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Book Review: “First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple”

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Brown-First-Principles-Cover-Final-Web-HiresBy Russell Stevenson

Note: The parenthetical citations reflect the enumeration found in the Kindle eBook version of this volume

Mormonism has never been merely a set of philosophical tenets, alienated from the material world. It is a religion of the here, the now, a religion that collapses the space between man and the cosmos, between the other-worldly and the earthly, and above all, between human beings. “This is my work and my glory,” the Christ of Mormonism declares, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” The stated purpose of Mormon project is more practical than ideological. Its success, the God of Mormonism declared, depends not on the propagation of tenets but upon the salvation of souls.

In First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple, Samuel M. Brown offers up a doctrinal exegesis of Joseph Smith’s fourth article of faith as stated in his 1842 letter to John Wentworth. Primary children the world over can recite the article by memory: “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by Immersion for the Remission of Sins; and fourth, Laying on of hands for the Gift of the Holy Ghost.” Primarily intended as a devotional text, the book could find a comfortable home in a church service, or a family home evening. [Read more…] about Book Review: “First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple”

A Response to Kristy Money’s Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed

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The LDS doctrine of
“The same revelation that Money wants us to ignore also provides the proof text that gives Latter-day Saint couples hope for an eternal union and companionship.”

By Russell Stevenson

In Kristy Money’s recent op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune, she urges seminary teachers and parents to “ignore [the] lesson altogether” on Doctrine and Covenants 132—which includes a discussion of the rationales undergirding Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy. By calling for seminary teachers to ignore section 132, Money would have us silence the teaching of an important aspect of Latter-day Saint history. While section 132 has often raised difficulties for even the most committed of Latter-day Saints, the best solution to these anxieties is not increased ignorance but education, knowledge, and understanding.

Over the past decade, faithful Latter-day Saint historians—men and women who have spent years in the archives—have made venerable strides in creating the kind of faith community that can bear rigorous inquiries into its own past and appreciate its own relationship to broader political contexts. Johann von Goethe warned that “those who cannot draw conclusions/From three thousand years of learning/Stay naïve in dark confusions” and go “day to day undiscerning.”[1] For a people as historically conscious as the Latter-day Saints, Goethe’s poetic injunction holds no less true in matters of the past two centuries.

The study of history ought not be a discipline given to validating our assumptions or even our lived experiences; it demands constant vigilance to ensure that we are not projecting onto the primary sources what we want them to say. When we do, we are not pursuing history but crafting mythologies and perpetuating morality tales, useful though they may be. Immanuel Kant’s quip functions in reverse as well: simply because an interpretation is useful does not mean that it is true.[2]

Money urges seminary teachers to “simply teach that Joseph Smith began practicing polygamy in the early 1830s,” that they should “teach the facts without the spin.” Serious historical inquiries demand that we seek to capture a sense for the man or woman’s values and motivations whether the subject of study are activists such as Harvey Milk and Jane Addams, dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, or religious figures such as Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith. Omitting Joseph Smith’s conviction in his own divinely-sanctioned mission does not present the kind of candid history that I assume Money wants to see. How can one seriously broach the historical Joseph Smith without acknowledging that he believed himself to be a Prophet, the very mouthpiece of God? “This is eternal lives,” he dictated in regards to the polygamy doctrine, “to know the only wise and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent.” Joseph Smith enjoined readers to “receive ye, therefore, my law.” Transparency demands that educators of all stripes not merely state that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy but also, explore why he did as well.

Moreover, the same revelation that Money wants us to ignore also provides the proof text that gives Latter-day Saint couples hope for an eternal union and companionship. Whether one wishes to embrace or dismiss the doctrine of eternal marriage, it is undeniable that the Latter-day Saint marriage ritual and its foundational text provide peace, comfort, and fulfillment to couples across the globe. Surely, Money recognizes the kind of emotional pain that would come as a result.

I share Money’s desires to eradicate environments that foster justifications for sexual exploitation. And the best weapons against these evils are not ignorance and taboo but awareness and candor. Latter-day Saints must seek out their history on the grassroots level; then and only then, can the Mormon community hope to make meaning of their rich, courageous, troubling, and inspiring past.

