Episode 19 // Repairing the World: How Faith and Politics Can Coexist

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In this special episode of the Proclaim Peace Podcast, Jennifer and Patrick share a recording of their recent presentation at the Faith Matters Restore gathering. They discuss the importance of applying principles of the gospel to foster peace in various aspects of life, from playgrounds to politics. The episode highlights the transformative power of active peacemaking and includes practical examples drawn from their experiences and their work. Join Jen and Patrick as they encourage listeners to embrace the call to be peacemakers in today's world.

Timestamps

[00:01:46] Our mission in the world.

[00:05:07] Power of small kindnesses.

[00:08:44] Cultivating inner peace.

[00:12:59] Community connections and relationships.

[00:15:28] Building communities of commitment.

[00:21:38] Christ-like approach to politics.

[00:23:35] Peacemaking principles in politics.

[00:30:06] Repairing the world together.

[00:31:42] Repairers of the breach.

Transcript

(00:03-00:06) Jennifer Thomas: Welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. I'm Jennifer Thomas.
(00:06-00:15) Patrick Mason: And I'm Patrick Mason. And this is the podcast where we apply principles of the gospel and read the Book of Mormon to become better peacemakers.

(00:15-01:18) Jennifer Thomas: I'm Jen Thomas, and today I'm flying solo as I introduce a special episode of our podcast. About a month ago, Patrick and I were invited by our friends at Faith Matters to speak at their Restore gathering. We were both thrilled to be given the opportunity to share more about what peacemaking looks like to each of us in practice. We've loved talking about peacemaking with our wonderful guests. They've been inspirational. Every single one of them walks the walk, and we hope that they have left you with practical examples of how you can tweak your own lives to make more space for peace. This is important because peacemaking is only transformational when we're actually willing to do it. The good news for all of us is there are many places where we can try. And in our remarks at Restore, Patrick and I were so grateful to have a chance to share our own ideas about how to act as peacemakers in spaces as diverse as playgrounds and politics. We wanted to share those thoughts with all of you, and luckily, we have a podcast where we could do that. We hope you enjoy hearing what we had to say. In two weeks, we'll be back with another inspirational guest, and hope you will join us then.

