No Poor Among Us: Beyond the Block
An interview with Derek Knox and James Jones, the creators of the Beyond the Block podcast.
No Poor Among Us
A new series by The Utah Monthly in which we interview and amplify marginalized voices within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The purpose of this series is to create a space for various perspectives that are not often considered “mainstream Mormon.” In order to amplify these voices, the format will be more or less a transcript so the reader can get a feel for the interviewees’ passions and perspectives.
Today I am sharing an interview with Derek and James, the creators of the Beyond the Block podcast.
James is a Black cis man born and raised in the Church. His family moved frequently while he was growing up. He first remembers becoming acquainted with inequality in the Church when he was preparing to receive the Aaronic priesthood and learned about the priesthood and temple restrictions on Church members of African descent. After serving a mission, moving to Utah, and attending BYU, James became grounded in his understanding of what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint.
Derek is a gay, white cis man. He was born and raised in a Christian home in the south and later moved to Boston to pursue a master’s degree in theology. Derek was exposed to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through childhood friendships and personal research. He ultimately joined the Church in 2015, just weeks after the November 2015 policy announcement regarding children of same-sex couples.
James and Derek met spring of 2017, where they were both singing bass in a local Church choral performance. After continuing to see each other at Institute and other activities, they became close friends.
Where did the name Beyond the Block come from?
J: This was either shortly before or shortly after we got rid of the third-hour block of Church. The idea was to communicate that these were conversations we'd want to have beyond that. These are conversations, or these are discussions that take us past our conventions, past our comfort zone beyond where we're inclined to explore because that's where all growth happens.
What made you decide to start this podcast?
J: I got the idea to do the podcast after attending the second annual Black LDS Legacy Conference. One of the event organizers said, "It would be great if we could somehow, throughout the year, create an unregulated space, like what we create here.” Since my friendship with Derek is basically a lot of talking about this kind of stuff anyway, the most efficient option to create that space was a podcast.
D: One of my main projects is to help people who choose to stay in the Church be more resilient, in addition to the larger goal of ending the injustices in the Church.
Our Church has wrestled with a number of issues, but we haven't really wrestled with LGBT things in a real way. Traditionally, if you were LGBT in the Church, you had few options. You just left the Church and lived an authentic LGBT life completely outside of the Church, or you stayed in the Church, were closeted and suppressed, or lived as the gender you were assigned at birth, or you married someone of a different gender and “blended in.”
About ten years ago, people started coming out and staying in the Church, which means now there's a bunch of questions that have never been asked before. We don't have a substantive precedent for LGBT exclusion. Many of my people are pioneers. It's interesting being a pioneer because if you're in the front row of the rollercoaster, you get hit with the water first. It might be the most exciting part of the roller coaster, but you pave the way for all the people on the roller coaster behind you. I like riding in the front row of the roller coaster of the Church, but some people can't handle it (through no fault of their own). That leads to a lot of pain and tragedy, and division and families and lowered quality of life, and many things like that. With this podcast, we are in the front row.
What is your vision or goal of this podcast?
J: I want people on the margins of society and our faith to feel as validated as I do at the Black LDS Legacy Conference. Our podcast is part of a ripple effect to embolden people to stand up in their truth and become a community of empowered believers. That's what I want to see: a community on the margins with its allies. It's not just valuable to the Church's worship and ministry experience; it's an essential component. I don't believe the Church will be what it needs to be without people like us. I'm hoping our work can expand this community to create more of a Church in line with the Christ we read about in the New Testament. A Christ that favors radical compassion over stringent legalism.
D: A lot of it is making the scholarship of the scriptures accessible to people. This helps anyone have a resource for going through the Come, Follow Me scripture reading in a way that is aligned with love, justice, peace, and inclusion. Another purpose is to empower (especially LGBT) folks to be more self-sufficient and have a stronger foundation for their own dignity and a more direct connection to God and the scriptures. My goal isn't to get all the leaders in Salt Lake to listen to the podcast and make changes in the Church. I want the changes to happen, but right now, I want to be a queer person talking to queer people because so much of it is straight people talking to straight people. I want to directly give them a model of one possible way of navigating these things— actually changing the quality of life for queer people.
