Date of Award

8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in History

Department

History

First Reader/Committee Chair

Michael Karp

Abstract

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned Black men from holding the priesthood until 1978, a policy many mistake for the whole of the faith's engagement with race. This thesis argues that the priesthood ban was only a symptom of a far deeper theology of race, one built into Mormonism's broader theology from its founding. Two intertwined beliefs anchor this theology: the default whiteness of the human body and soul, and twin curse narratives that mark Black and Indigenous peoples alike as bearers of a divine curse— dark skin read as the visible penalty for their ancestors' sin. These narratives originate with Joseph Smith and the scriptural canon he produced; where the Book of Mormon's "skin of blackness" curse upon the Lamanites echoes the nineteenth-century Biblical Cain and Ham narratives long used to justify Black enslavement, and where the Pearl of Great Price's Book of Abraham later supplied the scriptural language used to withhold the priesthood from men of Black African descent. Smith's own record was inconsistent rather than absent: he defended Southern slaveholders and rebuked abolitionists even while running for the U.S. presidency on a platform of gradual, compensated emancipation, a contradiction this thesis reads as choice rather than the unavoidable prejudice of his era. Brigham Young then transformed this theology into enforceable policy, drawing on his own authority, independent of Smith, to formally bar Black members from priesthood and temple ordinances in 1852, a restriction that lasted roughly 126 years, while Mormon settlement of the Great Basin proceeded as a form of Manifest Destiny that displaced and subordinated Indigenous peoples even as it promised them eventual redemption through conversion and whitening. Prophets and laymen defended this framework as fixed doctrine well into the twentieth century, resisting mounting scientific, institutional, and civil-rights-era pressure until the 1978 revelation extending priesthood ordination to all worthy male members. Rather than treating 1978 as resolution, this thesis positions it as a false ending. The reversal addressed access to priesthood ordination without dismantling the curse narratives themselves, leaving the underlying theological architecture largely intact and setting the stage for the Church's slow, still-incomplete reckoning with this legacy, from the 2013 Gospel Topics essay disavowing the curse theory to recent institutional missteps that show the theology's continued residue.

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