Chapter 5: Lockdown Part 2

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Duck, Cover, and Hold

“Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes” – 1 Nephi 4:13

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Unfortunately the story about Yarid isn’t an analogous parable at all; it’s actually a completely true story, and the only thing that makes it allegorical is that the following alternative translations have been substituted for certain LDS terms:

Allah = Heavenly Father
Mosque = LDS Chapel
Muslim = Mormon
Islam = Mormonism
Islamic Center = Seminary building
Infidel = Sinner
Iman = Bishop or seminary teacher
Qur’an = Book of Mormon
Training camp = Scout camp
Ahadith = Journal of Discourses
Sharia = Scriptures
Yarid Mu’alla Paadjit = Jared Michael Padgett
Shaikh = Elder = …me

Here is the actual story copied from the previous “analogy”, with the translated terms swapped out:

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Active Shooter

As it turned out, a radicalized [strict LDS] youth named Yarid Mu’alla-Paadjit [Jared Michael Padgett] had taken the lessons from his imam [bishop] too far and decided to take his self-righteous anger out on his classmates. He had enough ammunition to inflict a whole lot more damage; mere luck had prematurely ended Yarid’s [Jared’s] planned assault and thwarted his apparent goal of taking many more lives.

Investigators raided Yarid’s [Jared’s] home immediately after the shooting and confiscated his journal, which included some rather shocking revelations. Yarid [Jared] had written that he couldn’t stand to hear his public school classmates blaspheming the name of Allah [taking the name of God in vain]. On top of that, they ate pork [smoked cigarettes] and took other substances the Prophet [Joseph Smith] had declared to be harām – or unclean [against the Word of Wisdom].

Witnessing what in his eyes were reprehensible, capital crimes among his peers every day at school apparently made Yarid’s [Jared’s] own blood boil over, and some of his fellow students had begun to notice that he was getting more and more irritable. Just a week before the shooting, for example, he had caused quite a stir in his high school history class when he gave a speech about Hitler and implied that the Jews somehow deserved their fate in the extermination camps. I don’t know what would have led him down this line of thinking, but perhaps he saw it as some sort of divine retribution for the crimes against his own people [Christians] that were documented in his holy books [the New Testament].

Some of the guidance for his extreme beliefs seems to have come not just from the Qur’an [Book of Mormon] but from additional ahadith [the Journal of Discourses] and further proclamations that filled his governing sharia [scriptural library] with stories and statutes condoning the practice of shedding someone’s blood to pay for their sins. All the authorities could reveal was that at some point Yarid [Jared] took it upon himself to kill the “infidels” [“sinners”] in his own high school, as he described them in his journal. As long as it was done in Allah’s [God’s] name, he must have reasoned, he would be saving himself by bravely stepping in like a foot soldier in a justified jihad [the Camp of Israel]; from what I have read, his scriptures [the Book of Mormon] also mentions that killing a sinner carries the added benefit of saving that sinner from further sin, so he would actually be doing the “infidel” [“sinners”] a service. Convinced that these actions would be fully sanctioned by his maker, it seems like this win-win interpretation would have really struck a chord with Yarid [Jared].

Every morning before school the teenagers from his Islamic Center [ward] would go to the mosque [seminary building] and learn lessons straight out of the Qur’an [Book of Mormon] – and then go to their public schools and see everyone doing the complete opposite of the principles they had just learned. When school girls dressed immodestly and did things forbidden by fatwās [the youth pamphlets], for example, their behavior didn’t measure up to Allah’s [God’s] expectations of virginity [chastity] as taught by the imam [bishop]. At the same time, the shaikhs [seminary teachers] taught from [Old Testament] scriptures that included punishing promiscuity and other transgressions with a whole range of divinely decreed death penalties – some quite brutal, but fully approved and justified in Allah’s [God’s] eyes. To make matters worse, these same scriptures also taught of the eternal benefits and rewards promised to the executioner who commits his act in Allah’s [God’s] service.