How do you become comfortable knowing your opinions will face criticism and people within your own Church will disagree with you?
J: I stand to lose a lot more than I would gain by not speaking from a Mormon theological perspective that people like Derek and I, like anybody on the margins, share. I found very quickly after we started this show that even if part of the LDS community rejects me, there's another part that's very ready to embrace me.
D: I haven't really encountered a lot of criticism. I think people know that we know what we're talking about. At least some part of the Church knows that gay people have a tough time, and they're not going to make it harder. I've had straight people empathically say, “If I were gay, I would just leave the Church. I wouldn't be able to do what you do.” Which is not the ideal thing to say.
What do you think would be the ideal thing to say?
D: Rather than saying, “Oh, you're making this journey that I couldn't make,” say, “Let me use my privilege to help you. If there's anything you need, let me know, and I will help make the journey better for you.”
Are things getting better?
D: Yes, but not fast enough. My response to some of that is, you've got to find your dignity on your own terms in the meantime and not outsource your dignity to straight or cis people who have no idea what to do and have no authority to tell you what to do. They don't bear the cost of your decisions; you do. You should be the one to take responsibility for them.
As a convert, I think the journey is easier for me because I had the upfront decision, “Can I do this or not?” and I calculated, “I can do it.” A lot of LGBT people who were raised in the Church never got that choice. Charlie Byrd has said, “People either hate the Church and love themselves, or they hate themselves and love the Church.” It's very hard for them to do both, which I feel is what I'm doing. I'm thriving. I think I'm doing way better than a lot of straight people in the Church. Many straight people are suffering in their callings, their marriages, wrestling with faith crisis issues, or are wrestling with not fitting in.
I have a theory that it's better to fit in 50% of the way than to fit in 95% of the way. Here I am, doing whatever I'm authentically doing because I know that I'll never match everyone else. So I'm not going to try. But I think someone like a white, middle-class straight Mormon in Utah tries to fit in. That's actually a blessing that the queer community can teach everyone; no one fits in. But for a lot of people, if you fit in 95% of the way into this white Utah culture, you're going to exhaust yourself trying to catch up with that other 5% and, though I haven't experienced this directly, I've heard about this “catch up” in terms of how you look, how much money you make, what calling you have, what job you have, etc. So I'm free.
J: Just in October, a General Authority finally affirmed Black Lives Matter as an eternal truth. It took seven years. The Restored Church of Christ should have been the first one to do it. We’ve still got some wrestling to do.
Is there tension within the Church of being queer or Black and an engaged member? Are there things you have to reconcile?
J: Two things can be true: leaders can be called of God, and they can also be racist, homophobic, and transphobic. Those things are not mutually exclusive. Growing up in the Church, we get this idea that our prophets that our leaders are inerrant, which isn’t in our doctrine or scripturally based at all. As a Black member of the Church, I don't have the luxury of believing that my leaders are perfect men.
Theologically speaking, the gospel is very affirming for people on the margins. Given the history of Black folks in America, I don't know that there's any group in America that can identify more with the message of Christ, who was lynched by the state, than Black Americans. It's one of the reasons why the few Black folks you're able to find in the Church are some of the most spiritually resilient that you'll ever meet.
That said, there's a reason that the number of Black Saints, at least in America, is so low. It’s precisely because of that tension. It's difficult to go to church with people who aren't socialized to understand or empathize with you, especially when so many obvious examples of racism are around us. I go to church with too many people who embrace ideologies and policies that harm people who look like me. I can't blame Black folks for not wanting to show up to the Church when the Church hasn't really shown up for us.
