“The encounter with Africa may be teaching white American Latter-day Saints that ‘reverence,’ may not necessarily look the way white Americans raised in the mid-20th century presume it should,” mbbowman writes.
To achieve reverence, Latter-day Saint leaders pursued a variety of policies, many aimed at taming the music played in sacrament meeting to fit the tastes of the mid-century white American middle class. According to historian Ardis Parshall, apostle Spencer W. Kimball once reportedlythat music in the church is “generally sung too fast.” In the 1940s, the governing First Presidency directed that music should no longer be played during the passing of the sacrament to promote reverence.
And thus, most American Latter-day Saint wards, or congregations, have come to believe that slow, contemplative organ music is what “reverence” sounds like.But it is a mistake to assume that this association of reverence with solemnity is a universal human experience. It is not. Rather, it reflects the particular tastes of the white American middle and upper class.
For instance, in 1908, First Presidency member Anthon Lund recorded in his journal hearing a woman speak and sing in tongues in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Lund believed this to be a sign of the Holy Spirit. But at the same time other church leaders associated tongues-speaking with the Pentecostal movement, Christians who were generally poor, uneducated and known for raucous interracial worship services.
As the church grows, it may be learning a wider notion of reverence. In 2009, scholar Philip Jenkins observed that while the church was expanding rapidly in Africa, that speed might pick up if particularly American presumptions about what a sacrament meeting should look like could be relaxed. When the church began to expand in Africa in the 1980s, many white American church leaders were disconcerted that Africans perceived things like drumming, dancing and chanting to be spiritual.
that Black African converts “have to unlearn a lot of old things,” like “a lot of Pentecostal hallelujahs, singing, dancing and drums.”more leeway over what instrumentsThere is a lesson here. The encounter with Africa may be teaching white American Latter-day Saints that “reverence,” awe before the divine, may not necessarily look the way white Americans raised in the mid-20th century presume it should.
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