Despite early acceptance of black men into the LDS priesthood, the Church, beginning with Brigham Young in at least 1852 (and possibly earlier, with Joseph Smith), taught for more than 100 years that black people bore the Mark of Cain, which labeled them as a cursed and disfavored people in the eyes of God, and unable, therefore, to be part of the LDS priesthood. President Young said the following:

[A]ny man having one drop of the seed of [Cain] … in him cannot hold the priesthood and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ…

Recorded in the Diary of Wilford Woodruff, January 16, 1852

Later, in 1947, the First Presidency of the Church made the following official statement of LDS doctrine:

From the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel.

Statement of The First Presidency on the Negro Question, July 17 1947, quoted in Mormonism and the Negro, pp.46-7

Two years later, the First Presidency again reiterated the doctrinal, non-policy nature of the ban:

The attitude of the Church with reference to Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time.

The First Presidency on the Negro Question, 17 Aug. 1949

This LDS doctrine did not age well. The African-American Civil Rights Movement (which roiled the leadership of the Church¹) rolled forward , and the popularity of race discrimination began to wane. In the years prior to the Brown case, the Church attempted to officially explain its reasoning with respect to the racially discriminatory doctrine. In 1951, the First Presidency published the following statement:

The position of the Church regarding the Negro may be understood when another doctrine of the church is kept in mind, namely, that the conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence has some determining effect upon the conditions and circumstances under which these spirits take on mortality… Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes…

[The Church believes that] Man will be punished for his own sins and not for Adam’s transgression. If this is carried further, it would imply that the Negro is punished or allotted to a certain position on this earth, not because of Cain’s transgression, but came to earth through the loins of Cain because of his failure to achieve other stature in the spirit world.

Yes, the Church found itself in a hole created by its doctrine that got deeper and uglier over time. Finally, in 1978, about a decade after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the leaders of the Church felt that it was time for the Church to retire the doctrine. They did so through a letter, read in General Conference, announcing that all “worthy” males, regardless of race could now hold the priesthood.

In the years leading up to the change, Church leaders had made what appear to be efforts to begin preparing the Church for a change, characterizing the priesthood ban as a mere policy, even more vocally and clearly than they did with polygamy. As early as 1954, President David O. McKay was teaching that the priesthood ban was not doctrinal:

There is no doctrine in this church and there never was a doctrine in this church to the effect that the Negroes are under any kind of a divine curse.

We believe that we have scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the Negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine and the practice will some day be changed. And that’s all there is to it.

Letter written by Dr. Sterling M. McMurrin, reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, January 15, 1970

In 1963, Apostle Spencer W. Kimball (who would be President of the Church at the time the ban was lifted) continued to blur the line between doctrine and policy:

The doctrine or policy has not varied in my memory. I know it could. I know the Lord could change his policy and release the ban and forgive the possible error which brought about the deprivation.

Kimball, Edward L., The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball. Bookcraft. p. 448–9

Today, Church leaders seem to lean more toward calling the priesthood ban a policy or practice that was changed, rather than a doctrine. Recently, Jeffrey R. Holland has said that, despite what his predecessors have said in the past, the status of the ban (as doctrine/policy/practice), and the reason(s) for the ban, are now (and perhaps have always been) unknown:²

I have to concede to my earlier colleagues. … They, I’m sure, in their own way, were doing the best they knew to give shape to [the policy], to give context for it, to give even history to it. All I can say is however well intended the explanations were, I think almost all of them were inadequate and/or wrong. …

At the very least, there should be no effort to perpetuate those efforts to explain why that doctrine existed. I think, to the extent that I know anything about it, as one of the newer and younger [apostles] to come along, … we simply do not know why that practice, that policy, that doctrine was in place.

Interview for The Mormons, PBS documentary, 2006

Holland may have just been following Gordon B. Hinckley’s lead:

Helmut Nemetschek (interviewer): Until 1978 no person of color attained the priesthood in your church. Why did it take so long to overcome the racism?

Gordon B. Hinckley: I don’t know. I don’t know. I can only say that. (long pause) But it’s here now.

