The Priesthood and Temple Restriction

The restriction was not present at the founding of the movement, and the church now says so in its own published statement. Under Joseph Smith at least two Black men were ordained. Elijah Abel was ordained an elder in 1836 and a seventy shortly afterward, served missions, and held his office until his death in 1884. Q. Walker Lewis, a Black abolitionist in Massachusetts, was ordained an elder around 1843. Joseph Smith ran for president of the United States in 1844 on a platform that included compensated emancipation.

The change came under Brigham Young. In 1852, addressing the Utah territorial legislature, Young stated that men of Black African descent could not hold the priesthood, and the restriction hardened into settled policy over the following decades, extending in practice to the temple ordinances and therefore to the sealing on which exaltation depends. Explanations were offered afterward rather than at the outset, drawn from readings of the curse of Cain and of Ham in Genesis and from speculation about conduct in the premortal existence. None was ever presented as a revelation, and the absence of one became increasingly conspicuous.

Its administration produced genuine anguish. Missionary work in Brazil, where mixed ancestry was common and often undocumented, forced the church into genealogical investigations of converts that satisfied nobody, and the announcement of a temple at Sao Paulo in 1975 sharpened the problem to the point of unsustainability. Members of African descent joined the church throughout this period and remained in it without access to its central ordinances.

On the morning of 1 June 1978 the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles met in the upper room of the Salt Lake Temple. By the accounts later given by those present, Spencer W. Kimball, then president of the church, put the question to the quorum after long private prayer, and the assembled leaders reported a shared and unmistakable confirmation that the restriction should end. The decision was announced publicly on 9 June 1978 in a letter from the First Presidency stating that all worthy male members might be ordained without regard to race or colour, and that temple blessings were available to all. It was presented to a general conference on 30 September 1978 and sustained, and it stands in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 2.

What the announcement did not do was explain the restriction. For thirty-five years the church left the explanations of the past standing by not repudiating them, and they continued to circulate in manuals, in seminary classes and in family conversation. That ended in December 2013, when the church published its Gospel Topics essay on race and the priesthood. The essay states that the restriction began under Brigham Young, that no revelation is known to have established it, and that the church disavows the theories advanced in the past, naming among them the ideas that Black skin is a sign of divine disfavour or a curse, and that people were less valiant in a premortal life. It condemns all racism, past and present.

The essay is the tradition's own account and is cited here as such. It is also, by any reading, an unusual document for a church to publish about itself.