Can you imagine being inside the room for 1978 revelation? The journals of Marion D Hanks take us there when the 1978 revelation was announced to the Quorum of 70.
We will also discuss the 1969 statement by the Apostles and most of the First Presidency affirming the ban. Dr Matt Harris takes us behind the scenes to discuss the statement affirms a ban from temple & priesthood for black members and claiming the reasons were known only to God. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/
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Marion D. Hanks
GT 00:41 So another surprise. I felt like, because of our previous interview, I knew a lot of what you were going to say, but there were still surprises. I was [surprised by] the amount of correspondence that you got with Marion D. Hanks–now he’s a former Seventy, former General Authority.[1] He’s passed away, and I had heard from Margaret Young and some others that he was very instrumental and very progressive, for lack of a better word with regards to race. But I was shocked at how much correspondence you got from Marion D. Hanks. So could you introduce them and also say, how you got your hands on so much materia?
Matt 01:36 Yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. I get asked this a lot, and let me answer the broader question, which is, how I got access to this material. Then I’ll tell you some great things about Elder Hanks. So as a historian, I only want to write on things where I can get access to the best records. I always liken it to a Thanksgiving metaphor that the turkey would be the First Presidency meeting minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, letters, diaries, that’s the turkey. The trimmings, the Thanksgiving trimmings would be Ensign articles or Improvement Era articles, or maybe something in the Deseret News, or maybe a General Conference sermon or a BYU devotional or a published writing. Those are all important. And I utilize the trimmings in my book a lot. But make no mistake, this book is grounded in the turkey. And so how do I get the turkey? And there’s a there’s a couple of answers. One is that the Church archivist granted me stuff that I never thought I would be granted. For example, I got access to the Joseph Fielding Smith papers.
GT 02:49 Oh, I didn’t know that.
Matt 02:50 Yeah, which is rich, and I’ve said this before to different people, that it gave me a different perspective on him, that when people read his writings from the mid-20th century, you just see him as some hardliner with race and all of this. But when I was going through his diaries, I saw a person who was funny. I would just start laughing spontaneously in the Church Archives Reading Room. I’m sure the senior missionaries are like, “Who is this guy? What’s he doing? He’s just laughing.” And I’m reading his diaries. I’ll give you one example. Every year when I got to, I think, April 1, Joseph Fielding writes in his diary. He wasn’t a full diarist. He wouldn’t write 10 paragraphs, usually they were maybe two. He wrote them in a little–we would, today, call it a Franklin day planner or something. They didn’t have that in those days, but it was something similar. And so he would write a couple of paragraphs. So he wasn’t really a rich diarist, but he would say stuff like, “I was at the church building today,” or at the office, as he puts it, “and I met with this committee and that committee, and I interviewed these people for missions. Then I got home, so it was a good day,” he says paragraph one. Paragraph two. “Then I got home and I did my taxes. Oh, I hate giving my money to the government! Exclamation point.” It seems like every year, on April 1, I read the same thing. I’m laughing. I thought this guy is really funny, and he was a prankster. He would tell jokes, and you would never get that side of him publicly.
Matt 04:25 it was the same with his son-in-law, Bruce McConkie. They were very stern over the pulpit. They thought that, I think, God wanted them to be this Old Testament fire breather, you know, call the Saints to repentance, pound your fist on the podium four times, and hold up the Scriptures with your finger pointed. But, Smith was delightful in private. I got to see that side of him, it was great. I saw him as a person. So, I got to see the Joseph Fielding Smith papers. I got to see a whole bunch of other collections that are in this book at the Church archives. I found collections from CES people who, back in the day, would have access to the apostles and to the Church President. That’s not the case today. If you work for the Church today and you want to call President Nelson’s secretary and say, “Hey, can I come over on Tuesday?” They would say, probably, “No. Talk to your bishop or talk to somebody else. He’s busy.” But in those days, you could call the president’s office and, when’s his next available opening? And the Secretary would say, “Oh well, Tuesday at four.” “Okay.” “What’s this about?” “Yeah, you know, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote this stupid manual on evolution. I want to talk to him about that.”
