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God does not leave His children to navigate mortality without help.

This idea practically screams from the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

We are given commandments. We are given the gift of the Holy Ghost. We are given scripture. We are given prophets and covenants and ordinances. We are given bishops and other leaders. 

There are also the gifts of the Spirit. In particular helping with this task is the gift of discernment. Discernment can loom large in Latter-day Saint culture. 

Discernment is a gift that helps us perceive reality in the light of the Spirit. Jesus demonstrated it frequently when he was able to perceive the true thoughts of those he came in contact with. 

It helps those it is given to distinguish truth from error, sincerity from performance, wisdom from impulse, and spiritual influence from counterfeit. It is not simply a gift for detecting danger; it can help us minister better, helping us perceive burdens, possibilities, and hidden goodness. 

Spiritual Gifts Are for the Body of Christ

Doctrine and Covenants 46 places discernment within a broader theology of spiritual gifts. The Lord teaches that gifts come from God “for the benefit of the children of God.” It is listed broadly among the gifts that can be given.

The same section also specifically includes that this gift is given to bishops so the Saints are not misled by false claims of spiritual gifts. 

Discernment is not introduced as a private superpower. It is part of the Lord’s effort to bless, order, protect, and edify the Church.

Paul teaches a similar principle in 1 Corinthians 12. Spiritual gifts are distributed across the body of Christ. No single member possesses the whole body’s wisdom, and no single gift exhausts the Spirit’s work. That means discernment is best understood not as an isolated talent possessed by a few, but as one part of a larger divine economy in which God blesses His people through many members, many gifts, and many forms of inspired service.

Discernment is framed to be about service in building the kingdom of God. It is given so the body of Christ can be protected, guided, humbled, and healed.

Discernment Is Broader Than Detecting Evil

Elder David A. Bednar, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has offered one of the most helpful modern explanations of the gift. Drawing on earlier teachings, he describes discernment as operating in four major ways. 1) It can help us detect hidden error or evil in others. 2) More importantly, it can help us detect hidden error or evil in ourselves. 3) It can help us find concealed good in others. 4) And it can help us find concealed good in ourselves.

That four-part framework is crucial.

Many cultural conversations about discernment focus almost entirely on the first function: detecting what is wrong with someone else. But Elder Bednar’s description gives us a much richer and more Christian account.

Discernment may help a parent sense that a child’s anger is really fear. It may help a Relief Society president recognize that a sister’s distance is not indifference but exhaustion. It may help a bishop perceive that a confession needs less interrogation and more mercy. It may help a missionary see spiritual hunger beneath defensiveness. It may help a disciple recognize that his own “righteous concern” is actually pride.

The highest form of discernment may not be the ability to expose people. It may be the ability to see them truthfully enough to call forth their better selves.

That is a profoundly Christlike gift.

Christ saw hypocrisy, but He also saw faith. He saw sin, but He also saw repentance. He saw Peter’s denial, but He also saw Peter’s future. He saw Zacchaeus in a tree and called him into a transformed life. He saw the woman taken in adultery as a soul to be rescued.

Discernment, in this sense, is not merely suspicion sharpened by religion. It is perception purified by charity.

Discernment and Judgment

The classic biblical image of discernment may be Solomon’s prayer for “an understanding heart.” Solomon did not ask to become omniscient. He asked for wisdom to judge rightly between good and bad. Discernment is tied to judgment, humility, and stewardship.

The Church’s current Handbook uses similar language when speaking of bishops and stake presidents. It says that, in their role helping members repent, these leaders are blessed with the spiritual gift of discernment, which helps them “discern truth, understand a member’s heart, and identify his or her needs.”

That is a meaningful promise. Bishops and stake presidents are not merely administrators. They are called and set apart to serve as judges in Israel. In that role, they may receive spiritual help beyond their own natural insight.

A bishop who discerns well may be better able to answer the question “What does this child of God need to come closer to Christ?”

Discernment Can Grow

Discernment is a spiritual gift, but like most spiritual gifts, that does not mean it bypasses ordinary faithful effort.

Bednar connects discernment with being “quick to observe”—the capacity to notice and obey. In another teaching on revelation, he explains that some revelation comes suddenly, like light filling a dark room, while the more common pattern is gradual, like the slow increase of light at sunrise.

In my experience, that is often how discernment works in real life. 

Sometimes a bishop, parent, missionary, or friend may receive a sudden prompting. A question comes to mind. A name appears in prayer. A warning feeling interrupts an ordinary moment. These experiences of direct and sudden discernment are real, but are not universal or to be expected at every moment. 

Discernment often develops more quietly. It comes through listening over time. It comes through knowing the scriptures, asking better questions, noticing patterns, and learning from prior mistakes. For leaders, it can grow through studying the Handbook or honoring confidences.

A leader who listens carefully is not relying less on revelation than one who waits for an unexpected impression. A ward council that gathers information, counsels together, and prays over real people is not replacing revelation with process. It may be creating the conditions in which revelation, or spiritual discernment, can be recognized.

Discernment Belongs to Councils

One of the most important correctives to an overly narrow view of discernment is the doctrine of councils.

In a worldwide leadership training discussion, fellow apostle Elder M. Russell Ballard taught that no one person knows all the answers to every question and that councils allow leaders to draw on inspiration from various members. Bednar added that it is a mistaken notion that every element of ward revelation must come through the bishop. By virtue of his keys, the bishop directs and affirms, but he does not need to receive “every jot and tittle” of revelation himself. He also observed that discernment operates more effectively when a presiding officer listens rather than dominates.

The doctrine of discernment taught by these leaders is a mature and deeply grounded one. The gift of discernment works best when joined to humility, councils, and the gifts of others.

The Myth of the Magical Bishop

In some Latter-day Saint conversations, discernment has been imagined in a way that is much narrower, more automatic, and more dramatic than the scriptures require or even imply. This expectation shows up both among some believing members and among some critics of the Church.

