Chapter 15: Living with Tension

The LDS Church lives with a tension: it would love to distance itself from the practices and beliefs that once put it on the margins of American society. At the same time, it cannot distance itself from those things without distancing itself from the foundations of its faith. The more it seeks to join the American mainstream, the more it undermines its own foundations. How does it continue to move into the mainstream without undermining its unique claims to authority that arise from the early period of its history? This is the tension that Mormons live with.

This tension is experienced most clearly in three areas.

The first has to do with polygamy. There is no greater embarrassment to the LDS Church than polygamy. Its practice in the church is historically undeniable. Probably the most popular rationale put forth for the practice of polygamy today is that it was necessary because there were so many more women than men during the pioneer period. The realities of frontier life were such that men took more than one wife as a way to offer protection to women.

In truth, the practice of polygamy was not a practical matter designed for the protection of pioneer women. It was very much a part of Mormon theology. In the 19th century, plural marriage was considered an important aspect of man’s ultimate goal of exaltation to godhood.

Polygamy is still very much a part of LDS Scripture. Doctrine and Covenants 132:61 states:

“If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.”

Mormons would love for polygamy to go away, but it won’t. Popular culture is fascinated by polygamy. There have been hit shows like Big Love and Sister Wives that American culture has been fascinated by. These programs entertain our culture, but there is a dark side to polygamy. Consider fundamentalist Mormons like Warren Jeffs, who was convicted and imprisoned in 2011 for his own marriages to underage women, as well as for arranging marriages between his adult male followers and underage girls.

There are still somewhere around 70,000 people in the Intermountain West involved in polygamy. It is a huge social problem. Mainstream Latter-day Saints find polygamy and its practice abhorrent. They look at polygamy and say, “This is not who we are.” They wish it would go away. The reason it will not go away is because they revere Joseph Smith as the prophet the Lord used to restore the one true church in these latter days. Joseph Smith also instituted and practiced polygamy.

That fact is so well documented that the LDS Church finally decided to openly acknowledge it. In 2014, the LDS Church produced essays admitting that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. Before these essays, Joseph Smith was portrayed in church materials as a loyal partner to his loving spouse, Emma. Many Mormons, especially those with polygamous ancestors, were aware that Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, practiced polygamy when he led the LDS Church to Utah. Many did not know the full truth about Joseph Smith.

One lifelong Mormon woman named Emily Jensen, a blogger and editor from Farmington, Utah, put it this way after the church produced the essays:

“Joseph Smith was presented to me as a practically perfect prophet, and this is true for a lot of people. This is not the church I grew up with; this is not the Joseph Smith I love.”

The problem for the Church at this point was made succinctly about 20 years ago when a fundamentalist Mormon named Tom Green was arrested for crimes related to polygamy. He was a public-relations embarrassment for the church when he went on the Phil Donahue Show and talked openly about his polygamous family.

During his trial, he said something that puts the whole issue of polygamy in perspective. He said, “You honor Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and you hate me, yet I am only doing the things that they have done.” How can you put the present-day antipathy toward polygamists together with the reverence shown for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, who were prolific polygamists?

The next area of tension for the LDS Church has to do with the priesthood ban on Black men prior to June 1, 1978. Before this time, Black men could not receive the priesthood in the LDS Church. The priesthood means everything in Mormonism. The priesthood holds the keys to heaven. All faithful males can begin holding the Aaronic Priesthood at the age of 12. That means that a 12-year-old deacon had more status and rank in the church than a faithful adult Black man. The result was that the church had very few Black members at the time.

Why did the LDS Church change? In the ’60s, our nation went through the Civil Rights Movement. Many Americans became aware of this ban on the priesthood and objected. There were protests at BYU athletic contests. Schools like Arizona State and Stanford refused to schedule BYU for athletic contests. As missionaries knocked on doors, this view of race became a major stumbling block to getting their message to people.

The pressure to change grew to the point where, on June 1, 1978, Spencer Kimball ended the ban on Black men holding the priesthood. I had a neighbor who said that this was one of the happiest days of his life. He said that people were driving around Provo honking their horns and driving with their lights on. Finally, this great accusation against the Mormon character—the charge of racism—could be removed. No longer did they have to carry the burden of explaining the church’s position on race.

We need to be clear that Mormons are not the only church that has had to account for a history of racism. In 1997, I was asked to speak at a forum on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Utah Valley University about evangelicals and race. I spoke about a trip that I had taken recently to Chicago, where I had visited Wheaton College, a leading evangelical university. Wheaton’s roots were in the abolition movement. It had ties to the Underground Railroad. I felt grateful that evangelicals had been at the forefront of the abolitionist movement to end slavery. In that sense, I was proud of my evangelical roots.

There is another side to this story. My family is from the South. I spoke of my Southern roots and of traveling back to the South to be with my family as a young man and hearing my uncles say things about Black people that were shockingly racist. The saddest thing of all was to see how the church in the South was segregated and how white Christians used the Bible to justify their racism.

How do I explain racism in the church? I do not in any way rationalize it or try to explain it away. I can only condemn it. Racism is a sin. There is no biblical justification for it. One reason I am an evangelical is because we do not appeal to any human authority that speaks for God. We have the capacity to face up to Scripture and admit it when we have been wrong.

