The Life and Faith of William Paul Daniels

Home Bible Class

The third aspect of his giving is his home Bible class, and you can see here the minutes; I’ll talk about those in a minute. It’s a remarkable record that we have housed in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City. The minutes of the branch in Mowbray attest that Daniels himself did not let the inhospitable words and demeanor of white members in the branch deter him from attending meetings. But the disdain of some of those branch members was palpable, and the discomfort of Williams family members was real. William desired a space in which he and his family could worship with others who desired to have fellowship with him, black or white, or colored, mixed racial ancestry. 

In 1916, he started a weekly Bible study class at his home. This is just within months of his baptism, and he invited the missionaries, the white Branch members, and other non-Latter-day Saint friends to attend this class. Now it was somewhat unique in the Church’s South African Mission, this class was, but Daniels likely participated in similar Bible classes when he was a participant in his NGK congregation.

By starting this weekly cottage meeting, as it was sometimes called, he created not only a safe setting for his family and friends to worship together, but a space in which he exercised influence and provided leadership. Over the years, the class became an institution in the mission, and though the meetings were often attended only by the Daniels family, the missionaries, and perhaps a few other colored members or friends, all of the mission presidents and more than a dozen different white Branch members from Cape Town attended intermittently over the years. 

Minute Books

Eventually, the meeting gained greater institutional sanction; it was announced every week in the Mowbray Branch Sacrament services on Sundays. The mission newspaper encouraged attendance, saying that the meetings proved very inspirational to all who attend them and are a splendid means of better acquainting the members with the gospel, a beautiful endorsement. For more than a decade, Daniels ensured that his children took careful minutes of each Cottage meeting, and these minutes made the meetings official; they legitimized the Bible study class.

His minute books mimicked the Mowbray Branch minutes in form and content; they would read the previous minutes at the beginning of a meeting and approve them, they recorded attendance, they recorded who gave the prayers and which hymns they sang, which topics they studied, and often the words and the testimonies of those who were present.

That’s, I think, one of the most beautiful records that we have in our collection. William seems to have understood the importance of record-keeping in the church: “Whatsoever you record on Earth shall be recorded in heaven,” Joseph Smith said, and Daniels had a strong historical awareness. He insisted that these records should be kept and go down in Church history. He gave completed minute books to returning mission presidents so that they would take them to Salt Lake City and preserve them in the Church’s archives. These meetings were important enough to be recorded, preserved, and remembered.

Why Not Disengage?

Returning now to our social science lens for a moment, these theories of reciprocity and social exchange that I spoke of suggest that if over time we do not get reciprocation for all of our giving, that as human beings we disengage, and William did not disengage, as we have seen. What I described to you is collected from information that I’ve found in my research that extends all the way to the end of his life. On his deathbed, he was speaking with his daughter Alice to always be true to the Church, and his wife Clara as well. 

Why did he not disengage? It’s certainly true that his love of the Church’s teachings and his spiritual experiences were an important part of the equation, but if we read the historical sources carefully, William tells us about social dimensions of his continuing engagement, the reciprocation that he perceived he was receiving from the Church as a community, and the interwovenness of personal spiritual experience and community belonging. They go together. Because of William’s hospitality, because of his Bible class, and all of his other efforts, he was welcoming members and missionaries into his home on a scale not experienced by most other Church members.

He often said things like he felt he was the richest man in Cape Town because he had the priesthood in his house, or that no person had the privilege he had in having the Lord’s representatives there. Having them here, of course, meant social interaction; it meant religious instruction, but it was more than that for William.

William knew that because of the obligation his own giving had created, he was now in a position to command their faith by requesting prayers on behalf of his family, his businesses, and his health. He especially prized blessings of healing because he had numerous health issues in his declining years. He asked members of his faith community to breach social decorum and lay their hands on his head to give them numerous healing blessings, which were at once spiritual experiences and reciprocal gifts from his religious community. 

First Black Branch President

In November 1931, and we tell this part of the story in Saints volume three, President Don Mack Dalton formally organized the Daniels Family Bible class into a Church Branch. The creation of this Branch can be viewed in part as a way to quell growing concerns over integrated Worship in a South Africa that was marching full speed ahead toward segregation under apartheid at that moment.

But for President Dalton, and we know this, and for William, it was clearly understood as an acknowledgment of William’s faith. William was called as the first black Branch President in the Church. He remained unordained, so a rather unique situation, but he led the branch and he represented it in Mission leadership conferences.

Dalton’s rationale, this is from the minute book that we spoke of earlier, the minutes of that really sacred meeting, “Brother Daniel should have the privilege to perform a specific labor,” the irony being that William had been performing that labor on his own for 15 years. The creation of the branch, though integrated, what had begun as William’s gift into the Church’s structure. William’s persistent giving had at least partially disarticulated, or unfixed, some of those structures of inequality that he experienced. 

