Introduction and Welcome

Guest [00:00:06] Mormon Stories podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you.

Guest [00:00:19] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy when you're.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:00:33] Hello, and welcome back to another Mormon Stories interview. This is a joint interview with the Feminist Mormon Housewives podcast, and I'd really like to thank John Dehlin for helping set this up and allowing us to do this. Now, normally John would be doing this interview, but because of schedule and time, he wasn't able to do that. So I hope you'll permit me to interview instead. I know that John is a big part of Mormon Stories, but I appreciate those who have tuned in and are listening today, and I'm really excited to introduce Guest. Now, our guest is not a Mormon, actually has very little interaction with Mormonism. So you might wonder why I would be bringing on a non Mormon who knows very little bit, very little about Mormonism. And before I introduce her, I just want to kind of talk about how this interview even happened. So, as many of you know, I'm the assistant director for the Sunstone Education foundation, and every year we do a conference called the Borderlands Conference, where we try to maybe amplify the voices of those who we are not used to hearing in Mormonism. A lot of us, a lot of you out there listening have often felt like you don't have a voice in Mormonism, and Borderlands seeks to sort of amplify those voices. And so we've been doing this conference, and sometime this last year, I was watching a TED Talk and I saw this wonderful woman giving a TED Talk. And I was transformed by her, by her poetry and by her her speech. And so I thought, this is the woman that we have to bring to Sunstone and we have to have her talk to Mormons because what she has to say is so helpful and so beautiful and so necessary to Mormonism. And so I sent her a message and said, I know this is super strange and you don't know anything about this little organization, but will you come out? And she said, yes. So, so then I had conversations with John Dehlin and John said, yeah, we'd absolutely love to have her on an interview. John is committed to talking with those in the Borderlands as well and is committed to that work. So hopefully we can talk to you about why this conversation is so important in Mormonism. So I'd like to introduce you Erika Chilome. She is an amazing artist, very accomplished. I wish I had your bio to read right now. You've done so much. But maybe, Erika, you can tell us a little bit about yourself, where you come from.

Edyka Chilome's Background and Social Justice Roots

Edyka Chilome [00:03:00] Sure. Thank you, Lindsay, for having me. Thank you for inviting me, and thank you for bringing me into this fold and teaching me so much about your community. So my name is Erika Chilome. I'm an artist activist. I call myself a social justice educator because a big part of the work that I do is so centered and grounded around social justice teaching and really engaging and invoking these conversations, some of them very uncomfortable, some of them very difficult, a lot of them without resolve. But certainly in my work, I feel it very necessary to facilitate things around violence in our communities, in our society, and the ways that we can heal from that as people and as communities. So I've done a lot of sharing and talking and teaching and workshops with young people. I've had the benefit of doing a few TED talks now and doing work with NPR and doing work with different faith communities, with different universities and different art institutions. And I've been blessed to have people like yourself that are really interested in diversifying the ways that we're talking about certain topics that we're all dealing with, that we're all trying to wrestle with, no matter what faith community or what part of society we're located in. So I originally was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was born of two immigrant parents that were very involved in kind of the 80s 90s movements around apartheid and South Africa, around Latin American wars and different types of violence that very much included the US Involvement for good and bad reasons. And they really kind of were involved in faith communities, and they found faith communities to be a really important space for solidarity work in their social justice initiatives. And so I've been very engaged in the Christian faith for my whole life, and I continue to be. And I straddle those borders and those lines of what does it mean to be a person of faith that has a critical lens and is asking questions and is trying to kind of stretch our conversations a little bit further, to invoke other parts of myself that I feel like oftentimes are not a part of the conversation in the churches. And so my parents were a big model for me. My father's from El Salvador and my mother from Mexico, which, you know, that was one thing I knew about the Mormon Church, that it's a growing church in El Salvador, particularly in Latin America, throughout. And so I've lived in various places in the United States and right now I'm located in Dallas, the Dallas area in Texas, which is a really important place for me to be as first generation Latina mestiza. And that's having these conversations because we know that in the south and kind of in more rural areas in this country, it's kind of hard to invoke a little bit more diverse conversations around the issues.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:06:06] Yeah, yeah. And I'm so glad that you came. And we had our conference for Sunstone yesterday, and it was amazing. And one of the things that I'm learning. So a lot of the listeners will know that I have a background in studying Mormon fundamentalism, lots of polygamous groups. And it's been a real gift for me to learn from these other branches of Mormonism because learning so much more about my own faith tradition from. Learning from other faith traditions, some that are similar to mine and some that are completely different. And that's why I think it's so valuable to have other perspectives as Mormons. And so you, you grew up in the Methodist tradition. Can you kind of talk about what that was like?

