Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast. I'm your host

John Delinn. It is June 7th, 2024 and this episode is part now part four of what I think is a really important series on this brand new book, Second Class Saints,

by Matthew L. Harris, Dr. Harris, the subtitle is The Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality.

We've done four episodes now. This is, sorry, this is the fourth episode that we've been doing

and we're talking about the Mormon Church's history on banning black people, black members from both

black men from holding the priesthood and black men and women from what the Mormon Church calls temple blessings.

This is an in-depth dive that not only understands the history of racism and white supremacy

within the Mormon Church, in my words, I'll let Matt use his own words, but it also is an inside view of how the Mormon Church makes decisions, how it deals with problems, how it achieves consensus, how the leaders work, how it does damage control.

But it's for sure one of the top three most important books I've ever read on Mormonism.

So please buy it now, go to Amazon, buy it, support Matt, get a phenomenal book and check it out.

So far we've talked about the sort of the history of a race in the Mormon Church and how Joseph Smith did

ordain black men to the priesthood but then how Brigham Young brought his own

racist ideologies to Mormonism and instituted

what was called the priesthood ban, temple ban, and this one drop rule

where if you had even one drop of blood, you couldn't get the priesthood.

From there we talked about late 19th and early 20th century dynamics with the church,

how early 20th century church leaders grappled with the legacy of Brigham Young and how they slowly sort of eventually in

part three we talked about how they just by the late 1940s threw down the gauntlet and said this is doctrine and came up with a statement

in 1949 saying this is definitely doctrine and that's kind of where we left things and we did a full episode on

Larry Nelson who's a real hero opposing the church's ban from the start.

So today we're going to be talking about what's called racial passing and we're going to be talking

about the church attempting to expand into foreign countries including South Africa and Brazil.

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