Scholars & Saints
Scholars & Saints is the official podcast of the University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies program, housed in the Department of Religious Studies. Scholars & Saints is a venue of public scholarship that promotes respectful dialogue about Latter Day Saint traditions among laypersons and academics.
Scholars & Saints
Second-Class Saints (feat. Matt Harris)
For over a century, the LDS Church forbade Black Latter-day Saints from temple ordinances, and Black men from the priesthood. How did Black Latter-day Saints experience this discrimination, and what effects and consequences of these restrictions carry over to today? On this episode of Scholars & Saints, Nicholas speaks with Dr. Matthew L. Harris, Professor of History and Director of Legal Studies at Colorado State University-Pueblo, about his 2024 book, Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Dr. Harris draws from first-hand accounts of Black Latter-day Saints during the temple and priesthood ban, details the Church's past global response to race, explains the reaction of the LDS Church to the Civil Rights movement, and presents the Church's contemporary work at racial reconciliation.
To find out more about Dr. Harris and his upcoming projects, click here.
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Nicholas Shrum
You're listening to Scholars and Saints. The University of Virginia Mormon Studies podcast. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism, where we engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up and coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism’s relevance to the broader study of religion. Scholars and Saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.
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Nicholas Shrum
The podcast was founded by UVA Religious Studies PhD candidate Steven Betts. For the past several years, Stephen
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Nicholas Shrum
spoke with dozens of Mormon studies scholars and helped connect thousands of listeners to the world of Mormon studies. Starting this year in 2024, I, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD student in Religious Studies at UVA, will carry on the podcast’s goal of exploring some of the most pressing issues and cutting edge methods in Mormon studies and put them in conversation with scholarship.
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Nicholas Shrum
from the discipline of Religious Studies.
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Nicholas Shrum
On today's episode of Scholars and Saints, I speak with Doctor Matthew L Harris about his recent book, Second Class Saints Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, published in 2024 with Oxford University Press. Until 1978, Black Latter-Day Saints were restricted from the faith's highest religious rites, including priesthood ordination for men and temple ordinances for women and men,
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Nicholas Shrum
despite Joseph Smith ordaining Black men in the early years of the church.
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Nicholas Shrum
In Second Class Saints, Dr. Harris narrates how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints came to overturn the over 120 year racial ban. Consulting new and insightful sources, the book weaves together multiple important contexts of globalization, missionary work, the civil rights movement, and internal church leadership dynamics that all led to one of the most significant changes to Mormonism.
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Nicholas Shrum
Second Class Saints further centers the experiences of Black Latter day Saints, who publicly and privately challenged the ban during the decades leading to 1978 revelation and highlights those individuals who continue to navigate rationales, folk doctrines, and myths concerning the ban after the change. In our conversation, Dr. Harris discusses some of the book's archival findings that add new understandings of this important period of Mormon and American history.
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Nicholas Shrum
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Dr. Matthew Harris.
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Nicholas Shrum
Welcome to the UVA Mormon Studies Podcast, scholars and Saints. Today we have Dr. Matthew L. Harris, who is Professor of History at Colorado State University, Pueblo. Dr. Harris specializes in race and religion, civil rights, Mormon history, African American history, legal history, and American religious history. He is the author and editor of several books, including Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right, published with the University of Utah Press in 2020, and The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History, which he edited with Newell G.
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Nicholas Shrum
Bringhurst in 2015. Today on the podcast, I've invited Dr. Harris to speak about his most recent book, Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, published with Oxford University Press in 2024. It literally just came out a few weeks ago and excited to have Dr. Harris, to speak with us today. So welcome.
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Matt Harris
Thank you. Nicholas, it's nice to be here today with you.
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Nicholas Shrum
So to start off, I would love to have you explain to our listeners just a little bit about yourself, your background, your education, and what kind of projects you have undertaken up to this point.
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Matt Harris
Well, I grew up in Maine, so I'm an East Coast guy, and I never thought that I would live and raise my family in Colorado, in southern part of the state, but here I am. And I served an LDS mission to Idaho in the late 80s, early 90s. Let's see. I went to Brigham Young University, the church's flagship university in Provo, Utah, where I had a remarkable conservative education.
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Matt Harris
And then I sort of switched gears, and I went to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Government at Syracuse University, where I had a wonderful liberal education. I had the best of all worlds. When I started my career in the early 2000s, I was working in early American history, and about 12 or 13 years ago, I decided to make sense of my own tradition a little bit more.
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Matt Harris
So I transitioned to Mormon history, and one of my, mentors at BYU back in the day told me that I should “avoid Mormon history. It's like quicksand. Once you're in, you can never get out.” Well, here I am, still stuck in the quicksand all of these years later, and I'm happy to to be in the quicksand because it's a it's a vibrant field of scholarship.
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Matt Harris
My first foray into Mormon studies was the The Black and Mormon documentary history book that I co-edited with the distinguished scholar. Newell Bringhurst. And it's a book of documents, the most salient documents on Mormon racial history and theology with significant contextual essays talking about how the documents were created, who created them, and the effect that those documents had on the membership of the church.
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Matt Harris
And so, and I've explored race and Mormonism through different lenses, various conferences and scholarly articles. And then I've also done two books on the late, Mormon apostle and president, Ezra Benson, who wasn't just a significant Mormon leader, but also a two time presidential candidate in the 1960s, a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet as the secretary of agriculture–he took a leave of absence from his duties as a mormon apostle to serve in government–and in the post-World War II generation, he was one of the most significant conservative voices in the country, was friends with Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and all of those figures.
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Matt Harris
So anyway, I wanted to look at Benson and his views. And he wasn't just a conservative. He had some radical views of government, he affiliated with the John Birch Society. And because of his radical views, he had this incredible effect on the church body that still, I think, is riveting the church today. If you go on to any Latter-day Saint website, just a member’s website that they run and they call themselves conservative, you will frequently see Ezra Taft Benson's conference talks, sermons and some of his books that they would recommend.
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Matt Harris
So,I looked at Benson and which leads me to my point now with this latest book, it's been a book that I've it's taken me 15 years to do this, and I've produced other books in the interim, but this is certainly my magnum opus. And I had access to an extraordinary number of sources that were unavailable to scholars.
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Matt Harris
And these are sources at the church archives in Salt Lake City. There are sources at the flagship university, BYU, and then at other archives throughout the country. And so I got access to these sources by by making relationships with people, both at the church archives and also the living children of their deceased, fathers who were prior church leaders.
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Matt Harris
And so I got access to their private papers to these children. And I know that it's always a topic of interest, Nicholas, when people ask me, you know, “boy, you've got access to all these sources diaries, letters, meeting minutes that nobody has ever seen. How did you do it?” Well, like I said, building relationships. But there's a number of things that are available to scholars, anywhere, really, the University of Virginia community, just anywhere in the United States.
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Matt Harris
They just have to know where to look. And the University of Utah and BYU are probably the two richest repositories of documents outside of the LDS church archives. And those are open, typically open–not all– but typically open collections to most scholars. There's some things at BYU that would be restricted if they deal with institutional papers. But anyway, it's just about building relationships.
