The vulgarity and low character of Donald Trump are famously at odds with the values and teachings promoted by the Church, but another area of conflict has been less apparent despite its impact. For the Church, the Trump presidency is an apocalyptic catastrophe in the technical sense: at least a postponement and potentially a mortal blow to the eschaton we thought we were approaching.
The shift towards isolationism, detachment from former allies and alliances, renunciation of promoting democracy and human rights in favor of transactional advantage and spheres of influence, embrace of foreign dictators and ethnonationalist politicians, and general disdain for all other nations has not just stranded the internationalist wing of the Republican Party. It also hinders the Church from achieving its core identity.
Of course BYU-Hawaii can’t fulfill its religious mission of international education if student visas are denied, and obstructing the travel of missionaries and general authorities will hinder the Church’s accomplishment of its missions. But something much more basic is at stake.
The Church is currently looking forward to multiple high-profile events over the next decade, from the bicentennial of its founding to the next Salt Lake City Olympics, as opportunities for another turn in the spotlight. This is not just a media strategy. This is the core identity of the Church: to be a light to the world, for all nations to come up to the mountain of the Lord’s house, for Zion to be built upon the American continent. To be the restored church of Jesus Christ in the latter days hard-wires internationalism into the Church’s basic self-conception. It’s no accident that one of the few Republicans calling for the continuation of America’s international leadership is former ambassador and Arizona senator Jeff Flake.
To a degree we can only recognize now that it is slipping away, Francis Fukuyama’s end of history has been incorporated into our End of History. A world of enduring peace between liberal democracies where nations can attain higher levels of health, prosperity and education within a stable international order based on rules, free trade, and defensive alliances, a world becoming freer and more interconnected, is a world in which the Church can send missionaries to nearly every nation, find converts attracted to its messages, and start wards and branches.
This ending, the good ending, is the future you sold off for a mess of border conflicts and oppressive tyrants when you voted for Donald Trump. The world in which the good ending was possible is now receding into the past. You can’t build a temple in a city under siege, you can’t publish the Book of Mormon under a hostile censor, and you can’t preach the gospel if freedoms of speech, religion and association are not respected.
Look at the meetinghouse locator on the Church website, and you will find blank spaces where multiple wards once existed in Mariupol and Melitopol. Today the meetinghouse in Sumy is just over 10 miles from the front lines. And there are more red dots at risk of being swept off the map in every conflict zone where militant expansionists, who once worried about international sanctions, now see a chance to establish their own spheres of influence, from the conflicted Armenian-Azerbaijani border to the northern tier of sub-Saharan Africa, where a series of military rulers is steadily losing ground to Islamic State or Al Qaeda-aligned rebellions. In a world that has been carved up into spheres of influence, many of the dots on the meetinghouse locator will be erased by war, as in Ukraine, or by oppression, as is likely to happen across Russia and parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, after the United States has withdrawn to its own sphere of influence.
Liberal democracy and a rules-based international order are of course younger than the Church, and much younger than Christianity. The Church can still spread its message without them, just as the gospel was preached long before European philosophers imagined and American revolutionaries implemented a better way for countries to govern themselves.
But you and I and the Church are not ready for that kind of world and the sacrifices it required to live and preach the gospel. We are not ready to face the stark choice between renouncing our commission to preach the gospel, or cooperating enough with dictators to avoid their wrath as long as possible. The retreat of democracy and human rights will mean an age of confessors, exiles and martyrs, of saints persecuted for their faith or targeted for violence. Are you prepared to take them in? to stand with them?
This is what we rejected, and what we chose instead, when we re-elected Donald Trump. May God forgive us for our folly.
Comments
24 responses to “The good ending”
An excellent read. A bit of a bait-and-switch title, but still a good read.
Thanks, jader3rd. Next time I’ll look at the potential ( historical, non-eschatological) bad endings, and what a good ending might look like.
I am not criticizing President Nelson or, due to his law career and defense of constitutionality, President Oaks, but I sure wish that the church had been more effective at teaching its members what was at stake. It is a hard pill to swallow, the knowledge that my neighbors, family, and most of my ward voted repeatedly for Trump and all that he stands for. They did it in cold blood too, at least this time around. And I don’t really want to know how all the GAs voted…I mean, I do, but I don’t. It’s not a great moment. The disappointment and sadness is pretty overwhelming.
One of things that irritate me is when MAGA-ites think it’s only leftist who oppose them. Granted, most if not all of the Republican party has either surrendered or given fealty to Trump but there are still conservatives out there that oppose him based on what use to be thought of as conservative values.
