Are there things Lester Bush missed? Lester Bush wrote a groundbreaking 1873 article blaming Brigham Young, rather than Joseph Smith, for instituting the priesthood & temple ban. I asked Matt Harris if there was a weakness in the article that didn’t address the racial theology behind the ban. He said there was, and found some interesting information in the Adam Bennion minutes that Lester didn’t know about. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/
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Lester Bush Weaknesses/Bennion Minutes
GT 0:23 We all have great reverence for Lester Bush and his amazing, groundbreaking article that rewrote the priesthood ban, basically.[1] But I think I heard that one of the weaknesses of that article, which is fantastic, but the weakness is he didn’t go into the racial theology. Is that true?
Matt 0:46 Yeah. It is true. One of the omissions of Lester Bush, so for your audience, he’s was not trained in history. He was a medical doctor who worked for the government.
GT 1:00 He recently passed away, sadly.
Matt 1:01 He recently passed away, and he was a great person. I always sent my stuff to Lester Bush, and then I think he got, was it Alzheimer’s or dementia.
GT 1:11 I think so.
Matt 1:12 Alzheimer’s, yeah. And so he was a great critic. And a couple of years ago, I sent one of my articles to him, and he’d always say, “Oh, I love this. Send it back to me, or send me your next piece.” And he was just such a fine critic, and always made helpful suggestions. And anyway, I sent one of my articles to him, and I didn’t hear from him. I thought, oh, that’s odd. He always enjoys reading my stuff. But I didn’t know how sick he was and how much it had progressed to that point. So that’s what it was. He wasn’t reading any more emails. Anyway, a wonderful guy, and he lived in Maryland. When he was in Southeast Asia on government assignment, his brother, who was a BYU student at the time in the late 1960s, he wrote his brother, Lester, a note, a letter, and he said, “Hey, I just came across, or I heard that there are some papers at BYU that deal with the brethren’s First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 meeting minutes.” The Adam Bennion family had donated them. “You’re going to want to see these.” The BYU brother knew that Lester had an interest in this topic.
GT 2:19 Adam Bennion was a former apostle, is that right?
Matt 2:22 Adam Bennion was a former apostle whose family defied convention and donated the papers to BYU, rather than the Church Archives, where they’re put away, a vault within a vault and throw away the keys or eviscerate the code so nobody can get access. That wouldn’t happen today, by the way, they would not donate papers to the brethren today to BYU, at least institutional papers. But they did in those days. I think he died in 1953, so the family, at some point in the 50s, donated the papers. They didn’t have the policy in place yet. So this maverick librarian named Chad Flake, I knew him personally. He had sort of disheveled hair. He just did not look like a BYU person. I found him delightful. He was an interesting guy. He was just a free thinking kind of guy and he allowed Bush’s brother–I don’t know how Bush’s brother learned about the minutes, presumably from Chad Flake, who was the curator of the minutes. But Flake certainly let it be known that we have these minutes. So BYU Bush wrote his brother and said, “Next time you’re in town, come see this.” So Bush made the arrangements with Chad Flake to see the minutes. Almost immediately, he recognized what those minutes meant, because the minutes were part of a study that apostle Adam Bennion had done in 1954 at President McKay’s request to look into the feasibility of lifting the ban. This is in 1954. Your listeners have never heard this before.
GT 3:58 Yeah, I haven’t heard this, either.
Matt 4:00 In one of my chapters that go into great detail about this. Anyway, so in 1954 they couldn’t figure out who bore African ancestry in South Africa and Brazil. And the brethren were bothered by this. We now know that there’s no such thing as a pure race. It’s just nonsense. But they didn’t know that at the time. They couldn’t they knew they were baptizing and conferring priesthood ordination on people of African lineage in these two heavily biracial and mixed blood countries, mixed race countries. President McKay visited South Africa and Brazil. He came back and he said, “We’ve got to do something about the ban.” And so, he convened this committee led by Apostle Bennion and Spencer Kimball, we think, was on the committee. We’re not quite sure, because some of the records are nebulous. But Apostle Bennion asked his cousin, Lowell Bennion, with whom he was close, to assist. Whether he was an official member of the committee or just the guy behind the scenes ghost writing everything, I don’t know. I wish I knew this.