The assumption goes like this: if bishops and other leaders have the gift of discernment, then they should be able to detect hidden sin, deception, danger, or unworthiness with perfect reliability. Under that assumption, every missed warning sign becomes evidence that the gift is not real.

There is an assumption that the only way for the Church to be true is for no bishop to ever miss anything. This is not a straw man. It is a recognizable criticism that proliferates in spaces where people have become disillusioned with the Church, perhaps in part because they expected something more like the magic of Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth or Professor X’s telepathy than the spiritual gifts of the New Testament. 

Similar questions arise in pastoral and abuse contexts. If God can provide discernment in some cases, why doesn’t he provide it every time it could help alleviate pain or prevent deception?

These concerns deserve empathy. They often come from pain. But they also reveal a misunderstanding of the gift.

A grounded Christian understanding of discernment does not require bishops to be miraculously perfect. It does not treat a calling as a guarantee of constant supernatural detection. It does not make revelation a substitute for confession, evidence, councils, law, policy, or the moral responsibility to speak and act.

The magical version says, “If God is involved, the bishop should just know.”

The Christian version says, “Because God is involved, the bishop should pray, listen, counsel, study, ask, follow the Handbook, protect the vulnerable, receive correction, and seek the Spirit.”

Those are very different models.

A Better Practice

A better doctrine of discernment leads to better practice.

For members, it means we should not outsource honesty to a leader’s supposed ability to detect truth. A person confessing sin should tell the truth because discipleship requires truthfulness, not because the bishop might catch him. A person who needs help should not assume, “If God wanted the bishop to know, he would know.” Sometimes the Spirit prompts a leader. Sometimes the Lord expects us to speak.

For bishops and stake presidents, it means spiritual impressions should be received humbly. The Handbook itself makes this clear. In matters involving serious sin, a bishop or stake president may receive promptings, but if a member denies an accusation, “a spiritual impression alone is not sufficient” to hold a membership council. Leaders are instructed to gather appropriate information and avoid unlawful or inappropriate methods.

That is not a lack of faith in discernment. It is disciplined faith in discernment. It is realizing that when you learned in third grade that multiplication makes numbers bigger, and then learned in fifth grade that you can multiply by fractions, no one was lying to you; the full reality is just more nuanced than you learned on the first pass. 

If there was an example where you wish the gift of discernment had been present, but it wasn’t, that does disprove a simplistic version of the gift of discernment, but it can help you move to a more mature, fuller understanding of how gifts of the Spirit work. 

Seeing as Christ Sees

The gift of discernment is one of the great gifts of the Spirit because discipleship requires more than eyesight.

We need to distinguish spiritual light from counterfeit light. We need to recognize our own self-deception. We need to see hidden goodness in people we are tempted to dismiss. We need to understand when correction is needed and when mercy is needed. We need to know when to speak, when to listen, when to wait, and when to act.

Bishops need that gift. So do parents. So do all of us. But we need discernment not because leaders are flawless, but because none of us are. Discernment is not merely the power to see what is wrong. It is the grace to see more nearly as Christ sees.

The post The Discipline of Spiritual Sight appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints find themselves in a most unusual position. We believe in God, the Eternal Father. We believe in Jesus Christ, accept his gospel, acknowledge him as Savior, Lord, God, and King. We look to him for forgiveness of our sins and declare that salvation comes in and through his name and in no other way (Philippians 2:9-11). We strive to live our lives according to his example and teachings and are committed to the fact that the depth of our Christianity is most evident, not in theological gymnastics, nor in a received vocabulary, but rather in the way we treat other men and women. We exercise hope in the immortality of the soul, a belief that we will live again after death, because Jesus himself rose from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). And yet, interestingly, many in Christendom declare that the Latter-day Saints are not Christian.

Reasons for Exclusion

Non-acceptance of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Perhaps more than any other reason, Latter-day Saints aren’t considered to be Christian because of our non-acceptance of the post-New Testament creeds and theological formulations concerning Christ and the Godhead, beginning with the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Latter-day Saints do believe there are three members of the Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that each of the members of the Godhead possesses all of the attributes of Godliness in perfection; and that the love and unity that exist among these three Persons is of such magnitude that they constitute a divine community that is often referred to in the Book of Mormon as “one eternal God” (see 2 Nephi 31:21; Alma 11:44; 3 Nephi 11:27, 36; 28:10; Mormon 7:7). 

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland stated: 

We believe these three divine persons constituting a single Godhead are united in purpose, in manner, in testimony, in mission. We believe Them to be filled with the same godly sense of mercy and love, justice and grace, patience, forgiveness, and redemption. I think it is accurate to say we believe They are one in every significant and eternal aspect imaginable except believing Them to be three persons combined in one substance, a Trinitarian notion never set forth in the scriptures because it is not true …

It is not our purpose to demean any person’s belief,” Elder Holland affirmed, “nor the doctrine of any religion. We extend to all the same respect to their doctrine that we are asking for ours. (That, too, is an article of our faith.) But if one says we are not Christians because we do not hold a fourth- or fifth-century view of the Godhead, then what of those first Christian Saints, many of whom were eyewitnesses of the living Christ, who did not hold such a view either?

Were they not Christians?

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pray to God the Eternal Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Ghost; we acknowledge the Father as the ultimate object of our worship (John 5:19, 26; 7:16; 14:28; D&C 20:19) and confess the Son of God as our Lord and Redeemer, our one and only hope for deliverance from sin and death in this world, as well as our glorious hope for  eternal life in the world to come. We teach of the Holy Spirit as the Messenger of the Father and the Son, the Revealer of the mind and will of God, and the Sanctifier, the means by which filth and dross are burned out of the human soul as though by fire. We are encouraged and charged by our leaders to seek the constant companionship of the Spirit, to attend to its promptings, to follow its lead.

We baptize people “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (3 Nephi 11:23-26; D&C 20:73-74). And, for that matter, the highest ordinance or sacrament within our Church, eternal marriage, received only in the temple, is performed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In short, the Latter-day Saints live and move and have their being by and through the members of the Godhead; ours is a lived rather than a spoken or creedal connection to these holy beings. 

