Aight, friends. I’m back. Now let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this BYU thing in an orderly fashion. (As if my brain could ever be categorized as orderly.)
So what is this about, at its core? What is the deal here?
It could be categorized as a political brawl of left vs. right. A charged atmosphere of different governmental ideas.
It could be categorized as a civil war. A brother vs brother/sister vs sister clash, dividing a people into deeply entrenched factions.
It could be categorized as “Religion vs. Science!” or “Tradition vs. Progress!” or “Homophobia vs. Civil Rights!”
And while some of those things are technically true, I don’t see any of it as being the important part. Reason: because all of that focuses too much on ideology and too little on people. If you take the human element out of something, it’s very, very easy to end up with collateral damage.
And that is what happened here, a few days ago. Collateral damage.
The Human Element
Think how easy it is to hear casualty numbers from a war and go “oh, that’s horrible!” before kinda moving on with things. Even if we’re empathetic, emotionally intelligent people, numbers are numbers. They will never feel the same as “your son was one of the casualties.”
You can see it in movies. In books. In plays. In all of the stories of human history, personal connection makes something far more real than numbers ever will. Thousands of people dying in a grand space battle doesn’t mean all that much, even if the universe is at stake. The universe is too big a concept. But when the one heroic space fighter flies into certain doom to save a friend... now that means something.
Have you ever been to a Holocaust museum? Have you ever felt the weight close in on you at something so simple as seeing a pair of shoes that belonged to someone real? That pair of shoes can bring an entire era of our world history into a clearer perspective.
That’s why the Diary of Anne Frank is such a big deal. Not because it’s a work of literary genius, but because they’re real words from a real person speaking to us from beyond a too-early grave.
Now, let’s not pretend that the BYU thing is akin to the holocaust. That would be absurd. But the principle of storytelling remains the same: if you take out the human element, you forget people. And when you forget people, it’s easy to hurt them.
That is why the BYU policy changes went so very wrong. The changes were made by people who were thinking of strategies and policies and politics. No one asked anyone LGBT+, “Hey, what do you think of this wording change? How would you interpret it based on your situation?”
No one asked an editor, “hey, is there any ambiguity in this statement we’re about to officially release?”
No one asked, “Well, I know this change isn’t a real change, and YOU know this change isn’t a real change, but will our students who weren’t part of the creation process know and understand that this change isn’t a real change?” or even “is this a problem that the change isn’t real?”
Not only did no one ask that, but no one even thought to. And when they realized they’d messed up, they sat on the retraction for two entire weeks before getting around to doing anything about it. Because timing and policy and press were more important than wondering what was going to happen to the people affected.
And honestly, it doesn’t really matter whether they meant to hurt anyone by it, because the fact is they still did. Thoughtlessness is thoughtlessness.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
The thing here is that it’s really hard to think about or consider things that don’t personally affect you. If you are white, skin-color prejudice does not affect you. If you are male, misogyny does not affect you. If you are straight, homophobia does not affect you. Etc. Etc. Etc.
As I mentioned in my other post (What is Pride, which you can read here if you want.) it’s very easy to feel like any voices are too loud if silence has been the status quo so far. It’s very easy to wonder why people are making such a big deal out of things. And it’s very easy to not even realize what questions you should be asking in order to be helpful, rather than harmful.
I have every confidence that most of the leaders at both BYU and church headquarters don’t think they’re doing the wrong thing. I’m sure a lot of them don’t realize who gets hurt by these things. And I’m quite sure that most of them have absolutely no context or experience whatsoever that would allow them to grasp the ramifications of this fiasco.
I doubt it occurred to anyone that taking out the wording would even make people take notice, until everyone did and all the people making the change suddenly realized what had happened.
And that’s why it’s important to listen. To learn. To be prepared for a new perspective. To be able to adjust mindsets and soften hearts, when it comes to people that are different than you.
“But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.”
Now as for the actual content of the policy change…
We’ve established that the process here was a raging hurricane of bad decisions and poorer responses. Whichever side of the content question is right, the execution was wrong.
But the content here does matter too.
I’m not gonna dwell on this for too long. This is a fight I won’t win with one blog post. After all, it’s basically a struggle between people who are living certain life experiences within a church that does a terrible job protecting them, and the lifelong cultural traditions of the rest of the people in that church who easily fit into it and see nothing wrong.
I can’t break those cultural traditions with one voice. But if I add my voice to others, maybe it’ll do… something.
Anyway.
The core of the content debate revolves around “Is it okay for gay people to do gay things or not?”
Which is not a complicated question until you add religion into it. There are still a lot of religions around the world that categorically and emphatically say, “no it is not.” This church is one of them.
And that’s largely why there’s such a big fight. If something that you have always considered a core tenet of your faith gets questioned by an institution of your faith, there’s going to be some cognitive dissonance and/or pushback. The gut instinct to fight back or plug your ears and shout “I can’t hear you I can’t hear you”.
Which unfortunately is what a lot of people are doing.
Yet that’s the whole problem. The entire thing. There is a community of people who want to be part of this religion along with everyone else, but who get pushed out and silenced and literally given different promises/rules to follow, and they want you to listen.
For once, just listen.
They are not trying to say that God is wrong. They are not trying to say that there should be a double standard. They are not trying to say that they can tell God what to do or make eternal doctrinal changes just by voting on it. They are not trying to say “break the rules for me. I’m special.” That is not the idea.