In my opinion, there's not really anything to reconcile with the message of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ because it already includes me; it already includes people like me. I don't have to reconcile anything. It’s the Church that has to reconcile things.
D: I don't feel there's a lot that I need to reconcile. And people ask, “How can you live in a Church that tells you your ‘whatever’?” If someone said, “Derek, you have a carrot growing on top of your head,” I wouldn't even look up to see if it's true because I know it's not. If Oaks, or Spencer W. Kimball, or Packer says, “Oh, it's an ugly sin,” I don't even look up. Prophets have always been incredibly problematic. I know this from the study of ancient scripture, as well as modern scripture.
If you look at our Church's history, so many of our problematic theories or positions are the products of reconciliation. People are trying to harmonize things they shouldn’t be harmonizing. An example of this is when people try to come up with explanations for why we would discriminate against an entire continent of God's children. On the one hand, there’s the goodness and impartiality of God, but the way they reconciled the problematic doctrine was to say, “Oh, it can't be based on God being racist. It can't be based on us being racist; it must be because Black people did something.”
Another example is why women don't have the priesthood or why Heavenly Mother isn't talked about more. You'll hear people try to reconcile “male and female are all alike to God” and theories that Heavenly Mother is so sweet and Heavenly Father wants to protect Her. Or, “Women can't have the priesthood because men are so awful they need a little uplift to get where the women already are.” These are reconciliations, and none of them are satisfying.
As a theologian, I want to say we need to really be careful what we're reconciling because we might be like an oyster creating a pearl around a piece of sand that we should have let go of a long time ago.
What can we do to reduce that tension? What can we do to help queer or black, or marginalized members on their journey?
J: Wanting to know your place in this work is a righteous desire. In the Doctrine in Covenants, we see people like the Whitmers, Hyrum, Joseph Knight, etc., who wanted to know their place in the Restoration of the gospel, what their place was in this fight. The Lord had some revelation specifically catered to them about what they could do.
Unfortunately, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. You’ve got to find a level of engagement that works for you that complements your abilities, your talents, and your skill sets. As soon as the full emancipation and full liberation of the people you are trying to serve become a priority for you, you’ll start to figure things out.
What you're talking about reminds me of the Lord counseling Oliver Cowdery in Doctrine and Covenants 11 to study things out in his heart and mind and then to ask. You can’t ask others to do the work for you. You have to study beforehand; you have to listen. Ask people to tell their stories, be empathetic— mourn with those that mourn, and then pray, “These are my gifts, this is my time, this is what I can sacrifice, help me to know what to do.” From there, that's how God tells us how to engage in the work. That's why it's personal.
J: That's a great way to put it. I got like 20 text messages the week of the George Floyd protests from people I hardly even talk to; most of them were asking what they can do. And I'm just like, “First of all, I'm not even in this space to answer this question. Secondly, I don't know who you are well enough to know what you can specifically do.” So yeah, there's not a one size fits all answer to that question. When people make change a priority, I know they'll figure things out.
D: Yeah. So listening and learning is important, especially listening to those who have intentionally made themselves available. Don't go up to a random queer person and ask them to educate you. If someone has put themselves out there, if they’re making videos and blogs, consume their work and Google questions.
Another thing to do is amplify people's voices without speaking over them or for them. People on the margins are unfairly limited in our scope of influence. I can't think of any openly queer people in any real leadership positions. But there are straight people in leadership who can use their privilege to amplify my voice into a place that it won't get on my own for all the unfair reasons.
Right now, bigotry is costly for us queer people, but allies can make it costly for the homophobes. Here's an example. A young straight couple is going to get married, and their parents are homophobic. One thing they can do is say, “We're not going to marry in the temple until my queer friends can marry in the temple. And if you're crying because your grandbabies aren't gonna be with you forever, then you’re beginning to understand the problem with this policy.” Yes, that straight couple is making a sacrifice, but it's no bigger sacrifice than what queer people have to make, not even by our own choice. That type of creative tension, to borrow Dr. King's words, is something that can motivate people to the negotiation table.
