Timeline and Quotes on the Priesthood Ban: A Scholarly Response

The ldsdiscussions.com timeline raises hard questions about the ban's origins and the leaders who maintained it. Those questions deserve honest, rigorous answers — not deflection.

What ldsdiscussions.com Argues

The ldsdiscussions.com timeline presents a selection of quotes and dates designed to support a specific conclusion: that the Church's 126-year restriction of Black members from the priesthood and temple ordinances (roughly 1852–1978) was racist in origin, was falsely attributed to Joseph Smith by later leaders who knew better, was maintained through cultural and financial pressure rather than genuine revelation, and cannot be reconciled with any claim of divine guidance over the Church. The timeline marshals real quotes from real leaders. The evidence is not fabricated. The discomfort it produces is legitimate.

This page engages those quotes and that timeline directly, without sanitizing the history. The Latter-day Saint position is not that those quotes are false, or that the restriction was secretly wonderful. The position is that the historical record, read in full and with scholarly rigor, tells a more complex story — and that the complexity vindicates faith rather than destroying it.

We will walk through each major claim in sequence.

Claim 1: The Ban Existed “From the Days of the Prophet Joseph”

The ldsdiscussions timeline quotes the 1947 First Presidency letter to Dr. Lowry Nelson: “From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel.”

This claim is historically false, and the Church's own 2013 Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood explicitly repudiates it. The documented record is unambiguous:

Race and the Priesthood — LDS Gospel Topics Essay (2013)

“There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime.”

The facts are these: Elijah Abel was ordained an elder in 1836 by Joseph Smith, who declared him “entitled to the Priesthood and all the blessings.” Abel was subsequently ordained a Seventy in December of that same year — a quorum of the general Church — and remained in good standing throughout the Prophet's lifetime. His son Enoch Abel received the priesthood in 1900, and his grandson Elijah R. Abel received it in 1935. Q. Walker Lewis was ordained during the same era. In March 1847 — years after Joseph Smith's death — Brigham Young himself praised Lewis as “one of the best Elders, an African,” and said “we don't care about the color.”

The claim that the restriction dated to Joseph Smith was a false historical reconstruction. It was later leaders — particularly Joseph F. Smith in 1908 — who retroactively asserted a Smithian origin, even claiming Abel's ordination had been “declared null and void by the Prophet himself.” This claim contradicts Joseph F. Smith's own earlier statements defending Abel's ordination. Historian W. Paul Reeve (University of Utah), the nation's leading scholarly authority on race in LDS history, has documented how this false memory was deliberately introduced into Church consciousness to give the restriction an aura of founding-era authority it did not possess.

The 1947 First Presidency letter's assertion is therefore not evidence of a Smithian origin for the ban. It is evidence that by 1947, the false retroactive attribution had been thoroughly absorbed into institutional memory. The Church's 2013 essay corrects the record.

Claim 2: Brigham Young's 1852 Proclamation Was “Divine Commandment”

The 1949 First Presidency statement declared the restriction to be “not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord.” ldsdiscussions.com cites this statement as evidence that the ban was presented as binding revelation — and then asks why God would command such a thing.

This framing creates a false dilemma: either the restriction was from God (and therefore God is racist), or it was not from God (and therefore the Church is fraudulent). But the historical and doctrinal record supports a third position that the ldsdiscussions argument does not engage: the restriction was a human policy, falsely elevated to the status of revelation by leaders who were wrong to do so.

Several evidentiary points establish this:

The Documentary Record

• No written revelation — Brigham Young never presented a written or formally canonized revelation establishing the restriction. It was announced in political speeches to the Utah territorial legislature — not in a formal prophetic declaration submitted to the Church for a sustaining vote.
• No canonical text — Unlike Official Declaration 1 (ending polygamy) or Official Declaration 2 (ending the ban), there is no Official Declaration establishing the priesthood restriction. The Standard Works contain no such commandment.
• Contemporary trigger — The documentary record shows Young's attitude shifted between 1847 and 1852 following specific social pressures: Black Latter-day Saint men had married white women, Southern converts brought enslaved people into the territory, and Young faced political pressure around Utah's bid for statehood. Historian W. Paul Reeve has shown that Young's position hardened directly in response to anti-miscegenation ideology.
• Church acknowledgment — Multiple modern General Authorities — Gordon B. Hinckley, Dallin H. Oaks, Jeffrey R. Holland, and Alexander Morrison — have stated the Church does not know why the ban was implemented. This is not a claim that God commanded it. It is an acknowledgment of institutional uncertainty about a human decision.

