Floydian Slip

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Generation Gap
(2020 addendum to the original 2017 essay “Disavowment“)
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In the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a singular opportunity to atone for its racist past. That chance is slipping away as other topics now dominate the headlines. Will we need to wait another generation to see real change?

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I watched the 1992 Los Angeles riots unfold from a safe distance as a Mormon missionary in Germany. Being half a world away – and lacking a TV – I didn’t grasp the severity of the unrest, but my companion’s father was serving as an active-duty California cop at the time, and based on the snippets of apocalyptic news that we could gather from shop window television screens, we definitely feared for his life. Luckily, the riots ended up subsiding within a week – which wasn’t even enough time for my companion to get a letter from home about how his family had been affected.

I didn’t really feel like there was anything I could offer to the discussion from where I sat, and life seemed to get back to normal soon enough. In the years following my return to the US, I saw a few systemic changes that occurred as a result of the protests, but eventually – perhaps aided by OJ’s acquittal – suburbanites seem to have convinced themselves that the pendulum had swung far enough in the opposite direction for their comfort. Progress toward improved race relations seemed to stagnate – or at least drop out of the Provo newscasts that I could access at the time.

Now that similar tensions have erupted – and largely subsided again – a full generation later, I find myself wondering whether I could have done more to help combat racism in the meantime. Again, I found myself overseas this time around, watching the 2020 protests unfold from a safe distance an ocean away. And again, I didn’t feel there was much I could do about it other than to watch it all go down on the news. Perhaps that echoes the insulated sentiment of my parents when they watched news footage of the 1960s race riots from their student apartments in Utah Valley, which may as well have been a foreign country at the time!

Given the regular recurrence interval between these three periods of unrest, it sure seems like a pattern that repeats itself with each passing generation. Are we doomed to replicate this scenario another generation from now when a previously obscure name like Rodney King or George Floyd suddenly becomes a catalyst for lighting the fire of pent-up infuriation that has accumulated in the meantime?

I keep reading news reports and social media posts claiming that this time around, things are going to be different – that the sheer magnitude of the ambient energy will spark a real change, breaking the cycle. I really hope that is the case, but the real test, of course, comes after the headlines have dropped to the bottom of the newsfeeds. So how can we collectively make those predictions come true, harnessing the energy of the protests, capturing their momentum, and instigating a real, continuing change rather than stifling, supressing, and bottling up the dissent so that it ignites and explodes again in another generation? How can a single individual help to dismantle institutional racism within the institutions that they belong to?

When the head of the Mormon institution called on all racists to repent in June 2020, I thought that might signal the start of something profound, perhaps inspiring the first step up the stairway to heavenly penance. I was initially hopeful that a real change was coming; but sadly, within the official statements, there wasn’t even a first-rung acknowledgment of the Church’s own racist past nor any apology to those harmed along the way. Still, I followed news stories that seemed to offer hope, including accounts of harmonious meetings between the LDS Church and the NAACP.

The encouraging photos above were accompanied by headlines about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “locking arms” with the NAACP. Those positive headlines appeared primarily in news outlets controlled by the LDS Church itself.

In reality, the official response to the meetings from an authorized spokesman for the NAACP was that there seems to be “no willingness on the part of the church to do anything material.”

He acknowledged an improving friendliness but stated that the emerging partnership has not borne the fruits that some NAACP leaders had hoped. He added further that the group hasn’t seen very much progress on joint projects.

The handful of collaborations have been “minor efforts,” he said. They “do not befit the stature and magnitude of what the LDS Church can do and should do.” In that light, the NAACP is “looking forward to the church doing more to undo the 150 years of damage they did by how they treated African Americans in the church, by their endorsement of how African Americans were treated throughout the country, including segregation and Jim Crow laws.”

Yes, there were talks and hugs and a photo op with linked arms that made the backdrop for a very believable headline. But the NAACP special counsel said that given the lack of tangible efforts, he can only look forward “to their deeds matching their words,” adding, “It’s time now for more than sweet talk.”

On a daily basis during the peak of the unrest, Mormon social media streams distributed official statements condemning racism, but with no acknowledgment of the pain that the Church’s own discriminatory policies have introduced – not just in the past, but every day that goes by without a real retraction of the historical, racial ban. It seems even the “sweet talk” is a stretch, and if that isn’t even there, how can we move on to the deeds?