After I finished giving my talk, a BYU professor named Roger Keller stood up and used the opportunity to talk about the end of the ban on Blacks receiving the priesthood in 1978. He was tasked with answering the question, “Why was there a ban on Blacks in the priesthood in the first place?” His justification was that, in a way, the Lord was protecting Black people by denying them the priesthood up until 1978.

He explained that the Lord knew that there was racism in the church. White people in the church needed to be brought along to the point where the Lord would be assured that they would welcome Black people into their midst with kindness. Finally, when people were ready, the revelation giving Blacks the priesthood was given to President Spencer Kimball.

After listening to this explanation, an LDS professor from UVU stood up in the back of the room and said, “Roger, why can’t we just admit that we were wrong?” His response was, “You know why we can’t.” The reason that he could not condemn those racist doctrines is because those doctrines regarding race had been taught by LDS leaders and church presidents. For example, Brigham Young said, “When blacks receive the priesthood, that will be the end of the priesthood.”

For the most part, Mormons look at the change that took place in 1978 and say that it does not matter what anyone said before then. What matters is what the church teaches now. The problem with that is specifically what was said about race before 1978. In Doctrine of Salvation, Volume 1, page 61, Joseph F. Smith, the sixth president of the church, wrote, “There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we had an estate before we came here and were obedient more or less to the laws that were given there.”

Joseph F. Smith was talking about a commonly held belief. The prohibition on Blacks and the priesthood was based on what happened in the pre-existence. Mormons believe in a pre-existence where there was a war between the spirits who followed Jesus and His plan to save and the spirits who followed Lucifer. Those who fought with Lucifer became demons. Those who followed Jesus came to this earth and were given light-skinned bodies. There were also those who were less valiant. These received bodies with dark skin. Because these spirits were less valiant in the pre-existence, they were denied the priesthood on earth.

I saw this tension played out in front of my eyes in the early 1990s when I gave a talk on Understanding Mormonism at the Hill Air Force Base Chapel in Ogden. At that time, I brought up the issue of Blacks and the ban on the priesthood and attributed it to the belief that Blacks had been less valiant in the pre-existence. A young Mormon college professor reacted to this and said that I had misrepresented LDS beliefs. Interestingly, afterward, an LDS Air Force chaplain colonel took me aside and told me that what I had explained about Blacks and the pre-existence was precisely what Mormons believed.

It was not just the words of individual prophets that provided the foundation for those beliefs. The Mormon Scriptures themselves have things to say about race and righteousness. A number of passages in the Book of Mormon speak of dark skin as a curse for sins, as opposed to the “white and delightsome” appearance of the righteous (1 Nephi 12:23; 1 Nephi 13:15; 2 Nephi 5:21; Jacob 3:8–9; 3 Nephi 2:14–15; 2 Nephi 30:6). Once again, there is a great tension here. As the LDS Church seeks to accommodate and become a part of the mainstream, it finds itself in conflict with the early prophets of the church and the Scriptures that the LDS Church reveres.

There is one more way that this tension between the early beliefs of Mormonism and the desire to be mainstream has played out. This one is theological and has to do with the nature of God. Joseph Smith expounded on the nature of God in a funeral sermon he gave about three months before he was killed. It is called the King Follett Discourse. In it, he stated that, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the church, simplified this view of God by writing the following couplet: “As man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become.”

Clearly, this view of God was quite different from the God of historic Christianity, which teaches that God has always been God. In 1997, a book was written called How Wide the Divide. It was an exchange of ideas between an LDS scholar, Dr. Stephen Robinson from BYU, and Dr. Craig Blomberg, an evangelical professor from Denver Seminary.

In the book, Dr. Robinson confirms the historic Mormon view of God. On page 87, Robinson writes, “…it is the official teaching of the LDS Church that God the Father has a physical body (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22). The belief that God the Father was once a human being rests mainly on two technically uncanonized sources (sermons of Joseph Smith and Lorenzo Snow) which have, however, in effect become normative.” He was confirming the historic LDS doctrine of eternal progression.

The same year that How Wide the Divide was published, Gordon B. Hinckley, the President of the LDS Church, was interviewed by Richard Ostling, the religion editor for Time Magazine. This was at a time when the LDS Church was looking forward to hosting the Olympics in 2002 and was receiving a lot of international attention. This was an opportunity to erase some stereotypes and put the church in a whole different light.

Richard Ostling, as a part of that interview, asked President Hinckley, “Was God the Father once a man as we are?” President Hinckley answered, “I do not know that we teach it. I don’t know that we emphasize it. I haven’t heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don’t know the exact circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it but I don’t know a lot about it and I don’t think others know a lot about it.”

After the interview became public, there was a reaction within the church because it seemed that President Hinckley was backing away from a doctrine that the church had always taught. People reacted to such an extent that, at the next general conference, President Hinckley felt compelled to say, “You need not worry that I do not understand some matters of doctrine. I think I understand them thoroughly. Your prophet knows what we believe about God.”

Why would President Hinckley seemingly distance the LDS Church from the traditional LDS understanding of the nature of God? The doctrine of eternal progression was something that set Latter-day Saints outside of the Christian mainstream. President Hinckley, in his effort to go mainstream, downplayed a doctrine that LDS people had been taught their whole lives.

The lesson here is that Mormons want to move in the direction of traditional Christianity but can only go so far without undermining their foundations. Mormons want to change but have come to realize that they can only change so much.