Door Is Opened : Mormonism: A Challenge for Blacks

Last summer, the only all-black Mormon congregation in the Northern Hemisphere was disbanded and its 85 members told to attend services where they live instead of commuting from throughout Southern California to meetings in Downey.

A year later, about half the members had made the transition, but former leaders of the Downey branch say the others have drifted away from the church.

Although it lasted only four years, the very existence of the small, experimental, black congregation--and the move by church authorities to close it--exemplify both the problems black Americans face adjusting in an overwhelmingly white, conservative, middle-class church, and the intention of Mormon officials to integrate nonwhites into Mormon life without having to abandon their culture.

‘Means of Fellowship’

“The branch served its purpose,” says Paul Devine, a former president of the Downey branch who now worships at a Mormon ward (congregation) in Walnut. “It was a means of fellowship for blacks. But many used it as a crutch . . . and a lot of blacks are still afraid they won’t be accepted and treated fairly” by white Mormons.

Ten years ago, the white, all-male leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took a major step toward racial equality in the church.

Citing a new revelation from God, the late Mormon Church President Spencer W. Kimball decreed that, for the first time in the church’s 148-year history, black males could participate fully in church rites. While church membership has always been open to all races, the priesthood, normally attained by Mormon boys at the age of 12, had been closed to those with any black ancestry.

Mormon priesthood is the prerequisite to a meaningful role in the carefully structured family life prescribed by the church and is required for participation in temple ceremonies that the faithful believe assure them of eternal happiness. These special rites include baptism and marriage for “time and eternity,” permitted only to men who are priests in good standing. Mormon women, according to church doctrine and tradition, cannot be ordained.

Called God’s Will

Kimball stated simply that the change regarding black clergy was God’s will.

“He has heard our prayers,” Kimball said in a cryptic, four-paragraph announcement on June 9, 1978.

Kimball did not explain the origin of the black priesthood exclusion nor reasons for its recision. Church leaders then and now have said only that any explanation--except that it was God’s will--was supposition, not official Mormon doctrine.

The policy reversal blunted charges that the church practiced racial discrimination, opened the door for black men to become church officers, and enhanced Mormon mission work in the Third World.

Jan Shipps, former president of the Mormon History Assn., observed that Apostle Kimball’s “revelation was crucial to making Mormonism a worldwide religion. It was a reflection of what was happening, especially in mission opportunities in Africa and South America. . . . It was not a response to pressure (from civil rights advocates) inside this country.”

Mormonism has indeed experienced remarkable growth in the last decade: Total membership has increased from 4 million members to 6.5 million. Nearly 1.5 million of that increase has occurred in the United States. Conversions have also been particularly numerous in Africa, Latin America and Asia, according to the church.

Still a Tiny Fraction

Much of the growth is not directly linked to the priesthood change; at least half of the increase is from children born to Mormon parents, according to church statistics, and only a tiny fraction of the increase in the United States represents black converts.

In terms of percentages, however, church growth among blacks has been explosive. There are now an estimated 100,000 to 125,000 black members throughout the world--at least 50 times as many as 10 years ago.

“Not only has there been . . . growth of black converts in North America, but startling growth in Africa--Ghana, Nigeria and Zaire particularly,” said Armand L. Mauss, a white Mormon who is a sociologist at Washington State University.

The number of Mormons in Africa has soared by 900%--from 2,964 in 1978 to 30,000 now--and last spring the church’s first all-black stake (regional unit) was created in Nigeria.

Growing Fast

The church counts 8,500 members in Nigeria and 5,000 in Ghana and is growing by about 2,000 converts a year in both countries, according to a report presented in May by Gordon B. Hinckley, the first counselor to the church presidency. There are another 28,000 Mormons in the West Indies and, in predominantly black Haiti, the church reaps an average of 70 converts each month. Brazil, with a population that is 6% black and 38% of mixed races, claims 260,000 Mormons, according to church records.

In the United States, however, conversion of blacks has been much slower and is sometimes painful.

Because the church doesn’t keep records on the basis of color or race, press spokesman Jerry Cahill said from Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City, there are few accurate estimates of the number of black Mormons.

Alan Cherry, director of the Latter-day Saints’ Afro-American Oral History Project at Brigham Young University, ventured a “guestimate” of several thousand U.S. black Mormons, based on leads he developed by interviewing 225 of them.

Mormon mission efforts have been fruitful in several largely black urban areas. In Oakland, 200 black converts in the last decade represent a tenfold increase, according to Mauss, who edits the journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The 400-member Mormon congregation in urban Washington, D.C., founded last year, is 40% black, and North Carolina branches in Charlotte and Greensboro are primarily black.

But in these cities, as in Downey, black members face challenges and some drop out quickly. One study cited by church historian Heidi Swinton showed 100 active members in North Carolina out of a pool of 900 black converts.

