Review
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Title: Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality
Author: Matthew L. Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 488
Binding: Hardback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0197695715
Price: $22.89 – $37.99
Reviewed by Ryan Ward for the Association of Mormon Letters
Let’s cut to the chase. Second-Class Saints by Matthew Harris should, if grappled with appropriately, force a reckoning. The implications of the book reverberate far beyond it merely being a more detailed retelling of events surrounding this pivotal event in Mormon history. It will be impossible for anyone who reads it to be unaffected by what it clearly and irrefutably shows about the history of the priesthood and temple ban and the “revelation” that overturned it. I have put revelation in quotation marks in the foregoing because this highlights the other massive and potentially game-changing contribution of this book. It pulls the curtain back on a process that since the founding of the LDS church has been shrouded in mystery: the process of revelation; the actual logistics of how prophets and apostles produce revelation for the entire church, and what it takes to overturn, change, or disavow longheld doctrine.
Harris’s frankly at times astounding book demystifies this process as it was involved in one of the two most consequential revelations in the history of the church (the abandonment of polygamy being the other) and, by so doing, opens up the door to new ways of framing some of the big doctrinal and policy issues that impact the church today. Despite the thorough and rigorous historical account presented here (and make no mistake, the book is meticulously documented and researched), it is this second contribution that I think will (or at least should) lead to the publication of this book serving as a watershed, an inflection point. Mormon history, and especially the privileges, roles, functions, and methods of Latter-day Saint prophets, seers, and revelators, will be understood and viewed in terms of pre- and post-Second-Class Saints.
Harris indicates that this book has been underway for nearly fifteen years. To aid him in telling a new, more complete history of these events, he was given unprecedented access to all new material, both from the church archives as well as private correspondence and journals, some of them quite sensitive, from the personal collections of members of prominent church families, including the family of President Spencer W. Kimball. This new information fills in the massive gaps that have heretofore existed in accounts of this revelation. These gaps have occurred because, as Harris says, “the church hasn’t made available the appropriate records to tell it. Nor has the church itself told the story reliably, for official documents are shrouded in faith-promoting narratives” (p. x). Harris’s goal with the book is to show how “the inclusion of Black people in the church was as much the product of human agency as it was divine revelation” (p. xi). He overwhelmingly succeeds.
Harris states in the preface that his book aims to place discussions, doctrines, and the revelation on the priesthood and temple ban within its proper historical, social, and political context, with a particular focus on the fifty years leading up to the overturning of the ban. He stresses that his book is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the motivations for the ban or racism in the church. What his book does is go behind the scenes in the meetings, letters, discussions, arguments, and jockeying for position and influence that took place in these crucial decades.
Past historians have had to be content with having a limited view of the internal proceedings and being forced to correlate political and societal pressures with the moves taken by church leadership, who have always insisted that their decisions reflect God’s will, not a capitulation to “the world.” What Harris’s unprecedented access shows us is that these social and political factors (predominantly the Civil Rights Movement and athletic protests and government pressures on BYU to actively recruit Black students or be stripped of its federal funding) were being discussed often in meetings and were constantly on the mind of church leadership. These pressures, combined with the need to take the gospel to all the world by internationalizing the church into countries with a sizeable Black population (made particularly stark in Brazil, where a temple had recently been announced), was what led to the ban being overturned.
Harris describes his account as “unvarnished”. The book will be a welcome relief to those who are tired of apologetic treatments of the ban. There is not a hint of apologetics in the book. As noted by Harris, some may fault him for this. But for me, and I think for many other readers, this will come as a welcome relief. The apologetics have so taken over this discussion that hearing the actual facts comes across as almost anti-Mormon to many. Borderline heretical. The fact that this book forces a reckoning with prophets, seers, and revelators as actual humans with biases, weaknesses, stubbornness, and tempers is a huge contribution in and of itself.
Harris shows how the overturning of the ban was a contest of wills between the church liberals, like Hugh B. Brown and Adam S. Bennion, who felt deeply morally opposed to the ban and pressed for it to be overturned for decades, hard-liners, like Joseph Fielding Smith, Mark E. Peterson, and Bruce R. McConkie, whose racist doctrinal interpretations (quoted selectively, but disturbingly enough to make the point) cemented the theological justification in place (not to mention the wild conspiracy theorism of Ezra Taft Benson), and moderates, people like David O. McKay and Spencer W. Kimball, who harbored racist sympathies but had their hearts touched by the lived experience of Black members and also realized the practical necessity of overturning the ban. This contest of wills played out over decades, and it was only Kimball’s deft maneuvering that brought the hard-liners to their side and led to the ban being overturned.
This history will be a surprise to those church members who view the priesthood “revelation” in the simplified light that it is portrayed, both in the Official Declaration 2 that has been canonized and in official church accounts such as the essay on “Race and the Priesthood” on the church website. Some newer accounts, such as the Deseret Book published Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, indicate that there was a lack of consensus among the hard-liners and the liberals on the doctrinal justifications for the ban, but what Harris reveals by pulling back the curtain on the inner details of the proceedings, is that the lack of consensus was the reason why the ban was not overturned full stop. Readers may be surprised to hear that President Kimball had decided to overturn the ban years before the revelation was received. Others had been working for decades longer, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, even surreptitiously. The account of Hugh B. Brown’s decades-long campaign to remove the ban and last-ditch attempt to get McKay to overturn it before he died, only to be blocked by a late-breaking move by the hard-liners, is fascinating, frustrating, and reads with the intensity and cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a police novel.
