point that I want to make is that sometimes it takes two interventions, you know?

Samuel the Lamanite, the black—the dark-skinned prophet who stood on the threshold between the comfortable, inside, civilized, white core and the outside other, and called them to repentance.  He didn’t ask for an invitation, he didn’t receive an invitation.  His call to repentance wasn’t well-received at all and another important factor there is that sometimes speaking by itself isn’t enough.  It wasn’t enough that he got up and spoke.  Part of what also had to happen was he had to be vindicated.  There had to be a God in the machine.  Jesus had to come and say, ‘that guy that came and stood upon your wall that you tried to kill, I sent him. You need to pay attention to him.’”

Dan, “And why aren’t his writings right here?  Go add them here!”

Brad, “Why aren’t his writings alongside your white prophets.  So sometimes that’s what needs to happen, so that’s one possible route that we can choose to take as a church, as a periphery, simply to call on heaven, to call on God to intervene at the center, to step into the building and grab somebody by the shoulders and shake him and say, ‘pay attention to what’s happening.’”

Dr. Gina Colvin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Gina Colvin, “That’s a lofty goal, right there isn’t it?”

Marguerite Driessen laughs.  “Yes, let’s go ahead and make an appointment and have God go and do our work for us.”

Gina laughs.  “It would be awesome!”

Marguerite Driessen, Adjunct Professor at BYU in Law and Communications

Marguerite, “Boy life would be so much easier.  You know, but I do think there are many issues that relate to why this is such a tender issue for some, and such an abrasive issue for others, and yet even a non-issue for some others, and people in those groups probably would surprise you. I’ve known white people much more offended and hurt by the ban—that they’ve come to call the Priesthood ban, but now after talking to Brad, I will call it a Temple Ban, I will just call it ‘The Ban’ or whatever, to make sure that we know it was more than just priesthood—much more hurt and offended by it than say I am, having joined the church in 1981 when it was over.  And I didn’t join in Utah, I joined out in Washington, DC.”

Gina interrupts, “Can I just ask a question?  If you had known about it, would you have joined the Church?”

Marguerite, “I had known that there was a priesthood restriction until ’78 when I joined the Church.  I also knew it wasn’t there anymore.  What I never heard before ’81 was the folklore that people had invented to support it.  So it actually didn’t affect me at all.  I get asked, how can you join a church that is so racist?

And I said, well the policy doesn’t exist anymore, so what are you really asking me?  And it turns out, well, they had this policy and they had it longer than other people.  And that point, I actually am really comfortable with, and perhaps have a very different perspective than some other people and perhaps it comes from my legal background, but I will tell you—I studied, I studied, the Civil Rights acts of ’54 or ’64.  I mean I studied those de-segregation cases and I even met say you know Brown vs Board of Education—famous U.S. case that ended segregation in public education, the girls who were the subject of that lawsuit came to speak at BYU when I was part of the hosting team and spent hours and hours with them over the course of the time that they were here.

You know, it’s a really interesting perspective to talk to really little girls who at the age of 7 had to be escorted to school by the National Guard, or by police because the policy changed from the top down, and the people were angry and resentful and they still had their racist attitudes, and those attitudes had not changed.  My perspective on this restriction and the lifting of it and the timing is that, you know, thank goodness God waited until ‘78 because what might have been the result had he moved sooner in other contexts?

I want to explain that which is that when I think of an 8-year old girl, a 7-year old, 9-year old, having to have police protection to walk to school, having excrement thrown at them, being sworn at, having people trying to beat them, throwing rocks, throwing food, throwing garbage, the image that came to me immediately was I knew to my soul that that is not the way that God wanted any of his children to have to go to church.  If this ban had come from the top down too soon, that is what people like me would have faced when we embraced the gospel.  The doctrine that did not contain the racist poison.

You know certainly there are some questionable texts, and that could be the subject of another Mormon Matters podcast, but I also think that part of those questionable texts, part of the reason that they have had the impact is because people look at them through a lens that is already darkened with racial prejudice through histories of institutional racism, and social racism that they have been trained to accept as normal, so that they think of things in racial terms that were not thought of that way at the time people were writing, and certainly not thought of that way say in the time of the Old Testament or New Testament.  But I know in my core that there’s no way Heavenly Father wanted his children to have to go to church with the National Guard to protect them because people around them didn’t want them there.

One absolute benefit of this revelation coming as late as it did is that it came at a time when the vast majority of the people in the church wanted it. A vast majority of people in the church were praying for it individually, and scores of them were writing and lobbying their church leadership to change this hurtful damaging policy for racial reasons, and for compassionate reasons, and for doctrinal reasons all of which were well and good, but what it really meant is [that] when that revelation came in ’78, it was greeted with joy. It was greeted with welcome, almost uniformly throughout the church even among people who still clung to some racist ideas, they believed that denying people blessings for any reason other than their own unworthiness was bad, and that is a benefit from this that is the one aspect of the discussion that we’re not talking about. I don’t deny that it was racist, not at all.  I don’t deny that it was horrible, and I don’t deny that it was hurtful. Coming into the church after it was over, I was spared all of that hurt, and I was spared that damage, and I was spared that marginalization, and only then had to deal with the residual, ‘how do you deal with a black person when you’ve been trained all your life to think of them as the cursed seed of Cain with whom you should not mix your blood?’  and people trying to work their way around that or through that.

But I see things, coming this way at it, and I don’t know Gina in answer to your question, had I found the gospel or the Book of Mormon before ’78, I don’t know that I would have had the courage or the faith of a Darius Gray to join the church anyway and to trust that it will all work out in the end.  I joined at a time when the policy was gone, and all I had to do was be able to have a thick skin about the people around me who had not quite caught up with the policy in terms of total equality of access to God’s love and God’s blessings.”

Gina, “Do you think though that Marguerite, that if the church had been allowed to thrive in black communities as kind of black LDS churches, that that might have been a safe place for people. Can you think of anything historically that might have impeded the possibility of…?

Marguerite interrupts, “No, not anything that would have impeded the possibility, but look around you right now.  Churches that allowed black congregations to exist and have black ministers, they exist.  My dad was Roman Catholic.  When we went to his parents home, or went to their church when we had his mom’s funeral, my grandmother’s funeral, there was a whole church full of black Catholic people. But guess what?  That is the church where all the black Catholic people went.  The white Catholic people to this day don’t go to that building, they go somewhere else. That is the kind of history we could have ended up with had there not been that 10 more years, and that’s really what we’re talking about here.

Ten more years in changing the policy from the top down resulted in a today, a today in which there is not the church on that corner where black Mormons go, and the church on that corner where the white Mormons go, which is the case with Catholics, which is what I have experience with; Methodists as well, which is what my mom was Methodist.  I have friends who are Southern Baptist, friends who are Episcopalian, friends who are in religions that did not have a formal priesthood ban or a priesthood restriction for black people until 1978, but to this day have segregated congregations, not by doctrine, not by ecclesiastical fiat, but simply by tradition where people grew apart racially, and now we, as the LDS Church have the opportunity truly to be of one heart and one mind, to be one fold with one shepherd, who is Jesus Christ, and not the pastor on that corner versus the pastor on the other corner.”

Gina, “Well, I mean we have such centralized control though.  I wonder if that would be such a bad thing.  Like in 2012 the big issue of course would be, how do we bring our two kinds of thriving communities, a black community and a white community into conversation with each other?  I’m just kind of throwing that out there.”

Brad, “Segregation is creeping back in because of immigration. There aren’t all-black units in Utah, but there are all Mexican units in Arizona.”

Marguerite, “Well, let me re-phrase, there are units, but they tend to be language units more than anything else. There is no law—the Church has always had a policy of allowing everyone to be taught the gospel in their own language, and so what we have to guard against is the potential for having a Spanish language branch or a Chinese language branch or something like this where people can congregate in their own tongue from becoming a culture apart, like the black Catholic church on one corner in Baltimore, and the white Catholic church across town.”

Brad, “That’s what I’m saying.  I know that there are language units everywhere in the church where there’s the need for it.  But what I’m hearing about what’s going in some parts of Arizona is that the division is hardening along these more culturally antagonistic lines.”

Gina, “Yes, absolutely.”

Marguerite, “Well, Arizona has some other issues though. Arizona also has the extremely harsh immigration laws.  There are other factors contributing to that…”

Brad interrupts, “Right, no question.”

Marguerite, “…in that location, but they do not yet exist everywhere else.  I’m not denying that they exist.  I’m not denying that they may be coming into existence, but I guarantee you other issues are playing into that in Arizona that are not playing into it as much in other places, where once people are comfortable in English, they don’t feel the need to only attend the Spanish branch anymore.”

Dan, “Cool.  Brad, I want to steer to you for just one second, and then Gina I want to go with you.  Brad, what I’m hoping is there was something in your blog post that sort of said similar things to what Marguerite said about perhaps the timing was right if it had happened when David O. McKay was petitioning the Lord.  Some of the things she was saying there.  Do you have any follow up, or did she articulate basically the point that you were making in your blog post or was there pieces that were left out?”

Brad, “No there’s a follow up that I wanted to make, a kind of perhaps slightly different, but also complimentary read on the sort of question we’re defining.  By the time this is becoming a real problem—for a long time the ban exists and it’s not a—nobody is treating it as a problem. Nobody considers it to be a problem.  It’s not until during the 20th century that you get to the point where anybody on the inside, certainly anybody at the center of the church is considering it a problem at all, and it becomes increasingly a problem.  So you have people starting to ask questions about it.

So then the issue becomes, from the perspective of God, you’ve got 2 problems.  You’ve got a church where this ban exists, it’s already there, regardless of where it came from, it’s already there, but it’s also a church that’s profoundly racist, and where lots of racist sentiment exists.  So then you’ve got to deal with the question well ok, if I the Lord end this policy by fiat right now, say it’s 1950, ok?  A little ahead of the curve so to speak.  I’m going to end this policy right now. Then it’s very easy to imagine that the consequence of that would have been black priesthood holders presiding over black units, black temple workers officiating in black temples.

In other words, racism can still exist in the church and all the really—you can basically approach the question as ok, blacks are still inferior but they can still have the priesthood now.  Those two things could have been compatible with each other.  So when I look at someone like David O. McKay, vigorously opposed Civil Rights legislation, and not just on the grounds of sort of constitutional technicalities, but opposed Civil Rights legislation because he was uncomfortable with integration, and because he was uncomfortable with what he would have described as race-mixing.

So if somebody like that is asking me, can the blacks have the priesthood? If essentially what he’s asking me is can we finally give this inferior race some priesthood here?  My answer is going to be stop asking, it’s not going to happen when you’re in charge—exactly the answer that he got.

Marguerite, “Well, and I would also add to that— we’ve been told as LDS people that God has a really interesting way of hiding the mysteries of the universe.  He doesn’t tell us anything if we just ask.  He will give us everything if we just ask.  But it’s not just asking.  Oliver Cowdery learned that.  What are you supposed to do?  You’re supposed to study it out in your own mind, you’re supposed to come up with an answer, and then you ask God if your answer is right.  So we know from historical events and conversations and statements that McKay made and others made, that McKay was taking a question to the Lord, but do you know what that question was?”

Dan, “Yeah, he wasn’t framing it right.”

Marguerite continues, “Do you know how it was framed?  The fact is, he was bringing a question to the Lord, but it very may not have been, ‘I have decided now is the right time.  Do you concur?’ It might have been something else.”

Brad, “Yeah, and it goes to this larger question of the relationship between the ban and the racist teachings. Because what ends up happening, the longer the ban persists, the more it becomes a sort of millstone around our neck.  It becomes an embarrassment, something to be boycotted, and a big problem and everyone is trying to deal with it and try to figure out what to do about it. People are digging their heels in to explain it and to rationalize it, and the effect of all of this pressure is that this pressure locks all of this racist sentiment in the Church to the ban.  And the longer the ban persists, the more the ban gets tied to the racist sentiment, and the racist teachings, and the racist idea about the differences between people of African descent, and people without African lineage.

And so the effect can then be that when God tells the church, and we don’t know what he said.  We don’t have the revelation, right?  Official Declaration 2 is the language that church leaders use to announce to the church that a revelation has been received. It’s not the language of any revelation.  We don’t know what the revelation was other than that the substance of it was, all worthy male members.  And so what happens is that all of this waiting, persistent waiting, this embarrassing sort of how long it’s taking, and all of the racist teachings and rationalizations lead to a moment when God can say, every worthy male member, and that alone can stand as a repudiation of all the racist nonsense.

Marguerite, “And that’s how Bruce R. McConkie interpreted it when he in his ‘78 in his devotional address said forget everything that everybody’s ever said cause they didn’t have the light that we now have.  Not that He gave us everything they gave him, that the presidency got.  As you said, we didn’t get the actual revelation.  We got the announcement, but Bruce R. McConkie specifically said, forget anything we’ve ever said about this explaining it.  Anything, it all came without the knowledge, with lesser light, lesser knowledge. It was wrong.  He acknowledged that. People still kept their pet theories.

Dan, “Right.  But it hasn’t come from a General Conference pulpit yet.  I think it needs to come from a First Presidency member in General Conference to really have the true effect, so we’ll hope for that.  Gina, you had pre-circulated a few things to share.  There was an opening for one of them, a little bit in some of Marguerite’s talk about becoming one fold and stuff, and you kind of posed the question, is color-blindness the next problem we face within the church?  In other words, can we go so far in overcoming racism, that I’m assuming what you mean by that is some negative consequences of color-blindness as well, or cultural blindness, or mixing  everybody together.  Is that what you were getting at?”

Gina, “Yeah, I think what I mean by that is there is a culture.  I think Marguerite flags the kind of concern that there is with particular ethnic groups, allowing to flower in the Church.  There may have been some kind of conflict.  Correct me if I’m wrong, they might have grown up with some peculiarities within a particular culture.

What I’m suggesting is that a white ward has a particular culture, and often—we have a situation in New Zealand where there’s been historical tension around the disbanding of Samoan language units, where minority Samoan groups are sort of like asked to attend wards, and kind of the idea, and I think I’ve heard it before, actually I heard it directly from some general authorities in a leadership meeting once was that they were concerned about cultural particularities that seemed to be a pattern in Samoan culture which don’t adhere correctly to good Latter-day Saint behavior.  The question is, we’re going to disregard those kind of cultural behaviors, but what about the cultural behaviors that exist in all white wards?”

Dan, “Awesome.”

Gina continues, “There needs to be some kind of conversation, some self-reflexitivity.  What do we do?  You know the fact that we have to have this conversation about residual kind of racist dispositions in the Church indicates that it’s allowed to kind of flower, it’s allowed to continue and how do you kind of put the brakes on that? That’s where there’s that systemic inequality.

The center of the Church can kind of happily sort of disband non-English speaking wards, kind of ethnic units all over the place, but the same doesn’t apply to white wards where they say actually you’ve got a problem being a white ward, a largely white ward. What we need to do is kind of split you up and you go to Mexican wards, you go to Samoan wards because there’s some kind of problem with the way you’re behaving.  That’s the difference.  That’s the power inequality.  That’s why I think when we talk about racism we need to talk about power relations, and who gets to say what.  Who’d conversation is this about racism?  Is this a conversation about white folk about racism, their own racism, or is this a conversation that black and brown folk can have and transmit that into white spaces where it rearranges white spaces, where it brings some thoughtfulness and concern about their fundamental Christianity.

I’d like to see systemically that kind of pathways being created so that conversation can take place and those challenges can take place.  I don’t think we’re going to move on until it does, until something happens.”

Marguerite, “I would add to that Gina that I actually have seen what you say you’re not seeing in New Zealand.  I’ve seen that happen here, maybe not in a systemic way, but certainly in a unit by unit treatment.  I am now in Utah County. I moved here from the east coast.  I was in a stake in Maryland, and before that I was in my singles’ ward in Virginia, so three different stakes from there to come out to here, and I’ve noticed that the Church is different in Utah. Not that the gospel is different, not that the gospel is different, the scriptures are the same.  The Handbook of Instruction is the same.  The manuals are the same, but the Church is different.  There are people who do things the way that they’ve always been done since pioneer times without even checking to see if that’s actually the way things are supposed to be done.

I’ve noticed in branches in the mission field; my husband is from Hayward, Wisconsin, which is predominantly white, but where the Church is not very strong.  His little branch up there that we visit when we’re on vacation has so little leadership that every time we’re there, we’re filling in.  I mean I’m there on vacation, and I’m conducting music in Sacrament Meeting because the conductor, the chorister is now playing piano. The chorister is playing the piano because the ward accompanist is conducting Sacrament meeting because all three members of the bishopric are not there that day, and there is no Sunday School because it’s too small. They only meet for two hours, and the Elder’s Quorum president is gone, so he’s the highest ranking priesthood holder in the ward and he plays the piano.

Guess what?  In that ward, things are not like they are in Utah County.  They are cultural things that are built in that I think as the Church spreads out, they are getting that.  They are having that conversation whether they want it or not, because new people are saying, ‘show me where it says in the Handbook of Instruction that it has to be only this way, or you can’t do this.’  There are some things that are just not addressed.

There are some things that are in the Handbook of Instruction that are not necessarily tied to doctrine.  They are not doctrinal mandates.  Culture has seeped in, and I’ve seen a few of those things change over the years.  One of them that came in was there was an announcement several years ago, maybe one of you guys can help me with memory, I don’t know exactly when, that said, the only music that can be performed in Sacrament Meeting were the hymns in the actual hymnbook.

Now that almost immediately was softened to include the children’s song book, but then that was it.  For years, it was just what was in the hymnbook, even though prior to that, there hadn’t been that kind of restriction.  It was sort of a cultural response to some people maybe not liking the music that was showing up. Now though, that’s not in there.  That’s not in the Handbook of Instruction—the only music that you can sing in Sacrament Meeting is in the hymnbook or children’s song book.

Gina, “It shouldn’t be.”

Marguerite , “Right.  No, but that was sort of a cultural, new people doing things and the old guard not liking that new-fangled music and putting the brakes on it, but after a few years, people realized that really wasn’t the way to go and you need to just soften.  I think some of the softening is happening in the calling of much younger general authorities, and calling of authorities who are not all white males from Utah.  Not even all American.  It’s not going to be fast, but there will be people having those conversations now who are not part of the ‘crossed the plains with Brigham Young descendants’.  They will have a different cultural experience and will know that this song is not apostate just because it’s not in the hymnbook. They will have this experience.  I’ve seen that on micro-levels outside of Utah.  I’ve heard of those discussions in Utah. The Genesis Group, we start that. We start our fireside every month with a rousing, very much, southern black gospel song.  Something that is not in the hymnbook, something that is old time gospel music, foot stomping, hand clapping, holler if you want to, and then someone will make a joke.  ‘See the roof didn’t cave in.’

Dan, “Yep, I was there a couple of months ago, and it was “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’  That was a lot of fun.”

Marguerite, “There you go.  I could have met you.  I was there that time!”

