Today’s guest post is from Simon C.
We are definitely receiving more frequent messaging about diversity and inclusion in our church community, the most recent being Elder Christofferson’s talk last Conference on ‘The Doctrine of Belonging’. These are largely positive attempts to recognise diversity of background and experiences, to root out judgment and prejudice and to foster love and unity among us. Most messages, including Elder Christofferson’s, place at their heart Paul’s teaching of unity in Christ. Paul’s take, expressed in various ways in his letters, is summed up neatly here:
‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’
Galatians 3.28, RNSV.
Just a couple of years ago, Elder Cook gave this perspective:
‘The culture of the gospel of Jesus Christ is not a Gentile culture or a Judaic culture. It is not determined by the color of one’s skin or where one lives. While we rejoice in distinctive cultures, we should leave behind aspects of those cultures that conflict with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our members and new converts often come from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds … Yet we can be united in our love of and faith in Jesus Christ. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans establishes the principle that we follow the culture and doctrine of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the model for us even today.’
Quentin Cook, Hearts knit in righteousness and unity, October 2020 General Conference.
What Elder Cook expresses is a wonderful ideal on the surface, but let’s lift the lid and think critically and sensitively about the real-world dynamics of a quest towards inclusion and belonging in our community, and the celebration of diversity. What are the other sides to this story?What impact does ‘inclusion’ and the potential erasure of difference have on individuals, minorities and those marginalised?Is there a price to be paid for ‘belonging’?
Going back to the message of Paul:
‘While Paul’s impulse toward the founding of a non-differentiated, non-hierarchical humanity was laudable in my opinion, many of its effects in terms of actual lives were not. In terms of ethnicity, his system required that all human cultural specificities—first and foremost, that of the Jews—be eradicated, whether or not the people in question were willing. Moreover, since of course, there is no such thing as cultural unspecificity, merging all people into one common culture means ultimately (as it has meant in the history of European cultural imperialism) merging all people into the dominant culture. In terms of gender, for Paul (as indeed, for nearly everyone until now), autonomy and something like true equality for women were bought at the expense of sexuality and maternity. Also, analogously to the culture question, the erasure of gender seems always to have ended up positing maleness as the norm to which women can “aspire.”’
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994) p.8
Or to put it more succinctly:
‘The erasure of “male and female” is not necessarily a good thing for women; nor is the erasure of Jewish identity necessarily a good thing for Jews. For the slave, the erasure of the category “free” is another contested point.’
Warren Carter and Amy-Jill Levine, The New Testament: Methods and Meaning (2013) p.180.
How can we use these insightsas a lens for our own community?
Firstly, erasure or demotion of different identities has the potential to increase marginalisation, to further ignore voices and sidestep deep and profound questions. Think about the following statements: “We are all first and foremost children of god” and“There are no homosexual members of the church.”The first is of course meant to be a hopeful message; the second is just downright bizarre. Using this universalising angle, however well-intentioned, can be dismissive of real issues and real concerns and real identities. Some may be happy to let go some aspects of their identity (whatever that may be), or relegate them in importance while promoting others. Some may not. But it is their choice.
In relation to marginalised identities, bell hooks wrote:
“As such, I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose, to give up, or surrender as part of moving into the center, but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”
Marginality as a site of resistance. In R. Ferguson et al (eds), Out there: marginalization and contemporary cultures (1990) pp.341-343.
Which leads us to…
Erasure of difference in practice often means aligning to the dominant culture. Simply put, does belonging seek to eliminate difference or seek to empower diverse and marginalised voices? The church discourse is getting better, but inpractice the idea of belonging hasoften been seen in terms ofsurrendering to some idealised unifying ‘gospel culture’ which in turn can mean surrender to a culture that looks suspiciously ‘Western’ and ‘Corporate’. (As a Brit, I’m not going to go any further anddescribe possible ‘American’ aspects of this culture. I’ll leave that to other commentators. But a good friend—also British—who has worked for American corporations does note the similarities.) Elder Cook talked about ‘leaving behind aspects of those cultures that conflict with the gospel of Jesus Christ’. But what do those aspects look like and who is defining the conflict?