Most Muslim [Mormon] students were equipped to cope with this dichotomy and were able to separate the ancient scriptural stories from what was being taught as the current will of Allah [God], but not so with Yarid [Jared]. He just couldn’t take the hypocrisy anymore, so he set into action his plan to kill the heathens and infidels [non-Mormons] in his school. Unfortunately for the community, his family had a readily available arsenal of military-grade weapons at their disposal. On top of that, he had attended training [Scout] camps where one of his shaikhs – an elder in his congregation [named Krey] – helped teach him to shoot with deadly accuracy.

So three days before graduation in 2014, Yarid [Jared] opened his family’s weapons cabinet, put an assault rifle into a guitar case, and loaded a duffel bag full of ammunition. He boarded the school bus and entered the school’s gymnasium, ready to submit to Allah’s [God’s] will and spread the message of hate and intolerance that he saw justified in his holy books.

As he was suiting up in the locker room, he was apparently surprised by a young soccer player named Emilio, who became the first casualty when Yarid [Jared] opened fire. Heroic staff members – including a teacher who had taken his own bullet wound in the crossfire – were able to warn others and put the school into lockdown. In the end, Yarid [Jared] found himself backed into a corner of the locker room from which he saw only one way out: the self-inflicted gunshot that ended his own life.

Over the next few hours, parents and students anxiously waited for news of their loved ones while the first responders swept the school to ensure that the danger was over. In a strange twist of irony, many of the students had been escorted into a safe room in the mosque [seminary building] across the street from the high school – which happened to be the very same room where students like Yarid [Jared] had learned lessons about justified decapitations [Nephi beheading Laban] and other punishments for sin from their shaikh [Sunday school teacher named Krey].

I was stunned that this chain of events had happened right there in my old community. But what affected me even more was that as the motivation behind this horrific crime came to light, the local Muslim [Mormon] community seemed more worried about how their faith was being viewed than preventing a similar crime from happening again. “Why does a criminal’s religion only get brought up when he’s Muslim [Mormon]?” members of his faith wrote in editorials, complaining that they always get singled out and persecuted in these cases, “You’d never see this sort of finger-pointing if he was Christan [Lutheran]!”

The responses were alarmingly defensive – accusing the press of discrimination and condemning them for having even mentioned Yarid’s [Jared’s] religion at all. They argued that this was an isolated mental health issue that had nothing whatsoever to do with indoctrination.

Now I certainly don’t have any answers regarding the balance of Yarid’s [Jared’s] motives, but I’m sure both mental health and indoctrination played a role. On the mental health side of things, I read later that Emilio’s mom, Jennifer, started a charity combating mental illness in Emilio’s honor. The Reynolds High School soccer team now plays in an Emilio Hoffman memorial tournament, likewise raising awareness for mental health. Memorial plaques in the school hallways hopefully serve as preventive reminders to check in on each other. But as far as the role that indoctrination may have played in this crime, I have no idea whether any similar initiatives have been undertaken. Did this tragic event cause any introspection in the local Muslim [Mormon] community, for example? Were there any apologies or changes to the way lessons are taught? I sincerely hope so, but given my displacement, I wouldn’t have any way of knowing the answer.

What I do know is that those who knew Yarid [Jared] as a nice young man found the news excruciatingly hard to accept. “That wasn’t him,” a family friend said to a reporter, “that wasn’t the Yarid [Jared] I knew!” I obviously don’t know what sort of regret or second thoughts went through Yarid’s [Jared’s] mind while he was isolated in a toilet stall, weighing out his options after his plan had been foiled. He may have been begging Allah [God] for forgiveness, willing to trade anything for the chance to start the day over, or maybe his mind had just plain failed him. Whatever the case, it is an utter tragedy on all fronts. But the prevention of a future incident can’t focus on that moment in the locker room or even on the moment the gun cabinets were opened; effective intervention would have been needed much earlier in the story, perhaps while deranged thoughts were being penned in his journal or perhaps while lessons with violent subject matter were being taught in the mosque [church]. I just hope something has changed in the meantime to prevent a repetition of that day.

