Inside the Room for 1978 Revelation (Matt Harris 4 of 6)

Can you imagine being inside the room for 1978 revelation? The journals of Marion D Hanks take us there when the 1978 revelation was announced to the Quorum of 70. We will also discuss the 1969 statement by the Apostles and most of the First Presidency affirming the ban. Dr Matt Harris takes us behind the scenes to discuss the statement affirms a ban from temple & priesthood for black members and claiming the reasons were known only to God.  Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/MY9DQdG-lA4 Don't miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/ Copyright © 2024 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.   Marion D. Hanks GT  00:41  So another surprise. I felt like, because of our previous interview, I knew a lot of what you were going to say, but there were still surprises. I was [surprised by] the amount of correspondence that you got with Marion D. Hanks--now he's a former Seventy, former General Authority.[1] He's passed away, and I had heard from Margaret Young and some others that he was very instrumental and very progressive, for lack of a better word with regards to race. But I was shocked at how much correspondence you got from Marion D. Hanks. So could you introduce them and also say, how  you got your hands on so much materia? Matt  01:36  Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I get asked this a lot, and let me answer the broader question, which is, how I got access to this material. Then I'll tell you some great things about Elder Hanks. So as a historian, I only want to write on things where I can get access to the best records. I always liken it to a Thanksgiving metaphor that the turkey would be the First Presidency meeting minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, letters, diaries, that's the turkey. The trimmings, the Thanksgiving trimmings would be Ensign articles or Improvement Era articles, or maybe something in the Deseret News, or maybe a General Conference sermon or a BYU devotional or a published writing. Those are all important. And I utilize the trimmings in my book a lot. But make no mistake, this book is grounded in the turkey. And so how do I get the turkey? And there's a there's a couple of answers. One is that the Church archivist granted me stuff that I never thought I would be granted. For example, I got access to the Joseph Fielding Smith papers. GT  02:49  Oh, I didn't know that. Matt  02:50  Yeah, which is rich, and I've said this before to different people, that it gave me a different perspective on him, that when people read his writings from the mid-20th century, you just see him as some hardliner with race and all of this. But when I was going through his diaries, I saw a person who was funny. I would just start laughing spontaneously in the Church Archives Reading Room. I'm sure the senior missionaries are like, "Who is this guy? What's he doing? He's just laughing." And I'm reading his diaries. I'll give you one example. Every year when I got to, I think, April 1, Joseph Fielding writes in his diary. He wasn't a full diarist. He wouldn't write 10 paragraphs, usually they were maybe two. He wrote them in a little--we would, today, call it a Franklin day planner or something. They didn't have that in those days, but it was something similar. And so he would write a couple of paragraphs. So he wasn't really a rich diarist, but he would say stuff like, "I was at the church building today," or at the office, as he puts it, "and I met with this committee and that committee, and I interviewed these people for missions. Then I got home, so it was a good day," he says paragraph one. Paragraph two. "Then I got home and I did my taxes. Oh, I hate giving my money to the government! Exclamation point." It seems like every year, on April 1, I read the same thing. I’m laughing. I thought this guy is really funny, and he was a prankster.