Randy Bott and the Priesthood Ban

[Uncle Ted]

If Bott isn't fired he should still be subject to some sort of discipline. Maybe the powers that be at BYU should lop off his tallywhacker. They can explain to him how he should be greatful because he is now unable to commit the sin next to murder.

To make it up to the Jews for baptizing their dead maybe they should let them circumcise his wiener for as a proxy for all dead mormons...

[YOUTUBE]8H5Je7z2r4U[/YOUTUBE]

[LA Ute]

That quote does not acknowledge the possibility of God.

Of course I was being serious. I'm a well-established apologist when it comes to the Priesthood ban.

I think it was LA Ute that used the "context" rationale in this very thread. I chimed in quickly to show my support.

Context is not a rationale. It's merely an element in trying to understand and explain history, not to excuse anyone's behavior. It helps avoid presentism, IMO.

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists? I'm reminded of SIEQ's statement that "we all trust our own orthodoxies."

[Shaka]

Put another way: can anyone imagine the church rescinding the ban in 1978 if there weren't a civil rights movement?

It's an interesting question. One of the problems with letting old guys lead is that change happens at a snails pace. I'd like to think that if Kimball had not led the charge someone of the next generation would have. Either way it happened too late to be remotely comfortable.

[SeattleUte]

Slate weighs in with a powerful case that the virus of racism still is strong throughout the LDS Church including BYU, precisely because there has been no honest reconing by Church leaders.

Why did the church withhold the priesthood from blacks for over a century? Among the reasons trotted out by church leaders—including church presidents—during that time: Black people are the cursed descendants of ancient Biblical figures; black people committed pre-mortal perfidy; black people lacked the intelligence and personal integrity to hold such a sacred office.

Such past beliefs have never officially been repudiated. And the failure of the church to repudiate them helped set the stage for the comments made by Bott, perhaps the most popular professor at BYU (and at one point, according to ratemyprofessors.com, the most popular professor in the country). Bott, 67, teaches in the school’s religion education department, which is more like a college-level seminary class than the standard “religious studies” program at a liberal arts college. In his comments to the Post, Bott cited the Old Testament anti-heroes Cain and Canaan, whom Christians of many denominations long believed to be cursed for their ancient transgressions, marking their offspring with dark skin and casting them into perpetual servitude of the lighter skinned races.

The Mormon Church’s own longstanding priesthood ban was, according to Bott, not racist. Rather, it was a “blessing.” Prior to 1978, blacks weren’t spiritually mature enough to be ordained with such authority. Bott compared blacks to “a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car,” and told Horowitz that misusing priesthood authority—like crashing dad’s Oldsmobile—could have put blacks “in the lowest rungs of hell,” reserved for serial killers, child rapists, world-class tyrants, and “people who abuse their priesthood powers.”

On Wednesday, Bott apologized to his students for the uproar. He also claimed that he had been misquoted. Yet he provided similar justification for the priesthood ban in a blog post from 2008 that was only taken down after this week’s story broke.

For many Mormons, reading Bott’s words was like unearthing a theological dinosaur long thought extinct but suddenly rediscovered in the corner of an obscure BYU office. His positions seem radically out of place in a modern church with an international membership that includes probably some 500,000 Mormons of African descent. The church’s expensive and ubiquitous “I’m a Mormon” public relations campaign has been carefully and deliberately multiethnic; Mormon leaders want the world to view the religion as the diverse global community it has become.

Unfortunately, Bott’s beliefs, though arcane, represent a strain of Mormonism that has persisted well past the 1978 revelation. For most of the 182-year lifespan of the LDS Church, members of the church hierarchy—the senior-most of which are called prophets and speak to and for God—used similar racist rationalizations for excluding blacks from full membership. Joseph Fielding Smith, who served as church president in the early 1970s (and was the great-nephew of the religion’s founding prophet), wrote a popular treatise, still available on Kindle, asserting that during a pre-mortal battle between God and the devil, blacks were “fence-sitters,” siding neither with God or Lucifer. According to Fielding Smith, when blacks came to Earth, God cursed them with dark skin to set them apart from the more courageous whites who had sided with God.

