As many of you know, when a new, and therefore, young professor, I researched and wrote on violent attacks on Latter-day Saint persons and property in South America.
Almost thirty-two years later, an LDS ward in Michigan suffered a deadly attack worse than anything from the guerrilla violence of those days. Nonetheless, there are, perhaps, some things to learn in a comparison.
One very troublesome comparison: the United States is moving ever closer to the tactics honed by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile of silencing opposition and disappearing people (for now immigrants or those who are similar to them, but it threatens to do so with citizens and opponents as well.)
A key difference: the US president and wannabe dictator has practiced a tactic of encouraging his followers to violence against enemies, such as the congress on January 6th, and then practicing legalistic and journalistic denials, as well as finger pointing at a mirage, Antifa and democrats, liberals, “sicko leftists” in general.
This includes the counterfactual idea that violence stems from the left and not from the right. The fact that much violence is from lone wolves on the right who seem unorganized and receive no specific orders allows their politics to be denied and disavowed.
The US tends to see politics as a partisan and group issue. Individuals, per se, cannot be originators of politics unless they are influenced by or derive their ideas from some established group with a political ideology that they exemplify.
Names for ideologies are created from fever dreams among agitators and creators such as wokeism, ideology of gender, etc. Rightwing ideologues, such as Christopher Rufo of the Manhatttan Project, spend time thinking them up and actively marketing those labels among the right, often with only dubious empirical referents. His baby is the now powerful label “Critical Race Theory”. He borrowed the label from academics, gave it a new though perhaps related set of meanings, and marketed it.
The more current bugaboo is DEI that exists to define bureaucratic practices and values which when refocused and redefined becomes a “horror” to be attacked and undone.
Back to the comparison. In the late eighties and early nineties, the heyday of guerrilla violence against Mormonism, Latter-day Saints and much of the press could not grasp that their proselyting and building chapels was seen as a political act and could be made a political target. Instead, the onus was put on “bad people” or “irrational actions’ as a kind of denial.
While there were interests of power in this, there also was simply an inability to realize that our way of thinking and defining things is not universal; that what we label as good can also be labeled as bad.
In the case of the LDS young man who killed a political figure with the gun of his own ideas, there is a denial he could be “one of us”. We tend to insist that some nefarious political ideology or spending too much time online and “transgenderism,” a newish bugaboo, must have caused a transformation in him.
What we prefer not to see, are the tensions within our own community whether we are MAGA or Mormons that contribute to and even may provide the sociological base for the violence.
The murderous attack on a Ward in Michigan this last weekend with the dramatic, almost cinematic, entry to the building and murder of worshippers was much more Hollywoodesque than anything that took place in Chile or Bolivia against Mormons.
Whatever the legal motives, those have yet to be determined and announced, the act takes place in a political context: the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Mormon Utah by a probably inactive LDS young man. It is no surprise, sadly, that the accused killer in MIchigan is of MAGA and deploys its symbols, while at the same time displaying vigorous anti-Mormon feelings.
Please note, his ideas are not simply from right-wing, Evangelical radio and posts. He evidently lived in Jeremy Ranch, near Park City for some period of time and may well have absorbed Utah’s home-grown anti-Mormonism.
That would be background to this set of oppositional ideas of various institutional addresses becoming charged with the drama at UVU and a single bullet from an old deer rifle taking down a prominent Republican figure who, to be sure, was controversial within elements of the Right. That charging would also give Kirk’s violent defense through revenge weight and power.
There is another charging to be looked at, and that is the local issues in the killer’s area of Michigan that make the LDS Church controversial. It is useful to see how we are perceived.
In any case, the officials of law enforcement will investigate and bring charges. In both the case of the Orem shooter and the Michigan one. We will have to assess and learn though I, as an old and now retired professor, am very sad about the political situation in my country that is escalating violence.
