1—To get this out of the way: There was no good answer to the question of how the Church should have responded to Nazism. There was no safe middle ground between complicit engagement, impotent resistance, and needless death. If letting missionaries train the German basketball team had a .01% chance of making war less likely, then it was worth trying. The truth of the Church’s response to Nazism is not a handful of missionaries playing basketball, but 100,000 LDS soldiers fighting in the war against the Axis powers, with 5,000 dying during the war.
The lesson for today is: Don’t vote for fascists for any reason.
2—The Trump administration is not Nazi Germany. But it’s not entirely not Nazi Germany, either. Here’s a quick 7-point plan for how Republicans can avoid being mistaken for Nazis:
- Don’t ground your political movement on the Dolchstoßlegende of a stolen election.
- Don’t attempt to seize power in a violent Putsch after losing an election.
- Don’t build Konzentrationslager and use them in your propaganda.
- Don’t have unaccountable secret police terrorize American cities.
- Don’t install white supremacists in government positions to promote their Herrenvolk ideology.
- Don’t attempt cultural Gleichschaltung by imposing your will on the media, universities, and industry.
- Don’t promote fascist parties abroad.
- (Bonus) Don’t adopt a fascist aesthetic for official government communication.
It’s challenging but not impossible. Every administration prior to the Trump presidency managed it.
3—The good ending is still on the table. For the Church, the good ending means reaching the end of the current political moment with no major schism or loss of membership, still able to minister to members throughout the world and across the political spectrum. And the best way to achieve that is to ignore the Trump administration as long and as fully as possible. Look at other American institutions, such as large companies and leading research universities, which are slowly being sorted into three categories: the silent trying to avoid notice, the complicit profiteers, and those who have been forced into a ruinous conflict with the Trump administration by a threat to their core mission. The smart strategy is to stay in the first category as long as possible. You might find this situation dissatisfying, but the other outcomes are worse.
4—There are scenarios where the Church would have no choice but to condemn government actions and risk a substantial loss of membership, or remain silent and risk the loss of a different segment. These scenarios include the subversion of an election, an attack on a democratic ally, or interference with the operations of the Church itself. These scenarios seem unthinkable, yet the first was already attempted, and the president and vice president have openly proposed the second as recently as [check notes] today. Seizing Greenland would require the Church to either condemn the attack, and risk losing a segment of MAGA members, or remain silent, and risk losing Europe for a generation.
5—Should the Church publicly condemn the mistreatment of immigrants? I would welcome it, but the answer shouldn’t depend on my feelings, but on how it would affect immigrants. Would it make their lives better, or would it invite additional scrutiny of LDS congregations in ways that would make their lives worse? I don’t know. But once made, the choice can’t be undone. A year ago, the Church could exercise its rights and issue statements as a participant in the marketplace of ideas. Today, we’re halfway between a public square and surveillance by a corrupt vindictive unchecked personalist autocracy that’s willing to use the levers of government to persecute its opponents, and we’re learning every day that First Amendment protections are not nearly as strong as we once thought.
6—In addition: We have no idea what anyone else is doing out of public view. We don’t know what private options are foreclosed if the Church is compelled to speak. I can only control what I do and say. Getting upset over someone else’s silence is actively harmful because you don’t know what behind-the-scene moves you’re hindering.
In some Catholic dioceses, priests are preparing to put their lives on the line for their parishioners. And that’s awesome. I wouldn’t want my bishop to do that, because he has to care for his family and minister to some Republican ward members who aren’t ready for that conversation. But there’s nothing stopping you or me from supporting Catholic priests or anyone else. Each member of the body of Christ has its own function, and carping about what someone else isn’t doing is not useful.
7—Does all this sound dissatisfying and decidedly unheroic? That’s the nature of life under fascism. Every act of resistance follows a dozen acts of compromise and accommodation where the cost of resistance wasn’t worth the price. If you would prefer to have better options, stop voting fascists into office.
8—The Church is not a political institution, just like the Juilliard School and Starbucks and the NHL are not political institutions. Each of these entities has a particular mission while operating in various contexts (financial, legal, geographic, etc.), including a political context. These organizations seek to maximize the results of their various missions, not a particular political outcome. If you were drawing graphs, politics would lie along the X axis, not the Y axis. American society is worth living in because of all its non-political institutions, and we need to preserve that.