Women throughout the history of Christianity, for example, often abandoned a specifically gendered identity for either a non-gendered asceticism, or a more ‘masculine’ one, to increase their social and cultural capital in their Christian community. They didn’t feel they could be included ‘as women’. Instead of the dominant narrative changing to include them as they were, they changed to fit the dominant patriarchal narrative to achieve some form of equality and respect. Patriarchal equality—does that sound familiar? And what about ‘benign patriarchy’ where we marginalise upwards to the pedestal? Whether second-class, better-class or equal, patriarchy seems to define the terms.
But to understand how we approach belonging we need to understand how we approach the ‘other’. We all know the process; it is what we do as groups and societies, although the specifics will be context-bound. ‘Othering’ is a fundamental part of identity formation; to talk of ‘inclusion’ so often means to talk of exclusion, of separation. We can often include and exclude in the same breath. Love the sinner but hate the sin? Well, if the alleged ‘sin’ is an inseparable part of your identity, what then?
If you ever want a case study in forming a stark ‘us and them’, ‘good and evil’ paradigm, then look no further than the Johannine Epistles:
‘Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour.
They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.’
1 John 2.18-19 (RNSV)
It would be great to know what those on the ‘outside’ felt about this community split. Most likely they still considered themselves fellow Christians and resisted the identity chosen for them by others. Last conference’s message about overcoming “this sin-saturated, self-centered, and often exhausting world” shows we never stop drawing the dividing lines. Can we truly ever be inclusive when our desire to separate and feel ‘special’ seems to be in our very DNA? Does our attitude toward the ‘world’ have an impact on our attitude to members within of our community?
‘Othering’ is a slippery and creative process, the dividing lines changing to meet the needs of the community, constantly being constructed, deconstructed, re-constructed. Paradoxically, sometimes the fiercestlines are drawn against those who are the closest to us. Those who are most different can be so outside our daily experience that they can be safely neutralised as a benign curiosity. Those closest to us, on the other hand, can represent the real threat, just because they are so very close. Think about the controversies and schisms in the first centuries of Christianity over the meaning of a single word or the use of a single term.
The complexity of ‘othering’ can be seen everywhere. In 2015 the UK government did little to aid those fleeing war in Syria and elsewhere, preferring instead to fall back on the wider EU refugee policy that sanctuary should be sought in the first safe country entered (thus putting an undue and unfair burden on Greece, Italy and Spain). Fast-forward to this year and the UK government put in place a large refugee resettlement and hosting programme for those fleeing Ukraine; government officials were also dispatched to France to offer help to those Ukrainians who had made it to the shores of the English Channel (but not to Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis who had also been in the area for months, even years.) This was wonderful to see, but the different approach was not lost on refugee advocacy groups. Are there good refugees and bad refugees? I’ll let you decide the motives.
Just last week a British opposition MP was suspended from her party for saying that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, was only “superficially black” and that “If you hear him on the Today programme [a flagship radio news show], you wouldn’t know he’s black.” This jaw-droppingly awful comment was an attempt (I think) at criticising class and privilege, coming from a left-wing Labour politician aimed at a right-wing Conservative government; but it was also a racist play of ‘essentialist’ ideas of race, as defined by those on the outside. When someone else is telling you what someone of your race ‘should’ look, act, and sound like, we are in deep trouble. In the UK we have a very live debate surrounding class, privilege and educational background in our politics. But we also currently have the most ethnically diverse government ever. This is wonderful. On the other hand, there is still a lack of diversity according to these other measures. Fair point. But that cannot detract from the fact that we have the most ethnically diverse government ever! It seems sometimes we snatch ‘othering’ from the jaws of inclusion. The irony in all this is that the MP who made the remarks is herself from an ethnic minority. This is a seriously messy business. Who, how and why we ‘other’ can be very creative indeed.
I realise throughout all of this I speak from a position of privilege. I don’t come from a minority, although I too can feel marginalised sometimes. But I have also been guilty of marginalising others.I may have spoken about such sensitive and complicated issues clumsily, so forgive me. But I do know that it will benefit us to approach these issues with critical thinking and a huge dollop of humility and empathy. We can nobly talk of inclusion and belonging, but what that looks like and how we go about it really does matter.
- Have you had experiences of ‘identity erasure’, well-intentioned or otherwise? Have you felt these in a church and gospel context?
- How would you describe the dominant culture and identity of the church? Is the narrative changing to include you or do you still need to change to fit the narrative?
