Brett G. Scharffs is Rex E. Lee chair and professor of law at J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, and is director of the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies. The following post is based on his remarks at the AMAR Windsor Dialogue conference held at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, England, 24–25 June 2024. It was published as part of the Talk About blog feature “Marking the 10th Anniversary of the Yazidi Genocide.”
My engagement with the AMAR International Charitable Foundation began as a participant in the 2018 Windsor Dialogue conference held in Baghdad, where I and others discussed the experience of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their journey “from persecution to inclusion.”[1] The hope was that the Latter-day Saints’ journey might have salience, relevance, and resonance with the Yazidi community. I later discussed the Latter-day Saints’ journey at a 2022 Notre Dame University Symposium, “Re-Thinking the Law to Protect Religious Minorities,” and published a related essay in Notre Dame Law Review Reflection.
Readdressing the Yazidi’s journey from persecution to inclusion takes on new urgency in 2024, as the Iraqi government and UN entities prepare to defund and effectually close the IDP camps where Yazidis have resided since the genocide of 2014.
Institutions as Agents of Persecution or Inclusion: The Latter-day Saint Experience
In discussing this journey, it is important to consider how institutions, and people within those institutions, that have been agents of persecution can actually become agents of inclusion. Here I will focus on seven categories, although the list could easily be expanded: the state, majority faiths, the media, the persecuted themselves, business, neighbors, and academics.
The State. Some of the persecution experienced by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was officially sanctioned and state led. In October 1838, the governor of the state of Missouri infamously issued an “extermination order,” empowering mob militias to exterminate or drive Latter-day Saint “enemies” from the state “by any means necessary.” Approximately one month after the order was issued, the Church’s first president and prophet Joseph Smith and five other Church leaders were imprisoned in the ironically named Liberty Jail for nearly five bitterly cold months. Eventually they were allowed to escape because government officials had no real grounds to hold them. Less than six years later, Joseph Smith and his brother were killed in another jail, where they were being held on specious charges of rioting and treason. Latter-day Saint history is just one example of state-led persecution; when we examine the histories of most minority religious groups that suffer persecution, more often than not, there is a state element to that persecution.
However, the state can also be one of the most powerful institutions for inclusion. Nearly 140 years after Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued the extermination order, a twentieth-century governor of Missouri rescinded it, with an expression of “deep regret for the injustice and undue suffering caused.” We have also witnessed increased inclusion of Latter-day Saint politicians in U.S. politics. Mitt Romney served as governor of Massachusetts, U.S. Senator from Utah, and the Republican Party’s candidate for president in 2012. For a time, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah was the senior Republican in the U.S. Senate, and Harry Reid from Nevada was the senior Democrat in the U.S. Senate—both faithful Latter-day Saints. Vian Dakhil’s presence as the only Yazidi Kurd in Iraq’s Parliament is a significant step for the Yazidi community in their journey from exclusion to inclusion.
Majority Faiths. In the 1800s, the majority faiths in the United States, particularly Protestants, were extremely unfriendly to Latter-day Saints. Formal denunciations of the Church from the pulpit, by Protestant and other clergy, were common. An illustrative political cartoon of the time depicted two reptiles devouring the U.S. Capitol: one is labeled the “Roman Church” and the other the “Mormon Church.”[2] These “foreign faiths” were seen as two great threats to American democracy.
The reality, though, is that many efforts to promote inclusion have been facilitated or even led by majority faith communities. In June of this year, five “megachurch” Baptist pastors participated in our Center’s annual Religious Freedom Annual Review, held at Brigham Young University. They were there explicitly to build bridges, and their visit included meeting with Church leaders in Salt Lake City. Those who belong to or lead well-established faiths—faiths that have made the journey from “outside to inside”—can and should look for ways to extend themselves to include faiths still making that journey.
The Media. One hundred years ago or more, British and other media often depicted Latter-day Saints with horns. A Study in Scarlet, a popular novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, depicted Mormons as vengeful kidnappers and murderers engaged in human trafficking. Inaccurate and unflattering depictions are still promulgated today; a 2007 Time magazine coverfeaturing a photo of Mitt Romney deliberately cast him in shadow with a sideways glance next to the headline “Sure He Looks Like a President. But What Does Mitt Romney Really Believe?,” clearly designed to depict Romney as a shady, untrustworthy person with strange beliefs. And the popular The Book of Mormon musical reduces Latter-day Saints and their beliefs to caricature in a vulgar, mocking way that would be decried as unacceptable and immoral if aimed at other faiths or minority groups.
Conversely, the media produces more respectful, fair-minded, informative portrayals of The Church of Jesus Christ today than it did even 50 years ago. Extreme forms of discriminatory media treatment are rarer, although (as most religious groups feel) media treatment tends to focus on the negative rather than the positive, the sensational rather than the ordinary.