“Blacks wrestle with many issues,” Swinton noted: “ ‘Is joining the church leaving my black heritage behind? Are my spiritual ties strong enough to survive cultural differences? White members have yet to totally understand what it’s like to be black.’ ”

Black Mormons surveyed for the oral history project said deliberate racism is extremely rare among white Mormons. That view was echoed by Joseph Freeman, the first black to be ordained a priest after the ban was lifted in 1978. He has been a Mormon since 1973 and has now ordained both his sons.

“I was never treated with prejudice,” Freeman said in a telephone interview.

‘Cultural Misinformation’

But Cherry, speaking at a symposium at Brigham Young University marking the 10th anniversary of the priesthood revelation, said the survey had uncovered “cultural misinformation in the church.”

“Many black people are still somewhat invisible. Insensitivity is common. Black issues, feelings, hopes and history still go unnoticed,” Cherry said. “. . . Black mannerisms, language, and customs may go ignored or unlearned as black members are expected to completely yield to a white member’s cultural style.”

Marva Collins, who publishes Ebony Rose, an international newsletter for black Mormons, cites as an example of insensitivity the plan of a Mormon Women’s Auxiliary unit in Utah to hold a “slave auction.” Auxiliary members were to perform various household services in exchange for money donated to a church project.

But it apparently never dawned on the women how offensive the idea was to the one black woman in the group.

‘Sheer Naivete’

“That’s the kind of insensitivity that comes out of sheer naivete,” Mauss declared in a telephone interview.

On the other hand, black Mormon Joseph Smith, a former member of the disbanded Downey branch who now attends a Chino-area ward, thinks that “sometimes people try to make us too special. A lot of white (Mormon) kids grow up not knowing any blacks. We have to help them realize there isn’t any difference between blacks and whites.”

Quips Cherry: “We’d like to lose the feeling of being exotic and just become generic.”

Several black Mormons interviewed for this story spoke of a “white mind-set” that elevates the conversion of black celebrities, like Brigham Young University basketball star Jeff Chatman, as if they exemplify blacks coming of age in the church. Others said they see such black celebrities merely as “hood ornaments” or “church mascots.”

Scant Percentage

The 58 blacks at BYU during the last academic year--25 were on athletic scholarships--made up a scant 0.2% of the 27,000 students on the Provo, Utah, campus, according to BYU spokesman Brent Harker.

“I think we could do more to recruit minorities,” Harker said, “but our recruiting is primarily at (Mormon) schools, particularly in Utah and Idaho, which are very largely white.”

Bob Lang, first president of the Downey branch and now an officer in the Gardena First Bishopric, admits that “a lot of black people haven’t even heard of this (Mormon) church. Most . . . don’t even know of the revelation.”

Another “cultural misunderstanding” identified in Cherry’s survey revolves around music typically used in Mormon services--slow and traditional hymns rather than the lively gospel songs familiar in most black Protestant churches.

“New converts think they have to adapt to the (traditional) music whether they like it or not,” Jessie Embry, who works with Cherry at BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, said in an interview. “That isn’t true; their kind of music could also be sung in the church.”

Embry and Cherry nevertheless concluded from their interviews with black Mormons from throughout the country that a “surprising amount” of integration is taking place in the church.

“I didn’t realize how . . . blacks worship with whites and have so much social interaction with them,” such as visiting in each other’s homes, eating out together, working together to raise money for the church, Embry said. “There is much more contact than I would have imagined. . . . Blacks and whites are becoming best friends and sharing their greatest weaknesses and greatest joys.”

Doris Russell, a black member of the Southern California Mormon Choir, said her congregation, Wilshire Ward in Los Angeles, “is really thinking in terms of sisterhood and brotherhood, not in terms of color so much.”

‘True for Me’

“Probably some members of the black community and my family don’t understand how I can be a member of this church . . . but I just know what is true for me,” she said.

Afesa Adams, a black, non-Mormon social psychologist at the University of Utah, said that while many blacks still prefer black churches, Mormonism has “a natural appeal” to black families: the strong role of the male, emphasis on the extended, communal family, and “life centered around church activities.”

Some aspects of the Mormon church “are quite consistent with black Southern values,” she said.

Smith, the black Mormon in the Chino area, said he was drawn by the friendliness and courtesy of church members and their emphasis on family life.

“This is a real help . . . because that’s where blacks have been very weak,” he said in an interview. “The Mormon church emphasizes the role and example of the father in developing a strong faith.”

Mauss cited surveys by the National Opinion Research Center that suggest white Mormons are slightly more tolerant of blacks than are non-Mormon whites.

But, he added, “the acid test is how soon the day will come when they can look with real equanimity on intermarriage. Most white Mormons would still be appalled at the prospect.”

Shipps, professor of religious studies and history at Indiana and Purdue universities, sees among many U.S. white Mormons “a real ambivalence that’s probably not even understood . . .”

“There’s a desire,” said non-Mormon Shipps, “to welcome blacks into congregational groups because it’s (mandated) by revelation. And yet it’s the problem of bringing someone with a different cultural background into a group that was formerly homogenized. It makes for an awkwardness that only time can handle. And 10 years is not a very long time.”