LDS Democracy Network 1/14/24

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It’s 2024! Our New Year intentions are to carry with us a spirit of hope and to express a positive vision for the future of our community and country.

It’s been a little while since we were together. Here are some things you might have missed.

Of good report: An interfaith vigil for our democracy

On January 5th, members of seventeen faith-based and interfaith organizations gathered in Washington, DC to hold the third annual Faith in Democracy Interfaith Vigil (above). As Michele Dunne of the Franciscan Action Network reminded attendees:

Read more here or see the speaker list with time stamps here.

Context matters: Antisemitism on campus

Back in December, Representative Elise Stefanik—who has never denounced President Trump hosting two virulent antisemites at Mar-a-Lago—managed to get the then-presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard to give overly lawyerly answers on how their campuses would deal with calls for genocide. The daisy chain of resulting events has been intense, including a billionaire hedge fund manager trying to tweet his way through a plagiarism scandal, so let’s get back to basics:

• All students have a right to be safe on campus and universities often discipline students whose speech or actions undermine the safety of others.

• There isn’t evidence that college students are calling for genocide. There are debates about the meaning of certain slogans and words — Vox has a good overview here.

• The US Department of Education has recently opened six investigations into universities and one into a school district regarding antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment. Note: an Office of Civil Rights investigation is not a finding of fault but an acknowledgment that the Department has received a complaint.

• The Department of Education is conducting an antisemitism awareness campaign, which started before the current war and the increase in tensions. Resources from the Department of Education on religious freedom are here.

• Whether critiques of Zionism automatically constitute antisemitism is contested within the Jewish community. Critiques of Israel that draw on antisemitic tropes or imagery, however, are antisemitic.

• As David Perry reminds us, colleges should be a place for hard conversations and grappling with the challenges history presents. We need more humanities education to meet the moment, not less.

• Finally, as Jeremy Young notes, institutions of higher education can and should do more to defend themselves as leaders in promoting free speech and open dialogue.

Out of the best books: The Good Neighbor

Many of us grew up with Fred Rogers or had family members who did so. This biography was the first full-length look at his life, including his childhood in western Pennsylvania, his studies at a Presbyterian seminary, and his decision to work specifically in children’s television.

Maxwell King’s account is striking. Young Fred grew up sheltered in a wealthy family that sought to protect and nurture their asthmatic child. Expected to lead in business and civic life, he instead pursued the study of music and gave up a promising job at NBC to move back to Pittsburgh. Often intense and always dedicated, Rogers took his call to the ministry seriously and after ordination, persuaded the Pittsburgh Presbytery to allow him to focus on children’s television rather than pastoring a church.

The book is a fascinating look at a small slice of the twentieth century, including the ways the rise of television changed media, how Rogers’ Christian faith shaped his approach to civil rights, and the ways small decisions can build large and lasting projects.

For that full 1980s/1990s PBS experience, the audiobook is narrated by Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton.

The ward newsletter: A new member of the Quorum of the Twelve

The Church announced Patrick Kearon will fill the vacancy in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles left after the passing of M. Russell Ballard on November 12, 2023. In his remarks during the April 2016 session of General Conference, Elder Kearon shared the story of refugees and asked the membership of the Church to support people “driven violently from their homes” because “their story is our story.” In 2016, Europe was experiencing an influx of refugees as people fled violence in their home nations. Elder Kearon’s earnest perspective on refugees was a call to action tying religious belief to a temporal crisis. As Elder Kearon closed his remarks, he said, “this moment does not define [refugees], but our response will help define us.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 20 million people were displaced in the Americas last year. That has caused the backlog of pending cases for immigration review to explode in the United States and a bleak situation across the southern border of the United States. Congress failed to pass a deal on border security before breaking for the holidays.

Of our own free will: Reading the Letter from Birmingham Jail in 2024

Rob first read Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in his BYU English course and now teaches it as part of his day job. The story of the letter’s writing has a mythic vibe: Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, in response to broken promises by the Birmingham business community to remove “Whites Only” signs, engaged in a series of marches and sit-ins. A judge issued an injunction forbidding demonstrations, and Dr. King and other leaders were arrested when they continued to protest. Eight Alabama clergymen issued a “Call for Unity” denouncing the Birmingham campaign, which King read when an ally smuggled in a newspaper. He immediately started writing his response, first in the margins of the newspaper, then on other bits of smuggled paper, and finally on a writing pad his attorneys won allowance to bring him.

Reading the letter again at this moment, on the brink of a presidential election, amid backlash to racial justice protests of the summer of 2020, can feel daunting. Anxious Democrats want the Biden-Harris campaign to put forward a more forceful vision for the next four years, while non-MAGA Republicans hope that Nikki Haley can pull off an early-state bank shot to keep the GOP nomination competitive. Folks yearn that somebody, somewhere fixes things.

But we also have generations of wisdom from those who sought to bend the arc of the universe toward justice. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund reminds us about the tradition of celebrating Black joy. We Make the Future has lots of resources for talking about race and class in ways that persuade. Center for American Progress has collected great stories about the progress we are making.

Dr. King’s letter reminds us that we should not wait for someone else to create the kind of world in which we want to live. And he provides an important blueprint for making change:

We learn more to know whether injustice is occurring and its causes and we work within the system to mitigate and end it. If that fails, then we train so we are ready for the kind of non-violent action we are undertaking. (The recent Netflix film Rustin has a poignant illustration of the kind of self-purification civil rights participants underwent in the 1960s.)

Not everyone is in a position where they can engage in organized marches, boycotts, or other forms of non-violent protest, nor is protest the only tool in the kit—organizations used it heavily in the 1950s and 1960s because many of their members were otherwise disenfranchised and the “negotiation” phase had hit real limits. And we recognize that learning and self-purification can take many forms, including making sure we consider the cost and not running faster than we have strength.

But as we engage at the local, state, and/or national level to create a beloved community, we foster needed change and strengthen our democracy, where we can collectively nudge, support, and correct elected officials.

Finally, participate in your state’s primary or caucus if you are eligible. You can check your state’s primary or caucus date and review deadlines and eligibility requirements here. Primaries are our chance to decide who is on the ballot this fall—not just at the presidential level, but at the local and state levels as well, which often have just as large an impact on us and our communities.

One more praiseworthy thing: humanizing Lehi’s family

The opening chapters of 1 Nephi might be the scripture section some of us have read the most. As the Come, Follow Me lessons on the Book of Mormon go through these chapters again, Cole Wissinger of LDS Living had an interesting observation:

We’re also intrigued by the illustration we chose for the start of this section. Life of Nephi was a silent film by brothers Chester and Shirley Clawson on behalf of the Church, meant to be the first installment of a series covering the entirety of The Book of Mormon. Only forty stills from the film survive; this one was incorporated into the fifth edition of George Reynolds’ Story of the Book of Mormon, available from the Internet Archive here. (And yes, the Orientalism is strong.)

Until next time!