Black Members in the Church

Now none of this excuses the frankly appalling way that William was treated by some in his branch, and it is not an apology for the priesthood restriction. The reality is that before 1978 and the revelation extending temple blessings and priesthood ordination to all regardless of their race, before that moment, vanishingly few black members in the Church had experiences like Williams.

Far too many disengaged. After more than a decade of activity, all three of William’s sons distanced themselves from the Church. You can imagine his pain. We all have experience with loved ones who do that, or most of us probably do. It’s telling that when missionaries later interviewed them, his sons declared that their belief in the Church’s teachings had never waned and remained intact, that they felt there was no place for them in the Church’s community, and this is tragic. 

William’s hope for full participation led him to probe at the fixity of the priesthood restriction. We can see him doing this as he escalates his questioning from missionary to Mission President to President of the Church later in life. He even resorted to contesting his own racial identity. His claims over the years were complicated and sometimes contradictory.

In his response to Joseph F. Smith’s reiteration of the Restriction in 1915, that I mentioned earlier when he visited President Smith and received that blessing and that promise, you can see Daniel’s tacitly acknowledging his black ancestry, but by the mid-1920s, he began to argue in letters that he was of French and Malaysian descent and had no evidence of black progenitors.

His genealogical claims were weak, and they were never accepted, especially in view of the phenotypical traits that identified him as black in the eyes of Church leaders. But it is tragic that Daniels and so many others saw this as a necessary part of their negotiation for belonging.

Testimony vs Social Acceptance in Church

Now, we’re accustomed to thinking of our affiliation with the Church as being secured mostly by means of our testimonies. Now testimony is a complicated word the way we use it. It’s a complex construct. We think of it as involving in one way or another, at some level, elements of intellectual suasion or practical lived experience, but it is most common for us to characterize our testimonies as the result of spiritual communication, Spirit speaking to Spirit.

The emphasis we place on testimony as our tether to the church becomes especially clear when someone’s affiliation or activity in the Church is at risk. We exhort them to remember their testimony or strengthen their testimony. We question whether they ever had a testimony after they leave. People who leave sometimes speak of having lost their testimony.

On the one hand, William Paul Daniels’ decision today to stay in the Church complicates those purely sociological explanations of religion, demonstrates the power of ideas, the power of theological reasoning, and above all, the transcendent experience of divine revelation, of testimony. And all of these played a powerful role for William, planting seeds of desire in him, spurring him to engage, to stay.

Social Aspects of the Church

On the other hand, his story, and the story of his sons, should also give us pause, give us pause to those who may be prone sometimes to discount the social dimension of our relationship to the Church, especially among those of us for whom the social aspects of Church membership function really effectively.

And for whatever reason, I’m one of those people; the Church works very well for me and my family socially. It’s wonderful. I guess I’m suggesting that I, and perhaps others here, aren’t in the best position, perhaps, to understand some of the challenges of being part of a community that isn’t functioning for us the way that we hope. We might underestimate the friction that our community sometimes creates that works against the spiritual conversion of our friends, even be dismissive of their struggles. 

President Hinckley’s well-known formulation is instructive: Yes, members of the Church need to be nurtured with the good word of God, but they also need friends and a responsibility. And these two latter needs correspond to the bonding Social Capital, the belonging, the influence, and those other psychosocial needs a truly reciprocal relationship provides.

These needs are common to all of God’s children, and we belong to a religious tradition that believes in sealing human relationships for the eternities, in networked salvation, in building a Zion in which there are no poor. And I use that term to refer not only to temporal poverty but also to social spiritual poverty. Such a tradition has the wealth, the resources, and the doctrinal impetus to address the need for human connection.

Apologetics and the Life of William Daniels

Now, what does this story mean for the enterprise of apologetics? We often quote Austin Farrer: ‘Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.’ This is one important way to help people stay in the boat, so to speak.

William Paul Daniels’ story, though, reminds us that our efforts to create a rational defense of the faith, while vital, are just part of this larger picture. Strengthening the tether of testimony will always be a crucial element in our efforts to minister. We need to do it in ways that recognize the interplay of the spiritual and the social, to do it in ways that are not at cross purposes with our objective to build a flourishing Zion community.

My hope is that we can devote some of our best thinking not only to DNA in the Book of Mormon or providing workable historical contexts for plural marriage — again, all of this being very important — but also how we can be like William Paul Daniels, cast our bread upon the waters, and contribute to the social fabric that binds us all together as Latter-day Saints. Thank you.