Interview, ZDF German Television, January 29, 2002

Unlike the retirement of the polygamy doctrine, there hasn’t been an effort among leaders of the Church to rehabilitate, or reconcile the modern Church with, the LDS prophets who originated and promoted the priesthood ban doctrine.  This is probably for the best, given the frankly dispicable things that came out of their mouths during the ban. One Apostle’s response was to make an extremely rare exception to stare decisis and explicitly invoke a Brown-like overruling of the past prophets:

Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.

Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, CES speech, All Are Alike Unto God, August 18, 1979

Gordon B. Hinckley’s most memorable statement on the topic seems to vaguely imply broad condemnation of his predecessors and even himself (though I don’t think the faithful heard it that way):³

Now I am told that racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us. I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ. How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?

General Priesthood Meeting speech, The Need for More Kindness, April 1, 2006

The LDS Priesthood ban has gone from a rock-solid, eternal doctrine of the Church, to something that may or may not be a doctrine, or a policy, or just some kind of practice of the Church. A few things are clear, however: From the current Church leaders’ perspectives, the priesthood ban was definitely a horrible thing, and they were thrilled that the Church discarded it (whatever type of rule it was), but in a big, cowardly nod to stare decisis, no leader of the Church has (1) openly repudiated the LDS prophets who were responsible for initiating and perpetuating it, or (2) claimed that the ban was not divinely mandated. And that’s where the issue stands today.⁴

-PWM

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1. See, e.g., D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Signature Books. p. 81, describing a struggle between Apostles Ezra Taft Benson and Hugh B. Brown over whether the Civil Rights Movement was part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the United States. Benson, who eventually became President of the Church (1984-94), was insistent (and taught publicly, including in General Conference addresses) that it was a conspiracy.
2. Interestingly, while I basically like Holland’s approach to explaining the issue, it certainly makes him look like he is just as lost as everybody else when it comes to this important topic. Unfortunately for him, he is officially a “special witness of Christ“, and he and his colleagues at the highest levels of Church leadership not only perpetuate the idea that they receive regular instruction from the resurrected Jesus Christ, they also declare to the world, twice a year, that they are “prophets, seers, and revelators“. Jeffrey Holland’s direct line to God doesn’t allow him to be as ignorant as everybody else.
   This illustrates the difficulty of his situation–it’s lose-lose for him. He can ignore stare decisis and disavow the bigotry, but if those dead prophets can be so wrong, what does that say about his own prophetic claims? He can also honor stare decisis, but that means honoring what most of America already thinks is morally and ethically wrong, and what does that say about his prophetic moral compass? He appears to have chosen the former for himself. (What do you expect him to do, deny altogether that he is a prophet who hangs out with Jesus? Yeah, right.  The type of people who end up in the position he is in are not the type who would ever voluntarily relinquish that power.  I would love him to prove me wrong, but he won’t.)
3. In the last sentence of this quote, Hinckley describes the whole Church, including himself, for the entire period prior to 1978, when the ban was lifted. It seems like a subtle statement that the ban was a huge mistake, driven by arrogance. If so, I totally agree with the sentiment, though not the passive, ineffective way it was delivered.
4. Note that this is not where the Mark of Cain doctrine stands now, just the priesthood ban.  The Mark of Cain (or Curse of Ham) doctrine itself–the underlying basis for the priesthood ban–has never been repudiated by the Church, probably because of stare decisis too.  Yeah, I think that’s a problem.  It makes lifting the ban much less meaningful, since the underlying beliefs remain racist.  In fact, it seems almost like the bare minimum a post-Civil Rights American church has to do to avoid being a pariah.  Kind of pisses me off, actually.  But I suppose that’s a topic for another post.

In the nineteenth century, leaders of the Church taught that the practice of polygamy was an inextricable doctrine of Mormonism, and the only way to reach the highest levels of heaven.

President Brigham Young taught:

The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy. Others attain unto a glory and may even be permitted to come into the presence of the Father and the Son; but they cannot reign as kings in glory, because they had blessings offered unto them, and they refused to accept them.

Journal of Discourses, Vol 11, p. 269, August 19, 1866.

Apostle Heber C. Kimball declared:

You might as well deny ‘Mormonism,’ and turn away from it, as to oppose the plurality of wives. Let the Presidency of this Church, and the Twelve Apostles, and all the authorities unite and say with one voice that they will oppose the doctrine, and the whole of them will be damned.