Dan chuckles, “Shoot!  Yeah, it was the night Darius spoke and then that missionary that had that powerful night.  Hey, yeah again, in the interest of time, I want to steer a little bit more.  I think this is an important piece.  Gina, again from your list, you asked the question that I think a lot of us talk about, but let’s give it voice here again.  Is the reluctance of the Church to respond in a more robust way, this worry that it’s going to undermine the members’ faith in prophetic revelation?  Do you want to start us on that conversation?  Do you guys kind of agree that this is—let’s at least air this one out for a couple of minutes.”

Brad, “Well, it’s something that I’ve encountered already in an interesting form which is that I’ve encountered a number of people who have responded to my call for contrition and disavowal.  By saying like basically like well I can see why that’s needed here, but it just feels to me like you’re trying to set the stage for calling for the same thing on gay rights and women’s issues.   In other words—“

Marguerite, “Slippery slope argument?”

Brad, “Well, they see the undermining—and they’re not entirely wrong you know.  We’re not going to be—if something changes with regards to these questions that are sort of very salient at this very moment, something that is going to happen before that change is that people are going to re-evaluate, not necessarily lose faith, but they are going to re-evaluate what they think about the role of prophets, the role of church leaders, and that’s part of what is at stake in this question is are we willing to accept the possibility that on this one particular question, presidents of the church did lead us astray?  They didn’t lead us astray in that they led the Church into capital A apostasy, but they led us astray from truth, and God corrected it and brought us back.

But we have to I think come to terms with that and come to terms within that newly created space with just a slightly scaled back sense of sort of absolute prophetic almost infallibility.  I mean we constantly say that we don’t believe in that, but we kind of do.  But when that gets scaled back and just tempered down just a little bit, then that opens up the space, it does raise the question, it does open up the possibility that the things that we feel really strongly about and that we use as sort of boundary markers for Mormons today are subject to change in the future.”

Dan, “Gina do you have anything to add on to that?  Thanks Brad.”

Gina, “Yeah, I agree, and I think it’s kind of going down that rabbit hole.  It’s kind of shoving/pushing dominos over.  If you say ok in this respect perhaps prophets got that wrong or presidents of the church got that wrong, then what other aspects can we say that perhaps presidents got that wrong?  We need to kind of—I suppose it comes back to the question what is the role of the prophet and once we’ve kind of determined that—is the prophet’s role just kind of to tell us where to put our potatoes like Brigham Young did, ya know, by the back door next to the brooms, or is a prophet’s responsibility, and I think kind of theologically we’d have to agree that a prophet’s responsibility is pointing to Christ, and that everything else can kind of go by the wayside.  ‘Well, that’s his opinion.’ I speak as somebody from New Zealand, it would have been nice if someone—this is an American problem, this whole race issue, and rather than it being sort of washed up onto the tide, we’re having to deal with it. In Brazil for instance, the issue of race is not the same as it is in the United States.  And so they look like, we want to build a temple, how can we do that because we can’t find any person in Brazil that doesn’t have at least some bit of black heritage, what do we do about that?

So, yeah, I just kind of come back to that notion that we have to clarify, as part of our maturing that we recognize that prophets have a particular role in telling us how to become more like Christ and pointing the way to become a Zion people.  Now if they said everything that was the mind and will of God, they’d be God.”

Dan, “Hmmm, interesting.”

Gina continues, “So you know they have to filter this kind of, you know, speaking theologically they have to kind of filter all of these kind of promptings and thinking from kind of this omnipotent being through their kind of mortal framework and cultural locatedness.  I think we need to own it, unless it is helpful for us to understand the mind and will of Christ, and backed up with scriptural canon.  Some things can be disregarded just as kind of opinion.”

Dan, “Awesome.”

Marguerite, “I would add that there’s always the trouble, and this is where you are when you’re LDS you are supposed what—follow the prophet.  Did you learn the song?  [Sings] Follow the prophet.  Follow the prophet…’ [Gina interrupts.]

Marguerite continues, “We learned it out whole life so that’s one of the reasons that there’s an issue here because there are times when—I actually might disagree here a bit with Brad in that there are things a prophet has said and done before they were prophets or while wearing other hats.  It is rare, we do not have a spoken revelation on this race issue, or some prophet speaking at General Conference.  We’ve never had it, and we’re going to need one probably to fix it all but there is several little sub-issues here.  One, there are people in the Church who do not believe that any prophet ever in any aspect of their life could ever be infallible which then imbues anything they’ve ever said or done, including some paper they wrote when they were 21 for a sociology class with spiritual significance if they later become prophet of the church.  There is that issue that exists among people.

There are some of us willing to accept that prophets are human beings and when they are speaking as the mouthpiece of the Lord we have been promised that they won’t lead us astray, but we still have something to do here which is we need to rely on our own instructions, and our own gift of the Holy Ghost and spirit of revelation to know when something is coming from this person as the prophet from the mouth of God, and when it is something else.  Then you have to reconcile to yourself what to do with it. I mean I don’t want people to listen to this podcast and say that Dan and his panel of crazies are saying ‘don’t ever listen to the prophet because it’s really just his opinion.’ That’s not my opinion.

I’m telling you there are times when people who are prophets speak but when they are not speaking prophetically, and usually they give you some kind of clue.  Like if they’re speaking from the pulpit at General Conference, maybe you should listen.  But when they’re sitting there talking to the legislature as the governor of the state, take that with a huge grain of salt if you take it at all.  You could shovel it out in the dust bin and it wouldn’t make a difference to your immortal status, you know, your obedience or lack thereof, your willfulness or lack thereof.  I think that is something we need to come to grips with.

I think there are people who—I have a problem with people who won’t move forward unless there’s an apology for what happened in the past.  Maybe that’s because I understand repentance, or I understand the idea of forgiveness and these things as related only to yourself. If you’ve wronged me, you’ve wronged me, and that’s on you.  If I refuse to forgive you and move forward, that’s on me. So I want to be sure to tell people that look, you need to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ.  You need to develop a relationship with God.  You need to learn the doctrine, and the doctrine is inclusive.  It is loving, and the end of 2 Nephi 26 absolutely says that God denies none—what’s the exact quote? It says he denieth none.”

Dan, “He inviteth all.”

Marguerite continues, “He denieth none!  He denieth none that come unto him black and white, bond and free, male and female, and he, it says here specifically, remembereth the heathen and all are alike unto God, both Jew and gentile.  There’s nothing more clear than that, and yet we haven’t gotten it right yet.  We haven’t gotten it right yet.  We’re working towards it, now we get to keep working towards it and having these conversations to tell us guys, if it’s not one of those all are alike things, if you’re treating people differently, that’s contradictory to what we’ve already been told.  Don’t ask for a prophet to give you new revelation.  You’ve already got revelation.  How about you read it, and understand it, and then we don’t have to worry about making God tell us something else when he’s already told us, ‘hello. Why aren’t you listening?’”

Dan, “Right.  I thought of that verse too, and it’s sort of speaking to what you were talking about Gina.  This is the role of a prophet.  That verse kind of has that ideal, that calling you to Christ’s deep teaching stuff, a lot different than whatever it was that stuff that started the ban.   You know what I mean?  I think there’s a way to do that. We need to be careful, and we need to watch what you guys are all warning about, this rabbit hole, the dominos and all that stuff, but I can see it being done and it would lead towards—

Brad interrupts, “Dan can I say something in response?”

Dan, “Yeah, sure.”

Brad, “I think that when the conversation focuses on apology on the need or lack of need for an apology, I think it’s actually a real distraction,

Marguerite, “Yes it is.”

Brad continues, “because there’s something more important than apologizing.  Because you can apologize for the effects of something.  You can apologize that something hurt somebody without actually acknowledging that it was wrong.  An apology isn’t an essential step in the repentance process.

It may be, but it may not be, but what is absolutely essential is that you acknowledge the need of repentance in the first place.  You acknowledge that it was wrong, and if the Randy Bott debacle and all of its aftermath has taught us anything, it is that we are not past this issue in the church.”

Dan, “For sure.”

Brad, “This is a source of pain, this is a source of problems, this is still a millstone around our neck, an Achilles heel or whatever metaphor you want to use.  It seems obvious to me, you cannot get past this while at the same time refusing—we’re making it worse for ourselves because now we’re saying racism is bad, all racism, past and present, inside and outside the church is bad, is wrong we condemn it, but no comment on the ban.

That bespeaks a state of denial, an unwillingness to really come to terms with what the ban was, and the great evil that it entailed in the lives of millions and millions of children of God. If we are going to feel and experience and take in the full power of the atonement as a church, the power of the atonement to transform, to bring you back to a path of righteousness when you’ve gone astray, to lift you out of the mire of sin, we have to acknowledge it.  We have to at least be willing to say, regardless of whether there’s an apology to somebody, we have to be willing to say, you know what, it was racist and it was wrong.”

Dan, “And then you’ve added in some language, we need to repudiate it, disavow it, you know, that’s a lot different than apologize for how it’s harmed.  Yeah, and that’s clearly what your blog post points to.”

Brad, “Apology, no apology, it’s about contrition.  You cannot have the full power of Christ in your life without a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”

Marguerite, “I would ask though, I don’t disagree with the idea that you have to acknowledge the sin in order to repent of it and open you heart and make sure the stain is gone, but the church is millions of individuals.  How does an institution?  An institution has no soul.  It is merely the collection of everybody in it.  I think that we don’t want to set up on a path where—I mean I want to acknowledge all the individuals to that introspection that Dan was talking about to that kind of individual repentance.  If you get there, you’re done.  You can be done.  Does the institution itself have to say something?  Can an institution repent the way that you’re talking about?”

Brad, “I think it can I think it has to.”

Dan, “I do too, yeah.”

Gina, “Yeah me too.”

Brad continues, “I think on the one hand we’re called to repent.”

Marguerite interrupts, “Yes, but that’s individuals, that’s people. That’s the individuals in the Church.”

Brad continues, “Churches and nations and people, entire peoples are called to repentance.”

Marguerite, “But that’s the individuals, that’s individuals who are called to repentance.”

Dan, “No, I, I….”

Brad, “No.”

Marguerite, “How can an institution be condemned or saved?  It’s the people.  The church exists to save the individuals, and that’s why it exists.”

Brad, “The Church doesn’t exist for individuals, it exists to build Zion.  It exists to achieve potential as—“

Marguerite, “Yeah but what Zion?”

Brad continues, “As an institution.”

Marguerite, “What Zion?  But that’s just it.  The Church like the Sabbath—man was not invented for the Sabbath, Sabbath was invented for man.  And that’s the same thing as the Church.  Man was not invented for the church.  The church was instituted for man that we may learn and grow and get back to Heavenly Father.  So as an institution—”

Brad interrupts, “We don’t just do it as individuals, we do it as a society.  We depend on each other.  We are sealed together as a community. Zion.  The end result is not an individual association with God, it’s a kingdom.”

Marguerite, “No but its each individual has to be the part of that.”

Brad, “Right, I’m not saying—“

Dan, “It’s a both Marguerite.  I think you’re playing up the individual piece of it.  But I do think there’s a precedent for calling nations and things, especially this at this repudiation level, we have to absolutely not just explain it, we have to reject it.  Reject those structures.”

Marguerite, “I agree that this stuff is necessary. The Church has to take the lead in eradicating erroneous teachings wherever it finds them. And this is a whole bunch of erroneous stuff out there, and they need to absolutely correct that. But the reason is because people’s belief in those erroneous teachings then cuts them off from God.  It allows hatred and racism/discrimination to infect all of the individuals when the teaching is there. I think the Church has to get rid of that, but you know, sitting here as a black person, I don’t need anybody here to come and apologize to me.”

Brad, “I’m not asking anybody to apologize.”

Gina, “I want an apology.”

Dan, “All right!  Go Gina.”

Marguerite, ”I’m sorry Gina!”

Brad, “What I want though is I want us to acknowledge if we’re going to say that we need to eradicate false teachings, and the false teaching that we need to eradicate most is the false teaching that there was nothing wrong with the ban, that the ban wasn’t racist.”

Marguerite, “I agree, although I have not yet, I haven’t heard the Church’s statements are not saying there was nothing wrong with it, they just say we can’t explain where it came from.”

Brad, “They’re refusing to say that there was something wrong with it though.”

Marguerite, “Ummm, I guess I have to look at that. The current press release doesn’t really address that one way or another.  They acknowledge the existence of the ban, they say for a time it existed and they can’t explain why it existed.  It ended in ’78 and then they go—“

Brad, “Completely passing on the question of there being anything wrong with it.”

Dan, “It’s missing for sure.”

Marguerite, “Yeah, that’s what it is.  They’re passing on that.  They have not actually affirmative stated there was nothing wrong with it, they also have not affirmatively stated that it was something terribly wrong with it.”

Brad, “President Hinckley stated there was nothing wrong with it several years ago.  So it is something that does need—“

Marguerite, “What raised that?  What were his exact words?  Do you have that in front of you, because I actually read that just yesterday.  He didn’t say, ‘Oh, there was nothing wrong with it, what he did was—“

Brad, “He said it wasn’t wrong.”

Marguerite, “Is that was the quote was?  Because I don’t remember the ‘it was not wrong.’  I remember him deftly avoiding a couple of those questions that led directly to that and what he really said was it’s now over with and the revelation came and there was some language about, what was it?  I don’t have it in front of me anymore but I just read it the other day.  He did not say, ‘it was not wrong’, what he said was ‘this is over.  We don’t have the source of that policy was, but it is now gone, and why can’t we move past this?’  He left with the same kind of language he did in the Larry King interview.  You know why are we focusing on this when that’s past history.  Let’s focus and move forward.”

Brad, “Yeah, I’m just assuming we’re reading different things.”

Dan, “Could be, yeah, yeah.”

Brad, “He probably got asked about it quite often.”

Marguerite, “Oh I’m sure he did, but by the time he was on Larry King, you saw it.  He was expert at, he didn’t defend it, he didn’t condemn it.  He said it was, it existed, we don’t know what the source was.  It ended in ’78 and let’s talk about something else.  That’s kind of been the script for several years for ya know…”

Dan, “New script coming, please.  Let’s hope.”

Marguerite, “I don’t disagree that the conversation needs to happen, I just wanted to make sure that—I don’t want anybody’s focus, I don’t want any individuals, personal relationships or their testimonies with say the truths that are in the Book of Mormon and the truths that are in the gospel to be hindered by them waiting for a, you know an “I’m sorry”.  There are black people who joined the church when the ban existed and that kind of faith I don’t want to trivialize or minimize the amazing steps, the path that these people walked that quite frankly I have no idea if I would be able to walk at that time with that kind of faith, and with that kind of grace in the face of all that difficulty, extant, not just past, not just lingering, not just the artifacts, but in their faces every single day.  And that to me is tremendous faith in truths of the doctrine that isn’t tied to what other people think, what other people say.  I don’t want to ever deny someone the ability to walk that path.”

Brad, “No, I agree, and I don’t think that-that’s why I began that conversations about apology are sidestepping the main issue, which is that our unwillingness to acknowledge that it was wrong is still a stumbling block.”

Marguerite, “Well, and I would just add too that there’s a lot of other stumbling blocks to that conversation that people don’t have a good understanding of discrimination, they don’t have a good understanding of racism, and as long as they believe that they are not racist unless they possess animosity, hatred based on race, then this question can never be asked.  Because they will say there was no racism because there was no animosity.  “

Brad, “Right.”

Marguerite , “What we have to do first is let people know that discrimination based on race is racism no matter what your motives, no matter what your understanding.  If they have that, then people can start to do the light bulb will go off.  Oh my gosh!  That was discrimination, then that was racist.  We need to have that other conversation first.  We need to educate people as to ‘look guys this is discrimination.’ If somebody can be a religion professor at BYU for umpteen years and go into Washington Post saying that discrimination is merely denying people something that will be a benefit to them, we’ve got a lot of educating to do on that issue there before we can even get to the loftier issues that are the goal here.”

Dan, “Very good, thank you.  Hey guys we got to wrap this up. Brad and Marguerite, I don’t know if those can serve as final statements from you guys, I’ll get you one more chance to add anything that’s on your heart, but Gina, I’d love to send it back your direction for what haven’t you said that you want to say? I know there’s a lot of things on your list here, we’re obviously not going to get to those.  If you had a closing monologue or an impassioned plea or just a summation, I’d love to just throw it to you.”

Gina, “Gosh, I’d like to go back to Brad’s point about the need for an apology.  If we think about in the Mormon context, in the doctrinal context of what an apology means, an apology is a change of heart.  It’s doing something differently, and I think that by all means the institution can do something differently.  But what it requires is being able to kind of integrate the experience of the margins into the discourse of the center, so that our theology starts actually looking like our church.  And that’s the biggest problem, that I think that we face is that on one level we can crack open the scriptures and then on another level we’re dealing with this something that doesn’t actually reflect what we understand about our theology from the scriptures.  So, I would just like to see more self-reflexiveness in white spaces about the effect that white culture and white privilege and white advantages if not having to think about these issues has on minority folk, black and brown folk.  Until that happens, we can kind of work on dispositions and ask people to love people more, but until there’s systemic change and a reorientation and instability in our cultural spaces, I’m not sure that we’re going to move forward.  We’re just going to circle around the same old problem.”

Dan, “Terrific, thank you.  Anything else?”

Gina, “Nope.”

Dan, “Thank you Gina for being on.  We’re going to have you back.”

Gina, “Thanks.”

Dan, “Brad, any last thing you didn’t get out?”

Brad, “I would say that even if on a strictly individual level, racism is a problem in the church, and it is a problem in the church, because If you’re unwilling to accept that the ban was wrong, then what you’re doing is accepting a view of the universe in which it is ok to discriminate on the basis of race, even in these vital, vital things: temple access, temple covenants, sealings, sealing of families together.  It’s ok to withhold those blessings, to exclude people on the basis of race.  So the unwillingness, the inability to view the ban as wrong is a stumbling block to overcoming the sin of racism for the individual and the unwillingness of the leaders of the church to acknowledge the wrongness of the ban, therefore becomes a stumbling block for individual church members, in their own quest to overcome the sin of racism.  It still exists, the residual racism that still exists as an after-effect, and simply is a byproduct of our own cultural embeddedness.”

Dan, “Right.”

Brad, “Racism is a sin, it is a sin that has stained us in the past, it continues to stain us in the present, and full acknowledgement of all the wrongness of all the racism and all of its forms is the only possible path to removing the sin from—to unstaining our garments.”

Dan, “Cool, thank you.  Powerful.  Marguerite, anything left?”

Marguerite, “There is so much more, I don’t know how to add to this except that we started at the beginning by saying what you’re hearing here are the thoughts and feelings of people, all of whom are currently active members of the LDS Church.  This does not come from a position of trying to tear down, but from a position of reflecting on our own perspectives, from our own places within the church, and certainly offering our own opinions on what currently exists, the pains and problems, and how we can move forward to a day when we truly will be of one fold and one shepherd.  So I just want to make sure the listeners understand, we are not trying to rip down and tear apart, but to make sure if you’ve got this goal in mind, there are steps that have to be taken, and those steps are not always easy ones.

