Scott Woodward:
There was a season in our church’s history when members with Black African ancestry were unevenly barred from both priesthood and temple privileges. This overtly discriminatory practice is one of the most challenging aspects of our history, and for many is one of the most difficult to understand. How could something like this happen in a church led by living prophets and apostles? It’s a fair question, and the truth is the answer is impossible to really get at without understanding the prevailing attitudes and beliefs about black Africans in the broader American culture at the time the church was established and into this century that followed. In today’s episode of Church History Matters we begin our series on race and priesthood by exploring the racial climate in antebellum America in the 1800s and probing the three major factors responsible for how it got that way. I’m Scott Woodward, a managing director at Scripture Central, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central. And today, Casey and I dive into our first episode in this series dealing with race and priesthood. Now, let’s get into it. Hi, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hi. How are you?

Scott Woodward:
So good.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So good. And it’s so good to see you again and have the opportunity to participate in another one of these discussions.

Scott Woodward:
I’m excited for this series. This is going to be a good one.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
This is a meaty one for sure.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And it’s one that I have to admit to approaching with a little bit of fear and trepidation.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’re going to be spending the next couple episodes discussing race and the priesthood and the temple, and a lot of things linked to the history of the church and how we kind of manage and deal with it now, just as kind of a foreword and introduction, and Scott, you can jump in at any time here. We want to acknowledge that this topic is fraught. It’s complex, and it’s difficult, and it’s challenging, and it needs to be handled with extreme caution and a little skill and a lot of sensitivity, and I hope we’re able to do that.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’ve been hesitant to talk about this for a long time because it is just such an explosive topic. But as I’ve been reviewing the materials, especially the ones that Scott prepared, more and more it’s been impressed on my mind that this is something we need to have a conversation about. It’s something that we’re still in the midst of dealing with, and it’s not going to get better if we don’t ever confront it and try and figure out how we move forward, and so…

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, there’s just so many questions a lot of people have, as I teach in church history topics this comes up a lot. I know that there are people who wonder about this. Some have received not very good answers, unsatisfying answers, and so I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it in this series, but we’re going to do our best, aren’t we, Casey? We’re going to try to give the very best answers that we are aware of.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’re going to try, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I think this history in particular about blacks and the priesthood and the temple privileges is easy to misunderstand and get wrong. It’s—and that’s where, ooh, we just need to do our very best. I find, tragically, some people end up villainizing prophets and apostles on the one hand, as they study this history, while other people get overly protective of apostles and prophets, and therefore we can’t fully get into the details, and neither of these approaches is helpful or necessary.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I’m excited to just, let’s just go into it eyes wide open, faithful hearts, and let’s just do our best to understand what happened, when it happened, the best we can understand why it happened, and how ultimately God set things the way they are now after a 1978 revelation.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And one thing to keep in mind is that this is a challenging topic. It challenges the way that we look at the role of prophets and apostles. It even challenges maybe our perceptions of the society that we live in. And it can be really uncomfortable to discuss, but the leader of the church, President Nelson, has asked the members of the church to not only deal with this topic, but the exact wording he used was to “lead out”—

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—in dealing with this topic. And so we’re trying to follow the prophet here in having a discussion about race and racism, and the end goal is to try and make things better.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So we’re imperfect, and we’re going to make mistakes, and we might phrase things poorly, but we’re going to do the best we can because I think both of us feel really strongly that this is something that needs attention, that we need to understand and we need to present solutions to as well. We need to find a way forward.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. The true history here can grate a little uncomfortably against, sometimes I call them our “cozy assumptions”—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—that we might hold about prophets and God. It’s certainly done that for me.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
You know, at very least it forces us to confront and examine our assumptions, and that can be uncomfortable. It can be painful, especially when we realize maybe our assumptions weren’t quite accurate. But to do the hard work of modifying our assumptions in light of more accurate information, ultimately, I’ve found, has created a more robust faith, a more flexible faith in God and in prophets. And I think this is necessary and important work to do.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So let’s do it.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s do it. Let’s start with a couple resources. Now, Scott, you’ve done a lot of reading, and by the way, there’s been an explosion of tremendous resources that are helpful in understanding this topic just in the last couple years. Scott, give us a rundown on some of the best sources to go to to understand this particular issue.