(01:25-17:01) Patrick Mason: How's it going, everybody? Good to see you. I can actually only see the front row, but it's good to imagine the rest of you out there. So I want to spend a few minutes, and then my co-host, Jen Thomas, is going to follow me. And we want to talk a little bit about what we are called to do in the world in this moment that we live in. But first, I want to give a little bit of an update. So those of you who were here last year might remember that I talked about these groups that we have in our home on Sunday nights and the students that we have over. We just started up again this semester. Here's the shoes from our front entryway. This makes me very happy to see this. But I've heard so many amazing stories. So many of you have come up to even today and come up and said, oh, because of that, like I'm bringing people into my home, I'm gathering people together. And I just am so happy about that. God wants us to gather together. God wants us to bring everybody into the fold. God wants us to create a place for one another. So thank you for each and every one of you who is doing that work of gathering. It's incredible. And then a couple of years ago, I talked about what we might do to bring the message of the restoration into the world. What is our calling in the world? And so today, what I want to talk about is sort of combining these two things. What is our mission in the world? And how do we build the kinds of communities that can allow us to do that? Now, on a sober note, earlier this summer, I spent a couple of weeks in Rwanda. I just talked with Tim and Aubrey about it and just wrote a little thing in Wayfair about my experiences there. And this was one of the, probably the most sobering, horrific thing that I've ever seen, to bear witness to the incredible suffering of the people who were victims in the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. And we went to various sites where this genocide had taken place. And I had studied this before. I had read about this before. But to be there, to bear witness, to be in the presence of such evil and such suffering and such pain, but also over the past 30 years, such redemption, such reconciliation, such resurrection, it gave me a lot of hope. You know, I've spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking about peace, thinking about peace building, how do we bring peace into the world. And I've thought a lot about like big concepts and big theories and peace treaties and peace processes and all these kinds of things at a very high level. And I teach these things and I enjoy thinking about these things. And while I was in Rwanda, it really came home to me that the people experience suffering, people experience pain, people experience violence, people experience conflict on a human level. on a personal level. And yes, all of those big macro solutions about world peace and so forth, those are all really important. But I was so struck at this place, at Ntarama, at this genocide memorial, this church, where in this, you can see it's not a very big little, it's not a very big church, it's a small little place. 5,000 people were killed in this place. And we took a tour with a survivor of the genocide. And we asked, you know, how he thought about it. What had happened here? How could we prevent it? How could we prevent similar things like this from happening in the future? And I expected some big, grand answer. And this is what Antoine said, never underestimate the power of small kindnesses. In the face of enormous, unspeakable suffering, his answer was never underestimate the power of small kindnesses. And that sunk deep in my heart, I believe that. I believe that in the world that we face today, the conflict that we face in our communities, in our wards, in our homes, in our workplaces, the way we start to build peace is with small kindnesses. So I wanna talk today and then Jen will follow up with how do we begin to do this? Because Jesus called us to this work. Every single one of us who believes in and loves and follows Jesus has been called to the work of peace. And remember what he said in the sermon, both in the Sermon on the Mount and in the sermon to the Nephites. He told us twice so that we would remember it. Blessed are the peacemakers. Not just blessed are the people who love peace or the people who wish for peace or the people who hope for peace. Those are all good things. But Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers of all of the Beatitudes. Think about it. They all talk about the condition of our heart. They talk about the character that we should cultivate as Christians. This is the one that calls us to action. This is the one that calls us to do something in the world, to be peacemakers. Now, I've become increasingly convinced that to be a peacemaker, we have to become people of peace. I was on a listserv this past year of graduates of my master's program in peace studies. And these are amazing people, hundreds of people who have graduated, done graduate work in peace studies. They're all over the world doing incredible things. On October 7th of this last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, this listserv made up of peace builders, people who were trained, who had spent years training and working for peace, This listserv just exploded in hate and vitriol and personal attacks. And I realized that in all of our training and all the things that we'd learned about peace, all the things that we'd learned about how to do it at this big level and so forth, maybe we hadn't done enough to become people of peace. And so that, I think, is our first challenge. President Joseph F. Smith said that peace comes only by preparing for peace. We have to prepare our hearts. It doesn't just happen. It's not just an accident. We have to prepare this. We have to cultivate it. We have to build it inside of our hearts. Similarly, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about if we are not ourselves peaceful, we cannot share peace with others. It has to begin with us. We have to do the inner work to do this. I love the prayer of St. Francis. A little secret, this actually isn't St. Francis. He didn't say this. This is like from the early 20th century. But it sounds like the kind of thing he might have said several hundred years ago. So we call it the prayer of St. Francis. But I have prayed this prayer on many occasions when I was going into a situation that I knew that there would be conflict, where I knew that there might be hearts at war. I've prayed this in my home, I've prayed this in my workplace, I've prayed this in my ward. