What Lester Bush Missed (Matt Harris 3 of 6)

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... https://youtu.be/Rt9yJfxHzoc   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.   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 ...