Edyka Chilome [00:06:47] So for me, I mentioned the work around kind of social justice work that my parents were very involved in early on in my life and before I was born. My mother is an ordained clergy, one of the very few lat ordained clergy people in the United Methodist Church in this country. And for her, I think that she kind of was brought into the fold, into the church in a very particular time where liberation theology, this theology around God kind of calling us to be stewards of social justice and to really engage the way Jesus engaged as a radical, as an activist. And so this image of kind of what we are called to do as Christian people looked like organizing rallies on Sunday morning. And that was our service going down to the Capitol building in Washington D.C. i was born in the Washington D.C. area and serving the people and asking for justice for our neighbors, asking for people to join the solidarity networks around stopping the wars that were being played out around the global south and in our inner city communities against immigrants, against people of color. So protest was our worsh. And so it was a very different. And I talked to other people, even in the United Methodist tradition that didn't have this experience where it was very much grounded in that. It was very much led by lay leaders, what we call in the United Methodist Church, lay leaders that were women that gave their life to kind of invoking the social justice church community. Because we had no choice. Right? Because as immigrants, as people of color, we could not have service and ignore the reality that half of the congregation was at risk of being imprisoned or detained or deported and separated from their families, or more at risk to be killed by authorities to have human rights violations against them in this country. And so this was a part of what the people in our communities were facing. And it wasn't something that the women in my community were willing to ignore and be silent upon. So I have a lot of really amazing experiences that I can ground myself in, many of of the similar experiences that some of the women that I've met amongst the feminist collective here in the Mormon Church, including yourself, were a part of, you know, taking the time to make sure that our daughters understand that there are other ways to engage in our faith. And that's certainly something that my mother and the women I grew up around did for me. And so, you know, that was my church. And so going from that faith tradition to more traditional Methodist or Pentecostal churches, where certainly that was not being a part of the world or being a part of these political issues was not of God. And for me, that was confusing and it was contradicting, but also recognizing that my mothers were not shy about talking about the contradictions in our churches and the ways that we are able to talk about love and compassion and justice in our liturgy, in the sermons, but not necessarily act upon that as organized communities that really can have a big role in how our neighborhoods and how our country are run. So for me, it was important to see that the systemic organizing of the institutional church of the United Methodist Church was a system that we can move and navigate and really tap into to pull resources for the social justice work we are doing. But of course, there's a lot of resistance. There's a lot of people that say that that's not where the resources of the church should be. But, you know, of course there are some of us that say, absolutely, that's where we should be focusing our efforts and our energies and our money and our time.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:35] So, yeah, yeah, so that's. I mean, it's not similar, but there are similarities too. The sort of struggle in the. I guess you'd call it the progressive Mormon movement. So we have a vibrant Mormon feminist community. And of course, you've learned a little bit of the history of that, the ordained women movement and some of the resistance in our community. But we had, you know, our sort of frontier settler ancestors had this tradition of women activists. I don't know if that's how they would have self identified, but out of survival, as they're gathering to Utah, and immigrants are coming from all over the world, and they're poor and they're starving. They had to, you know, their work was a social justice in the time period. And of course, it's complicated, which we're going to talk about, because it was, you know, it was for the benefit of some people, but not all people. So of course you come here, we have. You come speak to our conference about being in the borderlands, but you really didn't know anything about Mormonism. And so I want to talk about that because as I've explained, I'm doing a podcast called the Color of Heaven where we are exploring sort of the history of the Mormon Church through the lens of racial issues. And I had already done the same thing with the polygamy podcast, and it was transformative for me in so many ways. But I don't think I was prepared to understand how racially based are LDS churches grounded in. I mean, it's everything. And so by the time you have come to me, I'm like 10 episodes into my research, and I think it was just very clear to me how tied in the Mormon Church is with race. Now, normally when we talk about race and the LDS Church, most people will probably go back into the 1970s, where there was a ban against people of African descent in the church. They were not allowed to be ordained or allowed in the temple. So this stopped them from having saving ordinances. And the ban was lifted in the 1970s. And we kind of think our race work is done. But I think what people forget, at least what I had forgotten, is that our church, our foundational scriptures, are the story of racial tensions in America and in the world. And so the Mormon Church is absolutely sort of this frontier way of reconciling, you know, this. What was happening in the 19th century. So when we took you to Temple Square, I want you to kind of talk about that, because I think we were kind of giving you a crash course of Mormonism telling you, oh, we have these. These people, the Lamanites and Nephites. And Nephites are white Indians.

Colonialism and Violence in Mormon History

Edyka Chilome [00:13:19] Right, right, right, right. I just. This story, I mean, you know,

Edyka Chilome [00:13:29] I

Edyka Chilome [00:13:29] am intrigued by different stories because I think that what the power of what stories do in terms of generational kind of consciousness construction is really powerful. So when people in the Mormon Church are told that white Indians came and gave answers and kind of instructed, you know, white Mormons to. To convert and to kind of assimilate these brown cursed natives that weren't originally from the continent of America of Course, as an indigenous person, I am alarmed. I am completely alarmed, but not surprised. Right. Because again, as you said, that this story is kind of that settlement colonialism tells itself or told itself in the historical process of colonization had to justify some of the most horrific things that happened on this land. And the Mormon Church being very much a part of that. And then that was something that I didn't know, that the Mormon Church was very much a part of, kind of the relocating and the killing and the assimilating and the fracturing of indigenous communities, particularly here in Utah. Right. That was a very. That is, all of this land is indigenous, but Utah being a very sacred land to many different indigenous peoples. So, you know, when your founder came and saw the valley and said this was perfect. Well, of course it was perfect. It was beautiful. Utah is gorgeous. And the people that lived here recognized that. And we're also beautiful and gorgeous and perfect. And so I think that for me to hear those stories is very disheartening. And how kind of the colonial, still the mindset of assimilation is being exported to El Salvador, to Latin America, to Asia, to Africa, and telling these darker skinned brothers and sisters that this is their story and they must assimilate to this religion to kind of save themselves from the curse that they inherently carry. It breaks my heart. It absolutely breaks my heart. But it's not something new. This is the cycles of colonization for the last 500 years or so that we saw with different waves of Christianity. And so to say that the Mormon Church is the worst of them all would not be accurate. To say that the Mormon Church is a reflection of the historical process of colonization of this land and this continent is more accurate, that it's just a part of the process of white settlement. And it's complicated. Right. And I'm sure, as you're exploring and just in your research is how do we challenge the foundational narratives of your faith identity and your cultural identity when it is steeped in this violence? And I think that there's a lot of healing to do with new generations that are opening the conversation as to what did this narrative do and what was the intention of this narrative, what was the political reasons for this narrative and what did it do under the table that we don't learn about this idea that, oh, okay, well, then the Mormon Church came and saved the cursed Indians, brown Indians. Maybe we need to reframe that. Maybe we need to recognize, okay, maybe the indigenous peoples of this continent don't necessarily need Mormonism, but are invited to kind of be a Part of the conversation, what it means to be a faith community in the history that involves all of us. Right, Because a white settlement is just not a white problem. It is not just your history. It's all of our history. We are all affected by these narratives and these stories that really had physical, consequential realities for our communities. So, I mean, there's a lot of pain and there's a lot of needing to open up, to maybe apologize, to repent, as in the United Method. There's a lot of conversations around the indigenous peoples that are still part of the United Methodist Church, asking for the structures of the church to be vocal about this conversation and to at least apologize for the things that they did.

