Silence is Violence

The first thing I noticed was the man on the stand wiping his brow. My eyes keep returning to him. Why didn’t he do something? Children who come out as LGBTQ in testimony meeting have their mics cut, are told to sit down, are reprimanded in public by the adult leaders speaking after them. We silence children speaking their truth and allow white men to enact all kinds of white heteropatriarchal Mormon supremacy? Those priorities stink. 

“Yes,” I want to say to the sweating man. “Yes. You should say something. You should interrupt the diatribe.”

Choosing silence, for whatever reason, is how supremacy maintains its stranglehold on all of us.

Some people become apologists, going so far as to liken Wilcox to the Savior himself. We saw this when his wife responded to someone who had pointed out the harm Wilcox had done. Can we please stop thinking of our church leaders as Christ himself? “There is but one Christ and him crucified” is not a metaphor. 

Some people try to downplay the harm, perhaps even trying to hide it from themselves. We see this when people say, “It wasn’t that bad,” or “He didn’t mean it to sound exactly the way he’s said it multiple times,” or “Don’t be so easily offended.” These are all forms of gaslighting, and I’m pretty sure Jesus never said, “Blessed are those who gaslight for they shall be made leaders in my church.”

Some people hide the harm, pretending it never existed. I’m looking at you, dirty deleters. Not to sound threatening, but Jesus did say our deeds will be shouted from the rooftops. In our modern day, this might look like screenshots and video grabs.

Some people attack those who point out the harm, rather than changing the system that supports the harm.

Some people issue statements that recenter whiteness and power, rather than humbly seeking to make amends. BYU cannot be committed to rooting out racism while keeping racist people in leadership and teaching positions. They cannot be committed to equity and inclusion as long as they ignore the history of supremacy, a history they reaffirmed twice this week (including the removal of trans affirming care, but more on that in a future post). Saying that they’re following President Nelson’s charge, and implementing guidelines from Pres. Worthen’s committee isn’t the strong statement they think it is. Where are the voices of women, Black people, Latiné, Asian, Indigenous, LGBTQIA…? A committee of people accustomed to power will never do enough to change the structure of supremacy which gives them that power.

Some people might argue that they don’t see how Brad Wilcox was doing anything remotely like white supremacy or misogyny or ageism. He wasn’t being intolerant or disrespectful of other religions. After all, there were no crosses burning, no cars being driven into the crowd. He was just saying what he believed to be true, according to the religion he is paid to represent (BYU) and which he voluntarily serves (Young Men’s General Presidency). 

Overt acts are the fireworks, the attention grabbers. They’re easy to see and simple to name. But that isn’t how supremacy usually shows up. The snake of supremacy is subtle, slithering across language, weaving around policies, undermining gospel messages. Supremacy looks like a man speaking to a crowd gathered to hear the good word of God who, in a power hungry moment, silences a valid question by saying, “But what about us?” The ‘us,’ of course, means people who look like him. People not accustomed to being held accountable for the harm they do. In our religion, it means older white cisgender heterosexual men. Married. Abled. Neurotypical.

It isn’t a better question to ask why white people had to wait until 1829 to have the Priesthood. The better question is to ask why white people give white supremacy a platform in what is supposed to be God’s own church. In the year 2022, with access to so much gospel truth preached from people who walk a godly walk, why do we turn the mic over to people whose hearts are far from the God their lips draw near to?

“Maybe we’re asking the wrong question.” Yes, we are. We should be asking why the people in power keep making statements that harm those who aren’t in power. Why is the ideal human, according to church leaders, white, cisgender, heterosexual, abled, and male? Why does leadership consistently look like leadership did during Brigham Young’s day? If we’re truly a global church, full of all of God’s children, shouldn’t the makeup of leadership look a lot more like the real world? This would mean far fewer white men and far more women. And where are the gender expansive leaders? Either God loves us all and wants us all to have equal membership in this church, or God is a liar for saying all are alike unto him. Either we are all the body of Christ, or Christ is incomplete. But we cannot expect change to happen if the same people always control the pulpit.

“In our church we don’t play church. We have the authority….”  Any God who would consign generations of people to spiritual limbo because of their religious beliefs or family connections isn’t a God I believe in, and I don’t think it’s the God preached by the LDS church. It is, however, a god too many of our church siblings believe in. It’s the god Brad Wilcox preached at that meeting. 

“People wanna sit and fight about it. Get uptight about it…we make it a little harder than it needs to be.” We don’t want to fight about it, but we do want changes. And some of the ‘we’ definitely make it harder than it needs to be. It’s easier when we say, “The Priesthood/Temple ban was racist and wrong. It never came from God. We’re now going to learn what reparations are needed to regain trust.” That isn’t hard. 

It’s easier to say, “There is a power imbalance in the church, and we only pay lip service to women as leaders in order to hide how oppression works. We’re meeting with women and nonbinary people (of all races) in order to figure out a healing path.” That’s simple. 

It’s easier to say, “People have questions. Those questions are valid. There are some hard things in the history of our church, and talking openly about them helps us build a personal relationship with God.” That’s honest. 

It’s easier to say, “There are beautiful things in other religions that the LDS church doesn’t have. We’re going to build these relationships, not to convert people, but to learn all the ways God shows up. Because we believe that God loves everyone, and that no one who tries to do good will be excluded from His loving presence.” That strengthens all of us.

It’s easier to say, “I don’t understand why this happened,” than it is to mock people who ask the question. 

The man in the stand wiping his brow. I keep returning to him. There are a lot of reasons people don’t speak up. Maybe we feel out-powered or out-privileged. We might be insecure in our knowledge. Sometimes, we don’t know how to say something. And sometimes, we prioritize comfort over truth speaking. So this is me, giving permission to all of us, to stop wiping our brows and start speaking up. If we’re complacent, if we let the supremacy go unchallenged, we’re complicit in the supremacy. The man wiping his brow, the people on the stand, everyone in the audience who didn’t walk out, who sat through the talk, laughing or not, nodding their heads or not, feeling joyful or uncomfortable, every one of them is complicit, and that made Wilcox powerful. The people who are now rampaging through social media defending Wilcox are making supremacy powerful. 

I don’t think that’s the side God wants me to be on. Anyway, it’s not the side I want me to be on, and it’s not the side I want to have surrounding me.