LDS Democracy Network - 11/4/2023

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📆 Calendar note: Rob is speaking as part of the Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance’s annual symposium on November 11th. This year’s topic is “Sacred Landscapes: Exploring the Intersections of Spirituality and Land Stewardship.” More information about this virtual gathering is available here.

Also, Tuesday is Election Day in much of the country! For more on the 2023 elections, see last week’s newsletter.

Of good report: Bridging religious communities and perspectives

Here are three stories of people finding ways to build bridges.

Govindan Gopalakrishnan had a childhood fascination with architecture. Growing up in India the son of a building contractor, he would trace the blueprints his father brought home. He learned basic sketching and drawing from an Anglo-Indian draftsman in his city and then did an apprenticeship with the local public works department that taught him more about building, drafting, and supervising construction.

He thought more seriously about moving into architecture when his father received the contract to rebuild the Palayam Mosque. Six years later, Gopalakrishnan, a practicing Hindu, received the contract to design and build the Beemapally Mosque. He dove into books on India’s rich architectural history and became known as “the Mosque man.”

In the fifty-six years since that first contract, Gopalakrishnan has designed and built at least 114 mosques, 4 churches, and a Hindu temple.

Greg Epstein first met Samantha Woll at the University of Michigan. He was a rabbinical student, already focused on a future career providing ministerial support from a secular humanist framework to atheist and agnostic students. Sam was more traditionally religious. When protests erupted on campus over Israel/Palestine issues, they found themselves in different spots—Sam on the pro-Israel side, Greg in a much smaller group rallying for a two-state solution.

But, as Greg remembers:

President Biden famously decided to run for President after seeing coverage of the so-called “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, now infamous for anti-Semitic and white supremacist chants, tiki torches, and President Trump’s initial comment denouncing “many sides” (which was criticized by Senator Orrin Hatch, among many, many others) and his August 15th remark about “very fine people, on both sides.”

Last year, President Biden convened the United We Stand summit and had the White House’s Domestic Policy and National Security Councils establish an inter-agency group to “counter antisemitism, Islamophobia, and related forms of bias and discrimination within the United States.” The first project of the inter-agency group—which includes staff from the White House and several Cabinet departments—was the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023.

On Wednesday, the White House announced that the group will develop our country’s first-ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia, which will also address attacks against people perceived to be Muslim, including Sikhs and Arab Christians.

(To learn more about different religious communities in the United States and around the world, we recommend this section of the Pew Research Center’s website.)

Context matters: What’s the deal with plastic?

Plastics emerged during the heyday of the mid-20th century and stands poised to become a major contributor to climate change as we move through the 21st.

Petrochemical and plastic manufacturers have been taking government subsidies to promote “advanced recycling” techniques. According to a new report from the watchdog group Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), these recycling efforts have fallen well short.

One of the many recycling efforts profiled in the report involves Boise, Idaho. Boise subsidized a recycling program to collect plastic bags and convert them to diesel fuel. Within a year they were trucking the bags to Salt Lake City and burning them at a cement factory.

The report also details how efforts to chemically recycle plastics often:

• Hurt poorer and marginalized communities.

• Damage our shared environment.

• Prevent further regulation of the plastics industry.

While individual consumer choice can only do so much, it is worth it to keep recycling plastics, especially stamped with a 1 and 2, and to take other steps to reduce our consumption of single-use plastics. We should also keep pressure on companies to provide other options and for governments to regulate when single-use plastics can be used.

Other items that caught our eye this week:

House Republicans have proposed cutting funding for OSHA, Americorps, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CDC, and NIH. The bill also proposes an 80% reduction in Title 1 educational grants, which go to the poorest K-12 public schools. Some of the cuts are reductions to pandemic stimulus but most of them aren’t.

Historian Kevin Kruse looks at how Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has cherry-picked his way to a fundamental misunderstanding of American religious history, especially the relationship between Christianity and our constitutional government.

