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This post started as a reaction to President Dallin H. Oaks’s commentary on religious freedom published Tuesday in the Deseret News. It morphed into a Christmastime commentary on social justice. It still dissects Oaks’s words, but that’s relegated to the very end.

Born into humble circumstances. Trained as a carpenter. Rejected as a prophet. Crucified as a rabble-rouser because he dared speak truth to both secular and religious oppressive power. Jesus Christ is my model of an activist.

Christ embraced the poor, the sick, and the “unclean.” He offered compassion and healing to all who suffered pain. He embraced Jews and Romans, Samaritans and strangers. He chose women to witness his birth, death, and resurrection. He preached unyielding lessons of love, peace, inclusion, and grace.

Christ proclaims that all are alike unto God. God’s love rejects anger, hatred, division, and control. It combats discrimination in all its forms: Sexism. Racism. Nationalism. Christ’s recognition of our divine equality obliterates hierarchical power structures. It demands a birth of empathy and a death of intolerance.

In the 1847 words of “O Holy Night,” my favorite Christmas hymn:

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace. Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease.

This doctrine is why Christ’s love is radical – and this is why he was crucified.

In societies built upon authoritarianism and oppression, love is a threat.

Embracing Christ means embracing the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned. It means welcoming the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger. It means empowering all women, races, and religions, alongside our LGBT neighbors.

In Christ’s name all oppression shall cease.

Entrenched political powers, corporate interests, and religious institutions (correctly!) perceive such radical inclusion as an existential threat.

We need look no further than current Fox-News-fueled-Trumpian rhetoric surrounding welfare, Obamacare, law and order, Muslims, Hispanic caravans, borders, #MeToo, police brutality, and “religious freedom” to see how often “Christian” individuals daily reject the core teachings of Christ. Plenty of “Christians” on the Left commit the same sin.

Radical love and divine equality is still a threat.

* * * * *

This is not a new dynamic. The history of America is the history of Christians manipulating the Bible to support their political positions.

Our history books dub America’s seminal events as the “Civil War” and the “Civil Rights Movement.” But make no mistake about it: the Civil War was a Christian War. The battleground was the worst of Old Testament literalism versus the best of New Testament liberty. The weapons were Bible verses demanding silence, separation and submission to authority, clashing against Bible verses proclaiming equality, unity and freedom.

Churches split over this rhetoric, with dividing lines that reverberate to this day.

Why are they called the Southern Baptist Convention? Because in 1845 a bunch of southern slaveowners couldn’t abide the progressive anti-slavery stances of northern Baptists.

Why do we have the Wesleyan Methodists? Because after the Methodist church excommunicated ministers in New York in 1843 for preaching against slavery, the spurned preachers broke away. They chose John Wesley’s name because of his 1778 tirade against slavery. The Wesleyans quickly became vocal advocates for abolitionism and champions of women’s rights; they hosted the Seneca Falls Convention and ordained Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first Protestant clergywoman in the United States.

In Christ’s name all oppression shall cease.

This was the rallying cry of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement, like the Civil War, was steeped in religiosity. Black churches, black ministers, black activists led the nonviolent protests, their orations teeming with praise to God.

It is impossible to read primary source Civil War or Civil Rights Movement sermons and letters and speeches without the sheer religiosity of the rhetorical war smacking you in the face.

Listen to anything by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Here’s just the ending lines of my favorite, 1965’s “Our God is Marching On!”

Meanwhile, in 1960 the Rev. Dr. Bob Jones sermonized on “Is Segregation Scriptural.” He defended segregation as God’s Biblical way, who had commanded the separation of races and nations. Jones decried progressive religious liberals to be “the worst infidels” in the country, deluded by Satanic lies of divine equality.

In 1987, Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status due to continuing segregation. In 2008, the president of Bob Jones University finally issued an apology.

For almost two centuries American Christianity, including Bob Jones University in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures…In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry.

* * * * *

Where was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the civil rights movement?

You, the reader, know the answer. You’ve read the “Race and the Priesthood” essay. You’ve read BCC and Sistas in Zion. You’re aware of Apostle Mark E. Petersen’s 1954 endorsement of segregation. You know throughout the 1960s Apostle Ezra Taft Benson condemned the civil rights movement. Our leaders’ words resoundingly echoed Bob Jones.

The “curse of Cain” doctrine the Church endorsed until 1978? Early Mormons appropriated that idea from southerners. It’s not original to Mormonism. We stole a false, racist doctrine, then mingled it with our scripture as a weapon we used to bar blacks from our schools, our temples, our priesthood ordinances, and interracial marriage. We made up theological justifications for discrimination, then bristled at the resulting boycotts on our athletics. We were wrong.

Hugh B. Brown aside, we were overwhelmingly on the wrong side of history.

But unlike Bob Jones University, we’ve never fully owned up to it. As Apostle Dallin H. Oaks said regarding LGBT policies in 2015, “I know that the history of the church is not to seek apologies or to give them.”

As a direct result? In 2018 a majority of our members still think the Temple and Priesthood Ban was God’s will. Our current teachings of Be One unity, equality, and love are wonderful, but I wish they were coupled with an acknowledgement of the past, an apology, and a humble commitment to eradicating all prejudice for the future.