Matt 05:43 And so, I determined that he was anti-evolution. He was not progressive on evolution, whereas some of the brethren were, just to be clear, I want to put context in that statement, too, for your listeners. Elder Widtsoe, Elder Talmage, among the two trained, Ph.D.-trained apostles. They had PhDs in science.
GT 06:03 Elder Bennion.
Matt 06:04 Elder Bennion did, yeah. So, they didn’t share Joseph Fielding Smith’s anti-evolution views. He was a very literalist.
GT 06:13 President Nelson, seems to, though.
Matt 06:15 Boy, that’s a rabbit hole that I don’t want to get into it. Anyway, the institute people would call him up, and that was one in particular in the mid 1950s, when Elder Smith was trying to push his anti-evolution views on the Church. He wanted them, the seminaries and institutes, to talk about his anti-evolution views in this book he had written. He wanted BYU students in the history department to read it. I mean, it was just nuts. The institute people pushed back hard. And David O. McKay, President McKay, would entertain all this, and he would have these people in and with not just the evolution issue, but other issues. So when these CES people died, they would donate their papers, either to BYU or to the U,[2] or Utah State. I’m telling you, when I discovered in those papers what was there, it was rich. Because they would oftentimes talk about the meeting with the President or an apostle, and they would write about in their diaries at length. Or they would have letters that they would write beforehand about the issue, or a follow up letter that the apostle would write. “You know, we talked about X, Y and Z. Did it ever get resolved? And here are my feelings on the subject.” So that was a rich way to get their voice, was through these CES papers. And finally, the other sources that I got was–I had to work for it. I had to interview with the children of General Authorities. So when their father died, of course, the papers would fall to the care of the children, and the children would sometimes donate them to the Church archives, in which case they would be restricted. Other times they wouldn’t donate them, and they would retain possession of the diaries, or if they did donate, then they would retain copies. So, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called up the children. I say, children, you know, these are people in their, what, 60s and 70s, but I would call up the children of the General Authorities, or the kids of the General Authorities, and I would say, “My name is Matt Harris. I’m doing a book on blacks in the priesthood, black people in the priesthood. I want to see your father’s diaries.” I wasn’t that jarring, but I had to build relationships of trust. I can talk about President Kimball’s diaries that I got access to in a minute. But you asked about Elder Hanks. My late friend, the late, great Curt Bench, who runs a wonderful bookstore at Benchmark Books– if any of you buy LDS books, go to Benchmark Books.
GT 08:55 Except for they’re out of yours.
Matt 08:57 Of my book, they’re out. They’re out.
GT 09:00 They’ll get them soon.
Matt 09:00 They’re getting them soon. Yeah, there’s going to be a very small delay. In fact, by the time this goes live, the books will be back in print. But anyway, my friend Curt Bench, who passed away a couple of years ago, his son and another friend of mine, Bryan Buchanan, they run the store, and they’re wonderful. Buy your LDS books from them. But Curt told me, or introduced me to Rich Hanks, the son of Marion Hanks. And he said, “Matt.” I remember I was at the store one day, and Curt was appraising the Marion Hanks diaries, that collection. He wasn’t just a bookseller, he was an appraiser. He told me one day, he said, “Matt, you’re going to want to see this.” I want to just pause the story here for a quick moment. I had found in many archives letters from Elder Hanks. I had always admired him for a lot of reasons, not just because he opposed the ban and had racially progressive views, believed in civil rights so passionately. That was a lot of large part of it. Those would be my values. But I really, really admired him, because when the Saints had written him letters about the race issue, they were struggling with it. Some of the Saints, they would write a handful of General Authorities, and some of the General Authorities, including Hartman Rector Jr, would write them back, these nasty notes: “Fall into line and repent, brother.” I’m just thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me. This brother just bore his soul. The letter that the brother wrote to the handful of General Authorities was, “I believe in the gospel. I have a strong testimony, but this really, really is weighing on my conscience.” So it was a heartfelt letter, and Hartman Rector Jr wrote him back this nasty letter, “Fall into line.” I’m just thinking, oh my goodness. That’s the wrong thing to say. And Elder Hanks would write these lengthy, really thoughtful and empathetic letters about, “I hear you, brother. I feel your pain.” I mean, they’re really moving. I’ve always been drawn to his compassion and his humanity. And so when Curt told me about the diaries being so rich and full, he was a really good diarist. He said, “I want to introduce you to Rich Hanks, his son. And I said, “I would love to do that.”