Scripture Beyond the Bible

Another reason for the exclusion of Latter-day Saints from the category of Christian is because we do not believe in the sufficiency of the Bible. In point of fact, to state that the Bible is the final word of God—more specifically, the final written word of God—is to claim more for the Bible than it claims for itself. We are nowhere given to understand that after the ascension of Jesus and the ministry and writings of those first century apostles, that revelations from God that would eventually take the form of written scripture and thus be added to the canon, would cease. As Joseph Smith taught, one would need to have received a modern revelation in order to know for certain that there will be no more revelation beyond the Bible.

So why was the canon of scripture closed? Emeritus Professor Lee M. McDonald, an Evangelical Christian scholar, posed some fascinating questions relative to the present closed canon of scripture. “The first question,” he writes, “and the most important one, is whether the church was right in perceiving the need for a closed canon of scriptures.” McDonald also asks: 

Did such a move toward a closed canon of scriptures ultimately (and unconsciously) limit the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the church? More precisely, does the recognition of absoluteness of the biblical canon minimize the presence and activity of God in the church today? … On what biblical or historical grounds has the inspiration of God been limited to the written documents that the church now calls its Bible?

While McDonald poses other issues, let me refer to his final question: “If the Spirit inspired only the written documents of the first century, does that mean that the same Spirit does not speak today in the church about matters that are of significant concern?”

Indeed, we might ask: Who authorized the canon to be closed? Who decided that the Bible was and forevermore would be the final written word of God?  Why would one suppose that the closing words of the Apocalypse represented the “end of the prophets”? Latter-day Saints find themselves today in a hauntingly reminiscent position relative to the continuing and ongoing mind and will of God. Is ours not the same basic message that Jesus and Peter and Paul and John delivered to the unbelieving Jews of their day—that the heavens had once again been opened, that new light and knowledge had burst upon the earth, and that God had chosen to reveal himself through the ministry of his Beloved Son and his ordained apostles?

Let’s be clear on this matter: no branch of Christianity limits itself entirely to the biblical text in making doctrinal decisions and in applying biblical principles. Roman Catholics turn to scripture, to church tradition, and to the magisterium or teaching office in the church for answers. Protestants, particularly Evangelicals, turn to linguists and scripture scholars for their answers, as well as to post-New Testament church councils and creeds. This seems, at least in my view, to be in violation of Sola Scriptura, the clarion call of the Reformation to rely solely upon scripture itself. In fact, there is no final authority on scriptural interpretation when differences arise, which of course they do regularly.

 “When [traditional Christians] accuse Mormons of not believing the Bible,” Professor Stephen Robinson has written, “they usually mean that we do not believe interpretations formulated by postbiblical councils. If [traditional Christians] are going to insist on the doctrine of sola scriptura [scripture alone] … then they ought to stop ascribing scriptural authority to postbiblical traditions.”

Would the early Christians who had for decades had access only to the Gospel of Mark (considered by most Biblical scholars to be the first Gospel written) have considered the deeper spiritual realities set forth later in the Gospel of John to be a portrait of “a different Jesus”?  Hardly. Thus the current mantra of “Latter-day Saints worship a different Jesus” is a sad, misguided, and too often malicious misrepresentation of the way things really are. Latter-day Saints clearly worship the historical Jesus, the Christ of the New Testament—the man who was born in Bethlehem, lived and ministered during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, functioned under the oversight of Caiaphas (Jews) and Pilate (Romans), gave his life as a sacrificial offering to atone for the sins of humankind, and rose from the grave in glorious resurrected immortality. That there may be differences on certain points of theology is not unimportant, but it does not merit the misleading concept that Latter-day Saints somehow worship a “different Jesus.” Supplementation of the Bible is clearly not the same as contradiction of the Bible.

One wonders whether modern conservative Christianity may unwittingly have created a type of double standard in terms of (a) what is required to be saved, and (b) what it takes to be a Christian. 

In the New Testament and at the time of Paul’s and Silas’s miraculous release from prison, the Philippian jailer asked the question of questions: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And [the apostles] said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Paul wrote to the Roman Saints that “if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation … For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” 

Could it be, then, that a Latter-day Saint who professes total faith in and reliance upon Jesus Christ and who seeks in gratitude to keep his commandments, can be saved but at the same time not qualify to be called a Christian? That seems strange at best.

What Kind of a Christian?

Sadly enough, the one feature and facet of Christianity with which too few seem to concern themselves is what might be called orthopraxy—how we act, how we live out our Christian faith. Jesus charged his disciples: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” In assessing whether a man or woman is a true follower of the Savior, a Christian, we might ask: How does this person treat others, especially those who believe or act differently? Is the manner in which a person presents the gospel message such that the gospel may be perceived as “good news”?

Is this person’s speech and interpersonal relations such that people feel welcomed and appreciated, rather than spurned and rejected? To what extent does this person’s faith community feed the hungry, care for the poor, respond swiftly to natural disaster, or otherwise involve itself and its members in extending and disbursing Christian charity? This is how the first century saints were known and identified, and it is today a pretty persuasive evidence of the depth of one’s Christianity. The age-old question is still poignant and haunting: “If you were arrested and were to be tried for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

The fact is, no mortal man or woman is in a position to judge, to discern and perceive the depths of another human soul. No one of us has within his or her grasp the data, the delicate details, to so determine. C. S. Lewis, the beloved Christian writer and defender of the faith, a man whose focus on “mere Christianity” has made him a favorite of millions, declared: “It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and indeed are forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense … When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.” 

What Exactly is a Christian?

A Christian is one who is a follower of Jesus. No one of us has the power or right to look into the hearts of men and women and discern the reality of their Christianity or the depths of their commitment to the Son of God. Faith is a personal matter and is really between that person and God. What then are some standard definitions of a Christian, put forward by more traditional Christians?

