Zion is Falling

Like many reading this, I have been particularly troubled, recently, in considering some of the real evils of the world. I find myself weighed down by it all. Instead of brushing this burden off, however, I am going to attempt an exploration of a small corner of the darkness that lurks in the shadows of Provo, my home. With a torch of a naïve hope in humanity in hand, I am going to try to figure out why some of the people most proximate to me have done truly vile things.

         I am a current student at BYU, and, as is the case in the rest of the world of higher education, there is a witch hunt afoot. Some students are taking it into their own hands to find and root out ideological impurities among the faculty and student population. While on a national scale this kind of behavior is evident on both extremes of the political spectrum, BYU's student body skews right, and thus the majority of faculty getting canceled and doxed are those that profess some kind of leftward or progressive point of view. This happens on X and Instagram, as well as through a variety of alt-right news organizations such as Campus Reform and its local affiliates. The first time I saw this happen in earnest was in March 2022 in the lengthy and vicious attack on BYU professor Eric Bybee. In a now-archived Twitter thread, Dr. Bybee documented, among other things, the massive volume of hateful emails, voice messages, and DMs that were generated by a critical article published by the now-defunct BYU Conservatives Instagram page. While it is unnecessary to go too much farther into it, a simple Google or Instagram search will show that Dr. Bybee's experience is hardly singular. In fact, the vitriol directed toward BYU professors seems to have only intensified since 2022.

         While this phenomena isn't constrained to BYU, I can't help but chafe against it, because, after all, isn't God's university supposed to be different from the rest of the world? How could one member of the Church feel justified in precipitating such psychological and 

emotional warfare against a fellow Saint? Such hatred frankly makes sense in the mainstream world because of today's hyper-polarized political climate. Op eds and think pieces abound on why social media affords such stark dehumanization. But this does not explain why, for instance, a BYU student could ever feel morally entitled to attack a religion professor for speaking lovingly about providing care to her transgender child. When your enemy does not have an embodiment you have to contend with, it is easy to consign them to hell.

         But how could you possibly dehumanize someone you have seen in the flesh, someone you know is human?

         Until recently, I believed that knowing someone always inevitably led to loving and accepting them. Whenever confronted with overt homophobia, I always told myself that my attacker simply did not have a queer person in their life. This notion is what held me afloat when in 2021, a Twitter troll told me that the only reason I was gay was because my father molested me as a child. No one with a gay brother could say that! This belief was founded on the change I saw in my family and friends as I started to come out in high school. I saw these people, many chock full of homophobic tendencies, start to soften and yield to their love for me. That is one of the foundations of love, after all: sacrificing one's own pride for the sake of another.

         Once I arrived at college, however, this rose-colored tint began to fade from my vision. I made many friends who were cut off and financially threatened by their parents after coming out as queer. In grappling with the discrepancy between my experience and others', I would often think back to a common conversation I had with my mother in high school where I would ask her to choose between me and Church. While, in hindsight, I realize the cruelty of this question, the grace of her responses astounds me. Instead of engaging (which frustrated me at the time), she would refuse the binary premise and insist on her love for me and God's love for me. She would tell me that, despite her limited understanding, she knew our family would be together in the afterlife. Her love for me was obvious in these interactions, even if that wasn't clear to me at the time. And ultimately—I understand this now—she was choosing our relationship over the strictures of the institutional Church, which taught that we really wouldn't be together in the afterlife if I chose a life oriented away from a celestial, heterosexual marriage.

         This is the real difference, I’ve come to realize: the choice between the human or the organization of power. The choice between chasing after the one versus pleasing the crowd. The choice between falling and weeping into the arms of the returning prodigal or shunning them for choosing to leave in the first place. True, Christlike charity is not mediated through the institutional but rather through the interpersonal. I say this not in the spirit of self-aggrandizement; in fact, I recently caught myself teetering over the edge of prioritizing my idealized political values over a close friend.

         When I came out in high school, the majority of my close friends were Ben-Shapiro-listening, gun-loving conservatives. While I was nervous at first, they became some of my fiercest supporters. We didn't talk about politics often, but when we did, I was surprised by how much we agreed on and how we could respect each other when our ideologies clashed. I have to be very clear: this does not mean that I didn't find some of their ideas to be offensive or even morally abject; rather, our political lives didn't poison our love for each other. However, over the two years one of my friends spent in Brazil on a mission, I became worried that when he came back I wouldn't be able to be friends with him because of his opinions on things like queer activism or American politics. However, as soon as we were reunited over lunch at our favorite pizza restaurant, I felt horrified that I ever considered cutting him off or "canceling" someone who had so much love and care for me.