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You may wish to Google “Reynolds High School shooting,” read the news reports, and tell me if you think I’ve missed the mark with anything I’ve written here. In the end the real story had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslims or mosques or anything remotely Islamic. If there were any religious motives behind the shooting, they would have come entirely from Mormonism – from a community that I was a part of during Jared’s formative years. And looking back on it, I have to admit my role in having been part of the organization and the community that somehow convinced Jared that his classmates were better off dead.

Maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up about that involvement; maybe I should just quietly let it go and secretly hope it was just a one-time anomaly. “It wasn’t my fault, after all,” I could argue, “I never could have known someone would twist the church teachings in that way!”

Well, maybe I could rationalize things along those lines. But even if I could deflect all of the blame for my role in this atrocity, if I did nothing about it and it happened again, could I at that point still deflect the blame?

I do believe that in the end we will find that this sort of deflection prevents the prevention of future tragedies, and I want to do everything I can to break that cycle.

Maybe the LDS Church as an institution has a responsibility to initiate some sort of change in response to this terrorist act; maybe they’ve already fulfilled that responsibility somehow in the meantime. I’m sure many tears have been shed for both of the affected families among Mormons and non-Mormons alike; after all, in this case it was two families who lost their sons and brothers. I do hope there has been forgiveness and healing in addition to some preventive changes. I wasn’t there, so I can’t answer for others; I can only answer for myself.

So how should I go about helping to stop something like this from happening again? I definitely don’t want to go around pointing fingers – unless I’m pointing a finger at myself to enact a personal change. And that’s a hard process to initiate; acknowledging my part in this tragedy is an extremely uncomfortable admission. Selfishly, I really wish Jared’s journal had said something different; because I don’t want my friends, family, or colleagues to know that I’ve been part of something that could inspire this sort of hatred and intolerance. I’d actually prefer to just sweep it under the carpet and cross my fingers that it doesn’t happen again somewhere..at least not in a case that hits closely enough to home to implicate me. But that self-serving reaction can’t be the answer; at least for myself, some difficult introspection is long overdue here.

And I guess that’s the whole point, echoing what Nathan proved with the ewe: how easy it is to condemn others, and how hard it is to point that finger back at yourself!

I don’t know if I have any valid responses to the interview questions that I listed above, but I do know that after that day in 2014, I became much more sensitive to the lessons my own kids were learning at church, and I have to admit that there were times I felt the need to step in and tone down inflammatory rhetoric that came from one of their teachers. When my kids hear opinions from those who believe in the exclusivity of their own faith, Jared’s actions make me shudder at the thought of them adopting this sort of “us versus them” mentality.

Knowing my complicit guilt in this story, I don’t EVER want a single word coming out of my mouth that promotes intolerance or gives any sort of indication that one group of people is somehow superior to another or any more or less deserving of divine love. I don’t care what scriptural or doctrinal rationale you throw in front of me, the first step I have taken from this devastating tragedy is to reject that notion entirely.

If you come away from this story claiming that you shouldn’t go around blaming an entire religion for the actions of a single extremist member, fine, I’ll respect that opinion. But then let’s stop blaming Islam for terrorism – or help me understand how this application is any different. If your initial reaction on reading the Muslim version of the story was along the lines of “someone should do something about that!” then why should it be any different when I find the finger pointing back at me? If any readers found it easier to point fingers at the fictional Muslims in this story than the Mormons, maybe it’s time to stop the finger-pointing altogether and work on healing and preventive solutions.

This lockdown really shook me to the core. This wasn’t just a random story that you read about in the newspaper, shake your head, and then turn the next page to the sports section. Those affected were our family friends in our old hometown, with the shooter himself having based his misguided intolerance on principles that I helped to disseminate. I want to take that back, and at this point the only way I know how is to put these thoughts into writing.