Matt 5:04 What I do know is, is that Lowell Bennion writes the report with Apostle Bennion’s approval. In this report called The Bennion Report, It says that there’s no scriptural justification for the ban. It says that the ban is pushing away our best and our brightest students, meaning at the institutes. They can’t justify this idea of the one drop rule and anything else, or that it’s theologically incompatible with Mormon scripture: that you’re judged for your own sins and not for your ancestors transgressions. Well, how can you have this pre-existent theology and you can’t repent of something that you may have allegedly done in the pre-existence. Bennion thought it was bad theology. They also said that there was no founding document that tied the ban to Joseph Smith. I mean, I don’t know who was on the committee. I wish I did, but I can tell you, I know for a fact who wasn’t on the committee, Joseph Fielding Smith.
Matt 6:05 (Both chuckling.) Because Elder Smith had spent his entire life building up this theological scaffolding that the curse and the ban began with Joseph Smith and all of that stuff. And the only logic that they used to imply or to state that the ban began with Joseph Smith was that all of the great founding doctrines of the church started with Joseph Smith, Jr. Therefore the priesthood doctrine must have started with him, too. I mean, that’s not really good reasoning, especially if you believe that you know God reveals line upon line, or at, what does President Nelson say today that the restoration is ongoing. It’s evolving. Well, somehow Joseph Fielding Smith had everything fixed in time at 1830 to 1844. So, that was just bad theology on so many different levels. So, the Bennion report was, as you can imagine, it was devastating. This is not doctrinal. This is just a policy and a practice.
GT 7:03 And so this is where Lester Bush’s punchline came from, it didn’t start with Joseph Smith.
Matt 7:10 That’s exactly right. It was from the Bennion report. And this is also the context in which President McKay told Sterling McMurrin, his close friend, he said that the ban was a policy and a practice, not a doctrine of the Church. And so that’s–some of your listeners may have heard President McKay believe that it was a policy and a practice, not a doctrine. Well, that comes from the Bennion report. Anyway, back to Chad Flake at BYU.
GT 7:38 Because that’s right when he was talking to Sterling McMurrin and I think he said that to him.
Matt 7:43 That’s the first person he said that to. President McKay had read the Bennion report in, it would have been May of 1954. He read the Bennion Report, and he told Sterling McMurrin, just after the report, “This is not doctrinal. It’s a policy and a practice.” And McMurrin–actually, it was April he said this to him. I’m sorry. It was late February. I’m getting this wrong, the details wrong. It was February where he read the Bennion report, and then he told McMurrin afterwards, it was a policy and a practice. McMurrin said, “Well, President McKay, General Conference is coming up in a month or so. Can you share that with the Saints?”
Matt 8:22 “Now, Sterling, you know, I can’t do that.” Why he couldn’t do it is because Mormon revelation requires buy in from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Section 107 of the Doctrine & Covenants says it has to be unanimous, the revelations. And so even though President McKay didn’t think it was doctrinal, he still thought it would require a revelation to overturn the ban, which means that each member of the Twelve would have to agree to it. Of course, Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold Lee, Ezra Taft Bension, Mark Peterson and others were not going to agree to it. And so that was the context in which he told Sterling McMurrin, “I can’t share this with the Church next week, because I don’t have consensus from the Twelve.”
Matt 9:10 Anyway, it’s those minutes from that committee in 1954 that get deposited at BYU. And those minutes that Elder Bennion had compiled, they began in 1830 and all the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve minutes that dealt with the race issue, he was permitted access to see from the vaults, and so he compiled them. So, it went from 1830, the minutes, to 1954. That’s what got donated to BYU, and that’s what Lester Bush saw. So Lester Bush published an article in Dialogue that came out 1973 and that was the big explosion that there is no founding document tying the prophet to the to the revelation, or to the priesthood ban. But he didn’t talk about the theology behind it. He left the scriptures out. He talks a little bit about the curse in Genesis in the Bible, but he doesn’t talk about how these racialized verses in the Book of Mormon and other scriptures fit into all this.
GT 10:12 The Book of Abraham.
Matt 10:13 The Book of Abraham, and that’s something that other scholars picked up, including my good friend, Newell Bringhurst.
GT 10:20 I was just going to say that, your co-author. You guys wrote the Gospel Topics Essays book together, and Newell’s one of my favorites, too.
