Just over one year ago, Thomas Jacob Sanford, a 40-year-old former U.S. Marine, drove his silver GMC Sierra truck into the side of a red brick meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan. It was a Sunday morning at about 10:30 a.m., and members of the Grand Blanc Ward were gathered inside the chapel participating in sacrament meeting. After impact, Sanford exited his truck, grabbed an AK-47 rifle, entered the church building, and opened fire on the congregants. In the chaos, he also used an accelerant to light the building ablaze. Police arrived within minutes, and after a brief exchange of gunfire, an officer shot and killed Sanford. 

Sanford appeared to be motivated by anti-Latter-day Saint bigotry, potentially exacerbated by mental illness and drug use. Four congregants were killed in the attack—two from gunshot wounds and two from the fire—and eight more were wounded. The meetinghouse itself was destroyed. Many victims were lauded as heroes, including two young congregants, both fourth-year emergency medicine resident physicians from nearby Henry Ford Genesys Hospital, who ran back into the burning building multiple times to help others escape. 

Within 48 hours of the attack, Utah resident and Latter-day Saint author Dave Butler, who has no connection to Grand Blanc, started a GiveSendGo fundraiser—not for the victims of the attack (there were already several of those), but for the shooter’s family. You see, Sanford left behind a wife and a young son with a rare genetic disorder that had required multiple surgeries and careful, expensive medical care. Donations flooded in, with many donors indicating that they were Latter-day Saints and that their faith inspired their donations. 

It would have been an extraordinary response to religious hatred even if the story ended there. It didn’t.

Eight weeks later, the BYU football team was scheduled to play the University of Cincinnati. As part of its Cougs Care initiative, which organizes service projects at each of the BYU football away game locations, the BYU Alumni Association held a coat drive with the NAACP that collected more than 600 coats for local children. In addition, The Church of Jesus Christ donated 27,000 pounds of food to Cincinnati’s on-campus Bearcats Pantry to support students facing food insecurity.

Jared Hicken, one of the heroic medical residents in Grand Blanc, and his wife Brandi attended the BYU football game at the University of Cincinnati. Brandi later recalled that after the attack, in which she, Jared, and their 5-year-old had all been wounded by gunshots or shrapnel, she was nervous to be publicly identified as a member of the Church. But she was excited for a “much-needed date night” with her husband, and wanted to “move on from the attack on our church.” She wrote, “We came. We smiled. We cheered. We enjoyed ourselves.” Until what has since become a familiar chant rang out from the student section: “F— the Mormons!” 

Twenty-seven thousand pounds of food. Hundreds of winter coats. Only two months and a few hundred miles away from a mass shooting and arson attack. And still, “F— the Mormons.”

In a 2022 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, only 15% percent of American respondents reported having a favorable view of Latter-day Saints, making them the lowest-rated religious group. Twenty-five percent of respondents reported an unfavorable view, with the remaining 59% indicating either a neutral rating or that they “[didn’t] know enough to say.”

Conversely, Latter-day Saints tend to view members of other faiths quite favorably. Fifty-four percent of Latter-day Saints expressed a favorable view of evangelical Christians, for example, while only 15% of Evangelicals expressed a favorable view of Latter-day Saints (and 27% viewed Latter-day Saints unfavorably). 

The bigotry that members of The Church of Jesus Christ face is nothing like what early Latter-day Saint ancestors faced. And many religious groups, both in the United States and abroad, still presently face serious safety threats and religious persecution. Fortunately, the horrific Michigan shooting was an anomaly, and the football chants, as nasty as they seem—well, we can probably just keep rolling our eyes. 

On the other hand, many Latter-day Saints may look at these events and wonder how we are supposed to respond. We could lament our neighbors’ misunderstanding. We could work harder to correct misconceptions. We could point to the 27,000 pounds of food and ask, What, exactly, can we do more?

But a year after Grand Blanc, here’s a different question to consider. What does our faith ask us when our neighbors don’t seem to like us very much?

A decade before the brutal Michigan attack, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught us about the cost—and blessings—of discipleship:

If you haven’t already, you will one day find yourself called upon to defend your faith or perhaps even endure some personal abuse simply because you are a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Such moments will require both courage and courtesy on your part.

Elder Holland did not counsel us to be passive. “Defend your beliefs with courtesy and compassion, but defend them,” he said. Religious bigotry isn’t harmless, and we can respond with more than niceness when it happens. We can correct falsehoods about our beliefs, insist that universities that host Latter-day Saints not allow their students to hurl profanities at us, and defend ourselves when we become targets of religious hatred. 

But even still, none of this releases us from the Christian obligation to love the people reviling us. Jesus Christ was unequivocal on this point: “Love your enemies … do good to them that hate you.” Why?

Sharon Eubank, director of Latter-day Saint Charities, once said of the Church’s humanitarian work, “We do this out of our faith in the love of Jesus Christ. We want to give evidence that we love God by loving our neighbors.” The good we are doing is not a transaction. We love the Lord our God, and that is enough. 

We do not stock a Catholic food pantry so that Catholics will think better of Latter-day Saints. Nor do we partner with Muslims on disaster relief efforts so they will defend us when someone attacks our faith. We do not give 27,000 pounds of food to university students in exchange for respectful behavior from their student section. We feed people because they are hungry. And if they don’t like us afterward? We feed them anyway. 

Religious service can easily become tangled up with our desire to be liked and understood. Latter-day Saints are human—we want to be liked, we want to be included. But Christian charity is not public relations work. The person receiving our love does not need to return it for that love to have been worth giving. 

But sometimes something interesting happens anyway.

Last year, Emma Simon, a Jewish student at Princeton University and a fellow with the American Jewish Committee, traveled to Salt Lake City as part of AJC’s Interreligious Mission. Simon came to Salt Lake knowing a little bit about our faith. She had spent weeks researching Church history, beliefs, and practices in preparation for the trip. In an article about her trip, she later explained that her feelings about our religious beliefs were “not simple. I am challenged by some of the political and social policy positions they take.”

But then she visited Welfare Square and the Church’s Humanitarian Center. And there, she encountered a religious community at work. “The amount of good the Church does is undeniable,” she later wrote. After her visit, she did not join the Church, nor did she change her beliefs on the conservative policy positions that the Church takes. But she did leave knowing us a little better.

I think sometimes we expect interfaith relationships to develop in one sort of way—we talk, we understand each other, we trust each other, and if all goes well, we cooperate. But sometimes that process goes backward. Sometimes we cooperate first. Catholic Charities of Oregon, for example, operates nine food pantries stocked with food from the Latter-day Saint bishops’ storehouse. Those pantries serve nearly 400 people each week. Latter-day Saint volunteers also work with Catholic Charities to resettle refugees, meeting newly arrived families at airports and helping prepare their apartments. Catholic Charities calls the two organizations “close partners.”

The Church has been working with Islamic Relief USA for more than two decades. In 2004 alone, the two organizations worked together to send millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Iraq, Sudan, and Bangladesh. They partnered again after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Islamic Relief later described the Church not merely as its oldest interfaith partner, but as its “oldest partnership.”

In Albuquerque, Catholic Charities runs a summer program for refugee families from Arab, Afghan, and African communities. Many of the families are Muslim. The program takes place in a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, with church members volunteering alongside Catholics. On many summer days, the building fills with cooking workshops, sewing classes, art classes, and people speaking different languages and practicing different faiths.

And in my favorite example: the Christmas before the Grand Blanc shooting, Detroit received its first Giving Machine. Using the machine, visitors could donate money toward:

• Zaman International, a Michigan-based Muslim nonprofit organization that supports women and children in extreme poverty. Money donated to Zaman went to healthy halal meals for local Muslim families in need, ESL instruction, winter coats for single mothers and their children, and refugee housewarming kits.
• Catholic Charities of Southeast Michigan. Giving Machine donations funded their Walking with Moms in Need program, providing critical resources, clothing, and basic necessities for mothers and infants. 
• Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County. Donations funded kosher meals for local Jewish families in need, emergency overnight shelter services, and gas cards for people who are newly employed after a period of unemployment.
• The Pope Francis Center, a support center in Detroit for the chronically homeless. Donations went to warm winter socks and boots, clean clothes and bedding, and warm shoes and bus passes. 

Nobody has to settle the nature of the Trinity before unloading a truck or agree about prophets before packing a box of food. It is actually liberating to have a problem outside of ourselves to solve together. Maybe we are approaching interfaith understanding backward. We assume that understanding must precede cooperation. But often cooperation produces familiarity, familiarity produces trust, and trust makes true understanding possible. It doesn’t always work. But sometimes.

After the Grand Blanc attack, we as Latter-day Saints truly had many friends who mourned with us as we mourned. Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and other religious communities condemned the violence and reached out with a hand of support. 

And then about six months later, another Michigan house of worship was attacked—Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. The FBI director described it as targeted violence against the Jewish community. 

Now it was our turn to mourn with them. At an interfaith Seder later shortly after the attack, Amy Sapeika of the American Jewish Committee’s Detroit office said that interfaith partners immediately reached out to her with calls, texts and emails expressing solidarity and condemning the attack, and she specifically identified Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc among those who reached out with comfort and offers to help. “We’re really grateful for their friendship,” she said.

No theological disagreements had disappeared, but instead of seeing each other as organizations with competing religious claims, they recognized each other as neighbors. 

Elder Holland said that “pure Christlike love flowing from true righteousness can change the world.” And sometimes we get to see that change. A Jewish college student comes to Utah skeptical of our beliefs and leaves with something new to think about. Catholics and Latter-day Saints with very different doctrines spend years side by side feeding hungry families. Muslims and Latter-day Saints find common ground as they support refugees coming to the United States to start a new life. 

And sometimes we will still get “F— the Mormons.” The Christlike love we give should not depend on what response we get. Because the better measure of interfaith service is not whether our neighbors understand us better when we are finished. It is whether we have loved them better. Sometimes understanding and friendship follow. Sometimes they don’t. 

Keep serving anyway.

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