Why choir member quitting due to Trump is following Mormon tradition

In what is quickly becoming a national trend, yet another performer has refused to participate in Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Joining the ranks of entertainers like Elton John, Andrea Bocelli and several Radio City Rockettes, Mormon Tabernacle Choir member Jan Chamberlain publicly announced that she would not take part in Trump’s ascension to the most powerful office in the land.

Officially resigning from the choir via a letter than she subsequently posted on Facebook, Chamberlain informed the LDS leadership that she could no longer belong to an organization that would risk “endorsing tyranny and fascism by singing for this man.”

“For me, this is a hugely moral issue,” she explained. “I simply cannot continue [in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir] with the recent turn of events. I could never look myself in the mirror again with self-respect.”

Chamberlain is not the only Latter-day Saint who’s objected to the choir’s decision to accept Trump’s invitation to perform on Jan. 20. On Dec. 26, church member Randall Thacker created a Change.org petition exhorting the LDS singers to withdraw from the inauguration.

“The thought of this choir and Mormonism being forever associated with a man who disparages minorities, brags about his sexual control of women, encourages intolerance and traffics in hate speech and bullying, was unacceptable,” Thacker explained in a public statement. “I immediately knew there were probably thousands of people who felt the same way, so I created the space on Change.org for like-minded Mormons and their friends to share their feelings.”

{mosads}At the time of this writing, more than 29,000 people — Mormons and non-Mormons alike — have signed Thacker’s petition.

Other Latter-day Saints, however, see nothing wrong with the church’s decision to have “America’s Choir” usher President-elect Trump into power.

“The choir’s participation continues its long tradition of performing for U.S. presidents of both parties,” LDS church spokesman Eric Hawkins announced. “We are honored to be able to serve our country by providing music for the inauguration of our next president,” choir president Ron Jarrett affirmed.

Responding to the uproar surrounding the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s involvement with the inauguration, Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox (R), himself a Latter-day Saint, tweeted, “this seems like one of the dumber controversies we’ve had.”

Cox’s LDS ancestors likely would have disagreed with him on this front. In the words of Thacker’s Change.org petition, “the Church’s participation will harm this spectacularly talented and beloved choir’s image.”

As I’ve previously written, the LDS leadership has now spent more than a century shaping its public image, adeptly recasting its church and its followers as wholesome model Americans after the Mormons’ polygamous period left them branded as a pack of savage, oversexed outlaws in the national imagination.

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir plays an ongoing role in this recuperative mission. If, as choir president Jarrett recently observed, “singing the music of America is one of the things we do best,” that’s because the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s primary goal has long been to do precisely that: to perform the Latter-day Saints’ unquestionably refined, unimpeachably American image on the national stage.

Singing for a man who seems categorically incapable of controlling his basest impulses hardly seems consonant with this objective.

Nor does the choir’s participation in Trump’s inauguration sit well with early Mormon women’s history.

During the last quarter of the 19th-century, many of these women — including several of Brigham Young’s own wives — became active players in the burgeoning women’s rights movement, joining forces with people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to fight for female suffrage and, beyond that, equality.

As difficult as it is to reconcile this proto-feminist stance with the intensely patriarchal nature of LDS polygamy itself, Mormon women joined organizations like the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, participated in events like the seminal World’s Congress of Representative Women and published one of the country’s first female suffrage newspapers, the Women’s Exponent.

In 1896, plural wife and medical doctor Martha Hughes Cannon even became the country’s first female state senator by beating her own husband for the seat. (Dr. Cannon ran as a Democrat, her husband as a Republican.)

“I get perfectly disgusted with womankind when I think how little independence there is among them,” an 1876 article in the The Woman’s Exponent, a Mormon publication, exclaimed. “It is my candid opinion that this would be a happier world if there were a few more independent women in it.”

As former choir member Jan Chamberlain takes the brave step of declaring her independence from President-elect Trump and all he stands for, I can’t help but think of women like Sen. Martha Hughes Cannon and her suffrage-seeking kin. As one young woman declared in The Woman’s Exponent in 1884, “we are not such meek, submissive creatures as you imagine we are.”

Listen up, Donald.

Mary Campbell, a lawyer and art historian, is a faculty member at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of “Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image.”

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.