Matt 10:30 Yeah. I dedicated Second Class Saints to–one of my persons I dedicated was to Newell Bringhurst, who’s been a close friend of mine for a long time.
GT 10:39 Yeah, I love Newell. He’s awesome. He’s a four-time guest, too, so I’ll have to get him on for number five.
Matt 58:52 Yeah, he’s a great guy.
J Reuben Clark/S Africa
GT 10:49 Well, very good. I’m trying to decide. I think one of the interesting and surprising things to me, there was several, was J. Reuben Clark. Now, I know this isn’t in your book. I know Michael Quinn has referred to Clark’s– and David Conley Nelson, too. I hate to say this, because it’s a harsh word, but antisemitism. He was very harsh towards Jews, and so I want to contrast that with–he seemed to be a lot more open to blacks. Would you agree with that?
Matt 11:36 Yes, I want to give a– I think it’s fair to give a composite to these folks and let them know these people and I don’t hold back my biases, whether I like somebody or maybe I find them a little, “grrrr.” But Reuben Clark is an interesting person, just to give a biography before I tackle your question.
GT 12:00 That’d be great.
Matt 12:01 He was a lawyer by training. He went to Columbia University Law School. He was sent there with the support of a person who would later become an apostle, a guy named James Talmage. Talmage was, I think, the President of the University of Utah at the time when Clark was an undergraduate. And then, as was the case in the late 19th century, if you were a Latter-day Saint in the territory of Utah and you needed to further your education, you’d have to go back East. So he went to Columbia Law School. At Columbia, he was influenced in profound ways. He bought into eugenics, which was not a fringe theory. I hate to say that, but not a fringe theory, at the time. It was something that was part of the Columbia curriculum, Harvard, a lot of places were teaching eugenics based on this idea there’s a pure race and that we ought to breed so people can continue that pure race. If that sounds like Hitler and Nazis, you’d be correct, who also believe in the purity of bloodlines. So Clark finished law school. He was a brilliant man. He had a good mind, and the government recognized his talents. He was a diplomat under, I think, two or three different US presidents, including a diplomat to Mexico. The brethren in Salt Lake wanted to call him into the apostleship, which they did in 1933 because they wanted to move the church forward in Mexico. The problem is Clark had not been active in the church. Whoops. (Both chuckling)
Matt 13:43 Last I knew, you probably should be maybe going to church when you get called into the highest quorum in the Church. And so Clark got his act together. They didn’t go to the temple in those days like today. Temple worship is really emphasized by today’s leaders, but in those days it wasn’t. I know this is going to be hard for your listeners to hear, maybe especially if they’re orthodox LDS but a lot of, some of the early apostles hardly ever went to the temple, including Reed Smoot, including Reuben Clark. So in fairness, it wasn’t just emphasized like it is today. So Reuben Clark got into the First Presidency, and it’s almost as though he’s making up for lost time about being inactive. He just goes the other way and becomes ultra conservative and ultra orthodox. Politically he’d always been conservative, but he emerges as one of the most politically conservative of the General Authorities when he’s called it in 1933. Clark is a very–he said something interesting, and I’m not usually critical in these kinds of things. But he said something that really bothered me. He said that I only read things that confirm what I already believe. I’m like, come on, you went to Columbia Law School. You’re supposed to be an educated man. The mark of someone educated is someone who could entertain thoughts they don’t necessarily agree with. But that’s what he said, “I only read literature that I agree with.” So Clark had been reading right wing literature. One of the people that he read frequently was a guy named Gerald Smith who was a Nazi. He was an American Nazi. Reuben Clark subscribes to his literature, his magazines, and he’s reading all this garbage.
GT 15:33 Now, let me ask you there, because in 1933 were Hitler and Nazis seen as bad as they were in, say, World War II? They probably weren’t, were they?
Matt 15:48 You mean World War I?
GT 15:51 You said he joined the apostleship in 1933, I think. And so, if he’s reading this George Smith, or whatever his name is…
Matt 16:01 Gerald Smith.
GT 16:02 Gerald Smith. Were the Nazis seen as evil as they were after the Holocaust was discovered?
Matt 16:10 Oh yeah, the Nazis were, in the 30s were just, yes, it was a process, right? I mean, you don’t just start killing people and sending millions of Jews to the gas chambers. There’s a lead up to that point, and it starts by dehumanizing people.