Perhaps my fellow teachers and youth leaders have adopted some changes and finished the healing process for themselves as it relates to this story; several years have already passed since that tragic day, after all. But as for me, I have just recently begun to recognize my role in promoting the lessons that Jared misunderstood – and that other impressionable young teenagers might misinterpret in the future. And if I could wrap my feelings of regret into a single goal for the future it would be this: if I happen to run into Jennifer Hoffman at some point along the remaining road of this life, I honestly just want to be able to look her in the eyes and let her know that in honor of her fun-loving son, I have made changes in my own attitude and in the messages I promote to help prevent another mother from facing a similar loss.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m at that point yet, because right up until today, I can’t claim to have taken any definitive action along those lines. But I’ll try to use this write-up as my first step along that path. This one’s for Emilio:

Emilio Hoffman, 1999 – 2014

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Aftermath

The Reynolds High School shooting barely made the national news, with the number of casualties quickly dwarfed by subsequent school shootings. Internationally, I don’t even think it got a single mention; without Facebook, in fact, I probably never would have even heard about it in Australia.

For a year or two after the shooting, I occasionally searched online articles for more information about the case. Being largely absent from the larger media outlets, the only coverage I could find was in local Oregon news sources that would occasionally post an update to the story.

Some of the ensuing developments in the case that I read about in the Portland-area press completely infuriated me, including the fate of the murder weapon and some of the political twists the case took. Now this write-up is about religion, not politics, but in this case, second amendment issues highlighted by the case help frame the overall context of the environment in which Jared was raised.

Within days of the crime, members of Jared’s ward and stake were expressing their support for gun rights and their opposition to gun control in social media, diverting attention from the real issues and spinning the arguments off in other directions that had nothing whatsoever to do with the motivation behind the crime itself.

Some of these reactions seemed incredibly insensitive and entirely inappropriate given the circumstances; disturbing as it was to see it turn into a political battle in editorials and social media posts, I was half a world away and eventually I let it slide to the back of my mind…that is, until the case hit the news again about a year after the incident: Without any objection from the members of his ward, Jared’s family had sued to get their weapons back, including the murder weapon that belonged to Jared’s brother, Liam. This was the very same weapon that was used to kill Emilio. The case went before a judge who was appalled at the notion:

“The thought of the weapons that…were used to commit that horrific crime going back into the community is objectionable,” he said, “in sort of a general moral outrage sense.”

The press coverage of the court case reported Liam’s unemotionally calloused insistence on getting his guns back, even after the judge challenged him with the fact that the weapon may still have blood on it. You would think it would be more appropriate – even if just as a symbolic gesture – that the gun be melted down rather than being taken out for recreational hunting or – God forbid – the commitment of a similar crime in the future.

Liam wanted it back anyway. And in the end, the judge said he was powerless to prevent that from happening. The murder weapon was handed back to Liam for him to use as he saw fit. There was a brief outcry in the press objecting to the decision. In response to the public backlash, a state senator tried to take action and mentioned the possibility of pressing charges against Liam and his family for having improperly secured firearms; the insinuation was met with death threats from supporters of the Padgett family. He immediately dropped the case.

Crazy? Go ahead and Google it – this really happened! I really know these people!

Well, if you were the judge who had to make the call concerning the fate of the murder weapon, how would you have ruled? If you held a press conference in which you could make a statement to the Brother of Jared to accompany your ruling, how would you inscribe your blank slate?

“Here you go, all yours!”

Or would you perhaps opt for something a bit more profound – some statement that would allow you to pass Jennifer Hoffman on the street without looking down at your feet in shame?

The right to re-bear these deadly arms wasn’t the only divisive political issue with relevance to the case. As the shooting drifted slowly into the past, I started seeing an increasing amount of anti-Muslim rhetoric, some of it originating from members of my own community back in the U.S. I actually have extended family members who would like to see all mosques shut down and Muslims deported and banned from re-entering the United States…while they themselves adhere to a supposedly Christian faith. Shameful as this sounds, it’s not like I’m disclosing anything here that they’re not proud to promote themselves. Check it out on Facebook. It’s a real thing! This year! Today! In my own hometown! Seriously?

