Evangelical communities distinguish between the saved and unsaved, with seeker sensitivity creating a transitional space for the unsaved to explore Christian doctrine. This approach acknowledges that people are in different places spiritually and otherwise and invites them to participate and belong before making firm commitments like baptism. Seeker status, distinct from being saved, shows spiritual potential that can be nurtured.

For Latter-day Saints, the tools for a seeker-sensitive church environment are readily available. There is support in messaging from church leadership: think, for example, of Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s reassuring statement in general conference, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a place for people with all kinds of testimonies. … The Church is a home for all to come together … I know of no sign on the doors of our meetinghouses that says, ‘Your testimony must be this tall to enter.’”

In this dilemma, the stakes are high. As Latter-day Saints, we know the problems that come when people make commitments too far beyond their actual convictions, and whenever our former members boast publicly of their earlier compliance and high participation in the Church, we are reminded that belonging has never been a substitute for real conversion.

Some groups among Latter-day Saints are attempting to develop a seeker-sensitive approach to our faith, in contrast with traditional agonistic (debate-oriented) apologetics aimed at defending the faith against skeptics. The search for alternatives to traditional apologetics is sometimes driven by an awareness that traditional apologetics is often a predominantly male endeavor, utilizing public debates and rational counterarguments to reinforce faith through intellectual contests that seek academic respectability. In 2016, Alastair Roberts described formerly male-dominated academia as a realm of “ritual combat and competition.”

In academia, the insistence upon a contest of ideas has indeed benefited many fields, as it has required participants to raise the bar of their research with the understanding that they would likely need to defend it against attack. When applied to religious apologetics, the agonistic academic framework has resulted in formidable answers to the claims of skeptics, and for many, it has indeed created intellectual soil conditions for successfully planting the seed of faith. But Roberts points to real pitfalls in this kind of engagement that extend to the realm of religious apologetics: “If not well tamed,” Roberts warned, male styles of discourse lead to “tiresome games of one-upmanship. … A concern for the truth has on many occasions been eclipsed by the pursuit of ego.”

Those of us involved in various forms of apologetics recognize these tendencies and how agonistic frameworks seem to often bring out the worst in our instincts. But when it comes to apologetics, we sometimes see deeper problems emerge. First, agonistic discourse often operates with an assumption of objectivity: I and my champion are bias-free, whereas the opponent’s thinking is clouded by subjective judgments and motivated reasoning. These are self-serving perspectives, and they are not true: numerous studies demonstrate that we all employ our rational thinking in service of our non-rational feelings and intuitions and not the other way around. The second of the deeper problems is that convincing is not conversion. A cerebral process of intellectual assent to ideas about God is not the same as coming to know God personally and experiencing inner transformation as a result. If apologists are not careful, we can mistakenly deprecate conversion or even ignore it in our pursuit of an idol of intellectual vindication.

If there have long been problems in male-dominated academic discourse, Heather Mac Donald points to different problems that have recently arisen in predominantly female academic spaces.  In a recent article titled “The Great Feminization of the American University,” she offers an alarming commentary:

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles …

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females, on average, score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression…

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity.

The gendered tendency toward validation over empowerment was discussed in a Psychology Today article by Dr. Steven Stosny, who noted a clear tendency toward over-validating among female therapists-in-training, while male trainees tend toward under-validation, skipping ahead to discussion of solutions. Validation is often a critical step in helping people to come to a receptive frame of heart and mind, but when taken to excess, it can reinforce false and harmful narratives of reality, as well as poor cognitive behavior. Heather Mac Donald is right to point to codependency as the dynamic at play; a validating friend can feel like they are behaving with kindness while enabling a person’s downward spiral into mental and emotional misery.

This problem illustrates many people’s frustrations with the seeker-sensitive church, and Paul Carter’s writing for The Gospel Coalition offers a case study. He tells of a church that promised to evolve from a lightweight, inclusive doctrine to a more substantial one but never did. As he describes, seeker churches become trapped in offering “Christianity Lite,” a superficial experience that trades genuine spiritual growth for continual entertainment and therapy.

As Paul Carter’s story indicates, any movement toward seeker sensitivity among Latter-day Saints should be honest, or it will repeat these and many other failures experienced elsewhere. And honesty requires a reckoning with the history and results of progressive religion, which has often formed the ideological basis for seeker-sensitive messaging. Progressive religion’s attempts to “keep people in the church” involve abandoning doctrinal clarity in the name of inclusion. Yet its ultimate result is the opposite of keeping people in the church. David Deavel wrote of the impact of the transition to progressive religion in the church of his youth, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC):

If progressive Christianity leads to ecclesial death is the first lesson, the second is that its parasitical nature means there are limits if enough people keep fighting for the host’s body. … This summer, at the CRC’s annual denominational meeting, known as Synod, the delegates voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm … much of traditional Christian morality. Not only did the delegates reaffirm it; they raised it to the level of “confessional status.” In Catholic terms, it went from doctrine to dogma. 

Deavel’s account is striking: As CRC adopted progressive reforms, conservatives left the denomination. But progressives left as well, causing the CRC pendulum to swing back to more conservative leanings. It might seem counterintuitive that progressive reforms cause progressives to leave their churches, but it is true. The relativism that characterizes so much of progressive religion turns the church experience into, paraphrasing Seinfeld, a show about nothing. And even progressives won’t roll out of bed early on Sunday mornings for that.

Those who, in the name of seeker sensitivity, imagine a progressive alternative vision for the church are faced with a hard dilemma: progressive religion does indeed offer a sense of relief for people who experience traditional faith as stifling or intellectually unpalatable. But as Ian Harber’s experience indicates, progressive religion and progressive political ideology share some basic assumptions, and progressive political ideology has a powerful gravitational pull. When the Christian story of inside-out redemption is replaced by a political story of outside-in activism, congregations soon find that political ideology cannot abide any rivals in theology or other areas. And the relief of progressive religion can only ever be temporary because its relativism opens the abyss of nihilism in the souls of the formerly believing. Political ideology deceptively offers to fill that abyss or sometimes offers a welcome distraction from it. But in the end, political religion turns out to be a much more harsh and jealous taskmaster than traditional religious faith.

The final point of honesty is to plainly acknowledge the importance of developing our own Latter-day Saint model of seeker sensitivity. The process of faith development looks very different for different people, and among some souls, the branches of commitment are too lofty, stretching beyond the strength of the roots of personal conversion. We can teach and testify; we can improve our assumptions and epistemology, but gospel-seeking is a process that will always vary among people who differ in their wiring, their culture, and their life experiences. Seeker sensitivity in the early restoration allowed Brigham Young to investigate the restored gospel for two years before making a firm commitment and for the great Eliza R. Snow, that process of seeking lasted four years. If we want more members whose conversions share the durability of those of Brigham Young and Eliza R. Snow, we should promote a church culture that is able to accommodate people’s individual processes of seeking while also maintaining clarity about the problems that have plagued the movement for seeker-sensitivity in broader Christianity.

The post Christianity Lite: The Seeker-Sensitive Church appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

“I can pinpoint the Sunday when I recognized a shift in my ward,” a friend of ours recounts: 

Cami,[ref num=”1″] a long-time member and respected Relief Society teacher, said she wanted to share some amazing new things she was learning during a lesson. A handful of other sisters echoed her enthusiasm that same Sunday. But there was an edge to some of the comments that felt off. I remember one specific comment that I wasn’t sure what to make of it, “We need to set personal boundaries in high-demand religions like ours by not being afraid to say ‘no’ to callings.” Though I brushed it off at the time, it left me unsettled. But it became difficult to ignore similarly strange things that kept happening, like another sister beginning the opening prayer for sacrament meeting with “Dear Heavenly Parents” or another woman explaining it was important to “understand that general authorities are for just general but not specific counsel for us.”

A month or so later, when our teacher revisited a recent General Conference talk, Cami and a few others seemed to take over the discussion. The lesson was dominated by comments critical of patriarchy, personal revelation being more important than anything, the balance of power between Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother (with a lot more light and knowledge that will be coming on female deity), and that we can pray to receive revelation about this. The teacher appeared taken off guard by these comments and didn’t know how to respond. But by then, many were rankled, and the Spirit was long gone. All of it put a divisive chill in the air. 

After the closing prayer, I walked back to put books away in the closet, and a row of women stayed back, waiting to talk to me. They shared their concerns, and the more I reflected on all that was happening, the more I became worried as well. Many of these sisters had changed—women who had a long history of positive influence in our ward. All of this seemed so uncharacteristic of our ward family. The Bishop and I spent a lot of time praying and fasting about what to do. 

Since that time, it’s been difficult to see some of these women leave the Church or become barely involved. The trajectory and changes that took these sweet families and our ward by storm occurred within a 6-8 month period of time. Nothing about it sat right with me from the beginning. In a conversation about it with my similarly-aged daughter, who lives on the East Coast, she told me she had been experiencing something similar with the Young Women leaders in her ward—often with strangely similar phrases being repeated in both wards. 

This woman went on to describe seeing similar language in social media posts by acquaintances—sometimes announcing that they weren’t in the Church anymore or had “quietly quitted” the Church. 

This clearly isn’t the only such story. Another friend recounted several sisters in her ward that began a “study the gospel” group during the pandemic that turned into “re-hashing podcasts and blogs they’d listen to and read”—including one by a woman who started reading feminist literature and had “an awakening.” She continues the story:

Last spring, some things came to a head. A few of these sisters were openly bashing the leadership of the Church and the Family Proclamation on Facebook and being very confrontational with other ward members.  I stepped in and provided some counterpoint and truth from the scriptures and church leaders, which in their eyes, was me picking a fight.  The next week in our Relief Society, there was a clear, physical divide in the room between this group of sisters and the rest of us.

Several of these sisters were in leadership positions in the ward as well.  They used their position to teach what they were learning in these podcasts instead of the gospel to our primary kids and teens. For example, one taught that the Holy Ghost is non-binary. Another was preaching that Jesus Christ is non-binary. Still another was encouraging a few of the youth who identify as LGBT to bring LGBT-themed material into the lessons. Bashing men/boys and the priesthood has also happened regularly.  Understandably it makes the Aaronic Priesthood-aged boys uncomfortable, and their parents are understandably upset. Our bishop has met with these sisters individually and as a group to try and help them work through these issues.  But as they were asked to commit to teaching only the lessons provided by the Church, some of them would not and have not come back to church.

This woman added in sorrow, “Our ward is a mess and really hurting.  I don’t know what will become of us”—acknowledging the absence of [these sisters] and their talents are deeply felt. … I feel bad for their kids—because you make choices for your kids too.”

To be clear, significant disagreements about even sensitive issues don’t have to lead to acrimony and division. By “culture war,” we’re referring here specifically to when things go off the rails and harm the sense of cohesion and community as a whole. As demonstrated by our work over the last three years, we wholeheartedly believe there are ways to make space for challenging conversations that draw our hearts together. Indeed, how exactly to take up important questions as productive conversations, rather than Big Fights is a big part of what we do as a magazine. (To illustrate, we recently explored many dimensions and implications of the precious truth about Heavenly Mother in our recent conversation with friends McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding, “Heavenly Mother Should be Joyful, Not Another Cultural Battle“—while featuring Carol and Gale Boyd’s honest questions that same week, “Is Our Heavenly Mother Conversation Drawing Us to Christ?” That conversation is not over, with more efforts to deepen understanding coming in the new year. This is the alternative to culture war!)

Even so, it’s easy for any of us to fall into something very different. And these kinds of departures and divisions, of course, arise for a wide variety of reasons and across the political spectrum. Stories and reporting about election-related conflict spilling over into faith communities have been common over the last several years. We’ve had loved ones step away from involvement after seeing so much pro-Trump support finding its way into lessons—and one of our staff members has family who got so sick of the contention it influenced their newfound distance from the church.   

Dan Ellsworth and Jeff Bennion have written poignantly about the consequences for faith when politics of any kind become embraced with religious fervor. Dan also wrote directly about peacemaking within congregations during the pandemic. 

What’s going on? On one level, it’s obvious why this is all happening: just look around in America!  In much the same way we absorb other cultural phenomena, it would be nearly impossible for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to not imbibe and breathe in some of the same acceleration of animosity we see in our larger culture. 

We are, after all, not the Amish—and our proximity and integration into secular society are close enough that we ultimately have to metabolize some of the toxic fumes in our larger society. 

On another level, however, many of us have been increasingly shocked by these cultural intrusions—and deeply saddened. Services of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are famously staid and virtually always harmonious—and that regularity and reverence are something many of us cherish.  The “gathering together” that we’re working to encourage as a people is also described in our sacred texts as, among other things, to be for our protection from many of these surrounding elements of a darkening society:  even “for a defense, and for a refuge from the storm, and from wrath when it shall be poured out without mixture upon the whole earth.”

