Thread by @TaylorPetrey

A modest proposal for how to deal with #DezNat, the white supremacist movement in contemporary Latter-day Saint culture: rehabilitate or excommunicate. A thread...

Background: The LDS church has a complicated relationship with racial teachings, but has spent much of the last decade working to improve. In 2017, with the rise of the alt-right, the LDS church issued a condemnation of LDS members affiliated with white supremacy movements.

More recently, this summer the LDS church has partnered with the NAACP to tackle joint initiatives. Certainly this is part of the effort the church has been making to improve its reputation on race issues. newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/first-…

This was also a part of a larger pattern where another senior church leader affirmed that "Black lives matter," in an imperfect, but clear statement directed at eliminated racism in the ranks of the church.
newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/presid…

But a small, vocal group of extremists that have rallied under the #DezNat banner and have espoused publicly and privately truly horrible things. @ExposeDezNat 's work to expose the identities of such individuals have turned up current LDS missionaries, return missionaries, and..

The Assistant AG of Alaska as major figures in this radical group expressing vile anti-Semitism, racism, anti-gay sentiments, and more.
theguardian.com/us-news/2021/j…

If we are to take the LDS church's efforts at combatting racism seriously, I offer a few ideas for how to enact measures that combat the rise of this dangerous ideology. First, we have to attempt to deradicalize.

The LDS church has developed extraordinary programs of mostly volunteers trained in "addiction recovery" from gambling, to substance abuse, and even sex addition, masturbation. They might develop this program in order to identify radical beliefs and behaviors.

A "DezNat" Recovery Program would draw on the principles used in various deradicalization programs that target white nationalism and other extremist ideologies and replace them.

Deradicalization does not have a great reputation for effectiveness, especially if the offenders are not interested in cooperating. That may be the case for many #DezNat devotees and those interested in these ideas.

In that case, the LDS church might get serious about combatting #DezNat and other white nationalist ideologies through church discipline, including excommunication (now called restricting membership).

Excommunication is reserved for very serious offenses, but has often been used to signal which ideas are so out of bounds that whoever advocates for them publicly must be excluded from the community.

Excommunication has lots of problems, but if the moral disaster of the unrepentant white supremacy of #DezNat is not treated as a severe moral failure, I fear for the church's efforts to live up to its ideals.