We should all thank God for modern revelation. Here's how it works:
Brigham Young: “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” But it would not, could not always be so. The last remaining state laws against the mixing of white blood with the seed of Cain—not to mention the mixing of metaphors—were struck down by a Supreme Court decision of 1967.
Pressure grew on the Mormon Church in the next decade to relax its ban on the recruitment of blacks to the priesthood, and to abandon those parts of scripture and theology that explained the inferiority and loathsomeness of blacks, their despised condition, in terms of their (assumed) behavior in a previous existence. In particular, a plan to erect a temple in São Paulo brought the Mormons up against the problem that none of their Brazilian recruits were liable to be of anything other than “mixed blood.”
In the face of such inconveniences, in 1978, the leaders of the church experienced, in an “upper room” in Salt Lake City, a highly convenient Pentecost, and with it a revelation ending the ban against black priests. Mormons were still counseled by their church President, Spencer W. Kimball, not to “cross racial lines in dating and marriage”—but this was presented as a practical matter, not a spiritual commandment. Meanwhile certain excisions were made, to render The Book of Mormon less embarrassing, and the text of II Nephi 30:6 was rewritten in 1981, to prophesy that righteous Indians would receive a blessing from the hand of God and that “their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a pure and delightsome people.” In the original version it had been foretold that the Indians would become a “white and a delightsome people.” (The Jews will also become delightsome, thank goodness, when they agree to believe in Jesus Christ.)
This willingness, admirable in its modest way, to jettison or modify revelation in order to conform to public opinion, has been characteristic of Mormonism since the long dispute over polygamy: in the end, it would seem, they get the point. They listen to criticism over the decades. They make some furtive adjustments. They clean up their act. And, at this rate, one might predict—one might be inclined to prophesy—that within a decade or two they will have reformed their teaching on homosexuality, which comes in for much good-humored ragging in the Broadway show, including one of the wittiest of the songs. It is as if the search for acceptability matters more, in the long term, than doctrine. In this sense, the candidatures of Mitt Romney, sacrificing his most significant legislative achievement on the altar of Republican censoriousness, and Jon Huntsman, sacrificing no less than his old master Obama, look like expert strategies of Mormon assimilationism.
Pressure grew on the Mormon Church in the next decade to relax its ban on the recruitment of blacks to the priesthood, and to abandon those parts of scripture and theology that explained the inferiority and loathsomeness of blacks, their despised condition, in terms of their (assumed) behavior in a previous existence. In particular, a plan to erect a temple in São Paulo brought the Mormons up against the problem that none of their Brazilian recruits were liable to be of anything other than “mixed blood.”
In the face of such inconveniences, in 1978, the leaders of the church experienced, in an “upper room” in Salt Lake City, a highly convenient Pentecost, and with it a revelation ending the ban against black priests. Mormons were still counseled by their church President, Spencer W. Kimball, not to “cross racial lines in dating and marriage”—but this was presented as a practical matter, not a spiritual commandment. Meanwhile certain excisions were made, to render The Book of Mormon less embarrassing, and the text of II Nephi 30:6 was rewritten in 1981, to prophesy that righteous Indians would receive a blessing from the hand of God and that “their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a pure and delightsome people.” In the original version it had been foretold that the Indians would become a “white and a delightsome people.” (The Jews will also become delightsome, thank goodness, when they agree to believe in Jesus Christ.)
This willingness, admirable in its modest way, to jettison or modify revelation in order to conform to public opinion, has been characteristic of Mormonism since the long dispute over polygamy: in the end, it would seem, they get the point. They listen to criticism over the decades. They make some furtive adjustments. They clean up their act. And, at this rate, one might predict—one might be inclined to prophesy—that within a decade or two they will have reformed their teaching on homosexuality, which comes in for much good-humored ragging in the Broadway show, including one of the wittiest of the songs. It is as if the search for acceptability matters more, in the long term, than doctrine. In this sense, the candidatures of Mitt Romney, sacrificing his most significant legislative achievement on the altar of Republican censoriousness, and Jon Huntsman, sacrificing no less than his old master Obama, look like expert strategies of Mormon assimilationism.
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