9—But the Church, like Starbucks and the NHL and the Juilliard School, is concretely embodied in the United States in a way that it was not in 1930s Germany or anywhere else in the world today. For better or worse, what happens in U.S. politics affects the Church unlike political events anywhere else, so the Church has to remain politically aware and engaged.
10—If you’re appalled by what is happening to the United States – and you should be – you should do something about it. But it is a basic category error to expect your favorite grocery chain or sports league to be a vehicle of protest unless it serves its overall mission. Starbucks and the NHL hope to continue attracting fans and customers from across the political spectrum and are only going to get involved in politics if their missions are threatened. The Church is not going to perform your protesting for you, especially not at the cost of hindering its own mission. It will get involved in situations where its missions are threatened. Those situations are so dire and the outcomes at that point are so poor that I hope it never comes to that.
11—The scriptures set an exceedingly high bar for resistance. Perhaps you can find an escape clause from “render unto Caesar.” It’s somewhat harder to get around “We believe in being subject to kings,” although there are some helpful clarifications in D&C 98 and 134. The hardest teaching of all is Paul’s injunction in Romans 13 for Christians to be subject to authorities, who are divinely established – even if the authorities are awful tyrants of the type that existed in Paul’s time. Commenting on this chapter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
It is not that Christians serve God when they pay taxes, Paul says, but that those who impose taxes are thereby doing – their! – service to God. Paul does not call Christians to this form of serving God, but to submission and to not owing anyone anything that is due to them. Any opposition, any resistance here would only make clear that Christians have confused the Kingdom of God with a kingdom of this world.
(Of course, Bonhoeffer eventually managed to find a bridge between Romans 13 and participating in a plot on Hitler’s life.)
12—Donald Trump is no Cyrus or Augustus. In terms of scriptural precedents, he is an uncannily accurate incarnation of wicked King Noah. Trump, like Noah, is driven by the “desires of his heart.” Trump’s multiple “wives and concubines” are a matter of public record, while their precise ages remain a matter of controversy. His imposition of new taxes in the form of arbitrary tariffs is unprecedented; compared to some tariffs, Noah’s 20% taxation rate is relatively mild. Trump moves government levers to enrich his family and friends, just like Noah changed the affairs of the kingdom to increase the wealth of his “wives and concubines; and also his priests, and their wives and concubines.” Like Trump, Noah was a lover of luxury and “spacious buildings” ornamented with fine woodwork, gold and silver (plus some brass, copper and ziff). Noah’s building program and wine industry gave the land a superficial prosperity, even as its foundations were rotting. Although Noah was indifferent to the land’s actual security needs, an episode of military success led the people to “boast in their own strength, saying that their fifty could stand against thousands of the Lamanites” and they “did delight in blood, and the shedding of the blood of their brethren, and this because of the wickedness of their king and priests.”
13—You are here.
14—When the prophet Abinadi begins his prophetic ministry in response to Noah’s reign, he doesn’t mention Noah at all. Instead, he condemns the people’s wickedness and calls on them to repent. Then he disappears for two years. When he reappears, he again calls for people to repent of their sins and idolatry and informs Noah that his life is fleeting, but still does not single out Noah for condemnation. In his final confrontation, Abinadi condemns the priests appointed by Noah for failing in their duty to teach the people. Abinadi teaches a basic message of obedience to the Ten Commandments while looking forward to the Savior’s atonement.
15—The prophets and apostles have spoken out multiple names over the last year. In their Conference addresses, they have taught the gospel of repentance, preached obedience, cautioned against idolatry and explained the Atonement. If this isn’t the message you want to hear, you may need to re-evaluate where you situate yourself in the confrontation between Abinadi and the priests of King Noah.
16—Anticipatory despair is not a form of resistance. It makes no sense to say, “Noah has been building spacious buildings for his concubines for years and Abinadi hasn’t said anything yet, so he probably approves of it,” “All Noah does is talk about repentance without mentioning King Noah directly, and that just doesn’t cut it,” “Noah said something once and then disappeared for two years, so he probably went hard core MNGA,” or “The red sash Abinadi chose for his cloak identifies him as a Noah supporter.” Cynical despair is a particularly harmful way to grant yourself permission to do nothing.
17—The cringe resist libs and MWEG moms have been right about everything over the last ten years. If you got it wrong, that’s not unusual. We all get a lot of things wrong. But the first step in repentance is admitting you were wrong, and then changing course.
Leave a Reply