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Matt Harris
it's also asking people just reaching out to someone like me or other scholars who are in the field and they can point fellow scholars to the right sources.
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Nicholas Shrum
It's really helpful, especially to set the stage on our discussion about Second Class Saints. I'm wondering if you might take a moment to describe for the listeners kind of the landscape of scholarship, or at least how you saw yourself intervening or contributing to what had already previously been said about Mormonism and race. And we recently on the podcast had Professor Reeve at the University of Utah who wrote, a book, Religion of a Different Color, that specifically deals more with Mormonism and race.
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Nicholas Shrum
During the 19th century through the very beginning of the 20th century and there's a few others important ones. And I'm just curious about how you see yourselves contributing.
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Matt Harris
Yeah. So Paul [Reeve] is a friend of mine, he endorsed Second Class Saints, my book, and Paul and Russell Stevenson and Newell Bringhurst and Lester Bush. They all produced wonderful works of scholarship on the 19th century. And without really going into detail into the 20tn, as they just sort of mentioned in passing. So where I contribute is that mine is the first really in-depth look, probing the church's race history or racial theology in the 20th and 21st century.
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Matt Harris
And because I got access to so many unique sources that were not available to other scholars, it obviously is in many ways challenged the traditional church narrative, enlarged the narrative, and then provided all kinds of details that were lost to the church body. And so that's my contribution, is that mine's the only work in the scholarly community.
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Matt Harris
And one of these days, I'm certain that somebody will write something else in the late or the 20th and 21st centuries. So that's where my work fits in. And it's a story that's complex. In the book, I cast a wide net, and I look at different voices throughout the story. So not just Mormon church leaders.
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Matt Harris
Certainly there's an institutional component to this. What were the apostles thinking and the church presidents thinking when they instituted this theology? But also, I wanted to look at how did the members receive this theology, not just black members and biracial members, which, of course, are significant to the story, but also, brown members and white members? I also looked at outside groups like the NAACP.
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Matt Harris
What are they saying about the church's theology? What are they saying about the church's reticence on civil rights in the mid-20th century? And how are they pressuring the church to alter their theology to accommodate racial equality? I'm looking at individual characters like Eldridge Cleaver, a former Black Panther who becomes a Mormon in the 20th century, or Gladys Knight, the singer songwriter, award-winning Grammy Award artist, you know, becomes a Mormon in the late 20th century.
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Matt Harris
So there's a lot of different figures in this story, and it really creates an interesting mosaic to help us understand better the LDS church's grapple with race and how various people fit into their conception of salvation.
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Nicholas Shrum
Yeah, I think it does an excellent job of touching on all these different points of history making that I think you you do a great job. You talk about the lay members, you talk about the institutions. I thought one of the most fascinating pieces is the discussion of higher education and the role that Stanford University and the University of Washington and sports teams within the NCAA all play in creating these pressures and responding to the church's policies, doctrines, beliefs, and practices related to Black members and to African Americans and Black people around the world.
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Nicholas Shrum
So you mentioned how you were able to obtain access to some of these sources. I'm wondering if, just for a taste for the listeners, if you could speak about maybe 1 or 2 of your favorite collections that maybe really stood out to you and highlighted parts of those things that you wanted to complicate with the narrative?
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Matt Harris
Yeah. So I've often said in some public speeches I've made over the years talking about this project that when I take on a project, I always compare it to a Thanksgiving. The turkey would be the letters, the diaries, the meeting minutes of church leaders. The Thanksgiving dressings, the salad, the rolls, the veggies. Those would be sermons, those would be talks, those things they wrote, newspaper coverage.
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Matt Harris
Those are all important, of course, and I utilize those in my work. But if I can't get the turkey, I'm not interested. And so the turkey for this project, certainly is Spencer W. Kimball, the church president who lifted the ban. And I worked really hard to forge a relationship with his son, who was a law professor at BYU.
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Matt Harris
Wonderful man named Ed Kimball. And, you know, it's one of those things you can't just call somebody up and say, “hey, my name is Matt Harris. I'm writing a book about Black people in the Mormon church, and I want your father's diaries.” Doesn't work that way. And I mean, these these are sacred jewels, right? These are private.
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Matt Harris
And so I had to really, he had to get to know me and realize that I could be trusted with his family's papers, that I would see things in that collection that outsiders ought not to see, but that I would not write about them, that I would treat them with the utmost care. And then I would just focus really on my purpose, which was to look at his father's role in the development and construction of racial theology and then the ending of it.
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Matt Harris
And so I developed a friendship with him, and he facilitated my access to his father's papers, not just the diaries, but all of it–the writing, the letters, the meeting minutes. And these were at the, church archives in Salt Lake City, which is a restricted collection. And I got to see the unredacted diaries today. Last summer, they just put, the church archivist just put a redacted version of the diaries on their web page.
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Matt Harris
But I got to see all the unredacted stuff. Which is really helpful. And so that certainly is the big one. I couldn't have written the story and the level of specificity that I did without having President Kimball's papers. So that's one. Another one would be the most significant Mormon theologian in the 20th century, a guy named Joseph Fielding Smith.
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Matt Harris
He was the great grandnephew to the founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. And Joseph Fielding Smith was an apostle and church president. He was ordained to the Council of the 12 Apostles in 1910, and he died in 1972. So he had a long life as an LDS church officer. And he was a prolific writer, and much of what Smith said became the go to on any number of issues in the 20th century.
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Matt Harris
From race and the priesthood to evolution, to the saints and how they understood polygamy or plural marriage, as it's called. So he was a significant figure, and I got access to a big chunk of his papers of the church archives. And strangely enough, as I read more and more into his papers, I really took a liking to him.
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Matt Harris
He was quirky, he was funny, had a delightful sense of humor, even though, you know, his views on race certainly made him a product of his time. I really got to see his personality by reading his private papers.
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Nicholas Shrum
So that's excellent to know. And so when people pick up a copy of the book, they can have a sense of some of the turkey, so to speak, that they can nibble on as they go through. I really appreciated how this book is structured. For those that might not have much familiarity with Mormon studies, Mormon history, and specifically about Mormonism’s relationship to race during the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the 20th century,
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Nicholas Shrum
I think Second Class Saints does an excellent job of giving an overview, a contextualization, and then a lot of detailing of how race was understood and engaged with by practicing Mormons during the 20th century. I'm wondering if we can kind of take a bird's eye view of the book to give the listeners a sense of the content, the arguments that you make, and wonder if we can start with an overview and maybe some of the significant moments that you see leading up to the Civil Rights Movement.
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Nicholas Shrum
And maybe I'll say really quick and you can you can add on, that when we speak about the ban and you had mentioned that Spencer W Kimball, a church president in the 70s and 80s, lifted a ban and the ban that we're that we're talking about in this conversation was a ban on Black men of African descent to be ordained to priesthood office.