Matt 11:22 So the next time I was in Salt Lake, I live in Colorado. Next time I was in Salt Lake, Curt arranged for the three of us to go to lunch. And so, I formed a relationship with Rich, and we had talked on the phone several times since we had that initial lunch meeting. Of course, he knew what I was doing, and so he sent me all the diary entries that dealt with race and priesthood and all of that. Sure enough, they were so good, I mean, really detailed moments in time. Let me give you one example or two examples, I think, that are apropos. The first one is in 1969 when Hugh Brown was told that the First Presidency was going to produce a statement reaffirming the ban as doctrine. Brown was crushed because Brown does not believe that this is doctrine. It needs to be lifted. It’s harming the Church. And Hanks talks about going to see President Lee, Harold Lee, who was in the First Presidency at the time. Excuse me, he was a senior member of the Twelve. Lee had just told Hugh Brown that the First Presidency is going to produce a statement affirming the ban as doctrine. Now let that think sink in for a moment. An apostle is telling a First Presidency counselor what he’s going to do in his quorum. Furthermore, he’s telling him to put his name to a document to which he disagrees. How is that possible? Harold Lee was the most dominant voice in the Twelve in the 1960s. He’s a younger man in his early 70s. They all think, because of his relative youth compared to his colleagues, that he’s going to be the Church president for maybe two decades, just like David O McKay. It turns out that’s not the case. He dies a year and a half into his presidency, but that’s what they believe. And so Elder Lee held a lot of power, and so much so that he could tell Hugh Brown what he’s going to do. And so Elder Hanks was outside of Lee’s door when Brown came out. And I quote this in my book. He gives this vivid description of in his diary, Hanks, of what he saw when Brown left. What he said was that he looked very red and ashen-faced. I mean, he was devastated, because that’s when Lee told him, “You’re going to do this or else.”
1969 Statement
Matt 13:58 And so Hanks talks about this. The other one that is so beautifully done, there’s several, but this is a second one, and probably one of my most favorite documents that I got access to, because it’s so rich, and it deals with the meeting that the brethren, the Twelve, when they were going to tell the General Authorities that they had lifted the ban the previous week. The ban was lifted on June 1. This is a private, secret, confidential meeting. If there’s any other descriptors I can give, I would give them. Did I say it’s private, secret and confidential? And so, the First Presidency told the General Authorities, members of the First Quorum of the Seventy. In those days, there was just one quorum. I think there are multiple quorums today, but it was just the First Quorum of the Seventy in those days. And the Presiding Bishopric and the church patriarch, they said that we’re going to have a meeting and don’t tell anyone, not even your secretaries. This is how private this meeting is on June 8th.
GT 15:05 And Hanks writes it all down.
Matt 15:07 Hanks writes it all down. As a historian, it’s just like, Wow. Thank you Elder Hanks. If you’re listening, thank you. He’s a good writer, too. There are so many beautiful things about him as a person and as a rich diarist. So he writes about this, and he talks about all of the suspicion. I mean, the General Authority Seventies are just gossiping. “What’s this about? We can’t even tell our secretaries. They know everything that we do.” So they’re speculating. “Is it about the Second Coming?” one asks. “Is it about some ‘current’ problem in the Church that we’re going to hear about?” Then one of them says, “I think it’s about the Negro.” And so, that’s the speculation.