Dallin H. Oaks is particularly direct: “It's not the pattern of the Lord to give reasons... When we do [give reasons], we're on our own.” The theological explanations offered for the restriction — the Curse of Cain, the less-valiant pre-mortal spirits — were human rationalizations, not revealed doctrine. The 2013 essay explicitly disavows all of them: “None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.”

The 1949 First Presidency statement was wrong. Leaders can be wrong. The question is whether that fact destroys the Church's claims — and we address that below.

Claim 3: The Quotes From Church Leaders Are Indefensible

The ldsdiscussions timeline assembles a devastating collection of quotes: Brigham Young on “the seed of Cain,” Bruce R. McConkie declaring Black members “not equal with other races,” Harold B. Lee on “racial limitations” as punishment for pre-mortal unfaithfulness, George F. Richards suggesting Black spirits were “indifferent perhaps, and possibly neutral in the war in Heaven,” Apostle Alvin R. Dyer claiming Black bodies exist because “those spirits rejected the Priesthood of God in the pre-existence,” Mark E. Petersen on Black members entering the celestial kingdom “as a servant,” and others.

These quotes are real. They are not taken out of context in any meaningful sense. They are morally repugnant. The appropriate response is not to explain why they were actually fine — they were not fine. The appropriate response is to understand what they tell us, and what they do not tell us.

What the quotes tell us: These leaders were men of their time and culture, absorbed in the racial ideology of 19th- and early 20th-century America. They constructed theological frameworks to justify a restriction that Brigham Young had implemented for social and political reasons. Each successive generation of leaders inherited the restriction, assumed it must have divine backing, and built more elaborate theological scaffolding around it. Joseph Fielding Smith invented a more sophisticated pre-mortal theory. McConkie systematized it in Mormon Doctrine. None of these explanations were ever submitted to the formal doctrinal process of the Church. None were canonized. All were personal — however authoritatively stated.

What the quotes do not tell us: They do not tell us that these explanations were ever the doctrine of the Church in the formal, binding sense. They do not tell us that the Church's founding scripture endorsed them. And crucially, they do not tell us these views were held without internal contradiction — because the scriptures those same leaders claimed to follow said something very different:

2 Nephi 26:33

“He inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”

This scripture — from the very Book of Mormon ldsdiscussions.com cites against the Church — declared the universality of the gospel in 1830. Joseph Smith's founding doctrine was not the curse of Cain. It was that all are alike unto God. The restriction that followed was a deviation from that founding vision, and a violation of the Church's own stated canon.

Bruce R. McConkie himself acknowledged this in his landmark 1978 address “All Are Alike Unto God”: “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.” McConkie further declared: “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.” This is not evasion. It is a senior apostle publicly repudiating decades of institutional error.

Claim 4: The “Follow the Prophet” Problem

ldsdiscussions.com argues that because Ezra Taft Benson taught “the prophet does not have to say 'Thus saith the Lord' to give us scripture,” and because Brigham Young said “I have never yet preached a sermon and sent it out to the children of men, that they may not call Scripture” — members were therefore obligated to treat these racist teachings as binding. If members were obligated to follow prophets who taught racism, and those prophets were wrong, then prophetic authority is either fraudulent or morally bankrupt.

This argument collapses under the Church's own doctrinal framework for prophetic authority, established by Joseph Smith himself:

Joseph Smith — Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 278

“A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such.”

The LDS Church's official Newsroom has stated: “Not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine.” The criteria for binding doctrine are specific: it must be taught consistently by the full First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, presented frequently across multiple authoritative sources, and formally sustained by the Church body. D. Todd Christofferson has noted that “a statement made by one leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well considered, opinion.”

Brigham Young's statement that his sermons may be called Scripture is itself a case in point: Young also taught the Adam-God theory, which President Spencer W. Kimball explicitly condemned as heresy. If we are to treat every Young sermon as binding doctrine, we must accept both his 1852 racial restriction and his teaching that Adam is God the Father — doctrines which directly contradict each other and which the modern Church repudiates. Brigham Young was wrong about Adam-God. He was wrong about race. The Church is not required to pretend otherwise.

The ldsdiscussions framing treats prophetic authority as a binary: either prophets are infallible (and therefore we must accept their racist teachings as divine), or prophets are fallible (and therefore the Church has no credibility). But this is a false binary that no serious theologian — Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Latter-day Saint — accepts. The doctrinal position of the Church has always been that prophets are mortal men subject to the biases of their culture, and that their personal views must be tested against canon, counsel, and the Spirit. The system failed catastrophically on the race issue. The Church has acknowledged this. But a system that can fail and then correct itself is not the same as a system that was never divinely instituted.