Rather than explicitly denouncing such racialist theology, the LDS Church has insisted that Kimball’s 1978 revelation, known as Official Declaration 2, stands on its own, hoping that time—and the church’s humanitarian and missionary efforts in Africa and around the world—would help to bury its racist past. Bott’s comments only highlight how this strategy has failed. The 1978 revelation itself does not address why the ban was instituted in the first place, and the lack of answers from today’s Mormon leaders creates a theological vacuum. To fill this vacuum, Mormons turn to the reams of answers provided by past prophets, who led a church in which blacks were not welcome.

Thus, some Mormon parents continue to teach their children beliefs like those proffered up by Bott. Some Sunday school teachers continue to answer questions about the priesthood denial by citing Cain, Canaan, and “fence-sitting.” And, at church meetings, some black Mormons still hear racial slurs. As African-American convert to the church Tamu Smith said in the documentary Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, “the first time I was called a nigger was in the Salt Lake Temple.”
Just this past month, the BYU campus became embroiled in a controversy concerning racism—or, at the very least, racial insensitivity and ignorance. In a satirical celebration of black history month, comedian David Ackerman dressed in a hoodie, Utah Jazz gear, and blackface, and quizzed BYU students on their knowledge of African-American history. On the video, which went viral, BYU students failed to correctly identify February as black history month and failed to name important black American figures beyond Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. (The rapper 50 Cent was also named as a hero of black history.) And Ackerman succeeded in getting his painfully naive interviewees to imitate what they believed to be typical black behavior, with finger snapping, the “gangsta limp,” and jive talk all making appearances.

According to Darron Smith—an African-American convert to Mormonism and a BYU alum who, from 1996 to 2006, taught a course there called “The African American Experience”—Ackerman’s video reveals that problematic attitudes about race are not limited to “older generations” of Mormons. Ackerman “provided a microphone for today’s BYU students (even the few black BYU students) to voice their ignorance about the black experience in America.” And while you might very well see something similar at other “isolated, conservative” college campuses around the country, in Smith’s view, the deference of BYU students to church authority makes church leaders responsible for such ignorance—a point now driven home by Bott’s remarks. Smith places the lion’s share of the blame on BYU’s administration. (Smith’s own contract at BYU was not renewed in 2006.)

That same administration has in the past celebrated Bott as one of its most effective teachers, and has given him the charge of educating generations of Mormons—and generations of Mormon missionaries—in the fundamental theologies of their faith. Some 3,000 students will take Bott’s classes this year. (Only 11 students are signed up for the African-American experience class Darron Smith used to teach.)

Asked for comment on the Bott affair, BYU officials directed me to a very general statement from the LDS Church Public Affairs office condemning racism. But my contacts at BYU have said that faculty members were generally shocked by Bott’s statements—in part because he went around school administration and talked to the media directly about such a sensitive matter. In an email to several faculty members, Terry Ball, dean of religious education, expressed his disgust with Bott’s statements and said he would “deal with Bott professionally.” (In a 2008 Deseret News story celebrating Bott’s ranking as America’s favorite professor, this same Dean Ball lavished praise on Bott, saying he was “among the excellent of the excellent” religion professors at BYU.)

My requests to speak to a member of the LDS hierarchy—the small cadre of men who have the authority to address whether Bott’s statements reflect current or past church doctrine—have been denied. That official statement from the Church Public Affairs office calls it “unfortunate that the Church was not given a chance to respond to what others said,” and asserts that the church does not “tolerate racism in any form.”

Almost to a person, the Mormons—both black and white—whom I have spoken with since the Post story broke were hoping for a “miracle,” as one well-known black Mormon called it—i.e., a full repudiation of the church’s past racial discrimination from a church apostle rather than a press release from the public affairs office. That miracle has not arrived so far.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/03/mormon_church_and_racism_a_new_controversy_about_old_teachings_.single.html

Slate calls this event "the most significant dust storm concerning Mormonism and race in 30 years." But, ultimately it will help Mormonism purge its continuing racism and redeem itself.