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Nicholas Shrum
Mormonism has a lay priesthood as well as the higher ordinances that Mormons obtain in temples, such as the endowment and sealings for both, Black men and women. And up until 1978, these members of the church were were restricted from obtaining these very important ordinances or rites or rituals that Mormons believe are important to creating and establishing family relationships into eternity and also understandings of salvation and exaltation and those kinds of things.
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Nicholas Shrum
So maybe, maybe we could start with kind of your thoughts on what Second Class Saints contributes to that conversation leading up to the Civil Rights Movement.
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Matt Harris
So one of the things I note in the preface is the book is focused on the 20th and 21st centuries. However, you can't just start in, you know, the mid-20th century and move along. So there's a framing chapter that I looked at, and in that framing chapter, there's a definite contribution to the literature. I talk about how the ban began in 1852 under the second prophet/president of Mormonism, Brigham Young.
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Matt Harris
And as you noted, Nicholas, the ban was lifted in 1978. So was 126 year ban barring Black men and women from the full rights and privileges of the church. And one of the things that my contribution looks at is that it was never doctrine until the mid-20th century, there were just a bunch of theories that were floating around the church in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and I talk about where Mormons are as similar to some of these theories and where they're different.
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Matt Harris
And I'll just mention a couple. Mormons had inherited this biblical curse uncritically from Protestants and Catholics and Jews and others, that is, that Cain and through Ham and Caanan. And Mormons believed that Black people were cursed. The Bible talks about a mark, but Mormons, like Protestants and others, attributed that mark to black skin.
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Matt Harris
And where Mormonism is unique is that after the American Civil War, Mormons started to apply another layer of theological complexity to the story. And they argued that there was a pre-earth life. And in this pre-Earth life, there were two plans that were presented to God. One was from his son Jesus, and one was from what Mormons would identify as Satan and Black people chose–
00;21;03;28 - 00;21;28;26
Matt Harris
there were two two layers to this, or two subsets–Black people chose Satan's plan, or excuse me, Black people were indifferent to Jesus's plan and the verbiage that some LDS leaders used was that “they were less valiant.” And then there was another competing claim that they actually didn't choose sides between the two plans. They were neutral.
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Matt Harris
They were” fence sitters,” to put it in colloquial language, not my words but the words of leaders. So two competing claims from the preexistence: one, they're less valiantand the other one was they were neutral. And so leaders are talking about these competing claims in the 20th century and members are confused by it. They would write into the church leaders and say, “Are Negroes– in those days is what they call them–
00;21;54;18 - 00;22;19;09
Matt Harris
Are Negroes, were they less valiant or were they fence sitters?” And they would also ask, “where is the revelation stating that Joseph Smith had started the ban?” Because that's what the church taught for a lot of years, that it began with the founding prophet and not Brigham Young. The church identifies and has acknowledged that it began with Brigham Young today, but in those days, they didn't.
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Matt Harris
And so the members are asking, you know, w”here's the revelation? Where's a document we can read?” And there were suspicions all along that the founding prophet didn't start the ban because he had ordained at least three black men to the priesthood, one of whom serves at several church missions, one of whom was a presiding minister at a congregation in Boston.
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Matt Harris
So it's hard to argue that Joseph Smith was the originator of the ban if he's ordaining Black men to the priesthood. So scholars by the late 20th century picked up on this idea that it was really Young that started the ban and not Smith. The church would come around to acknowledging this in 2013. But, so that's my contribution, is that I'm looking at the ways that Mormons constructed theology and these competing theological claims.
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Matt Harris
And finally, in the 20th century, by 1949–the mid 20th century–when enough letters had poured into church headquarters seeking clarity on the church's race teachings, that's when the First Presidency, the highest governing body of the church, decided to codify Mormon racial teachings into doctrine. And as I explain to people today, Mormon racial teachings were a doctrine, they were a practice, and they were a policy all rolled into one.
00;23;44;14 - 00;24;06;09
Matt Harris
And they produced a statement, the First Presidency, which consists of the church president–or as Mormons like to call him, a prophet– the church president and his two counselors. And they produced a statement that, weirdly enough, they did not distribute to the church at large. They didn't publish it in the church's magazine or refer to it in the church's, semiannual general conference.
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Matt Harris
They just used it as a document to distribute to mission presidents or to the Faculty of Religion at BYU. They used it as a document to clarify any teachings they may have about race, because in the First Presidency statement of 1949, it calls the teachings “the doctrine.” And oddly enough, it says the doctrine began with Joseph Smith.
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Matt Harris
And that's something that the church does not accept today. So that's my my contribution early on is how these teachings, these theories, these various theologies become doctrine. And by the mid-20th century, the church seeks to globalize itself by trying to spread missions throughout the world. They take very seriously Jesus's injunction to take the gospel to every kindred, nation, tongue, and people.
00;24;55;27 - 00;25;18;22
Matt Harris
It's hard to do that if you have this priesthood and temple ban where you can't get into sub-Saharan Africa or majority rich Black countries. So they try to get into Nigeria at one point in the early 60s. They realize that's not going to work because you can't have white missionaries from Utah going into Nigeria to run all Black churches.
00;25;18;22 - 00;25;48;12
Matt Harris
So that's problematic. They try to go into Brazil, which is problematic because it's a country that'd deeply racially divided. They try South Africa for the same reasons–it's racially divided. And so they're trying to globalize with the ban, and it produces enormous fits for them. They also, closer to home, the leadership of the church decide to take– they remain silent about civil rights.
00;25;48;14 - 00;26;16;10
Matt Harris
They don't go on record. You know, the church doesn't go on record saying “we support racial equality,” but nor do they oppose it. And their policy is simply just to remain mum. And the reason is because they don't want to call attention to their racial theology. And it's hard for the church to maintain that position when there's a senior church leader named Hugh Brown who was promoting civil rights and racial equality in sermons he gives.
00;26;16;13 - 00;26;50;20
Matt Harris
And then, on the other hand, there's another person in the high church leadership, Apostle Ezra Benson, about whom I've written two books. He's taking the opposite direction, talking about civil rights being a tool of communist subversion. He's talking about Dr. King being in allegiance with the Kremlin. So he's been radicalized by right wing extremism. So you've got these two apostles with different views on civil rights, and then you've got the church as a whole trying to remain aloof from it all, to keep themselves out of the firing line from critics.
00;26;50;22 - 00;27;21;24
Matt Harris
So what happens is by 1964, the churches will come under fire, or heat, I should say, on two fronts. One, they'll come under heat because they refused to accept two civil rights bills in the Utah Legislature, one that would prevent discrimination in jobs and one would prevent discrimination in housing. And the church wants nothing to do with either of those bills because their fear is it could lead to interracial marriage.
00;27;22;01 - 00;27;48;12
Matt Harris
If you have Black and white people working together, living in the same neighborhoods, it could create a coziness that the Mormon leaders, you know, wouldn't be comfortable with. And then the other one would be on a national scale when Lyndon Johnson passed or his bill was passed, a Civil Rights bill of 1964 was passed, that broke down the last vestiges of discrimination in public spaces.