GT 15:37 They used the word Negro in 1978? That seems strange to me.
Matt 16:02 Yeah. It shouldn’t. We would never use that term today, but these are men that are born in the early 20th century. That’s just a term that, by that point in history, was falling out of American parlance. But some of the older folks from a different generation were still using colored and Negro. And we’re moving in a different direction as a country.
GT 16:25 I think there was a book. You probably know what the name of it is, but it was something, or at least the author, Mormonism and the Negro. That was in the 1960s, I think. Do you remember who wrote it?
Matt 16:37 Oh, of course, there were two apologetic books. A guy named John J. Stewart and John L. Lund.
GT 16:43 Yeah, Lund is the one I remember.
Matt 16:45 Yeah.
GT 16:46 The two books had the same name?
Matt 16:50 No, I think one was called The Mormon and the Negro, the other one’s called Mormonism and the Negro.
GT 16:55 Okay, they were very similar, then.
Matt 16:57 Yeah. Is there a difference? So they go in. It’s about the Negro. This is what Hanks is writing in his diary. So he uses the word Negro, recounting somebody else. When they start to amble into the temple, Boyd Packer meets [them.] He’s shaking their hands as they come in. Just before I finish the story, just a quick context or aside. Hanks and Packer had clashed for a long time, over the ban a long time. Elder Hanks, another reason why admire him, he always spoke his mind. He never kowtowed, even to senior Church colleagues, never.
GT 17:39 Even with the grizzly bear, Boyd K. Packer?
Matt 17:42 Even with Elder Packer, who was once called a grizzly bear by Dallin H. Oaks. In all the things I know about Elder Packer, that was a very accurate description. Anyway, Elder Packer met Elder Hanks at the door, and there’s some tears that came down. Elder Hanks describes their handshake at the door as uncommonly cordial. (Both chuckling)
Matt 18:12 In other words, this is not the Boyd Packer that I’ve known for so long when we would absolutely take the gloves off and go at it over the ban.
Matt 18:21 Hanks, just to give you a sense, he never backed off. He even told Harold Lee, who was a very dominant personality like Marion Hanks was, he told President Lee on more than one occasion, Hanks told Lee, “I don’t believe that black people are inferior to white people. I don’t believe it.” That’s what the Church was teaching for so many years, that God had a racial hierarchy. Anyway, they shake hands and Packer’s shedding a tear. And he told Hanks, he said, “It’s good for us to be here today.” Now Hanks is already on the highest alert that something’s going on. And now, you have this guy who’s been teaching this anti-Black theology for so many years, and teaching it with conviction and gusto. He’s crying, teary-eyed.
GT 19:08 It’s funny, because Packer was part of the Genesis group founding. Right?
Matt 19:15 He was. I’ll say more about that in a second. Okay, so he shakes his hand. They go in, and this is all from Hanks’ diary. He’s telling these details which are great. He goes in, and he sits next to his friend, Paul Dunn, and he leans over to Elder Dunn as the prelude music is playing. As the brethren are filing in, they’re playing prelude music. He whispers to Dunn. He says, “I think this is about the Negro.” So, Hanks uses that word. They sing a song, the opening song, We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet. The detail is incredible. N. Eldon Tanner requested that song, We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet. He makes a note of putting that in his– it wasn’t just that we sang that song. It was N. Eldon Tanner wanted that song, and that’s what we sang. And then he said that President Benson, who was then the President of the Quorum of the Twelve, gave this lengthy opening prayer. Hanks writes in his diary, three times he says, this momentous event. We’re grateful we can be here today for this momentous event. He hears it three times, and Hanks is listening very carefully, and he writes this detail down in his diary. So you can imagine all that’s going on. Anyway, so they say the prayer. President Kimball gets up. He says, “I’ve been fasting and praying. This has been on my mind for a long time.” And then he breaks the news, “We’ve lifted the ban. I had a revelation.” And Hanks writes, “The whole room is silent.”