Scott Woodward:
I’ll mention a few and then, yeah, if you want to throw any others on here. I would recommend starting with the Gospel Topics essay “Race and the Priesthood.” Fantastic introduction to the topic and wonderful footnotes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
By far, I would say the best—if you only could choose one, one single resource after reading the Gospel Topics essay on race and the priesthood, I would recommend a little book. You can get it at Deseret Book. It’s called, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood by Paul Reeve. It’s part of a Let’s Talk About series. Paul Reeve, he is the preeminent scholar on this topic. He’s done the most cultural contextual research, as well as going through the records of the church and church meeting minutes, et cetera. So, much of what we’re going to discuss throughout this series will actually draw upon Paul’s really well done research.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Once you have read through that, I would recommend a book by Russell Stevenson. It’s called For The Cause of Righteousness, and it gives a global history of blacks and Mormonism from 1830 to 2013. And what he has that’s super valuable—it’s well written. It’s amazing research—but in the back, an appendix, he has original sources, all the original stuff by which he derived the narrative that he tells us. So you can basically read through the original stuff: Original council meeting minutes, for instance, when topics relevant to blacks and priesthood and temple were discussed by church leaders. You can come to your own conclusions as to what to make of that information. And he’s just done a very bang-up job. Well done, Russell Stevenson.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So Paul Reeve and Russell Stevenson. But if you can only choose one, I say choose Paul Reeve’s little book, Deseret Book, you can get it, called, Let’s Talk About Race and the Priesthood.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
What else would you add?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’d add a couple things to the list. First of all, amen to everything you say, especially Paul Reeve’s research, which is excellent. Paul’s a scholar of the University of Utah. He’s also an active church member, and he deals with things really well, really sensitively. One item that’s been helpful to my students is an article by Edward L. Kimball called “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood.” It’s a BYU Studies article. It’s on the longer side of things, but my students are usually pretty enthusiastic to read it. It gives the background for the 1978 revelation, and it also—it’s an insider’s perspective. Ed Kimball was Spencer W. Kimball’s son, and after the revelation was given, he actually asked President Kimball, “Can I interview everybody involved?” He was given pretty much unfettered access to the church leaders that were involved.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so it’s got this great amount of primary sources, a great discussion of what led to the revelation, what caused it to happen. And there’s an expanded version of it in his book, Lengthen Your Stride, which is a second volume of his biography of his dad, Spencer W. Kimball.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And I know this is a son writing about a father, but to me those two biographies about Spencer W. Kimball are sort of the golden mean of church president biographies. They’re just excellent. And Ed Kimball, who was a member of the law faculty at BYU, was super compassionate towards his subjects but also wasn’t afraid to ask difficult questions—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—and confront some of the more complex issues that his father dealt with during his presidency.

Scott Woodward:
Excellent.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And one last resource that I’ll recommend is you can go on the Church History Library site and actually download the autobiography of Jane Manning James. It’s only about eight pages long. Jane wasn’t able to write, she was illiterate, so somebody transcribed it for her, but just that little eight-page autobiography is a great snapshot of race relations and the church in the 1840s.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Where you see all the complexity that Jane has to deal with, where she’s not a slave: She’s born a free woman.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But she still faces incredible racism, even from some members of the church. But she also personally interacted with Joseph and Emma Smith and has a lot of insight there.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And Jane’s story not only captures the race question but questions about women, questions about the role of black women within the church. And so that was really enlightening. My wife and I sat down and read that together, and it opened our eyes to a couple issues that we maybe, in the 21st century, hadn’t been connected to.

Scott Woodward:
Excellent. Thank you. So there you go. We’ll put links to all of this in our show notes, everything we’ve mentioned. Boy, we just highly recommend—for those of you, we know you’re out there, those who want to go ever deeper into this subject, there you go. There’s our top recommendations.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Now, during today’s episode, we want to talk specifically about the 18th- and 19th-century racial culture of America, especially regarding the Black African population. Now, the reason this is an important place to begin is because, as Paul Reeve says, “It is impossible to divorce the racial history of the church from its American context.” That’s what we want to get at. So our burning question of the day is, “What was the racial culture and context in America during the 18th and 19th centuries, and how did it get that way? And how did that culture and context impact the thinking and views of church members about race?” Right? “We cannot divorce,” as Paul says, “We cannot divorce racial history of the church from the racial history of America.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So let’s start with a quote from the Gospel Topics essay. This is the first resource you said. I, too, would say, the first thing that you should read is probably the Gospel Topics essay, and then expand your study out from there. A quote in the Gospel Topics essay says, “The church was established in 1830 during an era of great racial division in the United States. At the time, many people of African descent lived in slavery, and racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans.”