Journal of Discourses, vol. 5, p. 203

Apostle Joseph F. Smith said:

Some people have supposed that the doctrine of plural marriage was a sort of superfluity, or nonessential to the salvation of mankind. In other words, some of the Saints have said, and believe that a man with one wife, sealed to him by the authority of the Priesthood for time and eternity, will receive an exaltation as great and glorious, if he is faithful, as he possibly could with more than one. I want here to enter my protest against this idea, for I know it is false…whoever has imagined that he could obtain the fullness of the blessings pertaining to this celestial law, by complying with only a portion of its conditions, has deceived himself.

Journal of Discourses, vol. 20, pp. 28

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the LDS Church encountered massive rejection of its doctrine of polygamy among the people of the United States, which caused Church leaders to very reluctantly rethink the religion-defining doctrine. The United States enacted and enforced laws that severely punished the Church and its leaders for embracing the doctrine, culminating in the dissolution of the Church as a corporate entity and seizure of all of its assets. The Church made a formal announcement that its practice of polygamy had ended, and after attempts to continue performing polygamous marriages in secret, eventually stopped polygamy altogether in the early 1900s.

That is not to say that the Church completely abandoned the doctrine of polygamy after that time, rather, it merely instituted a policy suspending the practice. Belief in the doctrine as described in the quotes above was not changed.  The doctrine, Mormons believed, would never go away, and the practice would return again. That’s what I was taught when I was a kid. But now, 100+ years after suspension, the practice has never resumed. In fact, a President of the Church has denied, without apology or retraction, that it is a Church doctrine (see below), and the Church has since become America’s most earnest, organized, and outspoken opponent of laws that attempt to define marriage as anything other than a union between one man and one woman.

President Gordon B. Hinckley professed:

I condemn [polygamy], yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law.

Larry King Live, CNN, 1998

Does this mean that now polygamy is doctrinal only when it is legal?  Possibly.  Nobody really knows.  One thing that it does seem to make clear, however, is that the practice of polygamy has gone from being an essential, permanent, religion-defining doctrine of Mormonism, to a non-doctrinal¹ policy that can be suspended as needed.

So what does all this say about the prophetic chops of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor, the first three (uber-polygamist) Presidents of the Church, who went to their graves teaching that practicing polygamy was, had been, and always would be, essential to the salvation of humanity?  Were they fallen prophets?  Never prophets in the first place?  How do people still trust these guys when they were so obviously wrong about fundamental LDS beliefs?

Take Brigham Young, for example.  President Hinckley not only denied Brigham’s eternal doctrine of polygamy as anything more than a quirky artifact of LDS Church history, but Hinckley’s tenure as President also saw Church curriculum used to hamfistedly repurpose Brigham Young as a stalwart monogamist.

How could a modern LDS prophet like Gordon B. Hinckley so thoroughly dismiss key beliefs and teachings of Brigham Young without also undercutting Young’s authority as a prophet of God (as well as his own)?  Well, Hinckley clearly made an effort to at least pay lip service to stare decisis–putting forth the appearance of deference to Brigham Young’s prophetic authority, even if it may not have been completely sincere.  Hinckley was not shy about connecting his own authority to that of Brigham Young.  He kept a large portrait of “Brother Brigham” on the wall in his office, and he referred to it often in his speeches and writings:

At the close of one particularly difficult day, I looked up at a portrait of Brigham Young that hangs on my wall. I asked, “Brother Brigham, what should we do?” I thought I saw him smile a little, and then he seemed to say: “In my day, I had problems enough of my own. Don’t ask me what to do. This is your watch. Ask the Lord, whose work this really is.” And this, I assure you, is what we do and must always do.

An Ensign to the Nations, a Light to the World, President Gordon B. Hinckley, General Conference Speech, October 5, 2003

Hinckley was also willing to lean on Brigham Young for words of wisdom, sometimes even taking those words from statements Brigham made about the doctrine of polygamy (and then reworking them to apply to other things Hinckley wanted to emphasize² ).

