I hope my grandkids are embarrassed by me

I hope they move things so far forward that even my most progressive ideas seem backward and outdated.

I have an album of my grandfather playing the guitar and singing songs. It’s a bit of a treasure in my family to be able to hear his voice; he passed away in the late 90s, but must have recorded the songs a decade or two before that. The album is a snapshot of another time; it includes several songs from an old book called “Songs of the Mormon Pioneers,” including such memorable tracks as “None Can Preach the Gospel Like the Mormons Do.”

My grandfather was a convert to the Church; he joined in the 1950s so that my grandmother would marry him (she did). They had five children, all married in the temple, and dozens of grandchildren (including me). Their legacy includes great-grandchildren (such as my four young boys) and now even great-great-granchildren who are active in the gospel. My grandpa was called as a bishop about two years after getting baptized, and served faithfully in the Church the rest of his life. He was a great man. His legacy of righteousness is strong and lasting.

This is not a picture of my grandfather.

But, the album. Unfortunately, the album that preserves his voice and his music is also incredibly cringey. My grandfather had been a school principal, and one song talks about paddling kids at school when they misbehave. “Zack, the Mormon Engineer”—one of those pioneer songs—is all about polygamy, in a “ha ha, remember that?” sort of way. Another one, “Heap Big Smoke,” is a song that Louis Prima covered in 1960, that depicts Native Americans in a way that is not considered appropriate today.

History is complicated. Both in our families and in the Church, we revere those who have gone before but also acknowledge that they weren’t perfect. Times change, and things that were seen as acceptable in their day are no longer acceptable in ours.

Of course, judging those in the past by today’s standards is presentism—judging the past based on the information we have now—and isn’t totally fair. My grandfather was a product of the era he grew up in; attitudes toward women, people of color, etc. were different then. It’s likely that he didn’t see anything wrong in the songs he was singing (and I’m certain he would have abandoned them if he had). In the Church we have figures like Brigham Young—and many others—who grew up swimming in the deeply racist waters of the 19th century United States, and subsequently espoused ideas about race that have since been soundly denounced by the Church. They were, without a doubt, the predictable outcome of the society they were raised in. We can—and should—have grace for our departed progenitors, when they don’t meet our current day’s standards.

But it’s a fine line. The principle that we are all children of God, and that we are all loved equally by our Heavenly Parents, is eternal—and living in an era of intolerance is not an airtight excuse for intolerant behavior. There have always been anti-racists, even when slavery was the norm and racist attitudes were the rule and not the exception. There have always been those who have advocated for the rights of women, even when those same women were considered property. So it stands to reason that our forebears should be held to some account for the things they said and did, even if those things are easy to excuse away because of the time and place in which they lived.

And really, I think they’d agree. The late Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye paints this beautiful picture, of what Brigham Young must be doing and thinking today:

I believe Brigham Young is still striving to follow Christ on the other side of the veil and that he has continued to learn and grow just as he did in mortality. I imagine he’s continued to support and cheer for fellow apostles and presidents of the church, sustaining them and their work into the 21st century. If this is true, Brother Brigham now heartily rejects hurtful things he said in the past, and bellows with rage every time a fellow Latter-day Saint tries to justify those ugly words as the eternal voice of God, not 1850s Brigham.¹

I like to think that my grandfather is doing the same thing. I bet that he, with the hindsight not only of our day but well beyond, also cringed when I dug up him singing about how Zack, the Mormon engineer, “had a wifey in every railroad town.” I think he’d want us to get rid of most of those song recordings.

Bruce R. McConkie saw the Church change right before his eyes, and had the self-awareness to make changes when it did. His first edition of the book Mormon Doctrine was clear in asserting that Black people of African descent had been less valiant in the pre-mortal existence and thus had spiritual limitations placed on them (an idea that the Church now specifically disavows), and Elder McConkie was likely responsible for cementing this idea into the mainstream of Latter-day Saint thought. But after President Spencer W. Kimball announced the revelation that restored the priesthood and temple blessings to Black Saints in 1978, Elder McConkie immediately walked back his prior statements, and released a new edition of the book with those ideas removed.

This quote from Elder McConkie, two months after the change, shows remarkable humility, and is an example to each of us in how to change our minds when we learn new information:

There are statements in our literature by the early Brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things… Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.

We get our truth and our light line upon line and precept upon precept. We have now had added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don’t matter any more.

It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day and a new arrangement, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds light out into the world on this subject. As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them.

It’s rare to see people make an about-face as complete as this. It’s also rare to have an issued decided with the finality of a revelation from God, as this one was. But anytime we learn new truth we have an opportunity to change our behavior. To do so is to live the gospel of Jesus Christ. To refuse to change is to prioritize our own ego over the truth.

The best example of this I can possibly share is my wife, Anne. In February and March of 2020, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor—both Black—were murdered by white shooters in acts that dripped with racial overtones. Anne took notice, and started to educate herself on racial issues in the United States. When George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer two months later, she joined a nation-wide anti-racism group, went through anti-racism training, and ultimately helped form a non-profit organization focused on increasing racial representation in our Church buildings. She had learned new truths about our marginalized brothers and sisters. And she acted on it.

Learning something new does not always mean we drop everything we’re doing and focus on something new; hopefully we’re learning new things all the time. But it can mean small changes; and many small changes add up. When we don’t put ourselves in positions to learn, or decline the opportunity to change, then we get left behind.

That’s why it’s great news that my grandpa’s songs feel out of date and politically incorrect. It means that societally we’ve progressed in some areas, especially in relation to marginalized peoples.

It would be incredibly fulfilling to look down from the heavens, after having passed away (I’m 40 years old right now, hopefully this is down the road a bit), and see my future grandchildren and great-grandchildren laud everything I have ever done or said. It would be gratifying to see that I landed on the “right side of history,” when it comes to women’s roles in the Church or other topics that can be blind spots today.

But I hope I’m a little more embarrassing than that. I hope that both our society and the Church move so far forward in antiracism, in women’s rights, in loving the LGBTQ+ community, and in so many other things, that I look completely backward and outdated. I want nothing more than to seem completely unsophisticated, because our children and our children’s children have picked up where we left off and made so much progress. I hope they are completely unimpressed by what I thought was a big victory, a big step forward. I hope their vision goes much, much farther than mine.

I’ll move things as far as I can. And I hope they move them so much farther.

1. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2023).