There is an obvious discrepancy between the NAACP’s position and the celebratory articles published by Church sources. One of the things that I find bothersome about the diverging story lines is the number of retweets and reposts of the whitewashed, one-sided articles that were sent around without any accompanying calls for further efforts or any recognition of the lack of substance. I never saw a single LDS source cite the NAACP’s version of the meeting minutes.

It’s almost like we’re trying to highlight things that make us feel good about ourselves, hoping to convince our hearts that we are part of an organization that is a force for good. We all want that. We all deserve that. But in this case, in terms of genuine efforts to combat racism, it just isn’t true.

In the height of the June 2020 protests, I ran across an article in my newsfeed that got my attention – and not in a good way! The headline in the June 10 Salt Lake Tribune claimed that Brigham Young’s descendants say, “he was no racist.”

The article featured a group of Brigham Young’s descendants who tried to downplay his racist rhetoric and blame the racist policies he implemented on God’s will. A 2016 survey of over 1,000 self-identified Latter-day Saints found that almost two-thirds of members believe racial ban to be “God’s will,” so perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise; but for me, seeing the words “it was God’s will” standing unchallenged in print, highlighted the sad realization that a divinely inspired racial ban is still the belief of many LDS Church members and is, in fact, still the official stance of the LDS Church despite every carefully worded statement decrying the “explanations” for the ban without disavowing its implementation in the first place. I’m sorry, but that is systemic racism by definition, which is exactly what many of the 2020 rallies (and even the First Presidency statements on the subject!) were aimed at combating.

Now this article hit me hard by association; in a way, I could consider myself a descendant of Brigham Young, though he’s not a known blood relative of mine. Now maybe I don’t count because of the missing DNA links, but whether or not I get a place at the table, I was “celestially” sealed to this dispensation’s Prophet #2 through my adopted triple-great grandfather.

Nobody asked for my input on the question of his racism, but if I have any say in it, I would say that only his racist descendants could possibly claim he was no racist. Pushing the blame on God as a convenient scapegoat seems like a low blow, but I guess as long as that ambiguity is allowed from the top, we can all be exonerated for our compliance with systemic racism!

I can’t believe this is actually going on today. This reported denial of Brigham Young’s racism was stated in 2020…right in the middle of the George Floyd uprisings and the snowballing demands for equality. That’s when this group of descendants decided it was time to stand up for Brigham Young and claim that the racial ban he implemented and upheld was God’s will? Seriously?

Well, can you blame them? These particular descendants are loyal Mormons, having vowed their eternal servitude to a system that will not claim otherwise. The absence of just five words, “The ban was not inspired,” tells a very sad tale indeed about the presence of systemic racism. How can we start talking about the deeds the NAACP is asking for when the most crucial, missing words haven’t even been said yet? I’m all for letting the past be the past, as long as the present stance is truthful. But a fake news story about God’s complicity in the ban is still being propagated today. Until that misdeed is officially undone, how can we possibly let the past be the past?

Well what would actually happen if an announcement were made and those missing words were finally to be uttered? Some people – like those quoted in the Tribune article – would need to eat their words. But I’m guessing most younger Mormons (at least those who can’t remember life under the ban) would wonder why the duplicate statement was necessary at all; because they believe the sentiment of that announcement is already contained in apparent apologies (which, incidentally, don’t include any form of the word apology). Those most affected by the statement’s absence, however, realize full well that it has been deliberately and cunningly omitted from all official statements covering racism. And I believe that the change would be welcome to those looking for healing.

Here’s an emotional excerpt from Sistas in Zion’s Zandra Vranes that really captures some of the sentiment around the refusal to admit that the ban was wrong:

“The only thing keeping us here is knowing that the things that are damaging and traumatizing us, God didn’t do it. And if you force people to believe, and if you double down on the idea that these things were of God, you will break us! If you make me believe that God did this to me, I cannot be here anymore. Because why would I stay with a God who thinks this of me? You have to tell people that the things that hurt them and harm them — that God did not do it to them! If you damage people’s relationship with God, you break them, and you cannot put them back together again. The minute someone believes that God is the reason that they are not whole, they are finished. And we, as the body of Christ, have the ability to make sure that no person ever believes that. I cannot stress that enough.”

Another BYU graduate, Melodie Jackson, was quoted in an ABC article about the response to the 2020 protests with these words:

“It was in the manual this past year that the priesthood ban was of God and it wasn’t, it wasn’t, and the Church needs to reckon with that.”