The Church has provided a remarkable amount of protection across many areas, especially for those living their covenants from the heart. But why is this particular storm of cultural hostilities reaching and affecting us so much? And why are our defenses not holding in this case?  

Whatever the answers, the implications of such hostilities are serious and clear. As a result of these intrusions, precious people and equally precious relationships are being shorn from us as a people. And it hurts.  

Looking to the year ahead, we’d like to understand more of what’s going on in these kinds of conflicts based on what you see in your own congregations, wards, and families. Are you seeing similar kinds of conflicts intruding in your own ward families and homes? If so, would you be willing to tell us about them?  

We’re also intrigued about new ways to reach across some of these divides and “find each other again.” So many of these issues are important conversations around weighty matters that don’t necessarily have to become congregational conflagrations. We can talk about sexuality, gender, race, Heavenly Mother, and lots of other important questions with respect and good feelings. And we have many dear, cherished friendships with people who don’t see God, the world, and human nature the same way as us. Are there ways to promote more generosity and peace within our family of faith?  

We’ve prepared a few short questions here and would really welcome your input. In addition, we include a request for input on the future of our own work, so we can get more feedback on ways we can improve and refine what we’re doing in the new year.  

Thank you for your friendship, support, and attention. Like our marvelous prophet, we believe that what “wins in the end” is true peace, true love, and the full truth about everything.  

And that’s why we get to keep smiling, no matter what. 

[footnote num=”1″]Name changed to preserve anonymity

The post Culture War Comes to Church appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

These bodies were discarded in heaps like the trash that some wounded souls had tragically been persuaded they were. How is that possible? What could lead a young soldier to be willing to do such vile and unforgivable things? 

The ignoble call to denazify. When Vladimir Putin announced his shocking decision to launch this vicious invasion in Ukraine earlier this year, he insisted that one of the goals of the offensive was to “denazify” the country. 

This rhetoric was meaningful in a country that had lost so many soldiers battling Nazis in World War II. And yet, to outside observers, the irony was painfully clear. The very country accusing leaders in Kyiv of being “abusive” and “genocidal” was destroying thousands of lives in its assault. As Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, put it at the time, Putin appears to be “fighting a war the way that actual Nazis did” in his willingness to roll across sovereign boundaries and attack Ukraine on its own turf.  

However threatened Putin and others may have felt by some elements of Ukraine’s growing embrace of the West, it’s been abundantly clear that the rhetoric around “denazification” represents little more than a pretext for invasion—a manufactured grievance designed to justify the onslaught to a Russian domestic audience. As Claudia Wallner wrote earlier this year, “The West should not fall for Russia’s pretend moral outrage and pseudo-principled stance.” 

We haven’t fallen for it.  No matter how passionately Russian leaders insist their “special military operation” has good aspirations behind it, the reality has always been clear:  these ruthless attacks have needlessly left tens of thousands of people dead, wounded, and grieving—and for absolutely no justified reason.   

Another liberation campaign. I’ve reflected recently on some parallels to this language being used to justify vicious actions overseas after witnessing a similar rhetorical pretext for an agonizing assault closer to home. Over the last decade, there has been a growing and increasingly organized anti-religious element in American society.  When it comes to Latter-day Saints, that opposition has been particularly organized and potent—with a cottage industry of anti-Church voices becoming more strident and more effective at reaching a wide audience.  

These assaults come from both the political left and the political right. What unites them is a conviction that faith leaders at the top are morally bankrupt—deceptive, power-hungry, and absolutely unworthy of trust. Thus, anything to dismantle and challenge their authority is game—including the promotion of “scary stories” about our people that are far from reality. As one friend put it, some of these voices “justify their brazen attacks on the Church because they think it’s evil and run by evil people (i.e., nazis), and as soon as you brand a group of people as nazis, whatever horrible attack you make on them is justifiable.” 

To listen to the motives and rationales of these full-time critics, you would hear plenty of insistence that they are, in fact, passionate about “doing good.” In fact, it’s striking how often this growing legion of podcasters, influencers, and activists frame what they are doing as a similar kind of liberation of believers—confronting the leaders and institution precisely so that naïve members will be disabused of their confidence and no longer be oppressed under their collective influence.  

To be clear, there are plenty of wonderful and thoughtful people with sincere questions and concerns about the Church. I’m speaking here of a subset who dedicate their lives to a relentless campaign of aggression framed up as a noble liberation effort—yes, against an institution and set of leaders despicable enough to deserve it. 

Looking closer at the consequences. It is true that some who step away from a life of faith initially feel some freedom and relief. There is a kind of relief that most anyone would feel, of course, to lay aside serious obligations that ask a lot of our hearts. But as Samuel Major pointed out recently, relief is not the same as peace. And whatever initial insistence there may be about being “happier than ever,” the truth can only be seen and known long-term. 

And if we take a closer look at the longer trajectory, the reality is that these “liberation” efforts over time often (not always) lead to hurting marriages and children swept away in all the currents of the day—being led towards decisions that cause heartbreak, fractured relationships, and any of the many varieties of addictive-compulsive behavior. 

This doesn’t even touch on the myriad other spiritual consequences set in motion. As one wise-and-wizened brother in my ward, Gary Sorensen, said recently, “we’ve each waited thousands of years to be able to come to earth and show God that we can follow His covenant.  This isn’t an invitation to a birthday party we’re talking about here. This is eternal life.”

To those leading these campaigns of faith attrition, are you aware of the full consequences of your work in the lives and homes of people you are reaching? Do you see what your efforts actually mean in the lives of these incredibly precious brothers and sisters?   

We will all one day stand before God—podcasters and prophets, faithful and faithless. Before that day comes, may we all recognize the significant rippling effect our choices have not only on people around us, but on our own unending futures. As General Maximus says in Gladiator, “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” 

Sadly, the rhetorical assault will undoubtedly continue against all faith communities, relentless and ruthless. And those leading this assault will surely continue to frame their attack on sacred things as a kind of glorious campaign of liberation that will surely do much good in the world.  

Don’t fall for it. Heaven above and the history books below will both ultimately tell the full story of the devastation they are causing. 

And if you look closely, you can see it too.

The post De-Nazifying The Church appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In a nutshell, the 60-Minutes story and related articles make a number of unsubstantiated claims about and against the Church for its financial dealings in Australia and in other countries, such as alleged abuse of Australian tax laws and alleged failure to disburse funds to care for the poor and the distressed.

I want to be upfront about why I would offer this opinion piece. I have never done this before.   And there’s no hiding the fact that I love this church, which I have observed as a member over my entire life blessing and helping the poor and distressed in countless places and circumstances. It is hurtful to me and other faithful members of the Church to see the Church unfairly attacked and slandered in this manner. 

I also have a particular connection with Australia and am thankful to have cherished friends (mates) there as a result of my having lived there for three of my high school years from 1968 to 1971.  My parents served as volunteer missionaries for the Church in Adelaide for three years and later in Sydney.  And so, this incomplete and misleading reporting strikes me as being deceptive and harmful to my Aussie brothers and sisters!

Over my 36-year career as a former tax, business, and estate planning attorney/CPA, I observed from my own numerous interactions with church tax professionals related to the dealings of my former clients with the Church that the Church and its tax advisors have always been fastidious about strict compliance with taxation laws and regulations relating to charitable giving.  

Bias bleeding through. The particular slant and prejudice of associated reporters are not hard to identify. For starters, since at least October 2018, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Russell M. Nelson, has pleaded with both its members and with news organizations to refer to the Church by its proper name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  As soon as a news story leads out by calling us “The Mormon Church” or “Mormons,” it’s become increasingly clear that this a bright red flag of bias, indicating that this news organization is in attack mode and has no respect for the Church and likely no interest in objective, honest reporting on the topic presented.  In the 60-Minutes story and related articles, that is exactly how the attack starts, by an in-your-face disregard for the correct name of the Church and its members.  Indeed, the article by the Sydney Morning Herald goes so far as to sarcastically refer to the Church’s family of related entities as “Mormon Inc.” To me, this is disrespectful and a true sign of the real smear motive of the author(s).

Even the music and lyrics in the background of the 60 Minutes story are clearly and cleverly orchestrated and calculated to send negative vibes/messages about the Church. Those are matched by creepy video segments of a supposed single young male missionary going door to door by himself for the Church (which clearly never happens since they always go with one or more companions).  To me, these were also big red flags of bias which signal little to no serious intention to give an honest, balanced view of the important subjects being discussed. Throughout the reporting, there are multiple quotes from disaffected former members of the Church, who appear to be their main sources. In fact, Ben Schneiders, who again appears to be the primary force behind these stories, has a history of misleading and inaccurate religious financial reporting and, in the early days of this story, engaged in misleading behavior about the breadth of the investigation.

Which is too bad. Because with the cynical bias removed, this story could be one about tremendous charitable giving organized quickly, run efficiently, and responsive to the incentives of the Australian government.  

There are five key claims made by these news organizations—each of which deserves a forthright response. In what follows, the direct quotes are from the main article in The Sydney Morning Herald, followed by some context notably left out by the journalists involved.

Claim #1: “The global Mormon church has overstated the amount it gives in charity by more than $US 1 billion ($1.56 billion), apparently to make itself appear more generous than it actually is … In public statements, the Church has claimed its global giving through its charity arm, Utah-based Latter-day Saint Charities increased by $US1.35 billion between 2008 and 2020.”

The Herald provides no reference or support for this allegation of what the Church has supposedly said in “public statements.” What this report seems to be missing is that Latter-day Saint Charities is one of multiple organizations through which the Church provides charitable giving—so we should expect the Church’s total charitable giving to be much larger than what is listed in the audited financial statements provided by Latter-day Saint Charities.

I put together the following table summarizing the three audited financial statements referenced in the Herald article: 

Among other things, this table demonstrates that this particular entity of the Church of Jesus Christ has indeed disbursed most of the funds it has received towards charitable causes.

If the desire was to consider and present a complete and honest picture of the Church’s charitable activities, the Herald article could have referenced other public information provided by the Church, such as “Caring for those in Need: 2021 Annual Report of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Why not even mention that report? Referring to this 2021 report, President Dallin H. Oaks, First Counselor in the Church’s First Presidency, provided this summary information in the October 2022 General Conference of The Church: “Our 2021 expenditures for those in need in 188 countries worldwide totaled $906 million—almost a billion dollars. In addition, our members volunteered over 6 million hours of labor in the same cause.”

To reiterate, the charitable activities administered through LDS Charities are only a small part of the expansive outreach and financial disbursements provided by the Church to the poor and the distressed as a result of the generous donations of Latter-day Saints around the world. Any attempt to capture the full picture of the Church’s finances would simply have to pay attention to the many other capital and operational expenditures associated with its work in the world. That includes temples, chapels, missionary work, higher education, church education, and family history, among other things—all of which are enormous investments and none of which are profit-making endeavors.[ref num=”1″]

Is any of this included in the calculations proffered by these articles? Not at all. Thus, the Herald article falls woefully short in giving a complete picture of all the good the Church does throughout the world. Surely these reporters had to know that they were putting the Church in a bad light based on only a very small part of the big picture. 

Claim #2:  “In addition, the Church runs a $US 100 billion, tax-free investment fund, Ensign Peak Advisors, which has quietly built up major stakes in blue-chip firms and now has multibillion-dollar investments in Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google owner Alphabet. It also invests in major weapons manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. Ensign Peak is supposed to be used to fund charitable and other spending, but former insiders alleged it was almost entirely used to stockpile cash and investments.” One former disaffected member also claims that what the Church has done is “totally unethical, absolutely a case of fraud.”  

Remarkably, these sweeping generalizations about partial truths are made by reporters and interviewees without any reliable evidence. The Herald article states that it has relied upon public filings with the SEC for these claims. Ensign Peak does, in fact, voluntarily file quarterly 13F reports with the SEC, though apparently not required by law to do so. That’s pretty impressive transparency. As of June 30, 2022, total equities of approximately $42 billion are shown in its 13F filing. And yes, it’s likely that this number is even larger when you also consider other holdings such as bonds and international equities.

The reality is that despite the whistle-blower report being made more than three years ago, no fraud has been uncovered or reported. It is, therefore, irresponsible for 60 Minutes Australia and The Herald article to include unsubstantiated claims from disaffected members as to the amount, purposes, or legality of these accumulated investments.  

Given all of the committed expenditures the Church faces in its worldwide religious operations, it is obvious that the Church needs very substantial resources, including for “a rainy day.” Shouldn’t every institution be operated to live within its means and save for “a rainy day”? Every time there is a downturn in the economy, I appreciate so much the wisdom and foresight of our inspired leaders. I wish our US Federal Government would follow this example of living within a budget and getting out of debt. 

