Revolting Against SRA and Sexual Abuse In General: A Plan For Latter Day Saints
Here's what you can do, if you can keep it to yourself
In April, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints will hold a General Conference for its members. Those who obtain tickets to one of the sessions will have an opportunity to make their feelings on their church’s institutional propensity for enabling sexual abusers known. Here’s what you can do if you oppose those practices.
First, don’t talk about your intentions. Second, have intentions, specifically the following:
When you’re asked to sustain the leadership, don’t. Raise your hand in opposition, stand up, turn your back, and walk out. If you’re a Latter Day Saint, you’ve seen one unanimous vote after another over your lifetime as a Latter Day Saint sustaining whatever the leadership puts forth.
That has to change, and it has to change in shocking fashion. There is no better place to demonstrate this than at General Conference. Even one hand raised in opposition will send shockwaves, as it would be an unprecedented demonstration of disapproval where church leadership is concerned.
As time wears on after General Conference, stop paying tithes. By the church’s own teachings, tithing has become priestcraft, the means by which ordinary members pay to access to the temples in which ordinances relevant to eternity are performed. The church has accumulated a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets as a result of its members’ contributions; leadership routinely tells members that their input and oversight over what the church does with those funds is unnecessary. Doctrine and Covenants 26:2 clearly states that all things shall be done by common consent in the church; there is no doctrinal basis for the church to conceal its financial dealings and assets from its members by structuring its investments in shell companies.
The church has not had common consent for decades; what it has constructed is the illusion of common consent in carefully stage managed votes where members vote unanimously to avoid the possibility of discipline for voting their conscience. Most Latter Day Saints do not support their church’s practice around sexual immorality which exempts abusers from culpability while bullying victims into forgiveness that abusers never asked for or showed any real contrition or repentance to obtain.
There are two means by which the laity can and should rebuke a leadership that does not abide by the church’s own rules on sexual purity in the way that leaders deal with rapists and molesters. Those means are exercising common consent as outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 26:2, which is not a rubber stamp for the heretical practices of church leadership lapsed into apostasy, as well as voting one’s dollar. The priesthood has no power absent the observance and obedience of priesthood leaders who are obligated to the same rules as everyone else. Good can have no fellowship with evil, and forgiveness is always conditioned on repentance and genuine contrition.
Those who are victims of sexual abuse bear no obligation to make atonement; responsibility for sexual abuse rests exclusively with the abuser. Even if a priesthood holder is tempted, he is never tempted beyond his ability and the means of escape is always available to him as 1 Corithians 10:13 outlines. The responsibility for lapsing into immorality always rests with the priesthood even in consensual sexual immorality; it is apostasy to say otherwise. There should be no hesitation on the part of those who follow the rules of the club to condemn those who do not even if those who do not-or those who enable or protect immoral members-are of higher rank.
Rank comes with an obligation to serve God, not to serve oneself or even the institution at the expense of God’s rules. God establishes the Church for His purpose and benefit; leaders within the Church are auxiliaries for that purpose. At no point are they to substitute their rules for those of God; that is exactly what the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has done.
If this speaks to you, keep it to yourself, and make your plans to attend General Conference and stand on sound doctrine and practice. It’s your Church: make its leaders follow God rather than the arm of the flesh. They are nothing-and the institution is nothing-without the Body of Christ. It is time to remind the leaders of the church that this is their reality: all things are to be done by common consent in the church. Exercise your common consent in April. Stand against impurity and immorality, and show victims and leaders alike that you are serious about reform and accountability for abusers. a
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Amen!