Teaching the Priesthood/Temple Ban at BYU

For the D&C class I taught at BYU, (see my previous post on teaching polygamy), when we got to Official Declaration 2, my objectives were to cover the difficult issues and present some possible frameworks by which to make sense of those issues.

The students had read the church’s essay, so they had some good background, but I wanted to get a little more specific on a few items. I began with a quiz where I just asked for thoughts and questions on the topic. They pretty much all had the same one: why did we do this? So I just started into my PowerPoint.

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Roundtable on Paul Reeve, RELIGION OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: Introduction

Paul Reeve‘s recent work, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015), was one of the few books that were highly anticipated yet exceeded expectations. To both celebrate and engage its arguments, we here at the JI have organized a roundtable that will take place over the next three weeks and offer a multivocal overview and analysis of what will certainly become one of the classics of the developing (sub)field of Mormon studies, not to mention the best book on the contested issue of the Mormon racial restriction’s origins to date. In this post, I will give a general overview and discussion of the work’s framework, and starting next week we will hear from Janiece J, Nate R, Joey S., and Amanda HK on the different sections of the book. In total, we hope to identify Religion of a Different Color‘s biggest strengths, historiographical contributions, and contested questions, as well as future avenues that scholarship on Mormonism and race can take in the next generation.

Religion of a Different Color uses Mormonism as a case study for understanding notions of “race” throughout the ninteenth century. We may assume that such a concept has always been clear, yet ideas of what constituted “white,” “black,” and a myriad of other racial qualifiers were constantly in flux in early America. More, even while these ideas were contested, their meaning was all the more important: being considered “white” gave access to the rights of citizenship and, far to often, the dignity of humanity. (In the 1850s, there was even a rise of the “Know Nothing Party,” a political base which centered around the principle of purely white citizenship.) This made the case of the Mormons all the more peculiar: by most estimations, they were clearly Angl0-Americans descended from the very ethnic lineages that were supposedly valid. Yet a combination of their actions and beliefs led Mormonism’s contemporaries to marginalize the sect any way they could, including through racial othering. Mormons were depicted as blending the racial lines between white and black, white and red, and eventually even white and yellow. In response, Mormons tried to prove their whiteness, and thus validate their rights of citizenship and civilization, by marginalizing the racial minorities within their own Church, most famously by instituting a restriction on black access to priesthood and temple activities.

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**UPDATE** PRE-REGISTRATION FOR #MHA50 ENDS MAY 8

The MHA Board has decided to extend reduced pre-registration fees for this year’s meeting of the Mormon History Association until May 8! The conference will be held June 4-7, 2015 in Provo, UT. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Association’s founding and the MHA Board and local arrangements committee have gone all out to ensure this is the best MHA conference ever held. Whether you are a graduate student, early-career scholar, an armchair historian or are just interested in Mormonism and its history, this is the conference for you. There is something for everyone. EVERYONE. [See program HERE]

As an added bonus this year, the following events are FREE to all registered attendees:

• Friday lunch
• Award presentations
• The Gold and Green Ball

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Book Review: For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism

A few weeks ago, I toured Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello with my parents. On the tour, the pleasant guide informed our group that Thomas Jefferson most likely fathered several children with his slave, Sally Hemmings. The tour guide than asked the group rhetorically, “How could the author of the Declaration of Independence also own slaves, much less father children that became his human property?” I admired her response to her own question, “There is no reconciling. He was wrong. We cannot excuse his behavior.”

The tour came in the midst of my reading of Russell W. Stevenson’s For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism. Like the tour guide, Stevenson offers valuable information in the midst of a larger narrative, the history of “blacks” in Mormonism.[i] His narrative offers readers a straightforward account of the priesthood and temple restriction for those of African descent in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He does so with a wealth of documents, including many that I had never before seen. Like the tour guide at Monticello, he does not attempt to excuse those that upheld the ban through action or apathy. Stevenson should be commended writing the best resource for Latter-day Saints to learn more about the experience of Mormon blacks in settings both American and international. Stevenson also does an admirable job demonstrating that lay Latter-day Saints largely upheld the priesthood and temple restriction; it was not merely the decree of church leaders.