Edyka Chilome [00:17:34] Right.

Edyka Chilome [00:17:34] And we can talk about how maybe the apology means nothing and what is constructive of that. Well, you know, it provides a platform for us to open up and say, hey, maybe some of these things were not accurate, and maybe there was some damage done, and maybe we should start recognizing that and undoing that, unraveling it, deconstructing it, and seeing how we can change the ways that we engage in this, in this faith tradition differently now, especially as the Mormon Church is growing and growing and growing amongst people in the global south, people of color all over the world. What does it mean? And, you know, to think that those people are not doing their own theological deconstruction, constructing, I think, would be a horrific mistake. I think that there are probably people in Latin America, indigenous people, that are asking these questions and still participating in the Mormon Church, just like your feminist collective is, and really trying to redefine that for themselves, and then many others that are not, that are taking it very literal and taking it very to the heart and following orders, as they must. But I do want to encourage us to consider that as new people come into the faith tradition, we bring all of our experiences with it. So when we're looking at people of color who are doing this theological work, we might have really important answers in their conversations to doing this reconciling work. So, I mean, yeah, and that's why

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:18:54] I'm glad you're here, because there are several things that I want to talk about. First of all, for listeners who might not know, Christopher C. Smith. Historian Christopher Smith has pointed out in our Color of Heaven podcast that we were talking about this idea that the Book of Mormon was written for the Lamanites, in essence, to redeem the brown Indians like you were talking about, and help them discover sort of, I guess, I mean, some would say their whiteness, Some would balk at that and say more, just like, you know, they're come back to Christ. However, I said to Christopher Smith, I said, what. What is the legacy of the Book of Mormon then for the Lamanites? And he said, it's a horrific legacy. And he let me know that something. I can't remember the exact numbers, but because of the settlers in Utah coming in, Brigham Young and the Mormons coming in, the indigenous tribes in Utah were massacred and displaced at a rate of two thirds faster than anywhere else. And because of that, I mean, I don't think we can. I don't think we pay attention to the violence of what that means, because our stories are the stories of pioneers. Right.

Edyka Chilome [00:20:07] And there's a lot of pride in that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:20:09] So much. Right.

Edyka Chilome [00:20:09] That's what I've noticed. There's a lot. And we talked a little bit about that of kind of. Of the good and the bad of that. Right? And this pioneer kind of sustainable, especially women being at the forefront of engaging in sustainable agriculture and canning and all these different kind of forms of alternative economy that women. And I see that there's a legacy amongst Mormon women that is very powerful and very strong. However, on the other side, it's at the cost of what. At the cost of what was the settlement and this kind of new pioneer pride. Because I think that there's a violence, too, that can happen amongst white settlers, where it's like, okay, well, nothing of me is good then anymore. And I think that.

Guest [00:20:52] That.

Edyka Chilome [00:20:53] I think that there is enough violence that has already been imposed in this kind of colonization.

Edyka Chilome [00:20:58] That.

Edyka Chilome [00:21:00] That is not what I want to say or that I think many of us really want to say at the root of it, that I want you to feel bad about everything in your faith tradition, about everything that you are, about all the legacy that you carry. Because we know that if we look farther before settlement, well, what were the colonialists that were. What were they fleeing? What was the violence that they saw and they witnessed in Europe that caused them to come here and to replicate some of those same cycles of violence? The story is infinite, right? And we look back at the historical legacy that constructed this concept of coming over, massacring the indigenous people and setting up shop. There's a lot more complex narrative. And so I want to. I want to be careful. And I know that, like a lot of people, a lot of my activist people of color friends will say, well, don't get soft, you know, don't share empathy to the colonizers. Well, you know, I think that we're all in need of empathy because I think that we're still living the residue in the present day reality of war. I mean, I'm very clear in my writings, I talk a lot about that. This is not over. The settlement didn't come and happen and now it's done and now, oops, the indigenous people are all dead. I guess this is where we're at now. This is not what has happened. We're still in the process. And as I said, you know, colonization is still happening in this country, in the state, around the world, amongst indigenous peoples of all kinds and amongst each other. You know, gentrification is a big issue in inner cities where people of color are still being displaced, people of color are still being shot in the streets, people of color are still being disposed amongst systems of violence in the prison industrial complex. And so we're still living in this war. And for me, when violence is all around us, is within us and is in front of us and behind us, the radical thing we can do is find empathy in the ways that we talk about this violence and find a resolve of how, where did this come from? I don't want to say that white settlers or Mormonism is innately evil. That is something I would never say. It is a complex inheritance that has resulted in many forms of violence. But. And that we need to talk about and acknowledge. But I think that there's also a lot of interesting potential for goodness and reconciliation and healing in the Mormon traditions that I think that, you know, certainly that a new wave of liberal Mormons are trying to tap into and trying to grow and trying to engage. And I think that does include having these, these really hard conversations and really taking accountability right. For some of the history and re engaging our actions in different ways again.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:23:38] So I don't want to make this all about white people, but I've learned in studying this issue that because Mormonism was a colonizing religion, I mean, that is what it is for so many years. It was literally about changing the skin color of brown people to, you know, whiter. We have Spencer W. Kimball that we told you about. One of our prophets who makes the remark of he knew a missionary that baptized a native family and their, their skin was getting lighter as they were accepting the gospel. So this was a literal belief. And yet that colonization, that imperialistic attitude, actually hurts white Mormons, Mormons too, because we have this idea in our scriptures, the justification for the destruction, the genocide of Native Americans is sort of in the Book of Mormon. And it's this idea of prosperity that if you follow God and Jesus, then you will prosper in the land, but if you don't, you'll be destroyed. And that that was meant in a lot of ways as a justification probably in the frontier period to understand and contextualize what was going on in the 1830s in America. However, the result of that, for a white Mormon like me, I grew up with this idea that all it would mean is that you would have to be just righteous enough and you would be okay. And so I would try to be righteous enough. And when that didn't work out, when I wasn't okay, or when families lose their jobs or people are poor, that's really confusing. And so I think that it's what you're talking about. It's a complicated narrative, because this colonialist attitude, of course white people have benefited from it for centuries, but we're also deeply at a loss because of it.