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Tick-tock

Isn’t it about time for an answer about the ban’s divinity once and for all? Only one man can answer that question with finality for the Church. I happened to meet that man when I was a young missionary in Dresden. I could have asked him anything that day, but here’s what I asked when I shook his hand:

“Would you mind if we took a picture?”

I managed to get a photo op out of it, but looking back on it, there are a whole lot of other questions I wish I had asked him instead. How about this:

“Do you believe the racial ban was inspired by God?”

There are really only three responses to that question other than silence, a refusal to answer, or a convenient change of topic. If he chose to answer the question, I can envisage three options for my own follow-up statement, had I been in my right mind at the time:

His response: Yes My follow-up: “Sorry, not my God, I’m out of here!”
His response: No My follow-up: “Then just say it publicly already!”
His response: I don’t know My follow-up: “You said God inspired the logo change. This seems more important. Please ask.”

Or maybe I should put the question in the form of a meme:

I cannot accept Answer #1, nor do I believe for a second that the brethren in the upper echelons have not formed an opinion that sways their beliefs to one side of the fence or the other; so #3 is out as well. In my eyes, the only realistic, believable answer is #2. And if that’s the truth – that Mormon leaders believe the ban was as off-base as the racist explanations that they vocally dismiss – why won’t they just say it?

Brigham Young, who first enforced the ban, publicly proclaimed the reasons for its divinity “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Retrogression: Brigham Young’s statue being moved back into the Utah State Capitol Building

Those authorized, published, spoken-as-a-prophet-and-not-as-a-man doctrines are now disavowed by the modern Church, but bizarrely, to this day there is still a refusal to admit that the ban itself was just as wrong as its denounced justifications. As far as today’s top LDS leaders, either they believe it was God’s will – and by inference worship a God who is foreign to me – or they believe it was not God’s will but recognize that such an admission ticket to the 21^st century comes with a purchase price that they are simply not willing to pay.

If I had to venture an opinion on the matter – which I think every practicing Mormon is obliged to do – I imagine the deliberate omission of those crucial words arises from a fear of the potential repercussions, measured in terms of the level of commitment to current guidance among Church membership; that concession, after all, would imply that each of the prophets who upheld the ban was simply wrong in their adherence to it – and that any in-tune prayer uttered on any one of the 40,000-odd days that the policy was on the books should have led to Official Declaration #2 that very same day.

There is some debate about whether Brigham Young inherited the idea for the ban from his predecessor, but from the time he openly implemented it until the time it was rescinded under Spencer W. Kimball, nine other prophets of the past had to decide whether to uphold the ban or to renounce it. The presence or absence of the five missing words, “The ban was not inspired,” paints two contrasting pictures of any one of those nine prophets who find themselves squashed between the bookends of Kimball and Young:

The absence of those five words implies the following screenplay that could star any one of those nine interim prophets:

Opening scene, set in a nicely furnished bedroom in the Avenues of pre-1978 Salt Lake City:

Cut to an elderly figure, kneeling at his bed. Deeply concerned about the pain that the priesthood ban is causing among the Latter-day Saints, the kneeling prophet begs God in fervent prayer to reveal His will:

“Please Lord, isn’t it time yet?” the prophet cries, “Thy people are suffering. Haven’t we been tested enough?”

“No, not yet,” comes the answer, perceived through spiritual ears, “but when my people are sufficiently humbled and prepared, equality will come for all men, and you will have cause to rejoice on that blessed day.”

As God’s mouthpiece on earth, the prophet feels duty-bound to proclaim the truth about the ban, so he presses a bit further:

“So how should we explain the inequality in the meantime?” the prophet asks.

“I mean, I really, really wish everyone would stop with their silly explanations,” the Lord responds, “but let’s just let the lies continue, and we’ll clear it up in the future. Remember, I let the wheat and the tares grow together…for a time.”

The prophet holds his hands in the air. He looks heavenward, keeping his physical eyes closed but his spiritual eyes open. Basking in the light of discernment and caught up in the spirit of revelation, he is blessed with a God-granted knowledge of the real reasons for the ban, but he is then told that those reasons are so sacred that they cannot be explained to mere mortals…no matter how pious they may be.

God’s mysterious ways are not yet to be revealed, but through patience, persistence, and humility, the prophet comes to accept the divine timeline, trusting that we’ll get there someday.

In the meantime, Mormons get a free pass for their divinely sanctioned bigotry.

Scene II: Salt Lake Tabernacle, June 1978:

“And there was much rejoicing…yaaaaay!”