They’re not even always clear ones.  If we can at least be dedicated to moving in the right direction, this was a step in the right direction.  We need more steps, but that that’s the goal.  The goal is so that we truly can be of one fold and one shepherd with one heart to guide us.”

Gina, “Amen.”

Dan, “Preach it.”

Brad, “Amen.”

Dan, “Thank you Marguerite.  Thanks all of you for being on here.  What did you call yourselves Marguerite?  Marguerite called you the band of crazies, Dan and the band of crazies.”  [chuckling]

Gina laughs, “Speak for yourself!”

Marguerite, “That’s right!  No, No, I said I don’t want to be known as a crazy.”

Dan, “I know, I know.”

Marguerite, “Dan and his band of crazies are you know trying to tell people, don’t listen to the prophet and that…I said don’t.”

Dan, “Yeah, I know, I got you.  I was just playing with it. I’ll just make it Dan and the people he’s crazy about, so how’s that?  I like it.”

Marguerite, “There you go, I like it.  Now can we have a closing song? I’m just kidding.”

Dan sings, “This little land of mine…. [stops singing]  Oh, that would be wonderful.  Thank you you guys for being on, and Brad, it’s 1:25 in the morning where you are so we appreciate that. We got started late because of Joanna’s schedule, and then we ended up not having Joanna on.  Yep, so anyone, so ”

Marguerite, “Well tell her the exciting conversation she missed.”

Dan, “She’ll be listening to it. We’ll have her join in with the blog conversation.  I just really appreciated this, and there’s just that one little thread that you could kind of tell I was trying to get to, and I really appreciated the open-hearted way we kind of used the word sin, we talked about repentance, and I don’t know, there was somewhere along the line in my journey where getting caught up short in an area of my life just quit being so devastating to me, and it was more like feedback, like God sitting there going, Yup, you screwed up here.  But I no longer feel condemnation from God.  I’m not really that messed—I’m not really that trouble when I’ve been wrong, so I’d just really love us to defang sin from evil, you know what I mean?  Of the need for repentance as something that is a deficiency in us.  This is what life was about was to learn and to grow and to own it for ourselves.”

Marguerite, “Don’t you remember, they say in the scriptures specifically God gives unto men weaknesses so that we can use Him to make them strengths.”

Dan, “Exactly”

Marguerite, “But I just wanted to add, just relevant to what you just said, living here in Utah County it surprises me, well maybe surprise isn’t’ the right word, but let me just finish the thought first that Utah County is the Prozac capital of the planet, and it is now the plastic surgery capital of the planet.

I think that a lot of the reason for that is exactly this problem that Dan is raising which is an inability to accept wrongness or imperfections in ourselves.  But I don’t know if it’s necessarily within our relationship to God.  It might simply be in our relationship to each other.  I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of that yet. I don’t know why I’m looking at all these women.  I sat in a restaurant listening to three women talk about all the plastic surgery procedures they’ve had.  ‘Oh darling, my doctor could take care of that thing around your eye.’  And you know, I was flummoxed really, but I think that a lot of that might relate to the idea that you’re now raising, or not now raising, but the idea that sometimes people have difficulty looking at themselves in the mirror and spotting the flaws, either because they are trying to hide them from God, or other people or themselves, and they can’t deal with imperfection.  I’m quite imperfect, and I don’t mind acknowledging that at all to all of you and everyone listening.”

Dan, “And with God, it’s just like, oh man, it’s so normal, and yeah, you need to acknowledge it, you need to repudiate it, disavow those actions, but it’s not us as much as its just—I don’t know it’s feedback. And feedback is loving.  To have the mirror shown to you is a loving act.  If we can just defang that, and so that’s why I kind of was pushing all along, you know a moment, here.  We don’t love the moment here with Dr. Bott’s comments, we don’t love it, but boy we can sure use it, and I hope we will do those deep self-reflections, all of us, and don’t make it a condemning yourself act.  Make it a changing yourself act, because that’s what repentance is all about.  You’re already forgiven.  There’s no begging for forgiveness.  You’re forgiven before you hit your knees.  You’re forgiven that your heart turns towards God, so just make it about turning and opening your eyes and seeing the mirror.  Anyway that’s kind of my last bit.”

Brad, “You know the best part about the Book of Mormon is Dan?”

Dan, “What?”

Brad, “It’s almost counter-intuitive, but it’s like a center piece of Book of Mormon theology.  It’s when King Benjamin says, tells his listeners the secret of life, the secret of happiness.  Remember?  He says, just remember your nothingness and always retain in remembrance your nothingness before God, and his long-suffering toward you unworthy creatures.  And if you remember that always, You’ll always rejoice.”

Dan, “Shall we close with that?  That will be our closing devotional.”

Marguerite, “Yes, you can go ahead and edit it and take care of everything else on the editing floor, right?”

Dan chuckels, “Oh, wonderful.  Thanks you guys.  I’ll let you know when this posts, and we invite you guys to come to the blog and interact with people, and folks out there who are listening, please come and tell us what we missed.  I mean I know how much we missed cause I’m staring at so many notes that we didn’t get to.  So let’s have this conversation and take advantage of this moment even though we didn’t choose this moment to be in front of us.  Let’s use it for all the good things that might come out of it.  Thank you again.  Please visit Mormon Matters.org and goodnight to my great guests.  Thank you crazies!”

[group thanks him back.]

Dan, “Good night.  Cue the music!”

Dan Wotherspoon, Host of Mormon Matters

Dan Wotherspoon, “Gina, again from your list, you asked the question that I think a lot of us talk about, but let’s give it voice here again.  Is the reluctance of the Church to respond in a more robust way, this worry that it’s going to undermine the members’ faith in prophetic revelation?  Do you want to start us on that conversation?  Do you guys kind of agree that this is—let’s at least air this one out for a couple of minutes.”

Brad, “Well, it’s something that I’ve encountered already in an interesting form which is that I’ve encountered a number of people who have responded to my call for contrition and disavowal.  By saying like basically like well I can see why that’s needed here, but it just feels to me like you’re trying to set the stage for calling for the same thing on gay rights and women’s issues.   In other words—“

Marguerite, “Slippery slope argument?”

Brad, “Well, they see the undermining—and they’re not entirely wrong you know.  We’re not going to be—if something changes with regards to these questions that are sort of very salient at this very moment, something that is going to happen before that change is that people are going to re-evaluate, not necessarily lose faith, but they are going to re-evaluate what they think about the role of prophets, the role of church leaders, and that’s part of what is at stake in this question is are we willing to accept the possibility that on this one particular question, presidents of the church did lead us astray?  They didn’t lead us astray in that they led the Church into capital A apostasy, but they led us astray from truth, and God corrected it and brought us back.

But we have to I think come to terms with that and come to terms within that newly created space with just a slightly scaled back sense of sort of absolute prophetic almost infallibility.  I mean we constantly say that we don’t believe in that, but we kind of do.  But when that gets scaled back and just tempered down just a little bit, then that opens up the space, it does raise the question, it does open up the possibility that the things that we feel really strongly about and that we use as sort of boundary markers for Mormons today are subject to change in the future.”

Dan, “Gina do you have anything to add on to that?  Thanks Brad.”

Dr. Gina Colvin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Gina, “Yeah, I agree, and I think it’s kind of going down that rabbit hole.  It’s kind of shoving/pushing dominos over.  If you say ok in this respect perhaps prophets got that wrong or presidents of the church got that wrong, then what other aspects can we say that perhaps presidents got that wrong?  We need to kind of—I suppose it comes back to the question what is the role of the prophet and once we’ve kind of determined that—is the prophet’s role just kind of to tell us where to put our potatoes like Brigham Young did, ya know, by the back door next to the brooms, or is a prophet’s responsibility, and I think kind of theologically we’d have to agree that a prophet’s responsibility is pointing to Christ, and that everything else can kind of go by the wayside.  ‘Well, that’s his opinion.’ I speak as somebody from New Zealand, it would have been nice if someone—this is an American problem, this whole race issue, and rather than it being sort of washed up onto the tide, we’re having to deal with it. In Brazil for instance, the issue of race is not the same as it is in the United States.  And so they look like, we want to build a temple, how can we do that because we can’t find any person in Brazil that doesn’t have at least some bit of black heritage, what do we do about that?

So, yeah, I just kind of come back to that notion that we have to clarify, as part of our maturing that we recognize that prophets have a particular role in telling us how to become more like Christ and pointing the way to become a Zion people.  Now if they said everything that was the mind and will of God, they’d be God.”

Dan, “Hmmm, interesting.”

Gina continues, “So you know they have to filter this kind of, you know, speaking theologically they have to kind of filter all of these kind of promptings and thinking from kind of this omnipotent being through their kind of mortal framework and cultural locatedness.  I think we need to own it, unless it is helpful for us to understand the mind and will of Christ, and backed up with scriptural canon.  Some things can be disregarded just as kind of opinion.”

Dan, “Awesome.”

Marguerite Driessen, Adjunct Professor at BYU in Law and Communications

Marguerite, “I would add that there’s always the trouble, and this is where you are when you’re LDS you are supposed what—follow the prophet.  Did you learn the song?  [Sings] Follow the prophet.  Follow the prophet…’ [Gina interrupts.]

Marguerite continues, “We learned it out whole life so that’s one of the reasons that there’s an issue here because there are times when—I actually might disagree here a bit with Brad in that there are things a prophet has said and done before they were prophets or while wearing other hats.  It is rare, we do not have a spoken revelation on this race issue, or some prophet speaking at General Conference.  We’ve never had it, and we’re going to need one probably to fix it all but there is several little sub-issues here.  One, there are people in the Church who do not believe that any prophet ever in any aspect of their life could ever be infallible which then imbues anything they’ve ever said or done, including some paper they wrote when they were 21 for a sociology class with spiritual significance if they later become prophet of the church.  There is that issue that exists among people.

There are some of us willing to accept that prophets are human beings and when they are speaking as the mouthpiece of the Lord we have been promised that they won’t lead us astray, but we still have something to do here which is we need to rely on our own instructions, and our own gift of the Holy Ghost and spirit of revelation to know when something is coming from this person as the prophet from the mouth of God, and when it is something else.  Then you have to reconcile to yourself what to do with it. I mean I don’t want people to listen to this podcast and say that Dan and his panel of crazies are saying ‘don’t ever listen to the prophet because it’s really just his opinion.’ That’s not my opinion.

I’m telling you there are times when people who are prophets speak but when they are not speaking prophetically, and usually they give you some kind of clue.  Like if they’re speaking from the pulpit at General Conference, maybe you should listen.  But when they’re sitting there talking to the legislature as the governor of the state, take that with a huge grain of salt if you take it at all.  You could shovel it out in the dust bin and it wouldn’t make a difference to your immortal status, you know, your obedience or lack thereof, your willfulness or lack thereof.  I think that is something we need to come to grips with.

I think there are people who—I have a problem with people who won’t move forward unless there’s an apology for what happened in the past.  Maybe that’s because I understand repentance, or I understand the idea of forgiveness and these things as related only to yourself. If you’ve wronged me, you’ve wronged me, and that’s on you.  If I refuse to forgive you and move forward, that’s on me. So I want to be sure to tell people that look, you need to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ.  You need to develop a relationship with God.  You need to learn the doctrine, and the doctrine is inclusive.  It is loving, and the end of 2 Nephi 26 absolutely says that God denies none—what’s the exact quote? It says he denieth none.”

Dan, “He inviteth all.”

Marguerite continues, “He denieth none!  He denieth none that come unto him black and white, bond and free, male and female, and he, it says here specifically, remembereth the heathen and all are alike unto God, both Jew and gentile.  There’s nothing more clear than that, and yet we haven’t gotten it right yet.  We haven’t gotten it right yet.  We’re working towards it, now we get to keep working towards it and having these conversations to tell us guys, if it’s not one of those all are alike things, if you’re treating people differently, that’s contradictory to what we’ve already been told.  Don’t ask for a prophet to give you new revelation.  You’ve already got revelation.  How about you read it, and understand it, and then we don’t have to worry about making God tell us something else when he’s already told us, ‘hello. Why aren’t you listening?’”

Dan, “Right.  I thought of that verse too, and it’s sort of speaking to what you were talking about Gina.  This is the role of a prophet.  That verse kind of has that ideal, that calling you to Christ’s deep teaching stuff, a lot different than whatever it was that stuff that started the ban.   You know what I mean?  I think there’s a way to do that. We need to be careful, and we need to watch what you guys are all warning about, this rabbit hole, the dominos and all that stuff, but I can see it being done and it would lead towards—

Brad interrupts, “Dan can I say something in response?”

Dan, “Yeah, sure.”

Brad Kramer - By Common Consent blogger

Brad, “I think that when the conversation focuses on apology on the need or lack of need for an apology, I think it’s actually a real distraction,

Marguerite, “Yes it is.”

Brad continues, “because there’s something more important than apologizing.  Because you can apologize for the effects of something.  You can apologize that something hurt somebody without actually acknowledging that it was wrong.  An apology isn’t an essential step in the repentance process.

It may be, but it may not be, but what is absolutely essential is that you acknowledge the need of repentance in the first place.  You acknowledge that it was wrong, and if the Randy Bott debacle and all of its aftermath has taught us anything, it is that we are not past this issue in the church.”

Dan, “For sure.”

Brad, “This is a source of pain, this is a source of problems, this is still a millstone around our neck, an Achilles heel or whatever metaphor you want to use.  It seems obvious to me, you cannot get past this while at the same time refusing—we’re making it worse for ourselves because now we’re saying racism is bad, all racism, past and present, inside and outside the church is bad, is wrong we condemn it, but no comment on the ban.

That bespeaks a state of denial, an unwillingness to really come to terms with what the ban was, and the great evil that it entailed in the lives of millions and millions of children of God. If we are going to feel and experience and take in the full power of the atonement as a church, the power of the atonement to transform, to bring you back to a path of righteousness when you’ve gone astray, to lift you out of the mire of sin, we have to acknowledge it.  We have to at least be willing to say, regardless of whether there’s an apology to somebody, we have to be willing to say, you know what, it was racist and it was wrong.”

Dan, “And then you’ve added in some language, we need to repudiate it, disavow it, you know, that’s a lot different than apologize for how it’s harmed.  Yeah, and that’s clearly what your blog post points to.”

Brad, “Apology, no apology, it’s about contrition.  You cannot have the full power of Christ in your life without a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”

Marguerite, “I would ask though, I don’t disagree with the idea that you have to acknowledge the sin in order to repent of it and open you heart and make sure the stain is gone, but the church is millions of individuals.  How does an institution?  An institution has no soul.  It is merely the collection of everybody in it.  I think that we don’t want to set up on a path where—I mean I want to acknowledge all the individuals to that introspection that Dan was talking about to that kind of individual repentance.  If you get there, you’re done.  You can be done.  Does the institution itself have to say something?  Can an institution repent the way that you’re talking about?”

Brad, “I think it can I think it has to.”

Dan, “I do too, yeah.”

Gina, “Yeah me too.”

Brad continues, “I think on the one hand we’re called to repent.”

Marguerite interrupts, “Yes, but that’s individuals, that’s people. That’s the individuals in the Church.”

Brad continues, “Churches and nations and people, entire peoples are called to repentance.”

Marguerite, “But that’s the individuals, that’s individuals who are called to repentance.”

Dan, “No, I, I….”

Brad, “No.”

Marguerite, “How can an institution be condemned or saved?  It’s the people.  The church exists to save the individuals, and that’s why it exists.”

Brad, “The Church doesn’t exist for individuals, it exists to build Zion.  It exists to achieve potential as—“

Marguerite, “Yeah but what Zion?”

Brad continues, “As an institution.”

Marguerite, “What Zion?  But that’s just it.  The Church like the Sabbath—man was not invented for the Sabbath, Sabbath was invented for man.  And that’s the same thing as the Church.  Man was not invented for the church.  The church was instituted for man that we may learn and grow and get back to Heavenly Father.  So as an institution—”

Brad interrupts, “We don’t just do it as individuals, we do it as a society.  We depend on each other.  We are sealed together as a community. Zion.  The end result is not an individual association with God, it’s a kingdom.”

Marguerite, “No but its each individual has to be the part of that.”

Brad, “Right, I’m not saying—“

Dan, “It’s a both Marguerite.  I think you’re playing up the individual piece of it.  But I do think there’s a precedent for calling nations and things, especially this at this repudiation level, we have to absolutely not just explain it, we have to reject it.  Reject those structures.”

Marguerite, “I agree that this stuff is necessary. The Church has to take the lead in eradicating erroneous teachings wherever it finds them. And this is a whole bunch of erroneous stuff out there, and they need to absolutely correct that. But the reason is because people’s belief in those erroneous teachings then cuts them off from God.  It allows hatred and racism/discrimination to infect all of the individuals when the teaching is there. I think the Church has to get rid of that, but you know, sitting here as a black person, I don’t need anybody here to come and apologize to me.”

Brad, “I’m not asking anybody to apologize.”

Gina, “I want an apology.”

Dan, “All right!  Go Gina.”

Marguerite, ”I’m sorry Gina!”

Brad, “What I want though is I want us to acknowledge if we’re going to say that we need to eradicate false teachings, and the false teaching that we need to eradicate most is the false teaching that there was nothing wrong with the ban, that the ban wasn’t racist.”

Marguerite, “I agree, although I have not yet, I haven’t heard the Church’s statements are not saying there was nothing wrong with it, they just say we can’t explain where it came from.”

Brad, “They’re refusing to say that there was something wrong with it though.”

Marguerite, “Ummm, I guess I have to look at that. The current press release doesn’t really address that one way or another.  They acknowledge the existence of the ban, they say for a time it existed and they can’t explain why it existed.  It ended in ’78 and then they go—“

Brad, “Completely passing on the question of there being anything wrong with it.”

Dan, “It’s missing for sure.”

Marguerite, “Yeah, that’s what it is.  They’re passing on that.  They have not actually affirmative stated there was nothing wrong with it, they also have not affirmatively stated that it was something terribly wrong with it.”

Brad, “President Hinckley stated there was nothing wrong with it several years ago.  So it is something that does need—“

Marguerite, “What raised that?  What were his exact words?  Do you have that in front of you, because I actually read that just yesterday.  He didn’t say, ‘Oh, there was nothing wrong with it, what he did was—“

Brad, “He said it wasn’t wrong.”

Marguerite, “Is that was the quote was?  Because I don’t remember the ‘it was not wrong.’  I remember him deftly avoiding a couple of those questions that led directly to that and what he really said was it’s now over with and the revelation came and there was some language about, what was it?  I don’t have it in front of me anymore but I just read it the other day.  He did not say, ‘it was not wrong’, what he said was ‘this is over.  We don’t have the source of that policy was, but it is now gone, and why can’t we move past this?’  He left with the same kind of language he did in the Larry King interview.  You know why are we focusing on this when that’s past history.  Let’s focus and move forward.”

Brad, “Yeah, I’m just assuming we’re reading different things.”