Edyka Chilome [00:25:26] Yeah. And there are theorists that talk about kind of the epistemological privilege of the oppressed that are able to see that. And when you're on the other side of the benefits of violence and imperialism, you're not able to gain that perspective of this is not prosperity in this material form, in this acquisition, this acquisition of land, this material wealth is not everything. It's not fulfilling spiritually. And if anything, we talk about kind of after generations of being brutally violent against other human beings and against the land, that depletes us. It depletes us of kind of a spiritual fulfillment in a connection, in a relational kind of lens where we can find love and sacredness in that sense. So, yeah, absolutely. I think that standing on this side, it looks like, yes, you might have created a system and a religion that provides certain answers. And obviously wealth and other things, it is not everything. And I think that many young, more white, middle class, upper middle class Christians of all faiths are finally realizing that. Right. And then, and we've talked a little bit about this, of finally saying, I'm missing something here, There is something that is not right. There's something that feels very superficial about this narrative of prosperity, of God, and there are no answers. And there's inconsistencies and contradictions all across the United States, there is this final realization of, hey, having money and having stability in this way is not everything. And so what happens is that you have a lot of young people, and I, what I've noticed in the conversations in the Mormon faith, you have a lot of young people leaving, and you have a lot of young people searching in other places for A type of connection. And that gets kind of tricky because we can talk a little bit about spiritual colonialism where you're saying, oh, and the Mormons having this really fascinating kind of connection with Native America, that it's a part of your history, but it's also a part of the history that needs to be saved or changed or colonized. Very, very complicated, it seems. But then you have a lot of folks here in Utah that are very obsessed and romanticize and fetish the Native American spirituality or identity or experience. Because I think that. I think that the places where Mormonism and this prosperity theology is lacking ancient traditions and spirituality hold. And so it's kind of a big fat reminder and slap in the face of saying, maybe we shouldn't have killed a. Maybe there were things that we could have learned from an abundant representation and, you know, mainstream exposure to indigenous, ancient traditions. And now we see, you know, indigenous people that have survived colonization and violence, that we keep it to ourselves. We say, I don't trust these Wasishus, these white folks, because of all the historical trauma. And so now we don't want to teach you kind of the things that have fulfilled us and have connected us in a higher way. And so I think that there are levels and levels and levels of violence, but I think that at the end of the day, it's very much this reminder that we need each other. There's nothing wrong now with you being a Mormon in this moment. There's nothing wrong now with me practicing indigenous spirituality and finding a place for myself. And there's nothing wrong for us fellowshipping and learning from each other in multiple ways and finding ways to kind of reconcile that relationship, which I think that, you know, even in this conversation that is happening, and I think. I think that it's really important that we take a moment and recognize that we are being intentional about talking about these really radical topics that are deemed taboo because they're too uncomfortable for people. And I'm sure you find that in the Mormon Church a lot. Is that, no, oh, there's that girl who wants to talk about race all the time and polygamy all the time. But it's an important step for us to realize that the things that you might be missing, other people that are different from you might have, and how to we then smooth that. That bridge to be able to share with each other safely. Right.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:29:28] So I want to ask you about this because certainly Mormonism have. Have a violent history. Our frontier history is very violent as. As is the story of most, you know, Christian American expansion. Right. So. But. But one of the things that we pride ourselves in is that Mormons had this sort of benevolent relationship with Native Americans, this idea that we had scriptures for them, that we believed that they were a lost tribe, that we were reuniting with them even. There are many stories, some of them not all true, but some of them true of, you know, Brigham Young telling the settlers to be kind to the Indians and to feed them. And, you know, there's some horrific stories of Ute slave traders bringing in Navajos and trying to sell them to the white Mormons, and Brigham Young saying, don't do that, and taking them in and bringing them in and adopting them. It was very common, not very common, but it happened that white settlers would adopt these slave children and bring them into their households. And, of course, they were never fully integrated as family. There was more like indentured servitude. Sometimes there's this idea that. But we were a little bit better than everybody else. We were a little bit kinder. We didn't kill as bad.

Edyka Chilome [00:30:48] Which I wonder. I mean, I don't know how far those stories go in terms of when they started being told that way, but

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:56] I. I think from the beginning, I don't know.

Edyka Chilome [00:30:58] I think.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:58] I mean, those are the stories we tell ourselves.

Edyka Chilome [00:31:00] Right, Right, right, right. And, you know, and it's. It's always interesting to kind of the victors tell the stories. Right. And it kind of. You know, I don't know if that was the case or not the case, but I do know that I've talked to a lot of Native Americans from the Midwest that say that that was certainly not their experience and not the case for their grandparents and their ancestors and that, you know, and even when we take that narrative of kind of this white savior entity that, oh, we'll teach you and we'll be kind to you, because we won't kill you, but we'll completely take you away from your community and your family and completely tell you to. To erase and forget all of what your identity and your ancestry is. Because it's this narrative of, we'll save you and we'll save your soul.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:31:45] We actually have a tradition which is this idea of forgetting the traditions of your fathers. And I remember this in context. I can't remember the exact prophet or quote, but in context of going to. On the island, missions, to Pacifica people, where we say explicitly, you have to abandon the traditions of your fathers, that isn't. The traditions of your fathers are an evil thing. And now we're Seeing sort of like. Like a return to that where people want to reconnect. So, you know, Polynesian Mormons want to reconnect with their roots, and it's more celebrated. But before there was an active.