- Does the talk of diversity and belonging in the church ring true or ring hollow? In our drive for inclusion do we just find ever more elaborate ways to exclude?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
I live in a US town that is 65% non-white. The LDS pews are 98% white. Our convert baptisms are usually non-white, but none of them stick around for longer than a week or two.
I also run a youth development program that leans white but that still has a good 35% non-white members (requires full family involvement).
Two differences that I can see. 1 – Lds members here are mostly 1st and 2nd gen transfers from Utah, youth development program is a huge mix. 2 – Lds church services, customs, social interactions are based around white, middle/upper class social dynamics whereas the youth program is based around local, mixed social dynamics.
If we want those of other cultures and backgrounds to feel like they belong in LDS circles, we have to create a space where they actually do belong. That requires way more than rhetoric. But it also works. (Not arguing there aren’t other barriers to gaining, retaining converts.)
Excellent post. You’re correct…when you erase everyone’s differences you allow the dominant to take over. Here’s what I’m looking for: a General Authority who dares to wear a blue shirt to General Conference. That will be a sign to us that “all are welcome”.
Imagine enlisting in the military only to be told, “Whatever you were before, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon…now you’re just a soldier.” You wouldn’t get many religious soldiers signing up that way. It’s clearly possible to maintain a multitude of identities while becoming part of a new community. At least it should be.
I’ve been impressed with the DEI training I’ve received at the university I teach at. It’s opened my eyes to ways we can discriminate without meaning to by failing to account for the possible needs of students in different circumstances. For example, posting an image online without a caption or alt text for a screen reader to use means parts of your content won’t be available to people with a vision impairment. Real inclusion looks like changing your own behavior to accommodate others, not asking them to change theirs.
Excellent post, Simon. It’s well-written and thought-provoking.
I liked Elder Christofferson’s talk about belonging, but as you point out, he didn’t talk about the very real differences among people. The Church wants us all to feel included, which works for people who hit all the major similarity points in terms of race, sexuality, family status and so forth. But then it just ignores any dissimilarities.
Being part of the Church community is a relationship. A relationship is healthy when you can be honest about who you are, good and bad, similarities and differences, and be accepted as a whole person. If you’re only presenting your acceptable qualities, then the relationship is on a shaky foundation. It’s the mirror of being pushed up onto a pedestal. “We accept all these wonderful things about you! Now live up to our ideal opinion of you and don’t ever disappoint us!” That’s the pedestal.
When we identify only as a child of God and nothing else, it’s like we’re saying: “Here are all the ways I’m like you, and I will push away and ignore the dissimilarities. I want to ignore them as much as you, so if I pretend they don’t exist, we’ll all be happier!” That’s only a temporary fix. You can have a personal shelf as much as you have a Church shelf and eventually your personal shelf can break too. You have to deal with all the uncomfortable truths about yourself that you never wanted to examine too closely either. That’s a self-image crisis rather than a faith/trust crisis.
There needs to be visible differences to help people trust that invisible differences can be accepted too. I liked josh h’s idea about blue shirts at Gen Conf. I hope the changes to FSOY mean we start seeing multiple piercings and tattoos. Simon is correct that Church culture skews white, American and corporate. It’s easy for the Brethren to feel a sense of belonging to that culture; I’m not sure they understand what it’s like to belong to an organization that wants to ignore an important part of your own identity.
I think the erasure of differences is where we in the church and 95% of male, white, heterosexual, cis, Anglo, Christians get belonging all wrong. It shows up in colonialism, but also the treatment of women. The Mormon church s no exception, and in fact one of the worst offenders. Instead of accepting African music when the church moves into Africa, and finding a nice drum piece to use as music for Oh, My Father, we insist they sing it exactly like Utah Mormons do. Instead of accepting native clothing, we expect the men to show up to church in a white shirt and tie.
And for things that can’t be changed (or they assume the person is refusing to change) to be just like the white, male, heterosexual, cis perfect men, they make second class. They see themselves as the ideal and everything else must be made into a copy of us. And they do it at least as long as they can get away with keeping them second class. For example, race cannot be changed, so what did the men do? They made blacks second class as long as they could get away with it. And they will continue to make women, gays and trans folk second class until they are forced, kicking and screaming to change their official rules, even if not their attitude.
