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The news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Wednesday at Utah Valley University is devastating.  He left behind a young wife and two small children, who were very clearly the center of his world. While much of the online commentary about him has been respectful and positive, it is hard to escape the online celebrations of his death—gleeful posts blaming the victim because of his political beliefs, excusing the lack of compassion for his family because of his views. Many acknowledge that, of course, it was wrong for the gunman to murder Kirk, but still seem relieved that a person they saw as a threat to their worldview is no longer around.

I am, unfortunately, all too familiar with those feelings, having once lived them myself.

From a young age, I believed the political left held the moral high ground. I knew that there were a few good and smart right-leaning people—my parents and neighbors among them—but I also assumed that they were the exceptions. In my eyes, the vast majority of people on the right were evil, dumb, selfish, or worse. Why else would anyone oppose the party of women’s rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights?

But over time, things began to change. I married and had three young children. I wrestled with my faith. I found myself questioning whether issues were as simple as I had once assumed. In 2020, like many people, I spent more time online—and to my surprise, I was exposed to ideas I had once rejected out of hand. Slowly, my moral intuitions shifted. I no longer felt my political home was on the left.

What startled me most was realizing how many people I had dismissed as “bigots” were simply people who thought as I now did. I carried real regret for the way politics had shaped my view of people I knew and loved. At the same time, the world became much lighter, knowing that the country was not divided into good guys and bad guys, but both sides were filled with mostly very good and earnest people, endowed with the light of Christ, trying to make the best for the world we could. 

My shift in beliefs did not lead me to see people on the left as I had seen people on the right. Like a growing number of Americans, I am quite politically homeless, perhaps leaning more conservative, but with serious criticisms of the right. I also reject both-sides-ism, where we throw up our hands and say “well, they’re all terrible,” or “the other guys are doing it too.” Each side has its own problems and vices, and those deserve direct criticism and remedy. I also have personal experience seeing the goodness, justice, and mercy present in people on all sides. 

Having observed the good and bad in both sides of the political spectrum, I have a few words of unsolicited advice at this sensitive time: 

To my liberal friends: The Overton window has shifted very far in the past few years. When almost all normie-conservative opinions are treated as beyond the pale in public discourse, it creates a distorted picture of your neighbors. Your political opponents do not wish you dead, and they are not opposing your very existence. The positions you take may be formed by thoughtfulness, personal experience, compassion, and the very best of intentions, but so are the positions of your political opponents. Half the country are not lunatic rednecks, and reaching that conclusion should invite some serious soul-searching.  Spencer Cox, Governor of Utah, said it well: “If anyone, in the sound of my voice, celebrated even a little bit at the news of the shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.” Look for the good in people on the other side of the aisle; you might be surprised by what you find.

In scripture, we read many times of darkness, and the message from our Lord is always the same: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27).

We are responsible for bringing that peace into the world. This does not require us to reject our convictions in favor of niceness. But it does require a soft heart, a willingness to listen, and a commitment to President Nelson’s call for peacemaking “especially when we have differences of opinion.”

Moments of violence can either harden our divisions or soften our hearts. The choice is ours. This week has felt so bleak. Resist the temptation of knee-jerk responses. Refuse to celebrate the suffering of your opponents. Remember that the people you disagree with most are still children of God. If we take seriously the call to be peacemakers, we can honor Charlie Kirk’s memory—not by weaponizing his death, but by living the harder path as peacemakers.

The post Did Murder Become a Meme? What Online Reactions to Charlie Kirk Reveal About Us appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In the “culture wars” being waged in the United States these days, one of the rhetorical weapons is the term “woke.” Many of the left are proudly woke. Many on the right decry wokeness. Many others—perhaps the majority—may not be sure what the term means. 

So, let’s start with definitions.

Or does “woke” describe the attempt by people on the left to impose their ideology on everyone else, either through public policy or pressure on private institutions and businesses? That’s how conservatives have redefined the term, usually with some contempt and derision toward those they accuse of “virtue signaling,” a public displaying of wokeness to demonstrate one’s presumed moral superiority.

Both definitions can be accurate, depending on the situation.

We can understand wokeness in a positive sense, following Lead Belly. Should people who are at the bottom of various social hierarchies stay woke? That certainly seems sensible, given the way people in power so often work to maintain those hierarchies, even though they may publicly pledge to pursue the goal of equity. Should a black driver who gets stopped by a police officer be awake to patterns of the disproportionate use of force against African Americans? That seems like good advice, not because all cops are abusive in every encounter but because some people are at greater risk. And if vulnerable people should stay woke out of self-interest, it would be appropriate for people in dominant positions in the hierarchies to strive to be woke out of solidarity.

Here’s an example of the complexity that will be familiar to many readers. During a meeting, some participants will preface a statement with phrases such as “As an indigenous man” or “As a black woman.” Sometimes, those details help others understand their comment, but some speakers use their identity to suggest that critique from white people or men, or both, is out of bounds and that their analysis is beyond challenge. 

Experience matters in how we understand the world, but it doesn’t guarantee one has the best argument. As I repeatedly told students, their experience may be the starting point for an analysis, but simply recounting their experience isn’t an analysis. If those kinds of identity invocations shut down a conversation, everyone loses. That doesn’t mean that hierarchies don’t exist or that oppression is acceptable. It simply recognizes that some people can derail important conversations by implicitly claiming that some other people cannot challenge their statements.

If this critique seems suspect coming from me, an older white guy, consider the analysis of Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, which describes him as “a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice.” In an essay widely circulated on the left, Mitchell was blunt: “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.” On a podcast after the essay was published, he said he has seen identity “being weaponized in ways that were not useful for the work.” He elaborated:

As a black person, it does no favors to me for me to say, “As a black son of immigrants,” and then for white people to sit on their hands and shut up. I need to be sharpened by debate. I might, at the end of the day, think you’re wrong. But I need the back and forth in order to sharpen my position or change my mind.

Where does this leave us? Let’s take the case of race. Some on the right say that racism is no longer a powerful force shaping people’s options. Most on the left argue that racist practices continue, albeit in different forms than in previous eras, and must be addressed in public policy. (I say “most” because some leftists argue that class divisions in capitalism are primary, both in terms of analysis and action.)

Let’s start with potential points of agreement. Everyone should be able to agree that the United States, both in legal and informal ways, has made progress in confronting white supremacy and changing racist practices. Would anyone argue that the United States in 2024 is no different than it was in the pre-civil rights 20th century? I think of this in concrete terms, about the year I was born. Does anyone—anyone who isn’t an overt racist, that is—want to return to the racial dynamics of 1958? 

Yet it’s also true that racialized disparities in measures of wealth and well-being—the statistics that tell us roughly how well people are doing—continue even after changes in law and policy. Given the racist history of the United States and the recent resurgence of openly white supremacist rhetoric, would anyone argue that we have transcended white supremacy in the few decades since the end of legal apartheid? Does anyone want to freeze racial dynamics at this moment in history because it can’t get any better than this? 

How do we sort this out? Too often, too many white people want to deny the lingering racist patterns in virtually every aspect of American life. When those white people are quick to label antiracist activists as overly zealous, that might be part of a denial strategy. It’s fair to ask whether critiques of wokeness might sometimes be a way to divert attention from the enduring nature of white supremacy. 

Yet it’s also reasonable to worry that such zealousness sometimes undermines the difficult work of building coalitions that can advance an antiracist agenda. People with a perceptive critique of white supremacy are people, and people can be arrogant in all sorts of ways. For example, the line between holding someone accountable for a racist comment and berating a well-intentioned person who may not be up-to-date on the latest trends in progressive terminology can be pretty thin. Even the director of a university’s Africana studies program can find himself undermined by a self-righteous student who feels the professor isn’t taking the correct position.

Vincent Lloyd, the Africana studies professor who saw that the seminar he was teaching undermined, offers a perceptive analysis of the situation:

I worry that left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters. That frustrates me because I firmly believe these movements are the key to our collective liberation. Justice struggles always involve a back-and-forth between movement participants making demands for radical transformation and those in power trying to manage those demands so that they can keep their grip on power. … Those of us who care about justice have to be willing to ask critical questions about these dynamics rather than blindly deferring to the activist language.

I’ll conclude by making the question personal: Am I woke? 

Because I’ve written critically about white supremacy, I have been described as part of the woke mob on racial justice, one of those people who allegedly is ashamed to be white. But I’ve also been shunned in left spaces for my writing on patriarchy, especially my challenges to transgender ideology. 

I have spent my adult life working in journalism and university teaching, endeavors that have provided me a fair amount of freedom to explore a complex world without worrying (for the most part) about who might attack me. I don’t have to worry about how I am labeled.

My concern is that framing intellectual debates as a culture war has been politically corrosive, limiting people’s capacity for democratic engagement. In war, the goal is victory, not deeper understanding. And given how complex the modern world is, we all need to deepen our understanding.

I’m not naïve. I’m not asking, “Can’t we all just get along?” I am suggesting we have an obligation to work at understanding why we don’t always get along.

The post What is Woke? Navigating the Polarization of Social Justice appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

On October 11th, there were already angry crowds on college campuses or blocking city streets, yelling, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”. These crowds are still combining in America and other countries, becoming ever more threatening and violent. Anti-semitism is on the rise everywhere. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Ron E. Hassner reported on a survey of 250 college students across the USA. 

Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%), and others to a lesser extent (53.2%). 

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake), and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). 

Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

The demonstrators don’t seem to realize that the chant calls for the displacement or annihilation of 9.5 million people. True genocide. But it is almost as bad to say, “Israel is doing this for revenge,” “Israel is apartheid,” “Israel is purposely killing as many Gazans as it can,” “Israel is blocking aid to Gaza,” or any sort of pat statement that ignores the befuddling complexity that is the Middle East generally and the Israeli/Palestinian situation specifically. The cultures, behaviors, and beliefs of the Middle East and Israel/Palestine are almost completely unfathomable for Westerners, and the history must be mastered in detail to make sense. Once it makes sense, irony besets us and makes us pace and stammer. Our best experts are pulling their hair out. We can’t relax and think we know because we read the news.

On the Ground Now

Today is March 5, 2024, and Hamas, demanding the exchange of about 100 Israeli hostages for many more Palestinian prisoners, scuttled the newest peace deal by refusing to list the hostages remaining alive, thus prolonging Gazan’s suffering. Hamas could have saved tens of thousands of Gazan lives by accepting a previous offer from the Israeli government—just release the hostages and let your terrorist leadership leave Gaza safely into exile, and the war would end. Now, Bibi Netanyahu is working to find talented, moderate Gazans to organize the delivery of aid in northern Gaza and talented, moderate Gazans to establish a new Gazan government in order to rebuild. The trouble is that moderate Palestinians who attempt to lead tend to be assassinated.

Extremists are determining the ongoing situation. The people who suffer most from extreme Moslem fundamentalism are other Moslems. Years ago (1981), when jihadists assassinated Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, who had just established detente with Israel, the assassins claimed that it didn’t matter how many people were killed as they tried to get to Sadat. They would all become martyrs for the cause and go to heaven. Does Hamas care how many Gazans suffer and die in this war? One Israeli commander said they were finding a tunnel under every school, hospital, mosque, and many private homes—part of a 350-mile network built with funds that could have made Gaza a Singapore. While Israel has spent billions of dollars to protect its own citizens (the Iron Dome and Iron Beam systems, defensive missiles, shelters, the Home Front Command), Hamas has spent nothing for defensive weapons development, nothing for bomb shelters, nothing on evacuation plans, and nothing on stockpiling food or resources in case of war. Its four leaders outside of Gaza are billionaires. Golda Meir, who was the Prime Minister during the Yom Kippur War, said, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

We’ve all noticed the intransigence of bordering Arab countries that adamantly refuse to accept Gazan refugees. There is an Egyptian entity that gets Gazans out if they pay enough. Few have been able to gather up the funds. Why have these countries closed their gates? The answer is that these countries have taken in Palestinians in the past. In Jordan, Palestinian extremists tried to assassinate the King and take over the country, then teamed up with Syria and triggered a full-scale war. They were ejected into Syria. The problems they caused there made Syria eject them into Lebanon. In Lebanon, they helped to trigger a years-long civil war. Lebanon is now a failed state. In Egypt, they fomented terrorist attacks. Egypt considers Hamas a dangerous terrorist group, so the border is closed. In Kuwait, they supported invading Iraqis. Kuwait ejected them after Iraq was defeated. In Gaza, Hamas killed at least 600 Fatah supporters. Children are groomed to be martyrs by Hamas, so the rising generation could be as radical as their parents. Meanwhile, moderate, innocent Palestinians suffer.

