The Priesthood/ Temple Ban in Mormon Fundamentalism Reconsidered

Me with Dr, Cristina Rosetti at Sunstone 2022

 The following is the script for my speech entitled "The Priesthood/ Temple Ban in Mormon Fundamentalism Reconsidered" with Dr. Cristina Rosetti at Sunstone Symposium on July 29, 2022 in Sandy, Utah.  This is only the transcript for my portion of the presentation.  Dr. Rosetti has professionally published her article, and the full audio transcript, including the Q&A will be made available on Sunstone's website soon.

This is a topic that is deeply important to me, and I intend on writing more about it:

Hi, my name is Moroni Jessop, and I am a practicing Mormon fundamentalist.  I’m not a historian.  I’m not an academic.  I rely on my own personal experience to inform me. This is the story of how I personally observed racism in Mormon fundamentalism as it pertains to the priesthood and temple ban, how it affected me personally, how this concept is now changing and evolving amongst polygamists.  This is my story.

 

Even though I am from a prominent fundamentalist family – the Jessops – my family was actually raised in the LDS church, and I spent my first twenty years as a mainstream member of the Church.  However, my father had fundamentalist inclinations, and the lifting of the priesthood ban in 1978, allowing all worthy males to receive the priesthood, and all worthy members to enter the temples regardless of race or skin color, was a proverbial shelf breaker for my dad.  He never entered an LDS temple again post-1978.  My dad believed implicitly in the teachings of Brigham Young in regard to race.

 

I do want to point out that, in spite of his views on the priesthood ban, my father taught us to avoid racism as much as possible.  He never tolerated racist slurs in his home.  Moreover, I grew up in a biracial home.  My white father, who served a mission in Mexico, married an indigenous Mexican woman, my mother.  Spanish was the principal language spoken in our home.  This was unusual for a 1970s Mormon home.

 

At age 20, I was excommunicated from the LDS Church, along with my entire family, for believing in fundamentalist principles.  My father encouraged me to move from our home in Arizona to Salt Lake City to be close to the Independent fundamentalists.  Growing up in Arizona around mostly Chicano culture, I had never really experienced racism first-hand – until I moved to Utah.  Although I met a lot of wonderful people with the Independents, I also experienced a high level of racism.  Mostly directed at people of the black race.  In levels I had never experienced before.  I also experienced racism directed at me for being Mexican – something I had never experienced.  One night, dejected, I called my mother in Arizona and said to her, “You’re not going to like it here.”

 

“Why?” she asked.

 

“They don’t like Mexicans,” I replied.

 

Shortly thereafter, my family and I joined the Apostolic United Brethren, a polygamous group also known as the Allred Group.  Their policy towards people of other races was less intense.  They had a sizeable colony in Mexico, and I met and married my wife Andrea there, also from a biracial family, half Japanese.  However, the AUB still maintained a tight restriction about black members joining, and I saw potential black converts turned away even without baptism.  They were told to go back to the LDS Church.  I had no reason to question the priesthood ban.  It was taught by the early Mormon leaders and by the priesthood council of the AUB.  It must be true.

 

Years later, my family and I wound up leaving the AUB and forming a United Order in the Arizona desert.  I got an email from a man from the AUB.  He had taken a Polynesian wife from New Zealand, and when he went to the AUB leadership requesting a sealing, he was denied because of the race of his wife.  You see, the AUB teaches that the Polynesian races also fall under the “curse of Cain”, as they call it.  I went to my father, my priesthood head and asked him what I should do,

 

“You had better leave this one alone, son,” he told me.  After all, who were we to question what other fundamentalist leaders had taught?  So, I wrote this guy back and literally told him, “I’m sorry, but you have no place among us.”

 

My dad passed away, but this man persisted and kept pestering me.  He said something that finally resonated with me.  “All I wanted from the AUB was righteous judgment, and they would not give it to me,” he wrote to me.  “Where do I go for judgment?” So, I took it upon myself to judge the situation and invited him out to Arizona.

 

They came out for one of our conferences, and when I saw them get out of their car, I took one look at her and felt an immediate love for her and wondered why I ever thought there was a problem.  Others in our community had the opposite reaction – they took one look at this woman and her children and saw “Canaanite”.  While we deliberated, this family moved to Arizona and started attending meetings with us.  It took three long, unnecessary years.  I researched church history and found that the priesthood had been given to the Islanders from the days of Brigham Young, and even Joseph Smith.  I even went to New Zealand with this family, got family records from the marae of the Maori, testimonies from the Hamilton Temple, and even visited an anthropological museum in Auckland.  I took all my findings, along with church history records and presented a packet of my findings to our priesthood council.  They turned a blind eye to it.