I am Australian. We had negotiated a free trade agreement, and a mutual defence agreement with America. We have similar agreements with most of the free world.
Trump has torn up the free trade agreement, and replaced it with a 10% tarriff on everything except steel and aluminium, 50%. Not the act of a friend. We do not know about the defence agreement. We also have an agreement to buy nuclear submarines off America, but trump has ordered an enquiry into that.
On the trade side we bought more from America than you bought from us. On the defence side we supply jungle training, we provide docking and repair for pacific and Indian Ocean, and we have listening stations for Asia and Middle East. We also provide communication for satelites on the other side of the world from America.
America is involved in 9% of world trade. We can redirect our trade elsewhere. The government has not yet come out and said we are boycotting America like Canada has but we individually are.
As for the Church; we understand that 2/3 of members voted for Trump, but more men voted for Trump than women, so perhaps 3/4 of Mormon men had the option of a capable brown woman, but chose Trump. To me this shows a moral deposit. If I see a conference speaker or visiting authority I think he would have to claim he didn’t vote for trump before he would have any moral credibility, anywhere outside America.
We will not be visiting America, buying anything America or trusting America until trump is gone. Our only hope for America is that he causes so much damage that there is a backlash and republicans have to completely reform before they can get back into government.
We had an election in May. Our Labor government (left of democrates) was returned with an increased majority. Labor has 58% of mps are women and the majority of cabinet are women.
We believe in climate change, as does most of the first world. America will fall behind on fossil free technology, and also destroy the environment for the rest of us. I hope you enjoy the consequences.
Well, since you’ve come very close to accusing me of thwarting the will of God and endangering the future of the church by voting for Trump, I’ll respond.
It’s probably fair to say that everyone who posts here or reads Times and Seasons belongs to what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call the cognitive class. We have higher than average IQs, we have degrees from respected universities, we work in government or academia or tech or other professions that rely on ideas more than physical things. For the past one hundred or so years we’ve been taking more and more control of society and molding it to suit our needs and desires. In many cases this has been good overall, but there are always trade offs, and we’ve made sure we weren’t the ones suffering the negative consequences. When the steel workers or plumbers or small businessmen or others have complained about how our policies have hurt them, we’ve ignored them or minimized their problems or, unfortunately, blamed them and called them racists or other such names.
For better or worse, Trump is the champion of the people we’ve been oppressing. He is a threat, not to democracy, but to our self regard and sense of entitlement as the “smart, educated” people who should be setting the tone for society.
It’s almost amusing to see the president who negotiated the Abraham accords, who just last month brokered talks that defused a conflict between Pakistan and India, and within the past week helped form a tentative peace agreement to end the conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo accused of isolationism and abandoning alliances. Trump has not so much tried to undo the international order as rebase it in something other than the hegemony of a globalist elite. And, really, how can you blame the devastation in Ukraine on Trump? Russia made no overt attacks on Ukraine until he was out of office.
Freedom of speech? Give me a break. The Biden administration was more hostile to freedom of speech than any other in my lifetime, probably more than any since Woodrow Wilson.
As I said in a previous comment, I was “Never Trump” in 2016. The disconnect between how his opponents characterize what he does with what I see him actually doing is a large part of what changed my mind. There are many things I know I should repent of, but I don’t think voting for Trump is one of them.
Sorry not moral deposit but deficiency
Geoff: It is often overlooked, but post-election polling takes a long time to provide any kind of reliable results and the numbers tossed around right after an election are not useful. It’s only very recently that useful polling for broad demographics like age groups has become available. Whatever statistics you may have seen so far about LDS voting patterns in 2024 should be treated with skepticism.
Carey, I’m glad there are conservatives who recognize the stakes and are willing to speak out. I wish the represented a larger voting bloc.
Curtis, I don’t think you’ve thwarted the will of God, as the will of God will be realized whatever we do. I think you voted for what you thought would be best for yourself, the country, and the Church, based on what you saw during the first Trump administration and the campaign.
At this point it should be clear that you made a terrible mistake – that’s okay, it happens to all of us – but it does give you a particular responsibility to help clean up the mess. Thousands of people have already died because of the sudden USAID cuts, for example, with millions more to follow. Did you call up your congressional representatives to tell them that you’re a Republican and a Trump supporter, but you want to keep feeding the hungry? They might listen to you, a reliable Republican voter, when they won’t listen to me.