Even though Hinckley tried to subtly erase much of what Brigham Young taught and believed as a prophet of God, his choice to align himself with Brigham Young and draw from Young’s teachings can be explained by the LDS concept of stare decisis: Hinckley’s own authority was legitimized through his demonstrated respect for the authority and wisdom of Brigham Young.  For members of the Church given to skepticism, who paid attention to the differences between the beliefs and teachings of the two men, Hinckley’s approach made him look like a spin doctor or a slick politician, posing for cheesy pictures with Brother Brigham, while secretly stabbing him in the back.  For most faithful members of the Church, however, Hinckley looked like a humble servant of the Lord providing modern guidance for the Church, while remaining part of an unbroken chain of authority–another in a long line of LDS prophets.

-PWM

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1. Well, it’s a non-doctrine only if you exclude non-physical living/loving arrangements, like my parents apparently had for 20 or so years as a divorced, but still sealed, couple.  Otherwise, Hinckley’s description of the practice of polygamy as a non-doctrine is deceptive doublespeak, and Mormons don’t do that.  (Just kidding.)  And LDS Prophets definitely don’t do that.  (Kidding again.)
2. Here is an example of Gordon B. Hinckley taking a (slightly veiled) Brigham Young teaching about the Gospel principle of polygamy and reapplying it to other Church doctrines:

   [Brigham Young said,] “Every principle God has revealed carries its own convictions of its truth to the human mind, and there is no calling of God to man on Earth but what brings with it the evidences of its authenticity.” (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 9, Jan. 12, 1862)   That’s a remarkable statement, really…I’ve never found a man who paid tithing who had any doubt that it represented a commandment of the Lord…And so I might go on with every principle of the gospel.  Each one, as we observe it, brings convictions of its divine source.

   President Gordon B. Hinckley, July 16, 1995 speech, reported in the LDS Church News, week of July 22, 1995

Every blessing we have is predicated upon a law. You break the law, the blessing is gone.

There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated. (D&C 130: 20-21)²

One must be intelligent not to confuse administrative actions with the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. truth) in its purest mode. There is a different between administration of earthly issues, the Truth of the Gospel, and, and what I call the “Doctrine of the Culture,” that some people cling to instead of the doctrine.

As a Mormon, I struggled with the legalistic LDS belief that all blessings a person receives from God are actually dependent upon his or her obedience to a specific Law (or body of Laws) of Heaven.  The reason I struggled is that I could never pin down exactly what the Law was, despite the fact that I was desperate to follow it.  (That seems to be a common theme in the LDS Church.) I studied the teachings of Mormon prophets over the 150+ year life of the LDS Church and found that certain Laws (or doctrines) they emphasized as “eternal” and “fundamental” to God’s plan for humanity had changed over time.  This was very distressing to me, as I had been taught my whole life that God’s Laws are eternal and unchanging, because they are based on Truth, which is eternal.  I was taught that the doctrines of Mormonism embody the sum of those unchanging Laws.  Clearly, however, doctrines had been changing and evolving the whole time.³

Once I realized this was the case, the contradiction between reality and what I had been taught and always believed about the LDS Church caused me to lose much of my confidence in the Church as the one true organization of God on Earth. I tried to figure out ways to reconcile the contradictions, trying to make distinctions between them that allowed both to be true at the same time.  My mind was working in ways similar to Deep Throat above, conceptually separating “doctrine” and “Truth” from “Mormon culture” and “folklore” in an effort to define the consistent Laws in LDS teachings upon which all blessings are predicated.⁴  Despite my best efforts, I was largely unsuccessful at convincing myself that the contradictions weren’t really contradictions, and that there was a consistent Law of the Gospel buried in Mormon beliefs.

When the believers in my family learned of my confusion, they pulled all of the strings they could to get me some help.  They put me in contact with Max Anderson, an LDS apologist, who had published a book defending mainstream LDS beliefs by deconstructing Mormon Fundamentalist claims to divine authority.  Max and his wife were very kind to me, and they had me over to their house on several occasions to sit in their living room and talk through my concerns.  A few times, Max invited other apologists to join us and discuss issues they had researched.  These meetings presented me with various ways of parsing the contradictions so that they made more sense.