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And that’s one thing that we neglect is—there’s been so much talk in the last couple years about critical race theory and what that means, and it’s a huge thing—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—that’s difficult to distill down to one thing, but I don’t think it’s controversial at all to just say that there was racism baked into the cake: that the world that the church was restored into had these racial class divisions, and that was something that was part and parcel of the world that the early saints lived in.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I like that line—I don’t like the line, but I think it’s an important line—that racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans, right? It was the air that they breathed. It was the water that they drank. This was—it was just totally normal. It was the way things were, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. When it comes down to it, we sometimes neglect how customary this was. Our faculty, for instance, went to Washington, D․C․ a couple of years ago.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And as part of the trip we went to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, and Mount Vernon is beautiful and impressive, and you walk through George Washington’s house, and you’re just thinking, “I love this guy. Like, what an amazing person. I’m so proud that he is the father of our country.”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And then you walk out of the house, and you walk down to the slave quarters.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, ooh.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And you’re immediately confronted by the fact that this great man, who was incredibly moral, also had this huge moral blind spot that to a 21st-century person is mind-boggling. And I sort of walked away from that experience a little shaken. I had to spend a little time diving into sources and writings about George Washington to appreciate the world he lived in.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And how this was the way it was where he grew up. If you’re a Virginia planter, if you’re part of the sort of upper strata of society, slaves are a part of your life.

 Scott Woodward:
Yeah. You’re not a bad person. Morally, right? I like your phrase, “moral blind spot.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That was a moral blind spot that they didn’t even consider, a lot of them. Now, plenty of them did. We’re going to talk about all that.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s complicated.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So let’s actually get into this. Why was it like that? Like, how did it get that way?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So there’s really three things that are going on in the early American republic—this is the world the church is going to be restored into—that have to do with widespread racial prejudice in the United States, and we’ll go through each one, but let me just list them here, and then we’ll expand outward.

Scott Woodward:
OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
One is African enslavement. It’s just part of society, especially in the Southern United States. We mentioned George Washington, and by the way, I’m going to stick up for George later on because his views on slavery are more complex than they sometimes get credit for.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But almost all the founders from the south were involved in slavery.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
John Adams, who’s from the north, notably isn’t, but it doesn’t seem like it was particularly morally pressing for him, either.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The second thing is the prevailing scientific thought. The popular science of the age had this racial component to it that just basically fundamentally saw the races as different and the white race as superior. And then the final thing is the Bible and the way that people interpreted the Bible. The Bible is an incredibly complex work. It has portions of it that can be strongly against the idea of slavery, that support agency, but other passages that were misinterpreted to support slavery and even justify it. And the arguments people used to justify slavery before the Civil War are often drenched in biblical verse and biblical imagery.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And all this stuff that makes it seem like, “Hey, this is the way God made it.”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so what are you going to do?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. OK. Let’s start with African enslavement, then.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So most of us have heard at school at some point the idea of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Black slavery, as a legal institution, was an established norm in several states and in union because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which begins back in the 1600s, and it led to over 10 million—just let that number sink in—10 million Africans, and that’s a low ball estimate, being sold and shipped to the new world. So that’s not just North America, that’s also South America, central America, but 10 million Africans brought over. And these are the ancestors of many in the African-American community today. And so you just think about over the centuries, from the 1600s to the 1800s, we have millions and millions of people being brought over from Africa as slaves into the Americas.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s going to set up a really interesting context, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But was everybody pro-slavery?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
There’s a whole spectrum, like there is with most things, where at one extreme end, you’ve got people that are totally pro-slavery, absolutely 100 percent believe God placed Africans in servitude, and that’s the end of it. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have abolitionists, sometimes extreme abolitionists that, you know, were willing to use violent means to bring about the end of slavery, who saw it as morally evil.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And in between is a wide view of views about slavery, its morality, and what should be done about it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It’s interesting: the pro-slavery group, right, who accept it, support it, build their economy on it, are opposed on the other end of the spectrum, as you said, by these abolitionists, who—they believed that the United States was laboring under, like, national sin, right? And that anybody who didn’t fight slavery was complicit with it to one degree or another.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And sometimes they would resort to violent means, but they felt that violent resistance to slavery paled in comparison to the daily violence of slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And a lot of us today might say, “Woo! The abolitionists, they’re the good guys,” right? They’re the emancipators. But actually in their day, it’s super interesting that they’re not seen as the good guys by most. They’re seen as, like, extremist, fringy, almost anarchist-type people, right? Since for what they were advocating for would be considered a radical overthrow of, by that time, a deeply embedded social economic system that was then protected by the U․ S․ Constitution, right? So to abolish slavery would be highly disruptive to the social order.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So you have these middle people that are not pro-slavery, but they’re also, they don’t want to be seen as, like, extreme abolitionists. And they call themselves the anti-slavery people, right? This is like Abraham Lincoln.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
The Republican Party—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—mostly fit in this anti-slavery group, which was they’re opposed to slavery, and they were uneasy with its spread, but they disagreed with the methods and extremism of abolitionists, right? They wanted to take a more gradual approach, a gradual phasing it out, whereas abolitionists would say, “Dude, we’ve got to get rid of this yesterday.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
“Like, this is evil. Evil is in our midst.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And many church members at that time fell into that more moderate anti-slavery camp, while at the same time actually opposing abolitionism, so very interesting.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And geography’s at play here too, right? I mean, at least initially early on, most members of the church are from the northern United States.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So it’s probably fair to say that most of the early church members didn’t own slaves, weren’t enmeshed in slave culture.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But at the same time, too, they weren’t the kind of radical bomb throwers, John Brown types—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That wanted to, you know, flip the whole system or anything. And so they find themselves caught in the middle between these two extremes, and sometimes trying to negotiate between both sides and find a space to just flat-out survive in, because they’re already considered radical because they’re introducing new scripture.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The Book of Mormon.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And they’re also advocating some radical ideas on race. Not necessarily towards Africans, but towards American Indians.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Saying that they’re part of the House of Israel, which is also a radical racial idea to begin with.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And just to put the timeline in perspective here, if it’s been a while since you’ve brushed up on your Civil War history, remember that the Civil War won’t happen until 1861 through 1865.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And so when we’re talking about the church being restored in 1830, we can see how this issue is, like—it is far from resolved.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And in fact, there’s an interesting editorial that was written by church leaders, either Oliver Cowdery or Frederick G. Williams of the first presidency, we’re not sure, but they wrote an editorial in the Northern Times, this is 1835, and they’re informing non-LDS readers about the church position on this issue, and watch how they’re trying to separate themselves from abolitionism. They say, “We are opposed to abolition and whatever is calculated to disturb the peace and harmony of our constitution and country. Abolition,” he continues, “does hardly belong to law or religion, politics or gospel.” So you could see, “We don’t want to be associated with abolitionists,” right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Even though most church members are from the north, kind of in this anti-slavery category, they do not want to be associated with this socially disruptive, radical group called abolitionists.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
I didn’t understand that for a long time. I thought abolitionists were, like, the good guys, and maybe from a modern perspective we would say that’s the case, you know? Some might say that, “Yeah, that was the only way.” But I didn’t know there was this group called the anti-slavery group which did not want to be associated with abolitionism, but also were anti-slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and we might need to contextualize that 1835 statement just a little bit.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, please.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
This is after the church has been booted out of Jackson County in Missouri, which adds to the complexity of the situation, too.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The location of Zion, as revealed to Joseph Smith, is Jackson County, Missouri, which is a slave state.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And it’s also right on the borders of the United States.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Just a couple miles away from where the American Indians live. And all of a sudden you’ve got these northerners that generally don’t own slaves coming in and filling up this small community, Independence.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And one of the tensions between them was that it’s not like the saints moving in were radical abolitionists—