Jared probably heard some of these same disturbing voices, and it scares me think that he was on track for a military career. Imagine him taking these messages too far as an American sniper, well versed in “America First” propaganda, with his finger on the trigger and his misguided eye looking straight down a high-power scope. His ROTC path could have led to a Middle East deployment where, armed with the deadliest precision assault rifles in Uncle Sam’s arsenal, he would have found himself literally fighting those who had declared a holy war on him. How many with his mindset get through the system without prior arrest, and finally get turned loose with full government authorization? We all wish he had made a different decision that morning in Troutdale. But let’s follow this one through if he had procrastinated the killing spree: there’s a good chance he would have found himself implementing his “us vs. them” mentality with the U.S. government’s full backing, becoming an instrument in their hands so to say.

One of the primary justifications stated in anti-Islamic social media posts is a fear that Muslims might have a greater inclination or disposition to commit acts of terrorism than your average Christian. When there is a tragedy linked to Islamic zealotry, a common reaction might be to push for a change in teaching methods to help convince adherents that lessons about jihad are figurative and spiritual and should not be taken literally – if not removed from the materials entirely. Well, when these demands come from Mormons, it seems a little introspection might be due.

The whole point of telling the alternate translation of Jared’s story above was to highlight the hypocrisy of viewing the real story of that shooting any differently than the Muslim analogy, force a bit of introspection for myself, and to expose the fallacy of extremism originating from any source. If the U.S. government ends up choosing to deport Muslims as the current regime is threatening to do, perhaps they should have a look at the Reynolds High School shooting and deport certain Mormons, too. If you disagree with that approach, then let’s all get together and do something to change the rhetoric across the board before the stereotyping even starts.

In reading the reactions in the press, I saw no introspection whatsoever, just Trumpesque name-calling and divisiveness and adherence to the same old tenets. As for me, I feel like I have been as much a part of the village that raised that boy as his bishop or anyone else in the local Mormon community. But the more editorials I read from some of those who are supposedly my brothers and sisters, the more I am inclined to conclude that “these are not my people!”

Perhaps it’s ironic that it was precisely because I felt that they were my people that I initially clung to a hope that the references to Mormonism in this case would simply go away. Again, I really didn’t want to admit to my non-Mormon friends that I was part of a system that could inspire such a heinous crime. One of the toughest questions I have to ask myself today is whether I wanted to brush this story aside because it would paint the LDS Church in an embarrassingly negative light; I’m afraid the answer to that question is a humiliating yes. Misguided as that reaction was, I have to admit that the thought of bad press and a negative perception – perhaps subconsciously – made me want to sweep this crime under the carpet.

When Jared’s membership in the LDS Church came to light – well before the revelations about his motivation – I wonder how many other Mormons like me thought to themselves, “Oh crap, he’s a Mormon!” (Or perhaps rather “Oh flip, it’s an LDS boy!”) hoping that his religion had, in fact, been unrelated to his mental illness and that the references would subside. I certainly wish the detectives who confiscated his journals had found something different as the investigation continued, but the contents made it clear that Jared’s religious views weren’t only relevant, they directly guided his actions on that dark day. Double flip!

Yes, it’s natural to try to dodge a finger that is pointed in our direction. Fellow ward members who were pressed for answers by interrogating reporters immediately blamed Jared’s issues on his parents’ divorce, for example, subtly highlighting the need to hold even faster to the tenets of the Family Proclamation. Some interviews essentially turned into a warning of what can happen when parents let go of the iron rod. But simply ignoring the obvious religious connections in this case cannot be the answer. When we duck and hide and fail to address the violent doctrines and practices that have motivated this and other similar crimes in the past, we undermine opportunities to effect positive change. Maybe I can’t be held responsible for my inadvertent complicity in the formation of Jared’s opinions about righteousness and punishment. But if a Mormon shooter emerged again, I most certainly can and should be held responsible for keeping my mouth shut and wishing it away instead of raising a stink and trying to help change how things are taught.

When a company official takes a bribe, the company may want to cover the story up rather than expose a culture of corruption. When a safety violation occurs on a construction site, no contractor wants to publicly reset their “days without injury” clock. When environmental standards are breached with no regulator in sight, a violator may be hesitant to report the infraction to the authorities. It’s a classic battle in these cases: you want to keep it quiet, but you need to make it public. I am an engineer, and I sometimes make mistakes in my work. Sometimes other engineers have made lesser mistakes that have resulted in fatal structural failures. I can understand an initial inclination to bury those mistakes in an attempt to preserve individual or company reputations, but I would fight cover-up tendencies for the industry as a whole in order to allow me and so many other practicing engineers to learn from those mistakes. If you cover them up, someone else is bound to repeat them!