One meeting in particular really blew my mind.  At that meeting, Eldon Watson, who had compiled a book of Brigham Young’s writings, attempted the mindbending feat of explaining how everything Brigham Young taught is in harmony with mainstream LDS beliefs about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I was flabbergasted to learn that what made it all fit together for him was to draw a distinction between “LDS doctrine” and ”Truth”.  The key, he explained, is to understand that Truth is eternal and unchanging, but LDS doctrine is only an expression of the Church’s acknowledged beliefs at a specific moment in time.  Thus, LDS doctrine when Brigham Young was alive included polygamy as a requirement to get into the highest part of heaven, but current LDS doctrine does not.

This idea was shocking to me because, despite its (semi)effectiveness as a logical solution to the problem of contradiction in authoritative LDS teachings, the concept is clearly heretical.  All LDS Church leaders I know of, and regular members alike, have talked about LDS doctrine as embodying “the fullness of the Gospel”.  Any past changes have been carefully characterized as adding more previously unrevealed Truth to the doctrine, because Truth is what LDS doctrine is all about.  Watson was explaining that doctrine freely changes with the needs of the Church at the given moment–things that are Truth, like the divine nature of polygamy, can be taken out and disavowed.

I’m pretty sure that Watson, in offering up his idea, was mainly just trying to accommodate the fact that Church President Gordon B. Hinckley had recently blurted out, on international television, that polygamy is not doctrinal⁵ when it had clearly been doctrinal (though not always practiced) during the previous 100+ years of LDS Church existence.  I think, however, that drawing a distinction between doctrine and Truth is just an apologetic invention, and has never been part of Church teachings. As far as I know, President Brigham Young never made that distinction, and Apostle Boyd K. Packer (currently the next in line to be President of the Church) doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo either, because he has taught that Some things cannot be changed. Doctrine cannot be changed. And understandably so.  Malleable doctrine undermines the authority of Church leaders, because it means that at least sometimes what they teach is not the real Truth, and therefore need not be obeyed.  This is also the reason why Mormons almost never admit (with any specificity) that Church leaders make mistakes.  Changing doctrine is just a slow-motion mistake.

Funny, though, because now that I have apostatized, I agree with Elden Watson.

-PWM

_______________________

1. Yeah, the irony of an apparently straight-laced Mormon naming him or herself Deep Throat hasn’t escaped me.  I assume the name is referring somehow to the Watergate informant, rather than the classic porn movie from which the informant’s pseudonym was derived.  Then again, either reference is kind of random.
2. By the way, this section of the Doctrine & Covenants (which is LDS scripture on par with the Bible or the Book of Mormon) is a treasure trove of canonized Mormon oddities, like Joseph Smith’s unfulfilled prediction about growing unrest in the American South (that eventually developed into the Civil War) being a precursor to the second coming of Jesus Christ, his cautiously hedged prediction that Jesus Christ’s second coming would happen prior to his 85th birthday (1890), his explanation for why the Holy Ghost is incorporeal, his insight into the planets that God and the angels live on, his view of what the afterlife is generally like, and other fun stuff.  Definitely worth a read, since these things are part of the “meat” of the Gospel that Mormons don’t share with outsiders very often (the “milk” always comes first).
3. For example, the importance of polygamy in attaining the highest glory in the Celestial Kingdom, the meaning and importance of Doctrine & Covenants 89 (the “Word of Wisdom”), the role of Blood Atonement in the Gospel, the meaning and importance of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the role of seer stones and other implements of folk magic in the Gospel, the role and meaning of race in determining worthiness to hold the Priesthood, the ancestral origins of the American Indians, the location of lands and people featured in Book of Mormon, the eternal and unchanging nature of LDS temple ceremonies and other Priesthood ordinances, etc.
4. I never went as far as Deep Throat has, however, in making distinctions between “administration of earthly issues” and “the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. truth) in its purest mode”, probably because that contradicts the basic Mormon belief that God doesn’t give any exclusively “earthly” rules–they are all applicable to spiritual matters (see D& C 29:34-35).
5. Larry King: You condemn it [polygamy].

   Gordon B. Hinckley: I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law.

   –1998 Larry King interview of Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet and President of the LDS Church

By “civilly divorced”, I don’t mean to say that the divorce process was completed in a civil manner, without petty bickering (though I believe that is true). I mean they were legally divorced. Free, in the eyes of the state, to remarry and move on with their lives.