Claim 5: The 1978 Revelation Was Not a Revelation — It Was a Business Decision

ldsdiscussions.com quotes the Apostle LeGrand Richards interview at length. Richards described President Kimball sharing a “little document” with the Twelve, discussing it, voting on it, and calling Mark Petersen in South America to get his approval by phone. The site asks: is this revelation, or is this a committee decision driven by the impending São Paulo temple dedication and the impossibility of determining “negro blood” in Brazilian members?

This objection misunderstands how the Church teaches revelation works. The Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants do not describe revelation as a dictated voice from heaven bypassing all human deliberation. The Lord instructed in D&C 9:8: “You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right.” The process of prayerful deliberation, scriptural study, mutual counsel, and then spiritual confirmation is not a departure from revelation — it is its prescribed pattern.

The LeGrand Richards interview describes the process. The eyewitness testimony of those present on June 1, 1978 describes the experience. These are not the same thing. Richards' account and the accounts of Hinckley, McConkie, Haight, Perry, and others are fully compatible. What Richards described was the preparation and the vote. What the apostles experienced in the temple that day was something else entirely:

Elder Bruce R. McConkie — “All Are Alike Unto God,” August 1978

“The Lord in his providences poured out the Holy Ghost upon the First Presidency and the Twelve in a miraculous and marvelous manner, beyond anything that any then present had ever experienced... There was no question whatsoever as to what happened or as to the word and message that came.”

Elder Gordon B. Hinckley — General Conference, October 1988

“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. Every man in that circle, by the power of the Holy Ghost, knew the same thing. Not one of us who was present on that occasion was ever quite the same after that.”

Elder David B. Haight — BYU Speeches

“The Spirit touched each of our hearts with the same message in the same way. Each was witness to a transcendent heavenly event.”

Elder Marion Romney stated that his own position changed “180 degrees” only after experiencing spiritual confirmation that “the mind and the will of the Lord had been made manifest.” Elder L. Tom Perry described “something like the rushing of wind.” These are not descriptions of a business committee reaching consensus. They are fifteen independent witnesses — each capable of vetoing the change, each theologically conservative, several personally resistant — describing the same overwhelming spiritual event.

The argument that the São Paulo temple was the real cause also fails on historical grounds. President David O. McKay spent years seeking a revelation to end the ban. He believed a revelation was needed. He prayed for it. He received no answer that satisfied him. President Harold B. Lee opposed changing the policy. The fact that pragmatic pressures existed does not mean the revelation did not occur. Pragmatic circumstances are often how the Lord prompts his servants to inquire. The D&C revelations on tithing, plural marriage, and the Word of Wisdom all came in response to specific temporal circumstances. Circumstances prompting inquiry and revelation responding to that inquiry are not mutually exclusive.

Official Declaration 2 was sustained by the full General Conference of the Church in September 1978 and added to the Doctrine and Covenants in 1981 — the only canonized revelation in the Church's scripture addressing race and the priesthood. It overturned 126 years of institutional practice. It was met with weeping, worldwide celebration, and unanimous apostolic witness. It was the opposite of a quiet bureaucratic adjustment.

Claim 6: The Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham Permanently Endorse Racism

ldsdiscussions.com presents an extended list of Book of Mormon scriptures about “skin of blackness,” “dark and loathsome people,” and curses upon the Lamanites, as well as Abraham 1:26–27 regarding priesthood and Ham's lineage. The argument is that these scriptures provided the theological foundation for the priesthood ban, and that therefore the founding scripture of the Church is inherently racist.

This argument requires two conflations that do not survive scholarly examination:

First conflation: Lamanite skin references and African descent. The Book of Mormon's “skin of blackness” passages refer to an ancient narrative context — a “mark” distinguishing two groups of people in a specific family and geographical setting. The text explicitly states this mark was reversible upon repentance (3 Nephi 2:14–16 records Lamanites whose “curse was taken from them”). Crucially, this passage was never the primary scriptural basis cited by Church leaders for the priesthood ban. Leaders cited the Book of Abraham — not the Book of Mormon narratives about Lamanites — as their proof text. The conflation of dark-skinned Lamanites in the Book of Mormon with Black Africans was itself a racially motivated interpretive error by 19th-century leaders. Jacob 3:9 explicitly condemns Nephites for hating the Lamanites “because of the darkness of their skins.” The Book of Mormon never restricts any group from holding the priesthood based on skin color.