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—but they also weren’t exactly pro-slavery.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And one of the reasons why persecutions flared up in 1833 against the church was that there were mild views about the equality of black people expressed in a church newspaper.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
In fact, the statement that the mob in Jackson County issues against the church, the reason why they need to be kicked out, is that they’re promoting the equalization of the races.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And so the church gets kicked out of Jackson County. And part of it is because they’re viewed as abolitionists, and Oliver Cowdery writes that in part to basically try to tell the people in Jackson County, “Hey, we’re not abolitionists. We’re not advocating violence against whites or anything like that.”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
They’re trying to get their homes back. They’re trying to convince them that they can be good neighbors.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But that’s a powder keg right there in that little county on the edge of the frontier, where slavery is prevalent.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I mean, they were entering into a complex situation where race was going to become a question sooner or later, whether or not they wanted it to be.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Really important context. Thank you. And we’ll talk about that in more depth in a future episode as we talk about this issue with the church and blacks.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So to summarize these kind of sub-points here, there’s a spectrum of strongly held views on the subject of slavery in the U. S. at the time the church is organized, from pro-slavery on the one end to abolitionism on the other and with anti-slavery somewhere in between. Everyone’s views on slavery are going to fall somewhere on this spectrum.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But the main point not to be missed here is that the enslavement of black Africans in some parts of America played a major role in making racial prejudice customary among white Americans.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
I mean, that’s the first ingredient of this three-part recipe for widespread racial prejudice in the U. S.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and it’s fair to say this recipe we’re talking about is still cooking in America. Some of the problems that existed back then we’re still dealing with today. In order to solve the problem, we have to understand it.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The second factor that we’re dealing with is prevailing scientific thought. There was the prevailing belief, and it was just seen as science, popular science, that black people were inferior to white people. Tell us a little bit about that, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Yeah. I think this is even more pernicious than slavery because while it’s true that slavery views varied widely among whites, there’s actually a more broadly shared belief amongst whites of that time that blacks were inherently inferior and that you could prove it by a simple observation, or scientifically, right? Like, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner and a scientist, he cautiously concluded after his own observations in 1781, that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and this is him observing and trying to come to some “cautious conclusion.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Scientists, zoologists, physicians, philosophers from the 17th to the 19th centuries, they all concluded, and they were all white, that blacks were biologically less advanced than whites. They had smaller brains, they said. They were a separate species more closely related to monkeys or apes. There’s this interesting book published by a scientist named Josiah Nott, where—he’s a doctor, an anthropologist, and he depicts—you have this row of, like, white people, white skulls, and then you have black people, black skulls, like, trying to anthropologically try to depict this, and then underneath that you have apes and ape skulls. And what he’s trying to show is, “Hey, look how blacks fall somewhere between whites and apes.” I mean, it today is just, like, the most repulsive, like, disgusting thing you’ve ever seen.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But he was taken seriously, and he was actually respected. This idea that they were either a separate species or that they had greatly degenerated from the “original, pure race” of Adam and Eve, which of course was why, they would say, this is very common— customary, right? And so all of this sort of explains in kind of a twisted logic why blacks were considered by whites less intelligent, because they had “smaller brains.” They felt less pain and emotion, some of them said, because they had more primitive nervous systems. They generally lack sexual restraint, some of them said, because they were more closely related to animals. So these pseudoscientific explanations actually allowed many whites who were not biologists, who were not scientists, just to, “Oh, OK,” just accept their superiority to blacks, not as a matter of bigotry, but simply as a matter of biology.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
This is a key reason why these racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And another piece of the puzzle that we sometimes neglect in the 21st century is that the idea of promoting racial purity to us today is really scary, right?

