Eugene England wrote about his observations of the racial attitudes he found at BYU in a 1990 essay for Sunstone. This part is interesting:
I can only take comfort that President Young never taught that the priesthood was denied because of any action or lack of valiance in the pre-existence, and he held out some hope that the curse would eventually be removed in this life--though many Mormons later forgot both those elements of his teachings.
By the late nineteenth century, though all slaves in Utah (contrary to Brigham Young's expectations) had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Utah was much like the rest of the country in its beliefs about Negro inferiority and the rightness of prejudice and segregation. This was true even of the more educated and supposedly enlightened leaders like that hero of Mormon intellectuals, B. H. Roberts (who in his ideas about race was perfectly in tune with Harvard professors such as Louis Agassiz). Roberts included, with approval, in the 1907 Seventy's Course in Theology a quotation from a then-current defense of racism, The Color Line, A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn: "That the negro is markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experience; and . . . the commingling of inferior with superior must lower the higher."11
In 1931, a new rationale for the Church's one official racist practice, denial of the priesthood and of temple blessings to blacks of African descent, was developed by Joseph Fielding Smith in his very influential The Way to Perfection.12 Explicitly recognizing that developments in science and popular thought had undermined the traditional rationale based on descent from
Cain, Elder Smith put forward what he called the "pre-existence hypothesis": Assuming that blacks themselves were somehow responsible for the denial, he used what might be called the Mormon escape clause for difficult social questions, that is, pushing the cause back to our pre-mortal development and decisions. By 1949 this hypothesis became the major rationale in the first official statement of Church policy on blacks, though it was there stated undogmatically as a possible explanation.13
One thing that did not change in twentieth century Mormonism was the persistent rejection of racial mixing, whether in intermarriage or simple social intercourse, a rejection which began in Joseph's time and continued. The predominantly Mormon Utah legislature in 1939 extended its anti-miscegenation statute to prohibit whites from marrying Mongolians, members of the "malay race," or anyone with even an eighth part black ancestry,14 and in the 1940s it persistently killed public housing and fair employment bills aimed at reducing segregation. In 1947 the First Presidency wrote to Mormon sociologist Lowry Nelson, who had questioned the Church's racial policies, that racial intermarriage was "a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people."15
WELL, here we are, forty years later, probably with some relatively normal-minded people reading this essay who are married to people of other races. Blacks were given the priesthood twelve years ago; no leaders now speak against interracial marriages (except occasionally on the purely practical grounds that the couple and their children will "experience difficulties" in society); the Church has no longer any official racist practices or doctrines. But there is something going on still, much more surprising to me than those statements by Brigham Young or B. H. Roberts or the First Presidency. Let me give some examples.
In January 1989, just before Martin Luther King's birthday, I received an unusual phone call. The voice was pleasant enough but the request a bit unsettling: "I've just read your essay on blacks and the priesthood. Can I come and talk with you?"
I said, "Sure," but as I was waiting I wondered who might still find that sixteen-year-old work troubling.16 It was a student, who introduced himself as a fairly recent convert from a big Eastern city, thanked me for the help the essay had given him, and told me how much he had been surprised and hurt to find, here at BYU, that most people he talked to, including professors, still believed that blacks like him had been denied the priesthood because they were "less valiant" in the pre-existence.
The week before that, in BYU's unofficial magazine, the Student Review, Stuart Pace, reflecting on his interracial marriage, talked about the "tacit racism" he has found in Provo. He mentioned "professors and amateur theologians who hypothesized about what spiritual shortcoming prevented blacks from getting the priesthood all those years, never once asking themselves what the universal atonement`s shortcoming was that prevented it from applying to all men."17
About that same time one of my students told me of going to dinner with friends of roommates and being regaled with a story, by a returned missionary, about how a convert's skin gradually turned white after she joined the Church, because of her spiritual change. The roommates stared at their plates in embarrassment but said nothing; the regaler was completely oblivious to the insult he was giving my student, who despite her conversion remains as black as ever; and she was hurt to the point of impotent anger and silence and later to uncertainty and tears as she considered that the people of the Church she believes is true seem to believe there is a connection between skin color and righteousness.
These three people, and probably thousands--even millions--of others, perhaps especially the white Mormons who believe such ideas, are being hurt, damaged, even damned up, I believe, in their spiritual progression, by a popular but false theology. It is a theology that developed--from Orson Pratt to B. H. Roberts to Joseph Fielding Smith--as a tentative, unofficial rationalization for the official policy of denying blacks the priesthood. But such theology gradually became so universally believed, despite its inconsistency with central Mormon beliefs and scriptures, that it easily took on dogmatic, official status when it was included, in 1958, in Elder Bruce R. McConkie's unofficial but forcefully worded and extremely popular book, Mormon Doctrine. It was then developed in detail by two books written specifically as rationales for the priesthood denial when that denial was coming under increasing attack, John J. Stewart's Mormonism and the Negro and John Lewis Lund's The Church and the Negro.18 In each of these books a temporary Church practice is used to develop a racist theology: the concept of a partial God, sending his favorite children into more and more favored conditions where they buy their salvation easily by taking advantage of their already superior advantages. Such an argument, that lets the tail of historical practice wag the dog of fundamental doctrine, leaves great concepts of the restored Gospel in a shambles--especially our concept of a universally loving God of all people and of a universal Atonement.
A typical example of the unabashed racism that resulted is the following from Lund's book: "When people rebel against God's commandments, either during their pre-earth life or while in mortality, they are given a dark skin so that those who are of the chosen seed will not intermarry with them."19 I know from personal conversations with some of those affected that
such ideas administer devastating hurt to dark-skinned people, who make up the majority of God's children on the earth and will before long make up a majority of members of the Church.
One reader of this essay has suggested that perhaps Mormons don't really take these notions seriously any more. I hope she is right, but I've taken various informal polls, and on that evidence and the many stories I keep hearing from blacks and other racial minorities themselves about such ideas being taught or left unchallenged in classes at BYU--right in their presence, I am convinced that a large number, perhaps a majority, of Mormons still believe them. I will proceed on that assumption.
What's wrong with the notion that blacks are "not equal" (in Elder McConkie's words in his original edition) and that that inequality is caused by God? What is false about thinking that God sends people into a certain race and places "spiritual restrictions" on them because they were "less valiant"--so false that, I believe, it interferes with the salvation of all those who believe it--whether black or white? Simply, as Stuart Pace pointed out, that such theology denies the "universal atonement" of Christ by telling blacks they did something wrong in the pre-existence but that they can neither know what they did nor repent of it. It thus introduces, against the many scriptures that claim the Atonement is universal and all are born innocent into life, the notion that there are differences, color-coded by race, in the plan of salvation.
Are All Alike Unto God? Prejudice Against Blacks And Women In Popular Mormon Thought
By Eugene England
Sunstone 14:2/19 (Apr 90)