Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Latter-day Saint
Travel and Religion
Touching the third rail: Apologizing for the priesthood ban?

Touching the third rail: Apologizing for the priesthood ban?

Last updated on: May 28, 2026 at 8:48 pm by Dan Peterson

0 Comments

Touching the third rail: Apologizing for the priesthood ban? 2026-05-28T20:48:01-06:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Two Latter-day Saint missionaries walking down a street in Africa (LDS Media Library)

I hope that I’ve made it clear enough and mentioned often enough that I found the pre-1978 priesthood ban baffling and, to say the least of it, awkward, and that I was absolutely delighted when it was rescinded. The day that I heard about President Spencer W. Kimball’s priesthood revelation — I was in Zollikofen, Switzerland, at the time, slowly returning from six months in the Middle East — was one of the happiest days of my life. I glowed for weeks thereafter. (Of course, I’ve had a few critics claim that I’m lying about this, just as I lie about almost everything else. I was, they insinuate, entirely on board with the ban because I’m both servile and a racist. Or something to that effect. There seems no point in insisting that I’m telling the truth, though; once they’ve decided that I’m an inveterate liar, they’re not likely to accept any claim that I make. Oh well.)

That said, however, I tend to resist confident assertions that the priesthood policy was, simply, the product of racism, that it was an evil mistake, and that the Church should therefore apologize for it. I have no theory of its origin to offer, no theological justification to provide for it, no apologetic to make on its behalf. I simply point to the fact that at least some Church leaders had hoped to rescind it earlier but felt themselves prevented (by the Lord himself) from doing so.

Now, obviously, such an argument will carry little if any weight with those who believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is led by ordinary mortals (or, even, by less than ordinary mortals) who have no access to the mind of God. But for me, since I believe that there is a God and that he stands in a special, revealing relationship with the prophets and apostles at the helm of the Church, it does seem important, as I hope and expect that it will to others.

A portrait of President David O. McKay (1873-1970), from LDS Media Library

Here is a specific illustration of what I have in mind, drawn from Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 103-104, 183:

It seems that President Hugh B. Brown, the first First Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of whom I was aware and a man for whom I felt and still feel considerable veneration, really hoped to see the priesthood exclusion policy overturned. Therefore, he attempted to persuade President David O. McKay to make that change. Unsuccessfully.

Reportedly, President McKay told some associates that he had prayed about the matter and that the answer was “Not yet.” In fact, according to Richard Jackson, he said that he had prayed repeatedly about the question and that he was told by the Lord to not bring the subject up again, that the change would come . . . but not during his administration. He even seems to have felt himself somewhat rebuked:

“I’ve inquired of the Lord repeatedly. The last time I did it was late last night. I was told, with no discussion, not to bring the subject up with the Lord again; that the time will come, but it will not be my time, and to leave the subject alone.”

If accurately reported and true, these accounts strongly suggest that, for his own inscrutable reasons, the Lord himself permitted the ban to continue until June 1978. Although it doesn’t demonstrate that God initiated the policy — that question remains open in my mind — it would make the policy seem to be something more than merely the lamentable product of regrettable nineteenth-century racism.

The opening sentence of Gregory A. Prince, “David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the 1978 Revelation,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35/1 (June 2010): 145, which quotes a General Authority who served under President McKay, is significant here:

“If there was ever a person, in terms of social justice in our society, for fairness, it would have been David O. McKay. Had it been up to him, alone, he would have given the Black the priesthood that quick!”

But President McKay — like President Spencer W. Kimball after him — plainly didn’t believe that a resolution of the matter was simply “up to him.” Both President McKay and President Kimball believed that any end to race-restricted access to priesthood ordination would require revelation. And both — both — believed themselves to have received revelation on the matter.

The Accra Ghana Temple by night (LDS Media Library)

I bring this issue up, and repost with modifications a few comments that I wrote the better part of a decade ago, because of some recent discussion that I’ve seen about it. On 15 May 2026, an article appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune under the title “Leader of Black LDS group says he fell victim to a racist threat while hiking in Utah: Despite repeated calls from church leaders to wipe out racism, Black members say such prejudice is on the rise in the state.”

I have no reason to doubt the reported incident and, assuming that it happened, I regret it. I do, though, wonder whether racial prejudice is actually rising within my adopted home state. I’ve seen no statistical evidence to suggest that it is. Whether it is or isn’t, though, racial abuse is regrettable and to be condemned without extenuation.

The Aba Nigeria Temple (LDS.org)

But that isn’t my topic here.

More than a few people responded to the reported incident that, unless and until the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledges that the pre-1978 priesthood ban was wrong and a mistake and apologizes for it, racism will persist in Utah and among members of the Church.

I have my doubts. I don’t believe that an apology for the past policy would have any impact on racist incidents in Utah.

I don’t know of any evidence correlating racism among Latter-day Saints, nominal Latter-day Saints, or residents of Utah (many of whom aren’t Latter-day Saints) with a priesthood policy that, after all, was revoked very nearly half a century ago. How, for example, would a past policy cause increasing racism? Does greater commitment to the teachings of the Church correspond to higher levels of racism? That seems unlikely, especially given the repeated denunciations of racial prejudice from the pulpit at General Conference over quite a few years now, the increased visibility of Black (and other non-White) leaders among the General Authorities and General Officers of the Church, and so forth. Do we even know that the perpetrator of the racist incident described in the Tribune article was an active Latter-day Saint? Or a Latter-day Saint at all? Or even a Utahn?