Dan, “Could be, yeah, yeah.”

Brad, “He probably got asked about it quite often.”

Marguerite, “Oh I’m sure he did, but by the time he was on Larry King, you saw it.  He was expert at, he didn’t defend it, he didn’t condemn it.  He said it was, it existed, we don’t know what the source was.  It ended in ’78 and let’s talk about something else.  That’s kind of been the script for several years for ya know…”

Dan, “New script coming, please.  Let’s hope.”

Marguerite, “I don’t disagree that the conversation needs to happen, I just wanted to make sure that—I don’t want anybody’s focus, I don’t want any individuals, personal relationships or their testimonies with say the truths that are in the Book of Mormon and the truths that are in the gospel to be hindered by them waiting for a, you know an “I’m sorry”.  There are black people who joined the church when the ban existed and that kind of faith I don’t want to trivialize or minimize the amazing steps, the path that these people walked that quite frankly I have no idea if I would be able to walk at that time with that kind of faith, and with that kind of grace in the face of all that difficulty, extant, not just past, not just lingering, not just the artifacts, but in their faces every single day.  And that to me is tremendous faith in truths of the doctrine that isn’t tied to what other people think, what other people say.  I don’t want to ever deny someone the ability to walk that path.”

Brad, “No, I agree, and I don’t think that-that’s why I began that conversations about apology are sidestepping the main issue, which is that our unwillingness to acknowledge that it was wrong is still a stumbling block.”

Marguerite, “Well, and I would just add too that there’s a lot of other stumbling blocks to that conversation that people don’t have a good understanding of discrimination, they don’t have a good understanding of racism, and as long as they believe that they are not racist unless they possess animosity, hatred based on race, then this question can never be asked.  Because they will say there was no racism because there was no animosity.  “

Brad, “Right.”

Marguerite , “What we have to do first is let people know that discrimination based on race is racism no matter what your motives, no matter what your understanding.  If they have that, then people can start to do the light bulb will go off.  Oh my gosh!  That was discrimination, then that was racist.  We need to have that other conversation first.  We need to educate people as to ‘look guys this is discrimination.’ If somebody can be a religion professor at BYU for umpteen years and go into Washington Post saying that discrimination is merely denying people something that will be a benefit to them, we’ve got a lot of educating to do on that issue there before we can even get to the loftier issues that are the goal here.”

Dan, “Very good, thank you.  Hey guys we got to wrap this up.

What are your thoughts?  Do you agree with Marguerite or Brad on the appropriateness of an apology?  Can/Should an institution repent?

Marguerite Driessen, Adjunct Professor at BYU in Law and Communications

Marguerite, “I do think there are many issues that relate to why this is such a tender issue for some, and such an abrasive issue for others, and yet even a non-issue for some others, and people in those groups probably would surprise you. I’ve known white people much more offended and hurt by the ban—that they’ve come to call the Priesthood ban, but now after talking to Brad, I will call it a Temple Ban, I will just call it ‘The Ban’ or whatever, to make sure that we know it was more than just priesthood—much more hurt and offended by it than say I am, having joined the church in 1981 when it was over.  And I didn’t join in Utah, I joined out in Washington, DC.”

Gina interrupts, “Can I just ask a question?  If you had known about it, would you have joined the Church?”

Marguerite, “I had known that there was a priesthood restriction until ’78 when I joined the Church.  I also knew it wasn’t there anymore.  What I never heard before ’81 was the folklore that people had invented to support it.  So it actually didn’t affect me at all.  I get asked, how can you join a church that is so racist?

And I said, well the policy doesn’t exist anymore, so what are you really asking me?  And it turns out, well, they had this policy and they had it longer than other people.  And that point, I actually am really comfortable with, and perhaps have a very different perspective than some other people and perhaps it comes from my legal background, but I will tell you—I studied, I studied, the Civil Rights acts of ’54 or ’64.  I mean I studied those de-segregation cases and I even met say you know Brown vs Board of Education—famous U.S. case that ended segregation in public education, the girls who were the subject of that lawsuit came to speak at BYU when I was part of the hosting team and spent hours and hours with them over the course of the time that they were here.

You know, it’s a really interesting perspective to talk to really little girls who at the age of 7 had to be escorted to school by the National Guard, or by police because the policy changed from the top down, and the people were angry and resentful and they still had their racist attitudes, and those attitudes had not changed.  My perspective on this restriction and the lifting of it and the timing is that, you know, thank goodness God waited until ‘78 because what might have been the result had he moved sooner in other contexts?

I want to explain that which is that when I think of an 8-year old girl, a 7-year old, 9-year old, having to have police protection to walk to school, having excrement thrown at them, being sworn at, having people trying to beat them, throwing rocks, throwing food, throwing garbage, the image that came to me immediately was I knew to my soul that that is not the way that God wanted any of his children to have to go to church.  If this ban had come from the top down too soon, that is what people like me would have faced when we embraced the gospel.  The doctrine that did not contain the racist poison.

You know certainly there are some questionable texts, and that could be the subject of another Mormon Matters podcast, but I also think that part of those questionable texts, part of the reason that they have had the impact is because people look at them through a lens that is already darkened with racial prejudice through histories of institutional racism, and social racism that they have been trained to accept as normal, so that they think of things in racial terms that were not thought of that way at the time people were writing, and certainly not thought of that way say in the time of the Old Testament or New Testament.  But I know in my core that there’s no way Heavenly Father wanted his children to have to go to church with the National Guard to protect them because people around them didn’t want them there.

One absolute benefit of this revelation coming as late as it did is that it came at a time when the vast majority of the people in the church wanted it. A vast majority of people in the church were praying for it individually, and scores of them were writing and lobbying their church leadership to change this hurtful damaging policy for racial reasons, and for compassionate reasons, and for doctrinal reasons all of which were well and good, but what it really meant is [that] when that revelation came in ’78, it was greeted with joy. It was greeted with welcome, almost uniformly throughout the church even among people who still clung to some racist ideas, they believed that denying people blessings for any reason other than their own unworthiness was bad, and that is a benefit from this that is the one aspect of the discussion that we’re not talking about. I don’t deny that it was racist, not at all.  I don’t deny that it was horrible, and I don’t deny that it was hurtful. Coming into the church after it was over, I was spared all of that hurt, and I was spared that damage, and I was spared that marginalization, and only then had to deal with the residual, ‘how do you deal with a black person when you’ve been trained all your life to think of them as the cursed seed of Cain with whom you should not mix your blood?’  and people trying to work their way around that or through that.

But I see things, coming this way at it, and I don’t know Gina in answer to your question, had I found the gospel or the Book of Mormon before ’78, I don’t know that I would have had the courage or the faith of a Darius Gray to join the church anyway and to trust that it will all work out in the end.  I joined at a time when the policy was gone, and all I had to do was be able to have a thick skin about the people around me who had not quite caught up with the policy in terms of total equality of access to God’s love and God’s blessings.”

Dr. Gina Colvin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Gina, “Do you think though that Marguerite, that if the church had been allowed to thrive in black communities as kind of black LDS churches, that that might have been a safe place for people. Can you think of anything historically that might have impeded the possibility of…?

Marguerite interrupts, “No, not anything that would have impeded the possibility, but look around you right now.  Churches that allowed black congregations to exist and have black ministers, they exist.  My dad was Roman Catholic.  When we went to his parents home, or went to their church when we had his mom’s funeral, my grandmother’s funeral, there was a whole church full of black Catholic people. But guess what?  That is the church where all the black Catholic people went.  The white Catholic people to this day don’t go to that building, they go somewhere else. That is the kind of history we could have ended up with had there not been that 10 more years, and that’s really what we’re talking about here.

Ten more years in changing the policy from the top down resulted in a today, a today in which there is not the church on that corner where black Mormons go, and the church on that corner where the white Mormons go, which is the case with Catholics, which is what I have experience with; Methodists as well, which is what my mom was Methodist.  I have friends who are Southern Baptist, friends who are Episcopalian, friends who are in religions that did not have a formal priesthood ban or a priesthood restriction for black people until 1978, but to this day have segregated congregations, not by doctrine, not by ecclesiastical fiat, but simply by tradition where people grew apart racially, and now we, as the LDS Church have the opportunity truly to be of one heart and one mind, to be one fold with one shepherd, who is Jesus Christ, and not the pastor on that corner versus the pastor on the other corner.”

Gina, “Well, I mean we have such centralized control though.  I wonder if that would be such a bad thing.  Like in 2012 the big issue of course would be, how do we bring our two kinds of thriving communities, a black community and a white community into conversation with each other?  I’m just kind of throwing that out there.”

Brad Kramer - By Common Consent blogger

Brad, “Segregation is creeping back in because of immigration. There aren’t all-black units in Utah, but there are all Mexican units in Arizona.”

Marguerite, “Well, let me re-phrase, there are units, but they tend to be language units more than anything else. There is no law—the Church has always had a policy of allowing everyone to be taught the gospel in their own language, and so what we have to guard against is the potential for having a Spanish language branch or a Chinese language branch or something like this where people can congregate in their own tongue from becoming a culture apart, like the black Catholic church on one corner in Baltimore, and the white Catholic church across town.”

Brad, “That’s what I’m saying.  I know that there are language units everywhere in the church where there’s the need for it.  But what I’m hearing about what’s going in some parts of Arizona is that the division is hardening along these more culturally antagonistic lines.”

Gina, “Yes, absolutely.”

Marguerite, “Well, Arizona has some other issues though. Arizona also has the extremely harsh immigration laws.  There are other factors contributing to that…”

Brad interrupts, “Right, no question.”

Marguerite, “…in that location, but they do not yet exist everywhere else.  I’m not denying that they exist.  I’m not denying that they may be coming into existence, but I guarantee you other issues are playing into that in Arizona that are not playing into it as much in other places, where once people are comfortable in English, they don’t feel the need to only attend the Spanish branch anymore.”

Dan Wotherspoon, Host of Mormon Matters

Dan, “Cool.  Brad, I want to steer to you for just one second, and then Gina I want to go with you.  Brad, what I’m hoping is there was something in your blog post that sort of said similar things to what Marguerite said about perhaps the timing was right if it had happened when David O. McKay was petitioning the Lord.  Some of the things she was saying there.  Do you have any follow up, or did she articulate basically the point that you were making in your blog post or was there pieces that were left out?”

Brad, “No there’s a follow up that I wanted to make, a kind of perhaps slightly different, but also complimentary read on the sort of question we’re defining.  By the time this is becoming a real problem—for a long time the ban exists and it’s not a—nobody is treating it as a problem. Nobody considers it to be a problem.  It’s not until during the 20th century that you get to the point where anybody on the inside, certainly anybody at the center of the church is considering it a problem at all, and it becomes increasingly a problem.  So you have people starting to ask questions about it.

So then the issue becomes, from the perspective of God, you’ve got 2 problems.  You’ve got a church where this ban exists, it’s already there, regardless of where it came from, it’s already there, but it’s also a church that’s profoundly racist, and where lots of racist sentiment exists.  So then you’ve got to deal with the question well ok, if I the Lord end this policy by fiat right now, say it’s 1950, ok?  A little ahead of the curve so to speak.  I’m going to end this policy right now. Then it’s very easy to imagine that the consequence of that would have been black priesthood holders presiding over black units, black temple workers officiating in black temples.

In other words, racism can still exist in the church and all the really—you can basically approach the question as ok, blacks are still inferior but they can still have the priesthood now.  Those two things could have been compatible with each other.  So when I look at someone like David O. McKay, vigorously opposed Civil Rights legislation, and not just on the grounds of sort of constitutional technicalities, but opposed Civil Rights legislation because he was uncomfortable with integration, and because he was uncomfortable with what he would have described as race-mixing.

So if somebody like that is asking me, can the blacks have the priesthood? If essentially what he’s asking me is can we finally give this inferior race some priesthood here?  My answer is going to be stop asking, it’s not going to happen when you’re in charge—exactly the answer that he got.

Marguerite, “Well, and I would also add to that— we’ve been told as LDS people that God has a really interesting way of hiding the mysteries of the universe.  He doesn’t tell us anything if we just ask.  He will give us everything if we just ask.  But it’s not just asking.  Oliver Cowdery learned that.  What are you supposed to do?  You’re supposed to study it out in your own mind, you’re supposed to come up with an answer, and then you ask God if your answer is right.  So we know from historical events and conversations and statements that McKay made and others made, that McKay was taking a question to the Lord, but do you know what that question was?”

Dan, “Yeah, he wasn’t framing it right.”

Marguerite continues, “Do you know how it was framed?  The fact is, he was bringing a question to the Lord, but it very may not have been, ‘I have decided now is the right time.  Do you concur?’ It might have been something else.”

Brad, “Yeah, and it goes to this larger question of the relationship between the ban and the racist teachings. Because what ends up happening, the longer the ban persists, the more it becomes a sort of millstone around our neck.  It becomes an embarrassment, something to be boycotted, and a big problem and everyone is trying to deal with it and try to figure out what to do about it. People are digging their heels in to explain it and to rationalize it, and the effect of all of this pressure is that this pressure locks all of this racist sentiment in the Church to the ban.  And the longer the ban persists, the more the ban gets tied to the racist sentiment, and the racist teachings, and the racist idea about the differences between people of African descent, and people without African lineage.

And so the effect can then be that when God tells the church, and we don’t know what he said.  We don’t have the revelation, right?  Official Declaration 2 is the language that church leaders use to announce to the church that a revelation has been received. It’s not the language of any revelation.  We don’t know what the revelation was other than that the substance of it was, all worthy male members.  And so what happens is that all of this waiting, persistent waiting, this embarrassing sort of how long it’s taking, and all of the racist teachings and rationalizations lead to a moment when God can say, every worthy male member, and that alone can stand as a repudiation of all the racist nonsense.

Marguerite, “And that’s how Bruce R. McConkie interpreted it when he in his ‘78 in his devotional address said forget everything that everybody’s ever said cause they didn’t have the light that we now have.  Not that He gave us everything they gave him, that the presidency got.  As you said, we didn’t get the actual revelation.  We got the announcement, but Bruce R. McConkie specifically said, forget anything we’ve ever said about this explaining it.  Anything, it all came without the knowledge, with lesser light, lesser knowledge. It was wrong.  He acknowledged that. People still kept their pet theories.

Dan, “Right.  But it hasn’t come from a General Conference pulpit yet.  I think it needs to come from a First Presidency member in General Conference to really have the true effect, so we’ll hope for that.

If you’d like to see the previous conversation, I talked about Misunderstanding Racism with this same panel.  What do you think of Marguerite’s belief that 1978 was the right time?  What do you think of Brad’s speculation about President McKay?  Do you have any thoughts about the cultural problems in Arizona?

Dan Wotherspoon, Host of Mormon Matters

Dan Wotherspoon, “Welcome everyone to the newest edition of Mormon Matters Podcast.  I’m your host Dan Wotherspoon, and I’m really excited to have this wonderful panel.  It’s taken us a little bit longer than I wanted to gather the right group to gather a discussion on the recent events in Mormonism that has surrounded the issue of race.  It all began with an article in the Washington Post that was about Mitt Romney, but it was sort of was the history of racism within the church.  We had the wonderful Darius Gray and Don Harwell were going along, doing their best to kind of give a great presentation, but one of the people that the reporter interviewed is a BYU professor who gave some fascinating but what do you call it, just ones that groan you know the deep—“

Brad Kramer, “Humbly offensive?”

Dan, “Yeah, there you go.  Just those things that you just don’t really love out there.  You know, it prompted some response, it prompted good discussion, and we’re going to try to continue that good discussion that it’s generated, reflect on it, reflect on how we’re seeing the people around us process the events of these last 10 days or so since it happened, and just get our minds and brains around racism, and institutional causes and personal racism, and speculated and share what we think would be great next moves and just do what the typical talking head stuff.

So I’m so grateful to have our guests.  They’re all first timers to the podcast—well no, that’s not true.  Marguerite Driessen, I’m going to start with you because you did come on but it was on a show that I didn’t host, it was Dustin Jones as the host, and we have Marguerite Driessen on and it was talking about the history, and the current stuff about the priesthood ban, so it was more of a theological kind of approach than what we’re doing today.  So Marguerite Driessen, welcome back to the podcast!  Would you mind just giving everyone a little bit about your background?”

Marguerite Driessen, Adjunct Professor at BYU in Law and Communications

Driessen, “Sure, happy to be here.  You’ve got my name Marguerite Driessen.  At this moment I’m adjunct faculty in the Communications Department at BYU teaching Media Law and Ethics.  I taught Law at BYU for 10 years and then relevant  to this discussion, you should know that I am an African American female, convert to the church.  I joined back in 1981 so after the revelation, and at a time when the dust had not quite settled, and at this moment, I serve as Relief Society President for the Genesis Group.   Don Harwell, who you mentioned, is the current President of the Genesis Group, and Darius Gray is the past president of the Genesis Group, so I’m very well acquainted by them.

Also my husband and I both serve as Genesis Group missionaries, so we’re members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we’re missionaries.  We also are deeply connected with the Genesis Group to serve the needs of African American members of the church, so that’s my perspective.”

Dan, “Fantastic.  Thank you, thank you for joining us.  We’re so grateful to have you.  I am excited to introduce to our audience Gina Colvin, or have her introduce herself.  Gina and I have been probably six months writing each other back and forth, sharing stories, and I’ve just really enjoyed interacting with you.  We’re planning to do a podcast in about a month from now on Lamanite identity, especially related to Islanders because Gina is coming to us from New Zealand.  Tell us a little bit about your background, and kind of you situation within the church, and racially and all that stuff.”

Dr. Gina Colvin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Gina, “Hi Dan.  Hi Mormon Matters listeners.  Thank you so much for having me.  It’s odd actually speaking to you, not listening to you. {Dan chuckles}.  As Dan said, I’m from New Zealand from Christchurch, New Zealand where is was born and bred.  I am biracial.  My father was a third generation member of the church who impregnated my unmarried my teen mother and so I inherit his race and also his religion and currently a university lecturer—in the United States, you like college professor don’t you?  Right?

Dan, “Yup, Yup.”

Gina, “Yeah, Ok.  A professor is something that we become when we’re very old around here.  So I’m a university lecturer, and active member of the church.  I’m currently Gospel Doctrine teacher and I have a blog called Kiwi Mormon.

Dan, “Yes, you do, and it’s a fantastic blog.”

Gina, “Thank you.”

Brad, “What do you teach Gina?”

Gina, “Oh I teach mostly cultural studies, critical theory, anti-race pedagogies, indigenous studies, etc.”

Dan, “Wow.  Thank you for all you bring to this and we’re just thrilled to have you.  Brad Kramer is that third voice that we’ve heard a couple of times.  Brad would you introduce yourself to our listeners?  We’re glad to have you.”

Brad Kramer - By Common Consent blogger

Brad Kramer, “Happy to and I appreciate the invite.  I am a candidate, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan in socio-cultural anthropology.  I live here with my wife and five kids.  I teach courses, introductory courses to anthropology as well as biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.  I study religion and in particular Mormons.  I also happen to be an active member of the church and I am a regular contributor to the blog, By Common Consent.”