But what if an institution’s reputation will be tarnished in the process, should we still blow the whistle? What if lives are being lost and the root cause of the tragedy would expose an institution’s root ties to the motivation behind a crime. Should the story be told? Hell yes, this is not about reputation, this is about prevention! Burying the real story results in a denial of the real cause-and-effect connections. In the long-term, an institution’s overall mission, if valid, will benefit more from disclosure and recognition of problematic elements than from denial.

In this case I have finally decided to confront the man in the mirror and ask myself the hardest of those interview questions, removing image as a factor at all. I’m not quite sure how I will respond to the self-interrogation, but I do promise to turn over every seer stone if that’s what it takes. Things that have been swept under the rug for fear of reputational damage may need a fresh look, come what may. If a hundred potential investigators slam their door on the missionaries after looking more deeply into the role that indoctrination played in this case, but one mother is saved from Jennifer’s pain, so be it!

My own grandfather’s grandfather sat in prison on a murder charge for a killing that was inspired by religious retribution. This does hit home, and a closer look at the context in these cases can be painful. Mormon scripture includes plenty of justifications for using weapons to protect your home or your homeland, but history has shown that self-defense can quickly give way to pre-emptive strikes that are likewise justified by claims of self-preservation. Vigilantes like the “Destroying Angel,” Porter Rockwell, are revered by Mormons and vindicated by an overarching, righteous mandate, even when they strike the first blow.

Have a look at Krakauer’s story of violent faith if the Padgett case appears to be isolated or unrelated to extremist acts in other sects. Krakauer rightly question how the implementation of Brigham Young’s death edicts makes Mormon extremists any different from those taking their orders from Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In the Lafferty Brothers’ case highlighted by Krakauer, practicing Latter-day Saints could claim, “that’s not us” and point their finger at the offshoot fundamentalists, who could rightly turn the accusation around and ask which church is the offshoot and which is the real thing. Based on what I know about early LDS history, I’d certainly say that question is up for debate!

Mormons are supposed to be proud of their Mormonism and are expected to pronounce their beliefs to the world. In my twenties and thirties, my religion became an integral part of my identity that I was happy to let shine, but back in high school, I really didn’t want anyone to know I was Mormon. I certainly wasn’t out trying to convert my friends, and I came up with all sorts of stories at school each morning to cover up the fact that I had just come from seminary. But one day I got caught while giving a friend a ride home after track practice. He got in the car, threw a Book of Mormon at me and said, “this thing can’t be true!” As it turned out he had seen the Book of Mormon that I kept under my seat for seminary, silently “borrowed” it, and had started reading it at home the day before. Just a few pages into the book, he had run across the murder of Laban at the hands of a supposedly righteous prophet of God. He was unable to reconcile the violation of hard-set rules inscribed into the stone tablets by that same God’s finger and concluded that Mormonism was thus a sham.

My friend was Catholic, but I was sure I knew more about his creed than he did, having spent most of my childhood in a Bavarian epicentre of Catholicism. In addition, I had just spent two years of seminary studying the biblical basis of his own catechism and at least knew enough accounts of widespread, Old Testament slaughters to counter any attack on Nephi’s slaying of a single soul.

“Go read your own Bible,” I told him, “God does it over and over again.”

I can’t remember if I quoted the verses verbatim or paraphrased them, but I certainly brought up the story behind God’s command as recorded in Deuteronomy: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them.”

If God could command one of these acts, why not the other? Looking back on it now, I’m ashamed that I used the genocide of every man, woman and child at the hands of Joshua’s army to justify Laban’s point-blank decapitation. Little did I know at the time, someday I would come to the conclusion that neither one had anything to do with God. [And I guess even more importantly, that neither one actually happened as biblical scholars have now largely agreed is the case with the utter destruction of Canaanite cities.]