00;27;48;15 - 00;28;24;28
Matt Harris
The church wanted to remain quiet on that, too, like they had with the 1957 Civil Rights Act. But the NAACP in Utah wouldn't let them. And they protested at church headquarters in 1963 and 1964. And finally the church relented, at least on part. They issued a statement in general conference. It was a tepid statement, but it simply said that the church is not opposed to civil rights and the full equality for all members of God's children.
00;28;25;05 - 00;28;55;13
Matt Harris
But what's curiously interesting about the statement that they produced in General Conference was it didn't endorse any particular bill and the NAACP, those folks were upset because they wanted church support, especially in Utah, because they knew that 95% of the Mormon legislature, I mean, they were dominated by Mormons. And so if the church didn't support a bill for racial equality then the fear was the legislature in Utah wouldn't either.
00;28;55;15 - 00;29;18;26
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah. I'm glad that you mentioned what I see as a major throughline all the way from the beginning and continues post-when the ban is lifted, is this concern about intermarriage. And maybe you could speak a little bit more about that and why that has such a staying power from those early days all the way through once the ban is lifted.
00;29;18;29 - 00;29;45;29
Matt Harris
Yeah, that's that's good. So there are two thoughts on interracial marriage and Mormon theology. One's a very extreme thought. And the other one would be a more accepted thought in the 20th century. The extreme thought was that there was such a thing as a pure white race. And of course, your listeners will know that this is not unique to Mormonism, right?
00;29;46;01 - 00;30;16;06
Matt Harris
There was this thought in 19th century and early 20th century, United States cultural and religious history, that there was a pure white race and that the races ought not to mix because the polluted race, the cursed race, if you will, would sully the white race. And so this is in part one of the reasons why you get all of these interracial marriage laws on the books after the American Civil War is because they're trying to create racial purity or keep racial purity.
00;30;16;09 - 00;30;52;01
Matt Harris
And Utah, like everybody else, other states, passes laws to prevent Black people from marrying white people. And it's not just Black and white. It's–they call them Orientals–for marrying Caucasians, you know? So it's a whole– it was an assortment of different races and groups that were supposed to marry within each race. But the idea was that the bloodlines would be polluted, which, of course, is nonsense, because, you know, we now know from modern science that we all have Indigenous and African ancestry, but that's what the church had taught for many years.
00;30;52;03 - 00;31;21;10
Matt Harris
And so you read some of the strictures against racial amalgamation, and it was about polluting the bloodlines. It really sounds ominous to our modern sensibilities. And it is, but that's what they taught in the mid-twentieth century. After the Second World War, you see a shift in their opposition to interracial marriage, and a number of the leaders were reading marital prescriptive literature that didn't talk about the polluting of bloodlines.
00;31;21;10 - 00;31;46;17
Matt Harris
It was more focused on the ideas in which successful marriages could occur. So a Mormon should marry a Mormon, a Catholic should marry Catholic, a middle class person should marry a middle class person. A Black person should marry a Black person. Those are the best chances for success in marriage if people married within their familiar socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.
00;31;46;20 - 00;32;13;11
Matt Harris
So that's what Mormon leaders were doing. Spencer Kimball, about whom we referred a minute ago, I found in his private papers he was reading this marital prescriptive literature, and that's where he's getting his ideas, in particular, when he counseled against interracial marriage. He never talked about the bloodlines. It was more from this prescriptive literature. And the church continues that position well into the 21st century.
00;32;13;14 - 00;32;44;18
Matt Harris
And lest your readers think that the church at large was unified on this subject, my book goes through several instances where leaders had different views about interracial marriage. And when they lifted the ban in 1978, it was perplexing for some Black Latter-day Saints because some of the church leaders had still taught that the races ought to marry within and Black people thought, “well, wait a minute, what difference does it make now we can all go to the temple together.
00;32;44;21 - 00;33;06;03
Matt Harris
You know, the church no longer deems me cursed, so what difference does it make?” Well, it's that prescriptive literature that still has the staying power. And there are other apostles who argued that “that's just something behind us. Never mind all that. All that stuff. If black people should marry white people, if they feel it's right and God calls them to.”
00;33;06;03 - 00;33;29;05
Matt Harris
And one leader named Marion Hanks, he's a guy that has very progressive views on race. He thought that interracial marriage would be a great way to break down racial barriers among members of the church and he was probably in the minority when he argued that in the early late 70s, early 80s. But anyway, there wasn't a monolithic view on this, Nicholas.
00;33;29;05 - 00;33;35;05
Matt Harris
There was a range of different opinions about marriage and who ought to marry whom.
00;33;35;08 - 00;33;56;15
Nicholas Shrum
Thank you for that. There's a number of through lines and themes that each chapter touches on really well. You had mentioned globalization was a large one. I'm wondering if you could speak about in that postwar period, how the church goes through a rapid globalization and the membership rises exponentially during the 60s and 70s.
00;33;56;18 - 00;34;24;24
Nicholas Shrum
I wonder if you can talk about that tension that these church leaders that feel, I don't know if there's the right word, but feel burdened to expand the church, to get it into the four corners of the earth, while also holding on to these other, cultural but also, in a sense, theological, doctrinal understandings of race and how that would, you know, what was the tension there and how did they negotiate it?
00;34;24;27 - 00;34;54;17
Matt Harris
Well, so just to give a broad picture, global picture, for a moment, the church had tried to establish a mission. They sent a handful of missionaries to Jamaica in 1853. And these were missionaries from Utah. They were white and they were in Jamaica for a short period. And they wrote the church president, Brigham Young at the time, who had just instituted the ban the previous year, in 1852. These missionaries wrote the church president.
00;34;54;17 - 00;35;13;16
Matt Harris
They said that this this place is is not a very good place for our doctrine. And, you know, there's a ban in place, and the church is now teaching that black people derive from Cain. And here they are trying to proselytize them. And so that didn't work. They tried in South Africa the following year, in 1853-54.
00;35;13;19 - 00;35;40;13
Matt Harris
They were there for a very short period. There were a lot of issues there, including language. So they called those missionaries home. They decided to go back into South Africa in 1903, fully aware that this is the African continent. This is where the curse had originated. At least they believed. And I want to just pause for a moment and tell your listeners that the church, the LDS church, teaches that the ban was predicated upon a one drop rule.
00;35;40;15 - 00;36;03;23
Matt Harris
It was not predicated upon skin color. And if you had one African ancestry–let's say there's 100 people in your genealogy line and there's one of those that has African ancestry, you would be considered cursed, even though you may look white or identify as white. So that's really challenging to a lot of people to hear, because they assume it's based on skin color and it's not.
00;36;03;26 - 00;36;30;14
Matt Harris
In Fiji, church leaders thought that Fijians were not thought to have derived from Africa, and so they could hold the priesthood and go to the temple and all of that, even though they had dark skin. So it wasn't based on skin color. Anyway. So they went into South Africa in 1903. They're trying to avoid darker skinned Africans and just focus on people who appeared white and who appeared to have a cursed free lineage.
