Race, Temple Access, and "All Are Called"
The 1852–1978 LDS restriction is usually described as a priesthood ban. The actual scope was broader. Black women, who were never eligible for priesthood ordination under any era of LDS practice, were independently and separately barred from the temple itself: the endowment, the sealing ordinance, and the ordinances performed on behalf of the deceased. The gate was temple access, not priesthood office. Race, not sex, was the variable being tested.
This entry corrects that framing, traces Community of Christ's "all are called" doctrine as a single phrase reused across three separate expansions of who may be ordained, and covers the LDS Church's decade-long institutional campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment: the clearest instance in this tradition's modern history of the institution itself mobilizing women against a measure of their own broader legal equality.
Access to the temple, not access to priesthood office specifically, was always the actual mechanism being restricted or extended. Every group this entry covers, Black men, Black women, spouses of Black members, and later women generally, was measured against the same gate.
Correcting the frame: race and temple access, 1852–1978
From 1852 until June 1978, the LDS Church did not ordain men of Black African descent to its priesthood. That fact is accurate and widely reported. It is also incomplete on its own: the priesthood restriction was paired with, and in practice inseparable from, a temple restriction that applied independently to women.
Both Black men and women were barred from receiving the temple endowment and the sealing ordinance. Both were barred from serving in certain leadership callings and from attending priesthood meetings. Spouses of Black members, regardless of the spouse's own race, were also barred from entering the temple. Priesthood ordination was never open to women of any race under LDS practice, so the temple restriction was the mechanism by which the exclusion of Black women operated. It was not a derivative or secondary effect of the priesthood ban but its own independent barrier, applied on the same racial basis.
The 1978 revelation, later canonized as Official Declaration 2, reflects this dual structure directly in its own language. It states that the change "extended the blessings of the temple to all worthy Latter-day Saints, men and women," addressing temple access for both sexes as the substance of the change, with priesthood ordination named alongside it rather than as its sole focus.
Priesthood ordination
Restricted to men; barred entirely for men of Black African descent, 1852–1978.
Temple endowment
Barred for both Black men and Black women, independent of priesthood eligibility.
Sealing ordinance
Barred for both Black men and Black women; also barred to non-Black spouses of Black members.
Leadership callings and meetings
Black members of both sexes restricted from certain callings and from attending priesthood meetings.
Church leaders and members advanced various theological justifications for the restriction over more than a century, most centrally a claimed connection to a "biblical curse." The 1978 declaration did not repudiate those justifications; it rescinded the restriction without addressing them. A 2013 Gospel Topics essay formally disavowed the underlying theories, stating that Black skin is not a sign of divine disfavor, that interracial marriage is not a sin, and that no race is inferior to another, thirty-five years after temple and priesthood access were restored.
"All are called": one phrase, three expansions
Community of Christ's Doctrine and Covenants contains a single recurring phrase, "all are called according to the gifts of God unto them," drawn from section 119:8b, that has functioned as the doctrinal basis for three separate, decades-apart expansions of who may hold priesthood office.
D&C 119:8b
States the general principle: priesthood is one particular expression of a universal ministry to which all members are called, rather than a status conferred on some categories of member and withheld from others.
D&C 156:9, women's ordination
Wallace B. Smith's revelation explicitly invokes the same language: "I say to you now, as I have said in the past, that all are called according to the gifts which have been given them. This applies to priesthood as well as to any other aspects of the work. Therefore, do not wonder that some women of the church are being called to priesthood responsibilities."
D&C 164, sexual orientation
Mission Center resolutions leading into that year's World Conference called on the church to "embrace its stated values of 'all are called' and 'unity in diversity'" by extending ordination to gay members without qualification and ending discrimination in marriage on the basis of sexual orientation. The resulting document was approved and canonized as Section 164.
The pattern differs structurally from the LDS Church's 1978 declaration in one specific way. Each Community of Christ expansion cites the same prior scriptural language as its own precedent, presenting the newest change as continuous application of an already-established principle rather than a new departure. The 1978 LDS declaration does not cite an equivalent standing principle from earlier canon; it presents itself as a discrete revelation resolving a distinct restriction.
The LDS Church and the Equal Rights Amendment
Where race and temple access is a story about restriction and later reversal, the LDS Church's involvement in the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment is a story about active institutional mobilization: the church directing its own membership, including large numbers of women, to organize against a proposed expansion of women's legal equality.
Early caution
Church President Joseph Fielding Smith addresses the role of women in society and the home in the Ensign, warning against messages he says undermine motherhood, without yet taking a formal institutional position on the ERA.