My own grandfather wrote a book about the crimes of the Catholic Church, and I had no lack of knowledge about officially sanctioned incidents that in my eyes superceded Laban’s beheading many times over. I had visited medieval torture chambers staffed by the Pope’s executioners and read enough accounts of the crusades and the Inquisition to arm myself with plenty of ammunition for this sort of a debate. If he wanted to attack my own church, I felt confident I could strike back with whatever force needed to deflect attention away from my ties to religious violence. In the end, neither one of us was motivated enough about religion to take it any further. We called the matter a draw at the time, but when I entered the Missionary Training Center a few years later, I was still armed with the defensive mentality that sprung from these sorts of encounters.

Arriving at the MTC was a surreal experience. I was no longer a loner in my beliefs; all around me were like-minded cadets in God’s Army. Some of the large group meetings really got the whole battalion motivated and inspired. We called it the spirit, but I wondered if I could distinguish that spirit from just plain bravado in unison. Looking back on it now, while we were strutting along all pumped up after an apostle’s speech, I wonder what would have happened if some look-alike imposter posing as that apostle were to pull aside some of the fervent missionaries and tell them how special they are. What if he then escorted them to a special room in the temple and told them God had a sacred, secret calling for them? Then, after a big pep talk, what if he took aside each one individually and asked them to strap on a suicide vest in Danite fashion, perhaps targeting someone who posed a greater threat to the modern Kingdom than Laban of old?

How many would comply? Perhaps not all – and hopefully not many – but given the similar emotions inspired by political rallies and other crowd-sourced persuasions that have historically prompted so many counter-intuitive, unconscionable acts, I’m afraid the answer is not zero. We would all like to think that we are better than ISIS, and perhaps we could hope that the “spirit of discernment” would kick in; but sad experience (e.g., Mountain Meadows) has shown the discernment test to be horribly inadequate, particularly when coupled with a belief in eternal punishment for non-compliance and in eternal rewards for submissively following orders.

Demented as it sounds, the MTC drive-by kidnapping scenario could actually be tested, and you could arrive at the statistically relevant proportion of absolute adherence within the missionary population. Mormons would likely abhor the thought of undertaking an experiment like this. But why couldn’t it happen for real? Holy scripture proudly proclaims that God demanded such allegiance in the past; after all, the Christian world largely reveres those who obeyed similar orders without question, bringing the temple pillars a-tumblin’ down on themselves and their enemies alike.

So for those who believe that the God whispering edicts to Russell M. Nelson in his dreams today is the same being who commanded the wholesale slaughter of entire populations as punishment for past or future sins, how can we guarantee that a similar command won’t be issued tomorrow to test our devotion?

Some scriptural accounts of violence might be passed off as figurative references or perhaps attributed to ancient, outdated customs without modern pertinence. In most religions, adherents can blur the lines between allegories and factual events, preventing archaic edicts from being enforced today; but Mormon history is full of disturbingly literal and relatively recent directives issued by a perceived mouthpiece of God, leading to acts of vengeance that have been carried out in keeping with binding temple oaths.

Thankfully, the most vengeful rhetoric has been removed from the current Mormon hymns and temple rites, but the violent symbolism still remains to this day. Rather than commit the cardinal sin of quoting directly from the standing Mormon endowment ceremony, I’ll include an excerpt from a 19th century publication about Masonic rituals as one example:

I’ll leave it to the reader to draw any relevant similarities between Masonic and Mormon temple wording, but hopefully it isn’t overly disrespectful to divulge that the extended thumb is still used by temple-going Mormons every day. The thumb’s original symbolic representation as a knife blade is not revealed to today’s temple attendees, but historical documents allow the dots to be clearly connected. So what place would a knife have in modern worship? Perhaps the Mormon version hints at ancient sacrificial altars, symbolizing one’s devotion to deity, rather than the chilling Masonic description above?