The fact the Church has built up a substantial reserve of investments is something positive to be lauded rather than meriting suspicion. If you were to study the history of the Church, you would learn that the Church was burdened with debt and struggling financially in the early 1900s.  I, for one, am thankful to see that the Church has come out of those very difficult financial circumstances to build up a substantial fund for rainy days.

As the Church builds up reserves for all of its programs and for future unforeseen hard times, would these reporters have the Church hold all of these funds in cash?!?  That would be an unwise investment indeed!  As a member, I am thankful the Church is investing its reserves responsibly, including securities, farms, and other real estate investments.

The 60 Minutes piece even contained a silly statement by one of its interviewees speculating that the Church is saving all this money for the time when after Jesus comes.  In all my life, I have never heard a leader of the Church make such a statement, and I am confident the Herald will not find such a verifiable statement anywhere from a general church leader.  Again, this seems to be smear rhetoric intended to harm the good name and reputation of the Church.

Claim #3: “Mormons are required to pay 10 percent of their gross income in tithing, a significant financial impost on followers. Nielsen said this was hard on poorer Mormons, particularly in the developing world, describing it as “an extremely regressive tax.”

This claim is undeniably false. Yes, members of the Church believe that this is a commandment from God, just as it was in ancient times of the Bible (Malachi 3:8-12). And like all commandments, Latter-day Saints are encouraged to follow it. But members pay tithing as a free-will offering (voluntarily) because we have faith that God will compensate us for our sacrifice.[ref num=”2″]

And what about the widow’s mite? (Mark 12:42,44). It seems clear from the ministry of Jesus that He was not about stopping the poor from sacrificing to make a charitable contribution to those even poorer. If that’s how Jesus felt, then why would we suggest otherwise? It is short-sighted and wrong to call tithing a burden upon any member of the Church, no matter how poor, because God’s promises of compensating blessings are indeed true.

It is also important to note that contributions from members of the Church fall into several categories—only one of which (tithing) is mentioned by the Herald article.[ref num=”3″]

Claim #4: “The joint investigation has also uncovered significant evidence of alleged tax minimization and evasion by the Church, including in Australia and Canada where hundreds of millions of dollars are routed through shell companies or other entities to maintain the tax-free status of its income.”

In relation to the above: “The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed in April that the Church in Australia had structured itself to allow its adherents to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions that are not lawfully available to followers of other religions.”

This is yet another spurious charge against the Church, made by reporters who simply have no serious basis for claiming there has been tax evasion. 

If there are lawful ways to use tax laws and regulations to minimize taxes, then that is exactly what any institution or individual should do. There is a difference between tax avoidance (legitimately using tax laws and regulations to minimize a tax bill) and tax evasion (fraudulently avoiding the payment of taxes). As former Federal Circuit Court Judge Learned Hand once said:

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes. Over and over again, the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike, and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.[ref num=”4″]

If there is a legitimate way for members of the Church in Australia to receive a tax deduction for their tithes and offerings, then, of course, the Church and the Australian Latter-day Saints should avail themselves of that law or regulation.

In this case, especially, the funds are being rerouted to humanitarian causes precisely the way Australian tax law both allows and incentivizes.

In the 60 Minutes segment, the interviewer pressed and pressed the Assistant Minister for Charities, Andrew Leigh, to agree that the Church was somehow involved in wrongdoing and then tried to make Mr. Leigh look like the big bad government for not being willing to do so.  Mr. Leigh appropriately respected the Church’s privacy. Believe me, if the Church were violating Australian tax law, the Australian government would be all over this.

But more substantively, Latter-day Saint Charity work in Australia appears to be run with striking efficiency. In 2021, the most recent year data is available on the Australia-specific LDS Charitable Trust Fund, it brought in $100,211,557, distributed $131,604,476, and spent $7,810 on overhead.[ref num=”5″]

Claims that this amounts to a “shell company” appear to be based upon evidence such as them not having a visible enough presence in the country or a paid staff.  I have addressed the staffing issues elsewhere in this piece.  As for visibility, I have been given to understand that most of their funds are then distributed to organizations like Red Cross, Water for People, and the World Food Program.

In the end, claiming that donating to humanitarian causes is a “tax minimization strategy” is extraordinarily cynical. I understand that Australian tax law incentivizes donating to humanitarian causes, and the Church has organized its finances in the country to do exactly that. 

Claim #5: It is “inconceivable that the Church was making significant global charitable decisions from Australia.”

According to Australian law, charities that qualify for tax deduction purposes must be run out of Australia. And the recent reporting on this matter takes for granted that this couldn’t possibly be the case—suggesting that because Latter-day Saint Charities Australia has no paid staff, it can’t be led within the country. But this speculation is simply not true. 

The high efficiency of the fund is made possible by the Church’s culture of volunteerism. As Public Square Magazine has confirmed, Paul Gray and Carl Maurer direct the fund. Carl Maurer is from Brisbane, served a mission in Perth, and attended Griffith University in Queensland. He built his career in the swimming pool industry. Paul Gray is from the Sydney area. He attended the University of South Australia and works as an accountant. In addition to his philanthropic work with the Church, he is involved with Australian charities focusing on child safety.

Does Australian law allow these people to coordinate and work with global Latter-day Saint Charities? Clearly, yes. Australian charity expert Krystian Seibert from Swinburne University’s Centre for Social Impact says that qualifying charities can “engage and consult with partner organizations outside Australia.”

This is precisely the type of relationship the Church describes existing when a spokesperson for the Church said it “identified and referred” charitable projects to their Australian counterparts. 

Conclusion. We all understand how media outlets are always looking for new material, especially sensational content that will be eye-catching. But as institutions we look towards for truthful investigation, these journalists have a moral obligation to be fair and unbiased in their reporting. We hope and pray they will reserve judgment and withhold attacks when they don’t have all the facts.  

And when they don’t—when they instead perpetrate a scandalous and dark narrative impugning an entire people and faith community—what are we to think? Rather than suspect fraud on the part of the Church and its leadership, it’s hard not to conclude in this case that 60 Minutes and the authors of the Herald article are the ones working a fraud and deception upon their viewers and readership. 

I obviously trust the Church and its leaders as humble and trustworthy men and women who come from all different professional backgrounds and socio-economic circumstances. Are they perfect?  No, of course not.  But I am persuaded that they are doing their best to ascertain and follow the mind and will of God, and they are trying hard to build the kingdom of God, help the poor and the distressed, and yet to keep sufficient reserves to cover current and future obligations. This is wisdom!  

I am confident that time and honest investigation will continue to vindicate the Church against these wrongful and hurtful allegations—demonstrating that the Church practices what it teaches about being an honorable, honest citizen in the world. As Joseph Smith himself taught, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.” 

News organizations should operate in good faith and give the Church some credit and recognize all the wonderful and generous things the Church is doing to lift and bless the world. Come on, mates, what we need here is some fair dinkum reporting!

Notes:

(1)  Here are just some of the many examples of where the resources of the Church are needed: 

• Temples. The Church is a temple-building church.  We members of the Church believe that temples are essential in the Lord’s plan to provide saving and exalting ordinances both for the living and the dead.  And, by the way, the Church is the only one in the world I am aware of that can explain how God can be fair and merciful to the billions of His children who have lived and died without a knowledge of their Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Temples, of course, are not income-producing properties. And we as a people are gladly making a priority investment in expanding them over the earth. The Church has 169 operating temples located around the world.  Four of those are being renovated.  The Church has an additional 55 temples under construction, and 72 temples announced.  When all the temples announced so far in the world are constructed, there will be 300. And this number will undoubtedly continue to grow each year. Each temple is constructed as the Lord’s house, and, like King Solomon in the Bible, the Church spares no expense in building with the very finest of designs, construction materials, and furnishings.  The Church does not provide numbers publicly regarding the cost to construct these temples, but the cost is obviously enormous, in the millions or tens of millions of dollars depending upon the temple.  And then there obviously has to be a significant annual operating budget to keep each temple functioning in its critically important role. These temples are being built in many countries around the globe, including those where the locally donated tithes and offerings would not cover a fraction of the cost.
• Gathering Scattered Israel—Missionary Work. As with the Apostles of old, the Apostles of our day have also received a divine commission to take the Church’s message of salvation and peace through Christ to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.  And the leadership of the Church takes this command from the Lord very seriously.  This is reflected in a robust missionary program around the world. Currently, there are approximately 54,500 full-time teaching missionaries serving as volunteers throughout the world and 36,600 Church-service missionaries. While it is true that missionaries pay a portion of their monthly living expenses, this missionary program is very heavily subsidized by the Church, including providing a fleet of cars to many of the teaching missionaries, providing apartments and a monthly food budget, covering medical expenses, and support from mission leaders and office staff in Church-owned properties at 407 different locations around the world.  Again, these are non-income-producing properties. The Church’s missionary program also includes missionary training centers located in various cities around the world, with extensive staffing and other operational costs. These mission-program properties of the Church have large budgets for both capital improvement and operations. 
• Education. The Church heavily subsidizes education through its three BYU campuses (Provo, Utah, Rexburg, Idaho, and Oahu, Hawaii).  Again, the capital improvement and operational budgets for these properties is enormous.  There is also a low-tuition BYU Pathways Worldwide program that provides online education to a current enrollment of approximately 57,000 students around the globe. 
• Family History.  The Church sponsors Family Search and other online programs and phone applications to assist both church members and friends around the world to find and connect to their ancestors and other relatives through the largest genealogical data base in the world.  Accounts are free to everyone.  And the Church owns and supports physical family history centers in many locations, to give hands-on help.
• Religious Education. The Church also sponsors religious education for students, beginning in 9th grade and continuing through the college years at hundreds of seminary and institute buildings around the world.  And yes, you guessed it, more non income-producing properties with enormous annual budgets.
• Houses of Worship. The Church obviously owns thousands of houses of worship around the world. Currently, the Church has approximately 31,300 congregations (called wards) and it supplies buildings and operating budgets for these non income-producing chapels.
• Visitors Centers.  The Church owns and operates visitor centers at multiple locations around the world.
• Other Related Charitable Entities. The Church has other related foundations and entities that are used for the disbursement of funds for humanitarian and charitable purposes.

(2) That means, in the end, members will not miss those funds. As promised by the ancient prophet Malachi, we believe that God will open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing upon us  In my own life, this promise has been fulfilled, and millions of faithful members around the world would similarly affirm the fulfillment of this promise from God. It also seems clear that God has richly blessed His earthly kingdom to finance and enable His work to be carried out throughout the world

(3) Different categories of contributions include the following: Tithing (10% of our income—these funds are understood by us to go towards buildings and church programs and operations); fast offerings (these funds are contributed by members to the Church for the use by local leaders to care for the poor and needy in their own geographies and congregations); humanitarian contributions to a general fund of the Church, for use by the Church to help many humanitarian causes around the world; missionary fund contributions (these are voluntary contributions to assist with the expenses of the Church’s missionary program—see related discussion herein); temple fund contributions (these funds are applied towards the Church’s numerous temples around the world—see discussion herein); and other contributions.

(4) Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809, 810-11, 2d Cir. (1934). Even though the Herald article is talking about Australian taxation, I submit this statement by a US judge is still both applicable and weighty.

(5) This LDS Charitable Trust Fund is a separate entity operating apparently within Australia—distinct from the Latter-Day Saint Charities organization in the US whose numbers are referenced in the earlier table. The Church works through multiple entities in sharing resources around the world. The fund’s published reports also show money being received and then  disbursed for charitable causes.

The post Defamation Down Under: Responding to the Aussie Allegations appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I don’t know what we thought we were going to do with duct tape and plastic sheeting, but in December 1999 in preparation for the much anticipated Y2K blackouts, that’s what many of us bought. It’s funny to think about it now, and there is certainly a little humor about the run on toilet paper at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. However, situations like this expose some not-so-funny concerns as well. For instance, we’ve learned that when faced with an emergency situation, people panic-buy. 

For many raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the frequent topic of one-year food supplies and emergency preparedness might well have prepared us for moments like this. We have been warned and admonished repeatedly by prophets for decades to prepare our food storage and emergency kits. But without pressing evidence that these efforts will ever be needed, the message too easily got set aside. 

After all, many of us observed our parents faithfully stock basements full of wheat that rarely, if ever, was needed. So maybe it’s understandable if we shrug our shoulders, and conclude it was never as important as we had thought all along.  And furthermore, the culture of “prepping” has today been cartoonishly portrayed as something like trading a house in the suburbs for a rural homestead, ditching designer jeans for a prairie dress, and finding creative ways to store big white food storage buckets as part of our decor. Some have even insisted self-reliance is not a gospel principle taught anywhere in the scriptures—portraying it instead as a relic of the “prosperity gospel” or an excuse to simply hoard wealth and resources.

