Priesthood & Temple Ban
The claim:
"As you know, for close to 130 years blacks were not only banned from holding the priesthood but black individuals and black families were blocked from the saving ordinances of the Temple. Every single prophet from Brigham Young all the way to Harold B. Lee kept this ban in place."[1]
"Of course, the revelation He gives to the Brethren in the Salt Lake Temple on June 1, 1978 has absolutely nothing to do with the IRS potentially revoking BYU's tax-exempt status, Stanford and other universities boycotting BYU athletics, we can't figure out who's black or not in Brazil . . . and that Post-Civil Rights societal trends were against the Church's racism. I would think Christ's one true Church would have led the Civil Rights movement; not be the last major church on the planet in 1978 to adopt it."[2]
For roughly 126 years, Black men were not ordained to the priesthood and Black members could not enter the temple. Every Church president across that span kept the policy in place. Then in 1978 the Church reversed itself, with the timing matching the outside pressure, and in 2013 it even disavowed the old reasons its earlier prophets had given for the ban. If a string of prophets can be that wrong for that long, and the change arrives only when the world pushes, how can the Church claim to be led by revelation?
The ban was real. It lasted about 126 years. It denied Black men ordination and blocked Black men and women from the temple endowment and from being sealed to their families. Real, faithful people lived their whole lives under it. Some died still asking for blessings they never received in life.
The case made below is narrower than "the ban was right," because the ban was not right. The Church itself now says the reasons given for it were wrong. The claim is only that the history, all of it, still supports faith, because a framework written into scripture before the ban began can account for an institutional error this large without the whole thing falling apart.
A note on words: this article keeps the older terms ("Negro," "colored") only inside direct quotations, and uses "Black" in its own voice, matching the Church's current usage.
The ban was not where the Restoration started
The single most important fact in this whole question is one the CES Letter mentions only in passing: Joseph Smith ordained Black men to the priesthood. The ban was not the Restoration's starting position. It was a later turn under Brigham Young, and only afterward did anyone read it back into Joseph Smith's day.
That fact is the Church's own current teaching, and the conclusion of every major historian of the ban. The Church's history topic on the restriction states: "There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime."[3] The Gospel Topics Essay agrees: "During the first two decades of the Church's existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood."[4]
The clearest case is Elijah Abel. He was ordained an elder in 1836, and Joseph Smith personally signed his ministerial certificate that year, recommending him as a "worthy brother in the Lord."[5] Abel served three missions, the last at age 73, and kept his priesthood office until he died in 1884, thirty-two years after the ban had already begun. Another Black man, Q. Walker Lewis, was ordained an elder around 1843 by Joseph Smith's brother William.[6]
In March 1847, five years before the ban, Brigham Young himself held up Walker Lewis as proof that race was no barrier in the Church:
"We don't care about the color . . . we have one of the best Elders, an African in Lowell — a barber."[7][6:1]
The same Brigham Young who would tie a priesthood restriction to revelation language in 1852 was, five years earlier, pointing to a Black priesthood holder as his counter-example. Something changed in those five years. Whatever changed was not there at the Restoration's start, and it was fully in place by 1852.
One more fact organizes everything else: there is no written revelation behind the ban. FAIR states it directly: "There is no known written revelation instituting the ban" and "there is no contemporary account of a revelation underlying the ban."[7:1] That absence matters, because real Latter-day Saint revelation leaves a paper trail. The Doctrine and Covenants has nearly 100 sections from Joseph Smith's lifetime; the 1890 Manifesto and the 1978 revelation both left a documentary record. The ban left none: no revelation transcript, no canonized declaration, nothing of the kind that produced the rest of the canon. W. Paul Reeve, who wrote the most cited academic history of the ban, concludes the ban emerged gradually under Brigham Young rather than as original doctrine.[8]
So the arc the record actually supports is a faith-promoting one: the Restoration began inclusive, nineteenth-century leaders deviated under the pressures of their time and place, and the 1978 revelation returned the Church to where it started. The ban is a departure from the Restoration that the Restoration's own framework eventually corrected. The in-depth version walks through the full documentary case, including the contested 1879 record on Elijah Abel.
The rule for what counts as doctrine came first
The whole faithful case turns on a distinction the Restoration drew in scripture long before any of this happened: the difference between what a prophet says and what the Church accepts as binding doctrine. It is the same rule the Adam-God question turns on, and it was written down decades before Brigham Young's 1852 speeches.