Edyka Chilome [00:32:20] It's interesting because I know that the Mormons, or what I've seen is that the Mormons are really. You're really intentional about tracing back your family, your genealogy, and there seems to be a foundational purpose for that. And so it's in one way you can see the importance of knowing your ancestry, but then in another, it's preaching this. Forget the religion of your fathers. And for indigenous people, including African people, Polynesian people, people who are connected to ancestral traditions that are, you know, millennia years old, the violence is that when you remove yourself from your lineage, spiritually, culturally, physically, you are lost. You are lost in yourself. You look in the mirror and the history that you've now adopted has nothing to do with your people. And I think that speaking as someone who grew up in the Christian faith, that is not my people's original faith. There is this deep, deep mourning of not knowing who we are, not knowing how to connect to this land that we've been on or. Or in this world that we're supposedly supposed to belong to. And a lot of black American

Edyka Chilome [00:33:35] authors,

Edyka Chilome [00:33:36] Baldwin, so many authors who have talked about what it means to be taken from their homeland and completely disconnected and cut off from everything they were. And that for people in the diaspora, people who have encountered colonialism, I think that that is the deepest wound of colonization is for us to be completely removed from everything that we are and told that everything that we are is wrong. And I mean, when we talk about. We've talked a lot about what the feminists here is what shame does to us. How does that invoke shame to be told that, you know, these great ancient civilizations and these modalities of existing mean nothing and that we should be ashamed of our brown skin, of our bodies, of everything that this earth has given to us. It does something violent to your psyche, to your spirit, to your heart. That I think that for people of color, in this context, we are never rid of, and it kind of perpetuates to our children, to our children's children, for us to be told over and over again in systems of power, whether that be the Mormon Church or the government of the United States, that we're not enough, that we're not worthy. And I think that violence is one of the worst crimes of humanity in the history of our species.

White Supremacy and Spiritual Authority in the Church

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:34:52] My opinion, so I know that you're an outsider to this, but I do want to know one of your other opinions about this idea. We talked a little bit about the expansion of the church in the global south, particularly in Latin America, and of course in parts of Africa. We have expansion in Asia. You met a lot of Asian sisters at Temple Square who were delightful. But this idea that we're expanding there, but when you look at our leadership, you know, we took you to the conference center, you got to see the stands. If I were to show you a picture, it is overwhelmingly white.

Edyka Chilome [00:35:27] And male.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:35:27] And male, absolutely. So tell me, tell me your opinions on what you think that that means and what that does and sort of the implications of that.

Edyka Chilome [00:35:37] I mean, again, this is, this is white supremacist colonialism. This is the direct face and the model of what white supremacist expansion looks like. You have the subjects on the bottom and you have those with power that look a very particular way. And we know who is calling the shots and who is creating the theology and who's perpetuating the narrative. And so, I mean, again, it's something that's super alarming and something that's super problematic in my opinion, but yet it's something that's not new. I mean, we look at the kind of the same image of the United States. You know, by 2050, most of the United States will be mixed race people, people of color, people with browner skin. And we continue to have an almost exclusive leadership that looks like white older men that come from legacies of settlement, religions and institutions and economies. And so we're still living, and this is kind of the face of this war. We're still living in a reality where we know the 1%, we know the 1% that calls the shots, you know, and so it becomes a problem where we're being told to swallow all of this theology and kind of convert and be a part of these institutions. And we're looking at the founders and we're looking at the ones, the prophets and the people with power and the people that have these connections to God and they don't look like us. And again, that is a reminder and a reinforcement of shame that we are not here to creatively take positions of leadership and determine, have self determination in our faith development. We are here to obey rules and we are here to forget our fathers and our mothers and our sacred traditions. And so it's a painful reality, and it's one, I don't think, that is so easily fixed by electing women or people of Color into those positions. It's really a call for us to realize, okay, obviously this system was constructed a very particular way on purpose. It was not just a casual coincidence that this. This is the way that the church looks. And so for us to really investigate and how do we change the paradigms of that structure? And maybe I'm saying some really radical things for kind of the viewer and the demographic that's looking on, but from a perspective of a person of color who sees these kind of structures replicated in different, not only faith communities, but all communities in this country at this time in our world world, it's really begging the question of what needs to be done to kind of change that really scary hierarchy that we're seeing in that division of power and that inequity.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:38:29] So I want to talk about that because we have a feminist theologian. Her name is Lavina Fielding Anderson. She was excommunicated years ago for chronicling sex abuse stories in the church. But she was a prolific. She is a prolific writer. And one of the most powerful things that she wrote about was this separation of hierarchical values versus spiritual values. And in Mormonism, reverence. The value of reverence is drilled into us from a young age. We have primary songs that teach us as children. Reverence is more than just quietly sitting. It's thinking of Father above. And then the primary song goes on to teach children that if you're reverent, if you sit still and you're quiet, you are showing Jesus that you love him. And Lavina points out that Jesus never talks of reverence, that reverence is a value that serves the hierarchy, and it keeps us in line, it keeps us listening, it keeps us, you know, calm in our classes. But it's not a spiritual value. And so I think that's what you're talking about. So do you want to talk about these sort of separation between spiritual values and hierarchical values?

Edyka Chilome [00:39:33] I mean, I think that certainly. I mean, again, we have to look at the socio. Histories, historical evolution of what the words we use around spirituality, where they come from. And I agree with this, sister, that a lot of our Christian faiths and traditions are replicating where they come from. From Europe, from monarchies, from these very intentional hierarchies where you obeyed and you are taught how to be a servant, these languages of servitude and servants.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:40:01] And Mormon heaven is like that. We have kingdoms and. And servants, right?