No wonder we lay so much of this aside.  If worry ever does creep in, thoughts like, “the Church has massive storehouses,” or “my prepper family has it covered,” can quickly quiet them. 

It’s true that we haven’t heard about temporal preparation from the pulpit as often as in the past. Acknowledging this, Elder David Bednar, in a worldwide message to our faith said, “Church members opine that emergency plans and supplies, food storage, and 72-hour kits must not be important anymore because the Brethren have not spoken recently and extensively about these and related topics.” But then he added, “repeated admonitions to prepare have been proclaimed by leaders of the Church for decades. The consistency of prophetic counsel over time creates a powerful concert of clarity and a warning volume far louder than solo performances can ever produce.” 

In addition to prophetic counsel, the realities of society today have begun to abundantly demonstrate that concern about famines and pestilence are not just for some other place or some other time. We see how alarming events rapidly created a baby formula shortage— including war, inflation, and weather—with predictions of more shortages to come. Respected JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon said recently, “You know, I said there’s storm clouds but I’m going to change it … it’s a hurricane. … You’d better brace yourself.” Some say that global famine could be significant as early as this fall. With rising costs and even President Biden himself speaking of war-related food shortages “It’s going to be real,” demands for more serious attention have converged. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve stunningly and lovingly been told by our prophet “time is running out.” 

It’s especially noteworthy to consider that panic and fear are almost never how prophets of God speak of preparedness. Rather, words like providence, self-reliance, and blessings are more commonly used. God’s house is a house of order, and we are invited to create our own home based on the same transcendent principles.

Providence, Self-Reliance, and Blessings

If the shortage realities turn out to be not as substantial as current projections, our preparation efforts would not be a waste. There are timeless lessons we can gain in the process.  One mother noted, “The farther we have gotten away from learning about life through natural practices of survival, like growing our own food and raising animals as the generations before us did, we grow disconnected from understanding truths about life and the important spiritual components that accompany that.”

Preparing soil, planting seeds, watering, weeding, tending, and harvesting are all important skills that, while growing a family, can help grow testimonies of the gospel and provide an array of valuable lessons. The lessons can be gained with even a tiny patch of land, or planters filled with herbs. For most of us, this is simply not a natural skill, but even in the practice, failing, and trying again, are to be found important life lessons.

Another mother observed a lesson through preparation. “I admire Joseph of Egypt’s faithful orchestration of storing excess food for seven years, positioning his community for vitality in a potential famine and the ability to relieve others. Indeed, Joseph’s routine preparation and trust in God’s inspiration led to eventually reuniting with and joyfully blessing his family. His efforts reflect the way that ‘God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.’” 

Another noted, “The law of the harvest is an eternal principle and our efforts to learn will never be wasted, citing a restoration scripture that declares, “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life … he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.” 

Practical Steps for Starting

There is a lot of advice and information about preparation available through many sources. That also means getting started can feel incredibly overwhelming. For those looking for simple ways to make progress, we summarize below five basic steps that are a good place to start:  

1. Begin with sincere prayer. What if what you need in terms of preparation is different from other families? Fortunately, you can receive specific help from someone with the ability to guide you right. God wants you to succeed; He knows your needs. He wants to help. As President Russell Nelson has assured, “Because when we seek to hear—truly hear—His Son, He will guide us to know what to do in any circumstance.” 

Don’t second guess your intuitions. Make this a matter of daily prayer, and don’t ignore promptings. We are promised, as President Nelson continues, “He communicates quietly and with such stunning plainness that we cannot misunderstand Him.” He will not overwhelm you; He will help you do this one box of cereal or one bag of wheat at a time.

2. Take inventory of what you already have. You might have more than you realize already on hand. Make a list of what’s already there and available. What’s in your cupboards also indicates what you naturally use and is a helpful guide for at least your regular, short-term storage.

3. Build up short-term storage. To begin building your short-term storage, create a menu of meals for one week. (Aim for two meals/day in this menu schedule, because we don’t eat the same in crisis). Then, using your menu schedule, create a list of ingredients needed to make all of the meals on the schedule. Multiply that ingredient list so you would have enough for 2-3 weeks of short-term storage on hand. (That won’t likely be enough for a case of job loss, illness, or natural disasters so you might want to consider something closer to 3 months eventually, but 2-3 weeks is a great start). Now, you can subtract your current inventory from this menu schedule, and you have your short-term shopping list. 

While this can feel daunting as grocery prices are stretching budgets, keep your aim on doable steps. For instance, every time you go to the store (even if it’s just for milk and diapers), get 1 (or a few) extra items from that list—especially if they are on sale. Of course, don’t feel like you have to buy something because it’s on sale. If it ends up sitting in your cupboard unused, it really doesn’t matter how great the price was. Remember, you’re not buying a year’s worth of this type of food—just do your best to fill in the holes and build up a couple of weeks’ worth of this short-term pantry food.

4. Create some emergency kits. As you work on your pantry storage, simultaneously be thinking of a “72 hours kit” of essential food, water, medicine, energy, clothing, and activities. Think of this as something you can transport. Pretend you’re going camping—what would you need for a long weekend? Pull it all together, set it in a corner in a box, or pack it in individual backpacks (maybe get some from D.I. or a local goodwill) and hang them on your garage wall.

5. Working towards long-term storage: Your cupboards and freezer are probably getting full with your short-term food. That’s why we need to think of foods that are “shelf-stable” (not perishable) beyond that time frame. It would be ideal to have a year’s worth of long-term, shelf-stable food here in the United States. Some items might not seem like food you would ever use. But remember, something like a bag of wheat is more than unground flour. Wheat can be sprouted for fresh greens, and gluten provides protein. Cracked wheat is fiber, vitamins, and minerals, and what’s left can be ground into flour, making crackers, bagels, pancakes, and bread filling hungry tummies. 

For this longer-term storage, consider sticking with the basics from the Church of Jesus Christ’s suggested food-storage list—which highlight seven specific items of life-sustaining ingredients. 

If this feels overwhelming to do for your entire family all at once, think about building up one year of supplies for one person at a time. Once a single person is completed, then add a second, third, and however many you need for your household. If you have a family of five (some being children), a complete full-year two-person supply will feed the five of you for almost six months. Recognize that it’s not as expensive to buy and store basic ingredients as it is to purchase and keep prepared food. In fact, the cost for a month or two of your regular groceries is about what it will cost for one person for an entire year’s worth of basics (using the 7-item list). Using the prices available through the Church’s Home Storage Center (updated Jan 1, 2022), the cost for one adult person’s food supply for one year is $812.42. (Inflation and availability might mean this looks different where you are, but this is an average to work with.)

Fishes and loaves. You will not get to the end of step five overnight. As you apply efforts and listen to your deepest spiritual intuitions, you will be inspired for your family’s specific needs. You will see miracles and tender mercies as others have. We have seen throughout sacred history that God can turn five loaves of bread into enough food for thousands, and provide daily manna for an entire people. The Lord loves effort and as you make your best attempt to get started, you will learn for yourself how much your efforts do matter; they open the windows of heaven. 

Just get started. With gradual steps. Small and simple. The blessings and cumulative effect might just mean you have all the toilet paper and duct tape you will need for whatever emergency lies ahead.

The post Prepared, Not Scared appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

If that sounds outlandish, it certainly was. Those of us who lived through those waves of cultural-religious panic were relieved when people came to their senses and stopped destroying records. One outcome of that frenzy of religious accusation still seen today is that Satan and Satanism have become a comedic punchline associated with naive irrationality. One of my childhood heroes, the late Rush drummer Neil Peart, addressed the controversy following an accusatory news article from a Christian activist group. Peart said:

As one who knows many of these “demonic figures” personally, especially some of those mentioned in the article, the idea of some of these sold-out, burnt-out, cynical, strutting peacocks being so deeply and religiously committed to anything (save their “image” and chart numbers) is also a bit of a joke. And a pretty lame one at that! … Yes, you Christian crypto-fascists, it is a joke! The only problem is—you’re not laughing.

Rush fans like me enjoyed reading Peart’s witty condemnation of these excesses from Christian groups. And later, we laughed at the shrieking Church Lady on Saturday Night Live, whose puritanical “SATAN!!!” outbursts humorously cemented the symbolic end of the Satanic panics that had emerged in the 1980s.

Those panics in the 1980s may be reminiscent of another panic that took place decades earlier but then among political conservatives. In the red scare of the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy’s public hounding of Americans in the name of anti-communism captured the country’s attention and has lingered in American consciousness as an example of how fanaticism can leave a trail of innocent lives wrecked in its wake.

For Latter-day Saints, in particular, anti-communism has left a significant mark on our psyche. Notably, apostle Ezra Taft Benson has been portrayed by many to be a purveyor of extreme anti-communist ideology during his service in the Quorum of the Twelve. And Cleon Skousen’s anti-communist tracts are influencing political commentary into the present. Adding to people’s sense of alarm, they and others have contributed to the view that communism and socialism are Satanic ideologies.

Wary of panics and hysteria, many of us have come to view these kinds of references to Satanism and communism with disdain, automatically and laughingly dismissing any suggestions of the same. Arguably as a direct consequence of these historical and cultural memories, many in America no longer believe that either Satan or communism are threatening realities. I have not second-guessed these instincts myself until only recently.

Going deeper. Has there been a Satanic influence in popular music? Or was Neil Peart correct in his assessment that rock musicians were too self-absorbed to pay attention to abstractions like Satanism? The answer to that question depends on how we define Satanism. Common notions of Satanism envision worship of Satan, occult rituals, pentagrams, and even a statue of Baphomet shown in public to counter the presence of the ten commandments.

But a more accurate description of what Satanism really involves is found in the words of Blanche Barton, “Magistra Templi Rex” of the Church of Satan:

The idea of worshiping Satan is ridiculous. We worship ourselves first and foremost, and we use the Satanic as a metaphor for calling forth the powers within ourselves that we find enriching or enlivening. Satan has always been a metaphor of defiance, fortitude against all odds, and self-determination in whatever guises he is represented.

Returning to questions of Satanic influence in rock music, and continuing Led Zeppelin as an example, it’s interesting to note that guitarist Jimmy Page became enamored with the ideas of Aleister Crowley, an occultist who claimed to receive from a supernatural being a set of teachings called The Book of The Law. This formed the foundation for Thelema, Crowley’s belief system named after the Greek word for “self.” These teachings have been foundational to modern Satanism, to the point where many refer to him as the godfather of the movement.

In an article on Crowley and modern Satanism, Asbjorn Dyrendal explains that “[Crowley’s] discourse makes use of and contributes to a literary tradition of positive discourse on Satan, and it is central to the disembedding of Satan from Christian demonology and re-embedding him into an esoteric discourse as something positive.”

Self-worship as the highest aspiration. And what is that something positive? It is self-worship, the insistence that one’s desires ought to never be “repressed” by culture, religion, or any other influence—and, indeed, in which any sort of suppression of the same becomes the “greatest … sin.” Or, as Marilyn Manson famously described the core of Satanism, it was about “being your own god.”

This brings us back to the hero of my youth, Neil Peart. It seems he was correct and that Christian critics were wrong to paint Rush and other bands as true Satan worshippers. But have Christian groups been correct in warning about Satanic influence in popular music? If we rightly identify the heart of Satanism as unfettered worship of self and will, then the answer is yes: just as it is true that many other areas of art, literature, and entertainment reflect that same influence.

For example, in Glennon Doyle’s blockbuster book Untamed, she writes that …

We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves … I love myself now. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself. I’ll disappoint everyone else before I’ll disappoint myself. I’ll forsake all others before I’ll forsake myself.

Doyle has achieved great success as a writer advocating for self as the supreme authority over every aspect of daily life. And her invocation of religion extends this mindset—God, in this view, is only ever to be conceptualized as affirming of our every impulse and desire.

For another example, observe how modern epicurean writers are obsessed with only the central panel of Heironymous Bosch’s three-panel painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” while ignoring the left and right panels. The three panel work moves from the innocence of the Garden of Eden, to the hedonistic debaucheries of our fallen world, to the punishments of hell. Their focus on the central panel and complete ignoring of the other two suggests that they worship a god very much of this world, one that denies anyone can ever really become innocent or pure, and who whispers there will never be any reckoning for our deeds here on earth.

Or, as Aleister Crowley’s supernatural entity states in the Book of the Law, “Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this.”