Another idea is when straight people post their engagement or temple wedding photos, they could say, “We are happy today, but we won't be fully happy until our queer friends can have a picture like this.” Then all those grandparents and cousins who scroll through and like that photo will have a seed planted in their minds, “Why are we doing this to these people?“ It would also take a little bit of the sting away from the queer people scrolling through all those pictures. There's a lot of things that people can do.
What questions or messages in the Church are empowering for you both, as members of the queer community and the Black community?
J: The accountability of our Christianity. No one can put people in lynching trees or participate in or ignore the dehumanization of the Black body and still understand the meaning of Jesus Christ. He's always been for those on the margins. He's always been for the dehumanized, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised.
Something very empowering to me about the gospel of Jesus Christ is how you cannot fully embrace it without understanding the people who are the least of this land. The Church isn't going to be what it's supposed to be until social justice is a deliberate part of our ministry and worship experience. Jesus Christ Himself is going to be found where we are. That, to me, is probably the greatest distillation of what is most empowering about the gospel of Jesus Christ and this work that Derek and I do.
The destiny of the Church is to be a place where everybody is not just welcome; it's a place that's made for everybody. Derek has said the goal of our Church shouldn't be “all are welcome”; the goal should be “this place was made for all in mind.”
D: My answer to everything is the scriptures. They testify of Christ; they testify of a community that's based on the story of Christ. That gets back to one of the things that can be troubling: Church history. But it also can be very empowering. If you look at the history of the Church, both ancient and modern, we realize that we are a people who do hard things. We are a people who ask hard questions. We are people led by God through difficult circumstances. We are a people who see unthinkable changes. If you look at the changes that have happened in the past nearly 200 years, that can provide a lot of hope. I don't want to say things like, “The 1978 revelation fixed racism, which means we can fix LGBT stuff, too,” because we haven't fixed racism, we can't pretend that struggle is over, and we can't appropriate that struggle. We have to be very sensitive to how we, as white LGBT people, speak about precedent for change, but there are precedents for change. And that can tide us over. There's a lot that we can rest on in terms of our heritage and our tradition.
What are some messages we need to unlearn as a community to better connect with marginalized groups?
J: Prophetic infallibility is a big one. Doctrine being unchangeable also has to be unlearned. Lots of things have changed in terms of how we operate as a Church and how Christ has decided to minister to His people, depending on their various contexts. We have got to get used to having the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Our Church wants to believe that it's apolitical or that the Church isn't a place to discuss the issues. I just want to be like, “Well, when are we going to discuss it, then?” If our faith is not leading us to be better citizens, if it's not leading us to be anti-racist or to be affirming, then what is?
The Church is also a place where we should feel uncomfortable. We can go and be spiritually edified and fed, but if we are not being called to repentance for our sins of racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc., we're not progressing.
We're going to have to learn to disagree publicly with each other. Is that what you're suggesting?
J: There's a way to do it. We've all been going to church for a long time, and we know how these discussions ought to go. But we don't actually know how to manage ourselves that well, which is why we're so afraid of this “contention” in church meetings. Contention is not what's happening. That's not the kind of contention that Jesus Christ was condemning in Third Nephi. This is the contention that Peter spoke of: we are earnestly contending for our faith. When we have these conversations, we are discussing with each other the matters pertaining to the kingdom and talking about how to best live them. We got to learn how to have those discussions at church because I believe that's one reason for the Church.
D: I think part of the real contrast we can see is when we visit Black churches. They have voter registration drives; they talk about the news, talk about the issues, and preach to the context. I'm not saying it's all partisan politics, like they're just on the side of one party or the other. But, the Black churches had each others’ backs and organized boycotts and mobilized themselves. We, as a Church, could have done that. We could have been active in the Civil Rights Movement. But we weren't.
