Muskets and Mormons: How Elder Holland has Yet Again Missed the Mark
By: Alex Crandall
Tags: Mormon, LGBTQ, Discrimination, Lds, Byu

Muskets and Mormons: How Elder Holland has Yet Again Missed the Mark Alex Crandall Aug 24·9 min read

I’ve been sick to my stomach since reading the speech Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, an apostle and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, made yesterday at BYU to its faculty and administration. While the beats aren’t new, the display shows just how much further the church has to evolve when it comes to how it treats its LGBTQ members and fellow humans.



In no uncertain terms, Holland used this platform to the academic flagship of the LDS Church, an institution he used to preside over, to double down on homophobia and intolerance while using a slew of emotionally manipulative narratives and even warlike imagery. He insinuated a threat of funds should the faculty engage in dialogues that cast the church in an unfavorable light.



I can’t see something like this and not say something. I’m not sure who my ultimate audience is in this essay; whether any of my active-member family and friends will read this or want to know my thoughts, or if it’s more for my LGBTQ loved ones, to make sure they know how much they are loved and how much this rhetoric is unacceptable.



I’m going to review a few of what I considered to be the grossest points and add my response.



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1.) Holland quotes Elder Oaks, a peer, from a time when Oaks said he’d “‘like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning,’ specifically [regarding] the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Holland goes on to say, “Little did [Oaks] know that while many would hear his appeal, especially the School of Family Life who moved quickly and visibly to assist, some others fired their muskets all right, but unfortunately didn’t always aim at those hostile to the Church”

First off, musket fire? I’m willing to grant that Holland isn’t attempting to advocate for physical violence in this setting, though even the allusion is worse than tone-deaf given the history of violence against the LGBTQ community… but he’s setting the context as ideological warfare.

A war, I might add, that the church has already lost. The Family: A Proclamation to the World treatise on gay marriage and touted in General Conference as revelation, was in fact a legal document originally created for an amicus brief in the ‘90s to fight against same-sex marriage in Hawaii. The church donated millions, even having its members go knock door-to-door and cold-call from out of state, to support California’s Prop 8 in 2008 (thank goodness Mormons have lots of experience with miserable tracting!) The church has undeniably failed in allthese efforts, as gay marriage ended up federally legalized in 2015, with over 70% of American adults now supporting gay marriage. The culture war is over.



So I have to ask, what else is there to fight? Nobody is coming to invalidate heterosexual marriages at BYU, no matter how hasty or ill-advised they are. The gang from Queer Eye isn’t protesting at the Wilk, telling students they can’t have tacky receptions in chapel “cultural halls” anymore.

The LDS church is free to say they think eternal marriage is “straights only”. I personally find that doctrine abhorrent, as it condemns LGBTQ members to a life of celibacy and thinking they’ll be “fixed” in the next life — that they are currently broken now, or afflicted with what Holland calls a “challenge”. But why does he need the faculty to point ideological muskets at the people that have advocated civil gay marriage? The only benefit I can imagine is to help re-entrench the orthodox membership in their bigotry, and perpetuate the erroneous notion the out-group demons are out to get them.



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2.) “I and many of my Brethren have spent more time and shed more tears on this subject than we could ever adequately convey to you this morning, or any morning….. Too often the world has been unkind, in many instances crushingly cruel, to these our brothers and sisters. Like many of you, we have spent hours with them, and wept and prayed and wept again in an effort to offer love and hope while keeping the gospel strong and the obedience to commandments evident in every individual life.”

This is just pure crocodile tears. Holland uses this sentence to frame himself as a moral authority, so if you start to wonder if he’s lacking in empathy towards LGBTQ students, well, no that cannot be because he said how much he’s cried for them.

Never mind that the “crushingly cruel” behavior has been coming from the church for decades. BYU was literally conducting electroshock aversion “therapy” up into the mid-90s, often only giving the offenders the options of expulsion (at great social and financial cost) or the treatment. This even happened under Elder Holland’s tenure as president.

The BYU Honor Code office, the Big Brother-like entity at the center of victim-shaming scandals for years, would set up entrapment events to catch underground gay students, and entice them with the possibility of staying in school if they turned on their inner circles. The church itself only disavowed conversion therapy in 2016, and even today it is still culturally acceptable to much Utah, though Governor Herbert signed an EO prohibiting it for minors in 2020.



So if Elder Holland wanted to see the cruelty up close, he need only look in the mirror. And yet, in this talk, he positions himself as an authority on this, using exaggerated, hushed, and labored tones to express how he feels the pain more than others, but convey that he pushing through at the behest of these “commandments” and his unswerving love for the Savior.



And that’s the real kicker, because there are NO scriptural commandments against gay marriage, particularly not in the Book of Mormon, not that that’d be a valid justification in this day and age. But Jesus didn’t say a jot or tittle about gay marriage.

But you know what WAS once absolute doctrine in Mormon theology? Polygamy as the only true marriage of heaven. The Prohibition of mixed-race marriage (still encouraged in various lesson manuals to teens). And most prominently in the last half century, that Black members are not allowed to obtain the highest blessings of the gospel, include godhood in the Celestial kingdom or the priesthood (or leadership positions).