Scene III: Provo Temple grounds, June 2020:

Pan to faithful LDS students joining the protest marchers while brandishing iPhones. The students take selfies and cheerfully retweet the Deseret News NAACP article about how awesome the Church is at not being racist these days. They encourage each other to hold to the rod and keep the faith, hoping their participation in the protest will distract non-Mormons – aka potential investigators – from their own belief that God still doesn’t think their parents’ church should have had black leaders. If it wasn’t God’s will in the first place, the prophet would have said so, after all!

The presence of those five missing words would paint a contrasting picture:

Opening scene, set in a nicely furnished bedroom in the Avenues of pre-1978 Salt Lake City:

Cut to an elderly figure, kneeling at his bed. Faced with accusations of racism within the Church, he desires to know God’s will on the subject. Being no more in tune with divinity than any other soul who wanders this planet, though, he is left to decide for himself. Knowing nothing of the future flip flop that would lead to a disavowment of the reasons for the ban, he decides to uphold not just the ban itself, but all the false reasons for it, too. He bases his decision on the warm fuzzies that he feels when he thinks about keeping things as they are, which contrast with the fear that he feels when he thinks about the uproar that such a concession would lead to among the largely segregationist population of the Church.

In an internally concocted vision, which bears no linkage to any natural or supernatural source outside of his own head, he shudders at the potential abomination of a rising generation of mixed-race Mormons. He mistakes the fear that his own indoctrination has fed him for a stupor of thought, taking that sign as a no-action answer to his prayer, which bolsters his support for the status quo of injustice.

He resolves to do nothing and climbs into bed.

Scene II: Salt Lake Tabernacle, June 1978:

“And there was much rejoicing…yaaaaay!”

Scene III: BYU campus, June 2020:

Freed from their own bondage to a 200-year old lie by the unprecedented apology and renouncement of the ban’s divinity, the students can stand with those demanding justice and racial equality without hypocrisy.

Protesters and counter-protesting “peacekeepers” near the Provo Temple, 2020

If people can be coerced into believing that the ban was God’s will, the first image of the prophet patiently awaiting the 1978 “revelation” can stand. By refraining from condemning the ban itself, believing Church members – at least those of a pre-1978 vintage – can keep that pretty picture in their heads, justifying their complicit involvement in systemic racism by deflecting the blame to a higher power.

The current leadership would love to paint that first picture for Church members to digest, but it is utterly false and entirely indigestible. The “good, warm feeling” upon which President Kimball based his “revelation” contrasts with the absence of that feeling as experienced by those who prayed about its validity while the ban was in place. Dallin Oaks, for example, claims to have experienced this phenomenon, professing his inability to confirm the ban’s truth while it was in place. His prayers can “bounce off the ceiling” like the rest of ours, to borrow from a book title that made its rounds in my youth. Perhaps this “stupor of thought” should have served as the scriptural answer to prayer that, in turn, casts a shadow on each prophet who upheld the ban!

If today’s church leaders were to admit that the ban was never God’s will in the first place, it would indicate that a continuous succession of prophets wasn’t listening in the first place…giving current followers the freedom to ignore any other statement issued in the past, present, or future under the guise of inspiration or revelation!

So yes, it’s scary. But it’s the right thing to do!

A 2020 statement about the ban being wrong would expose the principal character in the second play as being no more adept or inept at perceiving God’s will than any one of his followers. If there had been any connection whatsoever to God, He would have immediately called for the ban to be lifted. So either God wasn’t talking, or the professed prophet wasn’t listening, or both. Luckily for Mormons who were caught on the drifting, radio-silent ship, the civil rights movement intervened, and the accumulating pile of lawsuits finally forced a response, breaking the cycle of ignorant apathy – which likely would have continued through passing generations without the tugboat of civil unrest.

In any case, issuing the long-awaited statement condemning the ban would draw the curtain wide open, revealing that the emperor never had any clothes in the first place. It would turn the prophetic succession into a classic case of the blind leading the blind, completely glitching out the Matrix.

Although it is now blatantly obvious to the entire world that the ban was never God’s will in the first place, Character #2 never would have known this, because his proclaimed gift of seership was a mantle of nakedness that would only be fully exposed once the post-mortem, public sentiment caught up with the inaction he promoted while leading the Church.