[1]: Albrecht Schone, “Faust—today,” in Hans Schulte, John Noyes, and Pia Kleber, Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18–19.

[2]: In his Lectures on Logic, Immanuel Kant said that “many things can be true and still useful to man. Not all truth is useful.” See Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43.

Russell Stevenson is the author of For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013.

Articles of Faith 13: Russell Stevenson FairMormon Conference Follow Up – Coming to Grips With Brigham Young and Race

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Russell Stevenson
Written by Russell Stevenson

That Brigham Young struggled with and eventually succumbed to racial insensitivities is an undisputed matter of the historical record. From the perspective of not a few nineteenth-century Americans, not to mention most anyone born in the last 50 years, Brigham Young peddled in racial rhetoric and promoted policies that bode poorly not only with our sensibilities but also with the spirit of the Book of Mormon: “All are alike unto God, both black and white, bond and free,” a vision established for the Saints in 1830, not 1978.

I view the races of mankind as fundamentally equal in privilege and love before God. Embracing the gospel as I do, I cannot believe otherwise. Few things bring me as much pain as reading that a man whom I want to revere could say things so far below his calling. So how can such a man be worthy of my respect, let alone my sustaining vote?

Were the Saints merely a product of their time? Perhaps. But so was Rees E. Price, a Mormon convert in Cincinnati in 1842 who had committed much of his time and resources to the absolute destruction of the slave system in America. Though he left the faith shortly after his baptism, he never left behind his principles that slavery was a blight so evil that he could not find words strong enough to condemn it. However much a radical he was, the Latter-day Saint message resonated with him and his anti-slavery principles. For Price, Mormonism need not be moderate on matters of race, however much Missouri had frightened Church leaders.

As I place the finishing touches on my forthcoming book, For the Cause of Righteousness, I have had occasion to reflect on how I view the man most closely associated with the priesthood restriction: Brigham Young. A man who succumbed to a weakness that the Saints are only beginning to overcome. Unlike Price, Young endorsed slavery, albeit with reservations. While politics likely played a role in Young’s support for it, he would have found himself in good company had he chosen to oppose it outright. How could Mormonism not only produce men with such differing ideologies but with one as its prophet and another as its apostate? Even by standards known and accessible in mid-nineteenth-century America, it is hard to explain away racial rhetoric when anti-slavery activists such as Price, William Lloyd Garrison, and Angelina Grimke were successfully meeting a much higher standard–––and paying a heavy price for it.

The meaning of the word sustain can provide some answers. Drawing from an old French root, sostenir, the word originally meant “to hold up, bear, suffer” or “endure.” It is noteworthy that sustenance also derives from a French term referring to “support [and] aid.” Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines it as “to bear; to uphold; to support; as a foundation sustains the superstructure; pillars.”

How have I worked through my support for Brigham Young? The dismissal of Brigham Young based on racism follows this line of logic:

1) Brigham Young said racially offensive things–––things worthy of our condemnation.

2) Brigham Young is no longer trustworthy as a prophet.

3) Prophetic authority is no longer trustworthy

Let’s look at these individually. 

1) Brigham Young said racially offensive things–––things worthy of our condemnation.

Yes, and we have a moral obligation to come to grips with it. For a fuller discussion of the details of this claim, please listen to FairMormon conference talk accompanying this blog post.

2) Brigham Young is no longer trustworthy as a prophet.

I endeavor to see everybody—living and dead alike—in the complicated way that God sees them. And people are complicated. Their motives elude us. We think we know who a person is, and then we learn that they are better—or worse—people than we ever considered them to be.

That tremendously talented people have deep-seated weakness is a familiar theme in literature. We even have a body part named after one: the Achilles’ heel, named after the part of Achilles’ body left untouched by the waters of the river Styx–––waters capable of rendering anything it touched invulnerable.  Why do we have such a difficult time accepting the notion today?

At this juncture, it is tempting to rattle off all the biblical figures who cast national aspersions on peoples (and they number not a few: Jonah, Peter, and even Paul, to name a meager few). But one should hope that mankind is a little bit more tolerant in 2014 than it was in first-century C.E. And given the hope and vision of my faith at the outset, I have no choice but to look at racial discrimination in its midst with a critical eye.