For a teaching to become official, binding doctrine in this Church, several things have to happen. It has to be presented as revelation, accepted by the senior apostles, approved by the members in a sustaining vote (what the Church calls "common consent"), and consistent with the scriptures the Church already has. Common consent was written into Latter-day Saint scripture in 1830 (D&C 26:2; D&C 28:13), twenty-two years before 1852. An 1831 revelation went further and openly anticipated that the Lord's servants would speak "in their weakness," and that "inasmuch as they erred it might be made known."[9] The system expected its leaders to be fallible, and built in the safeguard, before any of this came up.
Under that rule, a prophet can sincerely mistake his own thinking for revelation. Joseph Smith stated the principle in 1843: "A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such."[10]
Apply that rule to Brigham Young's 1852 territorial-legislature speeches, the documents the CES Letter leans on hardest. They were severe. Brigham used revelation language and tied the restriction to the old "curse of Cain" idea. But the speeches were never canonized, never sustained by common consent, never made the subject of a unanimous declaration by the First Presidency and the Twelve, and no revelation transcript exists. By the Church's own long-standing test, the 1852 articulation expressed a policy in revelatory language without ever clearing the bar for binding doctrine.
The ban asks more of this rule than Adam-God did. Adam-God, Brigham Young's identification of Adam as God the Father, never moved from sermon to policy; it never stood between any member and any blessing. The ban did become policy, and for 126 years it decided who could be ordained and who could enter the temple. The Church had the rule on its books from 1830; applying it to the ban took until 1978.
The 1949 statement, the hardest single document
In 1949, the First Presidency, George Albert Smith and his two counselors, issued a written statement that called the ban doctrine:
"It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time."[11]
It bears the signatures of the President of the Church and his counselors, it says "doctrine," it says "direct commandment from the Lord," and it traces the ban to the founding of the Church. And every one of those claims is now contradicted by the Church's own 2013 essay, which places the ban with Brigham Young in 1852 and concedes there is no reliable evidence any Black man was denied the priesthood in Joseph Smith's lifetime.[4:1]
So how does the framework read it? A First Presidency signature makes the 1949 statement a formal communication, but it does not make it binding doctrine. No sustaining vote was ever taken on it, and it was never canonized or added to the standard works, so by the bars set in scripture since 1830 it does not clear the threshold, even with three signatures on it.
The framework does not make the statement right; it gives the reader a way to hold it squarely, inside a system that has anticipated exactly this kind of error since 1831. J. Reuben Clark, who signed the 1949 statement, was himself the author of the principle that even a President of the Church can address the people without being "moved upon by the Holy Ghost."[12] The man who signed it also gave us the rule by which it can be set aside.
The institution did walk it back. The 1969 First Presidency statement already conceded that the ban's origins were "known to God, but . . . not made fully known to man," dropping the 1949 claim that it was doctrine from the Church's founding.[13]
And the CES Letter's flattening of "every prophet kept the ban in place" into a single unbroken line is not what the record shows. President David O. McKay told the philosopher Sterling McMurrin in 1954 that the ban was a practice rather than a doctrine and that the practice would someday be changed, as McMurrin later recounted.[14] His counselor Hugh B. Brown pushed openly to end it through the 1960s and nearly succeeded in 1969.[15] Those are not the actions of leaders who all held the ban as settled prophetic conviction, and the in-depth version documents that internal advocacy, leader by leader.
What the 1978 revelation actually was
The CES Letter implies the 1978 revelation was political capitulation timed to outside pressure. The actual record, documented most thoroughly by Edward L. Kimball (Spencer W. Kimball's son), shows a multi-year prayerful preparation that looks like the pattern of every other major revelation in Latter-day Saint history.