Second conflation: Abraham 1:26–27 and the modern priesthood ban. Abraham 1:27 states that the Pharaoh was “of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood.” Joseph Smith never cited this passage to restrict any living members from the priesthood. The use of this passage as justification for the ban was a later development, introduced primarily by George Q. Cannon in the late 19th century. The passage describes an ancient Pharaoh — not a modern policy for any racial group.

In any case, the Church's 2013 disavowal does not require us to pretend these scriptures do not exist. It requires us to acknowledge that the use of them as justification for the ban was never officially canonized doctrine, and that the theological framework built from them was human invention, not revelation. The same Book of Mormon that contains Jacob 3 also contains 2 Nephi 26:33: “all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” The hermeneutical question of how to read these texts together is not resolved by citing half of them.

The Bigger Picture: What the Priesthood Ban Actually Shows

ldsdiscussions.com frames the priesthood ban as evidence that the LDS Church cannot be what it claims: a divinely guided institution whose prophets receive genuine revelation. If God was in charge, how could this happen?

This framing assumes that divine governance of an institution guarantees the infallibility of its leaders — an assumption rejected by the entire biblical tradition. The Old Testament is a chronicle of prophets, kings, and priests who failed catastrophically: Moses striking the rock in anger, David's adultery and murder, Solomon's idolatry, Jonah's flight, Peter's denial, the Jerusalem council's debates over Gentile inclusion. The prophetic tradition in scripture is not the story of infallible messengers. It is the story of fallible human beings through whom God works imperfectly and who must sometimes be corrected.

Brigham Young was wrong about race. He was wrong about Adam-God. He was a product of antebellum American culture who made catastrophic institutional decisions that injured Black Latter-day Saints for over a century. The 2013 Gospel Topics Essay names this plainly: the theories leaders offered for the ban are not accepted as doctrine; the Church disavows them all; Church leaders today “unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”

The question is whether a church that can produce both this failure and this correction — at institutional cost, under no external legal obligation — is better explained by fraud or by the messy reality of divine institutions staffed by imperfect humans. A purely human institution with purely financial motivations does not produce the spiritual testimonies of fifteen apostles weeping in the Salt Lake Temple. A fraud does not canonize its own correction and then invite the world to read it.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland — General Conference, October 2020

“I have spoken of a few of the continuing imperfections within our human application of divine principles... I speak of these things not to justify them but to acknowledge openly that such shortcomings exist and in the same breath declare our desire to do better.”

The honest reckoning the 2013 essay represents — published proactively, without external legal compulsion, contradicting the claims of every First Presidency statement from 1947 to 1969 — is itself a form of institutional integrity that fraudulent organizations do not typically display. ldsdiscussions.com cites the essay approvingly when it says the ban originated with Brigham Young. It cannot simultaneously treat the same essay as worthless when it documents the 1978 revelation's spiritual character and the Church's full disavowal of racist theories.

A Summary of the Timeline Corrected

Conclusion: Honest History Does Not Require Abandoning Faith

The priesthood ban was a moral catastrophe. It injured real people for over a century. It was defended by prophets and apostles with arguments that were false, racist, and unscriptural. The Church's 2013 essay says so plainly, and the Church deserves no praise for this failure — only honest acknowledgment.

But ldsdiscussions.com's timeline, for all its documentation of the failure, does not establish the conclusion the site draws from it. It does not establish that Joseph Smith originated the ban — he did not. It does not establish that the 1978 revelation was merely pragmatic — fifteen apostles testify otherwise. It does not establish that the Church's founding scripture endorsed the ban's theology — 2 Nephi 26:33 says the opposite. And it does not establish that a church whose prophets can err is therefore false — unless one requires a standard of prophetic infallibility that the biblical tradition itself never applies to any servant of God.

What the full record shows is a church that departed from its founding universalism under social and cultural pressure, constructed false theological justifications for that departure, and was eventually corrected by a genuine revelation that returned it to its origins. That story — ugly as it is in the middle — is more consistent with the Church's claims than the alternative, which would require fabricating the spiritual experiences of fifteen independent witnesses and publishing a 2013 essay that actively undermines the institutional authority of every First Presidency statement from 1947 to 1969.

The hard questions the ban raises deserve hard answers. The hard answers, rigorously examined, do not require leaving the Church to have intellectual integrity. They require a more honest, more adult, and more scripturally grounded faith than the one the ban's defenders offered for 126 years — and that is precisely what the Church's own reckoning with this history now demands.