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Black man ordaining another Black man in the style of African folk art<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report <\/i>here<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n The provenance and maintenance of the priesthood and temple ban against Black Latter-day Saints is one of the more if not the most sensitive subjects in the modern Church. Of particular sensitivity is the question of whether the ban was inspired or not and, if not, why it took as long as it did to rescind it. Both David O. McKay and Harold B. Lee <\/span>were reported<\/span><\/a> to have sought revelation to remove the restriction, but were told that it was not time.<\/span><\/p>\n Although the Church <\/span>published an essay<\/span><\/a> in 2013 that condemned past and present racism and disavowed theories of the past, it did not make a statement as to whether or not the restriction was inspired by God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We suspected that this question of the priesthood ban still divides the membership, with a lot of members on one side or the other. Because of its complexity, we could have asked myriad questions on race in the survey: how many members believe in the <\/span>\u201cCurse of Cain?\u201d<\/span><\/a> How many members think that <\/span>Joseph Smith started the ban<\/span><\/a>? How many members think that Black people were less valiant in the premortal existence?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately, space on a survey is not unlimited, and the race and priesthood ban can be complex, so to capture a lot of these we included a question that we thought, while a\u00a0 little double barrel-ish, mapped onto basic perceptions about the ban.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The priesthood and temple restriction against Black members was uninspired and was implemented and maintained primarily by racism<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n So what did we find?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At a high level, it looks like about 1\/3 of people disagree to some extent, 1\/3 of people agree to some extent, and 1\/3 of people choose the more ambiguous, don\u2019t know, \u201cneither agree nor disagree\u201d option.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So our hypothesis that the Church is still largely split on this issue is born out. We suspect these numbers basically translate to: about the same number of people think that the ban was ordained by God as who think that the ban was because of racism, and about as many are agnostic about it one way or the other. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Black man ordaining another Black man in the style of African folk art Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.\u00a0 The provenance and maintenance of the priesthood and temple ban against Black Latter-day Saints is one of the more if not the most sensitive subjects in the modern Church. Of particular sensitivity is the question of whether the ban was inspired or not and, if not, why it took as long as it did to rescind it. Both David O. McKay and Harold B. Lee were reported to have sought revelation to remove the restriction, but were told that it was not time. Although the Church published an essay in 2013 that condemned past and present racism and disavowed theories of the past, it did not make a statement as to whether or not the restriction was inspired by God.\u00a0 We suspected that this question of the priesthood ban still divides the membership, with a lot of members on one side or the other. Because of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2976,2903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-h-roberts-foundation","category-race-and-the-priesthood"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Screen.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47124"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50248,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47124\/revisions\/50248"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Screen1-800x497.jpg\")
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