And then there’s the weather: If you’ve been reading the news, you know displaced Gazans have suffered from hypothermia and a few drenching rain storms. Israel essentially has only two seasons—summer (completely dry and hot) and winter (cold and wet). You get a couple of weeks of spring in March and a couple of weeks of fall in September. On April 15th, it will be summer and very hot, creating a new and awful host of problems for the homeless in Gaza. 

The Politics of Onlookers

The woke/left portion of Western leaders and followers tends to view the situation in Israel/Palestine as a simple case of white imperialists oppressing native people of color. Since the Jews of the world were originally from Israel, their DNA just barely differs from the DNA of the Arabs from the same area, even among the Jews whose recent ancestors emigrated to Israel from Europe. So, this supposition is false.

Both the left and right views have big problems. 

Warping History

Note how the study of students cited at the beginning of this article denied the existence of the Oslo Accords. Through those accords, “Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. [The PLO has been governing the West Bank since then. Abbas is now 88 years old.] Both sides agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established and assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem would be held.” It sounds so good. But Fatah and the PLO are corrupt and inept and can’t possibly take over governing Gaza. In the vacuum left by departing Hamas, new leadership is necessary.

There have been many attempts to create deals for peace, and the Palestinian leadership has rejected nearly all of them because they want it all, as stated in Hamas’ charter, which calls for the genocide of Israel’s population.

Many in the West say that Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself, and some say it doesn’t have the right to exist. History says they had no choice. No other country would accept Holocaust survivors. No one wanted the Jews. They were destitute and hated in Europe. No country outside Europe would take them as refugees. They were looking for somewhere they could gather and be safe and even considered locations in Africa and Nevada (!). Although the British were leery, they finally agreed that Palestine made sense. After all, that’s where the Jews came from. The Holy Land felt like the logical place to dump them, come what may. Surprisingly, the Jews prospered, made the desert bloom like a rose, bought property legally, and built military might that has thwarted enemies in every war they’ve had to fight. If they had remained poor desert dwellers, the modern landscape would be entirely different. Despite that success, Jews are barely recovering their numbers to pre-Holocaust figures (now at about 15.7 million, with over 8 million in Israel). Note that there are 2 billion Moslems, with about 382 million in the Middle East.

One thing you will hear often is that Palestinians want revenge for the “Nakba.” This refers back to 1948 when about 700,000 local Arabs fled as large Arab armies fought Israel. Israel, not yet being a country, had no standing army, just whatever they could cobble together. Historians squabble over whether the Jews chased out the local Arabs or whether the warring Arab countries encouraged them to leave while they defeated the Jews, the prospect being that they could return to their homes within weeks. According to Israel, the latter is true, but the Jews were happy to take advantage of the situation as they began to triumph. The Palestinians cry, “We will never forget!” meaning, “We will take revenge and get our land back. The Jews often use the same phrase—”We will never forget!” It means, “We will remember the Holocaust and keep all Jews safe.”

Regarding the Nakba, Palestinians leave out of their history the fact that about the same amount of Jews (around the same time) were violently driven out of Arab nations, and most of these Jewish refugees found shelter in Israel. Baghdad used to be 40% Jewish.

Understanding Culture

One thing that really bothers the countries of the Middle East is that Israel is a “Western” country. It has a Western mindset and is capitalistic and democratic. All around Israel, the culture is Oriental—it’s a communal shame culture, where the individual means little, it is humiliating to compromise, and for its extremist groups, revenge is admirable.

Did you see the Gazans rejoicing after their attack on southern Israel? The barbarity of the incursion didn’t matter. The sure and devastating response from Israel didn’t matter. This is a different culture. Culture is extremely powerful, and the West may never understand the reasoning in the Middle East.

Religion is Everything

This is a holy war. Hamas’ attack on Israel was called “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” The Al-Aqsa mosque compound sits on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which also includes the Dome of the Rock, the oldest standing Islamic structure in the world, built from 688-692 AD. Tradition holds that Mohammed dreamed he ascended from there to heaven, although he never personally visited Jerusalem. The temple site in Jerusalem is Islam’s third holiest site. For Jews, of course, it is THE holy site, the site of Solomon’s Temple, Herod’s Temple, and in the future, the Messiah’s temple. 

Israel and Jews had no access to the Temple Mount until it won the Six Day War in 1967. Although Jews rejoiced to have access to their most holy site, they refrained from accessing it (except as infrequent tourists) out of respect for Islam. They left the mount under the management of the Jordanian Arab Waqf. Jews prayed instead at the Western Wall, which holds up the mount and was never part of the temple itself. For the Orthodox, this situation was less awful than it could have been because they feared stepping on the location of the ancient temple’s holy-of-holies—a possible sacrilege. Things have changed in the past few years. 

Fringe, ultra-religious Jewish groups have been encouraging their followers to pray openly at the Temple Mount. In 2019, at the end of the month of Ramadan, hundreds of Jewish ultra-nationalists entered the Al-Aqsa mosque compound to celebrate Jerusalem Day—the first time the Israeli authorities had allowed them to do this in 30 years. The mosque’s director bitterly complained that Israeli authorities had broken a promise not to enter during the final days of Ramadan.

In April 2023, amid rumors on social media of Jews heading to the Temple Mount to perform an animal sacrifice, Palestinian rioters illegally barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In response, Israeli police entered the compound and raided the mosque … arresting those inside. These scenes of stone-throwing Palestinians, Jewish zealots, and Israeli police in riot gear are now familiar at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. Rocket attacks from Hamas have duly followed each incident, along with Palestinian chants in the street: “In spirit and in blood, we will redeem Al-Aqsa.”

Days before the recent attacks, the situation had escalated to a critical point. On October 1, 2023, thousands of ultra-religious Jews began to carry out religious, apparently “provocative” tours of the mosque complex. …

But why are thousands of ultra-religious Israeli Jews suddenly intent on reclaiming the Temple Mount as a place of worship? And why did Hamas name Al-Aqsa as their cassus belli (“occasion for war”), neglecting the security of their own people and instead provoking an all-out, existential war with Israel?

Because Israel now has a Red Heifer. 

A perfect red heifer is so rare that the Mishnah says its sacrifice has only happened nine times in Jewish history. The sage Maimonides, a Jewish scholar, believed that the tenth animal would only be found and sacrificed when the Messiah was ready to appear.

Two groups, The Temple Institute and the Temple Mount Faithful (both extreme, orthodox Zionist groups), have for years been preparing for the advent of the Third Temple. They have been creating the implements needed for temple service for quite some time. 

[Orthodox groups] have built close ties with, and receive financial assistance from, Christian fundamentalist groups in the United States, who believe a Third Jewish Temple will herald the return of Jesus to Earth and the subsequent Rapture. This influential but subterranean belief helps explain, in part, the United States’ warm relationship with Israel.

Jews don’t agree on who will build the Third Temple, whether it will be the faithful preparing for the coming of the Messiah or the Messiah Himself, but this is an end-of-times, world-changing event.

This spring, that moment for the sacrifice arrives. The sacrifice could take place during Passover or any time through the Feast of Weeks. The important Moslem holiday of Ramadan is also coming soon.

To fundamentalists like Hamas, Jews and Zionism represent no less than the Dajjal (comparable to the Antichrist in Christianity). … This is a holy war fought between the most extreme, militant elements of two ethnoreligious groups to either cause or prevent the End of the World. …This is a war escalated between the most religious, extremist segments of both societies, while innocent civilians, women, and children are forced to suffer. 

The post No Simple Slogans for Israel and Gaza appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

 Such stifling injustices are a manifestation of the worst kind of climate change—a global warming of hostility and hatred that is laying waste to the hearts of humankind. Society’s twin pillars of civility and charity are crumbling. Love of neighbor is being replaced by disregard for neighbor. The rancor of our political discourse reflects a deep-seated contempt for the perspectives of others that spreads through social media channels with an almost combustible virulency. And taken together, the eradication of racism and the elimination of poverty constitute an urgent, pressing work that remains far from complete. The difficulties experienced by and evils perpetuated against innocent and repressed people cry out, as did Martin Luther King Jr., for justice that rolls “down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

It seems society has adopted the contemptuous attitude of Latimer, the narcissistic narrator in George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859), who, in his dying days, described the scorn and disdain with which humankind treat one another: 

While the heart beats, bruise it—it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. 

The severity of our social and spiritual condition should awaken each of us to take more determined and deliberate steps to create a just and civil society. But that task, worthy in its aim, seems increasingly formidable, even impossible, in its execution. Ironically, our magnified view of the world’s injustices seems to diminish our belief that we can do anything to help solve them. Difficulties, whether close or far, loom so large that we often feel powerless to shoulder them. We delegate their solutions to governments or charitable organizations, hoping some wisdom will prevail in the hearts of those who lead them. We then turn our hearts inward, trying to untangle our own problems and seek solace for our own hurts, forgetting or ignoring the needs of those around us. 

And what are those necessities? After food, said John Stuart Mill, our security is “the most vital of all interests” and “the most indispensable of all necessaries.” It is something “no human being can possibly do without; on it, we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good.” That security, says Mills, arises from the claim we have “on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence.” 

Indeed, we are bound together in making one another secure; we are in the same boat and of the same body. All of this is well and good. Yet even when motivated by our most noble and principled hopes and our staunchest determination, we come to realize our efforts will prove inadequate when measured against the staggering sum of the needs of humanity this moment in history presents us. 

Perhaps it was such a realization that prompted Gilbert Kilpack’s 1946 reflection on the emptiness of the peace that ensued after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then a secretary in the Stony Brook Friends Meeting in Baltimore, Kilpack believed that after enduring “so long and bitter a conflict, it became necessary to see ourselves clothed in righteousness, but it was self-righteousness—which frequently conquers, but never makes, peace.” There is, Kilpack continued, 

something of God in every man, let us affirm it more certainly than ever, but surrounded as we are by millions of new-made graves and with the voices of the hungry and the dispossessed in our ears, let us not easily accept the impious hope that the natural goodness of ourselves is sufficient stuff out of which to fashion a better world.

Dismissing what he saw as the “dominant hope” lingering “in millions of minds” that “man is sufficient unto himself and has but to strive to bring the good new kingdom in,” he gives this glaring warning: 

Hear me, I cry it with all my strength, and my voice rises out of the suffering and the bitter crucible of our times: man is not by nature good. We are all born with a freedom to turn to the good, but the Source of good is Beyond, and the power of human transformation is a given power. We may labor, study, and weep for it, which we must do, but in the end, it is given.

Now, more than seventy-five years later, Killpack’s exhortation speaks with a prescient thunder, for he was right: healing the pains of hunger and the wounds of war and inequality, bridging the chasms spanning society’s most deeply divided issues and resolving our differences—especially differences that polarize and paralyze us and evoke conflict and contention—will never be accomplished unless we turn to powers higher than those we possess.

