Kyle McKay, the LDS Church's Well-Intentioned but Unqualified and Sometimes Racist Historian

A week ago, I found the second shield beetle that had gotten through my poorly sealed window. Today, I've found eight. I am no longer willing to take time out of my day to catch and release them. Now they die. Sorry. I wish I didn't have to come to this. If I can find their exact entry points or a way to repel them, I'll do that. Sometimes I see them on the outside of my window and pound on it to scare them away before they get in.

At least I never burned grasshoppers to death for fun. How's that for a transition? That's how Kyle McKay, the official LDS Church "Historian" - I use scare quotes because, like most LDS Church leaders, his background is in business and law - recently opened his remarks at a stake conference in Oklahoma. He said that being under the bright lights with his glasses was like the "revenge of the grasshoppers" that he killed as a kid. Pretty messed up, but kids will be kids, I guess.

Then he called "This Little Light of Mine," which was recently added to the Mormon repertoire after decades of singing boring white Protestant hymns with as little enthusiasm as possible, "a song where white people try to sing like black people." If he'd stopped there, I wouldn't have seen a problem. Jokes about cultural differences are not inherently racist, and if anything, given the aforementioned context, this one sounds to me like it's poking fun at white people. But then he gave his impression of a white person singing like a black person and made up a whole conversation that didn't happen. "​I wanted to turn to him and say, 'You know you’re white. And he would say, 'No, I'm an African slave, is what I am, and I'm singing 'Swanee River.'" In case you're unaware, "Swanee River" is a racist minstrel song. I have no idea why he thought this imaginary conversation needed to be shared. He seemed to be under the influence of something, and I don't mean the Holy Ghost.

From my perspective, it appears that while ex-Mormons posted videos about this incident using words like "backlash" and "controversy," nobody outside their spaces gave a shit. I posted it to r/religiousfruitcake myself, where it got very little attention. It didn't appear to go viral like Brad Wilcox's arguably less offensive racist comments four years ago. Granted, I was Mormon then, and now I'm not, so maybe I can't make a fair comparison. In any case, Wilcox apologized, and now McKay has done the same, bringing the grand total of public apologies from LDS Church leadership to two. It seems members of the Seventy are trying to start a trend that the apostles and First Presidency refuse to follow despite having much more for which to apologize.

I have nothing personal against McKay, whom I heard from at an institute devotional before he was important and remember liking just fine. I appreciate his apology and don't think this incident makes him a bad person, but I think it demonstrates loud and clear that Mormon leaders are out of touch and uninspired - not, despite the straw man apologists will want to apply, because I expect them to be perfect, but because anyone actually speaking for God in the year 2026 would know better than to preface his remarks by joking about a racist song that most people born after the 1950s have probably never heard of. That is absolutely not an unreasonable standard to hold them to. This might be a good time to point out that McKay's primary qualification for Mormon leadership is being a former prophet's first cousin twice removed. His sole qualification for being a historian, meanwhile, is his loyalty to the LDS Church's narrative. If you think that's not a real qualification for being a historian, you're so right. This shows in a talk he gave in 2023 called "A Sure and Certain Foundation," which, while not racist, was pretty awful.

According to McKay, the abundance and strength of evidence and arguments against the LDS Church just prove that it's true. I'm not exaggerating.

​"As you increase your efforts to increase your testimony, you are likely to be confronted with reasons to doubt. President Nelson cautioned, 'Don’t pollute [your testimony] with false philosophies of unbelieving men and women.' Please hear me and understand: there will always be some reason or another to doubt the truthfulness of this church and gospel. There are arguments and evidence supporting the proposition that there is no God, that Jesus was just a good philosopher-teacher, that Joseph Smith was simply a charismatic storyteller and that this church and gospel are not true. This evidence, these arguments, are on some level appealing and believable, for there are many who believe them....

"In short, agency - that is, our ability, our responsibility, to choose for ourselves - is essential in all things, including and beginning with belief. In order to preserve our agency in the matter of belief, there must be opposites from which to choose - reasons to believe and reasons to doubt. God does not give us doubts, nor is He the author of error, but He allows them because it is absolutely critical that you and I choose for ourselves to believe or not to believe. There will never come a time, at least pre-Millennium, when God removes all reason to doubt, for to do so would be to remove all agency in the matter of belief.

"Now, I want to be clear - by acknowledging the existence of reasons to doubt, I am not legitimizing them, and I am certainly not advocating or excusing doubt itself. Jesus said, 'Doubt not.' In the face of reasons to doubt, doubt not.

"And what? Did you think Satan would throw up flimsy, easily dismissible reasons to doubt? No! They will be enticing and flattering. If the prince of darkness can transform himself into an angel of light, then surely he can put forth ideas and arguments that appear enlightened."

See, I told you I wasn't exaggerating. I hope you realize that any religion could make this same rebuttal to its critics with equal validity - Catholicism, Islam, Scientology, Heaven's Gate, etc. And I think it's so funny how Satan gets all the credit for deceiving people and destroying their testimonies when he has so much help from Mormon leaders themselves. Is Satan the one who inspired Brigham Young to undermine confidence in his prophetic authority by declaring on multiple occasions that mixed-race couples and their children should be put to death? But of course, following the party line, McKay grouped every uninspired or downright awful Mormon leaders have said or done under "mistakes" and "errors" and makes critics out to be the unreasonable ones for expecting them to be "perfect." He even turned the accusation around:

"And what about you? If the truthfulness of this Church or the truthfulness of or your beliefs were judged by your errors, would anyone ever believe what you believe? Would there have been fewer mistakes, fewer messes, if God had only restored His Church and gospel through you?"

