Personalist autocracies are bad for 99.99% of the people who live under them. By enabling bribery and corruption, they’re a significant drag on the economy. A few people get rich, while everyone else ends up worse off. By promoting incompetent but loyal functionaries, they make it difficult to accomplish important government tasks or provide the kind of information – about the economy, health, even the weather – that individuals and institutions need for basic decision-making. With scientific and academic research deprecated and artistic direction dictated by the autocrat’s tastes, science and culture tend to stagnate, and talent migrates to greener pastures.
While economic contraction and cultural stagnation have negative consequences for individuals, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Church as an institution will also be adversely affected. But in this case, it’s true: The Trump administration is bad for the Church, its members, and the fulfillment of its missions. It’s bad in comparison to both the alternative Democratic administration that was on offer and compared to the meager advantages of a Trump administration that might be envisioned (such as continued noninterference with BYU’s housing and hiring policies, already safe with a Supreme Court that leans 6-3 conservative).
Specifically:
Trump’s personal embodiment of self-indulgence, fraud, sexual assault, and flaunted luxury, not to mention his administration’s extraordinary efforts on behalf of a misogynistic pimp-influencer on trial for rape and human trafficking, undercut the Church’s efforts to teach industry, honesty, chastity, and modesty. The Church has rightly cautioned young people against seeing celebrity lifestyles as their ideals, but they need better role models than Donald Trump.
The pervasive scapegoating of immigrants and elimination of support for refugees affect many Church members personally and the communities in which the Church finds converts. The Church has invested substantial resources in welcoming refugees, but those efforts may become untenable. More perniciously, the whole question of family origin is becoming freighted with anxiety, hindering family history work even on a local level. (Imagine that you’re a recent immigrant in a foreign country with limited command of the local language and a newcomer’s understanding of its politics. All you know is that the new president wants to deport immigrants, while a mysterious group has gained unprecedented access to government databases. How willing are you to entrust your personal information to a family history database, or record the whereabouts of yourself and your ancestors over the last century?)
For many decades, the Church has advanced its international reputation and gained access for its missionaries in parallel with the U.S. government. A sudden and careless pullback of U.S. aid – leaving malnourished infants to starve and ailing children to die – along with callous renunciation of our debts to long-standing allies are leaving the U.S. isolated. The tarnishing of America’s image will make it harder for missionaries to be heard nearly everywhere, while doing nothing to gain access to countries that no U.S. citizen can enter without risk of arbitrary detention. There have been church members in Mexico and Canada for 150 years, and it’s common for American members to have Canadian friends and family members. My own temple lies across the border, in a city where two Canadians are buried who gave their lives in our defense when we called for their aid after 9/11. How can I expect to be received there in friendship – how can I even show my face – as the president jokes-but-not-really about annexing Canada?
Perhaps the most damaging walls and borders for the Church are the ones that threaten to go up between ward members. The enemies Trump and his administration are most intent on fighting are his fellow citizens. He has no interest in representation or fair treatment for all Americans, only in personal favor for his loyal supporters. So far my own ward has fortunately seen no signs of political division – even the people I assume (based on their 2A-friendly bumper stickers) to be Trump voters have expressed relief that church is a place where they can get away from political conflict. I hope my ward can continue as a space free from political contention, but personalist autocracies tend to politicize and polarize everything they touch. The Church has taken pains to seek out a mainstream centrist position in recent decades, but its neutral position is threatened by a Trump administration that sees only friends and enemies.
Finally, the Trump administration creates real obstacles for the Church’s promotion of its message and accomplishment of its missions by narrowing or eliminating the space between unacceptable reputational and regulatory risk. With the full spectrum of regulatory bureaucracy and federal criminal agencies at his disposal and lowered guardrails against arbitrary enforcement, the risks to any organization (or at least any organization that hopes to pursue its goals in the medium or long term) from opposing an autocrat become very high and rarely worth the point of contention: Google’s management rationally concluded that renaming the Gulf of Mexico and sending a million-dollar donation to the Trump inauguration is a small price to pay for safeguarding its fiduciary duty to its shareholders. But autocrats and their incompetent administrations are not just disliked by many of their citizens, but deeply loathed, so that any degree of association or accommodation risks steep and enduring reputational risks. The middle ground of acceptable risk becomes more and more difficult to find, until eventually it may disappear altogether, leaving only bad and awful alternatives. For a church with a worldwide mission that includes ministry to both loyalists and opponents of the administration and aspirations to carry its ministry far into the future, it creates a difficult environment where speaking out or refusing to compromise is rarely worth the cost, until some element of the core mission is endangered. And at that point, every outcome is bad.
I’m not going to tell the deck officers of the Old Ship Zion what to do. I want them to have maximum freedom to maneuver through treacherous waters without being distracted by my demands for a tour of the bridge. I don’t expect this cruise to be smooth or pleasurable. But we are a home-based, family-centered church, and as for me and my tiny lifeboat in the flotilla, we will keep rowing towards the promised land.
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