But, what if, instead of demanding conformity, we acted more like family? Families do not kick out members who are different, well, at least not healthy families. Sure, there are families that shun members who change religion, or shun children who are gay. But psychologists are pretty adamant that this kind of family is not a healthy or good family. So, a healthy family accepts when Annie brings home Abzule as her new fiancé and we don’t have movies made about “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” Healthy families do not worry about Megan’s child being too dark skinned, and treat Megan herself as a perpetual outsider, because her mother is obviously black. Healthy families don’t freak out about Johnny’s long hair, or Elvis’s style of music. Healthy families do not pay for a son’s education but not allow the daughter to attend. Healthy families do not disown a child for being gay.
Healthy families are families in which everyone belongs and in which the needs of everyone are met to the best of the families ability. Healthy families are really the kind of community that Paul was talking about. Read his scripture as “it no longer matters if you are male or female, bond or free, Jew or Gentile, we love you anyway and treat you as you wish to be treated.
A healthy family is one in which everyone’s culture is respected, not one in which the dominant culture stomps out the minority culture. Respect instead of conformity. I know a family who were foster parents, along with “his, hers, and ours.” So, they were given three Navaho children who no one on the reservation would accept to foster. They either had no relatives who could take them, or were so badly abused no one wanted to take on the problems they brought with them. Rather than demanding that the children conform to white culture, the mother and father learned everything they could about Navaho culture. They made their home a combination of white and Navaho culture. They accepted these children for who they were, not withholding love until they became “just like us.” That is a healthy family.
Yup, we are a long way from being the idea family of God. If we REALLY believed we are all children of God, we could accept that differences are good. Everyone at church would be given love, just for being there. We would get away from the conditional love that President Nelson thinks God has for his children and realize that God loves us because we are his. God loves us because we are his and he doesn’t stop loving us when we are not behaving like He wants us to. Good thing he still loves us when we sin, or he wouldn’t have bothered with an atonement to help us heal that sin.
We need to stop pretending that God is someone just like us and realize that he loves people who are not like us just as much as he loves us.
There should be no cost to belonging.
Ver thought-provoking post and comments. Thank you
I blogged about an incident in Relief Society that happened a few years ago that I found troubling. An older sister in the ward talked with great longing about how wonderful it would be in the Celestial Kingdom where we would no longer have all these races that divide us. To make her point clear, she started listing off all the races she could think of: black people, Asian people, Hispanic people. That’s about where she stopped, and I leaned over to the RSP sitting next to me and said, “What about white people? She didn’t say white people.” In her mind, eternal perfection means everyone is white like her.
The church has got so much work to do on diversity and inclusion, and the problem is that it’s not only not doing any work on it, but it is deliberately retrenching by putting hacks like Clark Gilbert in charge of things at BYU. We can’t expect good race policies, gender studies, LGBT rights, and inclusivity training from people who are instead focused on fighting “woke” ideology and scare-mongering about CRT infiltrating their already far right institutions.
There are differences you don’t see unless you are one of them. My wife and I were welcomed in new wards until we had been married long enough that we “should” have had children. Her inability to carry to term was her biggest heartbreak, and became the difference that made us outsiders.
My outsider status didn’t change, but the reason for it did when she died and I was widowed. As much as they tried, our local leaders struggled to find a way for us to fit, but The Church pretty much abandoned us, saying we will be blessed in the next life—we will be better off dead.
I stay in the church because of my testimony of Christ, but sometimes it seems like The Church goes out of its way to isolate us.
Hi all….I felt after a couple of posts I really should sign up and start commenting (although I’m annoyed Simon C was already taken; simonc1982 sounds suspiciously like my birth year…)
Thank you for the wonderful and thoughtful comments, especially Janey and Anna. I really did want to get a sense from people how they felt true belonging would look like in the church (or any community for that matter). Janey’s comment that saying “we are children of God” only gets us so far, perfectly sums it up. Unity is what we strive for, but at some point we need to account truly for difference. Difference is as real as it is vital, and as the bell hooks quote above suggests, difference can also be an important site of resistance. What THAT would look like in a church context is fascinating to think about….
I too liked Christofferson’s talk, but as so often happens they throw out interesting examples but then completely fail to think through implications or to ask the pertinent questions. He shared the moving story of Jodi King and her difficulties with feeling marginalised, and her commitment to keep attending in spite of those feelings. But there was no critique into a culture that would bring about those feelings in the first place. Now that would have been a great addition to the talk! He also used 1 Corinthians 12, but with no real delve into exactly why the different parts of the Body of Christ are not only useful but necessary…
@Angela C. Crazy story! A while back a friend told me of an EQ class discussion about separating out ‘Church Culture’ from the Gospel. One of the old guard insisted that there was no such thing as a church culture. It was the Gospel, pure and simple. I thought that was much like a fish asking “What’s water?” As CS Eric said, “There are differences you don’t see unless you are one of them”. Likewise, there are whole cultures you don’t see unless you are on the outside looking in.
