Sanctioned Hatred

The Peril of “Acceptable” Bigotry

Permission to say it plainly: our culture loves to congratulate itself on pluralism and tolerance, yet it still carves out safe zones for bigotry. This week’s headlines proved it again. A gunman rammed his vehicle into a church full of worshippers, opened fire, and then tried to burn the building before first responders stopped him. President Trump posted, “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America . . . . THIS EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE IN OUR COUNTRY MUST END, IMMEDIATELY!"

But an honest nation must ask itself: Would this particular tragedy have happened at all had the target not been a Mormon church? And what part did Christians themselves play—by fueling online hatred and “cult-bashing” rhetoric that inflamed, justified, and ultimately galvanized the perpetrator’s actions?

We live in a time of intense polarization, when Left and Right both weaponize the language of war. Political causes are moralized and elevated to holy crusades; people are not satisfied until they have not only defeated an opponent at the ballot box but also destroyed him, made everyone else hate him as disgusting, immoral, contemptible. Is this not what Jesus warned, “Because lawlessness will increase, the love of many will grow cold”?

I want to resist that chilling of the heart—in myself, my family, my congregation. I want to stand with those who refuse to be fueled by hate.

Our culture loves to congratulate itself on pluralism and tolerance, yet it still carves out safe zones for bigotry.

The Radicalization No One Talks About

Thomas Jacob Sandford, the gunman, was a decorated Marine. By all accounts, a predictable, reliable American. But radicalization is real—not just the kind that leads someone into a fringe religion, but the kind that transforms an ordinary person into a hater of a minority religious group.

According to emerging reports, Sandford spewed anti-Mormon rhetoric, calling them a dangerous cult, “the Antichrist,” and accusing them of supplanting Jesus. He believed the Mormon church was a threat to the future and that he had a moral duty to stop them. In a strange sense, it is not so different from Saul of Tarsus hunting down Christians before his Damascus road encounter.

Those who shriek “cult” and make it their mission to destroy minority faith expressions often reveal what they would do if they had power: imprison, ruin, eradicate. The stakes would still be ablaze with the blood of Christians—only now under a different pretext.

A “Special Dispensation” for Hatred

Thank God we live under laws that guarantee no establishment of religion and protect every faith to stand or fall on its own merits and fruits. Our culture discourages murderous hatred when directed at racial groups and even when directed at other religions such as Islam or Hinduism. But there is still a special carve-out for certain sects of Christianity.

Under the banner of “cult,” distortion, defamation, and contempt are fair play. Scripture is clear: “He who hates his brother is a murderer.” Hatred is not an end point but a progression. Left unchecked in the heart, it spews from the mouth; left uncurbed at the tongue, it moves through the hands and feet. Cain still walks among us.

Why People Hunger for Hate

Why do people seem to need someone to attack, blame, destroy? Because hatred is useful. In an immature mind that can only see itself as all good or all bad, hatred becomes the convenient way to project personal failure outward.

But there is another, deeper irony. The very mechanism our culture uses to marginalize non-conforming groups mirrors what it condemns. The “mainstream” prides itself on pluralism and tolerance—yet its respect is usually reserved for those who look like, live like, and believe like the majority. Those who differ are marked off as “other” and, under the label “cult,” made fair game for caricature, contempt, and defamation.

In other words, the broader culture behaves like a cult of its own: enforcing conformity, rewarding those who repeat its shibboleths, punishing the dissenters, and indulging its members in the delusion that their normal disappointments or conflicts are uniquely the fault of the out-group. Because the public’s dislike of the unlike makes lies about outsiders more plausible, slander sticks more easily.

This is herd mentality at scale—thinking outsourced to bigoted mouthpieces rather than owned by individuals willing to investigate for themselves. And history shows where it ends: whole societies externalizing their frustrations onto a despised minority until persecution becomes unthinkable no longer.

When “Cult” Becomes a Hunting License

Most of my readers will not have heard the following story of Sasha Krauss because it cuts against the fashionable narrative: it shows where “cult” smears, ex-member loathing, and respectable bigotry actually lead.

Sasha Krauss was 27—devout, gentle, a teacher and poet at the Lamp and Light Mennonite community in Farmington, New Mexico. On January 18, 2020, she stepped out to pick up Sunday-school books. Her car and keys were found at the church. Five weeks later, nearly 300 miles away, near Sunset Crater outside Flagstaff, Arizona, searchers found her body—face-down, wrists duct-taped, bludgeoned, and shot in the back of the head with a .22.

Investigators followed cell-tower pings and surveillance to a young Air Force airman: Mark Gooch. Mark and his two brothers had all been raised inside a strict Mennonite church that their parents had voluntarily joined. Later they walked away, and, instead of doing the inner work of self-examination, they externalized their resentments on the group that had shaped them. They became the quintessential ex-members—mocking, bitter, always rehearsing grievances about “the cult.” One of them even became a Virginia state trooper and bragged in texts of coughing into the faces of Mennonites he pulled over in hopes they would contract COVID and die. Together the three brothers formed a feedback loop of contempt, an infectious circle where “cultist” became their private slur and public justification.