Yet Mormons around the country—including Bott’s own colleagues and BYU students—are working to make this moment a turning point in Mormonism’s history of race relations. Around water coolers, in classrooms, in blog posts and op-eds, a growing number of Mormons who find Bott’s beliefs in direct conflict with the main tenets of their gospel are not waiting for church leaders to speak. Darius Gray, one of the black Mormons featured in the Post article, told me that he expects Bott’s comments to force Mormons both at a grassroots level and at church headquarters to begin the process of “healing wounds not creating them.” His belief was echoed by his longtime writing partner, BYU professor Margaret Young. “This is the beginning of our Truth and Reconciliation,” she told me. “This will help us deal with the history of apartheid in our own Church.”

Any LDS or person with LDS roots who believes the foregoing to be true should not remain silent.

Could the timing not be better for this event (or worse, depending on your perspective)? Mitt Romney nearing the brink of the Republican nomination, on the heels of Prop. 8 (how does Mormonism's support of Prop 8 look now? Like more hate).

[SeattleUte]

By the way, "Official Declaration 2" sounds so creepily Orwellian. It's a perfect succinct manifestation of how clueless these GAs have been.

Welcome to America, Mormon leaders.

[jay santos]

I can see a BYU professor embarrassing the church on a number of LDS doctrines.

--why blacks couldn't have the priesthood
--why women can't have the priesthood
--was God once a man, and will men become God
--polygamy related questions
--why we baptize Holocaust victims
--what does it mean that plain and precious parts were taken from the Bible
--what is the church of the devil

The list goes on.

You ask your average member and you get the same answer as your BYU professor. The BYU professor pulls out his list of sources, any of which could be quoted by a GA in conference, and gives the standard doctrinally conservative answer.

Then it gets published, we look like idiots, and the church makes statements about how BYU professors don't what the hell they're talking about. Meanwhile nobody really knows that the right answer is, including church members.

[Pheidippides]

Context is not a rationale. It's merely an element in trying to understand and explain history, not to excuse anyone's behavior. It helps avoid presentism, IMO.

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists?

Have you ever read Quinn? I don't want to hold him out as the authoritative source on everything, but his source material references alone are staggering and well footnoted. I've yet to see an apologist (or really anybody else) get close. He does have that whole Hoffman issue . . . on one minor point that doesn't affect the rest of his first book.

As soon as he starts talking about homosexuality, however, he gets the same scrutiny from me. Statement in interest, that sort of thing.

That's one reason why I am answering "no, not really" to your question. I can think of seven or eight others.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I would not be that upset to see Bott go, but they won't fire him. No way. Nor should they. He has been thoroughly humiliated. That is enough.

Furthermore, this is a mess that the church created. Are you going to fire a guy for saying something not substantially different from countless historical statements by church leaders? How awkward would that be? Consider the irony that it is officially verboten now to repeat a First Presidency message from 1952. Rather than firing Bott, the Church should clearly and unequivocally denounce the ban and issue a formal apology. Only then could they be in a position where discipline regarding comments like Bott's would not be considered hypocritical.

[TripletDaddy]

Context is not a rationale. It's merely an element in trying to understand and explain history, not to excuse anyone's behavior. It helps avoid presentism, IMO.

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists? I'm reminded of SIEQ's statement that "we all trust our own orthodoxies."

Skepticism should be the result of critical analysis, not vice versa. Otherwise, your starting premise is biased. I think Quinn's work should be scrutinized and analyzed critically, absolutely. As nik noted, the issue is that Quinn's work in Origins of Power stands up fairly well against a critical analysis. On the other hand, the Church's statements and explanations (or lack thereof) do not appear to be able to withstand the same critical analysis.

[jay santos]

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists? I'm reminded of SIEQ's statement that "we all trust our own orthodoxies."

The Quinns and Bushmans and Brodies of the world are at their best when they're providing a narrative of history using solid source material. I can ignore the interpretation and commentary and provide that for myself. If someone gets a reputation for abusing source material, I can ignore them completely.

[TripletDaddy]

I would not be that upset to see Bott go, but they won't fire him. No way. Nor should they. He has been thoroughly humiliated. That is enough.