They are trying to say “Hey. We’re here. We need help and compassion. How about not stepping all over us anymore?”
They are trying to say, “The core tenets of this faith are ‘love one another’ and ‘do unto others as you would have done unto you’ and ‘comfort those that stand in need of comfort.’ When you disregard us, or make places unsafe for us, you are not following those tenets.”
They are trying to say, “Hey, you leave us out an awful lot. How about considering us, too, when you make policies and rules?”
They are trying to say, “God’s church should be safe for those who need safety.”
And maybe they’re also trying to mention that God is perfect, but humans aren’t. This certainly isn’t the first time that a cultural misconception has morphed into a “law”.
1978 Happened
The church that runs BYU is known famously for a few things:
- Being pretty aggressively conservative.
- For missionaries going around the world knocking on doors and preaching.
- For having more books of official scripture than other Christian religions.
- For a not-super-factual-but-apparently-entertaining musical on Broadway.
- A history of polygamy.
- And, unfortunately, it has a reputation for not being a great place for minorities.
That last one is the biggie right now. There are many church policies that are staunchly anti-gay. And there have been other policies in the past that were staunchly bigoted toward other groups of people.
At the time that those history policies were in play, it was considered doctrine. An eternal principle that just happened to exclude several not-that-small populations of people from the full extent of church membership that everyone else got to have.
For fairly obvious reasons, this was pretty divisive. On the one hand, many people had a hard time understanding how a fair and loving God could be racist. How could it possibly make sense that some humans got to have religious things that others didn’t, based entirely on where their ancestors came from.
On the other hand, a lot of people—largely those unaffected by the policy—relied mostly on “God isn’t wrong. There must be a reason.” And while the thought itself isn’t a bad one, it led to a lot of very, very sketchy cultural traditions within the religion, such as the erroneous idea that black skin is a curse from God that shows sin. (That one is a LOT to unpack, but let’s remind each other for now that this is NOT a doctrine.)
I say traditions, because these things weren’t core principles of the church teachings, but thoughts and ideas that random people had, and that just kind of went viral. Once things go viral, they get so entrenched in the teachings of a culture that they sorta kinda DO become doctrines and laws.
But in 1978, the leaders came forth like “y’all, this can’t keep going on. Here is an official declaration to make an official change.” Basically “God isn’t wrong, but we as a people were.”
Most people celebrated. A few left the religion, because to them the inferiority of non-white people had become a core doctrine. And changing that meant that they felt the religion no longer followed God.
Here’s the thing about this church, though. There are a lot of small principles that are different from other Christan denominations. A lot of quirks that many others really don’t understand, such as the missionary program, or that we have more scriptures that other people.
But the one single MAJOR difference—the thing that largely causes most of the other small quirks—is the principle of continuing revelation.
The idea that God still calls prophets to speak to His people, and to reveal new things.
Yes, you read that right: the whole entire point of our church is that it continues to grow. To change. To get better. If you’re here for a church that will stay 100% the same at all times, then you are in the wrong religion. We even sing about it in our hymns.
“The Lord is extending the Saints' understanding,
Restoring their judges and all as at first.
The knowledge and power of God are expanding;
The veil o'er the earth is beginning to burst.”
Things don’t always change quickly, and they don’t always change in a timely manner. It’s an established fact that sometimes people are stupid and need things, as we say, line upon line, precept upon precept. We aren’t always ready for changes. But they have constantly and consistently come since the beginning. That’s literally the whole point of prophets: live updates.
Don’t make us come up with a religious version of “ok boomer” because you can’t let go of old things when new ones are on the horizon.
Conclusion
So yeah. This church is not safe or particularly welcoming right now for LGBT+ people. The protests that are happening are basically saying that, and asking everyone to do better.
I don’t know if future policies are gonna actually change or not. I don’t know the mind of any deities. I don’t have a timeline. I don’t have any kind of ability to speak for more than just myself.
But I do know a couple of things:
I know that they can change. And they might change.
And I know that whatever happens policy-wise, it is our (literally God-mandated) duty to help people, not hurt them. To bring people into our welcoming arms, not kick them out. To think about more than just ourselves, when we do anything. To stay open-minded about things that we may not understand, or have any experience with.
I know that “the church has a policy against this” is not a good reason to act like heathens and treat people like garbage. In the words of a friend, “Were you raised in a barn by wolves?? NO. Because the wolves would know better.”
I know that a lot of people are trying harder to be good allies to minorities such as PoC and LGBT+, and that those efforts are not wasted.
I know that it is NOT against church policy to love others. The only time I can think of that Jesus ever told someone in anger to get out was while flipping the moneychangers’ tables.
With those things being said, I conclude that the policy change at BYU was ill-thought out. That it actively hurt people. That the policy makers didn’t consider a lot of things that they should have, and that people need to stop blaming the victims of this for “making assumptions” or “knowing what they were getting into.” Stop telling people to just leave if they don’t like it. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
This isn’t about the content of the policy nearly as much as it’s about the way people are treating each other. The protesters have mobilized because this change and subsequent reversal was a last straw. People realized that they couldn’t handle it anymore and that they weren’t alone.
And if I keep typing, I’m just going to keep rambling on and on and on. This post is long enough as is. I sincerely have no idea whether I communicated everything I wanted to say. But I tried. If you want to talk further, feel free to message me.
