Protected people make policy. Unprotected people live with policy choices: Part 2/4
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
This is Part 2/4 of excerpts from When Church is Hard by Tyler Johnson.
Also see Part 1/4: “LGBTQ-affirming insights from When Church Is Hard”
I’ve thought a lot about this idea since I read it in Tyler Johnson’s book. He starts by quoting Peggy Noonan, a weekly columnist at The Wall Street Journal and former presidential speechwriter. Noonan said:
The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. …The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. …The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
I have thought about that often in so many contexts: those who make the rules aren’t the ones who have to live with them. It’s easy to make rules when other people pay the price.
Johnson then made this observation:
If our wards work the way they should (and we always have work to do better), the protected and the unprotected will be living, worshiping, and serving together—indeed, in a ward, neither such distinction should define anybody.
Ideally that means that the protected (those with power) are listening to the unprotected (those who have to live with the policy decisions made by those with power). It’s essential for EVERYONE to be listening to each other so that the protected and the unprotected come together to build Zion.
Yours in the good fight,
Marci