“Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics Essays

Sources

• “Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics Essays. (opens in a new tab)

Objections & responses

The 2013 essay disavows the theories used to justify the restriction but doesn’t 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 church has disavowed the racist explanations but has not said the restriction was an error, which leaves the question of prophetic fallibility open in exactly the way this claim is interested in. Critics inside and outside the church have pressed on that. The accurate statement, from the essay’s own text, is neither the church admits it was wrong nor the church still defends it, but that the church has repudiated the reasons and left the policy’s status unaddressed.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• 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.