The preparation began in 1975, three years before the change, when President Kimball referred early leaders' statements about race to his counselors; through the mid-1970s he kept a notebook of correspondence and clippings on the question.[14:1] In June 1977 he asked at least three apostles to write him memos "on the implications of the subject"; one concluded there was "no scriptural barrier to a change."[14:2] In early 1978 he began visiting the temple alone to pray over it, what the Gospel Topics Essay calls "many hours in the Upper Room of the [Salt Lake] Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance."[4:2]
Then, on June 1, 1978, the First Presidency and ten of the Twelve gathered in the temple, and what they reported afterward is remarkably consistent across independent accounts written in different settings over many years. Gordon B. Hinckley, who was there:
"There was a hallowed and sanctified atmosphere in the room. For me, it felt as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet of God who was joined by his Brethren. . . . Not one of us who was present on that occasion was ever quite the same after that. Nor has the Church been quite the same. . . . The answer was clear. There was perfect unity among us in our experience and in our understanding."[16]
Marion G. Romney admitted he had walked in expecting nothing, which makes his reversal harder to dismiss as groupthink: "I did not expect him to get an answer. . . . I have now changed my position 180 degrees."[14:3]
The most striking response came eleven weeks later from Bruce R. McConkie, who had defended the ban in his own widely read book for two decades. At BYU he publicly told the Church to throw out everything he and earlier leaders had taught on it:
"Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world. . . . It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day . . ."[17]
A senior apostle stood at the pulpit where he had taught the opposite and told the Church his own writings were wrong, with every reputational reason not to. Then the Church did the one thing it had never done for the ban itself: it canonized the change. Official Declaration 2 was sustained by the whole Church in conference and added to the Doctrine and Covenants.[18] By every criterion the framework has had since 1830, the 1978 revelation passed the test the 1852 speeches and the 1949 statement never did.
As for the outside pressure, the timing is looser than the charge suggests. The university boycotts peaked in 1969, nearly nine years before the revelation, and the tax-law scholar who studied the IRS question most carefully wrote, "I can't find any contemporaneous evidence . . . that there was public pressure for revoking the church's exemption, or that the church was concerned about the potential loss of exemption."[14:4][19] The non-Latter-day-Saint historian Jan Shipps noticed that the answer came not "in the '60s when the Church was under pressure from without," but in a quieter moment.[20] Outside events made the question urgent, which is not the same as causing the answer. The fuller picture on Brazil, where the policy really had become unworkable, is in the in-depth version.
The cost, and the unanswered "why"
Everything above is true, and none of it erases the cost. The framework explains how the error happened and how it was corrected, but it does not redeem what it cost the people who lived under it, and there is no clean answer to why God allowed it to stand for 126 years.
Jane Manning James is the witness at the center of this. Denied further boat passage at Buffalo because of their race, she and her family walked the remaining 800 miles to Nauvoo, "until our shoes were worn out, and our feet became sore and cracked open and bled until you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground."[21][22] She crossed the plains, raised a family, supported herself making soap, and donated to the building of three temples she was never allowed to enter. Between 1884 and 1904 she petitioned one Church President after another for her temple endowment, and was refused every time.[22:1] She received it only by proxy in 1979, seventy-one years after her death.
And she never wavered. Near the end of her life she wrote that her faith "is as strong today, nay, it is, if possible, stronger than it was the day I was first baptized."[21:1] Her obituary called her one of the most faithful members of the Church.[22:2] She was not alone in that. Elijah Abel kept his priesthood and served until two months before his death, denied the temple endowment by two Church presidents. Helvécio Martins helped pay for the São Paulo Temple while barred from entering it, then lived to receive the priesthood in 1978 and become, in 1990, the first Black General Authority.[23][14:5]
This story is best heard from inside the experience rather than summarized from outside it. Mauli Bonner, a Black Latter-day Saint, speaks here about growing up in the Church and what this history has meant in his life.
The standard answers, that God works through fallible human institutions, that the moral arc bends slowly, that the Church carried the racism of its time and place, all hold some truth. None of them cancel the cost. Jane Manning James lived and died without the endowment she spent a lifetime asking for, and that cost fell on her, not on the institution that maintained the ban. The Latter-day Saint framework has more room for this than some traditions, because it openly anticipates that prophets err. But anticipating error is not absolution.
President McKay believed the ban was practice rather than doctrine and prayed for it to be lifted, yet it was not lifted in his time, and by his own account he was told to wait. Why his prayers and not Kimball's, why 1978 and not 1968, is not a question this article can answer. The faithful response is to leave it open rather than manufacture a tidy reason; the in-depth version weighs the three available readings and ends in the same place.
The Church has disavowed the theories used to justify the ban and condemned racism in unequivocal terms, but it has not issued a formal apology for the ban itself. Black Latter-day Saint voices, including Darius Gray, have noticed that gap.[24]
Correction is the feature, not the flaw
The CES Letter ends its section with the question: how can we trust prophets who were so wrong, for so long, while claiming revelation?