Scott Woodward:
Repulsive, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It’s repulsive, right? White supremacy is condemned, and it should be. But in the 19th century, even into the 20th century, a little bit, it was common for people to talk about the purity of their race.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
There’s a address Teddy Roosevelt gave where he talked about the purity of the Teutonic race, the Germanic race, and how it needed to be preserved because they were destined to rule the world. Now, anybody starts talking about the purity of the Germanic race today, you know, the alarm bells go off in our mind because we saw those ideas play themselves out and saw how dangerous they were.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We also have the benefit today of—we’ve got the human genome. We know that the difference between a person with light-colored skin and dark-colored skin is less than, you know, 1% of 1% of the entire genetic makeup of the person.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But in the 19th century they didn’t see this as bigotry. They saw it as biology.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“That’s just the way it is, and what are you going to do about it? We’re superior, and we’ve been asked to civilize these other races.”

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And that was pretty common thought, which leads to another piece of the puzzle, which is a term we don’t hear a lot today, but in the 19th century you would often hear the term “amalgamation” or “racial amalgamation.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Explain to us a little bit about what that means.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Amalgamation is—and sometimes they also call it miscegenation.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Which basically just meant intermarriage between blacks and whites. And you can see, right? This helps us understand, too, this prevailing scientific thought helps us understand why intermarriage or sexual relations between whites and blacks was not just frowned upon during this time but actually legislated against in many states, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
There are many states that it wasn’t up until, what, the 1960s that we finally got laws against racial intermarriages—they’re called anti-miscegenation laws—off the books in every state. So racial intermarriage was totally taboo. It was the ultimate bugaboo.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, one of the major concerns of that middle group, the anti-slavery people, one of their concerns about abolitionists calling for immediate emancipation was what they saw as the inevitability of intermarriage.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
If blacks were all suddenly emancipated and made socially and politically equal with whites, then what would keep them from ultimately marrying whites?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
This was a major concern and a deeply held fear of many people.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And those concerns were used to perpetuate the system as it existed.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
As some people saw slavery as benevolent, “Hey, we’re educating them and Christianizing them,” and it feels like it was almost universal that people were worried about what would happen if the races intermixed with each other.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I have a dear friend who, you know, is in a mixed race marriage and he has, you know, biracial children.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And you still see this stuff flare up every now and then—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
—where sometimes he or his wife or his kids are singled out to like, “Hey, you know, are you sure you should be doing that?”