00;36;30;16 - 00;36;58;00
Matt Harris
They moved into Brazil in 1928, and they focused on the southern part of Brazil, because the southern part of Brazil, Germans had migrated there and they targeted German people in Brazil for conversion. And they carefully avoided Brazilians in the North that were majority Black. And that, of course, became complicated when northern Brazilians started to migrate to the southern part of the country.
00;36;58;02 - 00;37;21;10
Matt Harris
And it made it really difficult to find those pure bloodlines. That's the language they would use. They're seeking out pure bloodlines for conversion. And so they've been thinking about the need to spread the gospel to various corners of the world. But they have this ban in place. And of course, they can't figure out who bears the curse.
00;37;21;10 - 00;37;42;23
Matt Harris
I mean, how do you do that, just by looking at somebody? So they have a lot of different strategies that my book talks about that we won't have time to go into here today, but they have a lot of different strategies in which they try to determine who bears the curse. And the church never, ever had a policy that would turn Black or biracial people away.
00;37;42;26 - 00;38;06;29
Matt Harris
If they wanted baptism, they would baptize them, but they would have to fully understand the limitations of their membership, that they couldn't hold the priesthood. They couldn't go to the temple and all of that. And so if they agreed to those limitations, then church leaders saw to it that they were baptized. They could also get a special blessing, they’re called patriarchal blessings.
00;38;06;29 - 00;38;37;24
Matt Harris
And in those special blessings given by a church patriarch, they're told their covenant lineage through Israel. And most Mormons in the church will receive a blessing from one of the tribes of Israel, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their progenitors. And of course, these blessings are challenging theologically, because if you believe that Black people and biracial people derive from a cursed lineage, they are outside of the covenant that God had made with Israel.
00;38;37;24 - 00;39;00;26
Matt Harris
And therefore they were denied the church's salvific ordinances. So anyway, patriarchs didn't know what to say in the blessings to Black people for whom they blessed. Sometimes they would tell them, you know your lineage comes from Cain or Ham. And of course that didn't make Black Latter-Day Saints happy because the blessings are supposed to be comforting.
00;39;00;26 - 00;39;22;26
Matt Harris
They're supposed to give you guidance to your life, and now you're being associated with biblical counter figure. So anyway, but back to the globalization. So they tried in the early 60s to get into Nigeria. It was the first real attempt into a majority Black country. They were still in Brazil, they were still in South Africa, and they were just sort of avoiding people that they thought had cursed bloodlines and focusing on the ones who didn't.
00;39;22;28 - 00;39;48;14
Matt Harris
But in Nigeria, they knew that they would run up against that from the get-go because it's Nigeria. And so the Nigerians were angry. They wanted to run their own churches and they couldn't understand why the church that they loved, they loved the Book of Mormon, they loved some of the leaders that they had met, but they couldn't understand why they were denied these sacred priestly rights.
00;39;48;14 - 00;40;20;05
Matt Harris
They couldn't understand why they couldn't run their own worship services. And that led to a couple of, at least one apostle in Salt Lake to propose lifting the ban in the early 60s. In order to globalize and establish the church in Nigeria, let's give them the Aaronic priesthood, which is a lesser priesthood. And the idea was let them prove themselves, let them learn Mormon theology, and then they can qualify for the higher or more powerful Melchizedek priesthood, which would entitle them to be bishops and branch presidents.
00;40;20;07 - 00;40;46;16
Matt Harris
These ecclesiastical priesthood offices that would allow them to offer pastoral counsel, count church tithes, run the church in those local regions. So obviously that didn't happen in the early 60s because there wasn't a consensus in the high church leadership to lift the ban then. And so what they realized from Nigeria is that the church eventually left because the NAACP put pressure on them back in the United States.
00;40;46;19 - 00;41;14;24
Matt Harris
They were tired of the church dragging its feet on civil rights. And so they wrote letters to several countries that had a Mormon missionary presence, including Nigeria. And the NAACP told the Nigerian government, “you got to get these people out. They’re racist.” And the Nigerian government listened. They kicked the Mormon missionaries out. And so this experiment where all white missionaries would run these, you know, all Black churches in Nigeria, it came to a dramatic end in the mid 60s.
00;41;14;27 - 00;41;40;01
Matt Harris
And now what you're left with is essentially a church that can't proselytize around the world and to fulfill this scriptural mandate. And that's one of the great reasons, Nicholas, that Spencer W. Kimball, the church president in the early 70s, that's one of the great reasons why he decides that he wants to lift the ban is because he wants to be the church president to move the church into these countries that had been previously shut off to to missionaries.
00;41;40;04 - 00;42;16;05
Nicholas Shrum
Thank you for that. And my, there's so many things that I want to- just just ask more questions and people are just going to have to go read the book because there's so many amazing things that you include in it. One of the ones that I find fascinating that I was going to ask you about when you mentioned that Black Mormons didn't like the thought of having these patriarchal blessings that declared a lineage that, in a very real religious sense, reinscribed a curse, a cursed identity, the book Second Class Saints
00;42;16;05 - 00;42;46;26
Nicholas Shrum
does such a great job of highlighting and bringing to the front the experiences of African American Latter-day Saints and why they would join and why they would stay, and how so many fought for so long to vie– I mean, it's it's in the subtitle of the book–it's the struggle for racial equality. Mormonism offered these Black Latter-day Saints something, but it didn't offer them everything that it did to their white counterparts.
00;42;46;28 - 00;43;09;07
Nicholas Shrum
I'm just wondering if you could comment briefly on kind of that experience of –there's many, many interviews with people with Darius Gray and others that they talk about their experiences, Black Latter-Day Saints. Could you speak to your your experience, talking with them about their experience of of growing up and practicing as Black Latter-day Saints during this time period?
00;43;09;09 - 00;43;30;22
Matt Harris
Yeah, it was really, really important to me that I capture the voices of Black Latter-day Saints and why they would remain in a church that essentially treated them as second class saints. And Darius Gray, an African American Latter-day Saint. He grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, not far from where I live. He's a friend of mine.
00;43;30;24 - 00;43;58;03
Matt Harris
He joined the church in 1964, and to this day he's a strong member of the church. He's done a lot of work with the church leadership in promoting race relations. He was the church's front man on its videos when Mitt Romney ran for the presidency in 2012, it was Darius Gray producing videos and testimonials about the church and about its treatment of Black people.
00;43;58;05 - 00;44;18;28
Matt Harris
Well, I think if Darius were here and talking for himself, I don't want to talk for him. But I certainly read enough of his letters and writings and oral histories that he had given, and I feel comfortable with his view of why he stayed in the church. And that is, I mean, he believed it. He he believed that the Book of Mormon was an ancient text.
00;44;18;28 - 00;44;46;20
Matt Harris
It's what it purported to be. He believed that the founding prophet Joseph Smith had a divine epiphany in a grove of trees in Palmyra, New York, in 1820, which told him, as Joseph Smith inquired, that that he would ultimately start his own church and also translate sacred scripture that would result in thousands of pages spread out over four canonical works in the church the Bible, the Book of Mormon, The Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants.
