Shame, Fear, Violence: An Analysis of the Utah Area Presidency Message

During the second hour of the fifth Sunday this past December, many members of the church living in the Utah Area were subjected to a video recorded message from the area authority and his counselors. Several people described the message as “icky”.  While members in any given area comprise a small percentage of church membership, I share my analysis of the broadcast because the messaging is harmful, yet common in the church.

Here is a link to the broadcast recording on the church’s website: November 20, 2024 Utah Area Broadcast: The Power of Making and Keeping Sacred Covenants

Title: Covenants and Our Relationship with GodSpeaker: D. Todd Christofferson, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Elder Christofferson introduces covenants as the broadcast topic. His remarks comes across as a web of contradictions; reading the transcripts highlighted for me why I often feel confusion when he speaks. For example, he states, “Our principal covenantal promise to God is to obey Him in all that He commands and to love and serve Him and our fellow beings.” Cue puzzled minion look on my face. I still have not figured out what exactly this statement trying to communicate. A question I have is since some general authorities assert that obedience to the church is synonymous as obedience to God, does this statement mean we covenant to obey church leaders?

If Elder Christofferson’s remarks leave you puzzled as they do me, know that his remarks are often like trying to follow a snarled tangled thread. Here is a summary I extrapolated from his talk: We must make a covenant to obey God in order to have a place in the kingdom. Obedience is the most important. Oh, also love God and serve others. Covenants create a relationship. Our side of the relationship is to obey God. Covenants allow us to transform. Obedience is what gets us back to God. Obedience looks like keeping covenants. Keeping covenants means obedience which means doing the things these guys in the area presidency are going to tell you about. If you don’t do these things, you won’t get back to God and I will have failed to honor church pioneers. Please, please do the things these men are going to talk about. 

My takeaway:

Obedience as defined by church leaders is the objective of many messages by church leaders. 

Title: The Power of Sacred CovenantsSpeaker: Kevin W. Pearson, Utah Area Presidency

Pearson begins, after what seems to have become an obligatory quoting of President Nelson, by stating that he will talk about baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost because youth and adults will not understand covenants if they are not taught by parents and leaders. I assume that Pearson places himself in the category of a parent and leader rather than an adult learner.  He then goes on to describe attending a stake baptism where he was concerned about what was said and not said about the Holy Ghost. Here is the story upon which he builds his talk: 

Image of talk transcript

Did he really say that we don’t receive a remission of sins when we are baptized? For now I’m going to set that statement aside because I have so many questions about it. How did that statement make it past correlation? Is this a new teaching? Is the song “When I Am Baptized” going to be taken off the church website since it teaches that wrongs are washed away at baptism? So many questions.

As I sat listening feeling flames of anger growing in my body, I wondered why I was having such a visceral reaction to Pearson. There is beauty and truth in teaching about the Holy Ghost. The expansive role of the Holy Ghost as a revelator, teacher, and comforter are what I have shared with my kids. So what exactly was going on with Pearson in his talk? 

Shame and violence. 

Kevin Pearson is adept at shaming people; I’ve heard him shame people before. If you aren’t familiar with shame and what it is, here is a less than two-minute video that describes shame: Shame vs Guilt. Here are ways Pearson shames his audience: 

Tone and word choice. Pearson’s harsh, stern tone communicates that his audience is not as good as he is. He is the leader; the wise one. His adult audience can’t be trusted to learn things for themselves. He must “boldly” teach them. With his tone, he sets himself up as superior to his audience of fellow disciples of Christ. As a parent, I have learned that tone is what my kids and students hear first. When I am exasperated, frustrated, or tired, I try hard to stay patient to keep my volume down, words kind, and curious about any given situation. However, it took me a long time to learn that my kids still said I ‘yelled’ because they picked up on the tone of my words. Tone communicates what we really feel inside. Judgement.The stake baptism he attended did not give talks that were up to his standard. Rather than using what they did say as a starting point to build upon, Pearson rants about what he didn’t hear. He clearly communicates that what was shared at the baptism was inferior and not good enough. Listening to Pearson, I felt so sad for the people in that stake who I hoped would never hear what he had to say about their efforts that Pearson initially described as a beautiful service before ripping into the ways that it was inadequate. Assumptions and Exclusion.Pearson assumes, based on what he did not hear at the baptism service he attended, that church members in the Utah area do not understand the Holy Ghost, the importance of baptism, or the sacrament. He says, “Sacrament meeting is a sacred time. If properly understood, no one would intentionally miss partaking of the sacrament and honoring the Sabbath day. It would be unthinkable!” He shames by exclusion as he presents himself as the superior who knows better than the not-good-enough inferiors he is speaking to. Without curiosity about people’s lives, he broadly dismisses people to make assumptions about why someone would not attend sacrament meeting on any given Sunday. 

