Are there things Lester Bush missed? Lester Bush wrote a groundbreaking 1873 article blaming Brigham Young, rather than Joseph Smith, for instituting the priesthood & temple ban. I asked Matt Harris if there was a weakness in the article that didn't address the racial theology behind the ban. He said there was, and found some interesting information in the Adam Bennion minutes that Lester didn't know about. Check out our conversation...

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Lester Bush Weaknesses/Bennion Minutes

GT  0:23  We all have great reverence for Lester Bush and his amazing, groundbreaking article that rewrote the priesthood ban, basically.[1] But I think I heard that one of the weaknesses of that article, which is fantastic, but the weakness is he didn't go into the racial theology. Is that true?

Matt  0:46  Yeah. It is true. One of the omissions of Lester Bush, so for your audience, he's was not trained in history. He was a medical doctor who worked for the government.

GT  1:00  He recently passed away, sadly.

Matt  1:01  He recently passed away, and he was a great person. I always sent my stuff to Lester Bush, and then I think he got, was it Alzheimer's or dementia.

GT  1:11  I think so.

Matt  1:12  Alzheimer's, yeah. And so he was a great critic. And a couple of years ago, I sent one of my articles to him, and he'd always say, "Oh, I love this. Send it back to me, or send me your next piece." And he was just such a fine critic, and always made helpful suggestions. And anyway, I sent one of my articles to him, and I didn't hear from him. I thought, oh, that's odd. He always enjoys reading my stuff. But I didn't know how sick he was and how much it had progressed to that point. So that's what it was. He wasn't reading any more emails. Anyway, a wonderful guy, and he lived in Maryland. When he was in Southeast Asia on government assignment, his brother, who was a BYU student at the time in the late 1960s, he wrote his brother, Lester, a note, a letter, and he said, "Hey, I just came across, or I heard that there are some papers at BYU that deal with the brethren's First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 meeting minutes." The Adam Bennion family had donated them. "You're going to want to see these." The BYU brother knew that Lester had an interest in this topic.

GT  2:19  Adam Bennion was a former apostle, is that right?

Matt  2:22  Adam Bennion was a former apostle whose family defied convention and donated the papers to BYU, rather than the Church Archives, where they're put away, a vault within a vault and throw away the keys or eviscerate the code so nobody can get access. That wouldn't happen today, by the way, they would not donate papers to the brethren today to BYU, at least institutional papers. But they did in those days. I think he died in 1953, so the family, at some point in the 50s, donated the papers. They didn't have the policy in place yet. So this maverick librarian named Chad Flake, I knew him personally. He had sort of disheveled hair. He just did not look like a BYU person. I found him delightful. He was an interesting guy. He was just a free thinking kind of guy and  he allowed Bush's brother--I don't know how Bush's brother learned about the minutes, presumably from Chad Flake, who was the curator of the minutes. But Flake certainly let it be known that we have these minutes. So BYU Bush wrote his brother and said, "Next time you're in town, come see this." So Bush made the arrangements with Chad Flake to see the minutes. Almost immediately, he recognized what those minutes meant, because the minutes were part of a study that apostle Adam Bennion had done in 1954 at President McKay's request to look into the feasibility of lifting the ban. This is in 1954. Your listeners have never heard this before.

GT 3:58  Yeah, I haven't heard this, either.

Matt  4:00  In one of my chapters that go into great detail about this. Anyway, so in 1954 they couldn't figure out who bore African ancestry in South Africa and Brazil. And the brethren were bothered by this. We now know that there's no such thing as a pure race. It's just nonsense. But they didn't know that at the time. They couldn't they knew they were baptizing and conferring priesthood ordination on people of African lineage in these two heavily biracial and mixed blood countries, mixed race countries. President McKay visited South Africa and Brazil. He came back and he said, "We've got to do something about the ban." And so, he convened this committee led by Apostle Bennion and Spencer Kimball, we think, was on the committee. We're not quite sure, because some of the records are nebulous. But Apostle Bennion asked his cousin, Lowell Bennion, with whom he was close, to assist. Whether he was an official member of the committee or just the guy behind the scenes ghost writing everything, I don't know. I wish I knew this.

