I am excited to introduce Bryndis Roberts. We will talk about her conversion from the Baptist Church to the LDS Church. She definitely gave her missionaries a run for their money, as she asked more questions about the Church’s past polygamy practices and priesthood/temple ban.
Roberts: Well, I asked them about both polygamy and the priesthood, ban. I started out with polygamy, because, once I got my quad, I very quickly read through the Book of Mormon, I got to the book of Jacob, particularly the second chapter of the book of Jacob, and I think it’s like, verses 31 through 35, which, I mean, it’s really almost like a rant against polygamy about you know how it is–the Lord is saying, it grieves him that the man have wounded his daughters, by doing this, etc, etc, etc., and basically says, a man shall have only one wife. So I said to the missionaries, I’m a little bit confused, because this seems to me to be pretty straightforward, saying no to polygamy. So how in the world did y’all ever do that? Their response was to refer to, I think it’s the 30th verse of the second chapter of Jacob, which says something like, “If I will allow, raise up a seed unto to me,” as the reason for why the church later started practicing polygamy, and I was just like, “I don’t think that says that, but, you know, I’m going to give you that when you go on, if that’s, that’s your response. Then about that time, I started asking them a lot of questions about the priesthood ban, which, because, although I was taking the lessons, I was also reading other things about the church.
GT: Okay, so it wasn’t tunnel vision.
Roberts: No, it was not tunnel vision. Then that’s when they proceeded to bring a number of the black members. I almost felt like–I mean, because I didn’t know a whole lot about the ward, but seemed like they were bringing every black member of the ward and it was always male members, because you know, well, since I lived alone, for the missionaries to be able to come to visit me they had to bring another male member with them and so they were always bringing black male members to try to talk to me about the priesthood ban and they made various statements as to why.
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