Seen through this lens, Satanism as self-worship seems very banal. But the more unsettling implications of Satanic influence in popular music persist, and not without reason. The Netflix documentary ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads explores the life of guitarist Robert Johnson and the rumors that his skills were obtained through a pact with Satan. Johnson was part of what is called “the 27 club,” a surprisingly large group of popular musicians who died at the age of 27 after meteoric rises to fame. When asked if Led Zeppelin’s success was obtained through evil influences, Jimmy Page has always been evasive. In more recent examples, rappers Lil Nas X and Lil Uzy Vert both make explicit references to Lucifer in their current work. And the controversial TikTok star Flyysoulja posted a video narrative of a conversation with a demon, leading to a flurry of commentary suggesting that this is a regular occurrence in the music industry.

Satan, self-worship, and Marx. Back to communism now. Having earlier mentioned Joseph McCarthy’s red scare and prominent Latter-day Saints’ warnings about the Satanic nature of communism, is there any substance to those claims as well? Or is this another example of Satanic panic applied to politics? Again, the answer depends upon how we define important terms—in this case, communism. And if our definition of communism is the forced collectivization of society or some other narrow concept, we will be led to examine a straw man. I would argue communism is better defined as the application of Marxist assumptions and worldview to the economic ordering of society.

It’s hard to do justice to the breadth and all-encompassing nature of Marx’s theories here, but at a basic level, Marx operated from the following assumptions:

• Society can be divided into two basic classes (bourgeois and proletariat).
• The proletariat, lower class are victims of a social structure of oppression that keeps them alienated, which is conceptualized mainly as being disconnected from the product of one’s labor.
• The oppressive structure of society is maintained by a superstructure of religion and culture, which blinds and anesthetizes people to their own oppression.

In what sense is any of this Marxist teaching rightly considered by some to be “Satanic?” Enter Catholic writer Paul Kengor and his recent book The Devil and Karl Marx. Kengor’s book has been correctly criticized for its often ranting tone, but it nevertheless contains important insights into Marx’s inner world. Drawing heavily on Robert Payne’s well-respected 1968 biography of Marx, Kengor points out Marx’s fixation on the theme of self-supremacy in his writings; his use of the Satanic narrative of defiance of God; and his personal loathing for any system, religious or otherwise, that would inhibit the expression of his self-liberation.

Perhaps most telling is Marx’s focus on criticism as the primary means for achieving his vision of society. As he wrote:

The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism. … Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. … The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

In reading this statement from Marx, we might be tempted to agree to some extent. Religion does, in fact, benefit from some forms of critical analysis to correct its errors and temper its excesses. But Marx has something more extreme in mind. As he clarifies:

Criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted. In itself, it is no object worthy of thought, it is an existence which is as despicable as it is despised. Criticism does not need to make things clear to itself as regards this object, for it has already settled accounts with it. It no longer assumes the quality of an end-in-itself, but only of a means. Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential work is denunciation.

I’ve written previously on denunciation as a tool in revolutionary tyranny, and particularly its implications for Latter-day Saint understanding of Satan. The impulse to denounce is essentially destructive, especially when there is no constructive vision offered by the critic. In his book People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck explores the nature of evil, including a psychiatrist’s first-hand perspective on demonic possession. Some of his insights seem particularly relevant:

The spirit I witnessed at each exorcism was clearly, utterly, and totally dedicated to opposing human life and growth. It told both patients to kill themselves. When asked in one exorcism why it was the Antichrist, it answered, “Because Christ taught people to love each other.”… Queried more, it simply said to the exorcist, “I want to kill you.” There was absolutely nothing creative or constructive about it; it was purely destructive (my emphasis again added).

The image here is of evil transforming the soul into something like a vat of acid, consumed with the compulsion to criticize, tear down, and deconstruct. And the primary targets of these compulsions are good people and things, influences in the world that create and edify and heal.

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

The social systems and critical processes Marx envisioned are, of course, inseparable from the personal experiences of his own life, and in the words of biographer Robert Payne, “There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons, when rage overflowed in him and became poison, and he seemed to enter into a nightmare.” Whatever else others might say in praise of his life’s work, the direct fruits of his personal attitudes are not hard to discern: an unwillingness to work to support his own family; a loathing for life and the world around him; suicide fantasies that came to fruition in the lives of two of his children; delusions of power; constant conflict with everyone around him; and utter failure to ever transcend his personal impulses.

Marxism in real life. If Marx’s personal demons are horrifying, seeing them become the delusionary basis for state policy has been worse. As Kengor argues:

No other political ideology has produced as much wretched poverty, rank repression, and sheer violence. In country after country, implemented in varying forms across wide-ranging nationalities, traditions, backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities, communism coldly and consistently violated the full sweep of most basic human rights, from property to press, from speech to assembly, from conscience to religion. So restrictive was communism in the twentieth century that its implementers routinely refused to allow citizens the right to exit (that is, escape) the destructive systems imposed within their borders. In some cases, they erected walls to herd and fence in the “masses” they claimed to champion.

He states again, “That bears repeating: so restrictive was communism that its advocates had to build walls—poured with cement, topped with barbed wire, patrolled 24/7 by secret police with automatic weapons turned on their own citizenry—to keep their people from fleeing.”

The horrors of Communism are sometimes dismissed as erroneous past implementations of Marx’s ideas: the objection always seems to be that these systems based in Marxist assumptions about reality always failed because they weren’t Marxist enough! But beyond the question of political and economic systems, the question of Marx’s demons and his ideology has become particularly relevant in recent years, with the rise of critical theory in all of its various forms throughout the West. In his podcast, The New Discourses, James Lindsay has done lengthy readings of Marxist thought, ranging from Marx to his various branches of influence in critical theory down to the present.

Lindsay shows that even critical-theorist critiques of Marx have been backhanded compliments, accepting-while-modifying his basic model of oppressive society that is reinforced by a superstructure of ideology. In the present, our “oppression superstructures” have expanded to include white supremacy, heteronormativity, meritocracy, patriarchy, and even “healthism,” creating systems of oppression toward the “marginalized” who then need to awaken their critical consciousness in order to throw off oppressive influences of religion, tradition, family, and culture.

Marxism in the world. At the time of the writing of Payne’s 1968 biography of Marx, he noted that half the world was under the rule of governments that based their systems on Marxist thinking. This brings to mind a passage in restoration scripture that expands upon Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares: “That great church, the mother of abominations, that made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, that persecuteth the saints of God, that shed their blood—she who sitteth upon many waters, and upon the islands of the sea—behold, she is the tares of the earth … .”

The Marxist view of reality has indeed spread over the world—over many waters and the islands of the sea—like wildfire. In recent decades it has become a replacement religious system, filling a God- and church-shaped hole in the hearts of people throughout the world who have grown disillusioned with faith. Its primary tool, criticism, contributes to persecution of the saints and leads to the removal of plain and precious meanings of scripture.

With that in mind, it is important to understand, as James Lindsay has argued, that Marxism is happy to replace Judeo-Christian understanding of God with a new theology, including a new God. In the words of Marx that mirror Crowley and his acolytes in modern Satanism, the ideal is for man to “move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.” Theologically speaking, just as Christ was eager to point our worship to the Father, Satan is eager to point our worship to our ego, the thing Westerners call “self.” In questions of what is or is not “Satanic,” we can do no better than to start there.

Which returns us to the question of whether popular music and communism are Satanic. Are they? A good answer is that sometimes they can be. A collectivist society is no more inherently Satanic than a capitalist one, and popular music is no more inherently Satanic than any other form of music. Yet let us not stop our thinking there.  Because with a little more digging, at least this much becomes clear:  The question of Satanic influence in economic systems, art, entertainment, or anything else for that matter, may well be answered in the extent to which these things lead to worship of the self.

The post Marxism, Satanism, and the Worship of Self appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

But I think a careful look at the “book banning” controversy of today shows that it bears little resemblance to the controversies of the past.

The Borders of Book Banning

It’s not particularly difficult to recognize that most of us fall comfortably in the middle on questions of book banning. Very few believe government mandates should be in place to prohibit works with artistic, literary, or academic merit. We want these works to be freely produced, in an environment where authors know they can publish what they want in safety and that it will remain available to the public.

On the other hand, few of us believe that individuals should not be able to decide which books they keep in their own homes. 

Our primary debate, then, centers not on the rights of individuals to avoid censorship or the rights of individuals to avoid materials, but rather on how we spend limited community resources. In the case of school libraries, those limited resources are money and space, and in the case of a required reading curriculum, the limited resource is time.

Who has the right to dictate our decisions over how to use those scarce resources of time and money and what criteria should they use? 

When we talk about a book banning brouhaha in 21st century America, then, it should evoke the image of conversations at town halls and school board meetings, not the image of Nazi bonfires or Inquisition torture devices. Conflating WWI censorship with 21st-century curriculum disputes is a category error that can lead us to bad conclusions.

Bipartisan Book Banning

If you observe recent coverage of book banning, you’d think that the phenomenon is a uniquely conservative one. The Washington Post in their recent op-ed explicitly decries that those seeking book bans are “groups of mostly White conservatives” (sic). The New York Times’ coverage of the issue earlier this year similarly focused on conservative efforts to ban books.

That focus shouldn’t be surprising. Conservative civic engagement has been on the rise, and parental efforts to determine what books are used in school libraries and curricula have political support, especially in state legislatures, that hasn’t always existed. 

But these reports also unfairly target conservatives for banning books, with hints they are somehow doing so on the basis of race or sexuality, when, in fact, the stated intention is most often sexually explicit materials.

Books found on required reading lists around the country have included extended sections comparing the sensations of dildos and penises, and which of these the main character preferred to be penetrated by. Other required (non-fiction) books have included sections about a man falling in love with his dog, and when the dog went into heat gathering canine semen, injecting it into his penis, and then impregnating his dog.

But this is hardly a conservative-only enterprise. Duluth, Minnesota’s local paper, recently covered a university group hoping to ban books in local schools that they find offensive for race-related reasons. Meanwhile, the New York Times recently covered a successful effort by left-wing critics to have a book on black feminism banned because of the race of the author, one that, significantly, they avoided calling a “book ban.” 

A recent viral video showed high school students throwing out library books, describing their efforts as “decolonization” of the school’s library.

Meanwhile, more and more school librarians hope to ban many books from required reading lists, something that might be hard to believe with popular media coverage continuing to paint this as largely a right-wing parental phenomenon. But the suggestion of these librarians to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and Shakespeare plays are no less “banning books” than parents who suggest the same—except that librarians are already integrated into the decision-making apparatus, while parents are often excluded from these conversations. But why should librarians’ voices carry more weight and be respected more than the parents of children themselves? 

Before the Book Banning

This entire conversation sidesteps the important question of how books come to be in school libraries and required reading lists in the first place, and what the standards used to get them there are. According to the IFLA Code of Ethics: “Librarians and other information workers have the right to free speech in the workplace provided it does not infringe the principle of neutrality towards users.” While this principle of neutrality may be an important ideal, it may be difficult to accomplish in practice. Donations from the American Library Association’s employees during the 2020 political cycle went to Democratic candidates and organizations 100% of the time. And in 2016 among all librarians, donations went to the Democratic presidential candidate by a 419:1 ratio. 

A composition instructor who works for a major publicly funded research institution, who agreed to speak with me anonymously because of fears about employment repercussions, said that local librarians they had spoken to refused to purchase conservative children’s books because the librarians believed they weren’t of high enough quality to warrant inclusion.

The instructor went on to ask, “Is it banning, if the books never get on the library shelves? Or only once they are on, and then, only if the librarians resist the request to remove them?”

If librarians systemically tend toward liberal world views, we should expect to see a bias in which books are selected and which books are deemed to be of too low of quality. And consequently, we should expect those parents with conservative world views to speak out at higher rates. 

Placing the burden on those who are excluded and disempowered in the initial book selection process to simply accept the status quo or be unfairly labeled a “book banner” is deeply problematic. 

Book Banning Band-Aids

How to spend limited resources is one often used definition for the word “politics.” So it shouldn’t surprise us that with limited slots for books, and increasing polarization, selecting books for our community schools would become political.

Fortunately, in 93% of cases at least, there remains a solution: Democratically elected school boards. School boards should help community schools reflect their local communities because they are elected by and represent the values of that community.

Yes, we can expect disagreements about which books our schools spend their limited resources on, and school boards should be able to effectively navigate those disputes.

One Tennessee district could have been a positive example of this. Two local mom groups formed at about the same time each with concerns about the school’s required readings. One of the groups, One Willco, hoped to change the readings to better address racism. The other group, Moms for Liberty, formed because they worried the second-grade required readings were already too activist on issues of race. This could have been an opportunity for the community to work with the school board, but instead the group with concerns that the curriculum was already too activist was accused of “bullying our school board” because of the overwhelming support they received at school board meetings.