Formal opposition begins
As the amendment moves to the states for ratification, the church begins issuing formal statements against it: preaching, publishing, distributing pamphlets, launching letter-writing campaigns, and lobbying members to do the same.
Kimball's statement
Church President Spencer W. Kimball formally opposes ratification, stating the amendment "would strike at the family, humankind's basic institution," and citing concerns that it could expand court power and open the door to further legal recognition of LGBT relationships.
The Utah IWY conference
At the Utah State International Women's Year conference in Salt Lake City, organizers planned for roughly 3,000 attendees. Between 10,000 and 14,000 women arrived after the church communicated that each ward should send ten conservative women. The mobilized attendees voted down nearly every proposal on the floor and elected an overwhelmingly LDS, conservative delegate slate to the national IWY conference.
Sonia Johnson excommunicated
Sonia Johnson, a Mormon feminist and founder of Mormons for the ERA, was excommunicated after publicly opposing the church's institutional campaign against the amendment. The church's own public statement drew a careful distinction: her support for the ERA itself was not the stated grounds for the action — her public criticism of church leaders and doctrine, made in the course of that advocacy, was.
Final defeat
The ERA fails to reach the required three-fourths of state ratifications by its extended deadline, falling three states short. Scholarship on the amendment's defeat identifies the LDS Church as a significant, historically underexamined factor in stopping ratification in Utah, Nevada, and Virginia specifically.
Mormons for the ERA
Not all LDS women followed the institutional position. Mormons for the ERA (MERA) organized protests inside temples and at general conference sessions, deliberately re-appropriating LDS hymns, ritual language, and symbolism as methods of protest rather than rejecting them outright. Members faced scrutiny from church leaders and, in some documented cases, formal institutional consequences for their advocacy.
Historical treatment of this period has disproportionately focused on the institutional church's opposition. The extent and experience of LDS women who supported the ERA, including within MERA, remains comparatively under-documented in existing scholarship.
Reading the three together
| Question | LDS Church | Community of Christ |
|---|---|---|
| Race and temple access | Restricted 1852–1978 for both Black men and women, independent of priesthood; underlying theology formally disavowed only in 2013 | No equivalent restriction on temple-style ordinances; priesthood opened to Black members in 1865 |
| Gender and ordination | Priesthood remains male-only as of this entry; women participate in temple ordinances but do not hold priesthood office | Women ordained since 1984, explicitly grounded in the same "all are called" precedent later applied to sexual orientation |
| Institutional posture toward women's legal equality | Actively organized and mobilized membership against the Equal Rights Amendment throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s | No comparable documented institutional campaign identified against the ERA |
The throughline across all three is the same mechanism this site documents elsewhere under different names: a single gate, whether temple access, priesthood office, or legal equality outside the church entirely, governing multiple, formally distinct categories of person at once. The institution's own later account tends to narrow the story to whichever single category proves easiest to resolve and disavow.
Sources
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essay, "Race and the Priesthood" and "Priesthood and Temple Restriction," churchofjesuschrist.org.
- "Black people and temple and priesthood policies (LDS Church)," Wikipedia.
- KJZZ, "The inside story of how the LDS church ended its ban on Black people in the temple," interview with Matthew Harris, author of Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, September 2024.
- W. Paul Reeve, "Race, the Priesthood, and Temples," BYU Religious Studies Center.
- Mormon Studies Review, BYU ScholarsArchive, on Official Declaration 2 and its failure to repudiate underlying racial theology.
- Community of Christ, The Priesthood Manual, 2004 edition, Herald Publishing House, on D&C 119:8b.
- "Priesthood (Community of Christ)," Wikipedia.
- Saints Herald, "D&C 163," on D&C 156:9 and the 1984 women's ordination revelation.
- By Common Consent, "Gay Rights Revelation added to the Community of Christ D&C," April 2010, on Section 164 and the "all are called" resolutions.
- "The Equal Rights Amendment and Utah," Wikipedia.
- Salt Lake Tribune, "From no to neutral? LDS Church may have changed its stance on the Equal Rights Amendment," February 15, 2019.
- Beliefnet, "Where Have All the Mormon Feminists Gone?"
- Lindsay Hansen Park, "Timeline Of The LDS Church And The ERA," Patheos, December 2019.
- Gospel Tangents, "Feminism, Sexual Revolution, & LDS Church," interview with Dr. Taylor Petrey.
- Martha Bradley Rose, "'The Woman's Movement Has Discovered a New Enemy: the Mormon Church': Church Mobilization against the ERA," in Contingent Citizens (Cornell University Press, 2020).
- "The ERA Is a Moral Issue: The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment," American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007).
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Equal Rights Amendment," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics.
- "The Story of Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment," Utah State University thesis, Special Collections and Archives.