Is Utah exceptionally racist? Obviously, I operate inescapably from a position of White Privilege. Short of something like ritual harakiri, I have no realistic alternatives. But I’ve noticed no exceptional racism here, and I’ve heard of no exceptional racism. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been told of regrettable episodes. It’s just to say that I’ve heard of them just as frequently elsewhere as here. If Utah is exceptionally racist — more so than other socio-economically comparable states — I would need to see the evidence of that. My feeling, and certainly my hope, is that Utah is less racist than its secular sociological characteristics might lead one to expect.

The newly-dedicated Nairobi Kenya Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Media Library)

In 1967, when the priesthood ban still had more than a decade to go, the late Latter-day Saint sociologist Armand L. Mauss, who was widely regarded as a “liberal” and who was certainly no apologist for the ban, published a seminal article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 2/4 (Winter 1967): 19-40, entitled “Mormonism and the Negro: Faith, Folklore and Civil Rights.” In it, among many other important points, he presented research indicating that

the Mormons, in spite of their peculiar doctrine on Negroes, were no more likely to give anti-Negro responses than were the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans (whether American or Missouri Synod) or Baptists (whether American or Southern), and furthermore that the Mormon responses were very nearly the same as the Protestant averages.

Some of us — I was quite young, but I read the article soon after its publication — were disappointed that we didn’t do better in the survey data on racial issues, but at least we were relieved not to have done worse.

The incidence of anti-Negro secular attitudes varied inversely with education, occupation, community size of origin, and youth. That is to say, the likelihood of expressed anti-Negro attitudes was considerably greater among the poorly educated, the manual occupations, those of rural or small town origin, and the old—those categories known by sociologists to be prone to prejudice in any denomination. . . .

the differences between the “believers” and the “doubters” (in the tendency to express anti-Negro secular attitudes) greatly diminished (and in many cases disappeared entirely) with increasing education and community size of origin. In fact, among those of urban origin, the “orthodox” or “believers” were consistently less likely to express anti-Negro attitudes than were the “doubters” of key Church doctrines.

Mauss then cited a summary in another of his own publications (Armand L. Mauss, “Mormonism and Secular Attitudes toward Negroes,” Pacific Sociological Review 9/2 [Fall 1966]):

It would seem, from a study of the data here presented, that the null hypotheses must be allowed to stand for the religious variables; that is, no systematic differences in secular race attitudes were to be seen either between Mormons and others, or between orthodox and unorthodox Mormons. In most of their responses, Mormons resembled the rather “moderate” denominations (such as Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopalian), rather than the “fundamentalists” or the sects. To be sure, Mormons did differ among themselves in the tendency to hold negative secular attitudes toward Negroes, but these differences were not so much between the orthodox and unorthodox, or the active and inactive, as they were between the educated and uneducated, the manual and the professional, the old and the young, or the rural and the urban (as in any denomination). . . . This accords with other studies which have found socio-economic status an important determinant of attitudes toward minorities.

He then continued as follows:

My plea, then to the civil rights organizations and to all the critics of the Mormon Church is: get off our backs! The Mormon leadership has publicly condemned racism. There is no evidence of a carry-over of the Mormon doctrine on the Negro into secular civil life; in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. No matter how much racism you think you see in Utah, you can’t be sure it has anything to do with Mormonism. It might be related to the rural and small-town environment in much of the Mountain West (as in other parts of the country), or it might be the sickness of individual Mormon bigots, who would find some other way to rationalize their racism, even if the Mormon Church were without its peculiar “Negro doctrine.”

A cover illustration, from Amazon.com
This is my favorite image of President Spencer W. Kimball (1895-1985).

I can think of no particular reason why specifically Latter-day Saint racial prejudice should have become more pronounced sixty years after Armand Mauss’s pioneering work, nearly half a century after President Kimball’s revelation ending the priesthood ban, nor of anything peculiar to the Latter-day Saints that would have effected such a change. I remain to be convinced that theologically-motivated Latter-day Saint racism has grown since the days of Presidents McKay and Kimball. I suspect, rather, that racism has significantly declined among my fellow members of the Church, many of whom have now served as missionaries among non-White peoples around the world.

If there has been an increase in racial prejudice among Latter-day Saints, which may or may not be the case — I suspect that it is not — I would be strongly inclined to attribute any increase to the toxic politics of our lamentable national moment.

The 1978 Revelation on Priesthood was received in the Salt Lake City Utah Temple
(LDS.org)

I want to close, though, by citing part of Armand Mauss’s conclusion, which, happily, came to fruition in the summer of 1978:

Will the Mormon Church ever change its stand on the Negro? There is no reason, in either Mormon doctrine or tradition, that it could not be changed. In fact, the unique doctrine of continuous revelation makes even drastic changes less difficult than in most denominations (recall the polygamy issue). . . .

Whenever change comes, however, it must come in the Mormon way; that is, the integrity of the principle of continuous revelation must be maintained. Without this, and without the charisma of the “prophet, seer, and revelator,” Mormonism would be without its most vital distinguishing attribute. Any perceived threat to the “due process” implied in the doctrine of continuous revelation will be resisted not only by the Church leadership, but also by the overwhelming majority of the rank and file. Consequently, agitation over the “Negro issue” by non-Mormon groups, or even by Mormon liberals, is likely simply to increase the resistance to change.

Travel and Religion

History and Religion

Previous Post

May 27, 2026

On "moral images"

Next Post

May 29, 2026 Yup, the Interpreter Foundation is still clearly defunct

Which New Testament city was known for worshipping Artemis?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ephesus Corinth Rome Athens