Episode 211 (Transcript): Who's the Decider? | A Conversation with Natalie Brown

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Celeste LaFollette, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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TEASER INTRO

NB: There's this question about why did this practice originate? Was it a result of revelation? Was it someone just deciding this was an efficient thing to do at the moment? And was it intended to last forever? We just have a lack of clarity. 

CW: So much lack of clarity.

EPISODE

SH: Hi, I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is, “Who's the Decider? A Conversation with Natalie Brown.” Hi, Natalie. 

NB: Hi. Thank you for having me on the show. 

CW: We are excited to have you today.

SH: We are. We're going to be having a really interesting conversation today. We went with “Who's the Decider” because we were thinking about how tricky it is in a church where (I'm going to use quotes here) “the Lord is at the helm.” How hard it can be to untangle where revelation is really necessary to accomplish things in the church, where the leaders themselves just make decisions, and, kind of, who's in charge.

So that's what our conversation is going to be about today, and I want to first of all give you a chance to introduce yourself, Natalie, and to tell us a little bit about why you're the one that we wanted to join us for this conversation. So give us a little snapshot, anything that would give context to our conversation and what you'd like our listeners to know about you, and then also how it is that you come to be having this conversation with us.

NB: Excellent. Well, thank you so much again for having me. So you reached out to invite me on the podcast because of a piece I wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune called, “Maybe LDS Leaders Can Make Big Changes Without Big Revelations.”

CW: Best title. 

NB: It felt very audacious when I wrote it. It seemed very obvious the more I dwelled on it.

But before I dive in, I need to just make my standard disclaimer that I'm speaking and writing in my personal capacity. What I say here does not necessarily represent the views of the church, my employer, or the Tribune. So the piece I wrote for the Tribune was a review of a new book by scholar Matthew Harris entitled Second Class Saints: Black Mormons in the Struggle for Racial Equality.

As I am sure everyone listening to this podcast knows, prior to 1978, Black men were barred from holding the priesthood and both Black men and women were barred from temple ordinances. The 1978 revelation on the priesthood thankfully changed that. And Matt's book is about the history of how those changes came to happen.

I just want to say that I'm going to encourage everyone to read the book in full. It is a landmark work of scholarship that gives voices to Black saints, but I can't speak for Matt or for other Black saints, so you need to go seek out those voices. But what you invited me to talk about today was a more narrow point I made when reviewing his book, which is that, you know, that 1978 revelation now serves as a kind of pattern for the revelation needed to enact major shifts in the church. 

We've all heard stories about this revelation. I would hear about people sobbing, about  the divine influence that it had. It's taken on a, sort of, mythic status. So what I found so interesting about Matt's book is that he shows how this revelation came about not through a divine visitation, like the first vision, but actually through a very lengthy process of internal debate and cultural pressures, including the fact that the band was hindering the church's global aspirations, and that the church was going to be investigated by the federal government. And while that spiritual confirmation did happen in the temple, it was a testy, debated road to get there. 

And so I left this book with a lot of questions. I think the most obvious one for all of us is how something that, in our eyes, appears to likely have been merely a historical tradition rather than something divine origin was allowed to exist and persist for so long.