Edyka Chilome [00:40:04] Kings and queens. Queens. Lord God. Lord is God. Right? And these. I mean, we have to look at the language that we're using and where the historical source and the root of this is. And so I think that a big role for kind of the feminist sisters that I see working in the Mormon Church is changing the language. Because when we change the language, we change the ways that we relate to our spirit, so kind of each other in the communities we're building. So, you know, when I was growing up, my mothers and the radical women that I was raised by, we did a lot of. I watched them be very intentional of retraining their tongue to not refer to God as just male, to these very minimal things that they found so difficult, even though they were doing all of this radical feminist work. And they wouldn't call that feminist because they don't call that themselves feminists, but certainly aligned with the feminist values that the Mormon Church I see, is working within that. It was hard for them, but they found that to be a priority in the radical. The work that they were doing to change the words they used to refer to God, to change the words they use in service, in prayer, in even the ways that we interpret

Guest [00:41:22] who

Edyka Chilome [00:41:25] the. In the United Methodist Church, we do the monthly. The bread and the sacrifice Communion. We call it sacrament, Sacraments, right? We call it communion. So when we do sacrament, how are we interpret, interpreting that? How are we using the language to present that to the people? How are we presenting gratitude to the. To demographics of poor people, people where we're saying, this church, this chapel that is lined by gold and lined by all of this wealth, and we're telling you that you should be grateful for even being here, as if you're unworthy to be fed, you're unworthy to access the divine. Again, this concept of shame in the ways that we use language to perpetuate shame, of unworthiness. And we talked a lot about that this morning. It's. It's part of kind of the colonial kind of psychology that we're living in. And I think we're very much in a place in our history where there is no separation between hierarchy and spirituality and servitude and spirituality, political interests and spirituality. But again, this is why there is a huge movement of young people and maybe just people who have endured violence in institutions to say, I am a spiritual person, but I do not belong to a religion. I think that there is a big growth in people saying, I don't want to participate in that blurred line of becoming the slave to this political agenda of what is the church and call it God. And so people are stepping outside of the sanctuary and creating their own theology, which has its Problems not to romanticize that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:43:01] Right.

Edyka Chilome [00:43:02] When we have kind of a rebellion of people, whoever wants to become a church leader becomes a church. And it's interesting that the Mormon tradition begins there. When everyone else was. Everyone was creating their own churches in New England and that time in history. And there's problematics there, but certainly it tells us that there is a desire for us to make that distinction because we're tired of being a part of this kind of hierarchical, abusive systems and legacy. It is a legacy. And I don't think that many of us would even think about the language we're using in spiritual spaces as a part of that legacy of hierarchy. But it is. It certainly, certainly is.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:43:42] Did you grow up with white Jesus, white embodiment of God?

Edyka Chilome [00:43:45] Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that I grew up seeing it. And then in our own private spaces, in our own Latino communities, we started taking down the pictures. We, the Latino community in the United Methodist Church has grown a lot in this country by being missions of larger white Anglo churches. So we would get the little chapel on the side and we would have our Spanish language services later on.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:44:10] Yes, it's a similar thing.

Edyka Chilome [00:44:11] Okay, so the system. But what is happening, right, with the demographic shift in the landscape of this country is that we have older Anglo churches that are aging out, that are kind of fading because their young people are leaving, the older people are dying. And now you have these huge Methodist churches in the cities, and they're empty. And so what happens is the missions are growing and now they're growing into the churches. And now you have a lot of Latino churches that are now moved into full time into these, what used to be Anglo Saxon churches. And so, you know, when, when we have done that, in my experience, when our ministries grew into these spaces, we took down those images and we kept the cross up, but we also put our indigenous patterns and textiles up on the altar. And so there was this kind of mixing of what we're seeing as sacred. What do we put up in the sanctuary to see as power, as the sacred, as spiritual source? And it is shifting to us embodying, let's change our language, let's change what's up on the altar, let's change the image, let's talk about God as a genderless orbit, both gender entity. These are all things that are happening as new people are encountering the faith and really challenging the cultural inheritance that is not a white lineage, but rather the incorporation of all different types of things that we've experienced as indigenous people. So I think that there is a power. And there's a momentum of the Mormon Church growing and incorporating these people from different ethnic cultures and traditions. Because I think we never let go. Even if we want to say we're going to let go of our father's religion, we can't, because it's a part of who we are. And whether we acknowledge it or not is the question, but it's a part of what we carry. My body, I cannot look in the mirror and say I no longer participate in the traditions of my ancestors because I am my ancestors for the good and the bad of all of that. And so uncovering those stories and what I bring with me, me to the table, is a big priority in my work and in the things that I talk about or share or write about.

The Great Remembering and Healing from Scarcity

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:46:20] So yesterday at the Sunsong Conference, you talked about this great remembering and this word. Can you kind of explain to listeners your concept of remember?