Yes, I answer without hesitation, pausing only to add the caveat that this is entirely hypothetical because the "restoration" is a fiction to begin with. Like many, many people who aren't Joseph Smith, I've managed not to be a serial adulterer and sexual predator despite my imperfections. I'm aware that in real life, people might already be less inclined to listen to the spiritual wisdom I have to share because I don't always live by it, and that's too bad, but I've never claimed to speak for God, whether I'm sharing wisdom or being an asshole. My mistakes and messes reflect on me. Kyle McKay's racist flub reflects on God because he was speaking in his official capacity and was supposed to have the Holy Ghost telling him what to say, which he invoked right before he started talking about the grasshoppers. Of course, everyone has off days, and this wasn't so bad that I would consider it a smoking gun against the LDS Church on its own. It's just part of a long-term pattern, with countless much more concerning examples, of these men not having the inspiration they claim.

"Sometimes, in studying the Book of Mormon or presenting it to others, we are tempted to bypass its primary purpose and jump straight to the collateral conclusion that if the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet and this is God’s church."

Off-topic, but I noticed this while I was skimming and wanted to comment because excuse me, this is exactly what the LDS Church taught us to do and what it teaches missionaries to teach prospective converts to do. Literally this exact line of reasoning is spelled out in Preach My Gospel. I'm so tired of rank-and-file Mormons being thrown under the bus for issues that come from the top. Of course, when the church tells us that David Whitmer testified of the Book of Mormon to the end of his life, it doesn't mention that he also said Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, polygamy was an abomination, and the LDS Church was in apostasy. Anyway, McKay's point here was to suggest that we "read the book for its primary purpose - to convince the people of this earth that Jesus is the Christ." He went on,

"When you ask God, the Eternal Father, if these things are true - if Jesus is the Christ, if this is His gospel - it is essential that you ask in faith. Asking, and for that matter, reading from a position of doubt or skepticism will not summon a response from Heaven. 'Prove-it-to-me' prayers are seldom answered, and if they are, it is usually to the condemnation, even destruction, of the one demanding proof. Think Korihor and Sherem, for example. Asking in faith - even a particle of faith - implies that you at least have a desire to believe. Lead with this desire and 'let [it] work in you.'

"Asking in faith also means that you believe God will answer your prayers and give you the knowledge you desire. This faith is often demonstrated by what you do after you ask. Waiting patiently, unwaveringly for the witness you desire is part of asking in faith."

This is literally the definition of confirmation bias. Of course, McKay didn't come up with it on his own. Mormon epistemology is founded on confirmation bias.

"Brothers and sisters, I hope you realize that having perplexing questions that arise from reasons to doubt is not a problem. But please understand, finding answers to these perplexing questions ultimately is not the solution. The solution is a sure and certain foundation whereon if you build, you cannot fall. That foundation is Jesus Christ and His gospel, the fullness of which is found and taught in this Church."

Begging the question here - I mean actually begging the question, not the incorrect way everyone uses that term now. We must start with the conclusion that the fullness of Jesus Christ's gospel is found and taught in the LDS Church, and anything that gives us cause to doubt that conclusion, like whether the leaders of the LDS Church act anything like Jesus Christ would tell them to act if he were talking to them, is preemptively deemed irrelevant. Again, any religion could defend its truth claims with a similar fallacy. This is something I've noticed a lot lately. When I was a kid, prophets were supposed to direct us to Jesus, but now they cause so many problems for belief that we're told to just ignore them and focus on Jesus. My mom told me (back when I still spoke to her), "I made my covenants with God, not Spencer W. Kimball or Brigham Young." And where, pray tell, does she think everything she believes about covenants and God came from?

And oh, I didn't even realize this. McKay closed this talk with the story of Jane Elizabeth Manning maintaining her testimony of the LDS Church despite its policy that barred her from the temple because of the color of her skin, and the refusal of multiple prophets to make an exception for her.

"Her request was not granted. The Church President to whom she petitioned was John Taylor. He who once withstood what might have been his compelling reason to doubt now became part of what might have been Jane Manning’s compelling reason to doubt. Jane made similar petitions to Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, who similarly upheld the race restrictions at the time. It would have been easy and understandable for Jane to pack it in, shut it down, and walk away. But she didn’t. Why? Because because her foundation was sure and certain in the truths that she had learned."

Very inspirational. Of course, like the other white Mormon leaders who use Jane's story as propaganda, he didn't say the policy was racist or wrong, he didn't mention that Joseph F. Smith eventually did compromise by having Jane sealed to Joseph Smith as a "Servitor" with a white woman as proxy, and he didn't mention that her surviving children left the church. Maybe if he'd ever really grappled with the LDS Church's treatment of black people instead of assuring himself that it was fine because a very small number of them believed in it anyway, he wouldn't have been so out of touch with reality that he thought his "Swanee River" joke would go over well. How's that for continuity?