I think I’d be inclined to support the position of One Willco in this instance. Moms for Liberty’s concerns about books on Ruby Bridges feel too sensitive and overwrought. But I don’t live in their school district. I shouldn’t have a say. And those who live in that school district and disagree with me have every right to their opinion and to be heard by a democratically elected school board. And if there are large crowds hoping to share the same perspective at school board meetings, perhaps the school board should interpret that as a democratic signal, rather than a bullying effort. 

But when parents go even further and work on electing school board members who run on platforms to address their concerns, their efforts are still too often seen as invalid. 

Newberg, Oregon, is a small conservative suburb on the outskirts of Portland. Many of those who teach at the schools were educated in deeply liberal Portland and moved out to this community to find work. These are the kinds of folks who could have rainbow banners, and Black Lives Matter flags in their classrooms, and still believe the only political thing there was the American flag. 

In response to what many in the community saw as increasing politicization at school, new board members were elected who promised to create greater political neutrality in the schools. But when they started to implement policies in this direction there was very strong pushback from school personnel. And the superintendent simply refused to obey the direction of the school board.

The school board refused to back down and fired the superintendent. But school personnel and their supporters were so outraged that they forced the board members into a recall election. But the community once again chose those same school board members. Only time will tell if the parents’ voices in Newberg will be respected this time. 

In too many cases, when parents attempt to use the mechanism in place to address their concerns—working with and electing school board members—they are demonized or outright ignored.

Because this relationship isn’t working as ideally as it should, we’ve seen state legislators jump into the fray. But state lawmakers can often make things worse. Their motivations are often more blatantly political, and they paint with the big brush and heavy hammers that local decision-makers can avoid. For example, one law proposed in Oklahoma would require school librarians to remove a book any parent complains about within 30 days or be fired. 

But other laws by state legislators have been more helpful. Florida’s recent law, for example, put in place a process requiring school districts to take seriously parent complaints about books, offer a comment period before adding new materials, and consider requests for changes. 

So while local school boards clearly are better equipped to deal with these issues, when the relationships between these boards and the communities they represent break, prudent state legislatures might appropriately step in to try and make the situation better.  But only if they are prudent in prioritizing healing relationships rather than political grandstanding.

Book Banning Bromides

Ultimately the question isn’t whether or not books should be “banned” alone. Almost every book is functionally banned from every school library and required reading list as is since there are simply too many books and too few spots for them. The question is rather who gets to decide which precious few books won’t be banned. 

I have sympathies on multiple sides of this debate loving both books targeted by librarians such as The Great Gatsby, and books targeted by parents such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. But it’s not about which side I happen to agree with, it’s about the legitimacy of both sides to have a point of view, and ending the notion that only one side trying to affect what’s in school libraries and curriculums is “banning books.”

Those who consider parents pushing for changes to the curriculum to be problematic book banners, while librarians who do the same thing to be merely doing their job, are guilty of minimizing the role of parents in the school community.  Rather than playing an important part, these parents are portrayed as an obstacle to a relationship between school and children they would prefer to keep direct, and perhaps even unmediated? Instead of community servants, school personnel are to implement whatever ideology they currently deem best. And while anyone is free to side with anyone they want in which books should be used and which books shouldn’t, asserting that one side’s efforts to enter the debate are business as usual, but the other side’s efforts to enter the debate are illegitimate “book banning” simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. 

Neither can we comfort ourselves by saying that we don’t believe in any book banning. The current discourse characterizes exclusion from the limited slots on required reading lists and library shelves as “banning,” so most books will have to be banned. And all too often those who take this position simply mean, essentially, that only librarians and teachers get to decide what books are banned and that happens behind closed doors where parents don’t have to hear about it. 

No serious commentators suggest that anyone be prevented from writing, publishing, or reading whichever books they can. Books are more widely available than ever before. Between online archives, Google Books, Amazon, PDFs, and ebooks, you can access virtually any book that is currently available in any form in a matter of minutes online.  Even the  New York Library offered “banned” books free on its app to anyone across the country. There is no risk of anyone not being able to get access to any book they want. The United States is not in a time of onerous book banning. And accusations to the contrary are blunt tools to try and scare parents away from the table. 

Rather we are in a time of increased polarization, where opinions about what books schools should spend limited resources on are more dimorphic than in recent history. We should expect hard and difficult questions about which books should be selected, and we should empower parents to work with democratically elected school boards in making those decisions. But we should not reflexively dismiss anyone with a different opinion about which books our children should read as somehow being in favor of “book banning.” The accusation simply does not fit our current circumstances

The post The Book Banning Brouhaha appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

if there are any heavens my mother will

(all by herself) have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses …

& the whole garden will bow

My husband and I recently started watching the Japanese series “Old Enough” on Netflix. It’s a charming public-access documentary show about toddlers and preschool-age children running their first “errand” (taking dad’s work uniform to the dry cleaner down the street, picking up some curry from the corner store, etc.) on their own, somewhat of a Japanese rite of passage. The show doesn’t have English dubs; non-Japanese speakers have to follow along with subtitles. But there’s one word, probably the most frequently uttered word by the children, that is recognizable by speakers of almost any language—mama.

The word for mother, or a diminutive form of it such as mama, is almost universally recognizable in every language. This is likely due to the developmental order of sounds babies make—they start with the ahh sound, then will intermittently close their mouths, making an mmmm, hence, mama. Just as mama, or mother, is a nearly universally recognizable word, so it is a universally powerful one. 

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we refer to our primordial mother as Eve, or Chavah, meaning life. In a letter to the church membership in 1942, the first presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spoke of motherhood as “the highest, holiest service … assumed by mankind.” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelves Apostles taught that “no love in mortality comes closer to approximating the pure love of Jesus Christ than the selfless love a devoted mother has for her child.” President Sheri Dew, formerly of the General Relief Society Presidency, taught that motherhood is “the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us.” While there are relatively few accounts of specific women in ancient scripture, most of the references are to stories of brave, faithful mothers —Hannah, Mary, Sariah, the mothers of the stripling warriors, and so on. 

Some have complicated feelings about the word “mother.” Some mothers leave their children and some are taken from them. Some mothers, because of mental or physical illness, poverty, or other circumstances, do not or cannot provide a stable, loving childhood for the children they bear. Some mothers do all they can for their children and yet those children stray, and some mothers look back on their child-rearing years with regret of all they could have done. Some women desperately want to be mothers and cannot, and some women bear the cross of mothering children whose own parents abused and abandoned them. Some mothers feel stifled by motherhood, and in our fast-paced, self-centered world, many mothers don’t have the community support they deserve. But regardless of one’s association with the word mother, it is undeniably an important, tender word.

Because of the power and importance of the word mother, it has then been surprising and deeply troubling for many of us to see the secular society beginning to replace the word mother with “pregnant person,” “birthing person,” and the word “women” with “menstruators” and other similar language. Other words relating to the experience of womanhood, such as breastfeeding, have received a similar degendering makeover. This, we are told, is to include people who do not identify as women, such as transgender men and non-binary people, but who still have physically female reproductive systems. It is interesting to note that similar language has not been adopted for men—I can find few non-satirical examples of men being referred to as “testicle havers” or “inseminators” in the name of inclusion.

Occasionally, gendered language is more acceptable in progressive discourse. We see in the abortion debate, for instance, frequent talk about women’s specific experiences and common references to a “woman’s right to her reproductive health.” Unfortunately, when it is not used to further a socially liberal cause, female language seems far less acceptable.  

In particular, using inclusive language, including referring to individuals in a way which they prefer, has become an important virtue in progressive society. I do think on its face this is mostly a positive endeavor, regardless of one’s personal beliefs. I do not believe that trans women are literally the same as biological women, but I do believe they are beloved children of God and deserving of kindness and dignity. Out of a sense of courtesy and respect, I am happy to refer to them with the names and pronouns that they prefer. I was inspired during our own worldwide gathering of the Church of Jesus Christ by the many messages of peacemaking, particularly when Elder Neil L. Anderson stated, “We genuinely love and care for all our neighbors, whether or not they believe as we do.”

However, I do not think it is unreasonable to hope this courtesy could be returned. I, like I think most women, do not identify as a cisgender woman, nor a “birthing person,” or a “uterus haver” or a “menstruator.”

The potential effects of erasing female language go beyond hurt feelings. We risk not having a clear language to communicate the social problems primarily facing women (which is probably why female language is still especially prevalent in the progressive abortion discourse). While women’s rights in the United States have progressed immensely in the past century and women are well represented—even over-represented—in education and many professional fields, there are many problems still primarily or exclusively faced by women. For example, 85 percent of domestic violence victims are women. Mothers make up about 80 percent of single parents. And the maternal mortality rate in the United States is abysmal—by far worse than any other developed nation. 

Plain, direct language that most Americans understand is important to researching and alleviating these and other social problems. And while “birthing bodies” might be encouraged and favored among highly-educated liberals, these neologisms tend not to be part of most people’s identities and vocabularies. Take, for example, the term Latinx—while most institutions of higher learning and news media have adopted this term, a recent Pew Research Center Poll found that less than one in four U.S. Hispanics surveyed had heard of the term, and only 3 percent use it. 

While each side of this linguistic issue would likely favor the other to use only their preferred language, compromise is possible—we can use language that is both inclusive and clear to all, including women who identify simply as women. Rather than adopting exclusively gender-neutral language, particularly language that comes across as dehumanizing (with awkward emphasis on the body), we can use language that emphasizes the person and includes both gendered and non-gendered terms, such as “women, trans men, and others who need gynecological care.” As the cultural gaps widen between conservatives and progressives, these types of compromises will be necessary to be able to communicate and work together effectively. 

President Howard W. Hunter once taught, “The world in which we live would benefit greatly if men and women everywhere would exercise the pure love of Christ, which is kind, meek, and lowly … It refuses to condone ridicule, vulgarity, abuse, or ostracism. It encourages diverse people to live together in Christian love regardless of religious belief, race, nationality, financial standing, education, or culture.” As we navigate these difficult cultural differences, we need not concede our core divine identities we relish as believers—sons and daughters of God, male and female, in the express image of our Heavenly Parents. The gospel of Jesus Christ is welcome and accepting of all who will accept Him. Whatever our differences, we can remember as Latter-day saints that inclusivity is an important aspect of discipleship. 

And we can do this without forgetting eternal and beautiful differences.  I am a woman and a mother. These identities hold deep meaning and purpose for me and many women like me. And intimidating women like me into giving up our historic and visceral identifying language to be inclusive to others is at best inconsistent. 

At worst, we are obscuring something essential about ourselves—something that we cannot allow to be lost.

The post Don’t You Dare Say “Woman” appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We mourn with the wounded and the families of the victims. This attack especially hurts because of the clear racial hatred motivating it. But it was far from the only violence in America this weekend. Ninety-four other shooting deaths took place over the same weekend. In fact, it wasn’t even the only hate crime shooting this weekend. A church was also attacked in California, with police currently believing it was motivated because of the nationality of the congregants. There are obviously other kinds of violence happening with less media attention: an estimated 700,000 children are abused annually in the U.S alone, millions of partners battered, and other violence from sexual assault and bullying. Since Columbine, 320 schools have experienced shootings—leading to 163 deaths of children, educators, and other people, and 366 injuries, according to Washington Post data. 

The Book of Genesis states that in the days prior to Noah, the earth was “filled with violence.” When you add to U.S. violence the mounting toll of aggression overseas, it sometimes feels like we’re starting to get there too. 

Among all the words we use to describe such violence, one of the most common is “senseless’— as in, there’s no way to truly and fully make sense of such barbaric acts.  That’s absolutely true. But we have to try.  As self-interpreting creatures, we human beings cannot help but try to make sense of and “narrate” what’s happening moment by moment. That’s true of small things—and it’s equally true of profound, life-altering events. We need ways to understand and find meaning in what’s happening—to bring order to our lives, find comfort, and know what to do next.  It is also important to understand the causes of violence to help resolve them and “proclaim peace” as commanded in scripture.  

When it comes to violence, it’s clear from the research that there are many potential factors involved. Too often, however, we hear simplistic—often politically motivated—narratives. Each time there is another tragic mass shooting in America, for instance, there are certain explanatory stories that we tend to hear—and others that are rarely considered.

1. Gun availability. The easy availability of weapons is perhaps the most common explanation—and among the first things people logically turn to to make sense of why an act of violence has taken place: Where did the person purchase the weapons? Were they acquired legally—with proper background checks? (In this case, yes.) If so, what further legislation might be needed to better control the flow of weapons? 

While many now take for granted that the presence of more weapons heightens the risk of violence (with associated activism about stricter gun control), a strong segment of Americans believe otherwise—insisting that an armed population is among the best protections against violence. Many have noted that this is one thing Russia had not planned for in its invasion strategies for Ukraine—the possibility of having to face an armed population that did not welcome their incursion as “liberation.”