Trust in prophets, as the Restoration defines it, never depended on their being infallible. The prophets were wrong about the ban, and stayed wrong for 126 years. The answer lies in the framework the Restoration has carried since 1830, the one that separates binding doctrine from one leader's statement and that said from the start that the Lord's servants speak "in their weakness." That framework lets the Church admit that the 1949 statement and the 1852 speeches were wrong. A church without ongoing revelation has no mechanism to correct its own course the way the 1978 revelation did.
The capacity the CES Letter reads as proof of unreliability, a later prophet disavowing an earlier one, is the same capacity that allowed the ban to end and its justifications to be thrown out. And it is the biblical pattern, not a uniquely Latter-day Saint embarrassment: Peter, the senior apostle, received a revelation in Acts 10 reversing the apparent exclusion of the Gentiles, and concluded "God is no respecter of persons."[25]
And underneath it all sits the book that was right from the beginning. Published in 1830, the Book of Mormon stated the Restoration's theology of race plainly: God "denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female . . . and all are alike unto God."[26] No passage in it was ever cited as the basis for the ban; the justifications came from elsewhere, mostly nineteenth-century readings of Genesis.
The CES Letter quotes this verse as if it traps the Church, but it does the opposite: the book was right about race twenty-two years before Brigham Young's articulation and 148 years before the institution caught up to it, and President Nelson quoted the same verse in 2020, "God does not love one race more than another."[27] (The other verse the CES Letter raises, 2 Nephi 5:21's "skin of blackness," was likewise never the basis for the ban, and the in-depth version takes up the scholarship reading it as body paint and covenant marks rather than skin color.)
That same book told Jane Manning James she was "alike unto God," and she took it at its word even when the institution that printed it kept telling her no. Time has ruled on her choice. The theories that kept her out of the temple have been formally disavowed; the restriction is gone, ended through the same channel of revelation she spent her life believing in. The Church eventually followed the book back to her side. Faith in this history does not require defending the 126 years. It requires what Jane had: a grip on the book that was true the whole way through.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 4, p. 65. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 4, pp. 65–66. ↩︎
"Priesthood and Temple Restriction," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/priesthood-and-temple-restriction?lang=eng ↩︎
"Race and the Priesthood," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (December 2013). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng. Notes that Brigham Young announced the priesthood restriction in two speeches before the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Able, Elijah," Century of Black Mormons, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of-black-mormons/page/able-elijah. Documents Joseph Smith's signature on Abel's ministerial certificate dated March 30, 1836, and the post-Joseph 19th-century revisionism (John Taylor characterizing Abel's ordination as "an anomaly, a mistake that the founding prophet of Mormonism made but one that Brigham Young corrected"). ↩︎
"Lewis, Quack Walker," Century of Black Mormons, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of-black-mormons/page/lewis-quack-walker. Documents Lewis's ordination in 1843 or 1844 by William Smith and carries Brigham Young's March 26, 1847 statement praising Lewis as "one of the best Elders, an African in Lowell — a barber." The 1847 minutes survive as rough manuscript; this page and FAIR's render them with slightly different editorial brackets, and quotations here print the bracket-expanded text smooth. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Origin of the priesthood ban," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Origin_of_the_priesthood_ban ↩︎ ↩︎
W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015). The most rigorous academic account of the ban's origins; winner of three best-book awards. Argues that the ban emerged gradually under Brigham Young between 1847 and 1852 in response to the McCary affair, the racialization-of-Mormons context, and the practical challenge of ordering a diverse population in the new Utah Territory. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/religion-of-a-different-color-9780199754076 ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 1:24–28 (canonized November 1831). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/1?lang=eng ↩︎
Joseph Smith, February 8, 1843. History of the Church 5:265. "A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such." ↩︎
First Presidency Statement, August 17, 1949 (signed by George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark Jr., and David O. McKay). Reproduced in Bush, "Mormonism's Negro Doctrine," Dialogue 8, no. 1 (1973): 11–68; and in Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (University of Illinois Press, 2015). ↩︎
D. Todd Christofferson, "The Doctrine of Christ," April 2012 General Conference, Sunday Morning Session. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2012/04/the-doctrine-of-christ?lang=eng ↩︎