From the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary: “A believer in the religion of Christ; professor of his belief in the religion of Christ; one who … studies to follow the example, and obey the precepts, of Christ.”

From The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: “A member of a particular sect using this name”; a civilized human being; a decent, respectable person.”

From the Harper’s Bible Dictionary: “Christian’ is the term that was increasingly applied to Jesus’s followers in the late first and early second centuries.”

From the Holman Bible Dictionary: “an adherent of Christ; one committed to Christ; a follower of Christ.”

In the Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms: “a name applied originally in Antioch to followers of Jesus Christ (Acts 11:26) and now used to designate those who believe in Jesus Christ and seek to live in the ways he taught.”

From The Amsterdam Declaration (2000): “The word Christian should not be equated with any particular cultural, ethnic, political, or ideological tradition or group. Those who know and love Jesus are also called Christ-followers, believers and disciples.”

Some friends of other faiths have suggested to me that it appears that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is seeking to move into “the mainstream of Christianity.” To be sure, Latter-day Saint leaders have encouraged members of the Church to get to know their neighbors better; to be more involved in community, civic, and political affairs; to show greater love, acceptance, and tolerance for those of other faiths; and, in general, help the world to better understand us. In addition, our Church is seeking to be better understood, to teach our doctrine in a manner that would (a) allow others to see clearly where we stand on important issues, and (b) eliminate misperceptions and avoid misrepresentations.

To be honest, it would be foolish for Latter-day Saints to stray from their moorings and seek to blend in with everyone else in the Christian world. People are joining our Church in ever-increasing numbers, not because we are just like the Roman Catholics or the Greek Orthodox or the Baptists or the Methodists or the Presbyterians or the Anglicans down the street. These people choose to leave their former faith and be baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of our distinctives; our strength lies in our distinctive teachings and lifestyle. In that spirit, President Gordon B. Hinckley said:

 Those who observe us say that we are moving into the mainstream of religion. We are not changing. The world’s perception of us is changing. We teach the same doctrine. We have the same organization. We labor to perform the same good works … They are coming to realize what we stand for and what we do.

Joseph Smith once observed: 

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

 There is too much at stake in the world today for God-fearing people to spend their time and energies attacking, belittling, or misrepresenting those who choose to believe differently. Jesus certainly called us all to a higher standard than that. What was his plea in prayer for his followers only hours before his sufferings and death? “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”  

The post Latter-day Saints and the Christian World appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Dear Mayor Hubbard,

We write to you not as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nor on behalf of it, but as members of that church scattered across the country who have watched the Fairview temple controversy with growing concern. We know municipal leadership is hard. We know neighbors can disagree in good faith. We have often worked with our neighbors to get temples approved in our communities. We know growth can bring friction, and that public officials often inherit tensions they did not create. We also know that the language leaders use can either heal a community or quietly inflame it.

That is why your renewed request that the Church voluntarily lower the Fairview Texas Temple steeple deserves a candid response, not from the Church, but from its people. The town approved a 120-foot steeple more than a year ago; construction is now underway; and your latest appeal asks the Church to reopen what had already been mediated, compromised, approved, and begun.

The Church could have made this a courtroom fight from the beginning. It could have pressed for the original plan, with a steeple reported at roughly 174 feet—nearly 50% taller than the design now approved. Instead, after mediation, it reduced the project to the 120-foot steeple now under construction. The Church also accepted a slew of other concessions as part of a “neighborly” agreement. The concessions were not trivial. They were attempts to recognize your priorities and work with you. 

So when, after all that, you suggest that the “neighborly” thing would be still another reduction, many of us hear something more troubling than a plea for harmony. We hear a public official redefining neighborliness as surrender. We hear an approved agreement treated as merely the latest opening bid. We hear a handshake being turned into a pressure campaign.

That is not a compromise. It is a way of poisoning the well. It says to the public: if the Church builds what your town approved, then the Church has chosen legalism over love, rights over respect, height over harmony. But the Church already compromised. Fairview already approved. Construction already began. At some point, “please compromise” stops sounding like reconciliation and starts sounding like bad faith.

Nor is it serious to argue that because the Church has built smaller temples or steeples elsewhere, it must therefore build this temple smaller too. A smaller building in one city is not a perpetual promise never to build a larger one. Fairview’s own records show that religious-facility heights have historically been handled case by case, including approval of a 154-foot bell tower for Creekwood United Methodist Church. We noticed that distinct treatment. 

We understand that change is hard. Fairview sits in a region that is changing quickly. The Census Bureau reports that Dallas-Fort Worth grew 11% since 2020, with especially significant growth on the metro’s outer edges. Four of the country’s five fastest-growing cities are small cities in the DFW area. Latter-day Saints are part of that growth, too. The Church has tens of thousands of members in North Texas, and we need temples to serve them. Perhaps the character of Fairview that needs to be preserved is how you treat everyone in your city. Perhaps treating your neighbors of different faiths like they belong is the character that should be preserved. We’re not intruders. We’re neighbors. 

You can still be the neighborly one here. You can say, “We disagreed. We debated. We mediated. We both gave a little. We approved. And now we will honor what was approved.” That’s the neighborly thing to do. And mayor, if you don’t stop this passive-aggressive campaign, perhaps it’s you who’s chosen not to be neighborly. 

The Church is building the temple Fairview approved. It is not unneighborly for us to ask you to honor that.

Respectfully,

C.D. Cunningham

The post An Open Letter to the Mayor of Fairview, Texas appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

But today it has taken on a more bureaucratic feel. The old “UFO” has become the “UAP,” an unidentified anomalous phenomenon. The phrase feels less theatrical, but the fascination is the same. Americans still want to know whether the strange lights in the sky are drones, balloons, sensor errors, secret aircraft, or something stranger.