Scott Woodward:
Oh my goodness.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s still present in the 21st century. In the early 19th century, I mean, the prejudices on this level and the fears associated with it are just off the charts.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and what added fuel and, like, legitimacy to that fear were, again, some respected physicians in the mid-1800s who are actually saying stuff like this, that they’re warning that the offspring of a mixed-race couple would be weak.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
They would be infertile. They would probably, therefore, if this was allowed to continue, lead to the destruction of both races. Talk about fear-mongering, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But this is coming from respected physicians. They would refer to biracial children as “mulattos.” That’s a term still sometimes people throw around. It’s a pejorative term. It’s not a appropriate term. “Mulatto” derived from the word “mule.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Which is the infertile love child of a horse and a donkey. So horses and donkeys could have offspring, but then that offspring was infertile, and that’s what some respected physicians and doctors were saying, that this is what’s going to happen. Like, biracial children—in fact, one of them, again, Josiah Nott, I mentioned his name earlier, he said that biracial children are, “A degenerate, unnatural offspring doomed by nature to work out their own destruction.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
This guy’s a respected scientist.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And people were, like, just nodding their heads, like, “OK. I see the danger of interracial marriage,” right? Totally bunk, right? Totally—today we’re like, “Oh my gosh. That’s, like, the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Like, he would not be a respected scientist in any circle today, but then, like, how would you know better?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Right? How would you know better if you were living in that world, right? What would it have been like to grow up in such a world?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
You know, I think about that, right? If you were a white person in that context, do you think you could have resisted all of this and seen through it all? Or would you, like George Washington, have had some moral blind spots?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
When leading doctors and scientists themselves are confirming and giving apparent scientific backing to this racial prejudice, I mean, man.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It makes sense to me as I try to look through a lens of empathy into the past—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—why so many otherwise wonderful people did not see the moral problem here.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And, I mean, I’m using George Washington as my point of entrance into this time period, but—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I mean, George Washington owned his first slave at age 11. That’s the world that he grows up in. Thomas Jefferson owns hundreds of slaves, but he can write the words, “All men are created equal.” And like we said, today we sit and say, “How could they have had such a huge moral blind spot?” But we have to consider the world that they live in and not necessarily what’s normal to us, but what is normal to them. We’re not saying what was right.

Scott Woodward:
No.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’re just trying to gaze into the past with empathy and understand where they were living and where they’re at.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. The Congress, right? U. S. Congress in 1790, they limited citizenship in the United States to free white persons. That’s what they said, “Free white persons.” And they saw that as a totally upstanding, wonderful thing to do.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
The founding fathers themselves—there’s a great book called Founding Brothers written by Joseph Ellis, and he makes a stunning observation: He said, “No responsible statesman in the revolutionary era had ever contemplated, much less endorsed, a biracial American society.” Think about that. “No model,” he says, “of a genuinely biracial society existed anywhere in the world at that time, nor had any existed in recorded history.” Wow. So let that just sink in, right? There’s no such thing as a racially integrated society anywhere in the world at that time, nor had there been, that they could draw upon for a model. And so they’re not thinking about, “How can we make a racially balanced, integrated society?” right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so for Congress in 1790 to say the citizen in this country is a free white person was a totally reasonable stance to take, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Fast forward to 1857, there’s the Dred Scott case, infamous case, where the U. S. Supreme Court could declare that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
My goodness, right? The U. S. Supreme Court—these are respectable people in society, right, who are saying such things.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. The leaders of society.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And even people that were moderate held views that today would be deemed racially insensitive. For instance, you know, another person that’s a good point of entry into this period is Abraham Lincoln.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
We all know who Abraham Lincoln is and what he did and how important a figure he was. But during a political debate in 1858, this is two years before he is elected president of the United States, he said, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. That I am not nor have ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. I am as much as any man in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Scott Woodward:
Oy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Whoa. That’s Abraham Lincoln.

Scott Woodward:
Oy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And Abraham Lincoln very much occupies this moderate territory in the middle. He’s not an abolitionist, but he doesn’t own slaves, too, but he’s trying to make the country work, and he has to say things like this in order to even be considered a serious contender for president.

