Appropriate_Bat8114
I’ve been waiting for him to die so I could write my version of his eulogy. Here it is:
I served as a missionary in Sweden during the early 1990s when Jeffrey R. Holland presided over the Europe North Area. Approximately three months into my service during the transition from autumn into the harsh Scandinavian winter when most of us were miserable and ill from working in the rain and snow, he held a special conference in Stockholm for missionaries from the capital and surrounding areas.
We waited with anticipation. He arrived late, entering with performative warmth: handshakes, smiles, an almost theatrical display of GA care. The lead up and messaging to this meeting suggested we were about to receive encouragement from a beloved leader, I had never heard of him before.
Then he approached the pulpit. After a deliberate silence, he posed a question: “Do you want me to tell you how well you’re doing, or shall we discuss the truth?” We chose truth.
His response: “If you were a horse, we would shoot you dead.” He punctuated this with his fist slammed against the pulpit.
What followed was not instruction, it was a sustained exercise in shame and comparison. He recounted his mission in England with a repetition of suffering: the cold, the rain, the relentless labor to the point of illness. Hmmmm, just like we were experiencing. The implicit message was unmistakable: we were weak, insufficient, unworthy of the calling we had accepted and our redemption lay in our ability to learn how to suffer, like him.
The sisters wept. The elders seethed. Our mission president was so disturbed by the encounter that he formally wrote to the First Presidency demanding an apology.
Later, I learned from a recently returned missionary who had served in England that her mission received an identical lecture. We were not special. This was a script, a manufactured performance of authority delivered across Northern Europe with apparent regularity.
Years later, I encountered him on several occasions: in Africa, at the Kirton McConkie law offices in Salt Lake City, and once at Mr. Mac. At Mr. Mac, I observed a couple approach him with visible reverence, clearly moved to meet someone they admired. He dismissed them with visible contempt, chastising them for bothering him in public. The contrast between his public persona and private demeanor was absolute.
Across five separate interactions spanning from 1991 to 2018, I witnessed the same pattern: condescension, anger, and an inability to extend basic human courtesy to those beneath his perceived station.
This weekend, as hagiographic tributes flooded media and family group chats, praising his “compassion” and “servant leadership”, I muted the notifications. The dissonance between manufactured legacy and lived experience was unbearable.
Jeffrey R. Holland was not the man being canonized in death. He was an authoritarian who wielded shame as pedagogy, who mistook cruelty for discipline, and who reserved kindness only for those whose adulation served his image. A true living asshole, now dead