This word, “belonging,” is suddenly a thing in the Church. Elder Christofferson went so far as to simply invent a “doctrine of belonging” in his recent Conference talk. I’ll forgive him for just makeing it up, because he went on to make some very good statements, such as: “We cannot permit racism or tribal prejudice in the Church.” That seems like a necessary prerequisite to anything like a “culture of belonging” (see, I can invent phrases, too).
The problem is that the Church, by and large, *does* permit racism and tribal prejudice. Book of Mormon passages are easily cited. The politics of division, not a politics of belonging, is wildly popular with rank and file Mormons and possibly with LDS leaders. Maybe it’s the pernicious effect of Correlation but Mormons just always come down in favor of conformity and Correlation over actual diversity.
Excellent post, Simon C. You’ve really made me think!
On the topic of unresponsive leaders who aren’t able to empathize and care for the rank and file members I’ll begin with a story that demonstrates the opposite. I remember back in the early 1990’s when my dearly departed sister was in a hospital in Salt Lake City following major spine surgery to correct a life threatening problem. She was in the Intensive Care Unit and was in agony. Suddenly Presidents Monson and Hinkley walked into the unit to visit someone that they knew. After their visit they went around visiting the rest of the patients who wanted to visit and gave them Priesthood blessings if the patient desired one. When they came to my sister they visited with her and asked her why she was there. My sister said that it was like a dam broke, and she told them about the health problems that she’d dealt with her entire life. She wanted to know if God was angry with her. Several of her church leaders had told her that either she hadn’t repented of secret sins or that she’d chosen to have her many physical and mental health problems in the preexistence, so she asked Hinkley and Monson if they believed that to be true. They were absolutely horrified after she told them this. My sister and BIL said that these two men wept with her and assured her that what her church leaders had said was 100% wrong. Then they gave her a blessing of comfort and to help her recover quickly and with the least amount of pain possible which she did. They both asked her to write and keep them apprised of her recovery, and they promised her that they would individually pray for her and would pray for her during the weekly meetings of the Q15 in the SL Temple.
Think about our leaders now. Can you imagine most of them doing anything like this? I certainly can’t. They are so removed and insulated from the real lives that many of the members live. Have they ever experienced serious and/or chronic physical or mental health issues, tried to live and pay tithing on a very meager budget, been ostracized at church, and in public for situations beyond their control, known what it’s like to be single in a church that gives such a heavy overemphasis on being married, struggled with infertility and/or been unable to adopt children because of the exorbitant price of adoption, experienced racism, known women who deal with domestic abuse, had family members who are LGBTQ+, had a family member with substance abuse issues, had family members who have been incarcerated, etc.?
Jesus lived among people who struggled with many of these same problems, but rather than avoid, lecture to or outright shun them He empathized with their suffering and problems and blessed them. In fact, He was willing to take upon Himself the pains and suffering of everyone from the past, present and the future in Gethsemane and on the cross in order that He might truly understand the stressful and terrible things that can happen in life and to be able to even more lovingly, completely succor the people. I think of Pope Francis who washes the feet of the poor and homeless during Easter Week, or when he visits the poor, sick, homeless and marginalized wherever he travels. I think of other good men and women of whatever faith who are not afraid to work in homeless shelters, treatment centers, hospitals, battered women’s shelters, psychiatric facilities and crime ridden areas. They do the Lord’s work. I don’t see any of our leaders doing any of these things, or, if they do, they have to have a big congratulatory article put in the Church News or on the church’s website bragging about their good deed(s). Until these men are willing to actually live by the injunction in Mosaiah 18 to help others to bear their burdens and to empathize with and give emotional and physical comfort to everyone and anyone, regardless of church affiliation and economic status, I don’t see the church truly following Jesus’s command to love and support others as we do ourselves. We certainly have the money to do so. Do these leaders have the will to actually fully follow Jesus’s example? The name of the church rings hollow unless our leaders at all levels humbly set the correct example for everyone else.