But while these conversations have historically been sidelined as conspiracy theories that serious people don’t engage in, that has changed. Former President Barack Obama recently made headlines for saying he believes aliens are real. Congress held public hearings on UAPs, including a 2024 hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” followed by continued congressional requests for records and video files in 2026. NASA convened an independent UAP study team and concluded that the subject deserves a rigorous, evidence-based scientific approach. Since 2010, up to 70 planets have been discovered that are in the “habitable zones” of their star systems. The 2025 documentary “The Age of Disclosure” included interviews from military pilots, Department of Defense officials, Congressional Representatives and Senators, a Former Director of National Intelligence, and the Secretary of State. And the Pentagon began its release of UFO files. 

The sudden official sheen to this conversation has intensified the cultural imagination. While there have been no likely or definitive conclusions that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth, the question is being taken seriously in a way it never has before.

Aliens and Religion

A 2021 Pew survey found that just over half of Americans said military reports of UFOs were probably or definitely evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. Religious Americans were somewhat less likely than the unaffiliated to say intelligent extraterrestrial life exists. 

For many, the religious question is obvious: What would happen to faith if we discovered we are not alone?

At the same time, the most careful surveys complicate the popular assumption that religion would collapse under the weight of alien life. Ted Peters’ “ETI Religious Crisis Survey” tested the idea that contact with extraterrestrial intelligence would produce a religious crisis, and found that most religious respondents did not expect their own tradition to collapse. Interestingly, religious people were often less worried about their own faith than secular respondents were about religion in general. In other words, the people most confident that aliens would destroy religion were often people outside religion looking in.

But if intelligent life exists elsewhere, how could aliens and religion fit together? How would faith survive this change to our paradigm of life and creation?

I want to explore that question within the context of my own tradition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In my view, Latter-day Saints are unusually well-suited to think about the possibility of alien life. That does not mean we should credulously accept every sensational claim or canonize every blurry Pentagon video. Our faith does not depend on crashed saucers, whistleblower testimony, or the latest congressional hearing. But, if extraterrestrial life were discovered—microbial, animal, or intelligent—it would not require Latter-day Saints to rebuild their theology from the foundation up. In many ways, the foundation is already there.

Latter-day Saint scripture has never pictured creation as a small, sealed human stage with Earth alone under the eye of God. It teaches “worlds without number,” heavenly parents, faraway stars, and an infinite atonement. The Restoration certainly did not shrink the Christian cosmos. 

A Cosmos That is Already Full

The first reason Latter-day Saints need not panic over the possibility of extraterrestrial life is simple: our scriptures already teach that God’s creations extend far beyond this earth.

In the Book of Moses, Moses is shown a vision of the earth and its inhabitants and then learns that God has created “worlds without number” through the Only Begotten. The scripture does not explicitly state, but heavily implies, that many of these worlds were inhabited by children of God (and the chapter summary states that). It implies that these many worlds are part of God’s plan to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of His children.

Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) section 76 is even more direct. In Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon’s vision of the degrees of glory, they testify that by Jesus Christ “the worlds are and were created,” and that “the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” This is the most direct reference in Latter-day Saint scripture to inhabitants of multiple worlds. It does not merely say that God made stars, planets, or matter. He made inhabitants. And it places those inhabitants in a familial relationship to God. D&C 93 similarly teaches that worlds were made by Christ. 

D&C 88 describes that Christ is the light that is the sun, moon, stars, and earth, and the light that “fills the immensity of space.” Scripture then teaches that God created other worlds, they have inhabitants, those inhabitants are children of God, and it is Christ’s light that is on all of them.

It doesn’t say what our relationship is or will be with those inhabitants of other worlds. 

Modern Church leaders have repeatedly returned to this theme. Late Church President Russell M. Nelson taught that the earth is only one of many creations over which God presides, and he cautioned that our knowledge of the Creation is limited and will be augmented in the future. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has used the vastness of the universe to emphasize not human insignificance, but divine love; the God who created worlds without number still knows and values His children.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell, who also served in the Quorum of the Twelve, made the same point. He taught that the Restoration explicitly affirms a plurality of worlds and that God’s universal majesty does not make Him less personally involved in our individual lives. He said, “How many planets are there with people on them? We don’t know. There appears to be none in our own solar system, but we are not alone in the universe. … God is not the God of only one planet!”

These scriptural statements, and the interpretation from Church leaders, establish a basic theological posture. Latter-day Saints do not approach the universe assuming that human beings on Earth are the only rational creatures God has ever loved.

Creation is Not Random 

Latter-day Saint theology does not treat these worlds as mere divine trophies. The God of Moses creating these many worlds does not do so merely to display his power. He creates because He is a Father. This is the center of Moses 1. The scale of creation makes divine parenthood feel inexhaustible.

This is crucial for thinking about alien life. If there are living organisms elsewhere, they are not theological clutter. They are part of creation. If there are intelligent, morally accountable beings elsewhere, they are not an embarrassment to Christian doctrine. They would be evidence that God’s family is as large as we imagined.

Abraham 3 gives Latter-day Saints a distinctive vocabulary for this question. It speaks of intelligences, of differing degrees of intelligence, and of God as greater than them all. Whatever else this passage means, it resists the idea that human life is a late accidental spark in a meaningless universe. Intelligence, agency, hierarchy, progression, and divine governance are built into reality. 

But none of these possibilities would make God smaller. 

Are They Children of God?

The hard theological question is not whether extraterrestrial life could exist. In Latter-day Saint thought, it clearly can. The harder question is what kind of life it would be. 

Latter-day Saint theology distinguishes between different forms of life. Plants, animals, mortals, and resurrected beings do not occupy the same moral or salvific category. So if life exists elsewhere, the first theological question would not be “Are they aliens?” It would be, “Are they God’s spirit children?”

D&C 76 provides the strongest reason to believe that at least some inhabitants of other worlds are indeed sons and daughters of God. President Joseph Fielding Smith, a former prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ, similarly taught that the Father, through His Only Begotten, created worlds without number and that these worlds are peopled by His spirit children. 