Realizing our need to turn to such powers, this is a season to remember how God has turned to us. He sent His Son, who “left worlds of light” to become “the meek and lowly One.” Christ descended into our world to know our pain. It was, said Matthew Henry, “a great step downward, considering the glories of the world he came from and the calamities of the world he came to.”

Never was there a poorer man than Christ; He was the prince of poverty. . . . He who scattered the harvest o’er the broad acres of the world, had not sometimes wherewithal to stay the pangs of hunger? He who digged the springs of the ocean, sat upon a well and said to a Samaritan woman, “Give me to drink!” He rode in no chariot, He walked his weary way, footsore, o’er the flints of Galilee! . . . . [H]e said, “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but I, the Son of man, have not where to lay my head.” He who had once been waited on by angels becomes the servant of servants, takes a towel, girds himself, and washes his disciples’ feet! He who was once honored with the hallelujahs of ages is now spit upon and despised! . . . . Oh, for words to picture the humiliation of Christ! What leagues of distance between Him that sat upon the throne, and Him that died upon the cross! . . . . Trace him, Christian, He has left thee His manger to show thee how God came down to man. He hath bequeathed thee His cross to show thee how man can ascend to God. . . . Oh, Son of Man, I know not which to admire most, thine height of glory, or thy depths of misery! 

Matthew Henry suggests we should ask “with wonder,” “What moved Him to such an expedition?” 

Jesus answered simply: “I am come a light into the world,” He taught, “to seek and to save that which was lost.”

As His followers, seeking and saving now become our mission as well. Christ commands us to “condescend to men of low estate,” to “lift up the hands which hand down,” and to “heal the brokenhearted.” He asks us labor with Him to love and comfort those whose losses have drained the reservoirs of their hope, to feed those whose hunger can only be satisfied by the Bread of Life. He asks us to live the principles of His gospel, which radically contradict the world’s intemperate and revenge-filled ways. In a time of war, Jesus calls us to be peacemakers. He counsels us to agree with our adversaries quickly. He pleads with us to be meek and merciful. He invites us to treat others as we would want to be treated.

Then, among all these commandments comes “the admonition that challenges each of us,” said President Russell M. Nelson: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” When we do these things, we can “literally change the world—one person and one interaction at a time.” 

Of course, the full measure of the salvation Christ extends to us awaits His next coming, when He will reign supreme and when every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess He is the King come again to reign eternally. Then all the dead, billions upon billions, shall rise in resurrection, and all “they who have believed in the Holy One of Israel, they who have endured the crosses of the world, and despised the shame of it, they shall inherit the kingdom of God, which was prepared for them from the foundation of the world, and their joy shall be full forever.”

Yes, our world is becoming increasingly “unhinged.” But we need not, we cannot become hopeless. The words spoken by Martin Luther King Jr. nearly sixty years ago as he received the Nobel Peace Prize remind us that change is possible, even inevitable: 

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. . . . I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.

King’s powerful conviction invites us to deal with our personal and global challenges using a more active love born of faith in Christ’s redemption and fueled by a covenant of commitment to join with Him in the remaking of the world. Motivated by such love, we can be assured that the wrong will fail and the right prevail. And we can have peace, knowing that in Christ, all things will become new. 

Like Jesus did throughout His life, let’s determine to spend more time this year with the poor and those low in spirit, with the homeless and lonely, with the sick and the hungry. Let’s love our enemies. To these and to all, we must minister with His mercy and join Him in the cause of justice. 

How shall we begin? 

“Someone, “ said King, “must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

The post Hot War, Cold Hearts: Living in an “Unhinged” World appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Later, I learned that my biological grandmother had been a drug addict who couldn’t cope with motherhood. Even sadder but still a fairly simple story. 

 Only recently have I learned that the life of this grandmother-I-never-knew is also a story of the violence and abuse produced by racism and sexism—a reminder that our individual histories can’t be understood separate from the cruel, oppressive forces that shape society.

 But this fuller picture of my family, which I have pieced together from my prison cell, also has reminded me that beautiful things can be born through something broken.

 Let’s go back to that simple story.

My mother, Rebekah Patrice Davis, was raised by her adoptive mother, Geraldine Davis, who was a loving and kind Black woman. (Mom’s adoptive father died when she was very young.) My mom always yearned for a relationship with the family she was born into but was plagued by the thought that maybe her biological mother really didn’t want her. This fear of rejection, along with difficulty finding information about her birth family, discouraged her from trying to identify and contact her mother.

 But it didn’t end there. The case worker gave her four telephone numbers that possibly belonged to relatives. No one picked up at the first two numbers, but the third call was answered by a man named Ronnie. My mother hesitantly explained who she was, and her half-sibling abruptly interjected, “I’m your brother and Mom never wanted to give you away!”

 That was the beginning of the end of the simple story.

 Seven years later, I sat on the edge of my steel bunk, staring at the old photo of my biological grandmother that my mother had sent me. My grandmother’s long ember-colored hair flowed over her shoulders and rested on her back as she sat on the sidewalk, holding a 4-year-old who I would learn was my Uncle Marcus, another of my mother’s four half-siblings whom I had known nothing about. I had been incarcerated for nearly 15 years, and this was my first encounter with these relatives, through a photo that came in a large manila envelope to my prison cell.

 To sum up the simple story, my mother always knew she had been adopted at birth and believed that it was because her mother was too young to provide for her child. After talking with her half-siblings, she assumed that her mother’s drug problem was also a factor. But when I started talking with my newfound aunt and uncle, that story of how racism and sexism fueled the abuse and violence that shaped my grandmother’s life emerged. Should I have been surprised? These forces run deep in American history, of course, but we don’t always realize how powerful are the corrosive effects on individuals in our lives.

 I ran my fingers lightly across the photo, fascinated by the striking resemblance between my mother and grandmother. The brim of their noses, almond-shaped eyes, rosy cheeks, and thin lips made them look nearly identical. The only exception was that my grandmother was White, and my mother was Black. 

 I set the picture of my grandmother on the gray steel table next to the prison phone and dialed my Aunt Rhonda’s number. My mother had given me contact information for Rhonda and Ronnie, who could help me learn more about our family history. As the phone rang, I took a deep breath to relieve my nervousness. I didn’t know what to expect from this initial conversation. After my aunt accepted the collect call, we spent a few minutes in small talk before I jumped right into inquiring about the life of Donna Phillips, the woman in the photo whose blood runs through my veins

 I wanted to be respectful and began by asking what my grandmother was like—what things she loved to do. The awkwardness that can exist between two strangers was broken when my aunt, in her boisterous voice, said that my grandmother loved Keith Sweat, an R&B singer who released his breakout album in the late 1980s. The two of us began singing “Make It Last Forever,” drawing out the “ever” part melodramatically.

Rhonda told me that her mother/my grandmother really enjoyed music, fashion, and artwork. But above all, Donna felt most alive being outdoors, by the lake, surrounded by trees. My aunt talked about how my grandmother dreamed of living in a house where she could see the mountains from the backyard and wake up to the scent of crisp air and the feel of morning dew on green grass. “These were the things that made her happy,” Rhonda said. “These were the things that put a smile on her face.”

 When Rhonda talked about how much my grandmother loved and valued her children, I couldn’t help but wonder: “If her children meant so much to her, why did she give my mother away?” Rhonda began unpacking the traumatic circumstances surrounding my mother’s conception, details that Ronnie also would discuss with me. The information shattered my preconceptions about who my grandmother was, leaving my heart aching over what she was forced to endure as a child.

My great-grandmother apparently agreed with James’ views and didn’t challenge the emotional abandonment, frequent beatings, and sexual abuse that crushed Donna’s childhood spirit in ways hard to imagine.

 I could feel the lump form in my throat as I listened to my uncle talk to me in a separate conversation about the numerous times my grandmother was locked in a basement for hours. Apparently, this was her mother and stepfather’s way of disciplining her, either for misbehavior or whenever she became an inconvenience. It wasn’t long before her two stepbrothers began emulating the same abusive behavior. Both boys were physically aggressive toward Donna, and one forced her into a closet and raped her when she was 9 years old.

 The more I listened to my aunt and uncle describe my grandmother’s upbringing, the more I realized that I had too easily accepted the idea that my grandmother had been a selfish, irresponsible drug addict. I had failed, out of ignorance, to consider the traumatizing events that she’d experienced before her introduction to drugs. Sadly, this is too often what society trains us to do—define and categorize a person by what we hear and what we see, rarely considering the circumstances that may have shaped them as children.

 By the time my grandmother turned 15, she was having sex with multiple men, including Murray Givre, a 22-year-old Jewish man who had Nigerian, Sierra Leonean, and Somali heritage. My grandmother told her family that she had met him in high school, and apparently, no one had been concerned about his age or questioned the story about how they had met. According to my uncle, my grandmother’s stepfather had taken a liking to Murray in spite of James’ atheistic and White-supremacist views. My grandmother’s parents considered him Black and his Jewish heritage didn’t change that. In their eyes, there were no important distinctions between Blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics, and Jews. If you weren’t White, you were Black, plain and simple.

 Despite those prejudices, James often invited Murray over to play poker and go fishing on their days off work. Though Murray was a regular visitor to my grandmother’s home, no one suspected that he and my grandmother were sexually involved, even when my grandmother unexpectedly became pregnant.

 According to Ronnie, my grandmother’s high school teachers noticed her pregnancy first. My great-grandmother was furious, though her indignation apparently had nothing to do with a 15-year-old getting pregnant but rather that the child might be Black. For my great-grandmother, a Black child being raised in a White home was unacceptable. In the 1960s, these dividing lines between color were societal norms for many White families, not just in the South but also in northern states such as Washington. These prejudices led my great-grandmother to put my grandmother into a home that prepared White girls to give up their babies at birth, typically through adoption. On November 22, 1968, my grandmother gave birth to my mother and returned home without her child, a devastating loss that would dramatically alter her life.

 Rhonda emphasized that my grandmother never wanted to give up her baby and that having her daughter pried from her arms left a tremendous hole in her heart, exacerbating my grandmother’s childhood trauma. Donna Phillips teetered on the edge of hopelessness.

My uncle explained that through the chaos, Murray Givre continued to play poker with James Neely and work odd jobs around the house. The Neelys were bent on believing that my grandmother was pregnant by Ronnie Larry, a Black man who later fathered Rhonda and Ronnie. Murray continued his secret sex life with my grandmother, apparently unaware that he was the father of the child my grandmother was forced to give up.

 Within two years, my grandmother gave birth to Uncle Ronnie. But by this time, the trauma my grandmother had endured over the years had undermined her ability to mother. As these adverse experiences weighed on her teenage shoulders, she began escaping into drugs, promiscuity, and a criminal lifestyle. Going to jail became a part of her normal routine, which eventually led her to doing time in the penitentiary.

 After Ronnie was born, my grandmother gave birth to Rhonda, Markus, and Marketta. Although she eventually lost custody of all her kids because of her lifestyle, Ronnie, Rhonda, and Markus had opportunities to visit their mother. Marketta, on the other hand, was taken at 10 months, never to see her mother again except for once when she was 18. And there was other sadness in their lives. According to Rhonda, her and Ronnie’s father was murdered in Seattle in the 1980s, and they grew up without him, while the father of Markus and Marketta was rarely around to help raise his children.

 When I asked my aunt about her childhood memories of time with her mother, she responded by saying, “Some days were rough!” She said that my grandmother’s home was a “shooting gallery” where other drug addicts would come and shoot dope. Ronnie, who had been exposed to drugs as a child, eventually began using with my grandmother, developing the same habit and lifestyle.

