While I don’t know if Abinidi and Limhi knew of each other, I think it’s likely that they did. Abinidi is, of course, known for his parrhesia before King Noah, and Limhi is Noah’s son, who succeeded him and whose later comments indicated that he knew his father was doing evil. Today, most of the time, we focus on Abinidi more than we do on Limhi. We admire the courage that he had to speak up even though he knew that his life was threatened.
But what about Limhi? Was he of age when Abinidi called Noah, his priests, and his people to repentance? Did he say anything? Did he witness what happened?
The record is silent on this question. Maybe Limhi was too young to be involved. Maybe he was kept separate from his father and the court, and wasn’t involved. Or, more likely it seems to me, maybe he was the son of the King and with that privilege didn’t think too much about the things Abinidi said—until he was put in the place of having to rule his people and deal with the Lamanites who had conquered them.
Let’s look a little closer. Abinidi stands before Noah and calls out his evil-doing even though he has no power—even though he his vulnerable. This courage is admirable, but was it wise? Noah didn’t listen to what he said, and didn’t change. And the vast majority of Noah’s priests were apparently not reached by Abinidi’s words. Should he have said something different?
Maybe. Or maybe Noah and his priests weren’t the audience for his speech. The sermon was very effective for one of the priests, Alma, who made a radical change in his life. For him this was the sermon needed. And there may have been others who heard what Alma said and joined Alma or perhaps joined those who eventually rose up against Noah.
In contrast, we only hear about Limhi much later. If I’m right that Limhi was old enough when Abinidi gave his sermon and had access to his father, can we blame Limhi for not saying something? Everything he knew was grounded on his relationship with his father. Saying something meant loosing everything. And if he was an adult, challenging his father would likely mean death. But failing to act, to do something, makes it seem like Limhi is complicit in his father’s evil.
Limhi’s potential death for speaking up to his father may have been worse for his people, who would not have had his righteous leadership later. It seems likely that Limhi watched, listened and learned—witnessed if you like—so that his people would benefit later. Instead of the present audience of the time when Abinidi spoke, Limhi’s audience was a future audience, one after Noah’s death who would need his witness to suffer through the rule of the Lamanites and know how to flee when the time came.
So, how does this apply to us today? When do we call out the evil around us? When are we complicit in that evil? And when should we be witnesses of that evil against a future day?
I have been pondering about these roles for quite a while, and I was particularly inspired by the questions brought up in Melissa Dalton-Bradford’s Dialogue Sunday School lesson this past Sunday. She mentioned as part of her lesson the difficult choices faced by religious leaders in the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, where the choice was between parrhesia, witnessing, and complacency, or more specifically, to what degree and how to speak up.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important concern when speaking up is how we speak up. In politics the gut reaction is to protest—and I think that has a place. But protest has a reputation for anger, threatening actions, destruction of property, injury and sometimes even death. How it’s done is as important as who the protests are against. While protest brings problems to the attention of a wider audience, sometimes violence is either committed by the protesters (think January 6th) or by the police or counter protesters (think Charlottesville, or too many of the recent Black Lives Matters protesters, or the Edmund Pettus Bridge). And with today’s media assessing the blame for who was violent often becomes siloed by political belief.
Parrhesia, aka speaking truth to power, is likewise fraught. It can involve pleading, suggestion, criticism and even personal attacks. If the message isn’t strong enough then it is easily dismissed, but if is too strong, it’s ignored as biased—so the line between requesting or insisting on change and attacks is very thin. [Look at the recent case of Bishop Mariann Budde, whose nominally inoffensive remarks were simply requests, but were taken by many as criticism.]
Then there is bearing witness to what happened. The obvious problem with this approach is that it gives up on the present—it’s a kind of complacency, or at least an abandonment of the present in favor of a future audience. To witness means to some degree that you have to stand by and watch evil, preserving your own life so you can eventually communicate what happened. And today, with the media we have currently, isn’t testimony about what happened already being spread as soon as events happen?
I don’t know which of these roles are most important. And maybe we all need to be ready to do any one of them, depending on the circumstances. We may even have to do all three. The difficulty is first in deciding what to do under the circumstances we face, and then in deciding how to do it in a way that follows the gospel, that is the most like what Christ would do that we can manage.
However, it is clear that there is one thing we should not do. If it’s true that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” can we really remain complacent? Can we really not do anything?
I think Dalton-Bradford used the example of the Weimar Republic on purpose. We are at or are rapidly approaching a point where the risk of complacency is similar. When a Maryland man is deported to a foreign jail and the President refuses to get him back, despite an order from the Supreme Court, who is safe? When MASKED ICE officers unnecessarily seize an unarmed and non-violent woman off the street, without bothering to inform her that her visa had been revoked, how is that not like the SS? When the government willfully ignores the constitution, ignoring laws passed by congress and stealing powers given to the legislature and the courts, is complacency really an option?
I hope we can figure out how to act in the face of the current evil that has taken over our government. Whether we use protest, parrhesia, or act as witnesses, we are reaching the point where we must act. Ironically, Goldwater’s immoderate statement that “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue” seems like it will end up being the opposition’s rallying cry—despite the violence and discord that might imply. There are better ways of acting. Instead, I hope that the oft-discounted claim that the Elders of the Church will save the constitution from hanging by a thread will be soon instead of in some unnamed future, and prescient instead of mythic.
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