Trump is accurately described as a threat to democracy because he already tried to subvert an election outcome through violence. He pardoned people who were convicted of violently trying to storm the Capitol to halt certification of the election. He continues to insist that people under his authority repeat the lie that victory in 2020 was stolen from him. The threat to democracy could not be plainer.
Russia attacked Ukraine every day Trump was in office. While the front lines were largely static during his first term, attacks continued throughout. Trump is a threat to Ukraine now because he has authorized no new weapons shipments, but instead canceled delivery of weapons previously authorized, including much-needed ammunition for air defenses. He won’t even permit Ukraine to purchase it from us. He has not imposed any new sanctions on Russia, but has instead lifted some sanctions. It’s not that Trump is indifferent to Ukraine – it’s that he’s on the other side.
The simplest explanation for changing your mind about Trump because of unfair comments is that you actually liked him all along. What made the comments seem unfair and the predictions so overblown in his first term was that he was surrounded by responsible Republicans who kept the worst from happening. Those officials are now gone, and the overblown predictions now look prescient. The worst is here. It’s staring you in the face, if you’ll see it.
I admit I chuckled at the absolute arrogance of presuming to know why Curtis Pew changed his mind and voted for Trump, while also quoting NPR that “thousands have already died because of the sudden USAID cuts.” This is the same NPR whose CEO said that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction….”
“The worst is here.” Truly? The worst? My friend, put the laptop down, touch grass and admit that hyperbole has consumed your analysis.
“The worst is here.”
I think it is going to get worse. We’re not even six month’s into Trump’s term, with more than three-and-a-half years ahead of us. Yeah, and with regret, I think it is going to get worse. May God save our republic.
Thor, if you don’t trust NPR, try AP: Children die as USAID aid cuts snap a lifeline for the world’s most malnourished
Or the Washington Post: In Sudan, where children clung to life, doctors say USAID cuts have been fatal
Or pick your own source. Just do whatever it takes to find out about the children dying of AIDS and starvation because of what the Trump administration has done to USAID funding.
As for Curtis’s motivation, I’m just going off my own experience here. I don’t like unfair criticism either! Where I especially don’t like them is with things that I actually like a lot, so strong negative reactions to unfair criticism are a good way to uncover actual preferences.
The worst – of what was predicted by deranged Trump critics before the election – is indeed here. It’s even been surpassed. Did anyone predict the president would hawk his own brand of perfume? The worst that conditions will be in the US is probably still to come.
Well, I don’t think voting for Trump was a mistake. We seem to be living in alternate realities.
No, I don’t trust NPR, or the AP, or the Washington Post. All these organizations have demonstrated more than once that supporting their political narrative is a higher priority for them than telling the truth. Three examples: “Trump colluded with Russia!” “The Hunter Biden laptop story is Russian disinformation!” “Joe Biden isn’t experiencing cognitive decline!” All these stories were later proven or admitted to be false. Why should I believe their horror stories about deaths caused by ending USAID, particularly when they are mostly sourced from people who were getting money from USAID?
I’m not exactly a Trump fan. He has a lot of negatives that I’d rather do without. Besides being “Never Trump” in 2016, before the 2024 primary started I really hoped he would throw his support to someone like DeSantis and sit it out. But that isn’t what happened, so here we are.
Curtis, what do you think happens when you stop giving food to malnourished children? What do you think happens to people infected with HIV who lose access to medication?
You seem skeptical of some pretty mainstream news outlets doing basic factual reporting. What news sources do you trust?
My frustration with just about every Trump supporter I know–and that’s a large chunk of the family and friends I know and love–is what I’m admittedly assuming about Curtis Pew: they don’t like the mainstream news outlets because they’ve gotten things about Trump or the Right wrong in the past, but their solution to that potential bias is to exclusively turn to outlets who aren’t even trying to get it right (or are only trying to get it Right, if you follow my meaning). It’s as if they’re saying, “I don’t like your biased news, so I’m going to only watch unabashed, super biased news, because it’s at least telling me what I want to hear.” Put another way, if you’re primarily watching Fox News (or an outlet further to the Right), you’re not against bias in the news, you just want your bias.
Back when I was still naive enough to think that people could change their mind about Trump and Fox News, I was so ecstatic when several Fox executives admitted in deposition that they couldn’t be held to normal standards of defamation because no one would be gullible enough to believe that Fox News was engaged in factual reporting–it was just an entertainment channel, they said. But those admissions, like so many other would-be watershed moments over the last 10 years, failed to move the needle at all.
I’m afraid I’ve become quite skeptical of all news sources. So much reporting seems to be a “hot take” that’s eventually modified or even contradicted by later investigation. Once a story has been out for a while and covered by groups with differing political values we might have a chance at knowing the actual truth.