00;44;46;22 - 00;45;18;13
Matt Harris
And so he believed it wholeheartedly, but his lived experience in the church was a different matter. He's told the story that the first time that he visited and LDS meetinghouse in 1964, a little girl stood up and said, “what's that n— doing here? And then he went to BYU, the church's flagship university. He was one of three African American students at BYU, and he was told very early on, almost to the moment he stepped foot on campus, the dean of student life said, “you are not to date any white girls.
00;45;18;13 - 00;45;49;26
Matt Harris
Don't even think about it.” And so these are tremendous challenges for Gray. And he does leave the church in the 70s. He drifts away. Especially this is before the priesthood. He just said “enough is enough. The racism is overwhelming.” And he didn't believe in the church's race teachings. He didn't think that Black people were cursed, and he didn't understand this preexistance hypothesis that Black people had done something wrong in the preexistence.
00;45;49;28 - 00;46;09;10
Matt Harris
But yet he stayed for the most part because he believed. And then when the ban was lifted, he came back to the church. And when he learned that the ban had been lifted, he refused to believe it. Somebody had told him, he said, “that's that's not funny. Don't joke.” And the person telling this in Salt Lake said, “I'm not joking.
00;46;09;10 - 00;46;35;24
Matt Harris
It's true.” Anyway, he closed his eyes and he sort of tilted his head up towards the sky and said, “God is good.” So different Latter-day Saints have different perspectives. And I want to just share another one with you– this is a guy named David Jackson who lived in Orange County, California. He just passed away a few years ago. And David Jackson was a convert to Mormonism in 1990.
00;46;35;25 - 00;47;01;19
Matt Harris
And this is after the ban was lifted. And so David Jackson from the get-go, unlike Darius Gray, who was restricted from the priesthood and the temple at least until 1978, David Jackson never had those restrictions because he converted after the ban was lifted. But David Jackson was reading Mormon books that were extant. They were still sold at the church owned bookstore called Desert Book.
00;47;01;19 - 00;47;26;02
Matt Harris
They were sold at BYU. They were sold at other places. And he was horrified to think that church leaders talked about a divine curse. And so he wrote to the church president, Gordon Hinckley, a letter, and he said, “I want to know, are black people still considered cursed in the church?” And Hinckley's secretary, guy named Michael Watson, wrote him back.
00;47;26;02 - 00;47;45;19
Matt Harris
And he said, “Dear brother Jackson, you can go to the temple and and enjoy all the blessings of the priesthood.” And Jackson wrote him back and he said,” that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, does the church still believe that black people are cursed?” And he's putting the church leadership in this really intense situation because they don't want to go on record.
00;47;45;21 - 00;48;09;19
Matt Harris
This is in the 1990s. They don't want to go on record repudiating the past teachings of their predecessors. They just sort of want to look forward and talk about the church as it globalizes in various parts of Africa. And so it's the Latter-day Saints like David Jackson, Nicholas, who really, really pester the leadership to repudiate these past teachings.
00;48;09;22 - 00;48;35;21
Matt Harris
And in 2013, the church posted a 2000-word essay on its website called “Race in the priesthood.” It's the first time, as I write in my book, that the church will grapple with the systemic racism in the church that had gripped its body for so many years. And it's a remarkable statement in many ways, because it specifically names the past teachings that are no longer acceptable in the church.
00;48;35;24 - 00;49;18;13
Nicholas Shrum
Thanks for talking about those experiences of of those Black saints and also leading it to this reference, to this 2013 essay that the church publishes. I was just having a conversation recently, with some members of the church that weren't aware of those essays. I think because I've been plugged into church history for some time, and I've worked for the Church History Department in the past that, you know, I was aware of those. But your book does such a good job of narrating why that was such a big deal and how it it punctuates this moment of disrupting this idea that because the
00;49;18;13 - 00;49;43;14
Nicholas Shrum
1978 revelation that lifts the ban happened doesn't mean that you know all is well, that racism persists, these myths and these stories about people of Black African descent and they persist, right–because they're still in these books at Deseret Book. You talk about books by Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine and others that perpetuate these things.
00;49;43;14 - 00;50;08;16
Nicholas Shrum
And they're popular well into the 21st century. But, you know, it wasn't until less than a decade ago that the church itself actually puts it stamp of approval on this statement that disrupts and dispels some of these myths. I'm wondering if we can talk–again, I want to be considerate of time–about this post revelation period.
00;50;08;16 - 00;50;39;25
Nicholas Shrum
Again, for those that are interested in these topics, I really recommend you go look at how Dr. Harris is able to, with these sources, narrate how the ban came to be lifted, the struggle of Black saints and Mormon leaders, and also the wonderful strategy that went into this from Spencer W. Kimball and others to get the more, as you described them, “hardliners,” on board with lifting this ban.
00;50;39;27 - 00;51;08;17
Nicholas Shrum
But I encourage everybody go read those wonderful episodes. But what happens after the ban? And we've already talked a little bit about that with this essay and others, but how have those experiences, those myths, those stories continued to impact, all Latter-day Saints, especially Black Latter-day Saints that practice. The listeners
00;51;08;17 - 00;51;19;13
Nicholas Shrum
might not be aware that the church has never issued an apology for these types of statements and teachings that persisted for so long. How have members negotiated these things?
00;51;19;15 - 00;51;45;07
Matt Harris
Well, Mormons, you know, sometimes I think Mormons get a bad rap. And that is they just sort of kowtow to the leaders. They do as they're told, they're obedient. And I think that's true to a certain extent. But also, Latter-day Saints have a loud streak to them. When something doesn't sit right with, you know, to their thinking, they protest, they push back.
00;51;45;07 - 00;52;19;15
Matt Harris
And sometimes those protests are not always visible. You don't see them unless you read letters that they're writing to the leaders in private. And that's why it's important to get into the archives. And when the ban was lifted in 1978, racism was not eradicated instantaneously in the church. And it made it difficult because the announcement that the church president gave was it just simply said that they had a revelation in the Salt Lake Temple, and that all worthy men and women could enjoy the full privileges of the church.
00;52;19;15 - 00;52;48;26
Matt Harris
And of course, the context is Black people. It said nothing about the erstwhile doctrines that had sustained the ban and that gave the church what I would call theological fits, because Latter-day Saints in the pews, they still think it's the doctrine of the church that Black people are cursed. And I've interviewed more Black Latter-day Saints than I can remember and they all would say something like, these are older saints.
00;52;48;26 - 00;53;21;13
Matt Harris
They would say something like, white people telling them that, you know, “hey, yeah, you are coerced, but don't worry–God lifted that curse in 1978” and they can't realize how offensive it is to think that they were ever cursed. And so. But why would the Saints in the pews think otherwise? Because the church hadn't repudiated it when they announced the revelation, and there were still, as you pointed out, Nicholas, there were still numerous books in circulation throughout the church's bookstores.