Just as shocking is the account of how several of the hard-liners, chiefly Bruce R McConkie, fabricated faith-promoting narratives surrounding the overturning of the ban, such as that the event resembled the Day of Pentecost at the Kirtland Temple, not just in spirit but in detail. This led to the claim that all of the former church presidents had appeared to the Brethren in the temple or that Jesus Christ himself had appeared. Though the details of the original accounts are unclear, unsurprisingly, these stories were further embellished by lay leaders and members and spread like wildfire. Kimball was furious when these narratives came to his attention and demanded they be corrected. He rebuked McConkie, who then promptly threw his sister May Pope, who had recorded his provocative, tantalizing, and purposely vague accounts in her diary, under the bus, claiming that she had spread misinformation (disturbingly, his son, who had been spreading rumors as well, was more than happy to smear and disparage her).
As a detailed history of the inner goings-on of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles during these crucial decades, the book is a resounding success. But Harris states that his goal is also to put the stories of those Latter-day Saints who were affected by the ban front and center, which he also does superbly. In fact, it is these stories that underline and reinforce the real human cost of the ban and produce the book’s most moving moments, such as the account of Kimball’s visit to South America in the 1960s where he encountered a mixed-race boy “named Rodriquez, [who] also pleaded with Kimball to serve a church mission, and, when he learned that he couldn’t, said, “I accept the Church and I am willing to wait for the millennium wherein there will be a change of my body and when I can trade this life for another. Please remember me in your prayers” (p. 200). Also moving are the many accounts of members who had their lives upended and their priesthood and temple blessings stripped following the institution of the fraught “one-drop” rule, which required any member who was found to have any Black African ancestry to disclose this to their leaders. The sadness, bewilderment, and hardship in these stories is, at times, heartbreaking and infuriating.
Harris also details how lobbying by Black members over decades, as well as scholarly work and agitation and advocacy by Mormon intellectuals, contributed to the necessary attitudinal changes that led to the ban being overturned. Readers may be surprised at how progressive scholars, professors, and activists were targeted explicitly by church leadership for their views and for publishing historical truths that conflicted with the official narrative. Some lost their jobs or were pushed out of the church as a result of their advocacy. Others chose not to align themselves with a church that they felt was clearly racist.
The joy expressed by many Latter-day Saints when the long-awaited revelation is announced is palpable, and it is clear that many embraced this change with open arms. Harris’s treatment of the decades following the ban, however, will put a pause to any celebration. He details how many justifications for the ban remained official doctrine long after it was overturned, most visibly McConkie’s racist scriptural interpretations in Mormon Doctrine, which remained in print for decades afterward and was only pulled after extensive lobbying despite still being a best-seller. Racism in the church is still pervasive, leading to talks and statements being made in more recent years explicitly condemning racial prejudice. The church took a step towards repudiating former doctrinal teachings by publishing its “Race and the Priesthood” essay in 2013, but it has been reticent to offer any explicit admission of the racist origins of the ban, much less an apology. Dallin H. Oaks famously said that the church doesn’t “ask for apologies, nor do we give them.”
As an isolated historical incident, this refusal to apologize seems curious, even trivial. After all, can’t the church just look forward and not backward? But I think Harris’s book reveals the real stakes in doing so for church leadership. The book makes it clear that the decisions to institute the ban, solidify justifications as doctrine, begin to question the doctrine, change positions, and eventually overturn the ban and the doctrine were made by men. Whatever role God plays in the governance of the church and the revelations that pertain to it, most of the historical data seem to be accounted for by the agency of men. If church leaders issued a formal apology, indicating that the ban was never inspired, was racist from the beginning, and that former church leaders simply got it wrong on the doctrine and the policy, it would potentially undermine the basis for their authority as prophets, seers, and revelators. This, in turn, would open the door to real questions and debate regarding the morality of denying women the priesthood (questions that couldn’t be silenced by a round of excommunications) and the efficacy of the church’s position on LGBTQ issues and other doctrinal issues. Are these man-made policies? Are the “doctrines” that justify them really eternal and unchanging, as leaders continually teach and have particularly doubled down on in recent years? Or is there room for the faithful to suggest that even these things might change in the future? Is it true, as the popular adage says, that “a doctrine is only a policy that hasn’t been changed.” More importantly, can the history of the priesthood and temple ban provide clues as to how this change might happen?
These are discussions that need to seriously happen in the church. These are difficult topics that deserve more thought and less dismissal, with a perfunctory wave towards the infallibility of the leaders of the church or apologetic recontextualizations of absolutist doctrinal statements from former church leaders. For as Harris shows with force and clarity, the doctrines and policies of the church are crafted, elaborated, changed, and overturned by a counsel of men who are very aware of and influenced by the prevailing social and political ideologies and struggles of their day. The status quo can only hold insofar as the internal and external pressures permit. There will always be a breaking point. Whether that constitutes the revealed will of God or an apostolic consensus on a practical necessity may be indiscernible in the outcome, but it means everything in terms of the theological details and how members understand and engage with the church.
That is what is at stake in reckoning with Harris’s Second-Class Saints. I hope that it gets the hearing it deserves and that members grapple seriously with its important yet difficult implications. To paraphrase Harris’s statement about the centrality of the Brazil temple for the extension of priesthood to Black Mormons, “the road to understanding doctrine, revelation, and policy goes through the history of the priesthood and temple ban.” I hope his marvelous book helps us begin to more fully understand.