 

Then my father-in-law got the idea to do a DNA test on one of the daughters of this woman.  The DNA test showed no sub-Saharan African markers.  The result was met with skepticism by most of the community.  This did not stop the Polynesian daughter from marrying one of the young men in the community, the sealing performed by my father-in-law.  The backlash was immediate and startling.

 

Our chapel had an attic prayer room where we met early every Sunday morning for the true order of prayer.  One morning, we arrived to find that our keys would not unlock the door to the prayer room.  The locks had been changed without our knowledge.  That’s how we found out we had been excommunicated.  There was no trial.  No letter.  Nothing.  Just cut off.  I had taught Youth Sunday School for many years.  My wife had been Primary President for the community for ten years.  We weren’t informed.  We were just released, and other people called to replace us.  This schism sliced our community neatly in half between those who accepted Polynesians and those who did not.  I had family members on both sides.  We built another chapel and started over on our own.

A decade later, a leader in our new community suggested that we do DNA tests on ourselves, so I submitted my family to ancestry tests.  That summer, I took my kids on vacation to Utah.  On the way back, we stopped by Rockland Ranch, the polygamous community near Moab where the homes are blasted out of the red rocks.  We stayed with friends for the night, and our bedroom was at the back of the cave.  The room was utterly black and still, like a sensory deprivation tank, and that night I had a spiritual experience that I feel helped me prepare for what was to come.  If I had more time, I would share the experience, but it helped me to process what happened next.

 

The next morning, we drove back to Arizona, and when we arrived, that leader was waiting on the driveway with a paper in his hand.  My DNA results.  I suppose that I don’t need to say that my results showed what was not on the Polynesian girl’s results – a healthy dose of African DNA.  I was in violation of the one drop rule. Now, I don’t suppose for an instant that a small percentage of African DNA makes me black.  But for Mormon fundamentalists, it was enough. I fought it at first.  I tossed and turned that night.  My whole life felt like a lie.  After a few days, I started to remember instances in my life where I had seen evidence of the priesthood.  Some in my family said, “I know the DNA results are wrong, because I know I hold the priesthood.”  My attitude was: “I know I hold the priesthood even if the DNA tests are right.”

 

We called a meeting in our community with all endowed members to discuss the issue of my questionable lineage.  We decided as a community that I would not be restricted in my priesthood calling until we knew more.  This did not settle well with some.  My wife walked in on the Sunday School teacher telling my children that, if they lived righteously, maybe in the next life, they would be eligible to hold the priesthood.  We pulled our children out and never returned.  No one asked us to leave or kicked us out, but I would not remain anywhere my children would be considered lesser.  We have been independent and alone ever since.

 

I am grateful for this experience, because it has taught me something I never had to considered before.  That the priesthood/ temple ban is not a thing.  And it never should have been.  It was a kneejerk reaction by Brigham Young to Orson Pratt opposing him on the topic of slavery in the 1852 Territorial Legislative Session.  I know that all things in Mormonism are established by the mouths of two or more witnesses, yet in 1879, we continued the restriction based on the testimony of Zebedee Coltrin, and his testimony was contradictory and hearsay.  I learned that, even though Joseph Smith made several problematic statements on race, he never preached that black men can’t hold the priesthood.  Even the scriptures that he produced that we think say that don’t really say that.  Joseph Smith knew and sanctioned the ordination of black men like Walker Lewis and Elijah Abel.  Joseph Smith commissioned a mixed-race woman, Elizabeth Allred, to make the first pair of garments and later sealed her to her husband in the red brick store.  No, race should have never been an issue.  I am ashamed how we have treated our black  brothers and sisters.  How different things could have been…

 

I would have never come to this understanding without a little piece of paper, the DNA test.  I am grateful for this understanding.  Yet the result is – I have kept myself distant from other fundamentalist groups.  Because I don’t know they will react to me.  I have been nervous about this presentation, because the proverbial cat is out of the bag.

 

Fundamentalists have long clung to this teaching, because they value the words of those who went before.  Brigham Young, John Taylor.  If Brother Rulon said it, it must be so.

 

The LDS Church might pat themselves on the back for finally ending the ban in 1978, yet I would argue that they made this change for political expediency only.  They have yet to address this topic head-on and have merely swept it under the proverbial carpet with other verboten subjects.

 

Most fundamentalists will never reject the priesthood/ temple ban as I have.   But with some communities, things are already changing.  In 2022, one polygamous community I know of has held its own test case on the black issue, and a result was a young family accepting a black woman as a plural wife.  This mixed-race plural sealing has stirred the waters for sure.   But perhaps it will change the face of Mormon fundamentalism in ways that we cannot imagine. Hugh Nibley once said that if we believe the same thing five years from now that we currently believe, we have made no progress.  Five years ago, the possibility of blacks holding the priesthood was unimaginable to me.  Imagine what Mormon fundamentalists might believe five years from now.