A couple weeks ago, I was going to write a quick fun post asking whether, in a post-pandemic world, the church would start letting people wear masks to church Halloween parties.[fn1] After all, in the phased resumption of sacrament meeting, members can be encouraged to wear facemasks. And if at sacrament meeting, why not at Halloween?
To write the post, I did a quick Google search to see if the internet had any explanation of the origins of the church’s ban on masks. And you know what? If you Google “mormon no masks,” you get a lot of hits about the church’s mask-making activities and, right at the top, Elder Cook’s 2012 BYUI devotional titled, of all things, “Don’t Wear Masks.”
In his devotional, Elder Cook explains that masks allow us to disguise ourselves and to act out of character. He gives, as an example of why would shouldn’t wear masks (literal, of course, but I think his main point is more figurative), the hoods that members of the Ku Klux Klan wear. Those hoods allowed members of the KKK to hide their identities, and
hiding their identity and wearing a mask enabled them to participate in activities that they would normally have avoided. Their conduct had a terrible impact on American society.
Note that Elder Cook does not at any point argue that this is the origin of the church’s ban on masks. Like I said, while his example is literal, he seems to focus more on the figurative—mask as an excuse to act out of character. That hasn’t stopped some people from reading Elder Cook’s devotional as somehow an anachronistic explanation for a preexisting policy.
That’s clearly not why we don’t allow masks, and I don’t know the origins of the policy (though if you do, please feel free to mention it in the comments!), but 2020 provides some correctives to what we believed in 2012.
I mean, Elder Cook’s not wrong: masks allow us to disguise our identities and act out of character.[fn2] But that’s not all they do.
As we’ve learned over the last couple months, they allow us to protect and show our love for our neighbor. The masks we’ve been asked to wear provide very little protection for the wearer. But they protect people around us from our illness. And, to the extent enough of us wear masks, we can prevent exponential growth, avoiding future waves of disease even with less stringent lockdowns.
Masks—whether of the Spiderman costume type or the prevent-Covid-spread type—are uncomfortable and inconvenient. I get that. I agree. But they also allow us to show our love for neighbor—with the mildest personal inconvenience—and protect our economy and our homes.
So yes, Elder Cook was right in 2012 that one consequences of mask-wearing can be the ability to disguise ourselves and do things that we shouldn’t do. But 2020 has taught us that that’s an incomplete view of masks: they can also help us to follow the Second Great Commandment and show our love to our fellow people.
[fn1] Note that under the new Handbook, section 20.6.25 prohibits the church from sponsoring activities that “involve wearing masks, except in dramatic productions.”
[fn2] I’m actually researching the KKK right now for an article. Their hoods were meant to disguise them and to terrorize African Americans. They were also, however, performative, meant to send messages to Radical Republicans and Southern Democrats. And they also served as branding. They (the KKK and their hoods) were evil in every possible way, but they didn’t solely serve one purpose.