But was Brigham Young the one who started it all? As discussed in the presentation, Brigham Young tried to include a black priesthood holder, William McCary at Winter Quarters, in spite of the fact that he had married a white girl, Lucy Stanton, whose family was well-regarded (a taboo that could win a lynching in some places). After Brigham Young left Winter Quarters in early April, McCary experimented with (presumably unauthorized) polygamy, a social transgression that the already on-edge Winter Quarters Mormons could not abide. Word spread, and the Saints formed a mob to chase the McCarys out. It was in this context that local presiding officer Parley P. Pratt first declared that having Hamitic ancestry could disqualify a man (particularly McCary) from holding priesthood office. When Brigham Young returned that December, he learned of McCary’s offenses. Young’s jocularity warmth toward the young black man quickly soured. When he further heard of an interracial Mormon couple bearing a child in Massachusetts, his feelings descended into a kind of racial seizure. The meeting minutes reveal a man struggling with deeply-seated contradictions: a gospel vision he knew to be true versus entrenched views about the propriety of interracial couples bearing offspring.

But did not Brigham Young cite a revelation years later? In February 1852, he pointed to his position as prophet in declaring that African-Americans were not eligible to hold the priesthood. That he believed his statement to be inspired is certain; he knew well Joseph Smith’s comment that “a prophet is only a prophet when he is acting as such” (Link).

We also have the fortune of knowing how revelation happens in this Church, and it’s a process Brigham Young had participated in as well (e.g. D&C 136). So whatever his beliefs or justification, he did not follow the standard protocol for ratifying his comments as a binding revelation upon the Saints. As Apostle Neil L. Andersen has said, true doctrine is found in statements approved by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “It is not hidden in an obscure paragraph of one talk. True principles are taught frequently and by many” (Link). For the next six generations, the Saints could never quite decide what the priesthood restriction was about. Was it the curse of Cain? The curse of Ham? Premortal failures? Or maybe the Saints just didn’t know? Calling the priesthood ban revelatory is a claim that fails the Andersen test with flying colors. And, as President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has said so clearly, “[T]here have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine” (Link).

Complicating matters further is the role that Brigham Young’s fellow travelers played in developing the priesthood restriction. In many ways, modern Mormons have accepted the easy trope that Brigham Young ruled the Mormon people with total control, molding their thoughts, feelings, visions, and actions in every particular.

But there is a problem with this paradigm: its usable simplicity is more than overwhelmed by its inaccuracy. In other words, it isn’t true.

At the time Young was looking McCary in the eye as he promised him that he had a safe place in Mormonism in spite of the Saints’ flurry of racial epithets, Young was only beginning to win the full confidence of a community still mourning Joseph’s death. Even Young himself confided in other members that he might not ever live up to Joseph’s legacy. “I feel my weakness, my bitterness. I hurt in the Almighty,” he told his Brethren in May 1847. “I shall yet be a Mormon.”  Young struggled to keep the Saints on-board with his initiatives. When he tried to consolidate his control over the Saints in spring 1846, he felt it necessary to threaten those who resisted with a “slap of revelation” if they would not obey. But his efforts failed him when the Saints waffled on his initiative to head for the mountains in summer 1846 (Link).

That Brigham Young supported blacks holding the priesthood as late as March 1847 is a clearly documented point. So who made the shift first? Brigham Young was well on his way to the Great Basin while McCary was scandalizing the Saints. Apostles Parley P. Pratt and Orson Hyde both spoke of his sexual escapades as a point of high-profile spectacle. Those few who did support McCary–––and they were few indeed–––were considered low-browed. Hyde compared the sectarian James J. Strang favorably to them. At least Strang was an “honorable imposter.” Pratt (for the first time, incidentally) connected race to a priesthood restriction: “[T]his Black Man . . . has got the blood of Ham in him which linage was cursed as regards the Priesthood.” Perhaps, it was for the best, Hyde concluded, as it was “taking away the tares who were his kindred spirits.” McCary had so enraged the Saints from lay to leader that apostasy and dissent had been cast as cheap, low-browed “black religion” along the order of what McCary peddled. While Brigham Young was declaring the Great Basin to be “the place,” the Saints had worked themselves into a frenzy about eradicating the black influence from their midst. Whatever the depth of Brigham Young’s commitment to black inclusion in March 1847, it was more than overwhelmed by the collective action of the Pratt, Hyde, and others to ensure that blackness was rooted out of Zion. Though they no longer faced the racial politics of Missouri during which locals so readily associated them with the black population, they continued to deal with Missouri’s ghosts. McCary represented exactly the reason they had lost their homeland some fourteen years earlier, and they were not ready to forgive and forget.

