Mormon Apostle Tries to End LDS Priesthood and Temple Ban - Hugh B. Brown | Ep. 1941

When an Apostle Went Rogue: Hugh B. Brown’s Decade-Long War to End the Priesthood Ban

Hugh B. Brown spent ten years fighting his own church from the inside. As a counselor in the LDS First Presidency during the 1960s, he waged a sustained campaign to dismantle the priesthood and temple ban against Black members, a rebellion that forced him into clandestine meetings with apostates, leaked confidential deliberations to the New York Times, and nearly cost him his position. His story, documented in Mormon Stories Podcast episode 1941, reveals that the machinery behind one of Mormonism’s most painful policies was not divine immovability but institutional inertia and political calculation.

Background: The Progressive Apostle

Brown was an anomaly among mid-century Mormon leadership. A Canadian immigrant who embraced the Democratic Party and the New Deal, he carried his progressive politics into the Quorum of the Twelve after his 1958 call at age 78. While colleagues like Harold B. Lee and Joseph Fielding Smith represented conservative orthodoxy, Brown championed civil rights and racial equality. This ideological positioning set the stage for his prolonged campaign against the ban during the 1960s, a decade when federal civil rights legislation forced American institutions to confront segregation. Brown believed the restriction was morally indefensible and historically indefensible, and he set out to prove it.

Key Evidence: The Taggert Manuscript and Secret Alliances

The turning point came in August 1969. Brown convened a clandestine meeting with David O. McKay’s three sons, along with Sterling McMurrin, a known non-believer and former church employee, and Lowry Nelson, another unorthodox intellectual who had previously clashed with the hierarchy. The group strategized around a manuscript written by Stephen Taggert, a University of Utah graduate student who had died of cancer in 1970 at age 33. Taggert’s work argued the priesthood ban originated not with Joseph Smith but with Brigham Young in 1852, classifying it as administrative policy rather than unchangeable doctrine.