The Church Doesn't Need Your Panic: My Guest Post at Times and Seasons

      

  I wrote this piece in response to a pervasive pattern of despair. Since I was responding to a specific Times and Seasons post I submitted it to them as a guess post and they were gracious enough to post it. You can read it here and its republished below: 

        I read Johnathan Green’s post and because the underlying flaws have been repeated at least three times over the past year, I thought it was worth a substantive response, and it was too long for comments. There’s a lot of heat, hyperbole, and moral posturing in his post, but very little that holds up under scrutiny. I take strong exception to his exaggerations, false equivalence, and the assumption that his political lens should dictate the Church’s actions.

        Screaming “Nazi” louder is not an argument. He treated “warning signs” as functionally equivalent to moral certainty. Using German terms to dress up Nazi comparisons doesn’t make them more persuasive, it just adds rhetorical heat without light. As a result, much of his post rests on false equivalence and superficial similarities rather than serious analysis.

        He said in point three that the Church should “ignore the administration,” yet the post itself spends thousands of words obsessing over it. That contradiction matters, because point four revealed the underlying assumption: that the Church should function as an arm of his political views. I used to think that way too, that the Church should take a forceful position on every partisan controversy. That was twenty years ago and frankly, I grew up. The Church is not my political representative. It teaches principles that allow members to vote, persuade, and act in the public square on their own responsibility.

        He’ll probably respond that his post was a “strategic” argument about institutional survival rather than personal fixation. But strategy still reveals priorities. When every hypothetical risk is filtered through one political diagnosis, that diagnosis becomes the guiding authority, functionally replacing the Church’s own judgment with Green’s.

        The Church’s primary concern is ministering to the members it already has. We saw this in its restrained statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: as strong as possible while preserving its ability to support members and maintain its global mission. That same logic applies here.

        There’s also an implicit claim throughout that Green knows better than the prophets and apostles. If God had a direct, binding political message about Donald Trump, I assume we would have heard it from them. He defined “threats to the Church’s mission” in a way that mirrored his political hysteria.

        He appealed to Abinadi and Bonhoeffer to argue that prophets speak in principle rather than names. I can name a half dozen instances in the Bible where prophets directly name the wicked ruler but let’s go with his point. He went further and treated his interpretation of those principles as if it carries the same moral authority as prophetic judgment. That’s the move I’m rejecting.

        Points five and six repeated the same demand in softer language: he wanted the Church to endorse his position. It hasn’t, because its mission is ministering, not issuing grand political declarations that satisfy a political minority from a single country within a global church. He might claim he only wanted the church to act when faced with a clear red line, but that red line just happened to be what Green’s political beliefs say it was.

        He framed this as setting “red lines,” not seeking endorsement. But those red lines did not come from institutional revelation, global consensus, measurable harm, or even a consensus of LDS national security professionals—they came from his own political risk model. Calling that a moral threshold doesn’t make it one.

        Phrases like “surveillance by a corrupt, vindictive, unchecked personalist autocracy” read less like analysis and more like a political Gish gallop. Voters clearly weren’t persuaded by that framing. Yelling it louder won’t change that.

        He correctly noted that “getting upset over someone else’s silence is actively harmful,” yet most of the post is a sustained complaint about the Church’s silence. That tension ran through the whole piece.

        Point seven genuinely made me laugh. My life is fine under this government. I voted for border security, strict immigration enforcement, and a strong foreign policy. Inflation has stabilized, gas prices are reasonable, and I have the sense that someone is finally in charge. That calm is not a luxury based on my race, gender, or class. Unless a person lets it through their own hysteria or misdeeds, the government doesn’t affect much of your life.

        The discomfort Green described felt less like lived reality and more like a self-reinforcing media spiral: every action is filtered as sinister, which heightens anxiety, which then seeks out more bad news.

        His Gish gallop in the comments about there only being “one side” shows the harm of that cycle. Screaming “concentration camp”, “starving children”, and “torture”, might feel morally righteous or advance a partisan case, but it also heightens anxiety and escalates conflict. In short, it hurts as much as it helps.

        The healthier response is simple: consume less political media, touch grass, respect differing views, and count your blessings—basic Church principles. Screaming, “but he’s a nazi” when you’re asked to calm down and show respect is a ludicrous substitute for reasoned engagement and more of the problem.

        Green insisted that the Church shouldn’t threaten its own mission but repeatedly argue that it should adopt his political mission. “You should be appalled” isn’t a neutral principle—its Green’s emotional filter presented as moral obligation. To people who don’t share it, this comes off as unhinged, and even deranged, not persuasive.

        Green’s Trump–King Noah comparison is another false equivalence. Noah wasn’t elected. He raised taxes to intolerable levels; Trump reduced them and talks about tariff rebates. Noah imprisoned and tortured dissidents; Trump enforces immigration law, including against violent criminals. You can oppose that policy, and perhaps think it’s immoral, but calling it tyranny by analogy doesn’t make it so.

        Green claimed Trump and his supporters “rejoice in bloodshed.” As a former Marine and military analyst, I find that condescending—and a reflection of the privilege of living in peace and security. Wanting a strong defense and feeling pride in providing it is not rejoicing in bloodshed; it’s more like Captain Moroni rejoicing in the welfare and protection of his people.

        You might claim some of Trumps military actions are fascistic. But debates over presidential war powers found in Article II Section II of the constitution have been a feature of our government since Thomas Jefferson. Not part of a fascist dictatorship.

        When Green invoked Abinadi, he placed himself in the role of calling both fellow saints and Church leaders to repentance for not opposing Trump as he thinks they should. That circles back to the same contradiction: he says the Church isn’t political but then condemns it for not being political in the right way.

        He’ll say this is about obedience versus resistance under tyranny, not about Trump. But that only works if the premise, that we are already living under something functionally equivalent to tyranny, is established. He assumed the premise; he didn’t demonstrate it.

        Point 15 mentioned many recent, good talks. But scriptures should be used to examine our own conduct, not to bludgeon fellow members. If we’re staying in the Book of Mormon, Alma’s work of knitting hearts together in unity, even with love towards our fellow enemies, seems the better model.

        I agreed with one line in point sixteen: “Anticipatory despair is not a form of resistance.” That’s the clearest and strongest sentence in the entire post. The answer to despair is more time with family, friends, and neighbors, not arrogantly browbeating them into repentance for voting differently than you.

        Finally, the insider language such as “cringe resist libs” and “MWEG moms” doesn’t clarify anything. That insider framing is telling. It signaled that his argument was aimed less at persuading a broad body of saints and more at rallying a politically fluent in-group that already shared his sense of impending catastrophe.

        The Church has survived lynch mobs, federal invasion, disincorporation, KGB surveillance, and Hitler—it will survive this political moment too, without Green’s help. His post amplifies anxiety, casts fellow members and leaders as moral failures for not sharing his political conclusions and confuses personal panic with institutional necessity. Inflating warning signs into moral certainties and treating his interpretation as Church directive does nothing to build unity, influence policy responsibly, or foster understanding—it is simply noise. If we are serious about clarity, faithful witness, and real community, we need charity and reason, not labels, hysteria, or overreach. 

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