Dan, “Yes, you are, and in fact it’s your recent post that I—do you keep analytics?  Do you know how many times your post has been opened, or anything like that?  Because it’s made a huge impact Scott, it’s got a ton of comments, and you made some really great points that we’re just grateful to have you be able to share tonight.  Has it made a huge difference in your life?  Has your profile shot through the roof?”

Brad chuckles, “I don’t follow the stats too closely but I did glance a couple days ago.  It does seem like there was a bump that day, I’m not sure it was attributable to that post.  There were a lot of different conversations about this issue sort of at the same time, and there was a lot of linking via Facebook and Twitter and stuff to the side, so it’s a little difficult.  Peggy Fletcher Stack broke her piece as well, in which she referenced the blog, so it’s hard to know to attribute it to a single cause, but I would say that the conversation around the questions definitely like I said has given us a spike in our stats.”

Dan, “For sure.  I’ve seen a link like everybody too.  Just one more thing before we dive in, well actually two more things.  Joanna Brooks was going to be with us and we just barely learned recently that she is just unable to.  We’re sorry, we’re going to miss her. We’re grateful for her.  She actually contributed some ideas that I think we’ll definitely incorporate into tonight’s conversation, so we’d like to acknowledge her and thank her and also want to thank Rolf Strabhauer.  I don’t know if I’m saying his name right, but Rolf was one of those people right within the days of this story breaking that said Dan, Dan, you have to do this.  And he’s got wonderful theoretical perspectives and he wrote and I shared three of four of his angles in pre-conversation documents with everybody here, so I’m really thankful for Rolf for doing that.  We’re definitely going to have Rolf on a future podcast.  Alright guys, let’s just dive in and I’m really excited.

This is an angle we’ll just start on with first because since this story has broken, and since we’ve been watching the blogs, all of us have had a Sunday that we’ve been to church and we’re in conversation with families and friends and things like that.  I thought just to begin the podcast with what did Professor Bott say?  What did the Church’s response say immediately after that?  But mostly, what have the people around you been saying?  How are you seeing them process this new conversation that’s at least getting going again?

So before I have you guys talk about the reactions all around us, just a brief summary is within the Washington Post article, Professor Bott started to talk about justifications for the priesthood ban.  These were his own speculations but the nature of them were basically along a couple of lines.  It isn’t racism because the Lord was in charge of this and the Lord knew that black people were not ready at the time, prior to the revelation to receive it, and he used the analogy of it’s like giving a child or a teenager a car and telling them to drive before they’re ready.  Another time he says you know it was actual kindness to not do it because if you go up too high a ladder when you fall down you’re more likely to be injured if you’re higher up on the ladder so he was just keeping them on rung one or rung two, and that way—it was a loving God’s actions to do this and of course this did not go over well.

It made perfect sense to him and in his mind, and it’s within that world view of God is completely in charge, and no human being can really thwart God’s plan, therefore when you’re within that mindset you have to come up with justifications.  So after Dr. Bott did his musings and things like that, immediately, I think it was the next day the church issued a statement that said simply Professor Bott’s comments in no way represent the views of the Church.   I won’t read the statement here and things like that, but it was a very clear—you hate to say repudiation of the person, but at least a definite clear, that is not our view.  Those things are justifications of things that we do not endorse; we don’t know.  Their rhetoric was basically along the lines of we don’t know why it started, we don’t know why it ended, exactly when it did, etc. etc.  Is that a fair summary at least of the background of the story you guys?  Did I miss out on a key part?”

Gina, “No, I think that’s great.”

Brad, “No, I think that’s good.”

Marguerite, “That seems fair.”

Dan, “Ok, with that as our background, and I know a lot of out podcast listeners will have that.  Let’s turn to really since that happened you guys?  What are you hearing?  What are you watching?  Gina, can I go to you first?  Has this raised a stir at all over in New Zealand, or is it just mostly you’re aware of it because you’re watching the blogs?”

Gina, “Yes, it’s a curious thing.  I did a study on LDS New Zealanders understanding of—I’m going to call it the Negro Doctrine, and largely it was not necessarily a lack of engagement, but there was this thinking that it really was an American problem.  Issues of race that came out of pre-1978 were an example of how religion and politics get conflated.  And all of this washes up in the tide, and is left at the margins of the church.  We’re sort of left with what I means to us.  In terms of an immediate reaction, I had , like I say I have the privilege of being the Gospel Doctrine teacher, and I think that last week was on 2 Nephi chapter 26 where I think the last verse of that chapter is ‘all are alive unto God’, and I was able to pull out the Church’s statement, and it was sort of met by pleasant surprise, and lots of people wanted to see copies of it, an older member of the church, new to the class said, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that, that’s wonderful.’  In terms of hitting the spotlight, no it hasn’t really.”

Dan, “Ok, excellent.  That’s neat to get that angle on it, and feel free to weigh in on what you have noticed on blogs or online conversations.  But Brad, what have you seen.  Have you noticed?  What are people saying to you?  What are people saying in response to your post?  What are you seeing?  Have you noticed any patterns?  Is there anything?”

Brad, “Well, I’m seeing a few things.  Obviously there’s all the reactions that you’d expect.  There’s the reaction where people are trying to downplay it as a problem.  Their reaction, people are getting really angry and indifferent, sort of where it fits, peeling the scab off the wounds that are trying to heal or whatever.  There’s a lot of a whole range of responses that you’d expect where you have a church where you have a lot of different opinions, and a lot of different ideas about the underlying questions at play here.  But I have noticed a couple of interesting patterns, or phenomena that I’d like to bring to the table in this discussion.

One is that I went out of my way to in my post and in my description and in all the comments and in all the conversations I’ve been in, I’ve always gone out of my way to not just call it the priesthood ban, but to call it a priesthood and temple ban.  And when I call it only one of the two, I always call it a temple ban.”

Dan,”Interesting.”

Brad, “And what I’ve been realizing is that is a description—I mean on the one hand it’s just there’s no way around the fact that it’s a more accurate description.  The worst part of the policy was not exclusion of ecclesiastical privilege.  It was exclusion from exalting ordinances, from temple covenants and temple sealings for all black members of the church, not just black males.”

Marguerite, “Let me just tell you, it’s really interesting that you’re putting this together as a convert to the church, I didn’t even know about that aspect of the restriction until recently, meaning I knew about the priesthood restriction, but didn’t know that the church actually equated that priesthood restriction to all other temple blessings as well.  It wasn’t until I was participating in the “Nobody Knows: the Untold Story of Black Mormons” that I found out it actually found out it applied not just to men of the priesthood, but to women not being able to go to the temple as well.  That was not something that was generally talked about or known, nothing that I heard generally when I joined the church after 1981.”

Brad, “It’s kind of funny because in its own weird way, this very embarrassing, very sort of unfortunate part of our history, I think actually teaches us something implicitly about the relationship between priesthood and the temple and the relationship between priesthood and women.  That there is, at it’s very deepest core, the priesthood, the fullness of the priesthood is inextricably tied to the temple and therefore you can’t simply take the two from each other.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that that description of the priesthood and temple, or simply as the temple ban, or temple exclusion resonates really strongly with people who have always had a hard time, younger generations of folks in particular, people who never had to get used to the existence of the ban in the first place, people who have always been uncomfortable with it, but older generation folks, folks like my dad or just people in his generation, people who I know that actually had to learn to live with this at some point in their lives, had to be reconciled to it really take issue with my description of it as a temple ban.

Dan, “Hmmm, Interesting.”

Gina, Wow.

Brad, “They sort of find it, they feel like I’m trying to describe it in deliberately offensive terms, that I’m exaggerating.  It’s what it really was.  It’s so interesting because I went and I looked back at something I had looked at several years ago, which was in around, I can’t remember the issue.  There is an issue of Dialogue in the early 70s.”

Gina, “Lester Bush?”

Brad, “No, no, no.  I’m not talking about Mr. Bush.  I’m talking about Hugh Nibley.  I would imagine it was in response to Bush.  He writes this very short little piece, in which he basically defends the ban.  The way that he defends it is by treating it as if it’s only an exclusion from ecclesiastical privilege.  He does it in very classic Nibley-esque fashion: by skewering authority.  By saying that ecclesiastical privilege is nonsense anyway…”

Dan chuckles, “Privilege, Smivilege.”

Brad, “Yeah.  So he downplays it as a problem.  He sort of bears this weird testimony that he believes it comes from God, and that it’s going to end and completely elides the question of temple access.”

Marguerite, “Yeah, and I’ll tell you, I not only have read that article, I own a copy of it, but I’m not going to go grab it now to avoid noise, but I will tell you I read it a long time ago, and that’s part of what contributed to me not even realizing that this priesthood ban was also a temple ban.  It was a priesthood restriction, that’s all it was ever described as, and oh by the way, since I didn’t join the church until 1981, it was all water under the bridge, history to begin with.  So it’s not like anyone felt the need to dig in and deny it and feel the need to see if it was accurately described.  It’s an interesting concept.”

Brad, “Exactly.  So this particular phenomenon that I’ve encountered in responses, I think is connected to another one which is that I’m seeing that there are sort of—people are sort of two minds and I’m sensing that for people who are more indignant about this part of our history, and who want to more forcefully disavow or repudiate this part of our history in really strong language, that those people are seeing racism in any form as a very,  very serious problem, and what I’m seeing from people that don’t feel this strongly about disavowing the ban, or acknowledging that there was something wrong with the ban, and I know we’ll talk about the details more later in the podcast, what I’m seeing is a tendency to treat racism as a problem but not a super, super bad problem.  Like a more sort of let’s put things in perspective folks.  Yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.  And this is something that—I grew up in Utah.  I’m a white male, grew up in Utah, one of the things that I have come to realize in retrospect is that there’s a lot of racism in Utah, but it’s a racism of a peculiar flavor.

It’s not a sort of deeply entrenched white supremacy racism like you might encounter in residual forms in the American south.  It’s a racism that manifests itself in part by trivializing racism as a problem, so I encountered it most often in the form of a persistent willingness of my LDS friends, mainly my male LDS friends to be totally comfortable making really offensive racist jokes really casually.  These would be the kinds of friends that would never use the f-word in a joke because they were Mormon, and they probably wouldn’t, they probably knew at some level that historical forms of racism and segregation and certainly slavery were really bad things.  Using the n-word in a joke, if there weren’t any black folks around to hear it and have their feelings super hurt by it, using the n-word as a punch line was not really that big a deal.

So it got me thinking that if you on the one hand try to say that we don’t like racism. Racism is bad, and we believe in equality and this and this and that, but were not really gonna say anything bad about the fact that we had this policy of excluding black  folks from savings ordinances for most of our history.  We’re just going to sort of not comment on that.  That actually reflects and reinforces a culture that says that racism is bad, but it’s not that bad.”

Marguerite Driessen, ”Let me interject as someone that currently lives in Utah County.  I have definitely encountered the attitudes that Brad is talking about, but really it goes a different step which is that there are a lot of people here who don’t just trivialize racism, they clearly do not recognize it.  They act in these ways that are discriminatory, that clearly evince racial stereotypes or racial prejudices, and yet have a total inability to acknowledge that that is racist.  A dear friend of mine in an employment situation had the bosses absolutely treating her differentially based on race, and here’s what they did.

They said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to give you an executive parking place like all the other executives, but you can’t have one up at the front because we’re in this upscale area, and of course our neighbors saw that we’d given a black girl a position of this kind of authority, that would be terrible, so your parking place is going to be in the back by the dumpster.’

And they’re thinking ‘we’re not racists, of course not.  We’re simply acknowledging the racism that exists inside the community, and trying to protect you.  You’re going to be hired to have this title, but we’re not going to print you business cards because heaven forbid if that got out and people see that we had given a black girl a position of such authority then there will be racist backlash against you’, and these people do not understand that treating her differently because she was black IS racial discrimination.

I scratch my head because this is not you know 1950, this was happening in 2006, you know.  These are things that were happening recently from people who don’t even recognize it.  I scratch my head thinking, don’t they have a TV?  Haven’t they heard of the civil rights era?  Don’t they understand that discrimination is treating people differently based on race.  And there are people here in Utah County who I think don’t.  They think it’s not racism or discrimination unless it comes from a position of race hatred.”

Dan, “Good.  Good.”

Cramer, “That is so absolutely spot on.  That’s one of these underlying factors that I’ve seen this response is that when I’ve been trying to make the case that the ban was racist, it turns out that people who are unwilling to see the ban as racist, are people who think that racism is a solely mental phenomenon.  Racism is only carrying mean-spirited attitudes toward black folks or towards minorities.  Therefore I say the ban is racist, and they say ‘how do you know?  You don’t even  know where it came from?”

Dan, “Or why?”

Dreissen laughs.

Kramer, “It doesn’t matter where it came from.  It doesn’t matter if it came from people who thought that black people were superior.”

Driessen, “Right.  It’s differential treatment.”

Kramer, “It’s racism.  It discriminates on the basis of race.  It excludes on the basis of race. It is functionally racist.  Its consequences and its effects are racist.  It is racism.  No matter what motivates it.”

Dreissen, “Right.”

Kramer, “The story that you described there to me it, you couldn’t script a better microcosm of the problem, which is that in the Mormon corridor, in Mormon Utah where you have this long history and this really horrible skeleton in the closet, to say racism is bad at the same time that you’re not willing to acknowledge that a deeply and transparently racist practice was racist, you’re just going to breed a culture in which people who  think that racism is wrong are simply incapable of recognizing the racist behaviors all around them.

Wotherspoon, “Good, Good.  Hey, I want to tease that apart.  So you mentioned it’s not purely a mental state, and there’s just that because I don’t have hatred, or because I don’t think they’re inferior, I’m not racist.  How much is it like just the conflation in their minds of racism means bad people versus racism is embedded in systems of power and privilege, and all the different—you guys with all your sociological backgrounds and Gina, you’re probably dying to throw in the right language here, but is it because it feels like oh I would be so bad to acknowledge that I’m part of a system of power that’s racist?  You know, they’re worried that that’s going to reflect on them?  Is there a way to tease those two things apart, and could we deal with it better if we could just say, ‘Brigham Young was not a bad person.  This wasn’t a reflection on his character.  This was a systems of power and storytelling and all that stuff, that he inherited.  Get rid of the idea that he was a bad person because of those things coming out of his mouth. Does that make any sense?”

Colvin, “Yes. Absolutely.  I think sort of one of the key ideas that perhaps Mormonism fails to grasp is that white folk, particularly in the church, there’s certain kind of Mormon disposition when it comes to  matters of grace.  I thoroughly agree with you Brad, there’s the sense that if I think nice thoughts that will make me a nice person, therefore I couldn’t possibly be racist.  But one of the issues is that white folk, they’ve got the luxury of choosing whether or not to know black or brown truth.  They can engage with it, or they don’t have to engage with it.  Whereas black and brown folk don’t have that luxury, and I consistently with the need to survive in a racialized communities, in racialized societies, and so there’s inequity right  there. There’s an advantage to whiteness which doesn’t get acknowledged of not having to deal directly with the exigencies and the problems and the brutality of racism.  You can kind of opt in or opt out.”

Dan, “Interesting, thank you.”

Brad, “Yeah, and I think that going back to this question of thoughts versus larger systems and power structures and sociological patterns and things like that, you know, it’s really easy to treat racism as a problem that exists in the minds and the hearts and minds of people, and only there.  Because then if you do that, you don’t have to worry about changing how things actually operate, how things actually work.  So you can say, I’m not going to let you park here because you’re black, and that would cause problems, and it’s not in my interest to let a black person have this parking spot.  So because you’re black you don’t get to park here.  But I’m not a racist.  This isn’t racism because I like you, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with black people myself, so it’s not racism.  In other words, we don’t have to change anything that we do, and the most extreme version of this—you see this dichotomy breaking down with people saying, ‘hey we’re repudiating all the folklore, we’re repudiating the racist doctrine, we’re repudiating the racist sentiments and ideas and mythologies and all these things, all the teachings we’ve  repudiated.  We don’t need to repudiate the ban because we don’t know where it came from.’”

Driessen laughs.

Kramer, “The logical extension of all that is to say, if the ban were still in place, and the 1978 revelation had only repudiated all the racists teachings, and therefore we have got rid of all the doctrinal folklore but the ban was still in place, that we wouldn’t have a racism problem in the church.  Because even though we’re excluding blacks—

Driessen interrupts, “Yes, it would, yes they would.”

Brad continues, “I know but that’s a sort of logical outcome of thinking in these terms.  You can imagine for yourself a church in which it’s somehow—that the ban still exists and that’s somehow not racism.  Of course it’s racism.”

Dreissen, “It’s not that it’s not racism because you don’t acknowledge that it was.  There’s a difference between you know saying ‘oh yea it was and I’m guilty and just leaving it to be and do what it says’ but I would also add that it says to that Brad that there is a chicken and egg issue here: in that sure there was no big revelation pronouncing the ban and the reason.  However, people made up reasons because there was a ban.  If in 1978 all that had happened was that the Church had specifically repudiated the 3 say most popular theories or all of the then known theories, if that had happened, they simply would have invented other ones.  It was not that it would exist in a vacuum.

They would have come up with other reasons why the black people were singled out for this treatment.  They created them, because there was a policy and they needed some way to explain the policy, and if you actually get into Mormon doctrine, get into the scriptures, get into the core beliefs of the church, everything they came up with to explain the ban is contradicted in the basic core doctrines.  Just go into the Articles of Faith.  Every reason they came up with is repudiated in the Articles of Faith.  They were reaching, they were grasping at straws to explain the inexplicable in any other terms and if we got rid of all of those as you said, maybe there would have been a half day, that day in ’78,  but then the very next day, they would have come up with something else because the ban still existed.“

Gina, “I think one of the questions here though is who are we talking about when we say ‘they’?  Because I think the elephant in the room is the ‘they’ happen to be a succession of presidents of the Church, and so the elephant in the room is, yes they could have come up with it, and they do so in the positions of president and a prophet, but how much or that is revelation and are we to understand that kind of equivocation around reasons for the priesthood ban to be coming from God?  How are we supposed to understand the relationship with kind of prophetic instruction and revelation and something that just feels theologically out of step?”

Dreissen, “Well, and it wasn’t just the prophets of the Church, however.  I mean there were certainly things that Brigham Young said, but a lot of his most racially derogatory, racially-tinged comments were not spoken from a pulpit at General Conference but were spoken by him as the Governor of Utah or in some political meeting having to do with getting Utah’s statehood, which was coming up around the same era of time when Brigham Young was not just the chief, the CEO of the Church, but the head of the government as well.  He wore multiple hats, and spoke in that context in multiple ways, and a lot of the other things they arose after his time.

The ideas were promulgated by people, religious professors, and religious scholars.  Bruce R McConkie was never the prophet of the church, and yet a lot of the theorizing can be laid at his door.  So when I say ‘they’, I really do not mean just the prophets of the church, I mean people in the church who either came up with or accepted for themselves the truths of these various tracts of folklore to explain the policy that was then in place.”

