How much more is 85 than 78?

Author’s note: I wrote most of this post before the election. I thought I might hang onto it until June 2025 and post it around the anniversary of the end of the Priesthood and Temple Ban. But somehow it seems relevant to post today – two days after the election that saw Donald Trump re-elected as President of the United States.

A month or two ago I read the book Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew L. Harris. This book looks at efforts to remove the Temple and Priesthood Ban. The book was fascinating to read. I highly recommend it. 

But as I read I kept getting distracted by one question. The question was, “how much more is 85 than 78?”

I was born in 1985. I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard that there had been a time that black men could not hold the priesthood. Maybe I was 10 and I heard about it in 1995. I learned that President Spencer W Kimball had a revelation in the 1970s that allowed black men to hold the priesthood. This had all sounded like ancient history to my young mind. 

I know that sounds all sorts of privileged. The removal of the Temple and Priesthood ban didn’t have a direct impact on my life. I was a while girl in Salt Lake City, Utah. Racism didn’t impact my life and so I didn’t think it existed anymore. All that Civil Rights stuff had ended racism along time ago, right?

I grew up and realized that racism wasn’t gone. But I still have my blind spots. That’s one of the reasons I read this book.

In fact, I before I read this book I couldn’t have even told you the correct year that the Temple and Priesthood ban was lifted. I thought it was in 1976 so I was surprised to read that it was in 1978. 

I also realized that I’d always been a decade off in the timeline in my head. To me, the 1960s and 1970s were compressed into one unit. I was accustomed to think of the lifting of the Temple and Priesthood ban as happening concurrently with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Really the ban had happened in the 1970s – the late 1970s. More than 20 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. Almost 15 years after Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech in 1963. More than a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect.

That’s when I started to wonder. How close to my birth did this ban get lifted?

I stopped reading and tried to do the math in my head, but my brain seemed resistant to the calculations. So I started counting on my fingers. 

1978 to 1979 One year

1979 to 1980 Two years

1980 to 1981 Three years

1981 to 1982 Four years

1983 to 1984 Five years

1984 to 1985 Six years

Six years separated my birth from when black men couldn’t hold the priesthood and black people couldn’t attend the temple. Actually a little less since the ban was lifted in June of 1978 and I was born in February of 1985. 

How had I never realized this event happened so close to my birth? How had I missed the fact that if I’d been born 6 years earlier I would have been born into a church that openly discriminated against black people?

I flipped back through my knowledge of family history. Where were my family members in 1978?

My dad was still in high school. My mom had started college. My grandparents were raising their eight children – my youngest aunt was born in 1977. They’d just bought a 12 passenger van that my family would inherit in 1990.

My in-laws were married and had already had their first child. 

I stopped thinking about my family and started thinking about pop culture. 

Star Wars had come out in 1977. 

Jaws had come out three years earlier – I’d only recently watched that movie for the first time. 

The songs “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions” came out that year. I’d sung along to those songs within the last week. 

1978 wasn’t the ancient history I’d always thought. People I know had been alive then. Pop culture I still enjoy had been created then.

The Temple and Priesthood ban was in place up until 6 years before I was born. It was rescinded. But the effects continued on. Folk doctrines supporting the ban were not removed from church literature and consciousness. I grew up in a world impacted by that ban’s existence and its removal. I just didn’t know it.

And here we all are today. The United States has elected an open racist (among other things) to be President – again. I’m heartbroken over this. Civil Rights and many other things that I’ve taken for granted are suddenly seeming very fragile. I guess that they’ve always been fragile, but I didn’t realize that until recently.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash