A thing I’ve noticed about griping about the church is that only white people do it. And, really, only a particular kind of white people. College educated, internet-using, well-to-do white members of the church are, almost exclusively, the only people who publicly gripe about the church and its teachings.

Someone might object: well, church members are overwhelmingly white, at least in North America. Of course most of the murmurers are going to be white too.

But the pattern holds in my ward, here in a big Canadian city, where only 40% of active members are white. And in my stake beyond that. I’m telling you, only white people gripe. Only white people who grew up in intact Latter-day Saint families, who aren’t working menial jobs, and who generally should have little to gripe about, gripe.

The Filipinos, for example, don’t gripe. I’m trying to picture a Filipino member complaining that the Mother’s Day service “is hard” for people, or raising their hand in Gospel Doctrine to explain that “we need” to be more accepting of such-and-such. I just … I can’t quite summon the image. All that comes to mind is cassava cake, hot dog spaghetti and coming on Saturdays to clean the church (but spending Sundays in the hallway with overactive kids).

I’m not trying to put nonwhite members on a pedestal: other groups have their own issues, and at the end of the day, white members still make up the backbone of the wards and stakes in North America.

But sometimes (allow me my own gripe about my pioneer-stock tribe here) I feel like strangling the member posting his or her eighty millionth e-gripe on Facebook: don’t you know what you’ve inherited? Don’t you know what living the doctrine did for your ancestors, and what you have because of it?? Don’t you know how precious these truths are, how fragile is our blessed and happy state??!!

But maybe the gripers are right. Maybe if we join the sexual revolution, no one will hate us anymore. Maybe no member will ever feel bad about their family situation again. Maybe we’ll still get to enjoy the blessings of our ancestors’ chastity. And maybe, once we’ve caught up to the Community of Christ in wokeishness, all the Filipinos will become bloggers and the Africans will get fancy arts degrees (at least then the liberals would talk to them).

But I suspect not.