The Persecuted. After suffering from discrimination and persecution, early Latter-day Saints isolated themselves as a form of self-protection but in a way that perpetuated a continuation of misunderstanding. And they sometimes responded by lashing out and doing harm to those who passed in their midst. The most famous incident is the 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, which involved a wagon train traveling through southern Utah Territory on its way to California. Feeling threatened, a group of Latter-day Saints gathered a militia that killed 120 members of the wagon train and then blamed the killings on the local Indian tribe. Until more recent decades, books written on this tragic event had either been apologetic, denying the severity of what happened, or accusatory, designed to tar the entire church with guilt for the actions of a small subcommunity. But in more recent years, well-researched academic books have been written offering more even-handed accounts of this and other events in the Church’s history.[3]
It is fair to say that the Church adopted a strategy explicitly designed to promote inclusion. This has included more “superficial” actions, like governing the trademark attire of its young missionaries, producing social media and advertising campaigns, and providing distinctively colored attire for its humanitarian and emergency-response volunteers. But more substantively, the relinquishing of certain practices and doctrines such as polygamy facilitated the inclusion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into U.S. society.
As late as the early 1900s, the seating of Latter-day Saint Reed Smoot, who had been elected to the Senate, generated enormous nationwide controversy. This controversy was based largely on the Church’s history of sanctioning polygamy and on perceptions that the Church’s leadership would wield its influence through Smoot. Three years of congressional hearings, known as the “Smoot Hearings,” eventually resulted in the seating of Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and marked an important new chapter in the Church’s acceptance.[4] By the post–World War II era, Latter-day Saints, with their focus on the importance of the nuclear family, were generally regarded as patriotic, model, “uber” Americans. In more recent decades, the pendulum has swung, as the Church’s stance on same-sex marriage and gender identity have generally increased societal disfavor of Latter-day Saints, at least from progressive quarters. Ironically, nineteenth-century Church members were vilified for being too liberal with respect to sexual mores, while twenty-first-century members have been vilified for being too conservative with respect to sexual mores.
Business. History has witnessed explicit commercial discrimination against Latter-day Saints, from proverbial “Mormons Need Not Apply” notices to Church members being run off their properties and out of their businesses in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, to the desert wasteland of the Salt Lake Valley.
But business has also been a sphere in which Latter-day Saints have made significant strides. Books have been written about The Mormon Way of Doing Business and the success that individual Latter-day Saints have had in corporate leadership. Latter-day Saint thought leaders like Stephen R. Covey (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and Clayton Christensen (developer of “disruptive innovation” theory) have been influential in business worldwide.
Neighbors. At the 2018 AMAR Windsor Dialogue, Baroness Emma Nicholson illustrated the point that persecution typically happens from up close, rather than from afar, by recounting the story of a Yazidi girl who was raped by her dentist, a trusted family friend. At this year’s Windsor Dialogue conference, Iraqi MP Vian Dakhil has also discussed ways in which the Yazidi’s Muslim neighbors identified and pointed out Yazidis to their ISIL/Da’esh persecutors. This fact should be sobering for us all, since we are all neighbors with a duty to care for each other—even, and perhaps especially, for neighbors we might not particularly like or understand. Persecution is not a distant problem; it is almost always an intimate problem.
The reality, though, is that neighbors can also be an instrument of inclusion. In the last several years, Leaders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have worked together on multiple projects. Because of the Church’s pre-1978 policies limiting priesthood authority to white males, relations between these two groups were very different 50 years ago. But remarkable bonds of cooperation, respect, and even affection have been cultivated between members of both organizations in just the last 10 years.
Academics. Stated plainly, academic treatments of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 100 years ago were blatantly bigoted, biased, hostile, and inaccurate. Such treatments are another reminder that I, as an academic, can be an agent of either persecution or inclusion, depending on how I understand and do my job.
More recent scholarly treatments of the Church, both by Latter-day Saints and those who are not Latter-day Saints, are largely more fair minded and objective. Certainly, some are very critical and some point out faults and flaws that Church members might prefer not be pointed out. But for the most part, they are balanced, marking a significant step forward.
Leveraging Institutions as Agents of Inclusion: The Yazidi Experience
Ten years after the ISIL/Da’esh invasion of Sinjar, the Yazidi community now faces the defunding of IDP camps and the urgency of either dispersal or return to the now-devastated Sinjar region. Given the potential institutions have for inclusion or exclusion, the question now is how might the Yazidi community leverage institutions for support at this critical time?
Before suggesting some answers, I note that I offer the following from a place of humility, acknowledging my limited perspective and the fact that there are no easy answers. The following thoughts are an attempt to lend insights rather than an attempt to offer quick-fix, universally applicable solutions.
The State. I believe it will be important for the Yazidi people to refine a strategy for reaching out to the state—to local, regional, and national governments—and explaining themselves and their situation. This can be extremely challenging because it requires persistence in facing an audience that may not be terribly receptive. But it falls on the persecuted group itself to have a thoughtful strategy for engaging with the state and carrying out that strategy. This has been a hard lesson for Latter-day Saints to learn. But the Church now has an office in Washington, D.C., to engage with the U.S. federal government, as well as offices at the United Nations, African Union, and European Union. These offices focus on building relationships with leaders in national, regional, and international government and governing bodies, and on developing and carrying out communications and interfaith strategies.
