THIS ISN’T GOING to win me any friends locally. I may live within the boundaries of a fantastic stake and have one of the kindest, gentlest men I’ve ever known as my stake president, but I’m also in north Texas, near Fairview, where the LDS Church hopes to build the McKinney Temple. I am endowed and sealed, and I sustain my stake president. In this case, that requires me to refuse to do something I find out of the line with the gospel of Jesus Christ and contrary to the mission of the LDS Church. For clarity, I no longer hold a temple recommend because my familiarity with its historic connections to problematic, early Mormon polygamy make it uncomfortable for me to be there. My disinterest in participating in temple rituals disinclined me to speak on the controversy surrounding the proposed temple, all of which hinges on the fact that it’s height would require an exemption from current city ordinances. Yesterday, however, at 3:58 pm, I received an email that I found compromising and manipulative, asking me to help flood the Fairview City Planner with emails–15,000 to be exact. This pulls me into the issue in a personal way and so I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind.

Here is a word-for-word, copy/paste of the email, presented in italics, as written by Elder Art Rascon, the area authority. It is addressed to stake presidents and was forwarded in good faith by my own. I have obscured sensitive information to protect privacy.

Dear Stake Presidents,

I recognize that most of you are not within the boundaries of the Mckinney Temple district. But this invitation is to everyone throughout the three Councils in this region.

The opposition for the McKinney Temple continues to grow. Their letter writing campaign and attendance at the last P&Z meeting surpass the numbers of members of the church whom have written and/or attended the meetings. This needs to change. This is a call to action. 

Therefore, Elder Cannon and I are requesting two things. First, that all members who support the building of the McKinney Temple write a simple letter stating their support, and why. This is critical. We need to present to the Fairview town council thousands of letters. The letters only need to be a few sentences. Please call on bishops to take five minutes during the second hour to get this done. Aso, send an email or text blast to members. All youth are invited to write a letter as well. 

Please send Email to: REDACTED NAME OF CITY PLANNER

Email: REDACTED  EMAIL OF CITY PLANNER

Subject should read: In Support of Temple

Please copy on this email: REDACTED

The second ask, is this: please invite all members to attend the Fairview town council meeting on Tuesday, June 4 at 7:30 PM. Arrive early. Most will be standing outside, but we need the image and the visual of thousands of people in support.  Address to attend is below. This should be announced in sacrament meeting this weekend and the location sent by text or email.

Address for town council meeting: REDACTED, Fairview, TX 75069

Brethren, this is important! We need 15,000 letters by Monday on the desk of the town manager! For those of you who live in Fairview or McKinney, please sign the petition as well.

This is the time for action brethren. Please be responsive to these two requests as this is a pivotal next few days.

Thank you for all you do! God bless you in your service. Please send these messages with love and appreciation to your members for their support and love of the temple.

Faithfully, 

Elder Art Rascon

Because Elder Rascon states this “invitation” is “to everyone throughout the three Councils in this region” and seems to state the email should be made available to those who aren’t stake presidents (and because it was), in my view, this email loses any claim to privacy. If you disagree and are outside these three councils, feel free to stop reading.

There are a few bothersome things about this email. First up, this line: “The opposition for the McKinney Temple continues to grow.” It’s a half truth that is a silent trigger for the deep-seated persecution complex which many/most Latter-day Saints have ingrained into our psyche due to our early history. The area authority, Art Rascon (who, by the way, is a news anchor in the Houston area and surely ought to understand the importance of accuracy in reporting), should have written, “The opposition to the architectural plans for the McKinney Temple, which renders the roof line nearly twice what the Fairview town ordinance allows and promises a steeple that is much higher than that, continues to grow.” Over and over, the city of Fairview’s representatives and residents have made it clear that they don’t oppose an LDS temple being built there. Rather, they oppose its size; they want to maintain a town of lower profile in order to keep a small town, country feel. As one resident has said, “It’s like having a twenty karat ring on a child’s finger.” If the proposed LDS temple met the city’s requirements, there’d be no problem. Feel free to do your own research on the citizenry’s complaints because you’ll discover they say over and over they don’t oppose the temple itself, just its current design. A temple, if in compliance with the town’s law, is welcomed there.

The LDS Church can certainly ask for an exemption to the ordinance: it has and will try again to get that exemption. But I’m absolutely flumoxed at the un-neighborliness of asking those outside the proposed McKinney Temple district (people like me) to flood Fairview’s small town servant city planner with 15,000 emails by today and then to swarm a city council meeting, gathering outside in a manner that will likely be disruptive to the locals. Look, the LDS Church has made some pretty bad PR moves in recent years. This one, however, undermines two tenets of the LDS Church’s threefold mission, all in an effort to support the third. The first of this well-known, threefold mission is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ; the second, to perfect the Saints; and the third, to redeem the dead. I’ll explain.

When a town asks you to respect its laws and ordinances and you hope to extend a hand of fellowship to those residents, you completely destroy your opportunity to do so by attempting to bully them into submission. I’m not sorry to say that asking for 15,000 letters to bombard the Fairview City Planner and to show up en masse, whether or not you will be in the McKinney Temple District, is a use of pressure that is intent on overpowering their will. I know the talking point on this will be that the visibility of the temple with be a constant proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Nope. Only to the LDS. To those whom the LDS church will target with missionaries, the obtrusive height would be a constant reminder that Mormons don’t respect them. Good-bye first tenet of the threefold mission of the Church. Wouldn’t it be wiser to stop pretending the spire or height of the roofline has anything to do with the work that goes on inside?