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. So we begin, we prepare for peace, we cultivate ourselves to become people of peace by beginning with this prayer. We ask God to make us people of peace. We ask and we trust that the Holy Spirit will work upon us, will work upon our hearts to instill in us a spirit of peace. And then we go out and start practicing it. I love this. I've never read a better quote on what this looks like on a day-to-day basis. The simple ways, you know, a lot of us say like, I don't know how to make world peace. I don't know what to do about Israel and Gaza. I don't know what to do about Ukraine. I don't know what to do about, you know, Democrats and Republicans. I mean, it just seems too big. It seems so hopeless. It seems so paralyzing. Well, President Hunter tells us where to start. We start by becoming people of peace, by mending a quarrel, by seeking out a friend, by forgiving, by encouraging, by forgoing a grudge, by thinking of other people, by being kind. Never underestimate the power of small kindnesses. By being gentle, by welcoming a stranger, by gladdening people's heart. Speak your love and then speak it again. This is what it means to begin to cultivate a heart of peace. This is what it means to begin to become a person of peace. And according to Antoine, maybe this can forestall some terrible, terrible things in our lives if we were to follow this kind of advice. Okay, so once we begin to cultivate this in ourselves, once we begin to do this kind of inner work, to foster a kind of inner peace, we're still called to go out and make it. Jesus, again, it's not just blessed are the peaceful in the heart, but blessed are the peacemakers. So we begin from this place of creating inner peace, of cultivating inner peace, and there are so many ways to do this, but then we go out into the world to make peace. So in order to talk about that, I want you each to channel your own inner Spider-Man. All right, and you can choose which one, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Spider-Pig, whatever you want to be, okay? I resonate with Peter Porker, but that's just a body shape thing. Okay, so you choose whatever kind of spider you want to be, okay? And we're going to talk about spiders for a minute. So we're gonna talk about the garden orb weaver spider. Now, I can't say that I'm a lover of spider. If I saw this thing in my house, I would kill it and flush it down the toilet. Okay, so I'm not a, I'm not an entomologist. I'm not Steve Peck. I'm not, you know, so, but these are amazing creatures that God has created. I wanna talk about what they do to create beautiful things like this. How do they do this? Okay, well, first, they create a kind of anchor line, a bridge line that's gonna be the baseline for what they do. And then they look around their environment and they say, what can I anchor this to? So I've got this one baseline, but how am I going to anchor this to other points? And so they do that. Then they begin to create a radius. They begin to connect it to the, they create a central hub and then connect to these anchor points. They begin to build a spiral, a structure, a set of relationships between those anchor points that they've created from the center outward. Now this isn't sticky yet. This is just a framework. This is just the set of relationships between these anchor points that they've created. Then they begin to do the sticky stuff. Once they have that framework, once they have that set of relationships, then they start to get sticky so that they can draw people in. So it begins to look like a web. They pull those radii taught to make sure that those relationships are solid, to keep them solid, to keep that structure, and then they end up with something like this. Okay, it's both beautiful, but it's functional, and it's sticky. And this is my invitation to you, to think about yourself in your context, whatever that looks like, okay? And again, you may say like, I don't have any answers to what's happening in Gaza. That's okay, right? Can you do something where you have been called to your community, to your context? God planted you in a place and asks you to make a difference. Jesus doesn't ask you to save the whole world. He's done that. but he's asking you to be a savior on Mount Zion with what's right in front of you. So what is your baseline? What is the thing that's most important to you? Where is your center? What is the thing that you're gonna build upon? What are your core values? What are your anchor points? What are the places in your community that you have connection? And every single one of you is gonna be different. Think about this. Think about in your workplace, your professional relationships. Think about in your church. Think about in your neighborhood. Think about in your family, in your friend groups, maybe in the civic sphere. But where are your anchor points? Where are your points where you possibly have connections? Who is in your orbit? Who is God placed there? And then begin to build that framework. Begin to build a set of relationships. And then get sticky. based on that set of relationships. So think about this. I really want you to think about who in my life. And it's all about the who. It's not just about the what. It's about the who. Who do you have relationships with? Who do you know who has other kinds of relationships? Who do you know who is in a place where they can make a difference? How do you begin to build a web and then get sticky? So that's my invitation to you. That's what it looks like to begin to be a peacemaker, to be anchored, to do it out of your core set of values, right? We heard this from Eboo a little bit yesterday. We've heard that throughout this conference, to begin from this inner sense of strength and commitment. For most of us in this room, it's gonna be our relationship to and faith in Jesus Christ and in his gospel. Then spin your web. Build that set of relationships. Build a set of networks, whatever that looks like. It's going to look different for each one of you. I would love if a year from now I'm getting stories about what it looks like, what those webs look like for each one of you. And then be sticky. We need to build communities not just of convenience, but of commitment. Commitment to one another. Because we're entering in, we are in a time of conflict. We don't know what things are gonna look like in the coming days, in the coming months, in the coming years, but we know that conflict is a given. So get sticky. Stick to the people around you. Stick to them with love. Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, but I want you to pay attention to that second part of it. For they will be called the children of God. You and I are all children of God. You and I are all daughters and sons of heavenly parents. But when we go out and bring the peace and the love of God into the world, other people will look around and say, those people are doing the work of Jesus. And so to paraphrase my friend Tom Griffith, wouldn't it be amazing in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years, when those of us in this room and those of us in this church go about being peacemakers in the world, when people say, oh yeah, that woman in my neighborhood, I think she's a Mormon or whatever they call themselves these days, right? Okay, she is an amazing peacemaker. And she has something like she doesn't drink coffee or something like that. Wouldn't it be amazing If the thing that people know about us is that we are peacemakers, then we will be called the children of God. Good luck to you in your peacemaking.

