Note: between when I drafted this post and when I scheduled it to go live, Bro. Wilcox apologized for his statement. And it’s a real-deal kind of apology, not a squishy avoiding-blame one; in fact, it’s a model for one step of precisely what I hoped for. I’m still going to posting for two reasons. First, while apology is a critical part of repenting, it is not the only step. And second, I don’t think this was primarily an individual problem–there is an underlying institutional problem that his comments highlighted and his apology didn’t and couldn’t change. But I’m making some changes to what I previously wrote in light of his apology.
Last weekend, Bradley Wilcox, second counselor in the Young Men’s general presidency and associate teaching professor of ancient scripture at BYU-Provo, gave a youth fireside in Alpine, UT. Somewhere in the fireside he asked, rhetorically, why Black church members didn’t get the priesthood until 1978. (To be clear, his framing of the question is wrong: in the first decades of the church, a number of Black men received the priesthood; it wasn’t until 1852 that Brigham Young imposed the priesthood-and-temple ban on Black members.)
He responded to the question like this:
What? Brigham Young was a jerk? Members of the church were prejudiced? Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe instead of asking, “Why did the Blacks [sic] have to wait until 1978?” maybe what we should be asking is, “Why did the whites (and other races) have to wait until 1829?” One thousand eight hundred twenty-nine years they waited.
That statement is, well, not good. As in, it’s terribly, terribly bad and reflects some fundamentally racist ideas. Which, to his credit, he recognized, owned, and apologized for.
But while he is truly apologetic–and while he didn’t mean to cause harm—it still matters. Because he’s a church authority. And his statement about the priesthood and temple ban reflects both bad history and a racism that we have yet to root out from the church.
Look, to respond directly to him: the fact that the church withheld the priesthood and temple blessing from Black members between 1852 and 1978 was racist. The estimable Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “racist” means:
Prejudiced, antagonistic, or discriminatory towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized; expressing or characterized by racism. Also (esp. in early use): prejudiced, antagonistic, or discriminatory towards a person or people of another nationality.
Black members were not allowed to hold the priesthood or attend the temple during those 126 years because of their membership in a marginalized racial group.
And the fact that the priesthood had been removed from the earth for everybody for nearly two millennia is not a cogent analogy to the priesthood and temple ban. The exclusion from priesthood for those two thousand years was not based on individuals’ race (or nationality or gender or sexuality or any other personal characteristic). It was withheld from everybody.
In 1829, that changed. The priesthood was restored. And in 1829, there was only one restriction on holding the priesthood: gender. In 1852, as I said above, Brigham Young added another: race (or, rather, his 19th-century conception of race). Suddenly, priesthood was theoretically available, but because of race and gender, certain people were still excluded.
Add to that the fact that Wilcox’s statement minimizes the harm to Black individuals and instead focuses on the (not-) harm to white individuals.
But honestly, in the scheme of things, an individual church member trying to minimize past racism is bad, but wouldn’t warrant a blog post. There are, unfortunately but undeniably, full-blown racists among us.
But Wilcox is different: he’s a general officer of the church. And more than that: as a member of the Young Men’s general presidency, he’s directly responsible for what our teenage boys are learning and doing at church. And yet he instinctively fell back on racist ideas to protect a certain vision of prophetic infallibility.
So what should the church do? I originally wrote: “It absolutely, unquestionably, and immediately needs to apologize for his remarks and clarify that those are not the church’s beliefs. Wilcox, too, needs to apologize and repudiate what he said.”
And it looks like Wilcox did it! (And honestly, it’s not easy being publicly apologetic; look how many of those apologies are framed as, “I’m sorry if you took me the wrong way.” This apology doesn’t even hint at that direction at all.)