2. Group-based hatred. Another increasingly common explanation for violence is underlying animosities that may exist between an aggressor and members of another group—across differences of race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.

On some level, of course, hatred and hostility of some kind arguably underlie all acts of aggression—but this explanation draws attention not simply to hatred from one individual to another, but rather, for one individual to an entire group of people. 

For instance, the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto makes painfully clear his own racial paranoia about “white genocide” and his hatred of minority groups—detailing how he traveled to a zip code that has the highest percentage of black people close enough to where he lives and planned to kill as many black people as possible. 

3. Mental illness and instability. Virtually everyone willing to take another person’s life has shifted into another mental space. And in the case of Buffalo’s shooter, there are emerging reports of his own instability—implicit in earlier COVID-19 paranoia, arriving in school wearing a full hazmat suit to class. 

In order to avoid stigmatizing others who grapple with mental and emotional health, there is typically far less attention to this—brought up especially among commentators on the right, pushing back on guns as the primary variable of action.  

4. Structural and cultural inequality. Many who examine the underlying causes of violence point to issues such as poverty, or unjust laws targeting specific groups in more systematic ways. This has become more and more common as an explanation in popular discourse. Some peace scholars argue that attitudes and structures prioritizing one group over another are so directly tied to violence that they cast the inequalities as enacting violence themselves.

These theories see violence as being used to enforce inequalities, as the Buffalo shooter was attempting to do, but also as a likely reaction to long-term inequality by marginalized groups. 

5. Religious radicalization and rationalizations. Although fairly rare in modern crime statistics, there have been acts throughout history where perpetrators claimed to be acting under God’s command. The Lafferty murders again in the national spotlight, the brothers insisted they felt impressed to carry out the attacks as the “arm of God” (a rationale that prosecutors in the case argued was an excuse and pretext for a crime of passion and revenge).  

Although rare, there is clearly great interest in religious rationales given by killers for violence—far more than other factors that are much more prevalent. The 9/11 attacks are the most obvious example of wide-scale violence perpetrated by radical extremists—with it popular to point back to the Crusades as an earlier historical example. Believers today are quick to underscore how much any and all such attacks reflect a perversion of sacred teachings across all faiths.  

6. Media socialization. It used to be more common to hear people reference violent video games as playing a role in socializing real-life violence (something backed up by solid empirical evidence).  Today, it’s more common to hear concerns about radicalization happening via social media and exposure to other examples of violence. In the Buffalo killer’s manifesto, he wrote about his admiration for previous mass killers and said that he took as a particular inspiration the man responsible for a 2019 mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.

7. Early abuse and bullying. Media is clearly not the only (or strongest) socializing factor.  And it’s not uncommon to hear emphasis given to violence experienced by a perpetrator either at the hand of classmates or within their own family growing up.  

8. Social isolation fueling delusion. Since Columbine, there has been some attention to the social isolation of many who engage in violence. Although that has turned out to be exaggerated in some cases, there is a clear and historical empirical picture connecting the two variables.  

In the recent Buffalo shooting, several classmates have reported, “He was always very quiet and never much said anything,” and had grown more reclusive over the years since one student met him in elementary school—in part, at least, due to COVID-19 lock-downs, as his family claimed. Another classmate described him as “definitely a little bit of an outcast … He just wasn’t that social.”

9. Substance-induced volatility. The way in which alcohol and illegal drugs can remove inhibitions is tragically well known—showing up in countless family stories from children growing up with alcoholic fathers, as well as criminal cases involving stimulant drugs, especially cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, and spice (PCP, LSD, Ecstasy, and marijuana can also induce aggression).  

It’s estimated annually that as many as 90,000 domestic violence deaths worldwide happen under the influence of alcohol—with alcohol or drug use involved in 40-60% of family violence cases.  And one study found that 75% of individuals who begin treatment for substance abuse report having engaged in physical assault, mugging, using a weapon to attack another person, and other violent crimes.

10. Family dissolution. It’s not common to hear media outlets citing family background as a predisposing contributor to a certain act of aggression. Yet it’s fairly uncontroversial among researchers that children who experience divorce tend to have an increase in antisocial behavior and aggression, among other things. For instance, one recent study of hundreds of teens found that “parental divorce was significantly associated with more physical and verbal aggression and anger and hostility in adolescents.”

Research studies place the percentage of mass shooters coming from homes with unmarried parents as high as 90%. And among all gun violence, family factors even more prominently. 53% of shootings in the US occurred as part of domestic violence. 

Of course, divorcing parents can continue to provide nurturing homes for children—even if they must work harder to do so.  

11. A dangerous void of meaning and purpose. A final influence that hardly ever comes up in public conversation is a sense of meaning, purpose, and spirituality. Far beyond mere mental instability, Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic highlights a moral instability in the Buffalo killer, with “nearly every page of the Buffalo manifesto evidence of profound moral deformity.”

On many levels, religion and faith communities have proven to bolster a sense of meaning, purpose, and transcendence, that can not only restrain baser impulses—but integrate people into a community where better inclinations are socialized.  

Interpretations and implications.  Of course, there are more influences than even these eleven —but that’s really our main point. Especially given the escalating incidence of violence today, it is our belief that a public conversation attending to all the many potential factors will be better positioned to shape an effective response—compared with one selectively oriented on only a handful of such factors.  

In the case of the latter, our public conversations will almost inevitably bounce between competing partisan solutions: “better gun control could solve this!” vs. “no, if we only provided better treatment for mental illness, none of this would be happening.” By broadening our focus, perhaps we can acknowledge a role for many different kinds of steps—and pursue a more comprehensive response that not only acknowledges the complexity of influences but also stands a better chance of staunching the growing tide of societal aggression. Rather than deprioritizing and minimizing family and faith as potential protective factors, this kind of response would rightly see them as more central to the solution.

The post Narrating Violence: Stories We Tell (and Don’t Tell) appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In low-trust communities and societies, life is a little harder. You keep your doors locked and never leave your kids unaccompanied. You get your guard up when someone asks you for something. You take fewer risks and spend more energy protecting what you already have. You check and recheck, ask for references, and investigate, rather than simply trusting. People in low-trust communities even tend to have fewer kids, because of the vulnerability that is involved in bringing new life into the world.

High social trust is easier to maintain in communities where everyone “thinks the same,” in the sense of having a high degree of agreement on core values and beliefs. This is one reason Utah has tended to score highly on measures of social trust: most people in the state share a core worldview. When you know someone is a fellow church member, you feel you already know a lot about them because of the beliefs you expect they share with you. And when you feel you know someone, you tend to trust them more.

While there are substantial benefits to being part of a high trust community, there is a downside too, which is vulnerability to cheaters and liars, who can use high levels of trust to take advantage of community members. From the point of view of a conman, trust is just gullibility. Communities whose social trust is built on shared belief, in particular, are vulnerable to bad actors who exploit trust by pretending to share community beliefs.

This vulnerability makes high-trust communities unstable in one important sense. When bad actors insinuate themselves into a community, the level of trust diminishes. Community members become warier when they realize someone has taken advantage of them or their friends. Members of faith communities who repeatedly encounter bad actors realize they cannot assume that fellow members are also fellow believers. Social trust takes a long time to develop but can unravel quickly in the presence of bad actors.

It’s not so much like that anymore. Divisions in the Church increasingly resemble those outside of it. We have less in common than we used to—members who nominally share religious beliefs often seem to have wildly different worldviews. There is a diminishing sense of solidarity: we support each other less in keeping church standards, especially when keeping those standards involves a social cost. Other changes fit a pattern of declining trust: we are slipping in our ministering (formerly home/visiting teaching). Marriage rates are falling. We are having fewer children—the rate of decline in Utah specifically is striking. In general, we seem to be acting more and more like a low-trust community.

What explains this unraveling of social trust in the Church, if, in fact, it is happening?

Maybe the Saints have spontaneously become more jaded and untrusting. Or maybe we have become less worthy of trust. But it is hard to see why this would be the case, or, if it is, why the shift has been so rapid. It seems to me the presence of bad actors in our communities is part of the explanation. We have, unfortunately, been exposed to a growing number of them, coinciding with the emergence of a new religion and near-universal adoption of social media by our members.

Meaning, that there are now a lot of very vocal people, especially in English-speaking online spaces, who pretend to be loyal to the Church and to believe in its teachings but are not, and do not. They keep up a pretense of belief, at least in front of fellow members, because it gives them credibility when they criticize the Church.

This credibility is an underrated ingredient in successful efforts to pull people away from the Church. When someone outside the Church criticizes it, we correctly contextualize what they say as criticism and respond accordingly. When someone who appears to be a faithful member criticizes the Church, we assume they share our loyalties and try hard to integrate what they say into our mental model of what it means to be faithful, which causes confusion if the person does not, in fact, share our loyalties. A Latter-day Saint student at a secular university hearing something that challenges her beliefs usually meets the challenge, while a student at BYU hearing the same thing from a deceptive instructor will often simply become confused and discouraged—or worse.

In old-school online forums, the tactic of posing as a member of a high-trust community in order to criticize or sabotage it is called “concern trolling,” and is typically banned because of the poisonous effect it has on discourse. Jesus gave us the vivid metaphor of a wolf wearing sheep’s clothing. As much as we hate to admit it, deceit often works. The wolf’s teeth are not his only weapon, nor are “ideas” the critic’s.

Concern trolling, in the context of the Church, works on two levels. On the first level, bad actors simply trick many members into thinking they are fellow believers. On the second, they rely on members who see through the ruse not to say anything. In high-trust communities where everyone tends to be honest, there is usually a norm against accusing others of bad faith. And for good reason—false accusations of bad faith can themselves be very damaging to social trust. So church members feel compelled to assume good faith, or at least not to openly question it. When someone in our community says they are just as faithful as anyone, we tend to nod and take them at their word, even if they spend most of their time trying to discredit the prophets and introduce tension with church teachings.

Our group ethic of assuming everyone is being honest works wonderfully when everyone really is being honest. The price of engagement goes way down. Life is easier. But when bad actors exploit this tendency, the same ethic means they can do a lot more damage than they otherwise could. When a nontrivial number of people in the community are taking advantage of others by acting in bad faith, an unconditional assumption of good faith becomes untenable. When you become aware of burglars hitting houses nightly in your neighborhood, you lock your doors and install a security system. When violent criminals start posing as hitchhikers, you stop picking people up. When sheep are getting eaten, you start watching for wolf snouts poking through the mask.

But while they seek attention, these influential bad actors do not do what they do primarily for money or even for power, though money and power are often part of the story (defectors tend to lose followers and even funding when they are excommunicated or admit they do not believe in their faith). Rather, they honestly believe in what they are doing, despite the deception involved, because they think it advances a greater good. They are motivated mainly by the missionary urge, felt zealously in converts to any religion, to convert one’s friends and peers to a newfound faith. Such an urge in itself is healthy, but to hide one’s motive in some kind of missionary work is … cheating. It’s as if we sent former Catholics into Catholic communities as covert missionaries, where their job was to pretend they were still Catholic to retain trust and credibility with the people they tried to indoctrinate into our teachings. That might well work, but if it did, it would be at the expense of our souls. It would also be at the expense of considerable social trust in the communities we preyed upon.

Maybe the idea that influential bad-faith actors are contributing to an unraveling of social trust in the North American church is a stretch. Most problems we experience in the Church can be explained by our own flaws and sins, not by nefarious bad actors.

But social trust isn’t like individual righteousness—a thing no one but yourself can deprive you of. It’s not even like a collective virtue, comparable to our tendency to deal honestly with each other as Saints. Social trust is a public good; a social phenomenon. It cannot be sustained at a high level in the presence of dissembling and trickery. Nor should it be: insisting on an assumption of good faith when bad actors abound is like insisting on leaving your doors unlocked at night when crime is at high levels. You might be fine in doing it, but you also might be putting your kids or others in your stewardship at undue risk.

The good news is the situation is not hopeless. Something can be done about bad actors, and social trust can be rebuilt over time.

The bad news is there is no pleasant way to start the process. Criminals must be arrested. Conmen have to be publicly shamed or run out of town. The wolves must be recognized, in the open, as wolves. It’s no good if many of us privately know who the defectors are if we participate in the pretense that enables them to keep deceiving.

Jesus told us we must love our enemies. I think we often fail at this for a basic reason: we decline to admit that we have enemies in any specificity. We assume everyone is our friend and has good intentions for us, then we love them on that condition. But “do not even the publicans the same”? It was in this context Jesus told us to be perfect: to love even those who despitefully use us and persecute us. Such injurious people do exist, both within and outside the Church. They are our neighbors and our enemies, and once we accept this fact we can finally love and forgive them despite it. More than that, we can tell the truth that will free them and us both from the deception that continues to poison our relations with each other and to weaken the bonds of trust among the Saints.

