Bizarre Events Follow Black Mormon's Ordination

Religion Today By Harvey Harris

The ordination of Greensboro native Joseph F. Freeman Jr. as the first black priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) started a series of bizarre events that has the world's leading Mormon officials reeling in dismay.

Spencer W. Kimball, Mormon church president, said this week that the church is facing "many very serious image problems."

Kimball had announced a revelation declaring that black members may hold the priesthood, a church position offered to teen-age males. The office has been traditionally denied black male members, who were said to be the offspring of Cain, the Old Testament figure who slew his brother Abel and was forever damnd.

Now a loosely knit but apparently well-financed group calling itself "Concerned Mormons" has begun a campaign against Kimball's revelation, including a recent full-page ad in the Sunday Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake City, Utah, which called the ordination of Freeman a denial of church doctrine.

Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson, a longtime member of the Mormon Church's July Council of Twelve who was U.S. secretary of agriculture during the Eisenhower administration, said that Utahans have grown weary of stories of Mormon Church "crazies," who have held a secure place in the local news there for years.

The racial furor following Freemans' ordination included an incident this month in a county near Salt Lake where John Singer, an excommunicated Mormon, drew national media attention as he held lawmen at bay with threats of a gunfight. Singer was ordered arrested by a juvenile court months ago for refusing to send his children to school where, he said, "children are falsely taught that the races are equal."

Leaders in the Mormon church seem besieged of late by the embarrassing rise of cults and dissidents within the church, a growing faith with a worldwide membership topping four million.

The most dramatic example is the polygamist LeBaron cult, with some jailed awaiting trial for murder and others on the run. Following a philosophy of "conversion by the sword," the group led by the still-free Ervil LeBaron, another excommunicated Mormon, carried out over the past few years what are believed to be a dozen murders of other polygamist cult leaders at odds with LeBaron's violent philosophy.

The latest Mormon eccentrics to gain widespread attention from the national news media were Immanuel David, a 300-pound converted and then excommunicated Mormon who said he was God. David was found dead recently in Emigration Canyon, where Brigham Young, founder of the Mormon church, had led his followers to the Salt Lake Valley, 131 years earlier. Several days later, on the morning of Aug. 3, David's Swedish wife Rachel and her seven children leaped to their deaths from the balcony of the family's 11th-floor suite in Salt Lake City's International Dunes Hotel.

Freeman is remembered as a soft-spoken youngster who always provided leadership for interracial groups and youth meetings in area churches. His many friends here said this week that they believe him to be the least likely person to become the center of such controversies as those now rocking the Mormon church. . . .

The Samoan woman Freeman married after Peace Corps service in Samoa, Toe, said that her husband has kept himself so busy with his Mormon ministries that he hardly notices the controversies surrounding his ordination. . . .

"He's always on the go for God and only God knows where he might be at any time, but he's happiest when he keeps busy in serving the Lord," she said of her husband. . . .

. . .Kimball and other Mormon leaders said the Mormon "crazies" are a very small minority and insignificant when compared with the denomination's growing membership, worldwide attendance at worship services and "dynamic faith," which he said is at the highest level in history.

Kimball also said he considers the "Concerned Mormons" campaign against the revelation, which okayed ordaining blacks as an almost insignificant revolt by some ultra-conservatives who don't have much influence in Mormon circles. But he did acknowledge that the group's advertising campaign shows that it seems to have ready access to huge amounts of money.

Singer, the LeBaron cult and the philosophy of "conversion by the sword" may gain worldwide attention, which is embarrassing to the Mormons, acknowledge Kimball, but the eccentrics are far outnumbered by millions of the faithful whose families daily demonstrate a devotion to high standards of ethical and moral responsibility and who live their Christian faith to the fullest, he said.

Kimball said the quiet, modest and unassuming Christian faith demonstrated by Freeman is showing a depth of Christianity unknown to the small group trying to arouse a rebellion against the ordination of blacks as Mormon priests.