The pandemic was a crazy time – one day I went to work at an office that I loved with co-workers that I enjoyed, never realizing that it would be the last time that I ever did so.

But the politization of Covid19 was even crazier. What should have been a unifying event was instead used to further divide us.

The LDS church culture is normally all about helping one another. Our baptismal covenants include a promise that we will help and comfort each other. If a member is going through a hard time, the membership pulls together to help. If there is a danger towards a member, the membership works to mitigate that danger. But not so during the pandemic – many members were totally OK exposing others. I had one (former) friend say that they didn’t want me to die, but they wouldn’t put on a mask even if it meant saving my life. After all, my health was my own problem – not theirs. On the first Sunday after the mask mandate was lifted, I heard a smug man musing out loud that he was interested in seeing which members would still opt to wear a mask that day (he did not).

The church leadership (both local and general) appeared to do everything right (and they were criticized by many of the church members for it). They encouraged mask wearing and social distancing. As far as I can tell, the leadership was OK cancelling meetings (except for Elder Bednar). But I realized that I had very little in common with many members of the church – that our values were very far apart.

Things got even worse when the Black Lives Matter protests began after the murder of George Floyd. The conservative media portrayed the protesters as extremely violent and many church members told me that the protests were just a cover allowing the protesters to loot and to vandalize. I am fortunate that my daughter lived on Capitol Hill and invited me to attend a protest with her. What I witnessed was the exact opposite of what the media described.

On June 2, 2000 I attended the largest BLM protest in Seattle. The protesters were amazingly unified and controlled. When a white supremist with a bullhorn showed up and started spouting hatred, the crowd surrounded him to protect him. Nobody spoke to him and nobody touched him. Eventually he got bored and left. Everybody donated their umbrellas to the people in front. People ordered pizzas and passed them around the crowd. If your throat got hoarse from chanting, everybody had a lozenge to share. Many people brought a gallon of milk to help wash tear gas out of other people’s eyes (the previous evening my daughter washed the eyes of a protestor, and we saw him again on the night that we went). People were chanting things like “Hands up, don’t shoot”, “Whose streets, our streets”, and “Say their name”. Everybody was super well behaved as the police snipers watched us from their nearby perch. Some bystanders wanted to see a riot, so they set off some fireworks (which failed to have the desired effect). I left at 10pm, but apparently around 11:30 some people showed up and caused enough trouble for the police to break out their tear gas.

I went again two days later and it was much the same thing (except that nobody got gassed that night).

A few people from church were supportive of my attendance, but most saw it as a very negative thing. I was called out for “virtue signaling” and I lost friends that I had been very close to for over 20 years. Apparently, Jesus does not believe in protesting bad behavior.

A few days later my wife showed me a headline on the Fox website saying that Capitol Hill had been taken over by the protestors, that protestors were shooting people, and that Seattle was on fire. I did not believe a word of it, so we got in the car and I drove her to the Capitol Hill autonomous zone (CHAZ). Nothing was on fire (Fox news used a picture of an apartment fire in Minnesota, passing it off as Seattle). Everybody was ultra peaceful. Every corner had a tent handing out food and water. At first my wife thought that I had brought her to the wrong place.

I do not necessarily agree with the protestors taking over a small portion of Seattle for a few weeks, but the reality was nothing like it was reported to be. Meanwhile, many members of the church thought that anything civil rights oriented was evil.

In short, the pandemic taught me that:

• The entire show of unity and family within the church is usually not authentic. They tend to be individualists that merely pretend to care about others.
• Most members (and Christians in general) refuse to support the very populations that Jesus loved.