This is an important point, because their divorce was not fully recognized by the LDS Church. Their marriage in the temple was both a civil marriage and a religious marriage–a ritual (or “ordinance“) in which my mom and dad had been “sealed” to each other, not just “till death do [them] part”, but “for time and all eternity.” From the perspective of the LDS Church, they continued to be sealed together for eternity as husband and wife, despite the civil divorce.

I think there is a similar dynamic at play in Catholic “sacramental” marriages that end in divorce–the divorce isn’t recognized by the Catholic Church, and any remarriages occur with that in mind. In the Catholic Church, if the marriage is sacramental, neither of the divorcees will be married in the Church again. In the LDS Church, it’s a bit different. My parents’ story continues:

For those of you keeping score, in the eyes (and the records) of the LDS Church, my dad was now simultaneously eternally married to two living women, and both of those women were eternally married to my dad, and nobody else.

Around the year 2000, decades after my parents’ civil divorce, my mom’s new husband realized that in the Mormon world, she had been living as my dad’s “spiritual” wife the whole time. He was thoroughly creeped out, and very dismayed that there had been no “temple divorce”. He asked my mom to make sure that the temple divorce was made official, so she looked into it.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), the polygamous union was not just a record-keeping anomaly, and dissolving it wasn’t a mere formality that the Church could take care of right away. No, here is what had to happen for the Church to acknowledge that she was no longer my dad’s wife:

1. She had to obtain, from her local LDS bishop, an application form asking the First Presidency to cancel her sealing to my dad;
2. The application form required a letter from her, addressed to the First Presidency, explaining why she wanted to have the sealing canceled;
3. The application form also required a letter from my dad, also addressed to the First Presidency, agreeing to cancellation of the sealing;
4. The completed application could only be submitted for First Presidency review by the senior local ecclesiastical authority, the stake president, who was required to interview her and attach his own written approval before sending off the application.
5. The First Presidency, in its sole discretion, would decide whether or not to cancel the sealing.
6. She would receive written confirmation of the First Presidency’s decision.

To dissolve the polygamous sealing, my mom had to get the permission of not only five different leaders of the Church, but also her already remarried ex-husband. And it wasn’t a quick process. Step 6 was completed a full nine months from the time that my mom initiated Step 1 (and it was on the desk of the First Presidency for six of those months).

If, as President Gordon B. Hinckley (whose signature, incidentally, is on my mom’s sealing cancellation letter) once asserted, in the LDS Church the practice of polygamy is “not doctrinal”,¹ then what do we call the doctrine supporting the LDS Church practice of sealing my dad to both my mom and my stepmom?

-PWM

______________________

1. Larry King: You condemn it [polygamy].

   Gordon B. Hinckley: I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal. It is not legal. And this church takes the position that we will abide by the law. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates in honoring, obeying and sustaining the law.

   –1998 Larry King interview of Gordon B. Hinckley, prophet and President of the LDS Church

My professor was in a bit of a bind, however, because Mormons today don’t have prophets who give out that kind of advice, and modern Mormons live in all sorts of different places–not strictly the agrarian communities of the western United States, so the 19th-century advice doesn’t fit reality very well. My professor, however, solved that problem by making his reality fit the advice. He bought land 3 hours away from campus, out in the middle of nowhere, and lived a 19th-century lifestyle there. He was dead serious about following the prophets and being right with God.

Most modern members of the LDS Church do not go to these lengths to heed prophetic advice. The common reason for this is that the living prophets trump the dead prophets, and therefore the way of life lived by the living prophets reflects the “right” way to live. The living prophets and apostles are former surgeons, newspapermen, car dealers, teachers, etc., so bread-baking advice that the Prophet Brigham Young gave in the year 18-whatever probably isn’t applicable anymore.

Probably.

The uncertainty embodied in that word is a major issue for Mormons who want to be sure they are living in full accordance with the will of God. To be on the safe side, some, like my professor, just go ahead and follow all of Brigham Young’s advice as if it was prophetic guidance from God. Most Mormons acknowledge that Brigham Young (and other past Church) were prophets of God, but they just arbitrarily pick and choose which advice they will take seriously enough to follow. Such pickers and choosers are, of course, never on completely safe ground. The clearest rule a Mormon has to work with in figuring out if a given statement from an LDS prophet is a revelation from God, or just some guy talking, is a statement made by the Prophet Joseph Smith himself (in his own defense against accusations of being a false prophet): “A prophet [is] a prophet only when he [is] acting as such.” (History of the Church, 5:265)