Historian Thomas LeCaque pushes back on his fellow Evangelicals, especially politicians, who are presenting the Hamas attack and resulting Israeli campaign as a sign of the imminence of the Second Coming:

Out of the best books: Reflections on parenting

Kwame Alexander’s memoir Why Fathers Cry At Night is a remarkable book that contains poetry, music, food, and memories. The title comes from a poem Alexander wrote while processing his feelings about his then 15-year-old daughter asking whether she could go on a date. In a presentation Alexander gave at the 2023 National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) conference (sorry, no link), he explained how by writing his feelings down and sharing them with his daughter, they were able to understand each other a little more. He then shared that his daughter’s reaction was “thank you, I love you, I’m still going on that date.”

Alexander has gone on to win awards and his book The Crossover is now a show on Disney+. His message of being authentic and honest with oneself is inspiring. His presentation—the words and rhythm—is beautiful. The poem is included below and you can hear more of Kwame’s insights in his books, podcast, or website.

Ward newsletter: peacemaking through…better tests?

Parents and caregivers of a particular variety of anxious teenager have become familiar with @AP_Trevor. The head of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, Trevor Packer tweets tips, advice, and studies related to the courses and exams. Teens and tutors scour his account, especially for statistical breakdowns of each year’s tests.

Packer has also been responsible for shaping the College Board’s response to attempts by Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-Arkansas) to control the content of AP courses, especially AP Psychology and the recently developed course on African American Studies.

And Packer is a BYU graduate and the child of a homemaker and LDS institute teacher.

The Deseret News did an in-depth interview with him. Some key takeaways:

• Packer was a C- student in middle school and lagged behind his private high school classmates. That changed when he learned that the 3 he had mustered on the AP European History exam—an exam he almost didn’t take—was enough to receive college credit. In college and graduate school he read and treasured several works by Black authors, appreciating perspectives that differed from his own as a young white man from Utah.

• Packer has improved the AP Exams and related curriculum, reducing the “mile-wide, inch-deep” aspects of the tests and emphasizing the skills needed to read, think critically, and become a lifelong learner within a given discipline.

• Packer places peacemaking at the center of his work, bringing together experts and stakeholders to continuously improve the quality of the exams. He is more inclined to bring critics into the process than to dismiss them, but he notes that he balances “the role of peacemaker and the role of warrior,” defending what he sees as true.

The whole interview is worth reading, especially to learn more of his perspective on the battles over AP African American Studies and AP Psychology and his unwillingness to acquiesce to far-right politicians waging culture wars. Or, as he put it:

Of our own free will: not out-running our own strength

Rob has found himself thinking this week about King Benjamin’s address, especially this verse from Mosiah 4:

This note comes after the people of Zarahemla’s enthusiastic conversion and King Benjamin’s resulting discussion of what it means to take upon oneself Christ’s name. Moments of conversion, he reminds them, can lead to zealous enthusiasm and then burnout and disillusionment.

As Latter-day Saint Christians, we take the promises we make seriously, especially when it comes to creating a better society. We also talk among ourselves about the hazards of checklist mentalities and our overly conscientious youth, joke about “good at church” scores, and discuss how sometimes “endure to the end” sounds more like a threat.

These patterns of enthusiasm followed by anxieties of inadequacy and then disillusionment also show up in civic engagement: it’s known as “activist burnout.”

We could write a book about this burnout and how to avoid it (and people have!), but here are some tips:

• Remember that change is a marathon, not a sprint. Learning about earlier generations tackling the same problem can be inspiring—but don’t feel bound to how earlier activists do things.

• Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others—make sure you’re not damaging your physical or mental health and that you’re tending to your core priorities, such as your family, education/professional development, etc.

• Recognize that we are very, very, very rarely called upon to be martyrs. As the old adage says, “if you want to go far, go together.” Lasting change usually happens as part of a team, working in community. Or as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it:

 One more praiseworthy thing: Pro-family policies

CNN asked Secretary Pete Buttigieg about some of Speaker Johnson’s comments opposing marriage equality. Instead of taking the culture war bait, Secretary Buttigieg reframed the discussion around what it means to pursue “pro-family” policy, including the work happening at the US Department of Transportation:

Remember to be a voter!