Brigham Young, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels

The second part of our discussion with Matt Grow, the Managing Director of the Church History Department in Salt Lake City, is now up: “Why Brigham Young, An Introduction,” Part Two.  All of the five currently-available episodes (along with some other supporting materials) are accessible at becomingbrigham.com.

I wanted to add a comment to something that he said in this second part of our discussion: He mentioned Brigham Young’s encounter with the social and economic conditions of the middle and lower classes during the tumultuous days of the Industrial Revolution in England, and the impact that encounter had upon him.  This was the period when the Latter-day Saint missionaries first arrived in the British Isles, in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Things were very difficult, which probably played a role in the remarkable success of those early emissaries of the Gospel: They brought a message of hope, and, not unimportantly, the idea of emigrating had likely become unusually attractive.

These were the social conditions described by Dickens (in such notable stories as A Christmas Carol) and by other Victorian novelists, as Professor Jamie Horrocks told us last year in a video lecture that remains available on the website of the Interpreter Foundation and that I heartily recommend, especially for those who might be coming with us on our tour of England in May of this year:  “Truth Will Prevail!: Victorian Britain in the First Missionary Moment.”

They were also the conditions that, unfortunately, gave rise to Marxism.  I’m thinking particularly of the German philosopher, social and political theorist, journalist, businessman, and revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels (born in 1820; died in London in 1895), who was a lifelong collaborator with his fellow-German Karl Marx, who eventually moved to England in 1850 but with whom Engels had already co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848).  After Marx’s death in London in 1883, Engels served as the editor of his works, completing (among other things) the second and third volumes of Das Kapital.

Although Engels was German, his father had sent him to Manchester, England, in 1842 to work in a cotton mill in which the family had an investment.  Manchester is commonly considered to have been the world’s first industrial city, transforming itself from a small town into a global hub of cotton manufacturing and trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sometimes known as “Cottonopolis,” it pioneered huge factory systems, steam power, and infrastructure like canals and railways — the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830), connecting the mills of Manchester with Liverpool’s port, was the world’s first modern inter-city railroad system — driven by technological innovation and its helpful proximity to coalfields.

Friedrich Engels’s experiences with the industrial working class there in Manchester in his early to mid-twenties impelled him to write his first significant work, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).  Although the diagnosis that was eventually offered by Marx and Engels was seriously flawed, and despite the fact that their recommended cure, Communism, has proven not only deeply wrong in theory but economically catastrophic and massively lethal in practice, their observations on the actual plight of the English working classes were not dissimilar to some of the observations made by Brigham Young and the other apostles, who were shocked by what they saw.  Marx and Engels and the apostles diverged widely, but, to some degree, they shared indignation.

Brigham Young’s passion for building Zion was certainly not lessened by what he saw in England.  William Blake’s famous 18o4 poem, which has now become a find of unofficial national anthem for England, expresses a similar dream:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

In the comments section of this blog, a reader raises an important issue:  “In the discussion with Matt Grow about the Priesthood ban on those of Black African descent,” he writes, “it seems that the assumption was that B[r]other Brigham made a mistake.”

That’s certainly a possibility, but I don’t think that we actually said that and it’s not necessarily my position.

He goes on to observe that “Brigham served for another 26 years after his announcement, and there was nine Church Presidents after Brigham who did not correct it. This was a serious and important issue which I doubt the Lord would have permitted if He hadn’t ordered it.”

I’m inclined to agree.  Somewhat.  It certainly seems to me that the Lord permitted the policy to continue, whether he originally ordered it or didn’t.  I set forth a major reason for my view in a blog entry that I posted here back on 5 September 2018 under the title “Why I Can’t Simply Dismiss The Pre-1978 Priesthood Ban As A Mistake.”

I really meant what I said in that conversation with Matt Grow, that it’s important to say what we know (about this issue and others) and to acknowledge what we don’t know.  And I simply don’t know —  nor, so far as I’m aware, does anybody else know — what changed Brigham Young’s mind about Blacks and the priesthood between the end of the 1840s and the debates about slavery, servitude, and race in Utah Territory at the beginning of the 1850s.  Something changed, but we don’t have anything yet to tell us what it was.

I do want to make one thing very clear, though — despite the fact that I’ll be accused (I’ve already been accused) of lying about it:  I’m absolutely delighted that the Black priesthood ban is in our past.  (President Spencer W. Kimball’s revelation on priesthood came nearly half a century ago.) The day that I heard the news of the revelation was one of the greatest and one of the  happiest days of my entire life.  I almost felt like dancing for a week or two thereafter . . . and that’s saying quite a bit, because I don’t dance.