For more than a century prophets taught that God barred Black members from the priesthood and the temple, and the church now disavows the reasons given but not the restriction, which leaves the question of prophetic fallibility open.

From the 1850s to 1978 the church denied priesthood ordination and temple access to members of Black African descent, a policy presented by prophets as God’s will and changeable only by revelation. In 1978 the church president announced a revelation removing it. The exact start is debated by historians, since a few Black men were ordained in the earliest years and the ban hardened under Brigham Young. The church’s 2013 essay disavows the racial theories once offered to justify the restriction, and it does not say the restriction itself was a mistake; it leaves open that it was God’s will for reasons unknown. That is the most important feature of the essay. The Christian record on race must be conceded, plainly, and the difference is this: the Baptist and Reformed failures were violations of their own confessed teaching that all are one in Christ, whereas this restriction was official church policy declared as God’s will. The question it raises for Latter-day Saint theology is whether a prophet’s declared will of God can be wrong for a century.