Matt  5:04  What I do know is, is that Lowell Bennion writes the report with Apostle Bennion's approval. In this report called The Bennion Report, It says that there's no scriptural justification for the ban. It says that the ban is pushing away our best and our brightest students, meaning at the institutes. They can't justify this idea of the one drop rule and anything else, or that it's theologically incompatible with Mormon scripture: that you're judged for your own sins and not for your ancestors transgressions. Well, how can you have this pre-existent theology and you can't repent of something that you may have allegedly done in the pre-existence. Bennion thought it was bad theology. They also said that there was no founding document that tied the ban to Joseph Smith. I mean, I don't know who was on the committee. I wish I did, but I can tell you, I know for a fact who wasn't on the committee, Joseph Fielding Smith.

Matt  6:05  (Both chuckling.) Because Elder Smith had spent his entire life building up this theological scaffolding that the curse and the ban began with Joseph Smith and all of that stuff. And the only logic that they used to imply or to state that the ban began with Joseph Smith was that all of the great founding doctrines of the church started with Joseph Smith, Jr. Therefore the priesthood doctrine must have started with him, too. I mean, that's not really good reasoning, especially if you believe that you know God reveals line upon line, or at, what does President Nelson say today that the restoration is ongoing. It's evolving. Well, somehow Joseph Fielding Smith had everything fixed in time at 1830 to 1844. So, that was just bad theology on so many different levels. So, the Bennion report was, as you can imagine, it was devastating. This is not doctrinal. This is just a policy and a practice.

GT  7:03  And so this is where Lester Bush's punchline came from, it didn't start with Joseph Smith.

Matt  7:10  That's exactly right. It was from the Bennion report. And this is also the context in which President McKay told Sterling McMurrin, his close friend, he said that the ban was a policy and a practice, not a doctrine of the Church. And so that's--some of your listeners may have heard President McKay believe that it was a policy and a practice, not a doctrine. Well, that comes from the Bennion report. Anyway, back to Chad Flake at BYU.

GT 7:38  Because that's right when he was talking to Sterling McMurrin and I think he said that to him.

Matt  7:43  That's the first person he said that to. President McKay had read the Bennion report in, it would have been May of 1954. He read the Bennion Report, and he told Sterling McMurrin, just after the report, "This is not doctrinal. It's a policy and a practice." And McMurrin--actually, it was April he said this to him. I'm sorry. It was late February. I'm getting this wrong, the details wrong. It was February where he read the Bennion report, and then he told McMurrin afterwards, it was a policy and a practice. McMurrin said, "Well, President McKay, General Conference is coming up in a month or so. Can you share that with the Saints?"

Matt  8:22   "Now, Sterling, you know, I can't do that." Why he couldn't do it is because Mormon revelation requires buy in from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Section 107 of the Doctrine & Covenants says it has to be unanimous, the revelations. And so even though President McKay didn't think it was doctrinal, he still thought it would require a revelation to overturn the ban, which means that each member of the Twelve would have to agree to it. Of course, Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold Lee, Ezra Taft Bension, Mark Peterson and others were not going to agree to it. And so that was the context in which he told Sterling McMurrin, "I can't share this with the Church next week, because I don't have consensus from the Twelve."

Matt  9:10  Anyway, it's those minutes from that committee in 1954 that get deposited at BYU. And those minutes that Elder Bennion had compiled, they began in 1830 and all the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve minutes that dealt with the race issue, he was permitted access to see from the vaults, and so he compiled them. So, it went from 1830, the minutes, to 1954. That's what got donated to BYU, and that's what Lester Bush saw. So Lester Bush published an article in Dialogue that came out 1973 and that was the big explosion that there is no founding document tying the prophet to the to the revelation, or to the priesthood ban. But he didn't talk about the theology behind it. He left the scriptures out. He talks a little bit about the curse in Genesis in the Bible, but he doesn't talk about how these racialized verses in the Book of Mormon and other scriptures fit into all this.