Sure, there would be widespread implications associated with such an admission, but so what? What would the real, daily impacts be if the ban’s real source was finally admitted as simply originating from the heads and tainted hearts of biased men? How would practicing, believing members of the Church react to the change? Perhaps in the aftermath of such a statement, some church members would be a bit more selective about how unequivocally and unquestioningly the current First Presidency’s advice is accepted, but I suspect most members wouldn’t be phased in the least. Given the reaction to similar backpedaling around doctrine and policy reversals, most Mormons would likely get over it that very same day, supporting the official stance, come what may. They already realize that many former prophets weren’t listening in the first place about a lot of things that believing Mormons now cut them some slack for. Why would this one be received any differently?

I believe the vast majority of practicing Saints would get over this concession in a heartbeat. If historical shake-ups serve as any sort of precedent, a trickle of fence-sitting, quasi-adherents may make a stink, but the masses are not going to just turn their backs on the whole enterprise based on these sorts of admissions. On the contrary, I think more members would simply find the modernized Church to be a more comfortable place to worship, having been relieved of the burden of rationalizing things that many Latter-Day Saints, particularly the younger generation, don’t support anyway.

So just do it already! Say the words!

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I thought this might finally be the year. Unfortunately, though, the continuing refusal among the current gerontocracy to admit that the ban was wrong seems likely to remain an ongoing stain on race relations for anyone associated with today’s LDS Church.

So in the meantime, if systemic racism won’t be getting denounced by the system itself, what can individuals do to climb that repentance ladder? I’d like to take some steps of my own and perhaps offer them up as challenges to others, but who am I to comment on the matter at all? I’m just a plain old hetero-white-guy-American-ex-pat-BYU-alum watching recent events unfold from overseas. So what can I possibly offer to this conversation?

I guess the first step is admission. I admit that I myself have been shamefully silent on this issue for many years, believing that my skin color disqualified me from speaking on the matter, and I am truly sorry that I did not speak up earlier.

I find it awfully annoying when white people tell other white people to stop being so racist, like they’re on some high horse of their own. Unspoken advice tends to run through my head when I read posts on the subject of race from those who, like me, are far removed from daily decisions that have anything to do with race: “Show it through example and actions rather than self-righteous words.” I am not putting myself up on any pedestal to try to serve as an example; rather, I am acknowledging that my passive approach to combating racism was woefully inadequate.

My own social settings from elementary school through to high school and college took place in environments that were 99% white. Since then I have been fortunate enough to travel the world, but can I excuse my own, past ignorance based on historical context? My early interactions with anyone of color were very limited. There were a few notable exceptions; for example, I competed on a high school team with a few black wrestlers (one of whom stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson!) and at one point had a black bishop. Although I genuinely liked and admired them and thoroughly enjoyed our relatively brief interactions, I’m sure I’ve said some insensitive, ignorant things and – perhaps more importantly – made some assumptions based on the color of their skin. I hope I have evolved since that time, and I am truly sorry, having no valid excuses to offer for my behavior and for my ignorant mindset.

In the past, my inclination has been to let those who have been affected by racism be heard, feeling that my job was to just listen. As has been pointed out by a flurry of recent memes and protest placards around the world, however, silence is acceptance, and all too often the listen turns to dismissin’ once the fervor subsides.

A more active response is obviously well overdue from every soul on this planet, whether or not we have been directly affected by racism. So what can white people do to break their silence and come to the aid of those who can’t breathe? I’ve seen that question posted all over the internet over the last few months. Well, I do believe there is one white man in Utah who could utter five simple words that would make a difference – maybe not to the rest of the world or to the rest of the country – but certainly to the millions who count his voice as valid as God’s own. But this isn’t about him or about anyone else. I can’t extract those words from his mouth; but I certainly can speak up myself, taking actions of my own that may not have much of an impact on others, but feel like a good starting point nonetheless.

One very simple thing I can do right now is to disavow my association with Brigham Young’s name, because Black Lives Matter.

My engineering diploma includes Brigham Young’s name, but several years ago I deleted BYU from my resumes and social media profiles and replaced it with a fictitious institution named after my favorite mountain that towers over the BYU campus:

Sure, the hypothetical school is made up, but so is the notion that Brigham Young’s racial ban was inspired! Maybe that fake substitution carries some ethical implications with it; plenty of people have been fired or worse for falsifying their degrees, after all – but I was hoping it would spark some conversations that would allow me to state my conviction about racial equality. Since I swapped it out, though, nobody has ever even asked me the first thing about it, so my little protest has stayed silent.

