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This first appeared in Daniel C. Peterson’s blog called Sic et Non on the Patheos website.

I have long thought that the temple and the Gulag are appropriate opposing symbols.

The Gulag — which, for me, represents the entire class of concentration camps, labor camps, extermination camps, death camps, or whatever you wish to call them — embodies the denial that human individuals have any intrinsic value. For Marxists, particular people are mere instantiations of classes, some of which need to be eliminated. For the National Socialists, specific individuals were nothing but representatives of approved or disapproved ethnic groups. Hitler, a social Darwinist, regarded humanity as a whole as no more than “a ridiculous cosmic bacterium” (ein lächerliches kosmisches Bakterium). For the totalitarians of the twentieth century, entire populations were to be “liquidated.” And, in the Gulag and at Auschwitz and in the Ukrainian terror-famine and in the Cambodian killing fields and, for that matter, under the blade of Madame Guillotine, they were. Brutally and remorselessly. Whole villages and towns were demolished, their records destroyed, their populations murdered, all human traces obliterated.

In stark but wonderful contrast, the temple represents a conviction that human individuals are eternal and of irreplaceable worth. They aren’t fungible. Ordinances are performed for particular people, by name. Not in batches. Families aren’t destroyed; they’re sacralized. We labor to preserve records of individuals and families, not to destroy them. We do research, sometimes at considerable cost and effort, sifting through the records that remain in order to identify our ancestors and others who have passed away. We do this so that we can act on their behalf, for their benefit. As I’ve said before, in many cases these people are being remembered, and their names are being spoken, for the first time in generations and perhaps for the first time in centuries. (Today, I was privileged to act in the temple on behalf of an ancestor of mine, Niels Rasmussen. He was born around 1778 in Odense, Denmark.) This is in dramatic and holy opposition to the work of the death camps. It is, in centrally important ways, a profoundly humanistic enterprise.