Matt 20:51 I talk about in great detail about all of this. One last thing I’ll say about Elder Hanks’ diary on this special day on June 9, is he said that when they talked about it, they had a vote. Now, the revelations do not require the Seventies to support it, but President Kimball is sick over it. He is worried that there are some people with some deep-rooted views on race that they won’t support it.
GT 21:15 He should be very worried.
Matt 21:16 He should be very worried because there are some people in the room that have some really harsh views on race. It was the same war he brought to the Twelve the previous week. There were a few holdouts that we can show we get into it.
GT 21:28 Yes, we want to talk about that for sure.
What About the Women?
Matt 21:29 Anyway, so he’s worried about the Seventy, but as they were talking about the ban being lifted, Hanks writes in his diary that Franklin Richards, Frank, they called him who was, I think he was a member of the, he was one of the senior general authorities of the presidents of the Seventy. For your listeners, that’s really important, because the presidents of the Seventy were just a notch below in authority from the Quorum of the Twelve. In those days, they were closer in authority and responsibility and frankly, power to the Twelve than they are today. Franklin Richards, as they’re having this great spiritual moment, there are a lot of tears being shed. Frank Richards says, “What about the women?”
GT 22:16 Really?
Matt 22:17 This is in Hank’s diary, and I’m laughing as I read this. What about the women? Are you kidding me?
GT 22:20 It sounds like Peggy Fletcher Stack.[3]
Matt 22:29 I’m sure Peggy would love to know more about this, “What about the women statement,” as would I. Now, that’s all Elder Hank says. He just says, “Frank Richards asked, ‘What about the women?'” Now, there are multiple ways to interpret this. Right? I’ll just go through these. This really speaks to the idea that history is contingency. It’s based on decisions that we make that makes history. What about the women? Well, one would be, of course, this is ERA, and they’re sensitive to women’s issues. The Equal Rights Amendment is going on right as they’re meeting. It’s been in the news. And are we going to give them the priesthood, too? That’s one possibility. The other possibility would be, well, we’re giving back men the priesthood. What’s next? The women? There’s a slippery slope element.
GT 23:25 Oh, kind of a sarcastic comment.
Matt 23:26 It could be read sarcastically, but Elder Hanks does not [say.] I have to admit. I did not read it sarcastically the first time. Part of me wanted to say, you know, what about women?
GT 23:39 It reminds me when we were in Texas for Whitmer, and I remember you were up on the stand talking on this topic, and an audience member who I’m sure you remember, but she shall remain nameless, said, “There’s still a priesthood ban today.” We all sat there stunned [wondering what she was getting at.] Then she said, “One half of our church still doesn’t hold the priesthood.”
Matt 24:14 Yeah, I don’t know what weasel-ey answer I gave. That’s above my pay grade.
GT 24:20 I think that’s what you said.
Matt 24:21 I probably said that, knowing me. The question, well, it’s an interesting thought, because she’s not wrong that there’s still a ban today, but that’s not typically talked about, at least in the circles I run in about the women being denied the priesthood. But this is a Latter-day Saint woman who views this race ban as something similar to, maybe, the ban of preventing women from holding the priesthood.
GT 24: I don’t see that much of a difference, either.
Matt 24:40 There’s not a difference. I guess, as I said in this book, that, and we’ll get into this, I’m sure, that revelation is a process, not an event, when it comes to institutional revelation. I told this friend of ours that, “if women were to have the priesthood, then the brethren have to talk about it first. That’s how these things begin.” You’re not just out fishing one day and out of the blue, you feel like, ‘I’ve got to give women the priesthood.’ That’s just not how it works. But you do make the views known and they talk about them as a quorum, and then if somebody feels passionately about it–and truthfully, I’m not saying God’s not involved or prayers, because prayer is involved. But if they feel like this is the direction God wants him to go in, then they have to get everybody on board. That’s the revelation is the consensus part. But you can’t reach that consensus unless you start talking about it and planting seeds. So I told our colleague, “Start planting seeds. Good luck to you.”