That does not require us to assume that every organism in the cosmos is spiritually equivalent to human beings, but it implies we should be open to the idea that some are. It also doesn’t answer whether other worlds are populated now, were populated in the past, or will be populated in the future. But it does mean that Latter-day Saints already have a category for non-earthly persons who belong to the family of God. 

This is where Latter-day Saint theology differs from a thin human exceptionalism. We do believe human beings are made in the image of God. We do believe this earth has sacred significance. We do believe Jesus Christ was born, died, and rose here. But we do not believe God’s love is provincial. The fact that He is our Father does not prevent Him from being Fathers to others. 

As anyone who is not an only child knows, a sibling does not reduce the love you receive from a parent. 

One Savior, Many Sheep

One of the more difficult questions about extra-terrestrials and traditional Christianity has often been the Incarnation. If Christ was born on this Earth, does that make Earth cosmically unique? Would He need to be incarnate, suffer, die, and rise again on every inhabited world? Are there multiple falls, multiple redemptions, multiple atonements? 

Latter-day Saint leaders have generally answered by affirming both the local reality of Christ’s mortal ministry and the cosmic scope of His redeeming work. 

Nelson taught that the Atonement of Jesus Christ is infinite, not merely in duration, but in scope, extending to all humankind and to the infinite number of worlds created by Him. This gives Latter-day Saints a powerful doctrinal framework. We do not need to imagine a weak, local Christ whose saving power stops at the atmosphere. Nor do we need to multiply incarnations beyond what has been revealed. We can affirm what scripture and prophetic teaching affirm: Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten of the Father in the flesh, the Creator of worlds, the Redeemer, and the Lord of the universe.

That does not resolve every mechanics-of-salvation question. But questions remain even without the addition of extraterrestrial life. If intelligent beings on other worlds fall, how is Christ revealed to them? What ordinances do they receive? Do they have prophets? Do they have scriptures? We don’t know.

The Book of Mormon prepares Latter-day Saints for the idea that God’s dealings with one people are never the whole story.

In 3 Nephi, Jesus tells the Nephites that He has “other sheep” who are not of Jerusalem and not of the Nephite land, and that He must go show Himself to them. I’m not suggesting Jesus was implying he was visiting other worlds, but underlining the idea that there are always more children of God for Christ to minister to. 

Christ’s self-disclosure is not limited to the records we presently possess. There are divine visits not recorded in our canon. Latter-day Saints have an open canon. If God has had dealings with other worlds, that would not offend the structure of our faith. 

Do we know? No, but not being told is not the same as being trapped. Latter-day Saints are comfortable with revealed patterns and unrevealed details. We know enough.

What If They Are More Righteous Than We Are?

Latter-day Saints should be cautious about imagining ourselves as cosmic tourists or missionaries. We have been given commandments, covenants, priesthood keys, and missionary obligations for this world. We do not possess a revealed commission to carry ordinances to hypothetical civilizations in another solar system. If God has children elsewhere, He is capable of revealing Himself to them, calling prophets among them, appointing ordinances suited to His law, and gathering them in His own order.

The aliens say that they love Jesus, and that He comes to visit every few years.

The pope is shocked. “Every few years, but He hasn’t even come a second time yet?”

The aliens feel bad, and try to help, “Maybe He doesn’t like your chocolate.”

The pope confused asks, “Chocolate? What does chocolate have to do with anything?”

“Well,” the aliens explain, “every time he comes we give him a big basket of chocolate. Why, what did you give to Him?”

Jokes aside, another possibility is exactly what the joke posits, that intelligent extraterrestrial beings do exist, and they are not invaders or monsters or lost pagans waiting for us to teach them about God. They might be more obedient, unified, humble or righteous than we are. 

Again, Latter-day Saint scripture leaves room for such a possibility. Abraham 3 teaches that intelligence differ and that God is greater than them all. This should help discipline our imaginations. Much of our alien fiction is really human self-projection. Sometimes aliens are our fears, sometimes our aspirations. Latter-day Saint theology gives as a less sentimental and more serious possibility. Other beings could simply be God’s children. Some wicked, some innocent, some righteous. 

What if There is No Alien Life?

A sound theology must also account for the other possibility: that we may never discover intelligent extraterrestrial life. The current evidence certainly does not prove alien existence, let alone alien visitation. Serious Latter-day Saint thinking should not build spiritual excitement around speculation that may collapse under scrutiny.

If no alien civilization is ever found, however, Latter-day Saint theology remains untouched. “Worlds without number” does not need to mean that human scientists in 2026 can identify, contact, or verify those worlds. God’s creations may be distant in space, separated by time, hidden by limits of observation, or simply beyond our stewardship. 

This helps protect us from two opposite errors. If the skeptic says, “If aliens exist, religion is false,” and enthusiasts say “If UAPs are real, my religion is confirmed,” Latter-day Saints should reject both. Our faith is grounded in Jesus Christ, his covenants, and the witness of the Holy Ghost—not in the newest unidentified object.  

The Restoration gives us a capacious cosmos, but it does not require gullibility. 

A Theology Big Enough for Discovery

So where does that leave us?

No matter what we discover, or don’t discover, the theological center holds. The Latter-day Saint doctrine of creation is already cosmic. The doctrine of God is already parental. The atonement of Christ is already infinite. And our understanding of revelation is already open. 

Not every speculation has, or even needs, an answer. We do not know whether any UAP represents extraterrestrial intelligence. We do not know what they look like, we do not know what their history is, or what their relationship is like to Christ. 

But we know enough that we do not need to fear that a discovery of aliens will upend our theology or understanding of the cosmos. We already know our Earth is small, but important eternally.

The discovery of alien life would not make the gospel any less true. It might just remind us that God’s household is larger than we suppose. That wouldn’t upend our beliefs. In fact, it sounds quite familiar. 

The post Aliens and Latter-day Saint Theology appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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The story of Queen Esther focuses on a terrifying extermination order in Ancient Persia to eliminate the Jewish population—and a high-stakes marital challenge. Queen Esther, a Jew, was married to the Persian King Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes). The king had permitted his highest-ranking official, Haman, to pass the extermination order without knowing its consequences to the Jewish people—or the Jewish identity of his own wife. 