Edyka Chilome [00:46:29] So I have this. I had this great privilege of meeting one of my favorite poets, Sunny Patterson, who came to Dallas, and she's the one who kind of shared this concept of. Of the root of language. Again, the power of language. One of my other teachers talked about the ways that we use spelling. Words are spells, right? And just to kind of invoke some of that magical language. But when we speak, and a lot of traditions, even Christian traditions, will say the power of the word, the power of speaking things into existence. So as someone who deals with words in spiritual spaces, really looking at the root of words is really important. So one of the things that stuck with me when Sunny Patterson shared was she talked about the root of remember to remember, to re. Put together to remember again, some part that is fragmented. So yesterday I took that and I really invoked this idea of when we remember our past, we are putting back the pieces of this puzzle. We are putting back the missing pieces of the conversations we find too difficult to have. So, you know, there's this reminder that we need to talk about the violence that the Mormon Church evoked. We need to also talk about even further what caused Euro Americans to migrate to this continent. The good and the bad and the ugly. What is the historical legacy that we're living now in this country, all of us that came from monarchies and abuses and. And violence and wars in Europe, because we all migration as a human condition and an innate human action that has been around since. I think our species has evolved to stand up and walk around. We have all been connected by the movement of our ancestors and the movements of our culture. And so we have to really remember that, to recognize that as different as we are, are, we were created by God to live on the same planet in this moment, as different as we are and as complex as we are, we have lineages that bring us back full circle to each other. And so when we remember that, when we take the time to really do that investigating work, not only academically and literally, but also spiritually and mentally and emotionally, we can remember our communities, remember ourselves. And I think that there's power in that because at the end of the day, we, you know, the Mormon traditions, in all Christian and all spiritual traditions, we want to be whole, we want to feel connected, we want to feel assured that we are loved, that we belong, that we have purpose. And so when we remember the narratives of our ancestors, all the ones, the forgotten, the good and the ugly and the bad ones, I think that that is the ultimate sacred spiritual work that we can do. But it's hard. It's not easy. Not all of us can hop on Ancestry.com and say, okay, let's remember everything. It takes each other. It takes conversations, it takes bridging cross communities and cross difference. It takes the courage to really look at where we are right now. We're in this still in a very white supremacy, heteronormative worlds, and it was not always like this. And I think that that's important to remember that we did not always live in a world where we were at odds with each other. We violently traumatized each other daily. And so when we look back at those times, what can we pull from that? What can we pull from our ancestors that might not look like Mormons? They might have looked like other types of traditions in Europe or other types of traditions in Africa and indigenous lands. So I think it's important that we

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:50:16] remember this idea of scarcity, that there's not enough resources, there's not enough love, there's not enough redemption. And that's built into Mormonism with this sort of exclusive heaven as well. But everything is scarce, and we must get what we can.

Edyka Chilome [00:50:33] And so my question is, where does that come from?

Edyka Chilome [00:50:38] Right? And it's.

Edyka Chilome [00:50:39] And it's. And how far back does it come from that? You know, it was such a desperation and such an urgency for white colonial settlers to come here and say, we have to have this.

Edyka Chilome [00:50:51] We.

Edyka Chilome [00:50:51] At all costs, we will go to war with the indigenous people here so we can own this land, so that we can build our home, so we can have what we need. I mean, I think for me, that looks like PDF ptsd. For me, that looks like survivors of war that had nothing that needed to come and find something for themselves. And I recognize those same patterns amongst my own community that fled, you know, El Salvador being a country that is ravaged to its root, that is completely looted at this point in time because of since colonization and waves of war, of neoliberal capitalist intervention that has made scarcity a reality for the indigenous people of El Salvador. And so, you know, with great angst and with great desperation, you come running across the border and you will send your kids by themselves to walk across that desert because the need is so great for you to have something, for you to have a home, for you to find stability again. And you will come here and you will buy into all of this white American, white Christian narrative and you will do at all costs what you need to do, even if it exhausts you, even if it means you have to work three jobs, you have to prove to your family that you have made it by buying this house in the suburbs and reaching a middle class status. And for me, those are all results of having everything taken away from you. And so, you know, if we're looking at kind of the colonial project and the colonial kind of culture, what is it that created that and that makes that at this point, a mode of existing? You know, now it's not even a response. It is now. This is what life is, but it's slowly falling. And we talk a lot about kind of this empire falling and crumbling because we have seen that in history, that when you build so far up and you get so far with this desperation of acquisition and power that you come down, you will tumble down, the cycles will break, bring you down. And so I think that, you know, different, you know, Trump will say that a lot of things of that's what's happening and that we need to prevent that from happening. A lot of white Americans that have the power of having this, this luxury and this constant desire to consume more luxury and power will say that, that it's all going to fall and that we need to protect it. And it gives them even more of a fire to protect the borders, to protect their power, to protect their tradition and their orthodox thinking. And so I think that there's a lot of undoing to recognize. Where do those wounds come from? How do we remember those parts of ourselves that we right now have no answers for? But I think that there needs, there is, you know, there is a starting point to all of this.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:53:28] Do you think that Mormonism or Christianity or the gospel has an answer to reconcile that Sort of fear of scarcity. Do you think that that exists?

Edyka Chilome [00:53:37] Certainly. And I think that the, you know, and I said this yesterday when I talked at the event, that when we are talking about finding answers for the transformation and the reconciling of the wounds in our worlds, I think it'll come from spirit and it'll come from the inheritance of spirituality, the good of all of that. But I think it'll be the responsibility of new young theologians that will do the work to unravel all of that and find the goodness in that. Because we also can't just cut all that off and say, oh, that didn't work. We're going to move on. Because that's not how it works. We are a product of our Father's choices and their religion, and we are our experience that comes from all the people behind us. So we have to do this navigating in the scriptures and in our sacred stories and in our traditions. We have to collect more things. We have to invite new lens, we have to invite new analysis, and we have to find the good in that. And I think it is there. And I think that if anybody is going to shift the paradigms of violence in our reality, it will be people of faith. It will be people that are already at least somewhat plugged into a higher source that is bigger than us as humans. Because I think that also that is a big American virtue, is for us to be so human centric when in reality we live on a planet and in a universe where life force is so much greater than what our role is on this earth. And I think that that is in the scriptures too. And I think we don't see that because again, the ones with power, the ones that have been allowed to read and write, the ones that have been allowed to create the history that remained and that was celebrated and that is still remembered in practice, had very specific intentions, politically and otherwise. And so for us as women or for us as people, people who don't consider ourselves intellectuals or academics, to go to the scriptures or tell the sacred stories, I think that is already a walking towards a transformation. And I tell some of the sisters that I talked to this weekend that felt like, oh, I don't blog because I didn't get an English degree, or I feel like I don't have the same capacity to write an intellectual analysis on feminism. It's like, well, sister, we need you for even more reasons. We need you to be the one to write or to tell your perspective or to tell your experience and why you feel that way because we need new stories. We cannot say the same stories and expect to have different answers. We need to retell the stories in different ways, reimagine, re envision. And so I think that it's really important for us to honor each other and honor the work we're doing, even though we don't fully agree. And that is something that I was talking about yesterday, even though we're not all fully on the same page or maybe people watching this episode will be like, I don't agree with any of the things that that girl was saying. But that we consider that even if you don't agree, new voices will be important in the transformation and the remembering. So I celebrate our young people and our babies and our women that are out here trying to do that work. So thank you, Lindsay, for being a part of that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:56:42] So I really appreciate you sort of taking the time and the energy to walk mostly white church through this, this process because I know that it's energy you don't have to expend. So I appreciate that. But one of the things that I, I'm hoping you'll do is share some of your poetry with us. And for those who are interested in more of what she has to say, you have this book. Do you want to talk about the book first, then we'll get to the poem.