I think a lot of what we have to unlearn is cultural. We need to stop outsourcing the work of spiritual matters. Many people in the Church culturally just depend on their leaders to spoon feed everything, do the work for them, package it up, and do the wrestling for them. They just are consumers of the curriculum: the conference talks, everything else. What they don't realize is that if you're not spiritually self-reliant, things can fall apart. You'll get stuff wrong. You won't go through the development; you need to become a Celestial adult with initiative and responsibility as heirs of God in the Celestial Kingdom. If we're going to be Gods in the next life, then why do we act eternally like children in this life, expecting everyone else to give us the milk, spoon-feed us, and give us everything without doing any work on our part?
Another cultural thing is our arrogance as a community. We think we have all the answers and that we’re better than every other church. There's a lot of humility in our sources, saying, “Look, we've got stuff to learn; anyone from anywhere can bring truth. We should find and accept truth, wherever it is.”
Fear of difference or the fear of change is another cultural problem. Anything that gets seen as progressive automatically just gets labeled as a threat or apostate. People shut down their thinking, even when what is being said is well within the lines. People are just reticent to things that don’t fit with what they were taught, even if what they were taught wasn't doctrine.
We also have to unlearn a particular approach to the scriptures. Without a critical engagement of the scriptures on their own terms, we can easily take things out of context; we can miss things that have been there for thousands of years. A lot of people, especially with the Bible, treat it as “I'm going to just take out these little pearls here and there and have these little spiritual verses, and not actually read the whole thing.” This isn't just true with our Church; it’s true in most churches; people will just take a little line out of one of Paul's epistles and embroider it on a little pillow. That's not what Paul wanted you to do. You miss the power and the vibrancy of the scriptures if you do it that way.
What can the institutional Church do to make things better for its marginalized members?
D: One of my big regrets about how we've handled the 1978 revelation is they did what I do when I'm walking down the sidewalk, and I trip. I do a little jog to make it look like, “Oh, I didn't actually make a mistake, that's what I was doing all along, and I'm okay now. Just forget what I just did.” If we don't unpack the mess, we essentially deny we hurt their pain and sacrifice. That needs to be honored; the people who have endured that need to be remembered. Secondly, if we don't acknowledge what we did, we won't learn from it, and we're going to do it again and again with the same issue or with different issues.
J: You know, there are all kinds of things we could say about this in terms of, you know, what the Church's responsibility or what they need to do in this whole thing is, I personally am not so much looking for an apology as much as I'm looking for change behavior and a specific naming of this racism in our past.
Confession is a Christian imperative, a necessary part of this process. Whether or not the Church chooses to apologize for it or not, they got to at least name the Church's racism as a sin. I just want them to call what they did sin, and, you know, whatever they want to after that, but they certainly have to make an effort to make reparations for that.
What would reparations look like within the Church?
J: I want to see racists lose their temple recommends. I just don't like this idea that the Church has not been more specific about naming its own sin and in naming what that looks like, even among the Saints. I want there to be systems put into place, whether it be more training in the MTC, more training in Sunday schools, or actual organizations created for this purpose, where antiracism can be practiced. That's what reparations are—you give people what they need to be restored to where they should have been. I don't think anything less is going to do if we really want to overcome our past.
What changes do you hope to see?
J: So I would love to see more Black leadership. Not tokenization; I don't want to just create the picture of diversity. I don't want to just see more brown faces. I want to hear black voices from the pulpit. More than just in discussions of anti-racism, I want to hear them in our policies and our ministry.
D: I want to see unlearning. Unlearn some of our mess around what is doctrine? What is official doctrine? What is policy? What is culture? So many people think that stuff is eternal truth that actually isn't. We get this with the Family Proclamation, we get this with conference talks, we get this idea that anything said over the pulpit or published in a Church-approved setting is binding, and it's not. Official doctrine is a much smaller body than we think it is.