As I recently told the Salt Lake Tribune, my top hope with the Church’s renewed emphasis on the name of Christ is that we will take the Book of Mormon’s injunction seriously. We should “talk of Christ, rejoice in Christ, preach of Christ, prophesy of Christ” — and love like Christ.

Because in Christ’s name all oppression shall cease.

* * * * *

Given Christ’s radical message of love, and America’s fraught religious and racial history, President Dallin H. Oaks’s “religious freedom” commentary Tuesday in the Deseret News upset me.

As I’ve written before, religious freedom is a serious issue in need of defending, particularly abroad and for minorities. But here in the United States? Protections for religious practice are at an all-time high, and only growing stronger now that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are on the Supreme Court. I am extremely skeptical whenever the Church demands greater protections in the United States, particularly because the Church historically does not tolerate even minimal theological disagreements by its own students and employees.

President Oaks’s Deseret News remarks make just such an ask for greater protections — while framing political attacks on faith as a new phenomenon.

Today’s religious freedom debates are different than in the past. They’ve increased in breadth and intensity. Religious freedom has gotten political. It’s dividing people along lines different than before…. In the 1950s and 1960s, religious freedom debates were about issues like whether or not the federal government should give aid to Catholic parochial schools.

This is absurd. Religion has always been political — go reread the above discussion of religious rhetoric during the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. It is frankly irresponsible to characterize the 1950s and 1960s as a time when religious freedom debates centered around “mild” issues like the state bussing students to private religious schools (1947), the state funding textbooks to private religious schools (1971), and the Supreme Court ordering the state to stop mandating daily Protestant prayers in public schools (1962). At the very least, President Oaks’s minimization of that era contradicts his own doomsday assessment in 1990 that the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision on school prayer paved the way to Babylonian atheism, and should be overruled.

But more importantly, President Oaks’s minimization of that era ignores the everyday realities of the Civil Rights Movement — with which he should be intimately familiar.

In 1957, Oaks clerked on the United States Supreme Court for Chief Justice Earl Warren. (A Court that still refused to hire women; it rejected Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the basis of sex two years later.) NAACP v. Alabama was before the Supreme Court his year. Underlying this and like cases are the stories of black churches mobilizing against injustice, only to have their NAACP memberships lists subpoenaed by the white segregationist state so white politicians could pass copies out at white church brunches to their KKK lynching buddies.

The greatest threat to religious freedom in the 1960s wasn’t the state refusing to buy Bibles for white private schools, it was violence against black churches. How many black churches and homes were bombed in the city of Birmingham alone in the 1960s? (A: 50). Thousands of white preachers turned blind eyes to this violence while preaching that biblically, the black race was inferior and segregation was of God.

President Oaks should know this. He was an adult lawyer in Chicago and Washington D.C. during the 1960s. He related earlier this year that civil rights, and the Church’s own doctrine surrounding the Temple and Priesthood Ban, was a hot topic in his circles. He confessed that despite hoping and praying for the restrictions to be lifted, at the time he was nonetheless “determined to be loyal to our prophetic leaders.”

This is why his next quote made me bristle:

People who make light of religious freedom forget the history of the things that made this country great. The abolition of slavery was brought about by religious preachers. The civil rights movement was brought about by religious preachers. Other great moral advances in Western civilization came about through public preaching changing people’s hearts, not through secular arguments.

This is all true. But so is the converse. Slavery was perpetuated by white religious preachers. The civil rights movement was opposed by white religious preachers. These religious rhetorical wars splintered churches, destabilized governments, and wrought lynchings, bombings, and murders. Yes, religious freedom and free speech helped spread the message of peace and the divine dignity of every soul — but that work was born by the bodies of our black brothers and sisters in Christ, not by us or by our Church. Historically black churches lifted America up, even while whites bombed their sanctuaries.

All the while, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was too busy religiously discriminating against them to take their side. To me, it is the height of hypocrisy to use the inspired words of black preachers — from a movement we opposed! — as a tool in support of the Church’s religious right to condemn and exclude LGBT individuals.

* * * * *

President Oaks ends with a true sentiment I wholeheartedly support:

The First Amendment is, in the long run, what’s going to help us solve serious problems like racism and discrimination in our society.

But here too lies a problem. Let’s accept that combatting racism and discrimination is the purpose of religious freedom. Instead of engaging in meta-arguments about religious freedom, we should be using our current legal privilege to combat racism and discrimination. We, like Pope Francis, should be full-throatily invoking the peaceable doctrines of Christ in order to advocate for equality, justice, human dignity, and the end of oppression in all its forms. We’re not. Mormon Women for Ethical Government is. But as far as I can see, the Church itself is not.

The Good News is, though, that we can start. We can repent. We can change. We can stop babbling about religious freedom and start taking action.

Start with humble examination of our own implicit and explicit biases. (I personally am embarrassed by how many I’m continuing to root out of myself.) Start with apologies.

Start with examining the Church as an institution. Conduct a comprehensive survey of every single way the Church, its office buildings, its missions, its stakes, and its schools can work to eliminate structures and teachings that perpetuate pain and injustice.

Start with standing over the pulpit and teaching the radical gospel of Christ. Start with using the enormous power of General Conference to call for concrete efforts (like we have with refugees) to obliterate racism and sexism and hatred in all of its forms. Nothing stops us from tomorrow joining the progressive religious preachers who declare Christian liberty and decry injustice.

That’s what taking upon us the name of Christ calls us to do.

Because in His name all oppression shall cease.