 But Rhonda said that among the nightmarish moments, there also were plenty of positive memories. She recalled how excited she would be to sit by the lake and feed the ducks with her mom. She described a moment when her mother was sick and didn’t have the strength to step outside and watch the fireworks on the 4th of July. So, my aunt fired a few small ones out the window so my grandmother could see them. These were the moments when she and her brothers would feel the love they yearned for. Those experiences of family time brought an occasional semblance of stability into their chaotic world.

 My grandmother tried to be a better parent, but my great-grandmother, Mary-Ann, never really supported her. She had practically exiled my grandmother, not only because of her drug problem but because her children were Black. According to Ronnie, the Neelys made it clear that none of my grandmother’s children were welcome in their home, and that’s the way it stayed for much of their lives.

 Things began to change for my grandmother when her health deteriorated, and she was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. She began to reflect on her choices, reevaluating what was important to her. My aunt said that around this time, my grandmother began expressing interest in God, making frequent comments about Christ and His ability to forgive her for all her transgressions. Ronnie said that in the last three months of her life, she periodically would apologize for the lifestyle she had exposed him to, speaking of her deep regret for the way she had raised her children. She also spoke about my mother, trying to imagine what life would have been like had they not been separated. When my uncle told me about his response to my grandmother’s apologies, I felt his compassion and the ring of truth in his words: “Mom, you did the best you could with what you had.”

 Those words resonated deeply with me. Too often, people who are down in life are told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they have no boots. Now when I think about my grandmother, I account for all the trauma—the loss of her father and brother, being abused and raped as a child, routine mistreatment and abandonment, and then having her daughter pried from her hands because of racist parents. How could she have been better when better was never modeled for her? How could she love properly when she had never been properly loved? We all are, in some ways, limited in what we can do by what we have had done to us.

 Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I was sentenced to 63 years in prison as an accomplice to first-degree murder and on multiple counts of attempted murder in the second degree. Although I accept accountability for my actions, I cannot ignore the adverse experiences that molded my childhood and adolescent mind. Unfortunately, much of American society ignores these dynamics, choosing only to see incarcerated individuals through the lens of what they have done rather than the social forces that shape the communities they come from.

 After my last conversation with Rhonda, I paced the floors in my cell before picking up the photo of my grandmother again. Growing up, my five siblings and I knew nothing about the circumstances surrounding our mother’s conception. We were clueless about the life of our grandmother, including the childhood trauma she experienced.

 Herein is a testimony that no matter what life looks like, there is hope that beautiful things can still be born through something broken.

The post Racist Roots: A Prison Cell Journey Into My Mother’s Past appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I’ve seen many variations of these complaints. Some call for mass firings. Some call for a cessation of all donations. Some call for boycotts! Here are just two examples I’ve seen recently:

“[BYU is] spiritually dangerous to many unsuspecting church member youths and their parents who think all is well at BYU.”

“Remind me not to provide any financial support to grandchildren who express an interest in attending BYU.”

To my fellow brothers and sisters who are frustrated, I make the following appeal: Our loyalty to a beloved institution must go deeper than our current culture war. It is a cheap loyalty that throws a beloved institution under the bus on the basis of rumors or even on the basis of valid concerns. 

Some humility is in order. In psychology, we learn that we are exceptionally bad at evaluating relative risk. If you ask the average person if they are safer walking the streets today than 40 years ago, most will say no—despite the fact that rates of violent crime have plummeted. For one example, close to home: Headlines linking modesty culture to rape never mention that—even accounting for underreporting—BYU’s incidence of sexual assault is substantially lower than at other universities. 

In other words, we have a built-in tendency to fixate on and generalize from lurid stories. And in this case, we largely ignore the myriads of less sensational examples of faculty delivering on the university’s mission. Those stories don’t make it into the gossip. So I’ll admit to pulling my hair out a bit when I hear people say, in response to an anecdote about some perceived failing, “I now encourage other parents to consider sending their children elsewhere.” 

Where else? There isn’t another institution in this nation—except its sister institutions in Idaho and Hawaii—where students can learn secular subjects from instructors who are passionate about divine truth and who reinforce moral standards. Why throw all that away?

For all the scaremongering about BYU going “woke,” it’s still the most politically balanced university in the nation—and given the trends of all academic institutions to lean even more leftward, this also means it is still one of the most politically conservative universities in the nation! Fourth most, by some estimates, with only Liberty University, Cedarville University, and BYU-Idaho listed as more conservative. I do not think that doctrinal orthodoxy should be measured in political terms, but I think this should give politically conservative members of the Church some pause before disparaging the institution.

Institutional trust is easier to destroy than create. Like individual trust, institutional trust is difficult to build and very easy to lose. It is like an oak that takes decades to grow but can be chopped down in an afternoon. This is why it’s so damaging when trusted cultural institutions abuse that trust. To mix metaphors, the seeds of distrust, once planted, can grow perennially for years to come. This is perhaps one of many reasons I hope we all—anyone connected to BYU—will take these stories seriously and work to address these concerns.

But none of us can accomplish alone what can be accomplished through an institution like BYU. The institution cannot fulfill its prophetic purpose if institutional trust has been destroyed, and when we click “share” on every story, rumor, or piece of gossip, we might as well be taking hatchets of our own to that tree. Fomenting online outrage does not do any actual good. Not because those stories aren’t important—the right people should hear them—but your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are not the right people. 

Let’s not make our trust in church universities the latest victim of the culture war. I invite Latter-day Saint journalists and podcasters who concentrate and amplify stories about faculty or student misbehavior at BYU to consider a more productive approach. Broadcasting them in public venues doesn’t actually help the institution—it merely puts embattled administrators on the defensive and spreads seeds of mistrust that will continue to grow long after any perceived issues have been addressed.

Those of us concerned about institutional drift at BYU need to convey those concerns in a different way than those who disparage the institution for upholding Church teachings. When we pursue activist strategies and engage in pressure tactics, we are using secular, worldly approaches to seek to advance the spiritual mission of the institution. We turn the affairs of a Church-sponsored institution into a battleground of public perception.

Institutional change requires patience and commitment. Many think of tending an institution like weeding a garden. However (to reuse a metaphor), tending a university with a divine mission is far more like caring for an orchard than a garden. Every tree in the orchard represents years of investment and care. Actions taken today can have effects that won’t manifest for years to come. Changing the direction of an orchard is a decades-long process (compared to the weekend project of a garden).

We’ve witnessed tectonic cultural and legal shifts over the last ten years in the United States, particularly around sexuality and gender. The very soil has changed, so to speak. It would be unreasonable to expect that nobody at our beloved church schools would be influenced by those shifts. It’s understandable to be caught off-guard when we see evidence of these shifting worldviews within our own ranks. But adapting institutional norms to these new cultural winds is neither a simple nor quick affair.

Elder Holland’s address to faculty in the fall of 2021 communicated a clear message to those who have been concerned (paraphrased): “We hear you.” Elder Gilbert’s subsequent devotional address at BYU communicated another clear message: the prophet sits at the head of the board of trustees, and we can rest assured that the Lord has a plan for church schools. 

BYU employs nearly 2,000 faculty and instructs tens of thousands of students. With an institution that large, in good weather or bad, we should expect to see outliers and issues crop up along the way—and it shouldn’t surprise us to hear gossip of lurid stories. However, those striving to make the university’s divine mission a living reality will continue to do so the way disciples usually do: without fanfare and often under-the-radar. So inevitably, these reparative efforts will be much less visible than the incidents that prompted them. I’d like to relay what Elder Clark C. Gilbert assured BYU faculty and students in his devotional address: “The good guys do win in the end, but sometimes it takes a little patience and even some faith.” That victory comes not by fixating our attention on our current cultural turmoils but on our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Celebrating BYU’s unfolding mission. In 1976, Elder Maxwell invited Latter-day Saint social scientists to “become more of a link and bridge between revealed truth and the world of scholarship.” In response to Elder Maxwell’s invitation (and other inspired directives from Church leadership), a number of faculty in BYU’s psychology department and across the university centered their research and theorizing on ways to advance a distinctively Latter-day Saint approach to the study of human behavior. They made it their professional mission to train a generation of Latter-day Saint students who take the Restored Gospel seriously in their research and practice—to be rigorous scholars, careful thinkers, and absolutely loyal to church doctrine and prophetic teachings.

Many of my mentors at BYU were committed to examining their discipline through the lens of the gospel. They took seriously the call to be disciple-scholars who interact sincerely with the consensus of their field but who are not ashamed to remain different and distinct from that consensus. Because of their tireless efforts, a seed planted by Elder Maxwell’s remarks 45 years ago has borne fruit in my life and given me a professional purpose and mission. At BYU, I learned to explore the worldviews and assumptions that inform the social sciences and to compare and contrast them with alternatives informed by revealed truth. I was introduced to thinkers like Terry Warner and others who advanced a vision of psychology grounded in the assumption that we are moral agents acting in moral contexts.

This is why BYU is so dear to me. There, I was equipped with tools to help students maintain conviction. I love that institution with all my heart. May all of us who share that love take care to channel concerns in ways that build the institution rather than undermine and erode public trust.

The post On Confidence in BYU’s Mission and Potential appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

This religion has fundamentally different ideas about the nature of the self, the purpose of life, and how to define and achieve transcendence. It includes the major markers of religion, such as its own rituals, mythology, and metaphysics.

Much of the tension we are facing today in our public discourse comes from the ascension of this new religion and negotiating what place it should have in our public life.

The largest challenge is that almost none of the adherents of this religion recognize it as religion. In our recent past, religion has almost always existed in mature deistic sectarian forms. And while this new religion doesn’t have those features, that’s not what defines religion.

Many are seeking to answer important, fundamentally religious, questions, such as who we are, how we should treat others, and what our place is, in what—they believe—are areligious ways. Their explorations are often rooted in philosophical and academic disciplines, such as the Frankfurt School. As a result, even though their answers to these religious questions are just as ineffable and unfalsifiable as any other religion, they believe their conclusions should be able to take an outsized role in public life that other religions cannot take because of our constitutional limitations on the establishment of religion.

Most of us in the pluralistic West would be less concerned about ensuring the Catholics in the class see themselves in the curriculum than we would be about those who aren’t Catholic feeling excluded or proselyted to.

If a Muslim or Latter-day Saint family complained about such a curriculum, could you imagine a school administrator dismissing those with concerns because they are complaining about “inclusive materials?” I certainly hope not. Frankly, most American Catholics would agree that public schools aren’t the right place.

This powder keg of factors has ignited in Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) recently revised its curriculum to include books such as “Pride Puppy” about a family celebrating at a pride parade, and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” about a same-sex marriage. It includes word searches with words such as “intersex,” “drag queen,” and “leather.” This curriculum is aimed at children as young as preschoolers.

Many families tried to opt out of the materials, but the district rejected the request describing it as “language arts” material, not “human sexuality,” and dismissed their concerns as complaining about “inclusive materials.” Later they announced that they would not even inform families when these materials were presented in classrooms. As a result, a religiously diverse group of parents have sued MCPS, including Catholics, Muslims, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and Latter-day Saints. 

As Latter-day Saints, we have always existed on the frontier of religious freedom in the United States. Our robust theology and worship are only possible because of these protections. So when we see government agencies imposing religion on others, we are naturally concerned.

For example, now-President Dallin H. Oaks, the second-most presiding leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said first in 1963 that the rulings on prayer in school were reasonable, a position he continued to hold while serving in church leadership while much of the religious right was fighting to reinstate it. During these fights, Latter-day Saint and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch was advocating instead for silent prayers that could respect the diversity of students’ religions.

However, it is the diversity of religious parents opposed to this curriculum that has been so often noted in media coverage of the matter. Many religious groups not normally affiliated with freedom of religion causes have shown up with concerns, confusing some political commentators. 