Esther’s uncle, Mordecai, urged Esther to approach the king to plead for her people’s lives. But Persian law dictated that anyone who approached the king in his inner court without being specifically summoned would be put to death. The only exception was if the king extended his golden scepter to spare the person’s life.

Faced with the threat of her people’s destruction, Esther called her community to fast and pray before she approached the king:

Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

Esther then stepped forward with courage to do what was right despite immense danger. 

She expressed her strength not only inwardly, but in an outward act of faith. Through her religious actions and the united actions of her faith community, she successfully persuaded her husband, the king, to spare her people—and her own life. 

Esther’s inspiring story is retold once a year in the Jewish community, and her courageous spirit lives on in the daily lives of highly religious women. For highly religious women, Esther is not just a historical figure but a functional model for navigating challenging situations, including in the home. In this article, we will discuss the findings from a recent study we conducted about the religious actions that women of faith, like Esther, take to overcome their marital challenges and hardships.

Belief in God Leads to External Resources That Strengthen Marriage

Esther’s unwavering faith in God gave her the strength to face the king, even if it meant she might die. In our study, while the lives of believers were not on the line, family happiness was. We found a recurring theme of what religious women do to call down the power of God into their family life. Gwen, an African American Christian, called it the “big three” and said this:

If you are doing the big three: prayer, being in the word, and fellowshipping with those of like faith then it helps you, and you can encourage other people when they do see that you’re still happy in your marriage after umpteen years.

So how do prayer, scripture, and fellowshipping contribute to happy marriages and families? We turn now to insights from our study participants.

Prayer

Our study participants commonly expressed a connection between their relationship with God and the way they chose to act in their marriages and families. They reported that they built strong bonds with God through prayer. Anne, a Catholic, said:

My faith has had its ups and downs. During the lowest downs where I’ve really been kind of far from God, I haven’t been a very good wife, and I haven’t been a very good mother. But when I’ve come back to God and been closer and been more faithful and more active in my own personal prayer life, then I’ve been better: a nicer person and a better wife and a better mother. So, they just, they’re totally hand in hand. I can’t really separate prayer and my family relationships.

Not only did prayer help participants improve their relationships, but it also fostered spiritual and personal growth. Alyshia, an African American Christian, offered this:

Having a solid relationship with the Lord … He will tell you when you are out of line. The Lord will change you and say, ‘Look at thy selfishness; … and then we can see a little more clearly. Definitely, a solid relationship with God helps with my marriage and family relationships.

In addition, husbands and wives used prayer as a means of resolving disagreements. Yui, a Chinese Christian, said, “When we had some disagreements, we prayed together, confessed our sins before God, and learned to forgive each other.” For many of the women we interviewed, prayer was not merely a religious practice—it involved a sacred connection to get closer to God and closer to family.

Scripture Study

Reading sacred texts or scriptures emerged as another key resource for the women we interviewed. Moriah, a Jewish wife, said that reading the Torah brought her and her spouse closer together:

So often you just stop talking. You don’t communicate, and so I think when we read Torah together, which we really try to do pretty often, it does create conversation and more understanding, and I think certainly that reduces conflict. It prevents conflict. It also helps remedy conflict once it’s there.

Cassandra, an African American Christian wife, also commented:

I get all of my inspiration and all of my guidance from the Bible. That’s how I learned how to treat others. How to treat people and how to be in my marriage with my relationship with my husband. And that is what puts things in priority, in order. That’s where I get it from. And when I make decisions, I always say, ‘I don’t make decisions just based on what I think. It’s coming from scripture.’ It’s gonna be scripture-based or it’s gonna be something on that ground.

Not only did scripture study reportedly influence couple communication and personal decision-making, but it also enhanced participants’ relationships with both God and with their spouse—reflecting similar benefits to prayer. Mercy, a Baptist wife, relayed this about God’s word:

When two people are married, what’s wrong in you really influences the other person. But for me, I find the only way that I grow very effectively is through God’s touch in my life. So I study in scripture and learn more about who God is and what His heart is for our relationship, for His world that He’s made. It helps me to be able to grow myself so that I can better apply what I learn into my relationships.

Participating in a Faith Community

Just as Esther drew support from her uncle and the Jewish community, the women we interviewed drew vital support from their faith communities. Emily, a Baptist wife and mother, highlighted how her congregation gave her needed support:

So, faith helps me because I realize that there is a different way to do [life]. And I can actually learn how to do it differently, with other people who are also learning too. Some people I know are much further along, and I can learn from them. And I find that I can actually share experiences with other people that help them. I think being in a faith community is helpful that way, because we realize that we’re not alone.

Sometimes I’ll go to Bible study and I’ll realize: ‘Boy, the kinds of things that my husband Michael and I maybe are facing or dealing with are nothing compared to what someone else might be experiencing.’ Or I can learn from other people and bring it back into our marriage and say: ‘Hey, this is something somebody shared with me; and what do you think?’ So it’s a dynamic thing. There’s all these relationships that affect us and we have those relationships because we have the same faith.

Similarly, Noor, an Arab American Muslim wife and mother, commented on how her masjid (mosque) and its faith-based classes have offered her direction in her marriage:

Basically, I need to learn more about Islam to strengthen our marriage, even make it stronger. I think that by getting more in depth in Islam, which I’m trying to do now, I’m going to classes and everything. So, it’s helping me understand a lot more; and I think that it makes me understand more my role in our marriage and how I’m supposed to act.

Many of these women of faith drew marital support from their faith communities.  These supportive relationships were often so strong that many women referred to “sisters” and “brothers” in their “church family” who had helped their marriages to grow spiritually, temporally, and relationally. Many of the women of faith emphasized that growing alongside others helped them navigate their marriages and parenting with greater wisdom and perspective than they would have found on their own.