It is a messy narrative, and a painfully human one. A prophet can only be a prophet when the people want prophecy and expansiveness. Prophethood is not the unlimited capacity to compel a people to the Lord’s will, no matter the circumstances. The Lord allows his children to wander in the wilderness when they refuse to accept the greater truths he has prepared for them. It’s the story of how generally good Saints allowed themselves to countenance the great sin of the age–––slavery–––in spite of their having started out with such a noble vision of racial equality in the kingdom of God. In the Saints’ push to survive in the racially-tumultuous waters of nineteenth-century America, they adopted the very prejudices their gospel vision was designed to protect against.

3) Prophetic authority is no longer trustworthy.

As a child, I sat in a seminary class where the teacher handed out brownies and watched us greedily devour them, only to have him tell us that he had put a cockroach in the mix. I had heard the schtick before, but those around me gagged in disgust. “But it was a small cockroach,” he assured us. “Why are you making such a big deal out of it?” It was a lesson on the media, of course, and intended to teach us that even a “little bit” of inappropriate material makes the whole film, book, or song undesirable.

But imagine if we actually made that a motto for life? Imagine if we discarded a man or woman because they had a little–––or, in some cases, more than a little–––dirt in them. It might be a colorful way of teaching about good media, but it’s also a good way to reinforce self-righteousness and intolerance of others’ weaknesses. It certainly wasn’t the approach Jesus Christ took when he rubbed shoulders with lepers and the poor. He certainly was willing to overlook the hatred that Simon the Zealot harbored (not to be confused with the Zealot party that arose in later years) for all things Roman. Jesus happily entrusted Matthew with responsibilities of the kingdom, even if Matthew, who collected taxes for the Romans, collaborated in the oppression Simon had committed his life to opposing. When Jesus commissioned these men to take the lead in establishing his kingdom on earth, both had considerable prejudices to grapple with. And when Jesus told the story of the Samaritan kind enough to care for the dying man by the road, he chose his characters strategically, knowing full well that his listeners would recoil at the thought of a Samaritan being anything other than a disgusting example of the ills of racial intermarriage. After all, when locals wanted to hurl an easy insult at Jesus, they simply asked, “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?” (John 8:48) Though he lived by the standard of perfection, he worked with radicals and bureaucrats alike, despite their deep-seated flaws.

If we dismissed people based on such character flaws, imagine which luminaries we would need to ignore. If Reverend Ralph Abernathy and most reports are to be believed, Martin Luther King, Jr. had serious problem with marital fidelity. What’s more, he certainly plagiarized a large portion of his dissertation. Malcolm X had a penchant for violent rhetoric, but he helped the black community to articulate a more assertive voice after generations of oppression. Yet I would count them among the inspired leaders of their times in their part of the Lord’s vineyard.

Faithful members need not defend, excuse, ignore, or even deflect the racial thinking of our fathers, and it should pain us when we hear of it. But owning a deep-seated flaw in our past is a very different thing from trying to burn the Church to the ground. Our history can be not only a powerful story of faith, love, and triumph, but also, as Terryl Givens has said, a “troubling morality tale” that reveals “the need for eternal vigilance in negotiating a faith that must never be unmoored from humaneness.”

References:

Neil L. Andersen, “Trial of Your Faith,” October 2012 General Conference.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Come, Join with Us,” October 2013 General Conference.

General Meeting Minutes, in Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, DVD 18.

Joseph Smith, Journal, www.josephsmithpapers.org.

Russell Stevenson, Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables (Afton, WY: PrintVision, 2013).

Russell Stevenson is the author of Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables and For The Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2014 as well as several articles on race, sexuality, and politics in publications such as the Journal of Mormon History, Dialogue, and Oxford University Press’s American National Biography series.