GT 16:25 Okay, so they always had a bad reputation. Is that safe to say?
Matt 16:30 Well, with Hitler, yeah, yeah. And then, of course, his thugs that he associated with.
GT 16:37 Okay.
Matt 16:38 And maybe a different question is, did Reuben Clark understand the extent to which this is really bad stuff.
GT 16:46 Yeah.
Matt 16:47 I don’t want anyone listening today thinking that Reuben Clark supported the gassing of Jews. I don’t want anyone to think that, because there’s no evidence for that, and I can’t imagine that a Church official would do something as drastic as that. But, he’s reading some of the most virulent antisemitic literature of the day. The fact that he’s reading this and he’s writing Gerald Smith letters and agreeing with Gerald Smith and just dehumanizing Jews… And Reuben Clark knew this is controversial because he had exchanged pamphlets called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which I write about my Benson book. And I mentioned, actually, a little bit of this in this book, Second Class Saints. But when they exchanged the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a huge antisemitic tract talking about Jews or spreading communism, and all of that nonsense.So, Rueben Clark told Elder Benson, who’s his protege, he said that, do not share the protocols with anybody, and when you’re done, send it right back to me. Of course, what he was really saying was, don’t share this with President Grant or David O McKay, my fellow counselor, because they don’t agree with this garbage. So, Clark knew that it was controversial.
Matt 18:10 But to your question about his views about black people. Clark was a pragmatist, and he didn’t serve a church mission. He was never a mission president, which is sort of a standard trajectory for a lot of folks in Church leadership. I told you he was brought in to help out with missionary efforts in Mexico and other places, because he was a very intelligent human being. So the brethren relied on his leadership. What bothered him was that he thought it was just profoundly wrong to take a a person who was biracial, we would say today, but in those days, they were called mulattos, which is terribly offensive today. We would never use that word, but so a biracial person who had light skin, but yet, it was rumored that they had African ancestry. He thought it was wrong to deny them the priesthood and the temple ordinances.
GT 19:08 That’s what really surprised me.
Matt 19:11 Yeah, he thought it was wrong because it placed them in racial no man’s land. These are people who identified as white, but yet their church deems them cursed because of the one drop rule. I talk about this in detail in my book,.Clark, who has these strong racial views towards Jews, but he made a proposal to the brethren. He said, “Let’s ordain part negros to the priesthood.” That’s the word he used part negros. So he’s talking about biracial people. Let’s ordain them to the priesthood. And so that was the first thing.
GT 1:9:45 So, he was against full blacks.
Matt 19:48 Well, okay, so there’s two reasons why he wanted part Negroes or biracial people to the priesthood. One was he didn’t think it was fair, because they didn’t identify as black, but they identified as white, and they couldn’t marry a white person because their offspring would be cursed. That was the issue. But yet, they didn’t want to marry a black person because they didn’t identify as black. So, it really put them in a no man’s land with respect to race. So that was the first thing. The second thing was that Clark knew that there were Latter-day Saints, particularly in South Africa, who couldn’t prove their racial purity, so they just simply packed up and moved to Utah and Idaho, where nobody ever asked them about their ancestry because they looked white. And so Clark said, “You know, they’re doing this anyway. Let’s just ordain them to the priesthood.” Of course, when I read these documents, I was shocked.
GT 20:51 Yeah,
Matt 20:52 I thought, well, good for you, but the brethren shot it down. They didn’t want it, and so he didn’t get his way.
GT 21:00 But South Africans continued to move to Utah and Idaho and get the priesthood.
Matt 21:05 Yes, they were.
GT 21:06 And then they could go back and they were okay, right?
Matt 21:08 Well…
GT 22:09 I don’t know that they did, but…
Matt 21:10 No, they didn’t go back. It did create controversy. In Chapter two of my book, I go into this in some detail. So, South Africans, they had to prove their racial purity. It was the only place the Church where they had to do genealogy first to prove that they had racially pure bloodlines. I want to just pause again for a moment. This is all nonsense. There’s no such thing as a pure bloodline. If each of us goes back 200 years, we’ll have at least one African indigenous ancestor. But they don’t know that. You’d think that they would have known how difficult the pure bloodlines would be, because all of world history has been about interracial encounters and global migrations. We’ve created a new nomenclature of racial names to classify these mixed-race groups, you know, mestizos and mulattos and all of that. Those names evolve because of these interracial encounters, where people wouldn’t marry and produce biracial children. But anyway, they didn’t know that. And so in Africa, because it’s the continent that was thought to derive from Cain and all of that, black people, that they had to prove that they had racial purity. South Africans were bitter about that. And can you imagine in the 1950s trying to [prove ancestry?] They don’t have the tools that we have today.