Mark never met or knew Sasha; it didn’t matter. In his mind, she was part of “the cult,” and harm had to be brought somehow, some way. He drove seven hours to the Farmington church, not to worship, but to watch. After Sasha’s murder, he had his car detailed and tried to get the murder weapon hidden. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and theft. He is serving life without parole.

Why tell this? Because it is the straight-line consequence of what our culture keeps indulging: weaponized labels. Once you baptize a minority faith as “cult,” you grant moral permission to treat them as less than neighbors—less protected, less credible, less human. The label does the dehumanizing, and the dehumanizing does the rest. Former boys from inside the fold—angry, aggrieved, nursing grievances—learn to project their failures outward and seek redemption by punishing the people who once defined them. Call it “leaving the group” if you like; in too many cases, it curdles into a vendetta that needs a righteous mask. “Cult” supplies the mask.

Sasha’s murder is a warning. When the mainstream indulges cult-talk about nonconforming Christians, it mirrors the very cultish dynamics it condemns: policing dissent, rewarding those who repeat the shibboleths, punishing those who don’t. And when a minority faith is successfully othered, the distance between a smear and a trigger pull narrows.

Once you baptize a minority faith as ‘cult,’ you grant moral permission to treat them as less than neighbors—less protected, less credible, less human.

Sasha herself wrote at nineteen, “If I die young, think not the hours wasted I spent preparing for some future day. My God is not unrighteous to forget it; He will completely recompense someday.” Her words outlived the man who hated her people. But the lesson must outlive our news cycle: hatred armed with a holy label is still hatred. And when we normalize the slur—cult—we mint hunting licenses for the broken and the bitter.

Mainstream or Upstream

I don’t know if mainstream churches have ever watched the internet erupt in cheers when their founding pastor dies. Ours did: the slander syndicate hounding our congregation celebrated my father’s death in 2021. I don’t know if mainstream congregations have woken up to red swastikas painted across their property; our Homestead Heritage community has. I don’t know if mainstream churches have been hit with online threats of posses and guns after media portrayals cast them as criminals for exposing crimes; we have. I don’t know if mainstream churches have received letter after letter from an ex-member threatening to fill their cemetery with their children—but we did, until a sheriff’s arrest stopped it.

In short, I don’t know what it’s like to be “mainstream.” We’ve always been in a rougher stream—feeling the glares, reading the hatred, being screamed at in restaurants simply for belonging to a certain church. We grew up under the steady hostility of a determined few. Yet Jesus warned, “You will be hated by all men for My name’s sake.” Perhaps this is what He meant.

Disagreement without Destruction

From a Protestant evangelical perspective, there is almost nothing in Mormonism I personally agree with. I find much of indefensible. But God forbid I let doctrinal disagreement metastasize into hatred and hatred into defamation or destruction. That radicalization would be far worse than the “cult” I might be tempted to denounce.

Most Americans still instinctively distrust media filters and try to think for themselves; they often shrug off smears. But hatred activates the broken, the bitter, the angry—people looking for a scapegoat. That is what this projection is: scapegoating. It is easier to say, “It’s not my fault, it’s that group,” than to face our own inadequacies.

One hater uses a racial slur; another uses a religious slur—“cult.” Studies show the word “cult” engenders more loathing, fear, and contempt than any racial slur in common parlance today. It is every bit as dangerous. And we are cultivating a victimhood culture that demands someone to blame.

A Personal Illustration

I’ve seen this dynamic up close. Our own church has chosen an intentional way of life—educating our children differently, growing food differently, relating differently—not because we think we’re superior but because we want to reassert the gospel’s culture for our own souls and our children. Along the way, some have become disaffected.

One man, a talented attorney and former elder who chaired our church’s oversight board and finances, once raised his family here and signed the church’s checks. He loved our teaching, our precision, our covenant. But then came a convergence of crises—personal, midlife, and institutional. Instead of owning his part, he began to externalize blame: the board, the covenant, the leaders. If he had belonged to a mainstream church, there would have been no exotic target to project onto. But because we were distinct, we became the villain, the scapegoat that let him avoid his own failures.

He left in 2018 over what he claimed was a single doctrinal issue about swearing oaths. Seven years later, he accuses us of child abuse and links arms with a radical journalist to smear us. Bizarre, laughable—if it weren’t so dangerous. This is exactly what the Mormon Church has suffered for over a century: Christians turning theological disagreements into hatred and then acting shocked when someone follows that rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Hatred Is a Poison

Hatred is a convenient enticement for the weak but a poison we ourselves drink while imagining the other will die. It corrodes the mind, aborts personal growth, defines and controls the hater. He becomes obsessed with what he claims to reject.

God help us learn to disagree with respect. God help us set aside the labels and categories of hate—not only with regard to race but also to faith. Hell itself is the place where “the worm of blame never dies and the fires of hatred never ebb.” Some live in that hell already.

But, like Saul of Tarsus, we can be met by a light—not the false “enlightenment” of "seeing through" others, but the true illumination of seeing the scales of pride and blindness over our own eyes. Only then can we ask for prayer from those we once called enemies and realize we are all children of God. The blindness falls away. And we can live by love instead of hate.

Only then can we ask for prayer from those we once called enemies and realize we are all children of God.