Lowry Nelson and the 1947 Letters

A faithful sociologist wrote to the First Presidency about the priesthood restriction. The letters are real. Almost everything told about what happened to him afterward is not.

A Question About Cuba

In June of 1947, Heber Meeks wrote to Lowry Nelson. Meeks presided over the Southern States Mission and was weighing whether to open missionary work in Cuba. Nelson was a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota, a man who had done field research on the island and knew its villages from the ground up, and he was also a Latter-day Saint — so Meeks asked him a practical question, phrased in the easy assumptions of 1947: “Are there groups of pure white blood in the rural sections, particularly in the small communities?”

Nelson was startled. Not by the mission, but by the premise sitting underneath the question. He wrote back on 26 June 1947: “Your letter is the first intimation I have had that there was a fixed doctrine on this point. I had always known that certain statements had been made by authorities regarding the status of the Negro but I had never assumed that they constituted an irrevocable doctrine.”

Then he said the line he is remembered for. “I do not believe that God is a racist.”

What the First Presidency Wrote Back

The reply came on 17 July 1947, over the signatures of George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark Jr., and David O. McKay. There is no softening it, and this page will not try:

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, 17 July 1947

“From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel.”

The same letter described the mixing of races as something that had “heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now.” Critics quote that clause constantly, and almost always trimmed, because read whole it is plainly an appeal to inherited social custom rather than to a revelation — and that distinction is going to matter a great deal before this page is finished. It is still hard reading. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and dishonesty is what this site exists to answer, not to practice.

Concede the document, then. Every line of it. The letters say what they are said to say, and no honest defense of the Restoration is served by shading a single clause of them. Now watch what gets built on top.

“He Died Condemned”

The story now circulating online ends like this: Ezra Taft Benson denounced Nelson in general conference as a Judas and an apostate; the restriction was lifted in 1978; Nelson died in 1979, condemned by prophets for saying what the Church itself would later say.

It is a devastating ending. It is also assembled out of things that did not happen.

Start with the date, because it takes ninety seconds to check. Lowry Nelson was born in Ferron, Utah, on 16 April 1893, and he died in 1986. Brigham Young University’s Special Collections, which holds his papers, records those years. He did not die in 1979. He lived EIGHT years past the revelation of 1978 — long enough to see the thing he had asked about answered, long enough to keep writing, and long enough that he was ninety-three years old when Dialogue sat down to review the final volume of his memoirs.

The single most affecting sentence in the whole indictment is a fabrication. Why does that matter so much? Because the entire moral weight of the argument rests on a man dying under a cloud — and he did not.

Was He Cast Out?

No. He was never excommunicated. He was never disciplined. Not in 1947 after the letters, not in 1952 after he took the argument public in The Nation, not ever.

Samuel W. Taylor documented Nelson’s life in Dialogue in 1993, and the episode he recovers from the years before the 1947 exchange is the one that settles the question: a visiting professor reported Nelson for using the word “agnostic” in a private conversation about immortality, the complaint climbed all the way to the First Presidency, and there it died. David O. McKay — one of the three men who would later sign the 1947 letter — ended it in five words: “There will be no investigation.” Taylor’s summary of the decades that followed is that Nelson lived “a charmed life as a persistent dissident.”

A persistent dissident. Publishing against the restriction in a national magazine. Dying a member in good standing at ninety-three. That is the record of the man offered as proof that this Church destroys the people who ask.

The Judas That Was Aimed Somewhere Else

What about Benson calling him a Judas from the pulpit? Here the retelling has fused two unrelated things.

Benson did use that language. Twice, in the documented record: in general conference in October 1963, and again in a BYU devotional on 10 May 1966, both times speaking of early Church leaders who had fallen into apostasy and observing that even Jesus had his Judas. Did anyone in those rooms take him to mean a sociologist in Minnesota? Not one. D. Michael Quinn established from the papers of BYU president Ernest L. Wilkinson and of Hugh B. Brown himself that both men understood the 1963 remark as aimed at BROWN — a counselor in the First Presidency of the Church.

Read that again. The barb the critic hands to Lowry Nelson was understood by the people present to have been aimed at one of the highest officers in the Church. It was an argument inside the leading councils, not a prophet crushing a layman. And it is documented by a historian critics normally treat as unimpeachable.

There is one documented intersection between these two men, and it runs the opposite direction from the story. In 1976 it was Nelson who went after Benson — picking apart a talk Benson had given on writing about Church subjects. The layman criticized the apostle in print, and nothing happened to him. Does that sound like a Church that silences its questioners?

