https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/08/24/ ... s-support/An apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints expressed general support for social-justice movements Monday, while at the same time warning that some of those fighting against racism and police violence are undermining the U.S. Constitution.
“We all support peaceful efforts to overcome racial and social injustice. This needs to be accomplished,” Elder Quentin L. Cook told faculty at the church-owned Brigham Young University in Provo. And he urged his listeners to “be on the forefront of righteously repenting and following the counsel of [LDS Church] President Russell M. Nelson, who asked us to ‘build bridges of cooperation rather than walls of segregation.’”
But Cook voiced concern that some in those movements are attacking faith and attempting to reframe and distort history.
However...In his Monday speech, Cook acknowledged that Young “said things about race that fall short of our standards today,” saying that “some of his beliefs and words reflected the culture of his time.” But the 79-year-old apostle insisted the church’s second president (from 1847 to 1877) taught that “of one blood has God made all flesh. We don’t care about the color.”
He also noted Young’s relative kindness toward Native Americans.
And...Kimberly Applewhite, a Salt Lake City psychologist and Black Latter-day Saint, was disappointed in Cook’s message.
“If we’re calling ourselves the Lord’s people, we can and should do more to build the kingdom of heaven on earth,” she wrote in an email, “and not look for reasons to protect our reputations or take ourselves out of doing the work.”
The apostle’s justifications for the early Mormon behavior “not only feel like an inaccurate portrayal of church history but also take away a lot of the context for why church members have more to do today,” she said. “Can we stop saying Brigham Young was a product of his time? We already know that many of his contemporaries felt differently about Black people. And it doesn’t excuse the way that people took his thoughts and ran with them in a way that continues to damage the church’s relationship with the Black community at large.”
When Cook said that the church supports peaceful efforts to overcome racial and social injustice, Applewhite said, “I’m curious how he would see that the church as an organization has done so.”
She pointed to the statements of former LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson, who decried the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. when the civil rights leader was “perhaps the prime example of American pacifism in social justice.”
Cook is clearly messaging to the members at BYU to shut up and get on with paying, praying and obeying. It's equally clear that ain't gonna happen and his cheap attempt at shutting people up through laying a guilt trip on them and asking them to stop upsetting and distressing the Apostles just has zero credibility. When action is needed the Church (in this case Cook) just offers more words and tries to blame the members.Although Cook dubbed King a “hero” and called the civil rights movement of the 1960s an “exciting time” when he was in law school at Stanford, Applewhite said the voices of the church’s prophets “have been missing for nearly every major media injustice of my lifetime related to race.”
“The partnership with the NAACP seems to be at a standstill,” she said. “What have we been doing? As the hymn goes, when Black [Latter-day] Saints have needed the church’s help, were they there?”
The Utah professional respects her Latter-day Saint leaders, she said. “I want to sustain them and hold them up as they earnestly seek the counsel of the Lord to teach [members] to be their brother’s and sister’s keepers, so that the souls of Black Saints do not cry up from the dust against them.”