First Presidency Statement, December 15, 1969 (signed by counselors Hugh B. Brown and N. Eldon Tanner). https://bhroberts.org/records/0wm3ut-0jgUY5/n_eldon_tanner_and_hugh_b_brown_sign_a_statement_under_the_name_of_the_first_presidency_saying_that_the_origins_of_ban_are_not_known. The statement explicitly conceded that the reasons for the priesthood restriction "are known to God, but . . . not made fully known to man" — a substantial step away from the 1949 statement's "doctrine of the Church . . . from the days of its organization." ↩︎
Edward L. Kimball, "Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood," BYU Studies Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2008): 4–78. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood. The single most thorough secondary source on the 1978 revelation process, written by Spencer W. Kimball's son using primary papers including Spencer W. Kimball's notebook, correspondence, and family records. Documents McKay's prayer for revelation, McKay's practical relaxations, the Brown advocacy and the 1969 attempt to ordain Monroe Fleming, the Kimball preparation period (1975–1978), the March 9 and June 1, 1978 temple meetings, and the eyewitness accounts from McConkie, Hinckley, Perry, Ashton, Hanks, Romney, and Benson. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Matthew L. Harris, Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2024). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/second-class-saints-9780197695715. The most recent academic treatment, drawing on previously closed Spencer W. Kimball private papers, documents the Brown advocacy in detail (including Brown's 1962 prediction to Lowell Bennion, the September 1969 Monroe Fleming ordination attempt blocked by Harold B. Lee, and the November 1969 Stanford communication). ↩︎
Gordon B. Hinckley, "Priesthood Restoration," Ensign, October 1988. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1988/10/priesthood-restoration?lang=eng. Hinckley was present as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on June 1, 1978; the most-quoted "hallowed and sanctified atmosphere" / "conduit" passage is from this 1988 Ensign article — ten years after the temple meeting. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie, "All Are Alike unto God," CES Religious Educators Symposium, Brigham Young University, August 18, 1978. https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie/alike-unto-god/ ↩︎
Official Declaration 2, Doctrine and Covenants. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng ↩︎
Sam Brunson, "The Tax Roots of OD2(?)," By Common Consent (July 15, 2019). https://bycommonconsent.com/2019/07/15/the-tax-roots-of-od2/. Brunson, a tax-law professor at Loyola University Chicago, concluded after detailed research that there is no contemporaneous evidence the Church faced direct IRS pressure on its priesthood policy. The parenthetical question mark in Brunson's title signals his skepticism about the IRS-pressure thesis. ↩︎
Jan Shipps, quoted in Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003). ↩︎
"The Autobiography of Jane Manning James," in Pioneers in Every Land, Church History. https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/pioneers-in-every-land/the-autobiography-of-jane-manning-james?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎
"Jane Elizabeth Manning James," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/jane-elizabeth-manning-james?lang=eng. Documents Jane Manning James's repeated petitions for her endowment between 1884 and 1904, naming John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Zina D. H. Young, and Joseph F. Smith among the leaders she petitioned. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Mark L. Grover, "The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the São Paulo, Brazil Temple," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 39–53. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-mormon-priesthood-revelation-and-the-sao-paulo-brazil-temple/. The standard scholarly treatment of the Brazil factor; lists five contextual factors relevant to the question and concludes "We will probably never know the actual role of the events I have described in the priesthood revelation." Grover's framing — context rather than causation — is the article's characterization of his stance, not a direct quotation. Attributes the "All those people with Negro blood" quote to LeGrand Richards and carries President Kimball's March 1977 cornerstone exchange with Helvécio Martins. ↩︎
Darius Gray's public teaching on the ban and its supporting theories spans the Standing on the Promises trilogy, co-authored with Margaret Blair Young (Bookcraft / Zarahemla Books, 2000–2003); the documentary film Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons (2008), which he co-produced; and the Blacks in the Scriptures lecture project with Marvin Perkins. On his founding role in the Genesis Group (first counselor, 1971), see "Genesis Group," Church History Topics. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/genesis-group?lang=eng ↩︎
Acts 10:34–35, King James Version. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/nt/acts/10?lang=eng ↩︎
2 Nephi 26:33, Book of Mormon. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/26?lang=eng ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "Let God Prevail," October 2020 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2020/10/46nelson?lang=eng ↩︎