Gina, “But there’s still presidents of the Church who legitimated it.  They gave it some kind of credibility.”

Dressein, “Well, they gave it credibility in so much as they didn’t change it. They certainly didn’t repudiate them, and they didn’t change them even if they never spoke these words themselves from the pulpit.  They had power to repudiate them.  They had the power to make the change, and chose not to.”

Kramer. “And there’s something that we have to come to terms with, I think which is kind of the underlying sentiment of my post, which is that once we commit ourselves to the proposition that racism is a sin, we have to come to terms with the fact that the worst sin in our history is not something Brigham Young said, it’s not something that Joseph Fielding Smith said, or Bruce R. McConkie said, or Alvin Dyer said.  The worst sin in our history if racism is a sin is THE BAN: the actual practice of excluding black folks from access to temple ordinances, covenants and sealings. Everything else is extraneous to it.”

Group agrees.

Gina, “Then it becomes systemic.”

Dreissen, “It’s not extraneous, ancillary to.  They are certainly playing around out there, but we have to go back to even defining racism, and that’s where the problem is.  You saw it in the Washington Post article.  How did Randy Bott describe racial discrimination?  Do you remember what he said? He said simply denying people something that is a benefit to them.  He missed the point altogether.

Discrimination based on race is not simply denying someone a benefit.  It’s treating people differently because of race, and he did not define it that way, which then prevents the question that Brad just framed from ever being asked, or the assertion inherent therein, and from ever being asserted or discussed which is If we define racism is some really silly way, then of course we don’t have anything to worry about.  You know?  What do you care?  Denying someone a benefit?  People get denied benefits all the time, yada, yada, yada.

That to me was the part of the article that shocked me the most, because quite frankly I’ve heard all the theories.  I’ve heard all the folklore.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is here is someone who says discrimination is simply denying someone something that would be a benefit to them, and that’s not what discrimination is.  It’s differential treatment based on some characteristic based on some characteristic.   That is discrimination based on that characteristic.”

Brad, “And how often do folks who discriminate?  Do people who are participatants in patterns of discrimination rationalize discrimination on the grounds that somehow they are doing something nice for the people on behalf of the people they’re discriminating against.  It doesn’t matter if you think it’s nice. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re blessing them in the process.  It’s discrimination.”

Margarite, “Right, you’re treating them differently.”

Dan, “Good.  And that’s a way to kind of defang it right?  It depersonalizes it, it takes a lot of the emotion out of it., right?  I at least see an opening there Brad if that can simply be communicated really well that you know—Does it make it easier to deal with?”

Brad, “Yeah, I am much less hung up honestly—it’s going to sound weird—I’m much less hung up about the fact that past white male Church  leaders said things that today we can see as being seriously racist.  Like obviously I wish that weren’t the case, but I’m not—I don’t want to hold that over their head in the way like I don’t think that Brigham Young was more racist than Lincoln.  Maybe I don’t know the histories well enough.  But the problem isn’t that these men held racist attitudes.  The problem is what we did collectively as a church: what we permitted ourselves to do.  And the terribly harmful tragic effects that had—impact that had on the lives of church members, potential church members, potential converts, children of God everywhere.”

Dan, “That opens up to two different things Brad, and one of them came out in Joanna Brooks Ask Mormon Girl post that she did this week where she was asking people to reflect on how this ban –she was basically saying, have any of you really begun to process internally your life story and your interaction with this ban and how it’s affected you and how it’s distorted various pieces of you and you’ve experienced the world in a different way?  What you’ve raised there is that—have you guys been seeing that kind of reflection?

She posted to all of us in her little note saying that she couldn’t be part of the podcast this one fellow who really seems like was in his 60’s or something, and he has been a church leader.  He was taking this as the opportunity to say ‘what did I miss?  What did I blow?  How did I hurt people unintentionally?  And he’s s got the perfect attitude of repentance about the whole thing.  Are you guys seeing that?”

Dreissen, “I’m not seeing it, but I’ll tell you.  I’ll just jump right in.  I’ve been hanging out with Genesis folks who by and large are black people, family, friends of black people and they are reflecting upon another leap forward.  In that the statement the church made at least has been their strongest one to date¸ and the closest one to actual repudiation of the past folklore.  Eliminating the ban was one thing, and now President Hinckley in the priesthood session a few years ago condemned racism but he’s speaking presently, and speaking in terms of future conduct and how we should interact right now.  This time what the Genesis folks were rejoicing about is that the statement from the Church clearly condemned racism past and present and specifically inside the Church as well as out.

They didn’t get specific.  They didn’t tie names to it but they specifically condemned past racism inside the Church, acknowledging thereby, that there was racism inside the Church which is not something that had come officially from the Church before.  So the Genesis folks were celebrating that and there were people who said ‘yes this is a big step; wish it would have gone a little further’, there was some of that.  There were people, the black people especially weren’t necessarily surprised about the comments that Professor Bott made, because we hear that all the time. It was about this is another step forward, and we’re looking forward to the day when they make that next step.”

Dan, “Right.”

Brad, “It’s a baby step for one reason which is that it would be soooo much better—You’ve got this anonymously written Newsroom press release the same week that you’ve got one of the most strongly worded and deeply apologetic First Presidency letters that I’ve seen in a long time in the same week.  It was about baptizing holocaust victims for the dead.  It would be great if that exact language—and I agree it is novel language.  It is very—I wish it came from a more authoritative source.”

Dreissen, “Oh, you mean the anonymous news release from the church public affairs office?”

Brad, “Exactly.  I mean Michael Otterson didn’t even sign it.”

Dan, “Well let’s hope we’re close to conference.  This may be good timing in this game.

Hey Gina, we haven’t heard from you in a second.  There was a while back, probably 10 minutes ago, you reacted really strongly to when Brad said, ‘No the biggest sin is not when Brigham Young saying this and this and this, the biggest sin was the ban.’  It seemed like you got really energized there, so I didn’t want to miss a chance for you to get some stuff in.  Or has the points you wanted to make about that sort of come out yet?”

Colvin, “Oh, I’m still energized, I’m just listening.  It’s interesting.  Speaking to Americans is different kind of cultural ways of having conversations and discussions.  So yeah, I’ve still got lots of energy!  Yes, I agree with you Brad.

The problem was the ban, and that’s because it was a systemic problem.   I kind of posed in one of my blogs once, is if somebody gets it wrong.  If a policy comes out in the Church, it’s usually God that takes the flak.  I think that’s deeply, deeply problematic.  A prophet/God, well we’ll go with God because I guess he can’t speak back to us.

[Dan and Marguerite laugh.]

Colvin continues, “And so it becomes a systemic problem.  All the kind of nasty dispositions in the world can be sort of circulated and reproduced generation upon generation, but when you’ve got a systemic problem, that kind of shifts it.  That kind of challenges us to reorganize out thinking.  We bring that kind of reorganized thinking not to kind of personal, self-reflexive sort of thinking to community.  Like there is a systemic ban from a certain group of people from participating fully in the ordinances in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  What does that mean in a broader kind of—you know answering certain social questions?  It becomes much more gray?

I think Dan, you sort of hinted at this question of power, and I was kind of curious.  When I first read that Church statement regarding race in the Church, I was quite heartened.  But then it caused me to question who owns this conversation about racism in the Church? It seems to me that it largely comes out of the center.  We know what the center of the Church looks like.  It’s largely white, it’s largely American, it is male, and it’s kind of adhered to a particular model for churches which is a deeply conservative one.  So when they say, ‘we don’t believe this, the Church doesn’t believe this, we don’t know how or why”, my question is, have they moved that question out from the center to the periphery and asked people of color, and black folk what their position is, and how they would like to see the center change so that doesn’t continue?

There’s a big difference between moral outrage, and practical ethics, and I think that’s what we miss in the Church.  It’ like Ok, now that we’ve got to the point where we can acknowledge racism, what does that actually mean in terms or pursuing a vision of social justice, pursuing/acknowledging race and the different stories that people bring based on the kind of communities that they live in, which is their experiences of oppression?  So I kind of—I’m just sort of thoughtful on this notion about the systemic violence that happens which kinds of moves out question of racism on from whether I feel it or not to what can I do to change it?  What does my Christianity call upon me, and my theology call upon me to make a change and make a difference?  Would the church even facilitate that?  Would they ever be part of that conversation, or would they say their duty is goodwill to all people and just kind of stop there and bury our heads in the sand that there are actual kind of categorical violences that happen to marginalized persons?”

Brad, “You asked the question of who owns the conversation.  The answer that you gave is partially correct.  If anybody owns it, it’s the center, at least the way the Church is structured now.  The problem is that it’s a conversation they’re abdicating.  So, I made on a blog somewhere—I can’t remember, I’ve talked a lot about this in the last week, it may have even been a Facebook comment or something.  I sort of glibly said something that as I reflected more on it struck me as being actually quite true, which is that it’s impossible to deal with a question really thoroughly and really in a clear and unambiguous and straightforward and brutally honest fashion while simultaneously pretending it doesn’t exist.”

Wotherspoon, “Good point.”

Driessen, “That is 100% true, but I would also add to what Gina was saying, it’s not just the past violence that we are talking about.  When you have institutionalized racism and you have what happened here, which is the theories that developed to support it because it didn’t come with an instruction book or an explanation, so then you had the theories come to support it.  Now you have the policy changed, you did not have the repudiation of the folklore in any way, and so what you have was the policy gone, but people in the Church who still clung to their racist attitudes, discriminatory attitudes that resulted in the marginalization of people of color in noticeable ways, especially socially where people wouldn’t be welcome or just would be noticed, and there would be pressures, there would be a different status of life for a person of color in the Church than otherwise.  These are the artifacts if you will of institutionalized racism even when they end the institution.  So the conversation that they’re not having, I’ve seen it.  I’ve seen its corollary outside world.

Instead of thinking of the Church, think of say the United States where ok once you have the court ruling that segregation isn’t allowed, that’s enough.  Or let’s just get rid of the idea—we won’t have Jim Crow anymore, now. Now you get to compete on equal footing, except people aren’t on equal footing.  They are not going to be on equal footing unless you somehow acknowledge the evil of the past and do something to correct the effects of that.  So the conversation that they’re not having right now is, yeah we’ve got this, we’ve now made this statement, this statement is that step in the right direction.  It’s the first time we’ve acknowledged past racism inside and outside of the church. They need to move forward, but I kind of look at this.  It’s sort of the Church’s, this racism question, in say the LDS Church’s Achilles heel the way that pedophile priests were the Catholic church’s Achilles heel.

It’s something that when they finally had to acknowledge it.  They didn’t really know what to do, and so they hid it under the rug, they moved people around, and that went on for decades until it finally blew up in their face in terms of the harms created by not addressing the problem directly.  Now we’ve got some of those issues.  Now clearly it’s not the same level, but I’m just talking about it in analogy.  We’ve got our issue, and perhaps we could learn from the Catholic Church’s example, and rather than sweep it under the rug, pretend that it didn’t exist, pretend that it doesn’t have this lasting artifacts that need to be dealt with, we should address them.  But who’s going to bring that up to them? As you said, at the center of the Church, It is not us having that conversation.”

Gina, “Yeah, so I presume Marguerite that they didn’t consult with the Genesis Group about how to frame this question, and how to address past racism?”

Marguerite laughs, “No they did not, although I will tell you Darius Gray is not kidding when he said that part of the reason that the Genesis Group exists is because devout, faithful members of the Church who were descendants of folks with African blood were lobbying them, they were crying out to them.  Tell me what’s wrong with me.  You tell me what blot is on my soul or on my character.  They were lobbying these people to reassess the situation, to reassess the question and to raise it.  That had to have contributed to the fact that they did.  They had vocal voices within the Church, people who were people of strong character and of strong faith, people trying to be obedient in a situation where they were absolutely marginalized in direct ways in lacking ecclesiastical authority and in the everlasting ways in being denied the temple blessings.”

Colvin, “Well, perhaps the litmus test for when there is some kind of change in the Church is when that conversation about racism actually turns outward and people are consulted and not necessarily spoken to.  The need for kind of the marginalized to sort of speak loudly to the center is actually a sort of eradicating, because the center is sort of faced outward.  Tell me your truth. We need to hear it because we need to change.”

Dreissen, “What Darius Gray said is they didn’t wait for the invitation, they just spoke.  And what happens is–“

Brad interrupts, “It reminds me of Samuel the Lamanite.”

Dreissen continues, “Yes, Samuel the Lamanite didn’t wait for an invitation, Darius Gray did not wait for an invitation. They spoke but the interesting thing was the Church listened. We don’t have to wait for the invitation.  If you speak and they listen, then the seeds are planted, and it sometimes takes a while.  It takes a while all the time, especially when the minds that have to changed are the minds that grew up understanding what we know consider racist folklore as de-facto doctrine.  They had to change an entire mindset that we didn’t have to change.”

MSNBC has an interesting article about Intersexuals: people in which the “exact gender of the child cannot be determined”.  The story says that

“It is estimated that in Germany alone approximately 80,000 people are intersexual, so-called hermaphrodites, who have physical features – such as chromosomes, hormones, gonads and outer sexual organs – which cannot be unambiguously attributed to just one gender.”

Huh?  I have a hard time believing that the number is that high.  Regardless, the story of one individual is startling.  The child was born with ambiguous genitalia.  Raised as a boy because the midwife “supposedly mistook her enlarged clitoris for a penis.”

it was later diagnosed that her indeterminate external genitalia were the result of a rare genetic disorder of the adrenal gland, the so-called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH.

“My childhood and teenage development was often agonizing because I did not really know what was wrong with me and where I belonged,” Voelling said in a recent interview with NBC News.

If you thought the story was strange already, it gets worse.

After being admitted to a local hospital for an appendix surgery, doctors diagnosed that their patient had mixed male-female genitals and an atrophied reproductive system.

But, when the young adult landed on the operating table, the surgeon found a full set of female reproductive organs, including an intact womb and ovaries.

Without consent from the patient, the organs were removed.

“I never received a truthful explanation of my condition and after the operation I felt a lot of physical and emotional pain for many years,”  Voelling said.

“Some 95 percent of all intersexuals systematically undergo genital surgery and other interventions without medical informed consent and without clear scientific proof,” said Lucie Veith, the head of“Intersexuelle Menschen eV“ in Hamburg, a group that represents hermaphrodites in Germany.

Gratification after legal battle
Only a couple of years later, Voelling also started receiving the regular administration of testosterone, or steroid male hormones.

“For 27 years, I was more or less exposed to severe doping,” Voelling said.

“At age 47, when I felt more like a woman than a man anyway, I said enough is enough,”

…

In 2008, Voelling decided to take her case to court and sued the doctor that had removed her female reproduction organs over unlawful intervention.

In its verdict, the court ordered the surgeon to pay 100,000 euro, (approximately $133,000)  in compensation for performing an operation converting a hermaphrodite into a man without consent.

“I felt very relieved and it was really more of a moral reparation than anything else, but it unfortunately did not have consequences for the legal rights of intersexuals,” said Voelling.  She officially changed her gender from male to female, as well as her name from Thomas to Christiane, in a long bureaucratic process that same year.

How does the Proclamation fit in this situation?

Introduction, “William D. Russell is a professor of American History and Government at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa.  He received his B.A. in Religion from Graceland College.  He has his J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law, and he says he has about 70 hours of graduate study in history in St. Paul in the University of Iowa.  He has published a book, Treasures in Earthen Vessels, an Introduction to the New Testament and he tells me that he was given the True Believer Comeback of the Year Award by the John Whitmer Historical Association in 1985 for affirming the Book of Mormon as legitimate scripture shortly after advocating that the RLDS Church quit publishing the Doctrine and Covenants.  He is also a runner and has run 25 marathons including the LA and the Boston Marathon.”

Bill Russell, “I’ve been a regular attender of the Mormon History Association since 1971 and in those early meetings I met Dick Paul and Leonard Arrington, Mel Smith and a number of others here tonight. In 1984, some of my Mormon History friends suggested I ought to come to Sunstone, and so I wandered out here in 1984 and I think I met Catherine for the first time that year, and I can’t stay away ever since.  Often I’m the only RLDS person here, so I just wanted to assure you that being the case you might think that I am some sort of official spokesman for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I assure you, you can be confident that I don’t speak for any of the general officers of the Church, be they high or low, standing, sitting, or prone. [audience chuckles]

So I am really honored to be asked to explain the Pillars of my Faith before you.  I was born and raised in the RLDS wing of the Mormon movement.  My Father was a full-time paid minister in the RLDS Church.  Our lives revolved around the RLDS church.  To a great extent, mine still does.  And while I still affirm myself as RLDS, and have some commitment to that tradition, a more important commitment for me is the affirmation that I think of myself as Christian.  To be Christian is far more important for me than to be Latter-day Saint.  But another important part of my faith system is my commitment to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.  Thus I have labeled myself on a number of occasions as a First Amendment Christian.  Some of you may have received letters from me signed that way.

But when filling out questionnaires which ask for my religious preference, I sometimes check “other” and then write in First Amendment Christian because I have not yet seen my religion listed on a questionnaire, but then again I have not yet convinced five other persons to become charter members. [audience chuckles]  But there will be a meeting right after for investigators. [audience chuckles]

So let’s look at the three pillars of my religious self-identification:  #1 – First Amendment  freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly is fundamental for me because I believe that religious truth comes not from pronouncements from holy writ or ecclesiastical officials, but from human experience and from free discussion among free women and men.  Indeed, holy writ and pronouncements of ecclesiastical officials are often stumbling blocks for persons who are honestly searching for truth.

#2 – I’m a Christian because I choose to believe that God exists and that the life of the man from Nazareth gives us the best clue as to how God would have us live.  I don’t need my Jesus to be perfect or Divine, and I’m certain that the Gospel writers had an imperfect understanding of what he was about.  But the New Testament is simply a place where the religious quest begins for me, it doesn’t end there.

#3 – I remain a Latter-day Saint, albeit a Reorganized one, because the RLDS is a community in which I have found love, and it is a community which offers me and others a good sense of belonging.  It also does a reasonable job of encouraging people to be socially responsible human beings. I also feel that because of my roots in the RLDS community, I can be of more service to people in my faith community than would be the case if I became a Methodist, for example.

There are my affirmations as a First Amendment Christian.  Let me explain what I mean, mainly through some biographical reflections.  During my childhood and college years, I was convinced that the church I became a member of by accident of birth happened to be the one true church on the face of the earth.  What luck! [audience chuckles]

I had a fascination with numbers.  Arithmetic was my strongest subject and it led me to calculate with the sense of awe, and I was about 6 when I did this, the statistical improbability of a person being fortunate enough to be born to the true church of Jesus Christ headquartered in Independence, Missouri.  I marveled at this.  In the RLDS Church we have weeklong family camps in the summer which provide some spiritual highs which were often called Mountaintop Experiences at the daily Prayer and Testimony meetings.  There is often a heightened, a gradual heightening of spiritual awareness and receptivity through religious experience that in past eras of American religion was called enthusiasm.