Next is violence. (TW: rape)

I never met Haim Ginott. He died a few years before I was born. His writings as a teacher and later child psychologist significantly influence my parenting and teaching. In his book Between Teacher and Child, Ginott shares a report of one person’s observation of a 7th-grade class: 

“I went home, stunned by what I had seen. Thoughts ran through my head. No one had smiled. In the whole time, no one had smiled… All that we call education was conceived in love…warmth, caring, ease, sensitivity, tenderness, skill. What I had witnessed had nothing of this. It was more like a sadistic attempt at forcible penetration –a raping of children. And still we demand that the children respond.”

As the second hour wore on that Sunday, I looked around the room. There were no smiles. The climate of the room was frigid. When the meeting ended, there was a literal stampede for the door. Later that night, I thought of the violence with which Pearson delivered his message; shaming is an aggressive act. Pearson’s violent delivery was the equivalent of psychological rape; he attempted to force his message into people with every bit of power of domination acceptable in a church setting. 

My takeaway:

I know Pearson is a real person. Kevin, I hope that this post somehow finds its way to you and that you are open to feedback. Perhaps you are not aware of the damage you cause people. To quote Uncle Ben from Spider Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The power of your position carries with it a responsibility to stop harming people. 

Title: Temple Covenants and the EndowmentSpeaker, Elder Hugo E. Martinez, Utah Area Presidency

Condensed, this talk consists of two words: wear garments. 

This talk pulsated icky vibes. Would there be any other setting in which people, both adults and teens,  would be in a room with some people they know and some they don’t to hear a message about liturgical clothing that functions as underwear given by a person they’ve never met? I find myself at a loss for words to describe how icky this is. I do not want that level of intimacy with adults in the room who I may not even see outside of church. I don’t want that level of intimacy with the teens in that room; some of whom are my former high school students. It’s incredibly inappropriate. 

My takeaway:

Most of this talk consisted of quoting President Nelson. I want to reiterate that we do not make a covenant to wear garments. Wearing garments is not part of keeping any of the temple covenants. There seems to be a great deal of fear about members creating their own relationship with garments that is different from the relationship church leaders want members to have. 

Title: The Great Blessings and Godly Power in the Sealing OrdinanceSpeaker: Brian K. Taylor, Utah Area Presidency

I confess by this point I was tuned out. Reading the transcript confirmed this as I didn’t remember anything past the second paragraph. A few thoughts that ran through my mind as I counted down the minutes to the end of this talk: 

Are young adults not getting married as much in the temple or married as young as leaders would like them to? Beth Allison Barr’s next book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry, releases on March 18th and I am eager to read it. Will the scholarship in the book change how I see the sealing ordinance? The eternal marriage thing really messed up my approach to marriage. My husband and I have had to do a significant amount of therapy to create a partnership marriage based on choosing each other instead of a marriage based on completing a church ordinance. Telling people who aren’t sealed that it’s ok because their day is coming ignores the pain of life now. In my ward divorce both recent and long past, as well as people who have never married constitute a significant percentage of the ward. The youth who heard these messages are implicitly told that Jesus is not enough; that it is marriage that saves. I do not want the promises in Doctrine and Covenants 132 -the  thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions quoted by Elder Taylor. I want the opposite of that. I want a little cottage in the woods, near mountains and ideally not too far from an ocean, where family and friends gather for meals and linger with warm conversation and cheery laughter. Elder Taylor refers to sealing as the crowing sealing covenant. For me, baptism is enough. Sometimes I wish I had never gone to the temple. Baptism brings me joy and connects me to Jesus. Sealing, on the other hand, is complicated. 

My takeaways:

As my kids are growing into young adulthood, my wish is that they focus on a relationship with Jesus. If they choose to be sealed, I hope it is something they choose to do with a partner because that is what they both want as opposed to feeling like it is something they have to do to be accepted by God. 

I felt a bit sorry for the two area presidency counselors because I’m not sure they had much say in their topics given that both talks heavily relied on quoting President Nelson. It must be exhausting and scary to be given a calling for which you may or may not be prepared or for which you may or may not have skills to succeed. I feel the same way for the men serving as the bishop and counselors in my ward. They are kind, thoughtful souls who want to do right by their congregants. It would have been great if they had previewed this message and chosen not to show it. I got the feeling they were a bit blindsided by some of the things said in the broadcast.

In the end though, the kindest thing we can do for church leaders and ourselves is to develop critical thinking skills to recognize when we hear shame, violence, and fear at church. With critical thinking and reflection, we can choose to toss out the harmful, incorrect, or poisonous messages while keeping anything  good, beautiful, and nurturing.