It’s become an article of faith in some circles that the end of the racial temple and priesthood ban was motivated, at least in part, by the specter of the church losing its tax-exempt status. And that’s not just the bloggernacle, and it’s not just ex-Mormon reddit (though you can certainly find the assertion—repeatedly—on various internet fora). The same claim is made in academically rigorous places.
For example, in The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History, Harris and Bringhurst write,
Specifically, the Mormon hierarchy became concerned about potential lawsuits over their tax exemption status, particularly in light of the student protests against BYU in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They had watched very closely the Bob Jones University case, in which the IRS revoked its tax exemption status in an important 1975 ruling.
(p. 106)
They go on to quote a 1978 letter from church historian Leonard Arrington to his children where he talks about Wisconsin refusing to exempt church property from its property tax because of the church’s racial discrimination, and extrapolating from that the church’s potential loss of its exemption may have been one reason why the revelation came when it did.
And it’s clearly possible that the potential loss of exemption played into church leaders’ urgency in 1978. On the other hand, I’m not convinced. I can’t find any contemporaneous evidence (besides Arrington’s letter, only he’s guessing—it suggests that he wasn’t privy to any conversations citing Bob Jones) that there was public pressure for revoking the church’s exemption, or that the church was concerned about the potential loss of exemption.
[Update: Ardis has done some amazing research over at Keepapitchinin; while it’s impossible to absolutely prove a negative, she details how Arrington’s letter is third-hand. That’s not to say the church wasn’t concerned about a loss of exemption in Wisconsin, but it is to say that the letter itself doesn’t provide a ton of evidence of that.]
I mean, in searching newspaper databases, I’ve found assertions that the church was motivated, not by pure revelation, but to preserve its tax-exempt status. Typical of that assertion is this:
Some church critics found the action [i.e., eliminating the temple and priesthood ban] intolerable, and denounced the change as a business move rather than a revelation from God. There were suggestions that ordination of black priests was motivated by fear of losing tax-exempt status.[fn1]
The problem is, this piece was written a decade after OD2, and half a decade after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bob Jones that said the First Amendment didn’t prevent the IRS from revoking the tax exemption of organizations that violated a fundamental public policy. So by 1988, the risk of the church losing its exemption likely felt a lot more salient, and retrospective memories could easily slip it in.
Still, the search function on most PDF newspaper databases I’ve searched is not remarkably powerful; it’s clearly possible that my searches have missed contemporaneous agitation against the church’s exemption. And I just as clearly don’t have access to church records (though again, the fact that Arrington had to extrapolate his conclusion suggests there likely aren’t any such records).
So I’d welcome correction if I’m wrong: is there any evidence from the 1970s that individuals or groups were agitating for the church to lose its tax-exempt status as a result of its racially-discriminatory temple and priesthood ban? And is there any contemporaneous evidence that church leaders were concerned with the risk of the church losing its exemption?
(Bonus question: if anybody was living in Wisconsin in the 1970s, do you remember the state refusing to exempt church property from the property tax? I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to run that down, and I certainly can if I need to, but if anybody can give me a starting point, I’ll definitely take it!)
[fn1] Lance Guerwell, Mormons Have Accepted Black Priests for Past Decade, Times Herald, Jun. 11, 1988, at 4.