Furthermore, by expecting LDS members in the region to participate in this kind of bullying, Church leadership is expecting us to throw out our integrity to help the church destroy relationships between member and nonmember. What happened to the 12th and 13th Articles of Faith? To obeying, honoring and sustaining the law (Article 12)? To “being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men (Article 13)?  I don’t see consistency between these ideas and what I’m being asked to do, nor in the request itself.

Not only that, the claims being made by LDS leadership to the Fairview town council include statements to the effect that the steeple height isn’t subject to local law because of the protections afforded religion. An LDS man (who I think, judging by appearance, is the area authority) said at a town meeting that the steeple “means hope in Jesus Christ, it means we can overcome adversity in our lives, it points to heaven.” I’m sure he means what he said, but what he said is most assuredly an idea that, in my 62 years, I’ve never heard before, not even once. Its a fabrication of convenience. (FYI You can watch and listen to a news report that includes part of his talking points here. I could only find it on Ex-Mo reddit, a site I don’t frequent and wouldn’t normally point readers to but I think this is the best, brief clip I’ve seen out there.)

Maybe members of the LDS Church don’t know that Fairview residents oppose the temple because it violates an ordinance. Maybe they sincerely perceive this as the religious persecution Elder Rascon seems to want them to perceive it as. This would mean that the LDS Church is, once again, handing members another shelf-breaking item. These two points–1) that members in-the-know will compromise their integrity and 2) that members not in-the-know are put at risk of later realization that what they’ve been told by our area authority is less than factual–undermine the second mission of the Church, which is to perfect the Saints. I can see it in no other way.

I know it’s the way of Mormons to do as we’re told by our Church leaders, thinking of them as stand-ins for the Lord. But this is such flawed thinking that I’m not sure it deserves my time. It is a basic LDS belief that all mortals are here to use our agency to do good. Offending and alienating an entire town so that it resents the LDS Church is nothing like anything I can imagine Jesus doing. There is no right and wrong in a city’s height ordinance. Complying is simply a matter of respecting your neighbor. I’m coming at this as one who, in 1986, was compelled by church leaders to leave my entire family, all non-LDS, outside the temple as I was simultaneously married and sealed inside. They told me doing something this devastating to my family was the will of God. Back then, we didn’t understand that policy and doctrine had any kind of dividing line. I assure you, offending my family, especially my parents, on my wedding day left them with a sour taste for my church-of-choice that lasted throughout their lifetimes. This is similar. If we don’t need to offend, if we can build a working temple and comply with the ordinance, we should.

Of course, moving into an area and offending the people already living there is something LDS have experience doing. I ask, when did that ever turn out well for us?

I’m also annoyed at the language. The act of writing this email is first “an invitation,” then an “ask” and then a “call to action.” A call to action is not an invitation, not when you’re LDS. LDS probably all know what I’m talking about. The fact that Elder Rascon wants us to copy the email we write to the City Planner to a second address he offers will lead some to think “they” just might be checking to see who does and does not comply. More likely, they want a clear understanding of how effective this kind of half-truth email is in motivating members to do as they are invited, asked, and/or called. Take your pick.

Here’s an underlying thing about this email that chaps my hide beyond the whole McKinney Temple debate. I have some close, personal friends who have experienced serious ecclesiastical abuse at the hands of their stake presidents. My stake president may be a gem, but it does happen with other leaders. It happens most often to women, though not exclusively. Yet your average member, particularly female, has no way to register such a complaint against ecclesiastical abuses. I’m irritated that Elder Rascon is hiding behind the skirt of my stake president rather than sending the email directly to us so that we can access him. He could at least give us his contact information.

He’s clearly willing to give out the contact information of a city planner who’s just doing his job so that he’s spammed with thousands of emails from people he doesn’t represent. But, because of the way the LDS church system is designed, Rascon isn’t willing to receive the uninvited pleas of abuse victims or the difficult questions of other members when local leaders have no satisfactory answer to their faith crisis questions. That’s hypocrisy in action even if his heart isn’t, on its own, hypocritical. When a system has your allegiance rather than the people, this is what we get.

I’m not a fan of this wall of separation that the LDS Church has created to keep the unwashed masses at bay. Nor am I a fan of the way pleas for help that find a desk at Church Headquarters are sent down the chain of command to a stake president. If a person needs help dealing with an abusive bishop or stake president, the information that the person sends to Salt Lake City winds up in the hands of the abusers. There’s an obvious flaw in this, and the cost of that flaw can be measured in lives and mental wellness. I’d want to know what my area authority is doing to help remedy this problem.

I’d love to see a temple in McKinney. I want that for all the LDS people in its intended district who want it. But I’d also like for the church to stop shooting itself in the foot. The height of the spire or roofline is inconsequential to the activities of the believers within. Be honest about that. And stop bullying small town councils. Show respect for the boundaries they’ve set by ordinance. Follow your own religion by obeying the law and doing unto others as you would have done to you.

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