Edyka Chilome Performs Original Poetry

Edyka Chilome [00:57:08] Yeah.

Edyka Chilome [00:57:08] So I, I've been writing for many years. I've been doing poetry professional for about six years and sharing in different communities. And so I took the opportunity last year to write my first book that was really supported by so many communities and so many people around me. And I'm so blessed for that. But my book is called she Speaks Poetry and you can find it on Amazon. She Speaks Poetry by Erica Chilomi. Or you can order it directly from me from my website, ericachilome.com and, and it's spelled E D Y K A C-H I L O M E dot com. Yeah, great. And this is a collection of

Edyka Chilome [00:57:51] my

Edyka Chilome [00:57:51] kind of prayers and intentions and testimonies around the radical power of love and this history of violence and my experience as being a part of an indigenous Mestiza diaspora. And then my kind of reflections of on a lot of the things that I've shared today of God and liberation and the radical transformation that we have to take and the radical inclusion that we have to consider in terms of our queer communities, of our gender non binary communities, of our trans communities, of our different people of color and different peoples from different histories. So I am going to read a poem that is similar to many of the poems in this book but did not make this this book. So this is kind of an exclusive sharing here and I'll read the poem. The poem is called A Poem as Prayer. A Poem as Prayer A Prayer as

Edyka Chilome [00:58:50] Poem how shall I proceed? Shall I put my hands together and bow my head before I refer to God and beg that he transformed into a reflection of me, Knowing that most days I pray simply to figure out a way to breathe and see a little bit more light in my gray, a little less rain in my day, a little more weight in my say when I choose to acknowledge that I have run out of answers, too tired to search and too scared to trust. But maybe, maybe if he were not a lord or a king but a survivor of race, maybe if he were a she and she blood once a month on that cross, I would feel a little bit more safe. And if her wrists were cut by the broken mirrors of her own humanity, I would feel okay because I would be assured that the great Divine understood my pain. And maybe if she were branded too, covered in tattoos, maybe if she had ink on her dark skin that reflected the violence she was born in and served as hieroglyphs and roadmaps to her truth. Maybe she was short and thick with her shoulders hunched over and her tailbone tucked in in order to detour attention, in order to avoid a mention that she was sex and that breasts and thighs were to be offered at their best force, taught the art of dress and impressed because her goal, her goal here was survival. Maybe if she woke up wondering if

Edyka Chilome [01:00:12] it was miracle or will that kept

Edyka Chilome [01:00:14] her from sitting still and helped her survive a cross that felt irreconcilable. Maybe if she could show me a way to live life a little less scary so I could have the courage to look into a stranger's eyes without

Edyka Chilome [01:00:26] the weight of 1 in 3 being

Edyka Chilome [01:00:28] raped every 15 seconds on my shoulders, without the fear of my younger sisters getting older and being given that strong woman cross when brother, cousin, father decide to show them how to take their clothes off, and when my mothers who don't know how to be mothers are too busy bending over and trying not to fall into the mercy of others who insist that she's not a part of the three that is supposed to make you believe that there is hope. Maybe, just maybe, God would be merciful enough to transform into Infinite Mary so that I could cope and I could spark up every day to understand the systemic murder of my spirit as an inspiration to keep writing that would be dope Because I have to believe that poems can be prayers and prayers can be poems and maybe, just maybe, maybe if I could clap loud enough at the end of this war song I would believe that we can speak into existence our own songs Because I need to believe we can speak into existence our own psalms. Maybe, just maybe, if you clap loud enough at the end of this war song I will believe we can speak into existence our own psalms Because I need to believe we can speak into existence our own psalms and that somehow my voice can interrupt the wrongs that I made that I am made to believe. Nail me to your core, Cross. What if God were reflections? What if God were trying to show us how to erase this idea of perfection? Then maybe my sisters would start eating and my brothers would stop bleeding and maybe we would all understand that God is just the courage to see that our complex stories are divine, that my words and pain are not just mine but del Pueblo of the people. And maybe I will understand a little bit more when they announce that God's people say Amen when the Church says Amen. See, we'd let it be but how long will we continue to not see that we have some things to work out before we are truly free. So brothers and sisters and all those in between, I sincerely hope, I sincerely hope, I sincerely hope that you can hear hear me.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:02:32] Thank you thank you so much for coming on today. And thank you John Dehlin and Mormon Stories for allowing this to happen.

Edyka Chilome [01:02:39] Thank you for the invitation. Great talking to you, Lindsay.

Guest [01:02:42] Always thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. To discuss this podcast with others, please check us out@mormonstories.org to join one of our 80 plus support communities across the globe. Click on the Support communities tab@mormonstories.org to keep this podcast alive. Please consider a tax deductible donation today by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org a big thanks to the Saber Rattlers for providing the music for today's episode. The Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by studiocase.com come come ye saints no

Guest [01:03:19] toil nor labor fees but with joy when you're away.

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