Another criteria is the inherent plausibility of the story. I was still pretty anti-Trump when the “Russian collusion” story broke, but my initial reaction was that it didn’t seem very likely. After the way Clinton dealt with Russia as Secretary of State, why would Putin prefer Trump to her? Also, parts of the story seemed like something out of a third-rate spy story. (I remember thinking, “if this is the best they can come up with to stop him, maybe he isn’t that bad.”)
Now, USAID was shut down just under five months ago, and several USAID programs that were clearly humanitarian were transferred to the State Department instead of being shuttered. Am I really supposed to believe this has already caused thousands of deaths?
OK, one more thing. I rarely watch Fox News. To the extent I watch any television news, it’s mostly the local NBC affiliate. And there have been several times when I’ve seen something from a right-wing source and thought, “That fits my belief system a little too easily. I think I’ll hold off before I get all excited about it.”
The numbers: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc. But, basically, Curtis doesn’t care becuase anything he doesn’t like he can attribute to either Trump Derangement Syndrome or fake news –just like all the other MAGA people out there. Delusion.
The Senate intelligence report on Russia’s interference with the 2016 election is five volumes long and was bipartisan under a Republican majority. Names like Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and John Cronyn signed the report (as did some lady named Kamala Harris). It found that Russia did indeed work to influence the election in Trump’s favor. Moreover, if I may quote from the Wikipedia summary:
“Like the Mueller report that preceded it, the report does not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, but it does go further than the Mueller report in detailing the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. In particular, it describes Paul Manafort as “a grave counterintelligence threat”. According to the report, “some evidence suggests” that Konstantin Kilimnik, to whom Manafort provided polling data, was directly connected to the Russian theft of Clinton-campaign emails. In addition, while Trump’s written testimony in the Mueller report stated that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks, the Senate report concludes that “Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.””
The best that can be said for Trump is that he may not have known what Manafort (his campaign manager) was doing, that no provable crimes were committed (collusion is not a meaningful legal term in this context), and that some of the more lurid rumors of his connections to Russia turned out to be false. If you wish to give him the benefit of the doubt, that’s up to you.
But don’t you dare blame the whole thing on the media or Democrats. Russia worked to help sway the election, Trump’s campaign sought to take advantage of it, Trump obstructed investigation of it, continued to deny that Russia had done it (publicly siding with Putin against our own intelligence agencies), and finally pardoned all of the people who were convicted of lying about it (including Manfort and Roger Stone). If it was all a hoax, then Trump did his darn best to look guilty.
I thought about posting another long rebuttal, but it’s the 4th of July and it feels like this has gone on long enough. Happy Independence Day! Enjoy your freedom today. I plan to.
“Happy Independence Day??”
I did not celebrate — I can’t celebrate. I am convinced that we have an evil group in power trying to take away our independence.
And, Curtis, I find it particularly disturbing that the only way you can justify things is by claiming that the reports are not believable. That lack of belief and choosing which sources to believe is why we’re in a situation that is rapidly heading toward autocracy.
I believe Mr. Trump is a mean, old man in serious cognitive decline — I believe things will get worse before they get better (after all, he’s been president for less than six months, with more than three-and-a-half years left to go). I regret his attacks on our republic’s institutions, processes, and constitution, and I deplore the hatred he and his MAGA community have for immigrants. Nonetheless, I still celebrated July 4th. The United States is still a great country.
For the sake of balance, as an Australian I’ve got to say that while many people feel like Geoff-Aus, they’re far from a majority. Geoff may feel that a Trump-voting general authority wouldn’t have moral credibility, but the vast majority of Aussie LDS couldn’t care less. A GA is a GA to them. Trump isn’t popular in Australia, but I don’t think he’s that front of mind. More power to Geoff who’s obviously passionate about his politics – I’m just saying his views are not that representative, at least when it comes to Aussie LDS.
As an aside, I’d love it if political posts could be less polemical and more balanced. It’s perfectly easy to criticise Trump without overegging it, and while acknowledging the weakness in other options. I think you’d have a higher chance of persuading people to your view by pursuing this approach.
Curtis, you wrote “No, I don’t trust NPR, or the AP, or the Washington Post. All these organizations have demonstrated more than once that supporting their political narrative is a higher priority for them than telling the truth. Three examples: ‘Trump colluded with Russia!’”
This makes it seem like you are saying that Trump campaign officials in 2016 didn’t gladly accept help offered by Russian operatives. If it’s what you say, I love it!