And if this were merely a matter of supporting everyone’s civil rights, that reaction would make sense. But what if, instead, these ideas about the nature of self and identity were, in fact, part of a unique religious worldview? I expect that we would see something exactly like we’re seeing now, where those from diverse religions come out in mass, confused and indignant, that their children are being proselyted into a new faith—even if they don’t quite have those exact words to describe it.

Many critics have described this as the parents trying to push their religion on the school district. Given the diversity of religions and the fact that they are merely requesting an opt-out, this claim simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The school district has argued that they are not interfering with parents’ religious freedom rights because parents can still teach their children what they want at home. 

And they’re right. That’s not the problem. The parents are still free to exercise their religion. There’s a much larger and more trenchant problem: the school district is establishing a new and distinct religion. 

In the above examples, no one would be concerned that putting out the Catholic word search would constitute violating the free exercise of the other parents; they’d be rightfully worried that it constitutes establishing a religion.

Some might object that celebrating pride or same-sex marriage is not establishing religion but merely celebrating who those people are. But defining who we are is a religious question. And this curriculum teaches children answers to that question that are foreign to many other religious answers to that same question.

Christian Smith, in his book, The Sacred Project of American Sociology, noticed this religiosity in his field of sociology. He wrote that “Sociology misrecognizes its very own project.” Why not merely admit the religiosity, he wonders? Smith proposes that making the religious nature public would threaten the “authority” and “legitimacy” on which it “depends for its success.” The pattern Smith identified in sociology is the same basic pattern found repeated by this religious movement across its areas of influence. 

The MCPS can violate the religious freedom of the families it serves without preventing them from teaching their children at home. If teachers led a prayer to Allah, passed out Rosary beads before lunch, or read from the Book of Mormon, they would be violating the basic pluralistic contract that has allowed our nation to survive. 

The same is true if the teachers are passing out “Drag Queen” word searches, reading from “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” or reciting the sing-songy lyrics of “Puppy Pride.”

So, yes, parents are free to teach their children their religious approach to defining themselves at home, but they shouldn’t have to compete with teachers telling them a different, no less, religious approach to defining themselves at school.

As I noted in my piece analyzing this new religious movement, its adherents often seek to transmit it through existing institutions—schools primary among them. And they often use the authority and legitimacy Smith observes them clinging to in order to do so. What is happening in Montgomery County is a microcosm of a much larger and more salient conflict. 

Let me be clear, I’m not objecting to this new religion. I believe its adherents have the right to their beliefs. There are many places where our unique worldviews overlap, and we can work toward solutions together. But just because I respect this religion does not mean it is appropriate for it to become the official religion of the MCPS or any other public entity. These are not neutral answers just because those who believe them can’t see that they’re religious.

The Anti-Defamation League, no stranger to preserving and safeguarding religiously neutral civic spaces, has written:

Not endorsing or not appearing to endorse religion is especially important in the public school setting. This is due to a number of considerations unique to the public schools: the specific sensitivities of school-age children; the fact that public schools are public institutions; and the profound influence of school officials and teachers over students. … Moreover, children are highly susceptible to coercion. … These factors create a significant danger when religion is introduced into the public schools in circumstances evincing the apparent endorsement of teachers.

I couldn’t agree more. And while many have tried to paint this as religious individuals fighting for their free exercise of religion, it’s not how the parents see it. They see it as their local government sponsoring a belief system in direct opposition to theirs.

In coverage by The Free Press, a woman who would only identify herself as Hiwot described it as “a state-sponsored campaign to shame us into a corner.”

Another of the local parents, Raef Haggag, explained that one of the reasons he came to the United States was “because it was a safe and welcoming place.” He praised the diversity and inclusiveness, saying, “There are many families like mine that came from different parts of the world.” How could such a diverse place have such an iconoclastic school system? 

Public institutions must be neutral in their missions and policies to the many different religious viewpoints in their community, even those religious viewpoints that don’t see themselves as one. As big and intractable as these conflicts may seem, we have navigated religious disputes in the past. And if we have the clarity to see this the same way, we can find sustainable solutions.

The post When Schools Preach: Dogma and Doctrine in the Modern Classroom appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

1. Be generous with our resources. Every penny donated to the Church’s fast offering and Humanitarian Aid funds goes to those in need, with nothing reserved for overhead. In addition, there are many charitable organizations doing good work that we can research and support with our contributions. Further, government antipoverty programs may not be perfectly efficient or successful, but they do alleviate the suffering of many people, and we can pay our fair share of taxes to support them. We can even consider that continually cutting these programs hurts the people who need them without meaningfully reducing government spending or reining in the deficit and ask our representatives to find other ways—such as increasing fairness in the tax system—to achieve those laudable goals.

Each of us is bothered by the sight of a homeless person or family, and we are reminded that Jesus described Himself as having “not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58). Those who are forced to beg may make us feel uncomfortable and guilty for not being able to help more, although we can feel better knowing that we are contributing time, money, or both to the local homeless shelter, food bank, and similar services that help those suffering from poverty. 

By doing this, we are “succor[ing] those who stand in need of [our] succor; … administer[ing] of our substance unto [those] that stand … in need” and are not suffering beggars to put up their petitions to us in vain (Mosiah 4:16). Those of us who interact with people who are begging for money can carry gift certificates to fast food restaurants and give them away; we may feel prompted at times to give cash or invite a person asking for money to join us at a nearby restaurant for a meal. Remember that few to no cash benefits are available to the poor, and think of how many necessities cannot be obtained without cash—clothes, shoes, coins for the laundromat, bus fare, laundry detergent, toothpaste, household cleaners, period items, baby diapers, toilet paper. These items are not covered by food stamps—something to consider when purchasing things for the next food drive in your neighborhood because food banks desperately need them.

2. Consider how our practices are affecting the working poor. In a chapter in Poverty, By America on “how we undercut workers,” Desmond details the practices that many employers use to take advantage of workers in low-wage jobs—not only the low wages but also non-compete agreements, nonpayment of benefits such as health insurance or sick leave, and classifying workers as temporary or as independent contractors so they need not pay benefits, follow labor-protection laws, or pay into workers compensation insurance funds. In addition, corporations invest heavily in lobbying against increases to the minimum wage, even though such increases result in proven health benefits—people stop smoking, babies are born healthier, and child neglect incidents decrease. Some companies evade taxes or break laws intended to allow workers to organize and bargain collectively. Although labor unions, like any organization, can be vulnerable to corruption and abuse, they also can balance power between employers and employees and serve a public health interest. The decline of labor unions has had negative effects on middle- and working-class Americans.

Further, many employers use algorithms and software to monitor workers so intensively that they are expected to reach inhumane productivity goals. Similarly, widespread “just-in-time” scheduling practices require workers to hold open all their time to work without guaranteeing them a set number of hours (and thus the ability to predict their incomes) or allowing them to plan for education, another job, childcare, or family time.

The system of low-wage jobs in the United States, which provides most of us with the fast and cheap products and services that we demand, is based on a huge government subsidy to employers who are able to avoid paying a living wage because their employees receive food stamps, the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, and other government benefits. These programs (which, as we have seen, are being cut) are not so much a handout to the poor as they are a handout to the employers who are then able to pay substandard wages and provide no benefits to their employees. 

We may not be able to change these kinds of employment practices, but we can do what we can to discourage them or refrain from participating in them. For example, we can avoid patronizing businesses that have reputations for treating their employees poorly, opposing increases to the minimum wage, or undermining employee attempts to organize so they can bargain collectively.  

We can think carefully about patronizing businesses when their workers probably should be at home with their families, such as late at night, on Sundays, or on major holidays. We can avoid shopping at Black Friday sales when employees have been required to work late on the night of Thanksgiving Day or in the very early hours of Black Friday to prepare for an influx of shoppers before dawn. We can also consider whether we really need “next day” or “two-day” deliveries when the packers and delivery workers have been required to work toward extreme production goals to fill those orders.

We will face emergencies when we need to patronize businesses late at night or on Sunday or when we need a product as soon as possible. And those Black Friday sales and similar practices that exploit workers will still go on. But we can be more thoughtful about whether we want or need to contribute to those practices.

We can all try to support companies that treat their employees well. Journalists and others do the public a great service when they report which companies have good working conditions and policies so that we can choose to support those companies with our consumer dollars and financial investments. Just as there are charity-rating websites that allow us to assess which nonprofit organizations are using donations wisely, there are some websites that seek to hold corporations accountable in relation to public and environmental health and anti-poverty efforts. These include Donegood, Buycott, B Lab, Fairtrade, and Corporate Knights, but there could be much more information about which companies have the most humane working conditions and other sustainable practices throughout their supply chains. 

We can also deal kindly and respectfully with those who serve us as they work. Many servers in restaurants and cashiers in stores are expected to move diners or customers through at an efficient rate. They may not have time to chat with customers as seemed common in the “good old days.” They may not seem willing to help when we insist on exceptions to rules and policies they had no part in making and are not allowed to flaunt. They likely will not respond favorably or with a sense of humor when a customer flirts or seems overly familiar or disrespectful. We can avoid being offended when another person is not able to meet these kinds of expectations but still provides the service we need.

If we are among those demanding customers, we may also be tempted to punish an “unfriendly” worker by failing to leave a tip or even complaining to management. We can remember that often, people who are working for tips are being paid less than minimum wage and that there are no states where the minimum wage approaches a living wage, so they depend on tips to live. We can remember how difficult it may be for retail, food service, or other low-wage workers to gather the internal resources to be especially cordial, much less subservient, at all times. And we can remember that how we treat those whom we will likely never see again says more about our characters than it does about the quality of their work.  

3. Use the influence that we have in setting working conditions. Those among us who own or manage businesses or hire people to work in our homes can affect how workers are treated in those jobs. Research indicates that “when workers are treated well, they work harder and more productively, delivering value to investors and customers alike.” Further, employers can be careful to follow the existing labor laws, paying the minimum wage (at least) and not asking or allowing employees to work “off the clock” or forgo mandatory overtime wages. Employers can also guarantee their workers a predictable number of hours and avoid the use of “just-in-time” scheduling practices that require workers to keep all their time open for employment or productivity monitoring systems that require superhuman effort and don’t take human variability or needs into account. 

Many of us (about 53 percent, according to poverty researcher Matthew Desmond) are invested in the stock market through retirement plans and other investments. Corporations exist to make a profit, which is not in itself a bad thing, but problems arise when businesses exist only to make a profit, as though they have no responsibilities to the people who work for them, consumers of their products, the communities where they are located, or the societies that make it possible for them to operate. It is a recent myth that corporations should act only with the benefit of their shareholders in mind and need not consider the impact of their actions on families, communities, and society in general. And although many corporations fund foundations that do a great deal of good, often the same businesses do not seem to consider how they treat employees, consumers, the environment, and society as they acquire the riches necessary to later be able to fund their generosity. As shareholders, we can use what leverage we have to encourage corporations to be good citizens. 

Some investment products have a plan where the investor can choose not to have stocks in their portfolio of companies that do harmful things—such as manufacture tobacco or alcohol products, grow recreational marijuana, promote gambling, manufacture weapons, or harm the environment. If such a portfolio is available, we could consider switching to it. 

President N. Eldon Tanner spoke of the necessity of integrity in business:

What of the business world and integrity? Business leaders and financiers should be the very epitome of integrity. Fortunately, most of them are—but when we learn of wide-scale bribery, fraud, cheating, deceit, and power plays to gain control of vast financial empires; when we have to legislate to make our dealings with one another honest and prevent one group from taking undue advantage of another, we know that integrity is lacking. If it were not, businesses could operate more successfully, employees would be more honest in their performance, and the products of their labor would not be inferior or shoddy.

