For many Latter-day Saints living in and around Minneapolis, this past Sunday’s services arrived with a feeling of urgency — a sense that congregants needed one another and messages on peacemaking and healing more than ever.
The day before, masked federal agents had shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti. Meanwhile, word spread that fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were among those swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
People wept openly in the pews and at the pulpit, members report. Elders quorum meetings for men included debates on the difference between resistance and revolution. Women’s Relief Society presidents collected names of members in their congregations interested in bringing meals to those too afraid to leave their homes on account of ICE.
“A good part of both our sacrament meeting and then our priesthood meeting,” Minneapolis resident John Gustav-Wrathall said, “was about just addressing the fact that people are very scared right now.”
Quiet on the Wasatch Front
For Gustav-Wrathall and fellow Latter-day Saint worshippers, the dread comes partly from the sense that the cavalry is not coming, that the world is sitting back — waiting to see how the conflict plays out.
“It’s the classic bully scenario,” he said, “where the person being bullied feels very alone and isolated because nobody’s intervening, nobody’s stepping in to stop it.”
(John Gustav-Wrathall) Minneapolis resident John Gustav-Wrathall laments that Latter-day Saint leaders have not spoken out more directly about what is happening in the city.
That includes, as he sees it, church officials.
“The individual,” he said, “who gave me a ride home from church this past Sunday was sort of scratching his head and saying, ‘Why hasn’t the leadership in Salt Lake said something about this?”
Top leaders at church headquarters have not spoken out directly on the clashes in Minnesota.
Dave Sandberg, who lives and attends church in a suburb just west of the city, noted that Latter-day Saint higher-ups haven’t been totally silent.
Last week, area Seventy Corbin Coombs, a regional church leader, issued a call for members in the region to join an interfaith fast Friday.
Specifically, Coombs called on Latter-day Saints to fast, as he wrote in an email to local lay leaders, for “peace, unity and change, as well as an expression of solidarity with Minnesotans and those individuals and families in our own congregations that are experiencing fear, uncertainty and heartache during this time.”
Still, Sandberg, who several times grew too emotional to speak throughout the interview, said he wished for a greater emphasis on the need for action.
“My hope would be that they would say, ‘Go and do good things,’” he said. “Learn how to be an effective servant of your community.”
‘She was afraid to come out of her bedroom’
(Cindy and Dave Sandberg) Latter-day Saints Dave and Cindy Sandberg, shown outside the White House, live just west of Minneapolis. They have been helping members afraid to leave their homes.
Sandberg and his wife, Cindy, said the longer ICE’s aggressive campaign has gone on, the more church members they’ve seen take the initiative to serve those most impacted — sometimes through existing church networks, other times through outside groups.
Just the other day, Cindy received a call from her Relief Society president. The local leader wanted to know: Could Cindy bring groceries to a woman in another ward, or congregation, whose husband was detained?
Cindy did, and found herself, she said, in a “hovel of a basement apartment,” where the woman was holed up with her four children, including a newborn.
“She was afraid to come out of her bedroom while we were there,” Cindy said, her voice cracking, “because she didn’t trust anyone.”
Even those with citizenship, she said, have begun looking over their shoulders, second-guessing what they say and whom they say it to.
“I feel like,” she said, “we’re living in a dystopian novel right now.”
Bill Parsons, a former police officer and member of the National Guard, described his suburban Latter-day Saint ward on the city’s east side as fastidiously apolitical and split in its support for ICE. That hadn’t stopped members, the 57-year-old said, from collecting meals and supplies for those trapped in their homes.
“The whole point of the gospel,” Parsons said, “is we’re going to stand up and say, ‘Let’s help the downtrodden.’”
(Bill Parsons) Latter-day Saint Bill Parsons, a former police officer and member of the National Guard who lives on Minneapolis' east side, says his faith teaches him to "help the downtrodden."
All the same, LaVell Gold, a member of the same immigrant-heavy ward as Gustav-Wrathall, can’t help but compare the lack of institutional response to what the church is known for in the wake of natural disasters.
“If there was a huge flood or fire or tornado that was going on in Minneapolis right now,” the 76-year-old Gold said, “the church would be…bringing diapers and toilet paper and food. I firmly believe that. So why isn’t that happening now?”
(LaVell Gold) Minneapolis Latter-day Saint LaVell Gold wonders why the church isn't responding with more help in her city.
Holding fast to faith in a conflict zone
Gustav-Wrathall, who lives a short distance from the street where an ICE officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good earlier this month, is part of a group from his ward that regularly volunteers at a homeless shelter near the place where Pretti was shot.
The group was scheduled to go there the day he died.
“There were police and National Guard blocking off the streets, and we literally couldn’t get to the shelter,” Gustav-Wrathall said. “We’re pulling up, and then the sister that is driving says, ‘You stay in the car because they’re less threatened by women.’”
He said the woman was able to persuade law enforcement to let them pass but that the whole experience was “ominous and surreal.”
Amid the chaos, Gustav-Wrathall has clung to counsel he said his bishop delivered recently over the pulpit.
“And that is,” he said, “that we need to take our focus off the turmoil in the world around us and put it on the Savior.”
That does not mean shutting out the world, Gustav-Wrathall stressed. If anything, in fact, he said the message has led him to take greater action.
“Immediately,” he said, “my focus shifted from ‘everything’s going to hell and none of us are safe anymore,’ to ‘what does the Lord want me to do in this situation to make things better?’”
Tolu Salima is a 55-year-old California native who attends the same ward as Gustav-Wrathall and Gold. He’s also a physical therapist who works in the same Veterans Affairs hospital that employed Pretti (“I didn’t know him,” the Samoan American said, “but colleagues told me he was a sweetheart”).
Salima, who said he opposes ICE’s tactics but not necessarily its mission, was working the day Pretti died.
“I definitely felt waves of emotion going where I would feel sad and start crying about it, and then I would pick myself up,” he said. “This morning, I didn’t want to go to work. I just wanted to stay home.”
Salima went anyway, a prayer for peace in his heart and his employee badge in his hand.
“I put my faith and trust in the Lord,” he said, “that everything will be OK.”
This is a developing story.