The post Unraveling Trust in the North American Church appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

A quarter of pastors were concerned about their physical and mental (and spiritual) health. Most felt like the end of the pandemic would not be the relief some expect. 

First Things reported on the Barna survey and laid out some reasons for the pastoral fatigue religious leaders are experiencing. One important factor is the lack of support from American society as a whole, which began to pivot in the mid-2010s.  As described by Carl R. Trueman in his new book Strange New World, a philosophy of “expressive individualism” is becoming ubiquitous in America. One’s sense of self, instead of coming from family, faith, and nation as it once did, is being shaped by social forces exerted through social media and internet niches of “information.” For increasing numbers, “feelings” have become the highest authority and all things must honor and support their direction. The unforgivable sin is to not honor a person’s inner sense of what they need and want, or their chosen self-identity. 

Accompanying this trend—perhaps even arising directly from it—is a resurgent distaste for organized religion generally, swerving towards hostility for many people. Whereas society used to appreciate, sustain, and respect churches, the pendulum is swinging hard the other way. With decreasing support from society at large and confronted by this trend towards expressive individualism, pastors also face the atomization of their flocks. With every decision, there are congregants who rebel, complain, and even drop out. With Protestants able to shop for a congregation and pastor they like, pastors face a consumerist dilemma as well as a spiritual maelstrom.

This “negative world-view regarding organized religion has created increasing levels of pressure from outside these churches, such as the very real risk of being “canceled” for saying the wrong thing according to the views of “woke” society. This same negativity has also led to a culture war within evangelicalism as various ministry strategies have deformed in the face of growing secular hostility. Teachings on many issues, including race, are causing divisions in churches just as they are in schools and other institutions. It is now nigh impossible for pastors to avoid high-pressure and often high-stakes conflict situations. These extraordinary pressures are affecting not just the evangelical world but the church more broadly, including Catholics and mainline Protestants. 

As congregants are influenced by expressive individualism and the hostility to organized religion in American culture, they ultimately begin to individualize their religious beliefs and practices. Thus, pastors and priests, who occupy the role to train their flocks in true doctrine and practices, find their members increasingly practicing “cafeteria religion,” where they feel they have the right to pick and choose what to believe and how to act. A 2018 religious survey showed that 32% of Evangelicals see religious belief as “a matter of personal opinion [and] not about objective truth” representing, effectively, “a denial of the objective nature of Jesus’ salvific work.” This survey also showed that a majority visualized the Holy Ghost as a force rather than a being.

Struggling to Survive

David French is  an American political commentator, a theologically conservative traditional Christian, and a former attorney who has argued high-profile religious liberty cases. He’s also a remarkable journalist, able to discern and analyze the problems facing religions, especially where they interact with politics and the culture at large. Recently, he published a discussion between him and Curtis Chang, pastor of The River Church Community in San Jose, CA, and a noted theologian. The discussion is called, “When Pastors Head for the Exits.” 

Chang brings up the necessity of getting “butts in seats” in order for an evangelical pastor to make a decent living and support the workings of the congregation and building facilities. Bringing in new members is a matter of the highest importance for both the congregation and the pastor to survive. Within this unique American atmosphere today, once again, people come for “the feels” because they are expressive individualists looking for personal fulfillment. Pastor Chang said, “you know we have to provide a rock concert and a TED talk every Sunday.” This is a huge burden for a pastor, especially one who leads a small congregation. Pastors of congregations of fewer than 250 members are the most likely to give up. Many pastors have large families and are paid poorly. Some advise entering the ministry later in life after succeeding in a worldly profession. Others recommend some sort of part-time occupation or investment plan in place for the duration. This adds hours and mounds of worry for a pastor even if it does somehow ease financial burdens. 

All this explains why there’s a lot of advice out there for potential pastors who wish to “plant” a church, and why a lot of it is financial, even though a burning faith and a strong sense of calling drive every new pastor. Essentially, what they are facing is starting a business from the ground up. Best business practices are important.

Catholicism and Judaism also have paid, professional clergy. Potential Catholic priests must complete over 20 credit hours in undergraduate philosophy and then four years in seminary and one year as a transitional deacon. Potential rabbis must invest in the education necessary, including up to 5 years of rabbinical training from an accredited seminary studying the Torah, Talmud, Mishnah, Jewish history, and Hebrew language, and taking psychology courses, community outreach courses, public speaking courses, and teaching courses. This five-year course of study often begins after the student has earned a bachelor’s degree.

If all of this sounds daunting to you, then perhaps it’s not surprising that there is now a dire shortage of Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis. There is an opportunity for both, if they are practicing and suffering from burnout, to use their education and experience to veer into other fields, especially in education, counseling, or consulting. But both faiths are in crisis because of a lack of clergy. 

Because of this, Catholic leadership receives constant petitions to ordain priests who are married. From 1970 to 2020, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped by 60%, according to data from the Georgetown center. This has left more than 3,500 parishes without a resident pastor. This crisis is exacerbated by a spiritual schism in the church between conservative and liberal Catholics who are beginning to view the Pope as more of an advisor than an oracle. Catholics are engaging in cafeteria religion en masse, as about 60 percent of the couples that come for marriage preparation in the Catholic Church are already living together and many Catholics do not consider cohabitation a sin.

Potential Rabbis were once drawn by the hope of leading large, vibrant congregations. Now, influenced by American culture’s sway towards individual fulfillment, rabbinical students are looking for other ways to thrive. Congregational leaders are aging out and there are few young, new rabbis to replace them. The Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College will soon close because of falling enrollment. This year, 80 Conservative Jewish congregations are looking for rabbis but only 23 rabbinical students will graduate and become available to take their place.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Yes, the Church of Jesus Christ is feeling the effects of the spread of expressive individualism too. Members are influenced by the pull of these philosophies and there is contention over race, gender, and politics—along with the same pernicious pattern of picking and choosing among doctrines and policies. The prophet, his apostles, seventies, and auxiliary leadership of the church are united in declaring the doctrines of the church and the necessity of following the path Christ has established that leads to eternal life.

The congregations (wards) that members attend are assigned to them by geographical location, so shopping for a pastor who gives great sermons is not an option. Most of this is to avoid what the Book of Mormon calls “priestcraft,” which is “men preaching and setting themselves up for a light to the world that they may get gain and praise of the world.” It’s stressful to be a Latter-day Saint bishop—much like it is stressful to be a congregational leader in any church—but many stressors that professional clergy face are absent and the term of leadership is intentionally short. The downside may be a lack of training, but counsel from leaders up the chain of authority, along with multiple supportive church resources, are a help. Most importantly, personal revelation is the key to a successful ministry, and leaders are trained in ways to access help from the Holy Spirit directly.  

There’s a crisis in pastoral leadership in America today and churches will have to be exceptionally creative to address it and fix it. Perhaps there are lessons we can learn from each other—and ways the Latter-day Saint experience can inform and encourage our Christian brothers and sisters.  The faith of many hangs in the balance.

The post A Look at Pastoral Burnout appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In the coming weeks, much ink will be spilled (digitally) and many hands will be wrung (metaphorically) over the FX/Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven. I have not seen any more than the publicly available previews and will withhold judgment until I actually watch it. I expect to be alternately entertained, impressed with the acting and production quality, and occasionally dismayed at various inaccuracies and misreadings of my people’s faith and culture. Most of all, I expect that simply by virtue of narrating The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through the lens of the horrific murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, most viewers will walk away confirmed in their assumption that this faith community—no matter how nice their real-life Latter-day Saint neighbors or coworkers are—is something akin to a weird, dangerous cult.

This will not be the first time that the Church has been connected to violence in popular culture. In fact, it was the beloved Sherlock Holmes who helped introduce readers around the world to the alleged horrors of “Mormon violence.” A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first murder mystery featuring the famous detective, transported readers across the ocean from Victorian England to the “Country of the Saints” in the mountain deserts of Utah. The citizens of the territory live in perpetual fear under the theocratic grip of a cold, stern Brigham Young. In Doyle’s rendering, Young is all too eager to dispatch his secret police—the dreaded Danites—in maintaining his reign of terror. “The man who held out against the Church vanished away,” wrote Doyle, and “a rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation.” Residents live “in fear and trembling,” daring not speak a word out of line for fear that their neighbor, or even a member of their own family, might be one of Young’s enforcers and “bring down a swift retribution upon them.”

In using Latter-day Saint violence as a plot device, Doyle was in good company. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists on both sides of the Atlantic frequently outdid one another with their depictions of the “Destroying Angels” of Mormonism. In works by popular authors such as Zane Grey and Robert Louis Stevenson, Latter-day Saints appeared as stock villains preying on innocent women and eliminating anyone who got in their way. Novels with titles like The Fighting Danites or subtitles like Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar were sure to find a ready-made audience.[ref num=”1″]

New technologies afforded new opportunities to display violent, lecherous Mormons. Films with titles like A Victim of the Mormons, Marriage or Death, The Danites, and Trapped by the Mormons screened widely across the United States and Europe. Big-screen depictions of dangerous Latter-day Saints still pop up occasionally, such as the cinematic flop September Dawn (2007). Such portrayals have shaped a sinister image in the public mind, attributing the Church’s survival and success in part to coercive tactics of repression against both internal and external enemies.

Arguably, none of those previous novels or films have had the impact of Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven. I don’t have access to the book’s sales numbers, but they must be phenomenal; according to my semi-regular perusals of Amazon’s rankings of “Mormonism” books, Banner has not left the top five since it was published two decades ago. Several of my colleagues have told me that when they accepted a job in Utah, one or more well-meaning friends gave them a copy of Banner. Personally, I hold the heretical view that the book is not as bad as many people make it out to be—but it definitely should not be distributed as a reliable guide to life in the Beehive State or a Latter-day Saint 101 textbook.

To characterize this particular faith tradition as inherently and uniquely  violent is simply a misrepresentation. For some two centuries, most Latter-day Saints have lived in peace with one another and with their neighbors. The Church provided the spiritual and structural framework for an orderly frontier society in Utah. And many historical claims of Latter-day Saint violence were fabrications or almost-comical exaggerations. For example, in 1875 a newspaper reported that a man named Samuel Sirrine had been killed by Danites, but in fact, he had simply moved to California.

More broadly, Scott Thomas’s careful review of the historical record shows that Utah was not more violent than other western territories. The remarkable fact that historians can name virtually every instance of violence by Latter-day Saints against their opponents in the religion’s early decades suggests the relative infrequency of such episodes. By contrast, scholars who study the genocide of Native Americans or the lynching of African Americans admit that their estimates of how much violence actually occurred will always be imprecise given the overwhelming number of deaths and relative lack of documentation.

Nevertheless, it is absolutely true that Latter-day Saints have a history of violence. (I wrote a book about it.) The most lethal decade in Latter-day Saint history was the 1850s when church members used violent force against an assortment of perceived enemies, including dissenters from the faith, non-members whom they considered dangerous or hostile, and Native Americans who lived on land or competed for resources that the Latter-day Saint pioneers sought in settling the Great Basin. As a people, we need to acknowledge and wrestle with this violent past more than we have (although this essay and this book are a good start).

It would be convenient in a way to say that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is uniquely violent. Unfortunately, it is not. Every religion, every political system, every ideology, and every nation-state have blood on their hands. Whatever group you identify with, I guarantee you can find your equivalent of the Lafferty brothers. My Latter-day Saint theology informs my belief that humanity’s original sin wasn’t eating a piece of fruit, it was one brother killing another. We have all been living in Cain’s shadow ever since.

So yes, there have been times when Latter-day Saints have committed violence in the name of their religion. Far more often, however, they have done so primarily as some other category of humans—as frontiersmen, as white settler-colonists, as American (or German or Australian) soldiers, as abusive fathers or husbands, as the mentally ill, and yes, as the very rare religiously inspired psychopath. In this respect, Latter-day Saints and their faith are not special. The problem comes when we are treated as such.

Notes

[footnote num=”1″]See Jennie Switzer [Bartlett], Elder Northfield’s Home: Or, Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar (New York: J. Howard Brown, 1882); Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (New York: Harper, 1912); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Dynamiter (New York: Scribner, 1925); Dane Coolidge, The Fighting Danites (New York: Dutton, 1934). For more information and titles, see Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Rebecca Foster Cornwall and Leonard J. Arrington, “Perpetuation of a Myth: Mormon Danites in Five Western Novels, 1840-90,” BYU Studies Quarterly 23:2 (1983): 147-65.[/footnote]

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