GT 22:36 They don’t have FamilySearch.org.
Matt 22:37 They don’t have Family Search, and you can just go on your phone and put in a few things, and you know, whoa. Or you pay, what, 100 bucks, and those companies will do your ancestry for you. They have 19-20-year-old missionaries doing the genealogy.
GT 22:50 I can’t imagine
Matt 22:51 It’s a clown show. It sounds like I’m being critical, but this is what the missionaries themselves are saying. “Why are they having us do this? We’re not trained in this.” I have some good letters like this from my research and plus, the records are spotty. And yet, so much is at stake. They can’t inherit–you have to have the priesthood and the temple to inherit the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. So their fate in the afterlife is in jeopardy. And so the stakes are high. And so what happens is that when they can’t determine that they have a racially pure bloodline, or when these light skinned South Africans run into their ancestral line, that there is somebody from Sub Saharan Africa, which is typically the part of Africa that’s most dark skinned. When that happens, they get denied the priesthood there, and they just simply move to Utah and they get the priesthood. In the meantime, their relatives are still back in South Africa, and they can’t have the priesthood, and so they write to the brethren in Salt Lake and they say, these are people in their 50s and 60s. They’ll say, “My daughter just moved to Salt Lake and got married in the temple,” or, “My son went to Salt Lake and now he’s on a mission, but I can’t have the priesthood. What’s going on here?” In other words, if they can have the priesthood and go to the temple, why can’t I? I want to be sealed in the temple. And so that’s the problem. Those letters to the First Presidency is what necessitated David O. McKay going to South Africa in 1954 to see the situation firsthand.
GT 24:33 Which now I see is right after this Bennion report,
Matt 24:36 Just before the Bennion report.
GT 24:37 Oh, it was before the Bennion report.
Matt 24:38 That’s what commissions the Bennion report, this idea of racial detection and racial boundaries. Because they have been telling the brethren that people are passing below the color line. They’re leaving and they’re going to Utah and Idaho. I might add that this is happening around the world around the mid-20th century. America, the United States, they’re publishing all kinds of articles about American Negroes, as they put it, who are passing as white.
GT 25:03 Do we know when this policy was put in in South Africa, because it ended in 1954-55 right?
Matt 25:11 You had to prove your bloodlines, yeah, the 1940s.
GT 25:15 So it was a decade and a half, basically.
Matt 25:18 Yeah, basically. And it was one mission president, a guy named Evan P. Wright, who’s the one that made the big stink. The Church had been in South Africa for–they started in 1853. It wasn’t good for a lot of reasons, one of which was the missionaries never learned the language. News flash, there was no missionary training center in 1853.
GT 25:42 They didn’t learn Afrikaans?
Matt 25:43 They did not learn Afrikaans and so they recognized that a lot of the folks there spoke Afrikaans, and they didn’t know the language. And so that was one of the main issues in ‘53, so they got called home. Then they came back in 1903 and they ran into all kinds of issues with racial detection. So, what they did was, when they went into South Africa. I mean, they know the continent, of course. They know that there’s African ancestry, of course. So what they do when they go into regions like that is they try to determine where the white regions are, and they only want to missionize in the white regions and avoid the regions where black people live. Same thing in Brazil. When they when they go into Brazil in 1929, they focus on the southern tip of the country.
GT 26:38 Where all the Germans were.
Matt 26:39 Where all the Germans are, you got it? That’s exactly right. Then the northern part of Brazil, they stay away from because that’s where black Brazilians live.
GT 26:49 Well, maybe we should just mention that really quickly for people who aren’t as familiar with World War II. A lot of the Nazis, when they escaped Germany, went to South America and Brazil. I mean, I remember, I think the Americans called this the rat lines, because they referred to the German rats that were trying to escape and not get persecuted by the Allies in World War II, and so a lot of them went to South America.