         This sort of interrelational charity is what allows us, in a broader sense, to argue meaningfully. Understanding the humanity of your opponent does not mean you have to water down what you believe. On the contrary, establishing a mutual foundation of trust and care can enable us to argue more passionately about the things that matter most to us. Thus, any institution or ideology that requires us to sacrifice the bonds of real love is unequivocally dangerous. Many conservative BYU students likely see their hand wringing as protecting the sacred purity of BYU against the stain of progressive thought. This unquestioning devotion manifests in their supposed loyalty to the Church and the university as a bludgeon against their enemies. 

         But such a baldly ideological rationale is beside the point entirely. To return to my mother, in expressing her unconditional love for me, she was not betraying the institution of the Church. She was merely placing her priorities in order. She was doing exactly what Christ always did: focusing on the person at hand. I am not asking anyone to throw away what they believe. I am just suggesting that the moment you choose to prioritize the strictures of an institution over the care of an individual is the moment you lose sight of love. Again, Christlike charity is not mediated through the institutional but rather through the interpersonal. While this can feel nearly impossible to execute in our current, divided world, I can't think of any work that could be more worth our collective time and attention. After all, the relationships that exist between us are the only things that will follow us through this life and beyond.

On social media, the line between moral and immoral is almost always far more complex than it seems. Faceless, voiceless, lacking identity, the roving accounts that populate the digital landscape we call home often do have material faces and meaningful lives—bots notwithstanding. Nevertheless, it is important that we do draw a line in the sand somewhere. For example, if your online output is causing well-respected and well-loved members of the community to receive death threats, it might be time to consider your impact. To put it bluntly, you have stepped out of moral ambiguity into undeniable harm. The real question is, what could possibly lead someone to continue churning out devastating article after article if they knew this was the end result? Perhaps they might caution their audience into abstaining from such behavior. But when have the droves of trolls that follow such accounts ever been anything but unruly?

         This is the question I earnestly grapple with, most especially when it comes to the uptick in hateful behavior from the far-right wing of Mormonism. It would be dishonest and hypocritical to dehumanize the authors and administrators of such podcasts and accounts, to relegate them to the faceless, unknowable, digital ether. After all, we are all Saints. We have the same spiritual, theological, and organizational blood flowing in our veins. Like myself, they have mothers that love them and friends that they care for. They form a node within the complex, tangled web of interrelational care and trust. How many degrees of separation am I away from the person that issued a death threat against me my freshman year?

         How could such vitriol possibly be aimed at a fellow builder of Zion? The general prevailing opinion on the matter is that social media, as intimated earlier, makes it easy for one's psyche to relegate the unknown enemy online as "other" or even subhuman. I am sure that this makes up for some of the behavior that I have seen stoked over the past five years. But what are we to make of the fact that the victims of these harsh attacks are most often people like me: members of the same tribe as the attackers? Why do some BYU students make such an effort to push their well-meaning professors into the violent throngs of internet hate?

         This, I think, is where the vicious in-fighting apparent in Mormon-adjacent social media spaces differs from the incessant bickering between the far poles of the American political spectrum. There seems to be some sort of ownership over what the identity of "member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" gets to mean. As I go through my mental log books of all the different ways strangers have stared at me in public (such archives are natural for a queer BYU student to keep), the most upsetting realization lies in the discrepancy in gaze as dependent on where in Provo I am. If I'm on Center Street, no one bats an eye. But campus is a totally different story.

         I am stared down as, at best, a curiosity and, at worst, a threat to the purity of BYU. Of course, my own internalized demons are likely doing most of the talking here, yet it still seems safe to say that I, as a pierced, nail-painted, gaudily-dressed queer (with a blazing Mormon heart) pose some danger to God's university. I was told so more bluntly my freshman year over Twitter [insert story here].

         While it seems clear what is happening—some sort of group identity maintenance—it is still not entirely clear to me why. Perhaps I have too much faith in the good will of strangers. Perhaps, in giving those that probably hate me most in the world the benefit of the doubt, I am yielding to coercive power. But I simply cannot imagine a universe in which someone who earnestly considers themselves a Christian could feel justified in unleashing a torrent of death threats on a mere individual. What troubles me most is when the authors of such instigating articles were students in their victims’ university classes. How could you possibly know the glimmer in someone's eyes, the way their hands move when they speak, the cadence of their speech, and still feel justified in unleashing such unbridled emotional terror on them?

         And yet, I manage to resist the nihilist urge. As a follower of the radically humanist outlook on life engendered by the Restoration, I cannot dismiss those I cannot understand. But I also refuse to pull out the well-worn arguments of social-media-driven societal deterioration and inevitable political polarization. All I know is that there is something seriously wrong with how we—as members of a Church founded on the intuitive yet paradigm-destroying belief that humankind is fundamentally good—cannot seem to simply wish life and wellness for each other. I offer no balm other than my refusal to yield to the urge of dehumanization. This seems, for a lack of more systematic solutions, to be a good place to start.