4. Use the influence we have in establishing better conditions for housing. Those of us who own or manage rental housing can ensure that the premises are cared for and that repairs are made when needed as efficiently as possible. We can avoid asking others to live in conditions or under terms that we would not accept for ourselves or our families. We can help tenants by not charging higher rent than is necessary to meet obligations in connection with the property, manage it wisely, and secure a reasonable income from it. Landlords and property managers who take time to develop cordial relationships with their tenants may create a mutual respect that can smooth out differences. Tenants who are late in making their rent payments should be asked why, and if a valid emergency arises, could be allowed to make a payment on a later schedule. We all, at times, face circumstances when an act of kindness or a willingness to be flexible will make the difference between a difficulty and an emergency.

One of the practices that negatively affects the availability of affordable housing in the United States is the use of exclusionary zoning laws, which keep multifamily apartment complexes or affordable single-family homes out of neighborhoods zoned for more expensive single-family homes. Ending these zoning practices would go far in ending the segregation of neighborhoods and schools that prevails in the United States. This would lead to the integration of races and classes in our wards, stakes, schools, parks, neighborhoods, and communities. Imagine the positive impact this would have on the Church, where so many of us are denied the privilege of becoming neighbors and friends with many of God’s children who are strangers and foreigners to us now, even though they are of the same household of God (see Ephesians 2:19). If we are to love others as Jesus Christ loves them, we need to get to know them, serve beside them, care about their problems, share their joys, and give them the same opportunities, benefits, and blessings that those who live in high-opportunity neighborhoods enjoy now.

5. Support family-friendly and caregiver/homemaker-friendly policies. The United States is the only developed country that does not provide paid leave for employees who face the predictable transitions and necessities of life, such as our own illnesses or the need to care for an ill family member or a new baby—times when life must take priority over work. Although some employers provide that kind of leave, the need is universal.

We can begin to value caregiving efforts close to home by recognizing and helping caregivers. If a family caregiver is shouldering most of the burden of care, we can discuss with them what we can do to help them through fairly sharing the temporal, emotional, physical, and financial burdens of care and the need for respite. In our wards, we can be aware of the needs of those who are giving care and acknowledge their service, provide respite, and do what we can to be sure they and those for whom they care are not isolated or forgotten, especially if we are assigned to minister to them or have stewardship over them. 

As employers, we can acknowledge the needs of employees to care for their families and participate in family life. We can allow leave—ideally, paid leave—for those who need it whenever possible.  

As a society, we can recognize that participation in family life strengthens society, families, and individuals. Caregivers, paid or unpaid, and those for whom they care could be recognized as a significant part of the economy and their needs met, perhaps through health insurance, paid family leave, tax policies, and labor policies.

Our willingness to take steps to help the poor and needy as we have been commanded by God may involve habitually asking the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and remembering the answer, “He that showed mercy” on the person who needed help (see Luke 10:25–37). We may need to be more creative in examining how our actions are affecting our neighbors among the less fortunate. Nowhere does the Lord ask us to assess who is deserving of our mercy; that mercy is asked for or needed is the motivating factor. And in response to those needs, as commanded in Deuteronomy 15:7–8, we should open our hands wide.

The post The Currency of Kindness: Strategies for Weakening Poverty’s Chains appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Systemic or Soul Change,” and to “Renounce or Redeem.“

Every day, American media is filled with tit-for-tat warfare over woke. On one side, articles lament the intrusion of “woke” politics into elementary schools, children’s books, library reading hours, and churches. On the other side, articles bemoan the resistance to social justice progress as reflecting intransigent racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Do we really have to go to war over social justice?

Jacob spent the last few articles marching through competing visions of fundamental problems, core solutions, and what to do with those not on board with the popular answer to both. We wouldn’t blame anyone who came away thinking he was gearing up to encourage readers to join the wider culture war being fought in America over these same disagreements.

Interfaith Effort as a Model

Christopher recently added his exploration of how this new faith in social justice fits into the tapestry of world religions. The hope in identifying this belief system as religious, rather than religion and wokism as opposites, is not to heighten tension or prevent us from being able to work together—in fact, the hope is that it will produce the opposite result.

As a society, we already have systems and structures in place for understanding and navigating inevitable tensions between those of differing religious systems.

By framing this new movement as a religious faith, we are able to answer many of the questions that create social conflict today. Should the government be able to use its power to shut down institutions where this faith is practiced, such as has recently occurred in Florida? Should the symbols of this religion be displayed in public schools? Must other religions agree to the tenets of this faith in order to continue to function?

Each of these questions has prompted deep and sustained debate over human history. But once any belief system is framed as a religion, the good news is we already have fair and consistent answers to these challenging questions.

For instance, in a US context, the First Amendment’s free-exercise and establishment clauses function to provide both the protections and limits for any system of strong religious commitments.

And in the United States, we also have robust ecumenical and interfaith efforts. Yet today, because of the cultural power of this new religion, those who are not part of it are often wary of engaging in any joint work. Increasingly, it appears as if larger walls are established (on both sides of the conversation) in order to help protect identities and organizations.

By comparison, interfaith efforts don’t face these same challenges because religions come together as ideological equals, and there is much less risk of being subsumed. This framework frees adherents of different faiths, much like it may social justice advocates, to work together where there is a common cause.

Latter-day Saints certainly have plenty of common cause with those in this new faith. And this framework should hopefully allow us to better work together on those common goals.

Social Justice Implicit in Christianity?  

What’s most increased our confidence that this is possible has been meeting many people deeply committed to social justice and witnessing the vibrancy of their faith in Christ and their love for His Church. And we’ve also been reminded by many of these same people about how often an emphasis on justice—even social justice—shows up in scripture. As McArthur Krishna summarizes:

In the Bible, we see God saying over and over again, “I love justice.” Throughout the Bible, God denounces greed and calls for the right use of power. God speaks out, cares for, and protects those whose life, labor, and dignity are abused. And God continuously calls for the right treatment of the widow, immigrant, and orphan.

Given the interplay of religion and social justice, all of this raises an important question: what is the distinction between a form of social justice that fortifies and enhances faith in Christ as opposed to one that corrodes and diminishes it?

What does stronger faith look like? 

Before we even get to that question, it’s important to be clear about what is meant by “strengthened faith.” People, generally speaking, are not in agreement about this, including those among our own faith. This arises from the many different perspectives across American culture about what God wants, what is true, and what a healthy spiritual development looks like in terms of religion and social justice.

For our purposes, then, we’d like to operationalize something we would propose as consistent with prophetic teaching when it comes to the difference between a corroded faith and a vibrant one—reflected in this simple, 7-question survey:

1. When you sit in any worship meeting, do you get more preoccupied with the race or gender of speakers—so much so that you struggle to focus on what they are actually saying?

2. Do you more often than not feel uncomfortable joining in worship with the body of believers—be that in your local ward or in general conference as a whole?

3. Do you find yourself disregarding counsel from priesthood leaders—generally or locally—due to their race or gender?

4. Do you find yourself so frustrated about certain issues of inequity that it leaves you in a frustrated place about the institutional church?

5. Do you find yourself questioning whether the covenants and ordinances of the Church matter at all due to these other questions about inequity?

6. Have you started to entertain the possibility that a focus on repentance is, in fact, problematically shaming and guilt-provoking?

7. Do you ever wonder “if I can be a part of this church” as long as they teach X, or practice y, in relation to a specific minority issue?

If your answers to these seven questions are mostly or almost all “yes,” then by our definition, the strength of your faith has been hollowed out to some degree by a secular conception of social justice. No matter how much others might insist that you are, in fact, in a higher spiritual place—and with more enlightened views of God, divine love, and Zion building on earth—we’re among those who would humbly disagree.

And so would we imagine the prophets. You might disagree with all of us. But that’s why we’re trying to be clear by proposing the above criteria as a kind of metric for whether or not someone’s faith has been strengthened (or not)—and whether it has arrived at a corroded, hollowed out place (or not).

Imagining a faith-friendly social justice

Given that as a backdrop, here’s our best attempt to outline a set of social justice criteria that holds the potential to unite believers and bind hearts to sacred covenants rather than the reverse:

1. The priority of sin. Problematic inequities would be understood and presented as subsidiary and emblematic of sin rather than replacing or taking the place of sin. This hierarchy would need to be clean and clear. Caring about inequity, then, doesn’t need to mean we stop caring about sin … it simply means we are attentive to one particular kind of sin.

2. Roles aren’t a bad thing. Thoughtful space for purposive distinctions between roles and peoples would need to be allowed—rather than pretending that any and all differences are wrong-headed and evil. In this way, for instance, innate and eternal differences in gender roles would still be appreciated and valued.

3. The priority of repentance. Attention to systemic and institutional improvements would not eclipse the central attention to personal repentance. But neither would the individual improvements distract from larger collective changes needed either. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we can care about both of these too.

4. War no more. Contrasts or tensions between these various points of view would be explored with charity and generosity—putting aside the kinds of tensions with tradition that have characterized even religiously-themed liberationist strains. A faith-friendly social justice would not participate in the harsh and condemning rhetoric of the larger secular conversation at all.

5. Letting God lead the way. While acknowledging steps we can all take—individually and collectively—to move towards greater collective justice, this vision of social justice would emphasize the centrality of God and divine power in receiving the reconciliation and healing we ultimately seek. This foundation in divine faith would invite humility and encourage patience as we reach for a “more perfect union” among us.

Do you agree or disagree with these five criteria of religion and social justice? We would love to hear your additional thoughts.

By the way, similarities between these ideas and other proposals on the table are not accidental; for instance, notice the generosity and charity of Chloé Valdary’s antiracism program, the faith-infused Catholic-inspired “Dignity, Equality, and Solidarity,” and Brigham Young University’s own belonging initiatives aiming to foster “a community of belonging composed of students, faculty, and staff whose hearts are knit together in love.” It’s no coincidence that each of these comes from an explicitly faithful and Christian attempt to take social justice concerns seriously.

By considering these new ideologies as a robust and unique religious movement with distinct philosophical foundations—we might then examine its different approaches to some of the most important questions we face. By recognizing it for what it is, then, we don’t have to be so afraid of it. Latter-day Saints have a long history of inter-faith efforts. Perhaps this will be one new horizon in that work.

Let’s keep talking about this. And let’s keep exploring together what more we can do to articulate and chart a faithful, peace-oriented social justice effort that can draw hearts together and unite us all with the Prince of Peace, who promises to bring justice to the whole earth.

The post How Reimagining Social Justice Could Ease the Culture War appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Systemic or Soul Change.”

In every community of every kind, there are values, commitments, and ideas that unite them. And for this reason, every community must grapple with the question of what to do with those among them who decline and reject these offerings. 

Religious history is filled with tragic examples of the worst offenders in this regard, from crusades and inquisitions to martyrdoms and crucifixions. But it was the most famous of these violent rejections that ultimately highlights another “father-forgive-them” alternative. At the heart of the Christian message, in particular, is an aspiration to regard even our enemies with love. 

For most Christian communities, this remains the standard: grace, forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion to those who have gone astray, including the apostate and the heretic. While it’s true most faiths have boundaries that can be crossed to the point of various stages of disfellowship, most believers still regard those rejecting these community norms as former brothers and sisters to be reclaimed.  

Sinners of all kinds, in this view, are to be met with compassion and a hand of fellowship always outstretched. As many observers have noted, this is a noticeable contrast to how the unorthodox are regarded by those fervently committed to the popular ideology of social justice.  

Problematic people. Although it’s hard for anyone to see loved ones rejecting beliefs they themselves cherish, a long view of the future can encourage patience and compassion. “Religion, in part, is about distancing yourself from the temporal world, with all its imperfection,” Shadi Hamid writes of monotheistic religion today. “At its best, religion confers relief by withholding final judgments until another time—perhaps until eternity.”

