"I will not consent for one moment to have an african dictate me"

It's been almost exactly a month now since President Obama visited Utah and met with every member of the First Presidency, with the exception of Thomas Monson. The official line from the church was that Tommy was just too old and tired, and, with General Conference coming up, just didn't think it was prudent to have his chaffeur drive him to the Sheraton (less than two miles from the Church Administration Building) where he would have been escorted, by wheelchair if necessary, into the meeting.

Now, sure, the meeting was scheduled for around 9:00 p.m.  He might have had to wait until 9:45 p.m.  And, sure enough, El Presidente only spoke at General Conference half as much as would be typical for a hale and healthy prophet.  You'd be forgiven if you thought the old boy was slowing down.

To that, Public Affairs chides, "Hold your horses."  President Monson attends all his meetings at headquarters every day.  He conducts committee meetings, and while feeling the effects of age, is still perfectly able to run the affairs of a $10+ billion/year, 15 million member organization.  He just can't sit in on a meeting with the (black) President of the United States.

Whether Tommy is a racist or not, I can't say.  The modern church's most notorious racist, Ezra Taft Benson, did call him into the First Presidency, however.  And racist sentiments, expressed or not, would hardly be unique to the current occupant of his office. 

Take the church's all-time, undisputed racist, Brother Brigham.  While serving concurrently as Prophet, Seer, Revelator, President and Governor of the Utah Territory, Brigham Young got up in front of the Legislature and delivered a speech for the ages in support of Utah's slave act, then dubbed--no joke--"An Act in Relation to Service." 

We're treated in this speech to an explanation of how black people bear the mark of Cain ("Cain, I will not kill you, nor suffer any one else to kill you, but I will put a mark upon you.  What is that mark?  You will see it on the countenance of every African you ever did see up on the face of the earth, or ever will see....If there never was a prophet, or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you, this people that are comonly called negroes are the children of old Cain.""), and therefore cannot run their own affairs ("In the kingdom of God on the earth, the Affricans cannot hold one partical or power in Government."), and therefore need the seed of Abel, i.e., not black people, to rule over them.  It's a gentle kind of racism, the prophet reminds us, that black folk should be slaves.  They're better off in slavery, in fact, as long as their masters don't whip or rape them (because that would be morally wrong, of course).

And seriously it would be morally wrong for a white man to father a child by a black woman.  So wrong that Brother Brigham would gladly sever the man's head from his body, and kill the mother and the man's child to boot.  Of course, "A many would shuder should they heer us take about killing folk, but it is one of the greatest blessings to some to kill them, although the true principles of it are not understood." 

So, okay, maybe it's news to some these days in the church that a prophet really did forcefully advocate for the legalization of slavery.  And that the Lord's anointed really did preach that black people bore the mark of Cain, and that's why they couldn't hold the priesthood.  And that the President of the High Priesthood after the Order of the Son of God, really did state, unequivocally, that it would be a blessing to murder all the members of an interracial family, because blacks and whites aren't supposed to mix.  It shouldn't be news to too many.  My own father was serving a mission for the church when it would have been illegal for President Obama's parents to marry in Utah.

But, after all, Brother Brigham, let's be fair here, did say that someday the descendants of Cain would be given the priesthood.  And they were, hooray!, given the priesthood, when I was just a year old (yes, I was born when the church still officially denied men the priesthood if they were deemed to bear the mark of Cain).

So, what's the takeaway here?  Am I just a disaffected apostate trying to tear down the church?  Admittedly, I'm bitter about having spent two years of my life trying to persuade people (Africans, in Africa, no less) to join this church.  Yes, I'm angry that my sacrifice for this church came at the expense of my progress in a highly competitive, rigorous science program at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.  I spent some of the most productive, formative years of my life serving this church, with this history, and guided by these beliefs.  So, yeah, I'm upset about its racism.

Despite all that, however, I am not trying to tear down the church, at least not all of it.  What I would like to see crushed is the fanatical belief that everything issuing from the mouths of the prophets is the guiding, immutable Word of God.  The church has backed away from Brother Brigham's explicit doctrine of racism, and few members continue to openly preach it.  We're squishier about all that racist stuff these days, preferring to just shrug it off as something from a long time ago that we really just don't understand.  But, hey!, the church is still true and Thomas Monson is still the Lord's prophet, so we have to oppose gay marriage and ordaining women and abortion and Democrats, etc. 

We have to do all that, until the church changes its mind and catches up with social norms (and, frankly, eternal truth).  I mean, I can understand that the church should have a unified set of beliefs that we can all rally around.  I just challenge the notion that we should be subject, absolutely and without complaint, to the whims and frailties of guys like Brigham and Ezra and Tommy, et al.  It is undeniably true that Brigham Young advocated things that we now find repugnant, evil even.  If Thomas Monson had delivered Brigham Young's 1852 speech on slavery today, there'd be a uproar, possibly even a federal civil rights investigation.  So, are we really going to argue that an unchanging God speaks through Thomas Monson the same way that he spoke through Brigham Young?

The only way I can possibly accept that (and it is a bedrock article of faith among the faithful Latter-day Saints, and an unwaivable precondition to admittance to the temple and to the receipt of ordinances essential, under our doctrine, to salvation) is to accept that the Lord's prophets don't always speak for him, even when they think they do.  I cannot accept that everything spoken in General Conference is the inspired Word of God.  I have to believe that, for some reason, the Lord tolerates racism, homophobia, misogyny, and a host of other evils among his chosen leaders.  I have to believe that church leaders are sometimes flat out wrong, at least sometimes.

The good news is that I'm not entirely alone in this.  Our de facto current leader, Dieter Uchtdorf, has admitted, in softer language than I'm using, that "leaders in the church have simply made mistakes."  Calling for the murder of interracial families is a pretty damn big mistake, but Dieter at least made an admission that church leaders don't always act and speak in complete harmony with the gospel of Jesus Christ.