Which brings me to my final quote:

3.) “We have to be careful that love and empathy do not get interpreted as condoning and advocacy, or that orthodoxy and loyalty to principle not be interpreted as unkindness or disloyalty to people. As near as I can tell, Christ never once withheld His love from anyone, but He also never once said to anyone, “Because I love you, you are exempt from keeping my commandments.”

Yes, it was only in the ‘70s that BYU found itself in the exact same boat it is today — decades behind the social climate around them and unwilling to change. And then, like now, the church insisted that its doctrine and principles were divine and absolute, thereby justifying its intolerance and bigotry.

In 1949, prominent LDS member Stewart Udall wrote to the First Presidency to implore some progress regarding the racism in the church. They responded with the following:

“The attitude of the Church with reference to negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time…”

Here we see an absolute statement from the highest church authority at the time calling their racist policies “direct commandment.”

Furthermore, the response went on to explain how their church doctrine justified the racist systems, stating:

“The position of the Church regarding the negro may be understood when another doctrine of the Church is kept in mind, namely, that the conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence has some determining effect upon the conditions and circumstances under which these spirits take on mortality….[and these] spirits are willing to come to earth and take on bodies no matter what the handicap may be as to the kind of bodies they are to secure; and that among the handicaps failure of the right to enjoy in mortality the blessings of the priesthood, is a handicap which spirits are willing to assume in order that they might come to earth. Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the negroes.”

In other words, these individuals were “cursed” due to the unknowable, unprovable and therefore uncontestable actions in their supposed pre-Earth life, and the Church was only heeding God’s word when they enforced exclusive and hurtful policies.

This repugnant doctrine was under the spotlight when, in 1976, then President Spencer Kimball addressed the BYU administration in a talk Elder Holland referenced multiple times, called the “Second Century Address”.

In this talk, Kimball makes some alarmingly dystopian statements about freedom of thought, telling BYU staff that real individual freedom is “freedom from worldly ideologies and concepts”, and that BYU “must continue to resist false fashions” and the “false ways of the world”.

The backdrop of this speech, of course, was the extreme pressure BYU was facing due to their racism. There had been protests in the late 60s and 70s around this. BYU President Ernest Wilkinson had policies to prevent “mingling” between Black employees and students, and the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare investigated the school to determine whether or not BYU was actively complying with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Football teams in 1968 refused to play against BYU, and students even felt that the school wasn’t recruiting Black athletes because “they just don’t want negroes to socialize with our girls.”

To solidify just how strongly this was considered an inherent part of the BYU ethos and culture, BYU Dean Lester Whetten even wrote the following in the midst of scandals for the 1969 basketball season, saying:

“The Negro of today is not, and cannot become compatible with B.Y.U. standards”

While BYU found some ways to dampen the protests, such as finally hiring a Black faculty member and Black athletes, the core doctrine of discrimination remained firm and unflinching until its sudden reversion in 1978.

With that in mind, as we flash back to the present day, we can see the numerous parallels. BYU knows they are out of step with social acceptance of the LGBTQ movement, but doctrinally are unwilling to capitulate on their beliefs, even to the point of jeopardizing its accreditation or academic affiliations.

Elder Holland said this shocking statement regarding the potential fate of BYU:

“If at a future time that mission [staying true to the gospel] means foregoing some professional affiliations and certifications, then so be it. There may come a day when the price we are asked to pay for such association is simply too high, too inconsistent with who we are. No one wants it to come to that, but, if it does, we will pursue our own destiny”

A former President of a University is willing to see that University lose its standing, respect, and legitimacy in the name of fighting against gay marriage. The Musket imagery he explicitly endorsed is unwittingly accurate — a relic of antiquated and savage wars, a part of American history, yes, but one best learned from and left in the past. Not repeated.

He’s willing to sacrifice the most essential of his church’s commandments, namely “Love one another”, at the altar of cultural bigotry and homophobia. Because fighting against advocacy for equality is NOT the pure love of Christ. It’s not the charity they verbally tout but ignore.

No, this is the same church that forbade children of gay parents from baptism, and required repudiation of their parents as adults as a perquisite to heaven.

All members of the church deserve better leadership, and particularly LGBTQ members and Mormon-adjacent folks. I’m ashamed of the actions of the leadership of my alma mater (BYU grad of 2011), but so grateful to see more and more members speak out against this. I left the church in 2014, but I won’t ever stop caring for the well-being of my friends and families still affected by it.

If you are reading this and consider Elder Holland to be a spokesman for God, I implore you to reconsider the allegiance you give him and his cohort of church leaders. History has proven, time and time again, that they are not divinely inspired, but simply men at the helm of a $130bn corporation doing what they can to keep members within the rank and file.

And to the LGBTQ community, I’m so sorry for the bigotry you are constantly enduring, but hope the love and acceptance you feel from everyone else continues to grow until this thinking is only found in a museum, like a rusted-over weapon that can’t hurt anyone anymore.