GT 25:55 Well, Kate Kelly tried to do that not long ago.
Matt 25:58 Yeah, but you know, I’m not an activist. I mean, I’m a scholar, and what people do with my work, they do with my work. So, I don’t really weigh in on these contemporary issues. It’s just not who I am. But I do feel—that’s not entirely true. I do weigh in on race issues a lot. I’ve been pushing for the Church to adopt racial sensitivity training for a long time, and we can talk about that later. But, with this issue, I get it. There’s a push for gender equality in the Church. I understand it. I accept it. I remember just after the ban was announced to the world on June 9. So, this is the day after President Kimball met with the Seventies, there were a lot of women who wrote in with their husbands, too, by the way, they both signed the letters, which was interesting. I found these in the Kimball archives, Kimball papers at the Church Archives. This is why it’s so important to get turkey. And I wondered how women in the 1970s who were progressive Mormon women, who were pushing for ordination, as well as the ERA, the Church to support ERA in Utah. I wondered how they felt about the ban. And I talk about this in my book, where they wrote letters to President Kimball, and they said, “Now that you’ve solved racial equality,” they write, “What about gender equality?”
Matt 27:25 President Kimball gets asked about this by the Salt Lake Tribune, and he said, basically, “Nah, we’re not going to do that.” There’s a friend of mine who’s a lawyer who was in possession of a really a great letter, and it was a letter that Tom Monson wrote to a Latter-day Saint in California. So this would be 1981, years after the ban was lifted. I quote this letter in my book. This brother from California asked President Monson, who was just an apostle at the time, he said, “Are we going to ordain women to the priesthood?” I said, Tom Monson, it’s N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency. I need to correct myself. So, are we going to, President Tanner, ordain women to the priesthood now that black men have been ordained? President Tanner wrote back, and he said, “We are not currently talking about ordaining women to the priesthood.” We, meaning the First Presidency. But again, that’s really instructive, because you can’t produce a revelation which is consensus unless you talk about it first. And so what that letter said was, “We’re not even interested in talking about it. It’s just not going to happen.” I mean, the Church is a patriarchy, and it would really change a lot of things in the Church if they ordain women. We’ve seen as an interesting comparison, that when the Community of Christ began ordaining women in the early 1980s….
GT 29:00 [In] 1984.
Matt 29:00 [In] 1984, that really changed up a lot of things in terms of the dynamics and the relationships and now they have a current prophet/church president, who is a woman.
GT 29:11 Not yet, not till April.
Matt 29:12 Not till April, but she’s been selected. And by the way, she will be hopefully speaking at our Whitmer conference upcoming.
GT 29:19 I’m trying to get her, too.
Matt 29:22 She’s a busy, busy person. But anyway, so back to Elder Hanks. That’s his diary and…
GT 29:30 I was going to ask, do you have a sense? Was it a sarcastic comment, or was it sincere? What about the women?
Matt 29:42 I’ve thought about that. My initial response was, I took me [off guard.] I was floored when I read this…
GT 29:50 Yeah, me too.
Matt 29:51 …in Hanks’ diary, “What about the women.” Whoa, whoever thought that at least some old dude, well, I mean, really, older, I don’t know how old he was, but I know he’d been in as a Seventy for a long time. Franklin Richards comes from a long line of General Authorities and apostles. And so at first I thought, “Geez, this is someone who’s really asking an interesting question.” But the more I thought about it, given his age and his generation it was probably facetious.
GT 30:21 Oh, you think?