(17:01-32:50) Jennifer Thomas: Hello, I'm Jen, and this is possibly the scariest thing I've ever done. I'm not entirely sure why, because as part of my work, I regularly speak to large groups of people. Sometimes political organizations, sometimes professional organizations, sometimes the press. But in each of those situations, I'm usually hoping with all of my heart that my message gets across. This is a little bit different, and it feels a little more high stakes to me. And I think that's why I'm so nervous. Because in this situation, I feel deeply that I need for my message to get across. And that is because I believe that the people in this room have the power to change the world. And they have the power to change the world in ways that other people do not. I am the Executive Director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government. EMWG is dedicated to two things. First, promoting ethical governance, and second, helping women become powerful, peaceful, and independent political actors. I know that you might be nervous about hearing us talk about politics today, but I'm here to tell you you're not allowed to complain. You've spent the last two days listening to two of the things that people are not allowed to talk about in polite society, sex and religion, and so you're just gonna have to bear with me while we lean into the third and go for the trifecta. Let's start with the state of affairs today. This is taken from a Pew study earlier this year, and it basically tells us everything we need to know about politics in America. But you don't need me to tell you this because most of you feel this deeply. We're a divided nation. We are at war with one another. We've isolated into tribes. And Pew tells us that even these people here that say they are leaning are in fact usually identifying most with the registered members of the party, and that's who they really are. And there's a tiny sliver of people there in the middle who are, we don't know, indifferent, disengaged, it's not entirely clear. But we do know that this isn't working. It's been productive of significant contention and dysfunction in our society. Not only is our government not working for us, but it's ripping apart our families and our churches and even our most precious relationships. Here's another slide. It looks almost exactly like the first. This was taken as we measured MWAG membership records against voter records across the United States. And we found out that our organization was almost completely and evenly divided. Unlike Pew, because I wasn't talking to these people, I don't know what that independent slide means, but my guess is that it's probably pretty similar to the one here on the right, which is these are people who sort of lean one way or the other, but for various reasons are not affiliated with the party. Here's the thing that I'm here to tell you today. This is actually the only place in America where this is working. This slide here on your left is not dysfunctional. It's highly effective. It's not contentious. There's conflict, most certainly, but it is conflict that is resolved through peace. It's a place where people are growing They are developing, they're spiritually maturing, and most importantly, they're enjoying a deep and profound sisterhood that binds them together and binds them to God. Something's different. What is it? There's some little magical thing that's happening here. And I want to share a little bit about that with you today. One of the things that's happening to us recently is we have had many people ask us why we do what we do. And it's just this simple. Years ago, when we embarked on this journey as women of faith, we realized that there was no way we were going to be able to compete on the field of politics as it was currently constituted. We didn't have the power. We didn't have the money. We didn't have the influence. We knew what we had to do was find a better way. First, our founders introduced an amazing set of principles for us, which were the principles of peacemaking. We had that to start with, but we knew we needed a playbook. So today I'm going to share with you our super secret special playbook to how MWEG does politics. There it is. It's all right here, open for our enemies to see. We have decided to do politics the way Christ would have us do them. It's hard. Right after he was tempted, Christ delivered a transformational sermon. Sometimes we forget just how transformational it was, but it actually changed the way the entire Western world thought. It helped us to see people as true individuals and called us to work towards helping them in ways that were contrary to our interests. This sermon was transformational in the sense that it invited us to come into a new kind of community and work together in ways that demonstrated to those around us that we were disciples of Christ. Here are the things that are listed in that sermon. This is our playbook. If you're reading this and thinking, this is a list of weaknesses, this is a list that can't possibly