The End of the Priesthood and Temple Ban Came with a Catch | Ep. 1958

The End of the Priesthood Ban Came with a Catch: How the Church's 1978 Reversal Left Racial Restrictions in Place

In June 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially lifted its ban on Black priesthood ordination and temple participation, a policy that had lasted 126 years. Members celebrated this as a watershed moment of racial progress. Yet according to documentary evidence and oral histories explored in a recent Mormon Stories Podcast series examining Matthew Harris's book Second Class Saints: Black Mormons in the Struggle for Racial Equality, the lifting of the ban masked a more complicated reality: church leadership continued to discourage and discourage interracial marriage even after the official policy reversal, leaving Black and mixed-race members navigating contradictory signals from the institutional church.

The question at the heart of this contradiction is straightforward but unsettling: If the ban was truly lifted on religious grounds, why did church leaders persist in messaging, both public and private, that discouraged Black members from marrying white members?

Background: From Brigham Young's Racial Theology to 1978

The priesthood ban did not emerge in a vacuum. Early LDS theology under Brigham Young held that interracial marriage was so spiritually dangerous that it warranted blood atonement, Young infamously taught that those who polluted "racially pure bloodlines" through intermarriage could only achieve salvation through their own death. This doctrine tied priesthood restriction directly to a broader project of racial separation.

When Spencer W. Kimball announced the reversal in 1978, the official justification pivoted away from these historical teachings. Church statements claimed no doctrinal opposition to interracial marriage remained. However, the documentary record tells a different story.