The past week’s events have sent shock waves of despair throughout our community. Prominent Mormon Feminist Kate Kelly was excommunicated by a group of men in white shirts and ties in an act hauntingly named, “A Court of Love.” Many of us have called out the spiritual violence of the process. We had no idea the sting we would feel, even if we anticipated this decision. Some of us can barely harness the grief. It just seems so wrong. Many, many of us are hurting and deeply grieving. Some of us are angry and some want to make the Church or Kate’s local leaders the enemies.

But they are not the enemies. We have a heritage of fear and a legacy of violence that predate the events of the last week. Among the many spiritual legacies handed down to us, we have a birthright of deep Mormon shame and that birthright extends around and especially to the male leaders in authority. It is a system that every living Mormon today has inherited and one that is so ingrained in our Mormon psyche, it is second nature to us.

We Mormons are an End-of-Days bunch, a community that since 1830 has been convinced that the Second Coming is just beyond the cusp of our own generation. Ours is a fiery people.

On a quiet Ohio night on March 24, 1832, Joseph Smith had fallen asleep next to his sick child. Little Murdock, one of the twins, had contracted measles sometime in the night, and his father’s strong arms wrapped around his tiny, fevering body. Joseph would be woken by the sound of an angry, drunken group of men just outside the home. Fawn Brodie explains:

Fortified by a barrel of whiskey, [the mob] smashed their way into the Johnson home on the night of March 24, 1832 and dragged Joseph from the trundle bed where he had fallen asleep while watching one of the twins. They stripped him, scratched and beat him with savage pleasure, and smeared his bleeding body with tar from head to foot. Ripping a pillow into shreds, they plastered him with feathers. It is said that Eli Johnson demanded that the prophet be castrated, for he suspected Joseph of being too intimate with his sister, Nancy Marinda. But the doctor who had been persuaded to join the mob declined the responsibility at the last moment…” (No Man Knows My History, page119).

This would mark a beginning of a culture of violence for our people. Within a few years, the Mormons were organized and effective at returning violence for violence, intimidation for intimidation, and meeting cruelty and fear with retaliation.

We became a persecuted people. But things were not so simple.

Our brethren fau[gh]t like tigers. They cl[e]ared the ground at the time in knocking down and dragging out.” Joseph proudly wrote in his journal after another conflict (dubbed the Gallatin Election Day Battle) where Mormons had fought back after being harassed by local citizens.

By the night of October 24, 1838, Mormons were in full-on war with their neighbors.

Sidney Rigdon would deliver this famous, ominous speech calling for the extermination of Mormon enemies:

We would continue on, fighting back, and sometimes initiating violence against our enemies. Our narrative would be that of wronged innocents, but we were not always so innocent. Our hymns would reflect the narrative of God’s chosen people, exiled and victimized by apostates and gentiles. We would create stories, legends and an entire culture around the idea that we were always God’s persecuted people, and how it entitled us to exclusive blessings beyond the reach of our enemies.

Persecuted and peculiar, we adopted strange new doctrines that laid claim to ancient entitlements. These sacred curiosities would fuel even more isolation and contempt from outsiders. The provocation was the oven our community was baked in and it solidified us into a hard, brittle biscuit that we would spend decades trying to sweeten. We transitioned from phrases like, “Mind Your Business” to “Service with a Smile.” We would draw strength from the hardness of our pioneer grandmothers and soften ourselves with modern virtue.

We would take our history of double-speak and bend the rules in the name of righteousness. To survive, we sometimes had to smile through our pain to shelter the world from the realities of God’s restored gospel.

The culture of secrecy and putting-our-best-face-forward has evolved over time. Most contemporary members wouldn’t see any similarities in church public relations tactics between Orson Pratt’s The Seer and Ally Isom’s Radio West Interview. Yet, like any organization seeking growth and understanding, the parallels are there. We want to remain peculiar, but we also want desperately to fit in.

Our culture of violence- of both being victimized by violence and responding through violence would also evolve. We would no longer raid neighboring towns or form militias, but we became electrically efficient at In-group favoritism and often our harsh community boundaries have hard consequences.

The Strengthening the Members Committee doesn’t need to flash the glint of a bowie blade, but they don’t have to. Their very function is like the eery tune of a Whistling Elder. We know they are there and that they are watching, keeping our people in line, monitoring the words of the Saints. The rumor of the group is enough to keep a people like us, with generations of boundary policing, scared to speak publicly. We might even mistake these tactics for the ingredients of Zion and call them blessings.

There has been debate on who initiated the excommunication of Kate. Was this the result of a directive from Salt Lake City brass? Was it local? Truthfully, the answer is more blurry than that. The decision came from a system we are all complicit in. The burden is one we all shoulder. We as a people have continued for generations to perpetuate a victim mythology with an unchecked acknowledgement of our own involvement in our past. We have allowed ourselves to believe our bad deeds are justified because of the violence brought against us in days gone by. We hold in our hearts the harshness of the 19th century frontier and write it down, year after year, as if it were a branch on our family group sheet.

Somewhere, deep down in our spiritual DNA, are the bruises of Joseph Smith, the blood on our hands at Crooked River and the fanaticism of 1857 Southern Utah. Our history speaks to us like the whisper of a prophetic, still, small voice: “Keep quiet. Don’t express doubt publicly. Stay in line. Niceness instead of kindness. Obedience. Loyalty. Obedience.”

The men who excommunicated Kate Kelly are not the enemy; they too are our people. Our biggest enemy is our collective, unchecked self, and the bleeding scars of our history. We are a fiery people and we are still burning from the open wounds of our past. These wounds will not heal until we can all stand together as a people and change our mythology to one of strength, honesty and empowerment–one of a checked humility and joint responsibility, one that allows for our mistakes both past and present. Until then, we will not escape the abiding heirloom we have weaved for our people who truly believe that spiritual violence is an act of love.

We are all responsible.

———————————————

Special thanks to Joe Geisner and other historians for helping out with the resources linked here.