work in politics, I'm here to tell you, with all of the force that I can muster, that you are wrong. I'm here to tell you, with the witness of thousands of women at my back, that this works. This is not weakness, this is strength. This is the way to do politics in a way that is not only transformative to the world, but transformative for the women who are doing that work. So why is MWEG working when nothing else is? We've had a lot of people reach out to us and ask to study us, believe it or not. We've had people ask if they could do an analysis of us and do a recreation of us for other faith groups of women in the United States. We've had people reach out and ask if they could do an analysis and recreate and we could be mentors for women in other countries. There's a lot of really remarkable and innovative work going on at MWAG, but my heart tells me clearly that there is something very unique and not transferable that is happening among us. And that is we're deriving our power from a covenant discipleship that is committed to two things, and I want to share those with you today. The first is an absolute commitment to peacemaking. And there are three principles I wanted to share with you today of peacemaking. The first is that peacemaking has to be principled. We have to know that the people we're working with have a sense of right and wrong. that they are trustworthy. And I'm here to tell you that peace is possible among ideologically very diverse people if among them there is a deep, deep sense of trust that comes from knowing that the people that you're working with are principled. The second thing that I want to tell you is that peace is persuasive. Peacemakers are deeply and profoundly committed to the form of governance that allows us to deal persuasively with one another. They are deeply and profoundly committed to agency. They know that they cannot coerce other people, but they must always persuade. we know that there is such a profound and rich doctrinal depth that we can draw on in our own faith in terms of this. So I'm here to tell you that peace is possible amongst very diverse people when the majority absolutely refuse, no matter what they could gain by it, to use power to control, coerce, and to rule over others. But instead, they are always willing to work through persuasion. The third element of profound peacemaking in politics is that politics must absolutely never be cruel. It needs to be protective. Over the years, as I've been working with MWAG, I've had to learn what to pray for. As we've worked towards things like the child tax credit, I have wanted to pray to my heavenly parents and ask them to help me pass specifically the child tax credit. But I have learned that if I want to do politics the way the Savior has asked me to, I need to pray not with the objective, but the people in mind. I need to be asking the Lord how I can work to feed children, how I can work to feed the hungry. And when I place the people at the center, and at the center of my work is the desire to protect them and nurture them, we are finding that that is one of the most powerful ways that we can engage with people around us. Those that we're working with and collaborating with on both sides of the aisle recognize immediately when people are doing their work from a place of protection and service rather than from a place of power and subservience. And they desire, even from both sides of the aisle, to work with people who are doing it. Okay, the second thing that I want to share with you is simply that, in addition to being peacemakers, the thing that we have to offer the world as we do politics our way is by sharing with the world the power of redemption. I can't express to you how much that is not available to most people in the world right now. They don't know or believe that redemption is possible. And because of this, they are despairing. There are different versions of despair, and I get all of them. There's the kind of despair that says everybody's bad. I have to distance myself from them and tend to my own garden. There's the version of despair that says I want to do something good, but I have no power to do it. I'm not even going to try. I'm going to wash my hands of it. And then there's the version of despair that is perhaps the most incorrect, and that is the version that says Jesus will fix this when he comes. It's not my problem. This is a false sense of belief in the Savior. I get it. I understand it. Every day I have to wake up and face the difficulties of dealing with politics and the hard things that we have to face that can fill us to despair. But one thing that I always have to check myself and remind myself is that most of the people who I hear say I'm not willing to do this, I'm not willing to engage, it's not worth my time, are almost always coming from a place of comfort. They're never hungry, they don't necessarily feel threatened, and they almost always have the luxury of saying, I'm just going to step back and take care of what's mine. So, they despair. But