What do you hope looking at Church history and the Come, Follow Me curriculum through the lens of the marginalized will uncover?
J: I really like the allegory of the olive tree. Branches were taken out of the mother tree and put in other trees. Later, the same branches were taken back to the mother tree and grafted back in, and that's when they were finally able to bring forth some good fruit again. I thought that was super powerful— about the scattering of Israel and when they’re gathered in again. I liken that to us. When we include the perspectives of the marginalized, as we gather them in, as part of the gathering of Israel, and we accept them as their authentic selves, with all their experiences, with all of their cultures, with all of their beauty, I kind of viewed this as the parable of the great banquet, where the Lord of the house invites all these people off the streets. I imagine it's going to be a potluck, full of all these cultural foods and traditions.
Whatever it's going to be, it will include the fullness of all of what humanity is. The only way we will be able to put forth good fruit is to bring these branches in pretty much as they are with their various experiences from their previous trees, their various cultures, and identities. Everybody has something to offer, especially the people on the margins.
Every time Joseph Smith moved or faced persecution, there was additional growth, additional revelation, additional progress made in the restoration of the gospel. We see that throughout the scriptures, and we're going to continue to see that. There are going to be physical movements from persecution that lead to spiritual movements towards Christ.
D: On the queer side, we've got a problem because we don't have precedent for these kinds of changes. What we have as precedent in the Church is the unprecedented. I don't have a golden age of queer inclusion that I can go back to and say, “we need to restore that,” nor do I have any fully inclusive scriptures about LGBTs that get it right either. But we have a history of dealing with stuff that's new and expecting the unexpected. The other thing about the Doctrine and Covenants is out of all of our standard works; it's the one that mentions women the least. There's going to be a lot of work that we have to do to either recover what the voices and experiences of women would have been or to add the voices of women today to the list.
When people say, “But where do you find the queer stuff explicitly?” My answer to that is it's the stories that we write today that will become the scriptures of tomorrow. We're making history now. We're on the front row of the roller coaster. We're doing something new, and the spirit’s alive and Gods on the move here.
Almost nothing that I say is about same-gender love in the scriptures. It's all analogies about inclusion or marginalization— the first being last or people not fitting in boxes. Most of what I say comes from the gay male experience, but I hope it would be easily translated to issues of the trans experience or women, or disability, or impoverished, etc.
What episodes do you recommend people listen to?
D: People should just start with whatever the most recent one is because all of our episodes hit a home run. I mean, that's what we've been told, and I think they're getting better and better.
J: I agree with Derek's assessment; I would highly recommend just people start with the most recent and keep up with their own study. I would certainly recommend any of our bonus episodes, but especially the “Why We Believe” episode because it's a great introduction to me and Derek—where we're coming from, in terms of the podcast and our identities as Latter-day Saints in this Church.
Do you have any resources that you’d recommend?
J: In terms of organizations, the Black LDS Legacy is probably the closest thing to an organized community of Black Saints that I would trust. But there are places and people they can follow on Twitter and Instagram. Melodie Jackson, Janan, and my sister, Dr. Lashawn Williams. Reverend Dr. Fatimah Sellah is one of my favorite people. Unfortunately, she is not active on social media, but you can view her work and sermons at acertainwork.org. She also has a book calledBook of Mormon for the Least of These, which I highly recommend.
D: The downside to being a pioneer is that I don't have any models or examples of what my journey should look like. I don't have an Elijah Abel or a Jane Elizabeth Manning James or Darius Gray, any of these Black saints who joined the Church when things were more difficult than they are now. When I joined the Church in 2015, I was not aware of any gay converts. I wasn't aware of any success stories. So I have to be the one.
I think the only other person really doing queer theology in the Mormon context is Blaire Ostler. There's a lot of people doing pain management, but not really a lot of good constructive work. There are support groups, but there is no activist group.