But here’s the thing: a sincere apology is a start, but it’s not enough. On a personal level, Wilcox has “committed to do better.” And I believe he will. But his statement wasn’t just a personal thing; it reflects the institution he represents and serves it. 1978 was 44 years ago, and while we abandoned the race-based ban on priesthood and temple, we very clearly haven’t abandoned the mythology of white superiority. And we haven’t taken to hear McConkie’s acknowledgement that church leaders were, in fact, wrong about Black people before and we should discard what they said. As recently as a decade ago, the church had to condemn racism in response to BYU professor Randy Bott digging up racist justifications for the same priesthood and temple ban.
And it’s not enough, apparently, for general authorities to decry racism. Hinckley did. Elder Cook did. President Nelson did. And yet even high-ranking church leaders are still falling short.
I suspect we can trace this failure to two sources. The first is, while the church decries racism in the present and the future, it does not recognize or repent of its past racism. And I frankly don’t know why; rhetorically we admit that our leaders are fallible. But church leaders are loathe to recognize actual fallibility in past leaders.
And that leads to the second source: I think many members don’t understand what racism is. Because we’re not actively excluding Black people, because we’re not hurling epithets at them, because we’re not physically assaulting them (or, at least, because most of us aren’t), we reason, we can’t be doing a racism. And because Brigham Young and John Taylor and all of the prophets up through Harold B. Lee were good people, and because racists are bad people, they couldn’t have been racist.
And that failure to recognize racism, both individually and institutionally, means we can’t even begin to root it out, to repent of the wrongs we’ve done.
It’s a problem that we can, and must, fix. But it’s one we actually need to confront. Periodic statements by church leaders that racism is bad are insufficient. The “Race and the Priesthood” Gospel Topics essay is great but it’s not enough. Wilcox’s fireside statements make clear that we need more, from top to bottom.
So what would I propose? Two things: first, the church needs to actively and deliberately teach church leaders (down to bishops, I’d argue, but at the very least anybody who qualifies to speak in Conference) how to recognize racism and avoid it. Not just in other people, but in themselves. After that, the church could provide leaders with anti-racist tools unique to our theology; it can teach them how to read the Book of Mormon as an anti-racist text. It can assign them to give a talk using those tools. It can otherwise help them understand the practice and theology of fighting racism.
It can’t do any of those things effectively, though, if it doesn’t first teach them to recognize racism, in even its sneakiest, most plausibly-deniable form. It won’t help to understand our additional, and critical, theology against racism if they assume that racism is only physical (and maybe verbal) violence perpetrated by objectively bad people.
And for the general membership? In 2023, rather than talking about Conference talks, the church should develop a “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” manual. We’re failing at the second great commandment. And we shouldn’t be. The year wouldn’t have to be devoted solely to rooting out racism, but confronting the church’s past and current institutional racism and weeding it out both of our church culture and our individual selves should be a significant part of it. (It turns out that I’ve had this idea before. And where it was pressing then and is even more pressing now.)
To the extent we claim to be God’s only true and living church, to ensure that He is well-pleased with us, we need to do better as a people and as an institution. We need to have faith that our members can handle the truth and can stay faithful in light of personal and institutional repentance. But above all, we need to repent. And to do that, we need to confront our past and our present and learn from it.
Back to Wilcox’s statement: was Brigham Young a jerk? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter in this context. One can be a jerk but not be racist. Similarly, one can be an entirely pleasant person an a virulent racist. But his second question matters: were church members, including Young, prejudiced? Without doubt. Did they do racist things? Absolutely.
I also have no doubt that by now Brigham Young has repented of his racism. And he needs the institutional church to allow that repentance to happen, to let him let go of it, rather than excusing and denying it and prolonging the process. I have no doubt he has regrets, and I have no doubt that the temple and priesthood ban is one of those regrets. So let’s follow Bro. Wilcox’s example and professed goal and move past the racism of our past and present (both individually and collectively) by recognizing it, repenting of it, and leaving it behind.
And while it would have been better if Bro. Wilcox had chosen in advance not to make the statement he did, I’m truly grateful that he’s setting a public example both of the need to repent of racism and how to approach that repentance.
Photo by Liz Falconer on Unsplash