here's what I'm here to tell you. My response to that despair is twofold, and it mostly stems from the belief, or stems from a saying of the wise, stoic scholar, Marilla Cuthbert, to despair is to turn your back on God. The first thing I do when I want to share redemption and the power of redemption with the people that I'm working with in the field of politics is to remember my own stories of redemption and draw on that personal witness as a driving force for good. It doesn't mean that I share the specific stories, but I have ways and times when the redemptive power of Christ has utterly and completely transformed my life. And I have to be willing to draw on that in difficult moments to witness to others that that is possible. That power of witnessing puts gas in the tank. It's a salve on the wound. It is a way that we can heal a broken world. The second thing that we can do as we harness the power of redemption is to actually work from that place. If you remember the slide I showed at the very beginning, it's a slide of division with a little tiny sliver in the middle. I don't know if any of you have ever heard of the 3.5% rule, but it's a rule in peacemaking that is proven to be true, that societies can be utterly transformed if only 3.5% of the population is willing to commit to peacemaking and nonviolence. That's within our reach. We are so close to being that percentage in this population. And in a heavily divided society where people are at war with one another, if we are not at war with either side, but if we operate from a space of wanting to offer redemption and offer peace, we will always be in the position to tip our society for good. Okay, the last thing I want to share with you today is this phrase. This is a phrase that I was not familiar with until I started doing interfaith work. But it's a rabbinic phrase that is pretty much the motivating force behind most Jewish engagement in trying to deal with social issues or reparative justice. It means this, repairing the world. But for my friends of my Jewish faith, this means they're going to, the repairing of the world, it's a world of men and the repairing of the world is up to all of us. It's our job to do that work. I want to offer you from M. Wegg's perspective, a bit of a disciple's twist on this. It's to remind you that when we go out to repair the world, when we assume our role in a deeply, deeply troubled world, we don't have to do this alone. we repair alongside the great repairer of the universe. In narrow and contested spaces, we have the opportunity to draw on his strength and his direction to tip things in the favor of those who are principled, respect agency, work persuasively, and always protect the weak and the suffering. We have the opportunity to testify of redemption and to give people hope. And then we can actualize redemption through our own hard work and sacrifice. I want to testify to you that I do my work alongside a Savior who has gained His power and authority through repair. His power and authority flows from an eternal sacrifice that He made to heal the world. And His willingness to sacrifice is what ultimately has made His work so persuasive to all of us here in this room. Each of us has the opportunity in this life to decide whether we are going to work alongside him in this work, whether we are going to be repairers of the breach. I just want to share with you today that I know that it is possible. We are needed. Not only are we desperately needed in the world, but we are wanted. There are people calling out for our involvement, calling out for our participation, eager to hear what we have to share as disciples of Christ. But we have to be willing to take the courageous step into the breach and become the repairers. I'm so grateful for this calling, and I am so, so grateful for the women of MWAG who have courageously decided that they are going to do things differently in the world, that they are going to be peacemakers above all else, that they are going to transform the world Not because they want to rule in Christ's name, but because they want to repair in Christ's name. And I invite you to join us in this work because I can completely confirm what President Nelson has said to us. Peacemakers are needed. Thank you.

(32:58-33:17) Patrick Mason: Thanks everybody for listening today. We really appreciate it. We just want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast and also to rate and review it. We love hearing feedback from listeners, so please email us at podcast at mweg.org. We also want to invite you to think about ways that you can make peace in your life this week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

(33:22-33:38) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you for listening to Proclaim Peace, a proud member of the Faith Matters Podcast Network. Faith Matters holds expansive conversations about the restored gospel to accompany individuals on their journey of faith. You can learn more about Faith Matters and check out our other shows at faithmatters.org.