00;53;21;16 - 00;53;46;22
Matt Harris
And David Jackson was asked to give a talk on the church's race theology. Imagine this–a new convert in 1990. He knows nothing about the ban or the theology, and one of his insensitive priesthood leaders asks him to give a talk about the ban, and he goes to the nearest Desert Book in California, and he buys one of the most racist books that he could possibly get, Mormon Doctrine.
00;53;46;25 - 00;54;07;07
Matt Harris
And it's in that book where, as he's researching his talk for his his lesson, where he comes across the curse and the preexistence hypothesis, all of that, that's the first he had heard of it. And you could imagine that he this, this crisis of faith almost, you know, from the get-go. So they don't repudiate it. All of this stuff is still circulating.
00;54;07;07 - 00;54;33;28
Matt Harris
It's deeply offensive to Black and biracial Latter-day Saints and brown Latter-day Saints, too, for that matter, because the Book of Mormon talks about indigenous populations being cursed as well. And so there's a lot of stuff going on in private that Black and Black Latter-day Saints and other Latter-day Saints of a progressive bent will write the church leadership letters and say, “this is offensive.
00;54;34;01 - 00;55;00;18
Matt Harris
How could we talk about this Book of Mormon verse, that all are likened to God? If we have this offensive and harmful racial theology still in circulation, we've got to repudiate it,” these letters would say. And so what happens is, is that in 2000, it's the first time when they're feeling the heat, leadership, a lower level church leader named Alexander Morrison, gives a talk in General Conference.
00;55;00;18 - 00;55;20;15
Matt Harris
And his talk, he says that “the church has never been racist. We've stood strongly against racism.” And of course, anyone with a heartbeat and a brain stem listening to this sermon knows that that's patently false. But this is just a public relations statement to sort of bring down the temperature from the letters they've been receiving.
00;55;20;17 - 00;55;51;20
Matt Harris
And then in 2006, the church president, Gordon Hinckley, took it a step further, and he said that he made it personal when he said he had been told– this was by Darius Gray, he didn't mention Gray, but that's the context of the sermon. He had been told that Black people were the target of racist statements in their local meeting houses. But even that was not good enough, because it's the saints that are still circulating all of this racial nonsense.
00;55;51;20 - 00;56;24;22
Matt Harris
And the BYU religious department, religion department, some faculty members are still circulating this stuff. So it reached a crescendo in 2012 when a BYU religion faculty member named Randy Bott gave an interview with the Washington Post. It was supposed to be cleared through the University Administration. It wasn't. He decided to speak without approval. And so as he spoke to the reporter, he had reiterated all of the traditional church teachings.
00;56;24;24 - 00;56;49;02
Matt Harris
And I interviewed the reporter and I said, “how did it make you feel when you were being told that Black people bore a divine curse, that their their skin was a sign of a divine disfavor?” All of that, he said, “I knew I had a story.” And, so anyway, he published the story the next day and it was profoundly unflattering because the church is trying to move forward in various parts of the world with missionary work.
00;56;49;04 - 00;57;13;05
Matt Harris
And here you have a prominent religion faculty member dredging up all of these erstwhile teachings. Anyway, long story short, the church denounced that interview in two public relation statements. This poor professor didn't know that that was no longer the doctrine of the church. He wasn't going rogue. It had just never it had never been repudiated. So anyway, that was 2012.
00;57;13;05 - 00;57;43;00
Matt Harris
During the Mitt Romney campaign, the church was already on high alert, for various things, including race and plural marriage. And then the following year, in 2013, is when they released the Race and Priesthood statement that I referred to, in which they repudiate by name specific doctrines that leaders had previously taught. And so what's nice about that statement, Nicholas, is that any Latter-day Saint today, if they hear something racist, they can say, “you know, that's not what the church teaches today.”
00;57;43;03 - 00;57;54;26
Matt Harris
And they can hold up that, that document and say, “it's right here. You should read it.” And that's why I think it's really critical to get this in writing, is because it does produce something that the Saints can appeal to.
00;57;54;28 - 00;58;22;14
Nicholas Shrum
I agree, I was just surprised that, in this discussion with somebody about these essays that they hadn't heard about it, and it, I think, actually follows the trajectory of your book quite well, that there's always a complex tension, that there's a recognition that there have been things, that there are things that have been done that were wrong or, that need to be corrected and have been corrected.
00;58;22;14 - 00;59;16;17
Nicholas Shrum
But at the same time, the church isn't too forward in it's publicity. Right? That to my knowledge, this essay has never been referenced in a general conference talk. And so it's interesting to me that there’s still, right, an institutional roadblock or, something to be negotiated along the way that, and you have a great section in the last two chapters and in the epilogue about kind of the politics of apology, and describing how the church approaches its doctrine and its history and storytelling and refuses to apologize for various reasons, but refuses to apologize.
00;59;16;20 - 00;59;20;01
Nicholas Shrum
So, yeah, it's fascinating.
00;59;20;04 - 00;59;42;18
Matt Harris
I would add–there's a couple reasons why– I get asked all the time “why do you think the church won't apologize for its past racial teachings?” And I think it deserves at least a speculative answer. They're afraid that it might undermine their authority, that if they're wrong on this critical issue, what else would they be wrong on?
00;59;42;20 - 01;00;14;27
Matt Harris
And of course, LGBTQ latter day Saints, that's sort of, you know, in their wheelhouse: they're wrong on the ban, they must be wrong on sexuality, too. And so the church doesn't allow for full participation for LGBTQ members. And so they don't recognize marriage equality and so forth. And so that's one of the issues. The other thing is, I think it's important, and my book talks about this, and I think it's always critical for historians and religious scholars to be as open and honest and transparent as possible.
01;00;14;29 - 01;00;39;20
Matt Harris
And the church has been working–this is a conservative church, so this is really, really important context. Most Mormons are Republicans and conservatives, including the church hierarchy. And the church has forged a relationship with the NAACP in recent years. In fact, the NAACP just gave the Mormon prophet, guy named Russell Nelson, who will turn 100 years old this year.
01;00;39;27 - 01;01;06;00
Matt Harris
I mean, that's just extraordinary. And they just awarded him one of the highest awards they bestow. This is the NAACP. So they're recognizing President Nelson's contributions to racial justice. They're recognizing the church's contributions to racial justice. And I think you can make an argument that this is the way the church is apologizing without saying it.
01;01;06;02 - 01;01;30;05
Matt Harris
And I want to be clear, for those of you who don't know the landscape of some of the members, I mean, when the church had been posting all of the efforts it had been doing with the NAACP over the last five years, there were a number of conservative Mormons, I mean, ultra-conservative Mormons who push back. They were critical on Facebook and Twitter and various other social media mediums.
01;01;30;05 - 01;01;47;07
Matt Harris
And so the church was not doing this without some risk. And so, my opinion, kudos to the leadership for forging these relationships, because you can't address racial justice issues until you form relationships. That's what the church has been doing.