Matt 27:20 Yeah. So Americans, the missionaries are baptizing Nazis, I mean, it happens.
GT 27:24 Yeah.
Matt 25:26 And they know this.
GT 27:29 But they’re white, so it’s okay.
Matt 27:28 But they’re white, and they accepted all the provisions for baptism. And even Nazis need to be saved. So the problem–
GT 27:37 Nazis need to be saved, but blacks don’t.
Matt 27:39 Well, this is a problem.
GT 27:41 I know they could be baptized, but this is terrible.
All Are Alike Unto God
Matt 27:44 Well, it’s also, what’s interesting about this is my book talks about–there’s a lot in this book. It’s history, political history, it’s cultural history, it’s there’s legal history. It’s a combination of different subfields in history and but there’s a lot of theology. You can’t do a Book on Mormon history and not talk about theology and it creates a difficult theology, because the Book of Mormon 2nd Nephi, 26:33 talks about all are alike unto God. The apostle Paul talks about that God is no respecter of persons, and so black people in the Church are reading these scriptures and they’re writing the brethren letters. How do you reconcile the priesthood and temple ban? We call it the priesthood and temple ban today. It was just the priesthood ban in those days, but now we recognize it as more than just a priesthood ban. But how do you recognize reconcile the priesthood ban with this idea that all are alike unto to God? These are black people writing the brethren. I remember reading the letter where the black saints would be asking these questions and I’m thinking, “Oh, man. I can’t wait to read the response. Man, this ought to be good.” Then you get to the response in the second part when they respond back. They just don’t have an answer. They don’t have an answer. These black Latter-day Saints are very, very intuitive to this theology and they’re very intuitive to the fact that the brethren are not answering them. They revert back to the pre-existence. Sometimes you get these exchanges where they’ll read about the response about the pre-existence, and then they’ll write back, “You didn’t answer my question. What does the pre-existence have to do with all are alike unto God,” and they don’t know what to say.
GT 29:30 Is this why they have to go talk to their stake president now or their bishop?
Matt 29:37 Well, the brethren, they get so many questions from the saints. I mean, it’s probably a matter of policy. They’d never be able to function in their jobs if, of course, they took the time to answer every question. But I’m telling you, as a historian, the fact that a lot of them didn’t answer questions back in the day, it makes me happy. I also like when their secretaries respond sometimes, when there’s a hot button issue and they get dozens of letters, what happens is the General Authorities will tell their secretaries, “Okay, we’re getting all kinds of letters about this, and this is what I want you to say when you respond on my behalf.” The secretaries would always say, “I am directed to tell you, “and then they [respond.] This is nice, because it means that I’m not speaking for my own conscience. I’m speaking because of what my boss told me to say to you. And I see that a lot in letters, too, which, of course, is pretty official. But anyway, they struggle with that theology. And after, when the priesthood ban is lifted in 1978 the, “All are alike unto to God,” verse becomes the Church’s new branding efforts. And of course, everybody talks about it now. It’s in the…
GT 30:49 In the, “I’m a Mormon campaign. Is that what you’re talking about?
Matt 30:51 All over the place. Yeah, we’re all alike, into God, and it becomes the branding efforts. But before 1978, nobody, no apostle ever hardly talked about it. I found, I think, two instances, maybe one publicly in conference, that Spencer Kimball gave a sermon in 1954 about racial tolerance, but he didn’t mention black people. He said, “Be racially tolerant.” He listed Tongans and Mexicans and all these different racial groups, but not black people. Anyway, they never talked about all are alike unto God. And then after 1978, it’s everywhere because they’re having to make up for lost time. So, it’s a really interesting play about how the brethren interpret scriptures. It speaks to the idea that that cultural contexts matter. They start to see scriptures in a new light. When the ban is lifted, now they can really push this idea of racial equality forward. And it’s a beautiful scripture. It’s how I end my book, actually, that the Church is trying to live up to this central and founding scripture in 2nd Nephi. It’s really, I think, one of the most lovely scriptures in the Book of Mormon. It’s the scriptures that I like to dwell on, not the skins of blackness and all of that. Those are racially exclusive scriptures. This one’s racially inclusive, and it needs to be promoted.
{End of Part 3}
[1] It’s called “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” and can be found at https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V08N01_13.pdf
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