It was common for there to be at least one Prayer and Testimony meeting, usually late in the week in which one or more people would get up and utter a prophesy:  Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Roy Muir…. a buddy of mine that called really early, and Brother Muir would be told the good Lord’s current opinion of him.  Usually, the Lord was pleased with Brother Muir.  What an embarrassment it would have been if the Lord had been irked at Brother Muir and said so right in front of all of those people!  [audience chuckles]

The giver of the message from the Lord would usually be a high ranking church official, like a Stake President or Bishop, or a Seventy, or Patriarch.  Often the recipient of a prophecy would be a young man who had a potential to be a star in the church. Women weren’t often spoken to.  Men did the important stuff and they held the priesthood only in those days.  At the age of 19 I was called to the office of Priest in such a prophecy in a big camp meeting, a big church camp.  That first priesthood call isn’t automatic in my church, I got my call directly from On High in front of about 400 people.  But I have gained more self-awareness and religious insight as I reflect upon a prophecy given about 10 years earlier in a camp when I was about 9.

My father was the full-time paid pastor at the time at the 3 congregations in St. Joseph, Missouri.  He was having a difference of opinion with his Stake President, whom he considered a lazy bag of wind.  During a prayer service when the spirit was getting high, and prophecies were starting to flow, one high priest who was closely associated with the lazy bag of wind, got up and began to prophesy to my father: Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Melvin Russell….

As the Lord began to articulate his thoughts concerning Melvin Russell, Melvin Russell began to recognize that this high priest was telling him that God wanted him to knuckle under to the position that he was differing on with this lazy bag of wind stake president.  Well his prophecy might well have been labeled ‘Follow the Brother.’  My dad began to get hot under the collar, so hot that he got up and walked out of the large tent while the message of God was still in progress.  [audience chuckles]

Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Melvin Russell, Melvin ([shouts]) MELVIN!!! [audience chuckles]

Without saying so explicitly, my dad taught me specifically that claims to revelation should be critically examined.  If they don’t make sense to you, don’t believe them!  Trust the intelligence and judgment that God gave you, even over authoritative pronouncements allegedly issuing from on high.  More than once, when someone would prophesy at a reunion, dad would quietly tell family members, ‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to that.’  [audience chuckles]

My dad often criticized the revelations added to our Doctrine and Covenants, considering them not revelations at all.  In that tradition I have twice counseled our current president, W. Wallace Smith to cease having revelations.  [audience chuckles]  But do you think he would listen to me?!  On more than one occasion, dad chewed out the apostle who was his immediate supervisor in the church organization, the boss in other words.  He recognized that all church officials are sinners too.  They are very fallible, whatever their position in the church.  And that is fundamental for me, and why First Amendment freedom of inquiry and belief is so important, so my first pillar is that all religious pronouncements must be subject to critical scrutiny by the individual even if that pronouncement is in holy writ, or by ecclesiastical official, or by a spouse who thinks he is superior because he has a penis and/or priesthood office.  I say that because happily in my church, the former is no longer a requirement for the latter.  [audience applauds]

I say listen to the brethren, and then do what you think is right.  Don’t be intimidated by ecclesiastical actions, be it silencing from priesthood office, which is the main sanction that the RLDS church uses, or excommunication, the main threat in your tradition. I believe my own dignity as a human being is more important  than my status in a mere church organization, and I want to look at myself in the mirror and not vomit.

When I graduated from Graceland in 1960, (that ages me), I was offered a position on the editorial staff at Herald House, the RLDS publishing house.  I loved the job, and I began attending a nearby Methodist seminary on a part-time basis.  Seminary was the most intellectually challenging time of my life. I gained a great appreciation for the Bible, but I also recognized more than ever, its fallibility.  Perhaps the biggest eye-opener was my study of the four gospels. On the one hand, I found them very inspirational as I read about the life of the Galilean who they nailed to a tree.

But on the other hand, Lindsay Farragot, the best teacher I ever had, helped me to see that the four gospels were partisan propaganda.  Each evangelist has his own agenda when he wrote.  Matthew and Luke were written at least in part to correct what they saw were Mark’s errors.  The fourth gospel has very little in common with the other three, until we get to the Holy Week.  The author of Luke-Acts has a clear political agenda.  So I appreciated both the humanity and inspirational qualities of the four gospels.  I also fell in love with the Epistles of Paul.  The RLDS Church has traditionally emphasized the law too much.  Paul’s radical rejection of the Mosaic Law was liberating for me, as was his focus on salvation by grace, rather than by works, and of course, Paul was engaged in a mighty struggle with the General Authorities, in case you haven’t read Galatians.

He didn’t cower before the greater ecclesiastical authority of the original apostles who had by far the best possible credentials: they had been with Jesus from the baptism until the crucifixion.  Yet Paul didn’t knuckle under to those superlative apostles as he sarcastically referred to them.  Paul fought them and he won, and if he hadn’t won, we would not be here today.

So travelling down this path, I began to see that Joseph Smith was in real trouble, at least for me, not that he was worried.  [audience chuckles]  Joseph committed Mormonism to positions at odds with biblical and historical scholarship.  Joseph regarded the scriptures as true, insofar as correctly translated.  I discovered the problem usually wasn’t with the translation, or the transmission process, the problem usually was right there in the originals, and I also came to view the Book of Mormon as fiction, but felt it deserved it’s place in the canon of scriptures (that’s why I got that True Believers award), because it’s the founding document of Mormonism, and because it also has inspired many people to do good.  But my recent experience writing a book on the 1989 mass murder in Kirtland, Ohio by an RLDS splinter prophet has made me aware that the Book of Mormon has also inspired men to do evil.

Jeff Lundgren studied the scriptures diligently, and considered the Book of Mormon the most important of the standard works, the fullness.  He learned the love of guns from his father, and he was fascinated by the violence of the Book of Mormon and the Old Testament.  He quoted over and over again the various passages from the Book of Mormon which warned, ‘Repent or be destroyed.’  He gathered devout Latter-day Saints who wanted to build Zion and see the return of Christ.  He wanted to have faith like the Brother of Jared, faith so strong they would be able to see and feel Christ.  If they could produce a community of saints who had repented of their sins, Christ would return and Zion would be established.

But the five members of the Avery family were hopelessly unrepentant, so they had to be destroyed.  Jeff loved the story of Nephi beheading Laban, and stealing Laban’s treasures.  That story contains two of the most horrible passages in the standard works, indeed, two of the most dreadful lines ever written:  “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.’  ‘It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.’

The first sentence is a great justification for holy war.  The second sentence would serve quite well as a justification for the inquisition.  Neither passage can be condemned strongly enough. Incredibly we quote these sentences with approval, in my church anyway, and I suspect in yours.  By doing so, we place terrible ideas  in the minds of our members.  We abdicate our responsibility to provide moral leadership in our churches if we fail to condemn ideas like that.  I don’t care where they are found.  Don’t ask me to flush my brain down the toilet, or ignore my moral values just because I’m reading the scriptures.  And I’m confident of this: the jury that I observed in Painesville, Ohio would have sentenced Nephi to death for murder and robbery just as surely as they sentenced Jeff Lundgren to the electric chair.  I see no real difference in the two cases.  I’ve come to the very strong opinion that the Church has an affirmative duty to warn its members of the existence of extremely dangerous ideas in the pages of the standard works such as murder in the name of God, sexism, racism, and so forth.  Perhaps Deseret Books and Herald House should place warning labels on the standard works.  [audience chuckles]  Some passages contained herein can be harmful to your health.  Maybe we should register Bibles rather than guns.

Now I’ve often heard it said, if you’re going to destroy someone‘s faith, you need to replace that faith with a faith that is a better one.  Possibly that happened to me.  First with the historical and biblical studies that I’ve mentioned, and secondly my Christian Ethics professor, John Swamly, helped me apply the New Testament and the prophet s of the Old Testament to the social problems of our day:  issues of war and peace, civil rights, poverty, the environment, and many others were addressed in his classes.  I had rarely seen that in the church.

There were laboratories readily available to apply these principles.  I soon found myself heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the Kansas City area.  I deeply believed that I was doing what the gospel demanded of me if I were truly a disciple of Jesus Christ.  I helped push the RLDS Church in the area of Civil Rights. Right wing fanatics picketed me personally at both our Herald House offices and in the 1966 RLDS World Conference. The First Presidency would sometimes tell the managing editor, or me directly that I’d gone too far in that last editorial.  Rather than accept their directives, I would write the First Presidency long letters, carefully explaining their errors.  Incredibly they didn’t fire me.

It was very traumatic, to radically reinterpret the Latter-day Saint traditions that I had been taught as a child and had been happy to so luckily to receive.  I was losing something that had been very precious.  Sometimes I felt like Joseph Smith was a fraud. It was a very painful thought, but my love for the New Testament, and the commitment to social action that I had learned at that Methodist seminary may have kept me from doing what many disaffected Latter-day Saints do: dismiss all organized religion as nonsense.

As my Latter-day Saint faith declined, my appreciation for Christianity grew.  So the second pillar of my faith, is that in Jesus of Nazareth, I find my best clue to the kind of person God would have me be.  During the 1970s and early 80s my commitment to the RLDS tradition probably continued to decline a bit.  The church leadership did begin to shed its sectarianism, which I appreciated, but I didn’t feel they had a message that I could relate to either.  I sometimes wondered if they had a message at all.  But I don’t look to church leaders in Independence or Salt Lake City for my faith anyway.  New bursts of truth are not likely to come from the bureaucrats at the top of a bureaucracy, even if we do call them prophet.

But in the last 7 years, my appreciation for the RLDS community has been restored to a reasonable extent.  It has been restored in the crucible of life’s crises.  In the midst of recent traumas of my own life, the community of faith has brought new life to me when I was in great need of it.  The new life I experienced helped me to value above all the new worth of the women and men of my life. The first of these issues was my divorce.  Now I know you don’t experience this phenomenon out here in Utah, but we RLDS have a divorce rate that’s probably comparable to the national average.  You know it’s the most painful experience of my life. I have been blessed with a happy life, but then the roof gradually came tumbling down, and it didn’t seem to be there was anything we could do about it.

The thing that brought me out of it was the love and support of persons largely from the RLDS community who attempted to live their lives in harmony with the teachings of the humble carpenter they nailed to the tree.   These faithful souls were mostly RLDS, but some were LDS.  I will never forget the words of support and love at the time of my divorce at the 1986 MHA [meetings] from Lavina Fielding Anderson and Jack and Linda Newell.  I was barely to the point where this nightmare was barely behind me when a nasty local political battle erupted.

I was on the school board, and we had to get used to being regularly called a liar and a cheat, getting booed and hissed when trying to explain board policy was a new experience for me.  I even had an attorney on the other side stick her tongue out at me when I was speaking at a board meeting. I think she liked me. [audience chuckles]

In the midst of this nightmare, once again, people of the community of faith came forth and provided the love that helped me through it.  This time it was mainly people from the Lamoni RLDS congregation.  I had not been a member of that congregation for the previous 15 years, and felt they probably considered me a heretic, and probably rightly so.  I had joined with other Graceland liberals and had established a congregation in exile 7 miles south of town across the state line in Missouri.  We hid down there and did what we wanted to do ignoring what the church wants its congregations to do. But it surprised me that I got so much support from the Lamoni RLDS.

These two experiences helped prepare me to be more sensitive to the pain in other’s lives. For example, lately I’ve taken a close look at two cases of battered women.  The first was Alice Lundren who I talked about earlier today whose husband, the prophet murderer, was a male chauvinist pig of the highest order.  When Jeff began dating Alice in her first semester in college, he told he to drop out of college.  I know from more than 1000 pages of letters from Alice Lundgren that she is a very intelligent woman, but she dropped out of college at the end of her first semester as ordered by Jeff.

Jeff began to control her life entirely, the finances, her access to others and so forth.  He made every decision from naming the kids to what she would fix for supper.  That control increased over the years, especially in those periods when Jeff got more religious, so did the mental, physical, and sexual abuse. Jeff would have a great spiritual experience, and then rape his wife.  He would teach a scripture class, and then force Alice to consume his feces.  Alice has made a great recovery in prison.  She says she is freer now serving 150 years in a hell-hole prison in Ohio than she was during 20 years that she was married to the prophet murderer, and I certainly believe her.

More recently, I became involved in the case of a Lamoni woman with five children who has been beaten by her ex-husband on many occasions.  Some of the most pious and respected RLDS men in the community believed her ex-husbands typical excuses and character assassinations. As a result the victim was victimized further and dismissed by some crazy woman, a liar, a bitch or a slut.  The local police turned a deaf ear to her, as did the prosecuting attorney: no charges have been filed in some severe cases here.  When she could not get a court order to prevent her ex-husband from getting visitation to her children every other weekend, 100 of us began lining the streets in front of the Lamoni Police Station where the transfer of children takes place.  By this we seek to ensure her safety, to be witnesses to any violent acts if they occur, to let her know that she has significant community support, and bear witness of our outrage of such acts.

So if God exists, and I think She does, She calls us, She calls a community of faith to work to ease the pain of our sisters and brothers and so this is my third pillar: that is the divine principle I see in the life of the humble carpenter.  I believe we need to spend less time in church, and more time working to heal the broken.  Thank you.

[audience applauds]

Comments?

On the other hand, the RLDS has continued to add to their version of the Doctrine and Covenants.  Most recently, they added section 164–a revelation on gay marriage and recognition of non-RLDS baptisms into their church.  The 164 Sections of the Community of Christ’s Doctrine and Covenants break down as follows:

• Sections 1–113 (includes 108A) — From the presidency of Joseph Smith, Jr. (1828–1844)
• Sections 114–131 — From the presidency of Joseph Smith III (1860–1914)
• Sections 132–138 — From the presidency of Frederick M. Smith (1914–1946)
• Sections 139–144 — From the presidency of Israel A. Smith (1946–1958)
• Sections 145–152 (includes 149A) — From the presidency of W. Wallace Smith (1958–1978)
• Sections 153–160 — From the presidency of Wallace B. Smith (1978–1996)
• Sections 161–162 — From the presidency of W. Grant McMurray (1996–2004)
• Sections 163–164 — From the presidency of Stephen M. Veazey (2005– )

The following sections are not revelations, but letters, reports, statements, and so forth: 99, 108A, 109–113, and 123.

Based on the above, the number of revelations (accounting for sections that are not revelations) presented by each Community of Christ prophet, are as follows:

• Joseph Smith II: 107
• Joseph Smith III: 17
• Frederick M. Smith: 7
• Israel A. Smith: 6
• W. Wallace Smith: 9
• Wallace B. Smith: 8
• W. Grant McMurray: 2
• Stephen M. Veazey: 2

Bill Russell gave some interesting insights about the RLDS version of the Doctrine and Covenants in a 1993 Sunstone speech.  (The RLDS Church changed their name to the Community of Christ in 2001.)  I wanted to share his insights.  While a visible member of their church, he is hardly orthodox as you will see from the comments below.

During my childhood and college years, I was convinced that the church I became a member of by accident of birth happened to be the one true church on the face of the earth.  What luck! [audience chuckles]

I had a fascination with numbers.  Arithmetic was my strongest subject and it led me to calculate with the sense of awe, and I was about 6 when I did this, the statistical improbability of a person being fortunate enough to be born to the true church of Jesus Christ headquartered in Independence, Missouri.  I marveled at this.  In the RLDS Church we have weeklong family camps in the summer which provide some spiritual highs which were often called Mountaintop Experiences at the daily Prayer and Testimony meetings.  There is often a heightened, a gradual heightening of spiritual awareness and receptivity through religious experience that in past eras of American religion was called enthusiasm.

It was common for there to be at least one Prayer and Testimony meeting, usually late in the week in which one or more people would get up and utter a prophesy:  Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Roy Muir…. a buddy of mine that called really early, and Brother Muir would be told the good Lord’s current opinion of him.  Usually, the Lord was pleased with Brother Muir.  What an embarrassment it would have been if the Lord had been irked at Brother Muir and said so right in front of all of those people!  [audience chuckles]

The giver of the message from the Lord would usually be a high ranking church official, like a Stake President or Bishop, or a Seventy, or Patriarch.  Often the recipient of a prophecy would be a young man who had a potential to be a star in the church. Women weren’t often spoken to.  Men did the important stuff and they held the priesthood only in those days.  At the age of 19 I was called to the office of Priest in such a prophecy in a big camp meeting, a big church camp.  That first priesthood call isn’t automatic in my church, I got my call directly from On High in front of about 400 people.  But I have gained more self-awareness and religious insight as I reflect upon a prophecy given about 10 years earlier in a camp when I was about 9.

My father was the full-time paid pastor at the time at the 3 congregations in St. Joseph, Missouri.  He was having a difference of opinion with his Stake President, whom he considered a lazy bag of wind.  During a prayer service when the spirit was getting high, and prophecies were starting to flow, one high priest who was closely associated with the lazy bag of wind, got up and began to prophesy to my father: Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Melvin Russell….

As the Lord began to articulate his thoughts concerning Melvin Russell, Melvin Russell began to recognize that this high priest was telling him that God wanted him to knuckle under to the position that he was differing on with this lazy bag of wind stake president.  Well his prophecy might well have been labeled ‘Follow the Brother.’  My dad began to get hot under the collar, so hot that he got up and walked out of the large tent while the message of God was still in progress.  [audience chuckles]

Thus saith the Lord unto my servant Melvin Russell, Melvin ([shouts]) MELVIN!!! [audience chuckles]

Without saying so explicitly, my dad taught me specifically that claims to revelation should be critically examined.  If they don’t make sense to you, don’t believe them!  Trust the intelligence and judgment that God gave you, even over authoritative pronouncements allegedly issuing from on high.  More than once, when someone would prophesy at a reunion, dad would quietly tell family members, ‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to that.’  [audience chuckles]

My dad often criticized the revelations added to our Doctrine and Covenants, considering them not revelations at all.  In that tradition I have twice counseled our current president, W. Wallace Smith to cease having revelations.  [audience chuckles]  But do you think he would listen to me?!  On more than one occasion, dad chewed out the apostle who was his immediate supervisor in the church organization, the boss in other words.  He recognized that all church officials are sinners too.  They are very fallible, whatever their position in the church.  And that is fundamental for me, and why First Amendment freedom of inquiry and belief is so important, so my first pillar is that all religious pronouncements must be subject to critical scrutiny by the individual even if that pronouncement is in holy writ, or by ecclesiastical official, or by a spouse who thinks he is superior because he has a penis and/or priesthood office.  I say that because happily in my church, the former is no longer a requirement for the latter.  [audience applauds]

I say listen to the brethren, and then do what you think is right.  Don’t be intimidated by ecclesiastical actions, be it silencing from priesthood office, which is the main sanction that the RLDS church uses, or excommunication, the main threat in your tradition. I believe my own dignity as a human being is more important  than my status in a mere church organization, and I want to look at myself in the mirror and not vomit.

