“F—k your woman, f—k your man,
“It is all part of God’s plan,
“Mormons f—k all that they can,
“Here in Salt Lake City land!”
—Lyrics from the hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon
Those commercials are almost as abundant on the airwaves of America as the programming condemning a faith that centers on the Savior: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon religion.
What’s on tonight? Well, you can watch the anti-Mormon Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on Bravo.
Not in the mood for anti-religious hate? Let’s see what else Bravo offers. Well, there’s Surviving Mormonism.
Ok… let’s try a different network, shall we? What’s playing on Hulu? The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—a new season coming soon, replete with dishing and décolletage.
A 2022 poll found that 39 percent of Americans held unfavorable views of Latter-day Saints.
Well, let’s ditch the TV altogether. What’s on the bookshelf? Bad Mormon, the “memoir” by Heather Gay.
Turn on the TV, open a book, scroll your feed—the message is the same: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is bad and so are its people.
And now, four of those people lie dead, murdered by a bigot earlier this fall, who took open season on Mormons literally, driving his truck into a Michigan church, turning his gun on hundreds of parishioners gathered for peaceful worship, then setting the building ablaze. Four people were killed and eight more were injured—one of them a six-year-old boy.
The FBI has now determined that the shooter was motivated by hatred of Latter-day Saints.
That hatred didn’t just spring from nowhere. It was nurtured by media—Bravo, Hulu and the like—and cultivated by years of ridicule and ignorance, with the result of a quiet social permission to sniff disapprovingly at the beliefs and practices of a minority faith.
The normalization of hate against any community has death as its inevitable consequence, as history has long shown. The widely held belief that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” led to the nearly complete disappearance of Native Americans through a combination of government-sponsored warfare, violence, and systematic policies of dispossession and cultural eradication. Pope Urban II’s electrifying call for a Holy War against Muslims, whom he described as an “accursed and foreign race,” resulted in the slaughter of thousands of men, women and children in Jerusalem in 1099 AD.
And then there was the Holocaust, the culmination of 20 centuries of slander and calumny against a religion comprising less than 0.2 percent of the world population.
A 2022 poll found that 39 percent of Americans held unfavorable views of Latter-day Saints, compared to just 17 percent favorable.
The numbers mean that well over a third of us listen to and believe bad things about a religion that, in the past 40 years, has provided humanitarian services—clean water, disaster relief, family food production and more—to 30 million people in 179 nations.
The numbers mean that smut like what Bravo and Hulu broadcast will continue to rake in the big bucks, and that an unemployed bigot like Alex Barnes-Ross can coolly post “the Mormon Church is a cult” immediately after a murderous attack on hundreds of worshippers—and the wider world shrugs.
The socially acceptable bigotry that is anti-Mormon hate has even spawned a musical, The Book of Mormon, which has grossed over $1 billion internationally—proof that prejudice, set to music, can be lucrative.
If you’re among the 39 percent who are annoyed by the existence of Latter-day Saints and their religion, be warned: You are heard.
In dark corners, your cheap jokes become gospel, your cocktail criticisms become marching orders.
Yes, the late killer was a nut with a truck, a gun and a match.
But he didn’t act alone.
He had a chorus behind him—laughing, streaming, tapping their feet and nodding along.
And four people lost their lives.