Unfortunately not: In the original Mormon adaptation, the knife represented by the thumb is used to slit the throat from ear to ear, exposing the root of the tongue that is to be torn out of the body. The thumb is the sharp blade that is used to gut the guilty culprit and create an opening through which vital organs are torn out and fed to birds and beasts. It is the knife used to cut the body asunder, allowing the bowels to gush out in a fashion that reeks suspiciously like the fate of Judas, the original anti-Christ. We shudder at the thought of gruesome executions in the style of the Taliban, ISIS, or al Qaeda, but somehow these depictions of blood atonement have been rationalized inside the “House of the Lord.”

These morbid penalties are the stated, deserved fate for covenant-breakers like me. If any Mormons feel that my apostacy does not warrant such a grisly punishment, real or metaphorical, please stop extending your thumb in the temple! Given that the instruction to do so is voiced by someone claiming to be speaking for God, the refusal to comply may feel a bit seditious. But given the potential impacts of misguided practice, it may feel liberating, too. God’s ways seem to keep adapting to the less punitive societies we have created, after all, so maybe we can help speed things along and remove the last violent undertones that are still being mimicked. Perhaps they remain in current ceremonies for purely figurative purposes, but not everyone has the capacity to see things symbolically, especially those dealing with mental illness.

In the case of the Oregon shooting, Jared was too young to have ever heard this violent rhetoric in the temple himself; but he was certainly instructed by those who had. Perhaps the messages that he heard were watered down to some degree, but apparently not enough. I commend Jennifer Hoffman for promoting mental health awareness in honor of her son, especially if she believes Jared’s mental illness to be the cause of her loss. But this particular mental affliction was fed by ideas of self-righteousness that a “gentile” psychologist would have had trouble undoing. I don’t know if Jared was suffering from some sort of narcissism or other diagnosable condition, but his affliction included a need to impose one’s beliefs on others at all costs. How do you go about healing that sort of psyche? In my opinion, a prerequisite for that change – well before that tragic day – would need to have to come not just from professional mental health resources but from within the hierarchy of the LDS Church.

“Oh come on,” we might say, “it’s not the Church’s fault; he just misunderstood the message and took it to the extreme!”

But has the message changed to prevent a repeat? If not, what’s to prevent the next kid from taking it all wrong again? Has there been any sort of internal investigation with the findings passed along to CES teachers? Perhaps in the immediate wake of the shooting, a message of healing and comfort was most appropriate. But somewhere in the aftermath, the message should likewise include accountability, introspection, justice, restitution, and so on. All I’ve seen to date are indications that Mormons don’t want to wear any bit of the guilt associated with this crime, which leads me to believe that no lessons at all have been learned.

Instead of facing the facts about Jared’s motivation, the dialogue in the press and on social media quickly turned toward a discussion of the American school shooting epidemic. The responses made it clear that we were inclined to throw this shooting into the same categories as others before and dismiss it into the past as soon as the next, more fatal shooting occurred. But the Reynolds shooting is unique in its underlying motive. This wasn’t a reprisal for bullying or abuse. Perhaps the actions were fueled by mental illness, but there was a primary underlying motivation at work here: This was religious retribution.

The Reynolds shooting wasn’t classified as a mass shooting according to accepted definitions of the term, but given the firepower contained in Jared’s duffel bag that morning, it could easily have entered the record books. The random fluke of a confrontation that put an end to the attempted killing spree makes it possible for me today to completely bury the story and never discuss it again. Hardly a soul outside of Troutdale remembers it anymore, so why should I?

Well, for now I’m stuck with a story of my own violent faith. Only it’s not just a story. It’s my reality, set in my village; I helped cause this one. And now that I’ve had a hard look at my own upbringing, I’d like to set out to prevent a repeat. I’ll start by sharing Emilio’s story right here, right now, “lest we forget.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Reynolds High School shooting references:

“Emilio Hoffman’s Death – Sorry Is NOT Good Enough“, Jennifer Hoffman’s story, Huffington Post, June 8, 2015.

“‘Highly spiritual’ Oregon high school shooter Jared Padgett wrote plans to kill ‘sinners’ in diary“, NY Daily News June 14, 2014.

Emilio Inc.: Where Mental Health Matters, Jennifer’s charity website.

[ Next: Chapter 6: Yin and Yang]