Race & the Priesthood — a Reversal
Few chapters in Latter-day Saint history are more painful, more revealing, or more necessary to discuss honestly than race and the priesthood.
This is not merely a story about an old administrative policy. In Latter-day Saint theology, priesthood authority is central to church government, sacred ordinances, temple worship, family sealings, and the blessings connected to exaltation. For much of LDS history, men of Black African descent were denied ordination to that priesthood, and Black men and women were denied participation in temple endowment and sealing ordinances. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay acknowledges that “from the mid-1800s until 1978” this restriction was in place.
The question is not whether the reversal happened. It did. The question is what that reversal means.
Was this a divinely timed revelation correcting a painful limitation that faithful leaders had waited upon God to remove? Was it a policy shaped by nineteenth-century racial assumptions and later defended with theological explanations that the modern Church no longer accepts? Or does the story expose a deeper problem with the LDS claim that its prophets uniquely speak for God in matters of priesthood, temple access, and saving ordinances?
A fair treatment must avoid two errors. It should not pretend the LDS Church has never addressed this history. It has. But it should also not minimize the seriousness of a restriction that touched the very heart of LDS religious life.
Historical Background/Context
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830 in a United States deeply shaped by racial hierarchy, slavery, segregation, and anti-Black prejudice. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay acknowledges that racial distinctions and prejudice were not only common but “customary” among many white Americans during the nineteenth century, including in religious life.
In the earliest years of the movement, the situation was not yet the later blanket restriction. Black people could be baptized into the Church, and a small number of Black men were ordained to the LDS priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. The Church’s official essay states that “there is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.”
Elijah Abel, also spelled Elijah Able in some historical records, is the best-known example. The Joseph Smith Papers records that he was baptized in 1832, ordained an elder in January 1836, and ordained a member of the Third Quorum of the Seventy in December 1836.
This early history makes the later restriction especially significant. The ban was not simply “how Mormonism had always been.” It developed after the Church’s beginning.
The decisive shift came under Brigham Young. According to Edward L. Kimball’s study in BYU Studies, the first known direct statement by a Church President denying priesthood to Black men came from Brigham Young in February 1849. In 1852, Young publicly announced before the Utah territorial legislature that men of Black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood.
The restriction continued under later Church presidents. Its practical effect expanded beyond ordination: Black Latter-day Saints were also restricted from receiving the temple endowment and from being married, or sealed, in the temple.
That means the restriction affected more than leadership roles. In LDS theology, temple ordinances are bound up with exaltation, eternal family relationships, and the highest blessings of salvation. To be excluded from the endowment and sealing ordinances was to be placed at the edge of the very system the Church proclaimed as restored fullness.
The lives of Elijah Abel and Jane Elizabeth Manning James reveal this tension vividly.
Abel retained his priesthood office, but when he later sought additional temple blessings, his request was denied. The Church’s Gospel Topics essay notes that Abel petitioned to receive his temple endowment in 1879, but the request was not granted.
Jane Elizabeth Manning James tells the other side of the same sorrow. Born free in Connecticut, she converted to the LDS Church in the 1840s, traveled to Nauvoo, knew Joseph and Emma Smith, and later crossed the plains to Utah. She remained faithful for decades. Between 1884 and 1904, she repeatedly contacted Church leaders seeking permission to receive her temple endowment and to be sealed. She was allowed to perform baptisms for deceased relatives, but she did not receive the temple endowment or family sealings during her lifetime. Those ordinances were performed on her behalf in 1979.
These were not abstract theological cases. They were human beings: believers, pioneers, servants, missionaries, mothers, fathers, and disciples according to their own confession. Any honest discussion must keep their faces in view.
The Explanations Once Given
Over time, LDS leaders and members offered various explanations for the restriction. Some appealed to the so-called “curse of Cain.” Others argued that Black people had been less valiant in a premortal existence. Some connected the restriction to lineage theories or assumptions about divine timing.
The modern LDS Church no longer accepts these explanations. Its official Gospel Topics essay states that “none of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.” It also says the Church today disavows theories that Black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, that it reflects unrighteousness in premortal life, that interracial marriage is sinful, or that Black people or people of any race or ethnicity are inferior.
This is an important admission. It means that explanations once taught, repeated, and defended by Latter-day Saint authorities are now rejected by the institution itself.
But that admission also creates a serious theological question. If past leaders could teach racial explanations in connection with priesthood and temple exclusion, and if those explanations are now disavowed, how should members evaluate prophetic authority when leaders speak with confidence about controversial doctrines?
The issue is not merely that some nineteenth-century Mormons held nineteenth-century prejudices. Many did. So did many other Americans and many other religious groups. The deeper issue is that these prejudices became attached to priesthood, temple access, and divine authority within a church claiming modern prophets and restored revelation.
The 1978 Reversal
On June 8, 1978, the First Presidency announced that President Spencer W. Kimball had received a revelation extending priesthood and temple blessings without racial restriction. The declaration was later accepted by the Church and canonized as Official Declaration 2 in the Doctrine and Covenants.
Official Declaration 2 announced that “every faithful, worthy man in the Church” could receive the priesthood and enjoy, with his loved ones, “every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple.” It further stated that all worthy male members could be ordained “without regard for race or color.”
The historical context is also significant. By the twentieth century, the LDS Church was becoming increasingly global. The restriction caused practical and moral difficulties as the Church expanded into places such as Brazil, Nigeria, and Ghana. The São Paulo Brazil Temple, announced in 1975, highlighted the problem: faithful Black and mixed-ancestry Latter-day Saints had contributed to a temple they would not have been allowed to enter under the existing restriction. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay says their sacrifices, together with conversions in Nigeria and Ghana, “moved Church leaders.”
