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9. The Campaign to Cast Off the Curse of Cain [The Lord] . . . by revelation has confirmed that all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color. —LDS First Presidency, 1978 [The 1978 revelation] continues to speak for itself. . . . I don’t see anything further that we need to do. —President Gordon B. Hinckley, 1998 The 1978 declaration of the church leaders in the opening epigraph was widely expected to bring an end to the most important controversy in Mormondom during the second half of the twentieth century. That the church president,two decades later, was still facing questions about it suggested that the issue was not entirely dead.1 Like most large organizations and governments , the LDS Church usually struggles with some lag between its official pronouncements and their full implementation at the grassroots.Resistance is likely to be the more protracted the more fundamental the change.Among some individuals and interest groups in any community, old ways die hard and frequently require strenuous follow-up efforts by the leadership to eliminate them entirely.Even the struggle to divest Mormonism of its polygamous heritage is still underway, at least on the margins, more than a century after the official abandonment of the practice. The more contemporary struggle to cast off “the curse of Cain” from Mormons, black and white, has persisted for a full generation, largely because the “die-hards” among white Mormons have been as reluctant as white Americans more generally to relinquish traditional prejudices and stereotypes based on race or lineage. This struggle provides an interesting case study of successes and setbacks in organizational change, sometimes behind the ecclesiastical doors but often in the public arena as well. 232 all abraham’s children The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban against Blacks The process by which the LDS Church finally divested itself of the traditional restriction on priesthood for its black members is a complex story,which has been told from a variety of viewpoints and assumptions. Different authors have emphasized different elements in the process—internal, external, political , ecclesiastical,and even personal.2 Lester Bush found reason to believe that Joseph Smith himself inadvertently set in motion certain elements in Mormonism that would later undermine the restrictive racial policy, once it was eventually established (1984, 209–10).A careful scrutiny of the Mormon historical record would likely turn up a number of acts and events with unintended consequences for racial policy.After all,the church was always looking for ways to promote its growth among various peoples of the earth, so it was always unlikely that some peoples could be indefinitely ignored,set aside, or unequally treated without creating practical and theological problems. Outside Pressures and Tactical Adaptations Such consequences did indeed derive from certain practical and marginal policy changes that David O. McKay, president of the church, made during his world tour in 1953 and 1954.As a result of his observations in South Africa and Latin America, especially, he became aware of how much the work and growth of the church were hampered by the traditional requirement that priesthood candidates must demonstrate “pure” lineage back to Europe before they could be ordained, even if they had no visible characteristics of African lineage. More or less summarily, President McKay simply switched the “burden of proof,” so that anyone in those countries could be ordained unless the local church leaders provided evidence of a candidate’s African ancestry.3 In this way, the president opened the ranks of the priesthood to a great many who had been held back by “lineage questions.”At the same time, of course, he opened the door for a host of later predicaments when some of the men ordained under this looser policy subsequently discovered black ancestors in the process of doing the genealogical research that faithful Mormons are all expected to do. There is evidence also that in the 1950s some of the general authorities were already discussing the racial quandary behind closed doors or even with trusted friends and relatives. In general, however, the entire issue remained remarkably quiet in the church until the next decade (L. Bush 1999, 236–38, 245; Mauss 1981, 11–14). Especially after the arrival in 1961 of a federal administration more committed to promoting civil rights for ethnic minorities, restrictive racial policies of all kinds came under increased pressure. Various manifestations of such public pressure have been discussed at...

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