01;01;47;09 - 01;02;13;23
Nicholas Shrum
I agree and I appreciate you adding that on. And it’s absolutely, a thread that your book touches on an explains quite nicely that the church is an institution. It's complex. It's small comparatively to the rest of Christianity and to other world religions, but also has a wide reach. It's in all parts of the world.
01;02;13;23 - 01;02;43;19
Nicholas Shrum
And, so I did find it really fascinating to, you know, juxtapose these recent efforts, especially the ones of, President Gordon B Hinckley in the 80s, 90s, and the first decade of the 21st century, along with Russell M. Nelson's, to make those and establish and maintain those relationships with the Black community in the United States, alongside its other humanitarian and social justice efforts.
01;02;43;22 - 01;03;25;00
Nicholas Shrum
So thank you for including that. We're really close on time, but I do want to ask one more question, as a religious studies scholar about, how you, as a historian, understand religion operating in your narrative? I'm just curious about, specifically–and, for those that are going to read the book, I really want you to all to pay attention this wonderful, compelling line in Dr. Harris's preface where he says that, “the inclusion of Black people in the church was as much the product of human agency as it was divine revelation.”
01;03;25;03 - 01;03;49;03
Nicholas Shrum
And I think Latter-day Saints might take that line and have a moment of pause and think about that. But I would really encourage those people that read the book, to really hold that in tension and think about it as you go through the narrative. But, Dr. Harris, as we conclude, would you give us your thoughts on how religion operates to you?
01;03;49;06 - 01;04;15;09
Matt Harris
Yeah. Well, I mean, I can give you two answers. Personally, personal religion for me is something that brings the human family together, and if the theology is divisive, it's bad theology. So I'll let listeners let that sink in for a moment. And the other one would be it was really, really important for me, Nicholas, to see how this race theology affected people. It’s one thing to say,
01;04;15;09 - 01;04;44;06
Matt Harris
“here's the policy. This is what the church is doing now. They lifted it here.” But I really wanted to see in particular how it affected all Latter-day Saints, particularly Black and biracial people. And it wasn't just that they were told their skin color was cursed. They didn't feel comfortable in their own skin, much as you would see in the 20th century with segregation.
01;04;44;08 - 01;05;11;10
Matt Harris
And when they were told that, you know, these these kids in segregated Jim Crow America weren't good enough to worship with white kids. That's really how a lot of the Black saints felt about this policy. They just didn't measure up. They weren't good enough. And so it affected them so profoundly. Also, white and brown people, they are conditioned to see Black people as inferior and how that damaged their psyche and questioned their faith.
01;05;11;12 - 01;05;40;10
Matt Harris
And also with the theology. I learned that because Black and biracial Latter-day Saints thought so deeply about these restrictions, both the temple and the priesthood, and they thought about the rationales for that ranged from, you know, the curse, the preexistence to the latter part of the the 1960s during the civil rights era, where the church came up with a line that said, you know, “we're really not sure why the ban occurred,” rather than just acknowledging the racist impulse behind it.
01;05;40;13 - 01;06;04;02
Matt Harris
You know, during a time when 4 million Africans were enslaved in the 19th century, they just said, “we don't know.” And so what happened was, is that Black people moved into the gaps and they started creating their own reasons. And one person said that– this is Darius Gray–he said that that God wasn't responsible for this, but he allowed it to happen to see how people would treat each other.
01;06;04;04 - 01;06;25;00
Matt Harris
Then another Black Latter-day Saint said the exact opposite. He said God had revealed it to him, but he was in charge of the ban. And so there's a lot of, you know, contention or debate and discussion among Latter-day Saints in the Black community, to make sense of the ban. It was deeply unsettling for them.
01;06;25;02 - 01;06;52;27
Matt Harris
And it was the same group of people that had really, really pushed the church leadership to repudiate it in 2013, people like David Jackson, Darius Gray, and countless others. So the theology has to make sense to you. It has to be good. It has to be unifying. And what I saw in my work was how that theology had pushed Latter-day Saints to take a more inclusive view of their religion.
01;06;52;27 - 01;07;02;29
Matt Harris
And, you know, this is where we're at today with the church. And I don't think that the church would be where it's at today if it wasn't for the activism of these good natured Latter-day Saints.
01;07;03;02 - 01;07;45;23
Nicholas Shrum
Thank you so much for indulging me with that question. To me, this is so interesting because the book I think goes along very well in conversation with other books in religious studies, especially, as it relates to race and thinking of the incoming chair Bushman chair here at UVA, Laurie Maffly-Kipp has a wonderful book called Setting Down the Sacred Past that talks about how African Americans in the mid to late 19th century, early 20th century, develop these narratives to help understand themselves in religious terms, and amid this context of the United States, which is racist and it's the
01;07;45;23 - 01;08;09;23
Nicholas Shrum
Jim Crow laws and the precarious situation of Black Latter day Saints, pre-ban and then post-ban is just so interesting to me how these members are able to find their space and create their space, advocate for their space and then continue to face these roadblocks afterward.
01;08;09;23 - 01;08;33;17
Nicholas Shrum
And so, just really commendable work, I think, in Second Class Saints that puts all of those things in conversation together. And so, absolutely recommend that listeners pick up a copy. Oxford University Press, published this year. Dr. Harris, before we go, are there any projects that you're working on currently or are you taking a rest?
01;08;33;19 - 01;08;57;18
Matt Harris
You know, boy, you can you can sleep when you're dead. So, I'm working on two projects right now. I'm looking at a government official named Reuben Clark, who was also a high ranking Mormon leader. He was in the Woodrow Wilson administration. And he was sort of the guy that moved the church into a rightward tilt.
01;08;57;18 - 01;09;23;15
Matt Harris
It was his ideology that influenced Benson and others. So, I'm doing a book for a series that the University of Illinois will publish. And I'm also doing a book on a guy named Hugh Brown who was a high ranking Mormon leader. And he's a Canadian. He's a Canadian socialist in a church leadership run by extremely conservative Republicans from the Intermountain West.
01;09;23;17 - 01;09;50;19
Matt Harris
And so, needless to say, there's going to be a lot of tension there with that arrangement based on their backgrounds and experiences. So those are the two books I'm looking at.. Oh, and I just finished an article on white Christian nationalism from a Mormon perspective. And I look at how some Mormon leaders had utilized FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to spread white Mormon nationalism in the church
01;09;50;19 - 01;09;59;00
Matt Harris
in the postwar and the Cold War years. So just finishing that up and I'll be submitting that the next probably week or so.
01;09;59;00 - 01;10;04;28
Nicholas Shrum
Very exciting and I look forward to all of those and hopefully in the future have you back on the podcast to talk about those.
01;10;05;01 - 01;10;10;23
Matt Harris
Yeah, I'd love to, Nicholas. I've enjoyed talking to you today.
01;10;10;25 - 01;10;32;22
Nicholas Shrum
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversation soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production editing, and to Ben Howington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit Mormonguitar.com. Thank you for listening.