Furthermore, this is a mess that the church created. Are you going to fire a guy for saying something not substantially different from countless historical statements by church leaders? How awkward would the be? Consider the irony that it is officially verboten now to repeat a First Presidency message from 1952. Rather than firing Bott, the Church should clearly and unequivocally denounce the ban and issue a formal apology. Only then could they be in a position where discipline regarding comments like Bott's would not be considered hypocritical.

An interesting proposition. A rogue professor at BYU that goes public, expressing as his or her own opinion every potential peccadillo in the Church's closet. Next up, Bott opines that blacks and whites should not have sex and that men live on the moon. What a nightmare that would be for the Church's PR department.

[HuskyFreeNorthwest]

I would not be that upset to see Bott go, but they won't fire him. No way. Nor should they. He has been thoroughly humiliated. That is enough.

Furthermore, this is a mess that the church created. Are you going to fire a guy for saying something not substantially different from countless historical statements by church leaders? How awkward would the be? Consider the irony that it is officially verboten now to repeat a First Presidency message from 1952. Rather than firing Bott, the Church should clearly and unequivocally denounce the ban and issue a formal apology. Only then could they be in a position where discipline regarding comments like Bott's would not be considered hypocritical.

This would seem like a great springboard for the church to step forward and denounce the ban and issue the apology. Sadly this is something that is really crushing to me personally and I know isn't going to happen.

[Uncle Ted]

Context is not a rationale. It's merely an element in trying to understand and explain history, not to excuse anyone's behavior. It helps avoid presentism, IMO.

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists? I'm reminded of SIEQ's statement that "we all trust our own orthodoxies."

The church really needs to adopt something like the Freedom of Information Act so we can put to rest the speculation given by both sides. Quinn's work, of the little that I have read of it, is pretty well documented but there is still a lot of it that I question. I always have to ask what does the church have to hide if it is all about "truth and light"?

[Northwestcoug]

By the way, I have a question for those here who think highly of Michael Quinn's work (I don't think you have said anything one way or the other about him): do you all think Quinn's writing deserves the same level of critical analysis and skepticism that you apply to statements by apologists? I'm reminded of SIEQ's statement that "we all trust our own orthodoxies."

Have you ever read Quinn? I don't want to hold him out as the authoritative source on everything, but his source material references alone are staggering and well footnoted. I've yet to see an apologist (or really anybody else) get close. He does have that whole Hoffman issue . . . on one minor point that doesn't affect the rest of his first book.

As soon as he starts talking about homosexuality, however, he gets the same scrutiny from me. Statement in interest, that sort of thing.

That's one reason why I am answering "no, not really" to your question. I can think of seven or eight others.

Quinn is an enigma. He seems to still have a firm testimony of Joseph Smith and many other tenets of the gospel. But he kind of runs off the rails with trying to convince people that the early church leaders condoned homosexuality. On this topic, I think most people give him the scrutiny he deserves. But like Nikuman says, the guy was a prodigious researcher. He was given unparalelled access to church archives for his work on post-manifesto polygamy. I don't think there's anyone who can seriously question his research on that topic, and I haven't seen too many valid arguments against his work on Mormon heirarchy.

IMO, it isn't fair to compare a standard apologist to researchers like Quinn. Apologists state plainly and openly that their work is to prove the church is true. That midset alone colors their research. I'm not saying they can't produce good research, but it definitely deserves an added level of scrutiny.

[FMCoug]

I would not be that upset to see Bott go, but they won't fire him. No way. Nor should they. He has been thoroughly humiliated. That is enough.

Furthermore, this is a mess that the church created. Are you going to fire a guy for saying something not substantially different from countless historical statements by church leaders? How awkward would the be? Consider the irony that it is officially verboten now to repeat a First Presidency message from 1952. Rather than firing Bott, the Church should clearly and unequivocally denounce the ban and issue a formal apology. Only then could they be in a position where discipline regarding comments like Bott's would not be considered hypocritical.

You are right of course. What I wouldn't give to change things to see what would happen had he denounced the words of past prophets and called it what it is.