Welcome to the LDS Democracy Newsletter!

15 September 2023 - salmon steaks and children's books

Author

Nathan Maynes
September 15, 2023

Welcome everyone! This is the first edition of the LDS Democracy Network’s Newsletter.

Wait, what’s this? What’s LDS Democracy Network? Is this a political campaign?

LDS Democracy Network isn’t a campaign for any particular candidate. We’re here to inspire and mobilize Latter-day Saints and friends to take civic action around the core principles of democratic governance, pluralism, and promoting the general welfare. We are a big tent, but one built on the recognition that we all have inherent dignity, that the society that best protects and cares for us is the one that protects and cares for all of us, and that voting and other forms of civic engagement are part of the responsibility we shoulder to create a brighter shared future.

Oh! Well then. Who are you?

Our small but growing editorial team includes Rob Taber, who teaches history at a North Carolina HBCU by day and runs Latter-day Saints for Biden-Harris by night, and Nathan Maynes, who works in Children’s Media and is constantly trying to organize his neighbors. We met organizing people of faith during the 2012 presidential election.

Ok, then what’s going to be in the newsletter?

Here’s what you can expect in each section, along with an example:

Of good report

Highlighting people of faith doing things that either build community or provide an important service. Today we’re sharing how three New York City faith communities are responding to the arrival of asylum seekers.

As Fiona André writes for Religion Dispatches here:

When [Alexander] Rapaport and his team heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had sent buses carrying hundreds of migrants to New York last August, they showed up at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal with a truck filled with items to meet basic needs.

Rapaport said helping immigrants is at the core of Jewish identity. “There are also a few times in the Bible where it says that we need to welcome the strangers because we need to remember that we were strangers in the land of Egypt,” he said…

…Sunset Park’s Muslim Community Center, whose members also flocked to the Port Authority last August to offer migrants temporary shelters in the mosque’s prayer rooms, have also expanded their capacity as the flow of people remains steady.

“We didn’t even think about it like long term. It was just like, ‘OK, let’s house them.’ It wasn’t something we thought would be (doing) for almost a year,” said Soniya Ali, director of the center, sitting in its new women’s prayer room. (The women’s former space is now filled with 19 beds.)…

…Other organizations have tackled needs beyond beds. The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation is providing eye care to migrants who arrived in the city without insurance coverage, working out of two vans converted into mobile vision clinics that park outside the city’s shelters.

In mid-August, Dr. James Chuang and 15 volunteers offered free eye exams and created eyeglasses on the spot in the parking lot of a shelter on Long Island.

“We saw 21 patients that day, and I believe we were able to provide everyone with a pair of eyeglasses,” said Chuang, whose family was among the early members of Tzu Chi. Soon, the foundation will have its dental clinic van.

Context matters

Every week it seems that there’s a new outrage, designed to scare or enrage people of faith. We’re not going to rebut or fact-check everything, but we’ll use this section to provide larger context or background for a recent topic. Today, we want to make sure you’ve seen this Vice News report on Tim Ballard. Quick takeaways:

  • The Church has released an official statement on the Operation Underground Railroad founder’s previous friendship with President M. Russell Ballard (no relation).

  • The statement reads in part that Tim Ballard “betrayed their friendship, through the unauthorized use of President Ballard’s name for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.”

  • As Vice News previously reported, Tim Ballard stepped away from OUR before the box office release of Sound of Freedom.

  • Yesterday, The Washington Examiner shared reports that the OUR founder is preparing a candidacy for the US Senate seat currently occupied by Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

Out of the best books

We’re big believers in life-long learning, not in a self-deprecating way but because we’re called to be agents—active participants in our own lives—and learning can bring wisdom. Here we’ll share books, podcasts, or other materials that we’ve recently found helpful in building this wisdom.

“The Law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges” -Anatole France

The ward newsletter

Latter-day Saints do cool things! We’re going to use this section to share news from the Church or profiles of Latter-day Saints acting of their own volition to make the world a better place.

For this issue, we want to make sure that you see this profile of Shannon Hale in Mother Jones. The author of The Princess in Black Series and many, many other books reflects on the ways she “moves between two worlds.” A key quote:

❝

As an author, [Hale] gives passionate talks about the value of including people of all races and genders in children’s literature. On Twitter and in her newsletter, she speaks out against policies that she considers hateful—abortion bans, for instance, and rules that seek to limit gender-affirming medical care. In recent months, she has vociferously opposed the rising tide of book bans, especially in her home state of Utah.

Hale’s other identity is as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. During times of such polarization, her life as both a liberal activist and a Mormon can appear confounding. In her 2017 book Real Friends, the first in her trilogy of graphic novel memoirs about her childhood and early adolescence, she included imagined conversations with Jesus that she had as a child. One apparently secular reviewer on GoodReads complained, “I honestly think this was just about Jesus. There was no warning for all the religious propaganda and imagery.” Other, presumably more conservative, readers objected to what they saw as inappropriate themes in the book, such as kids kissing. “Progressive people are kind of suspicious of me,” Hale tells me, laying out the dynamic. “And then for books that I’ve written that never even had a single cheek kiss, I’ve gotten hate mail from conservative people.”

Kiera Butler, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Shannon Hale” Mother Jones

Of our own free will

While much of the newsletter will be focused on curated links, here we’ll share thoughts on recent news or reflections on the benefits and practices of civic engagement.

This week we’re thinking about not just Senator Romney’s retirement announcement, but about the trusting partnership that has developed through the years between the Senator and Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, who released the first excerpt from his new book Romney: A Reckoning. Something that jumped out to Rob is the cross-generational nature of the friendship and the way that can be fostered by the politician and reporter’s shared Latter-day Saints Christian faith - it’s one of the great strengths of ward life and ministering. (Though we can’t condone smearing the salmon steaks with ketchup.)

One more praiseworthy thing

Each newsletter will conclude with a thing or two that we just think is cool - anything from a great new children’s show to polling to a new government program. It’s eclectic!

This week we’re nerding out over the new PRRI study on the political diversity of mainline protestant congregations in the US. Some of the most notable findings are how extensive the political diversity is and how clergy navigate leading congregations that are often more conservative than they personally are.

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