By contrast, Hamid continues, “The new secular religions unleash dissatisfaction. … If matters of good and evil are not to be resolved by an omniscient God in the future, then Americans will judge and render punishment now.”

Much like religious leaders wielding judgment from a place of unique callings,  John McWhorter tells Helen Lewis, “The hyper-woke—who were firing people right and left, and shaming people right and left—think that they’re seeing further than most people, that they understand the grand nature of things better than the ordinary person can”—adding, “To them, they’re elect.” In his book, McWhorter identifies this as a “priestly class” of influential writers and politicians who dictate the rules of what can and cannot be said.

Compared with mere “sinners,” of course, apostates and heretics bring up other issues, like what religious communities should do if somebody actually is undermining the community with false preaching—or not embracing some of these brave new teachings. 

For instance, McWhorter suggests that teachings around privilege (white privilege or male privilege being inherited problems) are versions of original sin—a stain that humans are born with, no matter their individual circumstances. 

With any strong dogma, of course, people can become animated and passionate in their agreements and disagreements. And Helen Lewis points out how established religions have developed strategies for dealing with enthusiasm that shades into zealotry—quoting Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, of the Bromley Reform synagogue in south London, who said, “In religious life, or Jewish life, the person you sit next to in synagogue may drive you completely potty, they may be so annoying and have different views, and you must still go to their family’s funeral.”

This kind of geographical networking has a way of mediating and dampening conflict. As Lewis continues: 

In real life, churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples force together, in their congregations, a random assortment of people who just happen to live close to them. But today’s social activism is often mediated through the internet, where dissenting voices can easily be excluded. We have taken religion, with its innate possibility for sectarian conflict, and fed it through a polarization machine. No wonder that today’s politics can feel like a wasteland of anguished ranting—and like we are in hell already.

The stigma of being on the wrong side. No wonder those on the other side can feel like they’re in such  a tight and uncomfortable place indeed. Helen Lewis describes a conversation with Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, about whether expressing faith or gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. Clare-Young responded that admitting religious commitments was “probably” harder—adding, “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”

Noting that “politics has now crept into every aspect of our lives,” the Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis recounts, “In countries where racial and religious intermarriage have become commonplace, dating across political lines is the new taboo”—with more and more dating profiles now insisting, “no conservatives.” Lewis cites Victoria Turner, the editor of an anthology titled Young, Woke and Christian, as saying she could happily date someone from another faith or no faith at all. But a conservative? 

“Absolutely not. No.” 

Certainly, there are plenty of conservatives who would feel the same way about dating a hard-core progressive—and religious parents who would agonize over their children dating someone from a different tradition, especially if they have left their own faith.

In the absence of common ground appreciation of a gracious God with future possibilities of redemption, how else can we encourage more compassion and patience with some of these differences?

Perhaps simply by talking about these differences more openly.  

Taking social justice for granted as universal—the pressure this prompts. As mentioned earlier, almost no one talks about social justice as a religion. John McWhorter notes this is not unusual historically: 

In 1500, nobody in Europe considered themselves religious. It was just in the water. If there was such a thing as an atheist, they kept that to themselves … that’s where we are now. And so many of the people now who are religious would resist the label because especially a modern, secular, educated person often won’t like the idea of being told that they have a religion. But that doesn’t mean that the analysis isn’t accurate. There’s a religion.

If social justice ideology is so much in the air that people aren’t even paying attention to it, that would apply to people who are participating in other religious systems too. And referring to these new social justice commitments, Tom Stringham writes, “In most cases, believers simply do not know they are a part of it. Even most non-believers don’t see the religion for what it is.” As a result, these new beliefs and convictions can get passed along as basic decency, goodness, and love—rather than a particular philosophy any of us can simply disagree with. 

This underscores the danger when people see something as universal—and, therefore, not to be questioned. Compared with Catholicism which Stringham remarks is “contextualized in our society as a religion, and people are thus entitled not to believe in it,” contemporary American progressivism is not contextualized as a religion or even as a worldview—to believers, it’s understood as “literally just being a decent person.” 

Accordingly, adherents tend to expect everyone to live as if their beliefs are true. At best, he continues, this will lead others to “come to (mistakenly) believe our religion to be consistent with theirs. At worst, the Christian believer converts himself to the other religion by unwittingly participating in it.”

Calling social justice a “religion” creates new space. All this helps explain why calling this other system of thinking a new religion could be so helpful. As Tom Stringham explains further, this would give this ideological approach the “same social status” as other religions: “Specifically, you don’t have to convert to it, the same way other people don’t have to join our church. You can respect the religion, see what is good about it, and still decline to participate in its customs or adopt its worldview.” 

He goes on to explain more of the practical benefits: 

Many of us have been asked at some point why we don’t use a symbol or term when it “just means” equality, kindness, or respect. We may find it difficult to answer. But Latter-day Saints could just as well ask others why they don’t wear, say, CTR rings, which, after all, “just mean” that we should choose the right. But we know why: other people don’t wear CTR rings because they are not part of our religion. They may not object to the nominal meaning of a CTR ring, but that doesn’t mean they need to wear one. Neither should church members feel obligated to participate in the customs of religions we aren’t a part of, let alone customs that may cause tension with our own religious beliefs.

Among other things, this “reminds us that believers in the other religion deserve respect, the way Muslims or Catholics or Hindus do. It also permits us to identify the truths that exist within the religion.”

This, furthermore, can help us navigate conflicts that arise, especially the degree to which these center on ideological combat between traditional religions as this insurgent ideology. 

Greater awareness can thus generate greater space and recognition that “the unique teachings of contemporary American wokism should not be simply accepted.” For instance, Stringham points out that within social justice ideology, “maleness and femaleness, qua the social categories we are all familiar with, are, in fact, categories of gender identity, a gnostic sense of one’s identity that is perfectly knowable by the individual but not verifiable or falsifiable by others, even in principle.” 

Yet like distinctive teachings of other faiths, “This is a strong, arguably supernatural teaching which should not be simply accepted unless it is part of a conscious, deliberate conversion to the woke religion.”

More than simply guarding against undue pressure, this kind of transparent acknowledgment can also help “avoid accidental conversion.”

The need for redemption. Thus we see that important things are being left behind in secular religion when it comes to how to approach those rejecting its dogmas. When asked about how social-justice movements might adopt some of the “good bits” of religion, Helen Lewis says, “As somebody who was raised in the Catholic Church, I did see the way that it made sure that people were looked after. There were bonds between people, a sense of community, and also a sense of shared values.”

“Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment?” Shadi Hamid asks, before answering his own question: “There is little sign, so far, that it can.” He then added, “If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere.”

In addition to seeking a deeper source of meaning and value, Lewis added, “I think if we want people to genuinely own their mistakes, then you have to offer the possibility of redemption.” She continues, “I think what we have now with social-justice movements is a range of sins, but we don’t yet have a good idea of what the mechanism is for confessing, repenting, and being absolved.”

Could that still be developed in the social justice future? There is little evidence of this on the horizon of this new system of thought. In the absence, as John McWhorter laments, “We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.”

No wonder so many of us are watching our backs these days! Indeed, by many accounts, a new inquisition is afoot. But in this case, it’s an inquisition that doesn’t even admit it’s taking place. 

So, how will you be judged in this new religious regime? Even more importantly, how willing are you to be patient and compassionate with those who see you as a dangerous threat to their vision of the ideal society?

The post Renounce or Redeem: What’s to Be Done about the Rebels? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

When a Christian or Muslim or Jew wakes up for a new day, what does he or she see when they look out into the world and consider the greatest challenge to be overcome?

In all directions, these believers of many theological stripes see sin—some form of betrayal of God’s will—as the fundamental problem. Famously, there are many ways to sin—reflected in a hundred different flavors, varieties, and places. But through the eyes of the faithful, that’s what we are most basically dealing with in our struggle to improve the world—with everything going wrong and causing suffering potentially classified as a kind of sin.

By contrast, when a devoted believer in the ideology of social justice wakes up and looks out into the world, what do they see as the great and essential problem facing society?

Inequity, largely—far more than “iniquity.” This kind of inequity or unfairness, likewise, comes in a hundred different flavors, varieties, and places. In the minds of these adherents to this worldview, that’s what we are most basically dealing with in our struggle to improve the world.

As an illustration, one social media influencer wrote in a 2021 Instagram post, “The biggest threat to families is gender inequality. Gender inequality is threatening families—the imbalance of power in families, the unequal access to family resources, the devaluation of caregiving, rigid gender roles, intimate partner violence, the disproportionate amount of women and children living in poverty.”

Some, I recognize, will chafe at any suggestion that these contrasting views represent a forced choice dichotomy—insisting that no such bifurcation is needed. While sympathetic to and supportive of such integration impulses (especially those of the “bring all truth to Zion” variety that carefully avoids any sort of corrupting syncretism), for purposes now, I draw attention to these schools of thought as jealous masters, which cannot be served well at the same time.

So, what will it be: Iniquity or inequity?

An all-pervasive reality. The answer, to an increasing number of Americans, is the latter. As University of Columbia professor John McWhorter summarizes on the issue of race:

Many people are under the impression that change for Black America can only happen in a real way if the rest of America is united in a profound understanding of what Black people have been through. This means that they see battling power differentials wielded by whites as central to intellectual and artistic endeavor and any questioning of this as “white supremacy.” I question these lines of reasoning—I want true change for Black America but do not see this kind of psychosocial reprogramming as necessary to it.

While praising earlier generations of civil rights work, McWhorter objects to what he calls “Third Wave Antiracism.” Whereas the first wave of antiracism battled slavery and its remnants in legalized segregation, Second Wave Antiracism in the 1970s and ’80s combatted racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. These are both distinct from “Third Wave Antiracism,” becoming more mainstream in the 2010s, which teaches, in his words, that “because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”

As this wise scholar goes on to say:

The general idea is supposed to be that whatever kind of Black person you are, you are constantly undergoing all of these racist slights from the cops and everywhere else. And it doesn’t matter what social class you are, it doesn’t matter what shade of Black you are … what neighborhood you’re in, you are always under siege from, you know, at least microaggressions. So it shouldn’t matter that you wear cardigan sweaters and like musical theater and my ex-wife was white, etc., because supposedly anybody Black is going through the same experience, because racism is everywhere.

Racism is everywhere. And sexism is everywhere. And classism and heterosexism are everywhere, etc. These, of course, are the kinds of things Christians would say about sin itself—and why these more popular claims present such a striking contrast, representing as they do newfound articles of faith.

Not everyone believes these new dogmas that are being taught, however.

Straining logic. In the BBC audio-documentary The Church of Social Justice, McWhorter is quoted further as saying, “We are sternly told that even a white person who grows up in poverty and has a life more hideous than that of most black people in the U.S. is still supposed to think about themselves as fundamentally privileged. It strains logic, but you’re just supposed to accept it.”

There are other doctrines equally challenging to accept within prevailing social justice thought. In that same documentary, the producer Helen Lewis reflects on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—wherein the wafer of communion is believed to become the actual body of Christ. Lewis compares this insistence that “this wafer is the body of Christ” to an insistence that “trans women are literally women—and there is no leeway.”

In a similar way, McWhorter highlights the conviction that white privilege is “a stain that can never be removed, where you’re responsible for regularly attesting to it with your hand up in the air — it is precisely like original sin.”

There is a dogmatism to this strong and fervent insistence. “Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging ‘power,’” McWhorter continues, “you are to divide people into racial classes in exactly the way that First and Second Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids be taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past fifty years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.”

Those who can see the truth. All this represents quite a mental seachange—and one which requires some significant exposition. Thankfully there are people up to the task.