Majority Faiths. It is also important for the Yazidi people to identify other faith communities who could serve as allies. In doing so, it is critical that they not assume religious communities are monoliths, since some within Christian, Muslim, and other faith communities will be part of the problem and others will be part of the solution.
The Media. The Yazidi community would benefit from developing a media strategy, focusing on seeking allies in the media who can share and amplify their stories. It is also important that, as they face possible community dispersion following camp closures, they consider strategies for facilitating communication within the Yazidi community, particularly intergenerational communication.
Business. It will be important for members of the Yazidi community to seek educational and retraining opportunities, where possible, and to identify businesses and industries that welcome their skills and contributions.
Neighbors. The ICLRS recently co-sponsored a conference in Puebla, Mexico, where a number of participants had not previously interacted with our Center. At the end of the conference, one of the participants told ICLRS organizers, “I was impressed because you have embraced people who do not embrace you.” To build bridges, it is often necessary to embrace and attempt to build relations with “neighbors” who do not embrace us. This is certainly a challenging injunction for Yazidis who have been so widely mischaracterized and misunderstood, but proximity can facilitate understanding, and at times, the misunderstood must initiate that proximity.
Academics. It will obviously be important for Yazidis to continue seeking education as well as jobs in education, as teachers and academics. They might also seek opportunities to share their stories with people who are interested in doing academic research and writing on their community, to facilitate education about the Yazidis.
Facilitating Resettlement Goals and Avoiding Benevolent Indignities
While I offer the above suggestions for the Yazidis in their journey from persecution to inclusion, I also note that there is much others can do—and avoid doing—to assist the Yazidis on that journey.
The UNHCR has compiled a list of goals that institutions and individuals in countries of resettlement can work toward to facilitate the inclusion of refugees, in its Integration Handbook for Resettled Refugees. These goals include the following:
- Facilitate equal access to fundamental rights (i.e., building and upholding legal systems that are committed to the rule of law, due process of law, equal protection under the law, and other fundamental rights).
- Help create conditions that engender the autonomy and self-reliance of refugees.
- Promote family reunification.
- Promote support through connections with professionals and volunteers.
- Help rebuild trust in institutions and political systems. (This may be particularly difficult for Yazidis resettling in Iraq, where the government has in many ways failed them and must rebuild that community’s trust in its institutions.)
- Promote cultural and religious integrity and restore attachments to, and promote participation in, community, social, cultural and economic systems by valuing diversity and inclusion.
- Counter racism, discrimination, and xenophobia and build welcoming and inclusive societies.
- Support the development of strong refugee communities and meaningful participation of refugees.
- Foster conditions that support the integration of resettled refugees, while considering the impact of age, gender, and diversity.
While individuals and institutions can do much to promote the inclusion of IDPs and refugees in these ways, they must avoid inflicting “benevolent indignities” on those they are trying to help.
Professor Paul Perrin of the University of Notre Dame has extensive experience in monitoring and evaluating humanitarian services and outcomes. In his research, he found that recipients of aid identified many specific, unintentional harmful practices carried out by those trying to do good—practices that result in what Perrin terms “benevolent indignities.” The following are just a few of the many benevolent indignities identified by aid recipients.
Reductionism is treating an individual as a refugee or IDP, which may be a natural tendency when the individual actually is a refugee or IDP. But that identity is just one facet of an individual’s multi-faceted identity. We would do well to see and acknowledge other dimensions of refugees’ and IDPs’ identities and attachments.
Infantilization is the myth of expertise—of treating refugees like children who need to learn and be taught by more knowledgeable experts. While refugees will need some training and orienting to new ways of life, their depth and breadth of knowledge and experience should be recognized and honored as well.
Instrumentalization is thinking primarily in terms of the organization’s goals and ambitions and measuring success according to what the aid-giving organization has accomplished. While institutional goal setting and evaluation can be beneficial, it is important to understand and facilitate individual refugees’ goals and perceptions of progress.
It’s Your Problem Now involves “gifting” vulnerable communities with an infrastructure project, such as a well or a school. Such projects may not be inherently bad, but inquiries should be made before such a project is undertaken to assess (1) the community’s principal needs and (2) the community’s ability and desire to sustain a project in the long term.
And finally, Saviorism maintains a hierarchical distance between the aid giver and recipient.
Institutions and individuals who seek to help the Yazidis and others on the journey from persecution to inclusion would do well to avoid these and other benevolent indignities. Navigating the journey from persecution to inclusion will likely be long and arduous. It is important that the Yazidi people have friends and allies along the way.
References:
[1] Discussants included Sharon Eubank, then a member of the Church’s general Relief Society presidency and director of the Church’s humanitarian work, and Elder Anthony Perkins, who helped administer the Church’s affairs in the geographic area that included Iraq.
[2] Although Mormon Church and Mormonism were commonly used terms historically, the Church and its members now prefer that the official name of the Church—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—be used and that its members be referred to as Latter-day Saints.
[3] See, e.g., Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley & Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford Univ. Press 2008).
[4] See Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Univ. of North Carolina Press 2004).