Dissent: An Indispensable Virtue
When I first heard about the upcoming protests at BYU last spring over its recent assertion that LGBTQ relationships were still in violation of its Honor Code, my first thought was: “Could I get in trouble for attending?” Despite my understanding that the protests were meant to be peaceful and that the students organizing them had been working with BYU to make sure they operated within the bounds of BYU policy, I couldn’t help but wonder whether people who participated would face retaliation by our peers, the school, or even the Church. Fears about dissenting from mainstream LDS opinion or official Church stances are certainly not unfounded, but we as a Church need to work towards creating an environment in which people can openly discuss their opinions and concerns without fear of retaliation.
Dissent has played a central role in the history of Christianity and of the LDS Church. The Church teaches about the importance of Martin Luther’s dissent in setting the stage for Joseph Smith to dissent himself against the churches teaching in his area, in turn leading to the Restoration of the Gospel. President Eyring has described disagreement as an essential part of the revelatory process among the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Clearly, there is an important place for dissent in the Church.
Unfortunately, the suppression of dissent has similarly defined the LDS Church’s public posture. From the very beginning, the Church’s suppression of dissent has stirred up controversy; the arrest that led to Joseph Smith’s murder was over his ordered destruction of a dissenting Nauvoo paper’s printing press. Understanding the ways in which the Church has suppressed dissent since that time, and how it continues to do so, illuminates several ways that this suppression can be harmful to the Church and its members.
In the 1970s, Mormon women who disagreed with the Church’s stance against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) founded the group Mormons for the ERA (MERA). Kelli Morrill describes how these women faced negative institutional and social consequences, both in private and in public. These consequences included loss of callings and temple recommends, excommunication, severed ties by former friends in the Church, and labels such as “bad Mormon”. A person’s position on this political issue was seen as a yardstick with which to measure their true devotion to the Church and the standard by which some decided who was worthy of friendship and fellowship. Despite these sharp private consequences, the Church often avoided public response, and when it did respond, it took a deflective tone. It claimed moral high ground by condemning protest tactics and on one occasion rescheduled the sustaining of Church leaders to avoid the public protests that had been planned to occur during the sustaining.
Twenty years later, similar tactics were used to silence dissenting voices, ultimately leading to the excommunication of six prominent Mormon academics in 1993 (the “September Six”) whose scholarship (the topics ranged from polygamy, to feminism, to dissent itself) was deemed to be in conflict with the teachings of the Church. One scholar’s experience, though not herself one of the members who was excommunicated, demonstrates poignantly how the consequences of dissent listed above can often manifest.
Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans taught history at BYU, with an expertise in the history of Mormon feminism. As her work became more well-known, she began to receive hate mail and obscene phone calls from the families of BYU students and from tithe-payers, upset that their donations were helping pay for feminist scholarship. Eventually, after a local television appearance in which she discussed Mormon feminism, the First Presidency forwarded several letters they had received to then-BYU President Rex Lee from these members expressing their discontent with Bradley and calling for her firing. As the pressure mounted, Bradley was chastised by a BYU administrator for having discussed feminism on a talk show, and she eventually decided to resign from BYU, instead taking a post at the University of Utah. She told the Associated Press that she faced certain termination when she came up for review the following year and that she’d rather work in an environment that valued diversity of thought.
The last, and most recent, example of suppression of dissent that is important to note is the excommunication in 2018 of Sam Young, the former LDS bishop and founder of Protect LDS Children. The initiative, which he had organized the previous year, was created to advocate for official Church policy that would prevent ecclesiastical abuse by prohibiting leaders from asking sexually explicit questions in interviews and requiring another adult to be in the room during interviews with children. After leading a march of over 1,000 people in Salt Lake City and performing a 23-day hunger strike, Sam was disappointed, but not particularly surprised to receive a letter announcing his excommunication from the Church for “repeatedly and deliberately attacking and publicly opposing the Church and its leaders.”
These examples demonstrate how dissenters are retaliated against, both institutionally and socially, for expressing opinions that break with the Church’s predominant or official view. They also reveal several of the ways that this suppression of dissent can prove disastrous for individuals and for the Church as a whole. By exhibiting an intolerance for dissent, we ostracize anyone who doesn’t think just like everyone else, either intentionally or unintentionally. Stifling dissent is counterproductive towards the Church’s goal of building trust among its members, and without hearing dissent, we as a Church are in danger of being too permissive of harmful status quo practices. We would experience a complete lack of diversity of thought, leading to a toxic homogeneity that would be stifling to personal learning, growth, and revelation.
As Paul Toscano, one of the September Six, writes in his book The Sanctity of Dissent, “dissent should be embraced by the church as holy—that is, inspired and ordained of God as necessary to the spiritual well-being of the church.” In a Church founded on modern and personal revelation, we face a moral obligation to provide space for opinions that might differ from our own. Only when dissent is not simply allowed, but embraced, can we become a Church that invites all, accepts all, and perfects all.