Matt 30:22 Probably. And the reason why I would think that is, again, his age and his generation. But the only way to really get a stronger sense about what he meant was to interview somebody in the room at the time. Sadly, Elder Hanks is not available. He passed away in, I think, 2011. The other way, if I couldn’t talk to anybody in the room, I think most of those guys are all passed. The Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency, they’re all gone now. And probably all the Seventies are gone. I haven’t checked, but I’m certain that they are. The only way I can make a really, really good speculation would be, if I were to read Franklin Richard’s papers. Did he ever say anything progressive towards women? Did he ever express his opinions about the matter? But I haven’t read his papers. They’re not available for researchers, and so my conclusion would be that he was probably just saying something facetious, but even that, even saying something facetious, is instructive, because they’re having this great spiritual moment, including Paul Dunn. When President Kimball gets the unanimous vote, Paul Dunn wrote about something or observed something that he remembered for the rest of his life. He gave an oral history in the 1990s, just before he died. Paul Dunn told Greg Prince, in this oral history that he saw Spencer Kimball. This is after they voted in the affirmative to support the ban the General Authorities, Paul Dunn saw President Kimball put his hand on Eldon Tanner’s leg, and he whispered, “Eldon, go tell the world. We just had the vote. It’s unanimous.”
GT 32:14 So the Seventies were unanimous.
Matt 32:16 The Seventies were unanimous, of course, the Twelve before, unanimous, with some wrinkles. And so Paul Dunn witnessed that event, and it moved him. That was the first time when Eldon Tanner left the meeting and he told Heber Woolsey, the person in charge of PR he said, Heber, it’s time go tell the press, and then the news leaked out, and within a matter of hours, people from all around the world called into Salt Lake to confirm the news. It jammed the phone lines because there was so much interest and excitement and, frankly, disbelief. So I don’t know about Franklin Richards. I just can only speculate that he may have been saying this in jest, but, even for Hanks to put that detail in there is interesting, because here they are having this spiritual moment. This is going to be so impactful for the Church moving forward.
GT 33:11 Would it make sense when it’s such a spiritual meeting to pop off like that?
Matt 33:21 See, that’s what’s interesting to me. You’ve been in church meetings where there’s always that person in the room who just takes the wind out of the room for a moment. He says something maybe that’s out of line, or, anyway, just sort of that disrupts the flow of the meeting. Well, I interpreted that as disrupting the flow of the meeting. But Hanks wrote about it. I mean, of all the things he could had written in his diary…
GT 33:49 He didn’t say there was a response to the question.
Matt 33:52 He didn’t.
GT 33:53 Okay, so it could have been just him popping off.
Matt 33:57 Yeah, I mean, the guy is in his 80s. “Are we going to give women the priesthood next?” What’s this? What’s this? So I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I just don’t see that happening. I don’t see him in– I have to confess, I don’t know a ton about him. I’ve never had access to his papers. Frankly, I’ve never asked.
GT 34:16 But there’s a research idea, somebody.
Matt 34:21 But you know, honestly, I identified a lot of key people in this story I wanted to tell. And it’s those collections I targeted. Franklin Richards is not a key person in this story. Ezra Taft Benson, Mark Peterson, Harold Lee, Spencer Kimball, of course, David O. McKay, Hugh Brown and others, those are huge stories. And my focus on this book is the 20th and 21st centuries. We talked about the 19th century.
GT 34:49 Yeah, briefly.
Matt 34:51 There’s a yeah, there’s a framing chapter in this book that deals with the 1800s but, really, the strength of this book is the modern era, because I go through in detail a story that’s never been told before.
GT 35:05 Yes, for sure.
{End of Part 4}
[1] Richard D Hanks wrote a biography of his father Marion titled, “To Be a Friend of Christ.” It is available at https://amzn.to/4i4JOsa
[2] University of Utah.
[3] Peggy is the Religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. She asked a question to the prophet about women’s ordination during a press conference The leader got sidetracked in his answer, and Peggy exclaimed, “What about the women?”
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