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The Garfield Assassination, 4 of 4: Aftermath and Conclusion

In the last post we looked at ways Mormonism appeared in the trial of Charles Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield. Today we?ll look outside and after the trial.

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Aidah, Eliza, and Emma: The Stairs and Domestic Abuse in Nauvoo

One of the women in my family tree is Aidah Clements, a New York convert whose testimony is often cited as one of the sources for the idea that Emma Smith pushed Eliza R. Snow, one of her husband?s wives down the stairs. Aidah’s relationship to the Smith family has always fascinated me. Aidah participated in many important events in Mormon history. She was a part of Zion’s Camp, immigrated with some of the companies to travel to the Salt Lake Valley, and watched as her two daughters married the same man.

I was recently searching for more documents about Aidah Clements when I came across some documents in the Church History Library that provided some interesting information about her marital history.

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Summer Book Club: Richard Lyman Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Ten years ago, Richard Bushman published Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling with Knopf. Bushman’s biography of Mormonism’s founder garnered widespread praise and provoked a number of conversations within the Mormon Studies community. Jan Shipps argued in the Journal of American History that Bushman’s biography represented a new chapter in the study of Mormonism. She wrote that Rough Stone Rolling is “a work of new American history that forces readers to recognize that religion is as much of our past as anything else.”[i] Through doing so, she argued that Mormon history would soon function be used as a lens to understand broader topics in American history and American religion rather than for exclusively Mormon purposes to Mormon audiences.[ii]

Shipps’ review appears to have been, well, prophetic. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of scholarship on Mormonism that historians and religious studies scholars must take seriously. Books by Spencer Fluhman, Patrick Mason, John Turner, Christine Talbot, the Joseph Smith Papers Project Team, Paul Reeve, Jared Farmer, Steve Taysom, Sam Brown, as well as many journal authors, have produced work useable in university classrooms.[iii]

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News from MHA and the Weekly Roundup

First, some very important new from this week comes from our friends at the Mormon History Association (from their Facebook page):

We regret to announce that Debra and David Marsh have resigned as executive directors of the Mormon History Association. We thank them for their service and wish them well in their future endeavors. MHA office assistance is in place. We are grateful to MHA’s program committee and local arrangements committee, who continue in their efforts to provide an outstanding 50th-Anniversary Conference this June.

Board of Directors, Mormon History Association

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Religious Persecution and the Great and Abominable Church

In 1 Nephi 13:5, the angel says to Nephi, “Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.” We used to stress this being the Catholics but have sort of backed off this in the last few decades to the point where I don’t hear much talk about the GAC anymore. And yet it’s quite important in these chapters in the Book of Mormon where Nephi lays out a kind of visionary history of the world from Christ to the coming of the Book of Mormon.

Both the discussion of the apostasy and restoration that the kids are having now in church coupled with my recent discovery of the movie Agora on Netflix (it’s R but a fairly light R, historical violence that isn’t too bad), put me in mind of the topic.

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Teaching Polygamy at BYU

So I recently finished teaching the second half of the Doctrine and Covenants at BYU, which I enjoyed very much. When we got to some of the harder issues that are part of the curriculum, especially polygamy and blacks and the priesthood, I wanted to cover them in a way that was both direct and helpful. I applaud the church’s essays in these topics, assigned them, and wanted to cover these topics in the same spirit of openness. Yet these are tough and as 132 approached, I was trying to thing about how to go about it. To me it seemed like I had three options. 1) Dodge it. Again, I didn’t want to do that. 2) Tell the students information that I felt pretty sure was incorrect. As I mentioned in this previous post,  I like the articles but think there are some mistakes, especially eternity only sealings. 3) Tell them what I believe is correct. Having tried this out on my own kids and feeling it went well, I decided to give my assertion about shared marriages a shot. So I got my powerpoint ready and headed to class.

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