Where the Line Actually Falls

Critics need the line to fall at questioning, because if it falls there the Church is a machine for crushing honest people. But Nelson questioned for four decades and kept his membership. So where does the line actually fall?

It falls where the Gospel of Jesus Christ has always put it. Asking is commanded. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God” (James 1:5). The Bereans were called more noble precisely because they refused to take an apostle’s word without checking it against scripture (Acts 17:11). Moroni does not ask for deference; he asks for a test (Moroni 10:3–5). A church that punished questions would have to start by deleting its own founding story, because the Restoration begins with a boy who would not accept what the ministers of his day told him.

The line falls at the campaign to pull others out. That is what apostasy has always meant — not doubt, not disagreement, not a hard letter to Salt Lake City. Nelson never crossed it, and he was never touched. The distinction is not a modern invention for damage control; it is the reason his membership survived forty years of open dissent.

What 2013 Did and Did Not Say

The claim is that in 2013 the Church repudiated “every single statement by apostles and prophets.” It did not, and the essay is one click away for anyone who wants to check.

What the Gospel Topics essay Race and the Priesthood sets aside are the theories — that dark skin marked divine disfavor, that the restriction reflected conduct in a premortal life, that interracial marriage is sinful. Those were explanations men offered to account for a restriction whose origin the essay openly says it cannot trace to a revelation. Explanations advanced to justify a practice are not the same thing as doctrine delivered by revelation, and the difference is the whole ballgame. One was set aside. The other was never there to begin with.

And what ended the restriction? Not a magazine article, not public pressure, and not a sociologist. A revelation received in the temple by Spencer W. Kimball and the Twelve, presented to the Church, sustained, and canonized as Official Declaration 2. The capacity to receive that revelation required the very keys the critic is trying to discredit. A man with no priesthood authority cannot receive a revelation ending a priesthood restriction. Only a prophet could close it — which is an odd sort of evidence that there was no prophet.

The Verdict

The 1947 letters are genuine and they are painful to read. Concede every word of them. What cannot be conceded is the story bolted onto them, because that story is false in each of its load-bearing parts. Nelson was not cast out — he was never disciplined at all. He was not called a Judas from the pulpit — that language, documented by the critics’ own favorite historian, was understood to be aimed at a member of the First Presidency. He did not die in 1979 under a cloud — he died in 1986, at ninety-three, a member of the Church, having lived to see the answer.

Strip out the invented death date, the discipline that never happened, and the sermon that was about someone else. What survives? A faithful member asked a hard question, was answered in the language of 1947, kept asking for the rest of a long life, and was never punished for any of it. That is not a Church that destroys its questioners. That is a man who questioned and was left in peace for forty years.

And notice what the argument requires you to believe about the writer of it. Nelson’s dates are in a public archive. His discipline — or the absence of it — is in a published journal article. The target of Benson’s remark is documented in a book critics cite constantly. None of this is hidden. It took an afternoon to check. Whoever assembled that post either did not check, or checked and wrote it anyway.

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That is a command, and it is a good one. Apply it here. Prove this claim — actually prove it, source by source — and it does not survive contact with the record.

Lowry Nelson asked an honest question and got to see it answered. The men who tell you he died condemned never bothered to look up the year he died.

Related

On This Site

Sources

  • Nelson–First Presidency correspondence, 1947 — Meeks to Nelson (June 1947); Nelson to Meeks (26 June 1947); First Presidency to Nelson (17 July 1947), signed George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark Jr., David O. McKay
  • Lowry Nelson, “Mormons and the Negro,” The Nation 174 (24 May 1952)
  • Samuel W. Taylor, “The Ordeal of Lowry Nelson and the Mis-spoken Word,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 3 (Fall 1993) — source for the McKay decision and for Nelson never being disciplined
  • Lowry Nelson papers — BYU Library Special Collections, recording his dates as 1893–1986
  • D. Michael Quinn, on the Wilkinson and Brown papers establishing the intended target of Benson’s October 1963 and 10 May 1966 remarks
  • “Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics Essays (2013)

Citation Traps

  • “Died 1979” — no archive supports this. BYU Special Collections gives 1893–1986. Anyone repeating 1979 is copying another retelling rather than a source.
  • The “repugnant” quotation — almost always trimmed. The full clause reads “heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now,” which is an appeal to inherited custom, not a revelation.
  • Benson’s “Judas” — belongs to October 1963 and 10 May 1966, and the documented understanding of those present points to Hugh B. Brown. Any version placing Nelson as the target should be asked for the page number.
  • “Disavowed every statement by apostles and prophets” — the 2013 essay addresses theories advanced to explain the restriction. Read it and count.