This does not prove that social pressure alone caused the reversal. It does show that the restriction had become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the Church’s global mission. Even official LDS materials acknowledge that as the Church grew worldwide, its mission to teach all nations “seemed increasingly incompatible” with the priesthood and temple restrictions.
For believing Latter-day Saints, 1978 is remembered as a sacred revelation. For critics, it looks like a long-overdue correction of an unjust practice. Historically, it was both a landmark moment and a reversal of prior practice.
Different Ways Latter-day Saints Understand It
Faithful Latter-day Saints often frame the 1978 declaration as evidence that God still guides the Church through living prophets. In this view, the restriction was painful and difficult to understand, but the Lord revealed the change in His own time. The emphasis falls on continuing revelation, prophetic patience, and the eventual extension of blessings to all worthy members.
A more critical interpretation sees the matter differently. From this perspective, the restriction arose from nineteenth-century racial assumptions, became institutionalized under Brigham Young, was defended for generations with theological explanations now rejected, and was finally reversed when moral, social, and global missionary pressures became impossible to ignore.
A third view, held by some thoughtful Latter-day Saints and outside historians, tries to distinguish between the restriction itself and the explanations attached to it. This view may say: we do not know exactly why the restriction began, we should reject racist theories, and we should be humble about what past leaders misunderstood. The modern Church has taken a similar approach by stating that past theories are not official doctrine and that current leaders condemn racism.
But even this more careful view leaves hard questions unresolved. If the origin is unclear, why was the restriction enforced for so long? If the explanations were not revealed, why were they allowed to circulate with such authority? If the priesthood and temple are essential in LDS theology, why would access to them be racially restricted for generations without a clear revealed foundation?
These are not cheap questions. They are the kind of questions historical honesty requires.
A Christian Theological Response
From a historic Christian perspective, the restriction stands in deep tension with the New Testament’s vision of the people of God.
In Acts 10, Peter learns that God shows no partiality. In Galatians 3:28, Paul declares that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. In Ephesians 2, Christ breaks down the dividing wall of hostility and creates one new humanity in Himself. The apostolic witness does not erase ethnicity, but it does destroy ethnic hierarchy in the household of God.
To be clear, the New Testament has its own categories of ordained ministry, church order, and pastoral authority. Christians debate those questions. But the apostolic Church gives no precedent for withholding spiritual office or sacramental blessing from a people group because of Black African descent.
This is why the LDS restriction is not a minor historical embarrassment. It touches revelation, authority, scripture, race, salvation, and the credibility of prophetic claims.
If a church claims restored authority from God, then the use of that claimed authority must be examined. The question is not whether God can guide His people over time. Historic Christianity gladly confesses that God corrects, sanctifies, and leads His Church. The question is whether a claimed prophet can bind generations under a racial priesthood and temple restriction, offer or permit explanations now disavowed, and still be treated as a uniquely reliable mouthpiece for God.
That question cannot be answered by simply saying, “The Church changed.” The change is precisely what requires interpretation.
What the LDS Church Says Today
The modern LDS Church condemns racism and teaches that all people are children of God. Its Gospel Topics essay says Church leaders today “unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”
Those statements should be acknowledged fairly. They are real. They are public. They are far better than defending the old theories.
At the same time, disavowing past explanations is not the same as fully explaining how those explanations became so influential. Condemning racism today does not erase the fact that Black Latter-day Saints lived, served, waited, and died under a restriction that denied them blessings their own church taught were sacred and eternal.
A faithful historical memory must do both: recognize present correction and refuse to sentimentalize the past.
Why This History Still Demands Attention
This history forces a larger question about religious authority.
Every Christian tradition has sins in its history. Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and Latter-day Saints all have examples of cowardice, compromise, prejudice, and failure. Honest Apologist should never pretend otherwise. Christians should be the first to confess that human beings can misuse Scripture, baptize cultural prejudice, and confuse inherited assumptions with the voice of God.
But the LDS claim is distinct. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not merely claim to be one Christian tradition among others. It claims to be the restored Church, led by living prophets, possessing restored priesthood authority, and administering ordinances necessary for exaltation.
That makes the priesthood and temple restriction especially serious. If a Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, or Orthodox leader defended racial prejudice, that would be sinful and shameful. But if LDS prophets and apostles restricted access to priesthood and temple blessings for more than a century, while claiming divine authority to govern the restored Church, the problem reaches into the structure of the claim itself.
The reversal of 1978 was a mercy to those who had been excluded. But it also remains a wound in the LDS story — a wound that cannot be healed by vague appeals to mystery.
Reflection
There is a way to study this history that produces only anger. There is also a way to study it that produces only embarrassment and silence. Neither is enough.
The Christian response should be truthful, sober, and humane. We should grieve for those who were told to wait outside doors that should never have been closed to them. We should honor the perseverance of people like Elijah Abel and Jane Manning James, whose lives were more than footnotes in a controversy. We should refuse every theology that turns skin into stigma, ancestry into exclusion, or prejudice into revelation.
But we should also look higher than the failure of any institution.
In Christ, the dividing wall has been broken. The gospel does not gather the nations by making them less themselves, nor by ranking them before God, but by reconciling them in the crucified and risen Lord. Around His throne, the redeemed are not a single tribe pretending history never happened. They are “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” worshiping the Lamb who was slain.
That vision is not a public relations correction. It is not a late institutional adjustment. It is the inheritance of the gospel itself.
The Church must always be measured by Christ. Every prophet, priesthood claim, council, confession, and institution must stand beneath His judgment. Where men have excluded, Christ calls. Where men have ranked, Christ humbles. Where men have wounded, Christ heals. And where history exposes the poverty of human authority, the glory of the true Shepherd becomes all the more radiant.