While other monuments were being dismantled by angry crowds during the 2020 unrest, LDS monuments seem to have survived the threat. Somebody spray painted the word “racist” on a Brigham Young statue located on the BYU campus (which happens to be situated against a backdrop of buildings named after slave owners and segregationists.) The vandalism would have gone entirely unnoticed if the photographer had passed by an hour later, since the graffiti was promptly removed by the grounds crew, but the photo was snapped just in time to accompany a newspaper article about the act. The article, in turn, was accompanied by a few online comments debating the merits of renaming the campus.

For years there has been an active petition to rename BYU in light of Brigham Young’s racist views and policies. A few hundred people had signed it before 2020. During the racial strife of 2020, thousands more signed it, perhaps aided by articles like “Time to change the name of BYU,” written by BYU grad Tasi Young and published in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Dropping Brigham Young’s name, given that he was the instigator of the ban, might represent a step in the right direction. In my view, however, the campaign to rename BYU and tear down his statue is a side channel to the more pressing matter of tearing down the ongoing, systematic racism that is packaged up in the myth of divine support for racist practices. Perhaps the mounting pressure to rename the campus can help draw attention to the absence of a statement contrary to the notion of divine bigotry?

I thought there might be some potential, but after this relatively brief flash of momentum, the “Rename BYU” movement died down again, and only a handful of supporters have signed the petition in the last few months. So congratulations to us! Let’s give ourselves a pat on our own backs! We survived this one without being forced to admit the truth and without a single policy change, name change, or dismantled statue. Brigham Young still graces the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall of Fame as the most representative soul to embody Utah’s spirit. No culture was cancelled, and fortunately for the fortune, no expenses were expended on an expensive rebranding effort for his namesake school. We can shout out a cheer that the widow’s mites have been spared [or perhaps redirected toward a more comprehensive rebranding effort for the entire church…] and now that the terrorists and anarchists have all moved to Portland and Seattle, Utah’s Mormons won’t have to face our uncomfortable past again until a new generation makes a stink!

Well, in the meantime, even if BYU’s board of directors wouldn’t consider a new name due to a number of predictable rebuttals – including the massive expense of rebranding – renaming it on your own resume is absolutely free! And how does it feel to take another step up the redemption ladder – with more real action to come? Priceless!

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The LDS Church seems to have dodged another bullet in 2020. Similar to the aftermath of the 1992 riots, Mormons are able to breathe a sigh of relief now that the unrest has subsided. The canned First Presidency statements condemning racism seem to have done the trick of deflecting any substantial calls for introspection, and the Church largely avoided having to confront its uncomfortable, racist past.

The 2020 incidents should have provided an ideal catalyst for some real change within the LDS Church, but the fervor around racial equality is now dying down again, at least in Salt Lake City. If history is indeed repetitious, we may need to wait another thirty years for our next chance to instigate real change…unless…unless…

How’s this? Throughout the 2020 episode, thousands of COVID-restricted LDS missionaries, many with nothing in their daily planner besides studying and sending out e-mails, watched the riots play out from the safe distance of their own apartments. Many of those missionaries are still under lockdown orders today. Could those missionaries be doing something more to contribute to the cause of equality and to the fight against injustice? If history does indeed repeat itself once more, we’ll reach another boiling point in the year 2050 – long after today’s missionaries return home to start raising their own families. In that event, perhaps they’ll look back as I am doing now and wonder if there is anything they could have done in the meantime to make a difference.

Well, what about those thousands of missionaries with nothing to do except write letters these days? Hmmm….don’t they deserve to know the official stance on the racial ban, considering these troubled times? When they do start preaching from door to door again, questions about racism will certainly be more prevalent. I would think these missionaries have a right to know whether their commander-in-chief believes that the ban was inspired.

These missionaries have to write their mission president a letter every single week; they are part of a direct chain of command that could pass their questions straight to the very top. I am an outsider with no means of instigating an internal change, but what if the missionaries collectively started sending the request for an answer up the chain from the inside?

It’s a simple question: “Was the priesthood ban inspired?” There are only three answers, and each one comes with a unique call to action. So what’s it going to be?

I should have asked that question as a missionary myself many decades ago; the corresponding call to action – and my own personal willingness to actively combat racism – could have begun much earlier. Today’s missionaries could break that cycle and become part of the movement to help eradicate the false notion of a white supremacist God who arbitrarily enforces his bias while allowing the implementation of his will to be rationalized with outright, pernicious lies. Let’s not wait until 2050 for the next opportunity to correct the record!

To church members: Ask the question already! To church leaders: Answer the question already!

[This is an addendum to the 2017 essay “Disavowment“]