Scott Woodward:
Oy. Can you imagine a U. S. presidential candidate today saying, “I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race?” Like, oh my gosh.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oh, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It is so revolting.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But that’s, like you’re saying, that was moderate. That was like, “OK, this is a respectable guy,” you know?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Man.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
OK, so we’ve got the second sort of factor, which is prevailing scientific thought. That’s the world they live in.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
The last one, and this might be the toughest one for me personally, is how they interpreted the scriptures, specifically the Bible.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
One of the things the Gospel Topics essay on race and the priesthood brings up is, “Racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common, but customary among white Americans,” and then the next line said, “Those realities, though unfamiliar and disturbing today, influenced all aspects of people’s lives, including their religion.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So maybe the toughest thing for me is that religion was also used to justify these racial views and practices. So tell us a little bit about that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. How could white Christians who are slave owners feel good about what they were doing? Well, they would go to the Bible, and they would find that which seemed to justify their behavior, right? I want to be a good Christian as a good, honorable slave holder, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
In the Gospel Topics essay, it continues saying that, “According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s,” right? That’s a hundred years before the church is organized.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
“Blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother, Abel. Those who accepted this view believe that God’s curse on Cain was the mark of a dark skin.” So a hundred years before the church is organized in America, this actually goes back way further over in Europe, but in America, 1730s, they’re teaching that Cain was the ancestor of the black Africans, and he received a mark on his skin of blackness.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Now, can we just pause here for a second and say that this is an indefensibly wack reading of the Cain story.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But this understanding was pervasive among Protestant Christians in America, especially those with a vested interest in slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
It was believed by people who joined the church a hundred years later in the 1830s and forties, and they actually carry this idea with them into the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We’re going to see this play out in future episodes of this podcast, but can we just briefly review the Cain story for our listeners, if…?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And before we get into Genesis 4, I’m just going to advise everybody, we all bring assumptions to the scriptures, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But before we read Genesis 4 or review its contents, try and set all your assumptions aside and just look at what the story actually says. So go ahead.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. OK. Number one: Cain killed Abel. Remember the story? The first recorded murder of scripture.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So God cursed him to be a homeless wanderer, right? A wanderer and a vagabond.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Cain then worries that, “Everyone that findeth me shall slay me,” he tells God. So the Lord put a protective mark on Cain so that people wouldn’t kill him when they found him.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s the end of the whole story. So what was the mark, and what’s that got to do with black Africans? I mean, like, the text says nothing about the mark. Actually, early rabbinic tradition speculates that this Mark may have been that Cain was given a dog as his companion or that a horn grew from his forehead or that a permanent Hebrew letter was seared onto his forehead. In other words, nobody actually knows what the mark was.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
It’s not in the text. So it’s all just speculation, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So I want to speculate. Maybe it was male pattern baldness. How about that? Every male who’s got male pattern baldness, that’s the mark of Cain, right? See, I can do it too. We can all do this. It’s all speculative, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Male pattern baldness is just as justifiable in the text as is black African skin.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
So to associate Cain’s mark with black Africans—like, what in the world, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So let’s just review a few key points. What do we know from Genesis 4, and what do we not know? OK, so first point: The mark placed on Cain was a mark of mercy. Did you catch that in the narrative?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
It’s a mark of mercy meant specifically to protect Cain from being killed, right? Number two, nobody knows what the mark was. The text itself just doesn’t say, so any attempt to define exactly what it was is purely speculative.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Number three, nowhere in the narrative is there even a hint that Cain’s protective mark would, in any sense, be passed down genetically to his children. And so just to go from that story to say, “Therefore it is justified to enslave black Africans because they carry the mark of Cain” is just a colossal leap totally unjustified by scripture.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we should point out that there were critics of this in the 1830s in the environment the church comes into. David Walker said, “Some ignorant creatures hesitate not to tell us that we, the blacks, are the seed of Cain and the murderer of his brother Abel. But where or of whom those ignorant and avaricious wretches could have got their information I am unable to declare.” He’s basically saying, “Where are you getting this from?” He goes on to say, “Did they receive it from the Bible? I’ve searched the Bible as well as they and have never seen a verse which testifies whether we are the seed of Cain or of Abel. Yet those men tell us that we are the seed of Cain, that God put a dark stain upon us that we might be known as their slaves. Who act more like the seed of cane by murdering, the whites or the blacks?”

Scott Woodward:
Ah, shoot.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“How many vessel loads of human beings have the blacks thrown into the seas?”

Scott Woodward:
Oh-ho-ho-ho.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“How many thousand souls have the blacks murdered in cold blood to make them work in wretchedness and ignorance to support them and their families?” Like, powerful arguments.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And I’ve got to point out really fast, the longevity of this argument about the mark of Cain is astounding.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I mean, I have heard well-meaning but misguided members of the church within the last 20 years make that argument.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“Yeah, of course black people are descendants of Cain. That’s just how it is.” And sometimes we have to be willing to look at the scripture and question our own assumptions.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
What’s in the text and what’s not in the text are really, really important. It can be a matter of life or death for some people.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So the Gospel Topics essay is showing us that as far back as a hundred years before the church was established, this is the narrative already entrenched, right? And then think about it, and this is a Protestant America. Many of those Protestant Americans join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Do they automatically shed all of their assumptions?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
No.