When I graduated from Graceland in 1960, (that ages me), I was offered a position on the editorial staff at Herald House, the RLDS publishing house.  I loved the job, and I began attending a nearby Methodist seminary on a part-time basis.  Seminary was the most intellectually challenging time of my life. I gained a great appreciation for the Bible, but I also recognized more than ever, its fallibility.  Perhaps the biggest eye-opener was my study of the four gospels. On the one hand, I found them very inspirational as I read about the life of the Galilean who they nailed to a tree.

But on the other hand, Lindsay Farragot, the best teacher I ever had, helped me to see that the four gospels were partisan propaganda.  Each evangelist has his own agenda when he wrote.  Matthew and Luke were written at least in part to correct what they saw were Mark’s errors.  The fourth gospel has very little in common with the other three, until we get to the Holy Week.  The author of Luke-Acts has a clear political agenda.  So I appreciated both the humanity and inspirational qualities of the four gospels.  I also fell in love with the Epistles of Paul.  The RLDS Church has traditionally emphasized the law too much.  Paul’s radical rejection of the Mosaic Law was liberating for me, as was his focus on salvation by grace, rather than by works, and of course, Paul was engaged in a mighty struggle with the General Authorities, in case you haven’t read Galatians.

He didn’t cower before the greater ecclesiastical authority of the original apostles who had by far the best possible credentials: they had been with Jesus from the baptism until the crucifixion.  Yet Paul didn’t knuckle under to those superlative apostles as he sarcastically referred to them.  Paul fought them and he won, and if he hadn’t won, we would not be here today.

His next comments were recorded in my previous post.  I got a real chuckle out of his imitation of his father walking out during a revelation.  While many lament that we don’t see revelation in the LDS church more often, I wonder if we would be jaded as Bill is if revelation was more routine.  What do you think?

Introduction, “William D. Russell is a professor of American History and Government at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa.  He received his B.A. in Religion from Graceland College.  He has his J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law, and he says he has about 70 hours of graduate study in history in St. Paul in the University of Iowa.  He has published a book, Treasures in Earthen Vessels, an Introduction to the New Testament and he tells me that he was given the True Believer Comeback of the Year Award by the John Whitmer Historical Association in 1985 for affirming the Book of Mormon as legitimate scripture shortly after advocating that the RLDS Church quit publishing the Doctrine and Covenants.  He is also a runner and has run 25 marathons including the LA and the Boston Marathon.”

The whole speech is interesting, and I will probably post the whole transcript in the future.  But Bill spoke about a very interesting topic concerning the story of Nephi and Laban.  Before we get to I thought I would give a few of Bill’s opening remarks.

I’ve been a regular attender of the Mormon History Association since 1971 and in those early meetings I met Dick Paul and Leonard Arrington, Mel Smith and a number of others here tonight. In 1984, some of my Mormon History friends suggested I ought to come to Sunstone, and so I wandered out here in 1984 and I think I met Catherine for the first time that year, and I can’t stay away ever since.  Often I’m the only RLDS person here, so I just wanted to assure you that being the case you might think that I am some sort of official spokesman for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I assure you, you can be confident that I don’t speak for any of the general officers of the Church, be they high or low, standing, sitting, or prone. [audience chuckles]

So, I want to make it clear that Bill is not a spokesman for the RLDS Church (now known as the Community of Christ.)  He had a very provocative perspective on the story of Nephi, and I wanted to see what you thought of his beliefs about the story.

So travelling down this path, I began to see that Joseph Smith was in real trouble, at least for me, not that he was worried.  [audience chuckles]  Joseph committed Mormonism to positions at odds with biblical and historical scholarship.  Joseph regarded the scriptures as true, insofar as correctly translated.  I discovered the problem usually wasn’t with the translation, or the transmission process, the problem usually was right there in the originals, and I also came to view the Book of Mormon as fiction, but felt it deserved it’s place in the canon of scriptures (that’s why I got that True Believers award), because it’s the founding document of Mormonism, and because it also has inspired many people to do good.  But my recent experience writing a book on the 1989 mass murder in Kirtland, Ohio by an RLDS splinter prophet has made me aware that the Book of Mormon has also inspired men to do evil.

Jeff Lundgren studied the scriptures diligently, and considered the Book of Mormon the most important of the standard works, the fullness.  He learned the love of guns from his father, and he was fascinated by the violence of the Book of Mormon and the Old Testament.  He quoted over and over again the various passages from the Book of Mormon which warned, ‘Repent or be destroyed.’  He gathered devout Latter-day Saints who wanted to build Zion and see the return of Christ.  He wanted to have faith like the Brother of Jared, faith so strong they would be able to see and feel Christ.  If they could produce a community of saints who had repented of their sins, Christ would return and Zion would be established.

But the five members of the Avery family were hopelessly unrepentant, so they had to be destroyed.  Jeff loved the story of Nephi beheading Laban, and stealing Laban’s treasures.  That story contains two of the most horrible passages in the standard works, indeed, two of the most dreadful lines ever written:  “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.’  ‘It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.’

The first sentence is a great justification for holy war.  The second sentence would serve quite well as a justification for the inquisition.  Neither passage can be condemned strongly enough. Incredibly we quote these sentences with approval, in my church anyway, and I suspect in yours.  By doing so, we place terrible ideas  in the minds of our members.  We abdicate our responsibility to provide moral leadership in our churches if we fail to condemn ideas like that.  I don’t care where they are found.  Don’t ask me to flush my brain down the toilet, or ignore my moral values just because I’m reading the scriptures.  And I’m confident of this: the jury that I observed in Painesville, Ohio would have sentenced Nephi to death for murder and robbery just as surely as they sentenced Jeff Lundgren to the electric chair.  I see no real difference in the two cases.  I’ve come to the very strong opinion that the Church has an affirmative duty to warn its members of the existence of extremely dangerous ideas in the pages of the standard works such as murder in the name of God, sexism, racism, and so forth.  Perhaps Deseret Books and Herald House should place warning labels on the standard works.  [audience chuckles]  Some passages contained herein can be harmful to your health.  Maybe we should register Bibles rather than guns.

What do you think of Russell’s take on the story of Nephi and Laban?  Is it really better for one man to perish than for a nation to dwindle in unbelief?

Dan Wotherspoon of Mormon Matters recently interviewed Brad Kramer, Marguerite Dreissen, and Gina Colvin about the priesthood ban, and discussed why racism seems to be misunderstood.  Brad is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan in socio-cultural anthropology, and permablogger at By Common Consent.  Marguerite is an Adjunct Professor at BYU in Law and Communications.  Gina Colvin is a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.  They were part of a fascinating panel discussion on this topic, and I wanted to highlight the points relative to Jeff’s recent post.  Here is a transcript of part of their interview.

Brad Kramer - By Common Consent blogger

Brad Kramer, “I’m seeing is a tendency to treat racism as a problem but not a super, super bad problem.  Like a more sort of “let’s put things in perspective folks.”  Yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.  And this is something that—I grew up in Utah.  I’m a white male, grew up in Utah, one of the things that I have come to realize in retrospect is that there’s a lot of racism in Utah, but it’s a racism of a peculiar flavor.

It’s not a sort of deeply entrenched white supremacy racism like you might encounter in residual forms in the American south.  It’s a racism that manifests itself in part by trivializing racism as a problem, so I encountered it most often in the form of a persistent willingness of my LDS friends, mainly my male LDS friends to be totally comfortable making really offensive racist jokes really casually.  These would be the kinds of friends that would never use the f-word in a joke because they were Mormon, and they probably wouldn’t, they probably knew at some level that historical forms of racism and segregation and certainly slavery were really bad things.  Using the n-word in a joke, if there weren’t any black folks around to hear it and have their feelings super hurt by it, using the n-word as a punch line was not really that big a deal.

So it got me thinking that if you on the one hand try to say that we don’t like racism. Racism is bad, and we believe in equality and this and this and that, but were not really gonna say anything bad about the fact that we had this policy of excluding black  folks from savings ordinances for most of our history.  We’re just going to sort of not comment on that.  That actually reflects and reinforces a culture that says that racism is bad, but it’s not that bad.”

Marguerite Driessen, Adjunct Professor at BYU

Marguerite Driessen, ”Let me interject as someone that currently lives in Utah County.  I have definitely encountered the attitudes that Brad is talking about, but really it goes a different step which is that there are a lot of people here who don’t just trivialize racism, they clearly do not recognize it.  They act in these ways that are discriminatory, that clearly evince racial stereotypes or racial prejudices, and yet have a total inability to acknowledge that that is racist.  A dear friend of mine in an employment situation had the bosses absolutely treating her differentially based on race, and here’s what they did.

They said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to give you an executive parking place like all the other executives, but you can’t have one up at the front because we’re in this upscale area, and of course our neighbors saw that we’d given a black girl a position of this kind of authority, that would be terrible, so your parking place is going to be in the back by the dumpster.’

And they’re thinking ‘we’re not racists, of course not.  We’re simply acknowledging the racism that exists inside the community, and trying to protect you.  You’re going to be hired to have this title, but we’re not going to print you business cards because heaven forbid if that got out and people see that we had given a black girl a position of such authority then there will be racist backlash against you’, and these people do not understand that treating her differently because she was black IS racial discrimination.

I scratch my head because this is not you know 1950, this was happening in 2006, you know.  These are things that were happening recently from people who don’t even recognize it.  I scratch my head thinking, don’t they have a TV?  Haven’t they heard of the civil rights era?  Don’t they understand that discrimination is treating people differently based on race.  And there are people here in Utah County who I think don’t.  They think it’s not racism or discrimination unless it comes from a position of race hatred.”

Dan Wotherspoon, “Good.  Good.”

Kramer, “That is so absolutely spot on.  That’s one of these underlying factors that I’ve seen this response is that when I’ve been trying to make the case that the ban was racist, it turns out that people who are unwilling to see the ban as racist, are people who think that racism is a solely mental phenomenon.  Racism is only carrying mean-spirited attitudes toward black folks or towards minorities.  Therefore I say the ban is racist, and they say ‘how do you know?  You don’t even  know where it came from?”

Dan Wotherspoon, Host of Mormon Matters

Dan, “Or why?”

[Dreissen laughs.]

Kramer, “It doesn’t matter where it came from.  It doesn’t matter if it came from people who thought that black people were superior.”

Driessen, “Right.  It’s differential treatment.”

Kramer, “It’s racism.  It discriminates on the basis of race.  It excludes on the basis of race. It is functionally racist.  Its consequences and its effects are racist.  It is racism.  No matter what motivates it.”

Dreissen, “Right.”

Kramer, “The story that you described there to me it, you couldn’t script a better microcosm of the problem, which is that in the Mormon corridor, in Mormon Utah where you have this long history and this really horrible skeleton in the closet, to say racism is bad at the same time that you’re not willing to acknowledge that a deeply and transparently racist practice was racist, you’re just going to breed a culture in which people who  think that racism is wrong are simply incapable of recognizing the racist behaviors all around them.”

Wotherspoon, “Good, Good.  Hey, I want to tease that apart.  So you mentioned it’s not purely a mental state, and there’s just that because I don’t have hatred, or because I don’t think they’re inferior, I’m not racist.  How much is it like just the conflation in their minds of racism means bad people versus racism is embedded in systems of power and privilege, and all the different—you guys with all your sociological backgrounds and Gina, you’re probably dying to throw in the right language here, but is it because it feels like oh I would be so bad to acknowledge that I’m part of a system of power that’s racist?  You know, they’re worried that that’s going to reflect on them?

Is there a way to tease those two things apart, and could we deal with it better if we could just say, ‘Brigham Young was not a bad person.  This wasn’t a reflection on his character.  This was a systems of power and storytelling and all that stuff, that he inherited.  Get rid of the idea that he was a bad person because of those things coming out of his mouth. Does that make any sense?”

Dr. Gina Colvin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Gina Colvin, “Yes. Absolutely.  I think sort of one of the key ideas that perhaps Mormonism fails to grasp is that white folk, particularly in the church, there’s certain kind of Mormon disposition when it comes to matters of race.  I thoroughly agree with you Brad, there’s the sense that if I think nice thoughts that will make me a nice person, therefore I couldn’t possibly be racist.  But one of the issues is that white folk, they’ve got the luxury of choosing whether or not to know black or brown truth.  They can engage with it, or they don’t have to engage with it.  Whereas black and brown folk don’t have that luxury, and I consistently with the need to survive in a racialized communities, in racialized societies, and so there’s inequity right  there. There’s an advantage to whiteness which doesn’t get acknowledged of not having to deal directly with the exigencies and the problems and the brutality of racism.  You can kind of opt in or opt out.”

Dan, “Interesting, thank you.”

Brad, “Yeah, and I think that going back to this question of thoughts versus larger systems and power structures and sociological structures and things like that, you know, it’s really easy to treat racism as a problem that exists in the minds and the hearts and minds of people, and only there.  Because if you do that, you don’t have to worry about changing how things actually operate, how things actually work.  So you can say, I’m not going to let you park here because you’re black, and that would cause problems, and it’s not in my interest to let a black person have this parking spot.  So because you’re black you don’t get to park here.  But I’m not a racist.  This isn’t racism because I like you, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with black people myself, so it’s not racism.  In other words, we don’t have to change anything that we do, and the most extreme version of this—you see this dichotomy break down with people saying, hey we’re repudiating all the folklore, we’re repudiating the racist doctrine, we’re repudiating the racist sentiments and ideas and mythologies and all these things, all the teachings we’ve  repudiated.  We don’t need to repudiate the ban because we don’t know where it came from.”

[Driessen laughs.]

Kramer, “The logical extension of all that is to say, if the ban were still in place, and the 1978 revelation had only repudiated all the racists teachings, and therefore we have got rid of all the doctrinal folklore but the ban was still in place, that we wouldn’t have a racism problem in the church.  Because even though we’re excluding blacks—

Driessen interrupts, “Yes, it would, yes they would.”

Brad continues, “I know but that’s a sort of logical outcome of thinking in these terms.  You can imagine for yourself a church in which it’s somehow—that the ban still exists and that’s somehow not racism.  Of course it’s racism.”

Dreissen, “It’s not that it’s not racism because you don’t acknowledge that it was.  There’s a difference between you know saying ‘oh yea it was, and I’m guilty and just leaving it to be and do what it says, but I would also add that it says to that Brad that there is a chicken and egg issue here: in that sure there was no big revelation pronouncing the ban and the reason.  However, people made up reasons because there was a ban.  If in 1978 all that had happened was that the church had specifically repudiated the 3 say most popular theories or all of the then known theories, if that had happened, they simply would have invented other ones.  It was not that it would exist in a vacuum.  They would have come up with other reasons why the black people were singled out for this treatment.  They created them, because there was a policy and they needed some way to explain the policy, and if you actually get into Mormon doctrine, get into the scriptures, get into the core beliefs of the church, everything they came up with to explain the ban is contradicted in the basic core doctrines.  Just go into the Articles of Faith.  Every reason they came up with is repudiated in the Articles of Faith.  They were reaching, they were grasping at straws to explain the inexplicable in any other terms and if we got rid of those as you side, maybe there would have been a half day, that day in ’78,  but then the very next day, they would have come up with something else because the ban still existed.“

Colvin, “I think one of the questions here though is who are we talking about when we say ‘they’?  Because I think the elephant in the room is the ‘they’ happen to be a succession of presidents of the Church, and so the elephant in the room is, yes they could have come up with it, and they do so in the positions of president and a prophet, but how much or that is revelation and are we to understand that kind of equivocation around the priesthood ban to be coming from God?  How are we supposed to understand the relationship with kind of prophetic instruction and revelation and something that just feels theologically out of step?”

Dreissen, “Well, and it wasn’t just the prophets of the Church, however.  I mean there were certainly things that Brigham Young said, but a lot of his most racially derogatory, racially-tinged comments were not spoken from a pulpit at General Conference.  They were spoken by him as the Governor of Utah or in some political meeting having to do with getting Utah’s statehood, which was coming up around the same era of time when Brigham Young was not just the chief, the CEO of the Church, but the head of the government as well.  He wore multiple hats, and spoke in that context in multiple ways, and a lot of the other things they arose after his time.

The ideas were promulgated by people, religious professors, and religious scholars.  Bruce R. McConkie was never the prophet of the church, and yet a lot of the theorizing can be laid at his door.  So when I say ‘they’, I really do not mean just the prophets of the church, I mean people in the church who either came up with or accepted for themselves the truths of these various tracts of folklore to explain the policy that was then in place.”

Gina, “But there’s still presidents of the Church who legitimated it.  They gave it some kind of credibility.”

Marguerite, “Well, they gave it credibility in so much as they didn’t change it. They certainly didn’t repudiate them, and they didn’t change them even if they never spoke these words themselves from the pulpit.  They had power to repudiate them, they had the power to make the change, and chose not to.”

Brad, “And there’s something that we have to come to terms with, I think is the underlying sentiment of my post, which is that once we commit ourselves to he proposition that racism is a sin, we have to come to terms with the fact that the worst sin in our history is not something Brigham Young said, it’s not something that Joseph Fielding Smith said, or Bruce R. McConkie said, or Alvin Dyer said.  The worst sin in our history if racism is a sin is THE BAN: the actual practice of excluding black folks from access to temple ordinances, covenants and sealings. Everything else is extraneous to it.”

[Group agrees.]

Gina, “Then it becomes systemic.”

Dreissen, “It’s not extraneous, ancillary to.  They are certainly playing around out there, but we have to go back to defining racism, and that’s where the problem is.  You saw it in the Washington Post article.  How did Randy Bott describe racial discrimination?  Do you remember what he said? He said simply denying people something that is a benefit to them.  He missed the point altogether.

Discrimination based on race is not simply denying someone a benefit.  It’s treating people differently because of race, and he did not define it that way, which then prevents the question that Brad just framed from ever being asked, or the assertion inherent therein, and from ever being asserted or discussed which is if we define racism is some really silly way, then of course we don’t have anything to worry about.  You know?  What do you care?  Denying someone a benefit?  People get denied benefits all the time, yada, yada, yada.

That to me was the part of the article that shocked me the most, because quite frankly I’ve heard all the theories.  I’ve heard all the folklore.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is here is someone who says discrimination is simply denying someone something that would be a benefit to them, and that’s not what discrimination is.  It’s differential treatment based on some characteristic based on some characteristic.   That is discrimination based on that characteristic.”

Brad, “And how often do folks who discriminate?  Do people who participate in patterns of discrimination rationalize discrimination on the grounds somehow they are doing something nice for the people on behalf of the people they’re discriminating against.  It doesn’t matter if you think it’s nice. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re blessing them in the process.  It’s discrimination.”

Marguerite, “Right, you’re treating them differently.”

Dan, “Good.  And that’s a way to kind of defang it right?  It depersonalizes it, it takes a lot of the emotion out of it, right?  I at least see an opening there Brad if that can simply be communicated really well that you know—Does it make it easier to deal with?”

I think this is a good place to end the quote.  Do you think that the panel properly defines racism?