Borrowing a term from the author Joseph Bottum, John McWhorter refers to the prophets of the Third Wave as “the Elect.” They see themselves as “bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world.” This “priestly class” of “a few highly influential writers” includes most prominently, Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist), Robin DiAngelo’s (White Fragility), Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times’s 1619 Project) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (“Letter to My Son”).

Referring to this group of scholars, McWhorter elaborates, “They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.”

In “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” McWhorter takes up one example, “DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too ‘fragile’ to admit it. The circularity here—’You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are’—is the logic of the sandbox.”

The sin of inequity. We know, of course, there is an overlap in these different ways of thinking, along with interesting and earnest attempts to reconcile them. As Latter-day Saints, for instance, we might point to the Doctrine and Covenants of our faith, where the Lord is quoted as saying, “But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.”

How can we all repent of this kind of inequality? That’s a weighty question for believers like me, who see the injustices of severe poverty and racial discrimination as two kinds of sobering sins—each reflecting a serious betrayal of God’s will and heart.

On this basis, communities like the Church of Jesus Christ are seeking to marshal their resources to “eradicate racism” and any other prejudice that leads to unfairness. Far beyond leveraging Christian teaching and practice to address the sin of racism, however, others go well beyond this—beginning to fundamentally reconceptualize Christian teaching out of the lens of inequity ideology.

For most Christian believers, by contrast, the central answer to racism (like all sins) is principally to look inward at what needs to be changed through the practice of repentance. As Elder D. Todd Christofferson said in 2009, “In the end, it is only an internal moral compass in each individual that can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay. Societies will struggle in vain to establish the common good until sin is denounced as sin and moral discipline takes its place in the pantheon of civic virtues.”

By comparison, a focus on inequity presumes that only some people are causing the problems centrally—those on the privileged side of the imbalance. Whatever other improvements might be good for everyone to consider, it’s really this unfairly elevated group of people that needs to change in order to bring us back to a healthy place.

Ideologies as jealous masters. Without more consciousness of these kinds of distinctions, my concern is that many good people will end up embracing these popular notions in a way that minimizes prior religious commitments. That seems to be what’s happening all around me, with so many friends and family now looking upon sin and repentance as inherently “shaming”—lamenting that we don’t focus instead on inequality and unfairness in our discussions.

What they would see as higher enlightenment, I’m calling here an ideological take-over.

That’s why I call these ideologies jealous masters. In the absence of thoughtful integration (a project for another day), you really can’t embrace both well.

Some might rightly object that inequality is a secular concept that we can work on extinguishing across religious lines, while sin is a religious concept, so perhaps it’s more limiting as a society-wide focus. While a fair point, that’s ultimately unsatisfying to religious people who can’t be asked to simply lay aside how they see the core drivers of the world’s problems.

Competing narratives of overall threat. In the end, the contrasts between competing problem definitions in America today are striking, with different priorities for attention, different proposed solutions, and different questions that preoccupy us.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had profound disagreements on what constitutes the great threats and dangers the nation faces—the most prominent example being the Civil War itself.

Although our political armies haven’t yet become real armies, the contrast between visions and rhetoric has become sharper by the day. General Christian teaching (including the sin-focus noted above) used to be a kind of common ground for a country that saw divine providence smiling over its history. That’s no longer the case for many who see our national history shaped by repeated instances of oppressing rather than blessing.

Just as we see our historical failings differently, Americans now see our present challenges in profoundly different ways. For instance, are threats to our country primarily coming from actions on the political right, the political left, or a combination of the two? And are they arising from our departure from God’s mind and ways or from embracing historic oppressions (or a little of both)? Where you stand—and what narrative you adopt about all of this—shapes a lot about how you see this moment and what you think needs to happen next.

The post Iniquity or Inequity: What is Our Fundamental Problem? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

But what if I told you a university campus has already figured out how to keep sexual assault rates extremely low? Surely this would be a model that should be discussed and emulated. 

The Church Education System of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had tremendous success in achieving significantly lower rates of sexual assault at Brigham Young University (BYU) and its sister school BYU-Idaho than other campuses nationwide.

According to two anonymous campus climate surveys conducted in 2017 and 2022, about 7.4% of women at BYU experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact. This a stark difference from the numerous campus climate surveys conducted at other universities which consistently report that anywhere from 19-25% of women experience unwanted sexual contact. Even LGBT+ students at BYU anonymously reported sexual assault victimization rates lower than the percentage for straight students at other universities at 17%. This is shocking, considering that LGBT+ students at other universities tend to report a rate of anywhere from 33 to 73%.

The findings from the BYU reports are even more enlightening because, according to both reports, 50-55% of the victims reported that their perpetrator was not affiliated with BYU. 

What makes BYU and BYU-Idaho so successful in maintaining low rates of sexual assault? And what can other universities do to emulate their success?

Before jumping into this question, it’s worth looking at a common approach to dismiss BYU’s success on this front. Some claim that BYU students are afraid to report their sexual assault on an anonymous survey. They suggest this is because BYU’s honor code office has mishandled sexual assault cases in which women were disciplined because they were assaulted while breaking the honor code. 

It’s absolutely the case that sexual assaults are under-reported. But this problem is nationwide. And universities mishandling sexual assault allegations is hardly unique to BYU. No evidence suggests BYU students would be less likely to report a sexual assault on an anonymous survey than other students. In fact, the little research that does exist suggests the opposite. 

If BYU and BYU-Idaho are, in fact, having this level of success, as it appears they are, we would be foolish not to look at how they are approaching sexual assault and related questions. 

There are two primary models for sexual assault prevention education. The more common model, consent training, doesn’t appear to be working, as outlined above. But the research is clear that abstinence education doesn’t prevent sexual assault either.

BYU and BYU-Idaho follow a third way. They uphold the principle of chastity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sponsors BYU and teaches this principle and expects students at its universities to uphold it. Chastity contextualizes sexuality and gives it purpose and meaning.

Sexuality, in this ethic, is intended to bond spouses and provide bodies and families for the spiritual children of God. So rather than discourage sexuality—chastity encourages sexuality within marriage. Fifty-one percent of students who graduate from BYU are married, compared to eleven percent nationally. And if statistics are to be believed, that means that BYU students are, on average, having considerably more sex than students at other universities. 

Importantly this ideology fundamentally changes how BYU students view sex. As Daniel Frost has argued, consent can often coexist with exploitation and dehumanization. Chastity, and the larger picture way it contextualizes sex, elevates sex beyond mere pleasure fulfillment. In this worldview, sexual partners are not tools for gratification but partners in achieving divine ends. No wonder sexual assault is so low.

Students are not only taught about this principle but expected to follow it, even if the school’s March Madness chances hinge on you. The school’s sexual standards are not given with a wink and a nod. Students are expected to follow them, and overwhelmingly they do. So while consent programs teach students that they should not initiate sexual activity without the consent of the other person, BYU and its sponsoring organization take self-control to the next level and teaches them that they shouldn’t engage in sexual activity at all until they are married. This removes any ambiguity about what is acceptable regarding sexual initiation during the dating and courting process and can be a protective factor against sexual assault. 

It is true that some of these principles may be difficult to apply to secular and public universities. But much could be learned. Existing consent programs can be expanded to include a more robust sexual ethic that focuses on relational outcomes and avoiding exploitation. Universities could also expand resources for married students, including affordable housing and on-campus child care. 

But BYU’s education and expectations on sexual ethics are far from the only attributes of campus that help reduce sexual assault.

Numerous amounts of research show a strong connection between alcohol consumption, college party culture, and sexual assault. Some have come to equate this research with “victim blaming” because one way that alcohol contributes to increased sexual assault is by making its victims more susceptible. This is a completely understandable position and the attempt to find a balance here is tricky, but the key here is timing: warning people to lock their doors to avoid being burglarized isn’t victim blaming, but berating them for not locking their doors after they’ve been burglarized certainly is. In the end, the only one to blame for abuse is the abuser, but we can still advise taking proper precautions to help potential victims avoid being victimized. Even victimologists maintain that crime-prevention tips and strategies are ignored at our peril. 

More importantly, though, alcohol increases aggression, disinhibition, and sexual arousal. So when men drink more alcohol, sexual assaults increase independently of whether women are drinking more alcohol or not. So conversations around alcohol and sexual assault don’t need to risk devolving into victim blaming. 

BYU is the driest campus in the country. And the fact that potential perpetrators are not drinking must be considered one of the most likely reasons for BYU’s low sexual assault rate.

Some have begun to give up on the idea that it’s even possible to reduce drinking on college campuses. And to be sure, major cultural change will need to happen. But it is far from impossible. The public University of Oklahoma managed to reduce alcohol on campus after a student died from binge drinking. If universities consider sexual assault as much of a problem as binge drinking, they can follow suit.

In addition to alcohol, the Centers for Disease Control lists exposure to sexually explicit media as a factor that contributes to increased sexual assault rates. Both Gary Wilson and Jacob Hess have shown convincingly that highly religious individuals, such as those attending BYU, are significantly less likely to view pornography than the population at large.

Universities are in a strong position to dramatically reduce the use of pornography by their students if they have the political will to do so. There is no constitutional right to pornography, so even public universities could prohibit it in their on-campus housing and fraternities and even directly block it through their internet services. 

The CDC also notes that poor mental health is a risk factor for increased sexual assault. In this respect, Latter-day Saints are fortunate. Between 1960 and 2022, there were 158 studies published concerning the relationship between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mental health. Overwhelmingly, these studies showed that Latter-day Saint individuals and families performed better on the mental health indicators the CDC connects to sexual assault. The factors contributing to this are incredibly complex and difficult to replicate at other universities. But this should at the least suggest that a comprehensive plan for addressing sexual assault should include putting resources into improving mental health on campuses.

The last set of risk factors the CDC identifies is hostility towards women, adherence to traditional gender role norms, and hyper-masculinity. It may seem counterintuitive that BYU would also excel in this area since it actively promotes some of these traditional gender roles.

Her experience with The Church of Jesus Christ was considerably different. “One of the first things that drew my interest in the Church was that not a single missionary made any attempt to engage with me on a sexual level. Attending church was my first experience where trustworthy males were the norm. It was an earth-shattering revelation to me that you could have a culture where men act like that consistently.”

She goes on to say that these experiences continued when she enrolled at BYU, recounting that never in her five years of casual and serious dating was she pressured into sex. “I was never once struck, called a name, whistled at, groped, or complimented on one of my body parts.” 

The reason why Megan’s experience is so important to the issue of sexual assault at BYU is that when the CDC refers to “hostility towards women, adherence to traditional gender role norms, and hyper-masculinity” as risk factors for sexual assault, they are mostly referring to the environment that Megan grew up in when she was young. While some research shows putting women on a pedestal this way may increase victim-blaming behavior, nothing suggests it increases actual sexual assault. In fact, because it is correlated with less hostility toward women and less hyper-masculinity, it is likely the opposite. 

Of course, universities can’t emulate all the benefits that BYU has in reducing sexual assault. BYU has a large percentage of Latter-day Saint students. And these students’ faith provides the motivation to adhere to many of these standards. In addition, while there’s no research that directly answers the question, the indirect evidence suggests that Latter-day Saints suffer significantly less childhood abuse and trauma than those from other backgrounds. Jana Riess has also said that she is “not aware of any research showing that Latter-day Saint men are more likely to be abusers than any other men.” All of these factors correlate with lower sexual assault rates.

There are many things that we can emulate, however. Yes, Latter-day Saint students are certainly not in the mainstream on many of these issues. But these approaches have a successful track record, and anyone serious about addressing campus sexual assault should take BYU seriously.

Obviously, the only tolerable amount of sexual assaults on any college campus is zero, but when talking about sexual assault on college campuses, BYU is far closer to that goal than most.

The post A Sobering Reality: We Already Have The Answer to College Sexual Assault appeared first on Public Square Magazine.