Scott Woodward:
They do not. They do not shed those assumptions. And so it actually starts to become woven into some church narratives, right? And like you said it continues even to this day, with some segments of church members believing that this is still the case, because there’s been some apostles who, in the early church and in the mid-1900s, mention this again, and we’re going to get into all that, right? Again—

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
—we’re going to track this whole story carefully, but today we’re just focusing on how did the climate in America get such that this racial prejudice was customary, and then how does that influence church members? I think this is a big example of that. This is going to influence how they read the Bible. And “As good Christians, how do we make sense of black Africans?” And since this answer was already entrenched in their culture, in their biblical environment, it’s no wonder that they bring it with them into the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s another tragic example of this that we need to talk about as well: the curse of Ham, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Should we talk about that one?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
This is in Genesis chapter 9. This is even a bigger whopper than the Cain story in my mind. So let me just review the story real quick. So you remember after the flood, Noah planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine. He got drunk, and then he laid naked in his tent. Do you remember this story?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And then his son Ham “saw the nakedness of his father, and he went and told his two brethren, Shem and Japheth,” who got some kind of a cloth, and they walked backwards toward their father, and they covered his nakedness. OK. So far, this is a weird story, but then number three, when Noah wakes up, he somehow “knew what his younger son Ham had done unto him. And so he exclaimed, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’” That’s Ham’s son. “‘Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’ He then said of both Shem and Japheth that Canaan shall be his servant.” OK, so three important points here. First of all, this is the weirdest story in the whole Bible, all right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And then number two, nowhere in this narrative, if you were tracking carefully here, was there any sort of a mark given nor any sort of condemnation to servitude of an entire race of people, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Associating this story with black Africans is totally unjustified by the text and therefore wildly irresponsible. Wildly irresponsible.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But it’s used by Christians 200 years ago to justify slavery and to further affirm the inferiority of blacks to whites. Crazy.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. This is a strange story, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And to associate it with black Africans is—I don’t know. I mean. But it’s also an example of a story I’ve heard people use to justify racism and racial practices. We’ve just got to be extremely cautious with how we use the scriptures because our own assumptions and biases can (inaudible)—that’s what’s happening in the early American republic. And by the way, not just in America but generally among white Christians around the world these assumptions prevailed, and a cold, hard look at the scriptures basically shows that it was an addition. It wasn’t actually in there to begin with.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It was an assumption they brought to the text.

Scott Woodward:
So it would be a really important thing, I think, for us in the modern age to just take a cold, hard look at ourselves, right? Just to ask ourselves what do we accept as “common knowledge?” And what social assumptions do we accept without question? What interpretations of scripture do we just accept without having ourselves examine the text? I think that’s a very healthy practice. Just always question your own assumptions, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
Realize that there’s probably more to it than what you thought or what you’ve heard, and go to the text itself and examine it for yourself and see if you come to those same conclusions.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
I should also say that as far as biblical interpretation goes, on top of the curse of Cain and curse of Ham readings, there are verses in the Bible that explicitly talk about slavery, right? Like, Paul talks about this, talks about how to deal with your slaves benevolently, that kind of thing.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
But we’ve got to realize that this wasn’t about whites enslaving black Africans. It was Mediterranean people enslaving Mediterranean people. Not that even that’s right, but it was a practice in Paul’s day, and so he talks about it. But the text is in no way justifying whites enslaving black Africans, right? That’s the point here to read it that way, is to read it with an agenda.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And, I mean, this is unpleasant stuff, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I am an American. I love my country. At the same time, too, I don’t want to have my eyes covered when it comes to our history because I believe that America has a divine destiny and purpose, but the narrative given in scripture is that people have to qualify for those things. They have to live up to the ideals that they have.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
And in order to understand and be better in the future, we need to know this background a little bit. In order to just give a fair assessment of what the Saints did in the 19th century we have to do a little bit of work to understand the world that they’re living in, particularly with regards to this really complex issue.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So I know it’s taken us an hour, and all we’ve done is really set the table, basically, but this is such a complicated issue that we could probably go a couple more hours on this, couldn’t we Scott?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
To just introduce the world that the church is born into. Church members can’t just look at this academically, either. This is the world they exist in. And early on they’re going to start bumping into these ideas and responding, and that’s the legacy that we still have to grapple with today.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And so our point today has been to hopefully help everyone understand that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was organized in 1830, was organized during the height of this stuff, right? It was the height of the Protestant acceptance of the curse of Cain doctrine in North America, as well as the even more popular curse of Ham doctrine. Most converts were from Protestant sects, and they carry these ideas with them into the church. There’s these other unexamined assumptions, right, that were brought in by prevailing scientific thought and by the prevalence of African enslavement in certain parts of the country. It’s against that backdrop of entrenched racial prejudice in America that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward:
And so we’ve just got to keep in mind that these unexamined assumptions about blacks being inferior to whites, blacks carrying the curse of Cain and Ham, and especially that interracial marriage was bad or unhealthy, they’re all there when the church is organized, all there just stewing in the background. And we’ll find in our next episode that Joseph Smith will challenge some of these assumptions, and he’ll adopt others. And so our next episode’s going to be really interesting as we look at Joseph Smith and Blacks. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week we continue this series by diving into what we can learn from the historical record about Joseph Smith’s own views of black Africans generally and specifically of their ability to be ordained to priesthood and enjoy temple privileges while he was church president. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.