The question of when an LDS prophet is “acting as such” is the key issue for devout Mormons, and unfortunately something that neither the LDS Church nor any LDS prophets so far have had the inclination (or guts?) to opine on with any specificity. They simply refuse to say which “prophetic” advice from past prophets is or isn’t actually a message from God. I think they refuse because (a) they don’t know, and (b) doing so would confirm the possibility that LDS prophets sometimes think they are channeling the eternal will and mind of God, when they really aren’t, and that undermines the authority of both the dead prophets and themselves. Whatever the reason for it, the lack of official guidance on what prophetic advice to heed leaves some members of the Church with the sincere belief that a loaf of bread ought to be no thicker than two of Brigham Young’s hands, and that polygamy is the True form of marriage (even if it is not practiced by the LDS Church today).

Reverence for every word that has fallen from the lips of early Church prophets is something the modern LDS Church and the FLDS or other fundamentalist branches of Mormonism have in common. Both flavors of Mormonism are built on certainty about the nature of God, the purpose of life, the order of the universe, and the early prophets’ connection to God (though only the fundamentalists openly embrace the implications of that). When members of the LDS Church discover contradictions, ambiguities, or ridiculous bullshit in the teachings or policies of the early Church compared to that of the modern Church, their prophets and apostles offer no explanation (in fact, they don’t even acknowledge a conflict). And then those questioning members, in a sincere attempt to find answers, reach out and find the Mormon fundamentalists there waiting, happy to provide answers that bring the certainty back, and to take the questioning members out of the LDS Church. This connection–this path between mainstream Mormons and fundamentalist Mormons–is why the two movements continue to be so intertwined.

Modern leaders of the LDS Church, like the Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley in a 1998 interview with Larry King, don’t appear to perceive this connection. In fact, they seem to be altogether baffled by why people can’t clearly distinguish between mainstream Mormons and fundamentalist Mormons :

Larry King: But when the word ["polygamy"] is mentioned, when you hear the word, you think Mormon, right?

Gordon B. Hinckley: You do it mistakenly. [Fundamentalists] have no connection with us whatever. They don’t belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon fundamentalists.

***

Larry King: President Hinckley, when the press pays attention to [polygamy and Mormon fundamentalism], it does affect you, certainly, in a public relations sense?

Gordon B. Hinckley: It does, because people mistakenly assume that this church has something to do with it. It has nothing whatever to do with it. It has had nothing to do with it for a very long time. It’s outside the realm of our responsibility. These people are not members. Any man or woman who becomes involved in it is excommunicated from the church.

It isn’t really fair for Gordon B. Hinckley to say that the LDS Church has “nothing whatever to do with it”, when the Church leadership’s failure to disavow fundamentalist beliefs and past LDS Church practices has caused, and continues to cause, sincere believing Mormons to be curious about, or sometimes to silently support the illegal activities of fundamentalist Mormon churches. And the issue is not “outside the realm of [the Church's] responsibility,” since the Church bears responsibility for its continuing contribution to the situation.

For example, LDS Church doctrine has never been officially changed away from its polygamist roots (see e.g., the current version of the Doctrine & Covenants 132: 34-40 and 61-65); only the Church’s practice of polygamy has changed (and it hasn’t changed as much as people generally think, but that’s a topic for a future post). With that in mind, excommunicating somebody from the Church (or invoking other forms of discipline) for having been exposed as a participant in Mormon fundamentalism is an act filled with ambiguity, because it is unclear what that discipline means. Is the excommunication simply punishing people who are caught improperly practicing current LDS beliefs, or is the excommunication also supposed to say something about the beliefs themselves? Excommunication from the LDS Church can’t alter a person’s beliefs when the Church’s own scriptures still contain the voice of the Lord clearly declaring those beliefs to be correct.

If the LDS Church really wants to avoid the bad PR that comes with being connected to fundamentalist Mormons, then Church ought to revise its scriptures, have frank discussions with its members and the media about what is and what isn’t part of the beliefs of the Church. Only then will the Church be able to say, with sincerity (as Gordon B. Hinckley failed to do in the interview above), “it’s behind us”. Until then, it’s not.

-PWM