A Legacy of Courage

Our study participants’ words echo the legacy of Esther: courage is born not only from within, but from a life rooted in faith and the relationships it enriches. Like Esther, these women found strength not in their circumstances but in their devotion to God and in the support of a covenant community. 

By turning to the “big three” of prayer, studying sacred texts, and engaging in marriage-strengthening fellowship with others, their faith shaped how they navigated marital hardship in myriad ways. The sacred practices of these women did more than comfort them; these relational efforts empowered them. Prayer, study, and covenant community worked together to foster clarity, compassion, and resilience in the face of difficulties and challenges in family life. Ultimately, the perspective of these women was that active faith in God can help provide not only a set of coping tools, but a deeper sense of strength, purpose, and connection within their marriages.

The post Women of Faith, Action, and Power appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Forgive the provocative title. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints certainly should care for the poor and needy as modeled by the head of the Church, Jesus Christ Himself.

There is, however, a consistent thread of criticism whenever the cost of a Church-involved project becomes public, that all of that cost should have been spent helping the poor instead. 

The argument has even been extended to time, with critics arguing that spending time in worship is a waste when it could be spent in soup kitchens.

I disagree. Worship is not an alternative to doing good. It’s the engine that makes doing good last.

And this isn’t a new argument. A home crowded with people. A dinner. A sense that Something Big is about to happen. Then a woman—Mary of Bethany, in the telling of the Gospel of John—breaks open a jar of costly ointment and pours it on the feet of Jesus Christ. The room fills with fragrance. It’s extravagantly impractical. It looks, from a certain perspective, like waste.

And right on cue, a voice rises with the sensible objection—the ethical objection:

Why wasn’t this sold and given to the poor?

It comes from Judas Iscariot. And if you’re honest, the line sounds persuasive. It sounds like moral clarity. It sounds like priorities. It sounds like what an enlightened, modern faith should say.

But Jesus doesn’t nod along. He doesn’t say, “Great point—let’s liquidate the perfume and put together a hunger-relief budget.” He defends the act. 

Jesus’ action should break the false spell that says devotion and discipleship are only real when they are immediately convertible into measurable “impact.” It reminds us that worship—direct, reverent, God-facing worship—can look inefficient to anyone who thinks humanitarian deliverables are the only ledger that matters.

And it’s not the only time Jesus refuses to reduce the life of faith into a single social program. He commands His followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, lift the heavy burden. But He also commands love of God with heart, might, mind, and strength. He commands prayer. He retreats to commune with the Father. He institutes ordinances. He receives honor. He welcomes adoration.

In other words, worship and service both matter enormously. The Christian life is not either/or.

Let’s take that critique seriously, because the best versions of it come from a good instinct: people are suffering, and we should not be casual about it. If you believe in Christ, you should feel a holy discomfort when you see hunger, war, displacement, addiction, loneliness, and abuse. If your faith never pulls you outward into sacrifice and service, then it’s not discipleship.

But the critique collapses when it assumes something that sounds compassionate yet ends up being corrosive: Worship is basically overhead, and the “real work” begins only when worship ends.

That assumption is not just spiritually mistaken. It’s historically naïve and psychologically backward. In practice, it’s one of the fastest ways to kill the very humanitarian impulse it claims to maximize.

Worship is the foundation of sustainable humanitarian good.

Not because worship is a loophole to avoid helping people. But because worship is how you make a people who keep helping people when it’s hard, when it’s boring, when it’s thankless, when it’s politically inconvenient, when the cameras are gone, when your own life is falling apart, when you’re tempted to turn cynical.

And if—hypothetically—humanitarian aid were the ultimate end goal, you would still want a church to stay fiercely centered on its religious mission. Because that mission is what grows the community, strengthens the moral muscles, and keeps the generosity from becoming a short-lived mood.

Even if the only goal was to maximize humanitarian efforts, a religious mission is a wise investment. 

The Trap of Turning a Church Into an NGO

The world already has many institutions whose job description is “make material life better.”

Some are incredible: disaster responders, hospitals, development orgs, refugee agencies, food systems, governments running safety nets. Many of them do heroic work, and believers should often be their most loyal partners and supporters.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if a church becomes just another version of those institutions, it loses its reason to exist.

Not because humanitarian work isn’t holy. It is. But because a church’s unique contribution is not merely relief—it is redemption. It exists to reconcile people to God, shape souls, bind communities through covenant, preach repentance and hope, administer ordinances, and teach a way of life anchored in the living Christ.

When a church quietly trades that identity for the safer, more broadly applauded identity of “a values-based service club,” it doesn’t become more relevant. It becomes replaceable.

And replaceable institutions tend to shrink.

That isn’t an abstract theory; it’s one of the storylines of modern Western Christianity. Beginning in the mid‑20th century, many churches in Europe and North America leaned hard into social and political engagement, sometimes explicitly downplaying doctrine, miracles, and distinctive worship as embarrassments from a pre-modern past. On the far edge, you even had “Death of God” theology in the 1960s, arguing that belief in God had become meaningless in modern life.

At the same time, older currents like the “Social Gospel”—a movement that interpreted the kingdom of God as demanding social reform as well as personal conversion—became newly influential in modern form.

These movements that built on the foundation of faith and religious strength produced real good. Civil rights advances, anti-poverty efforts, humanitarian advocacy, not to mention the millions of individuals given a hand up—many believers gave their lives to these causes. That deserves sincere admiration.

The sociological details are debated, but the broad fact of mainline decline is not. Pew Research Center has documented significant declines in mainline Protestant identification and retention in the United States in recent decades. And these losses have been localized in the congregations that went all in on a modern social gospel emphasis. When social action becomes the main product and worship becomes a mild preface, churches tend to lose the very people who would have fueled the action.

A church that abandons worship does not become a better charity. It becomes a worse church and, eventually, a weaker charity too. Because the deepest engines of durable compassion—repentance, gratitude, covenant, awe, accountability, forgiveness, hope, spiritual discipline—are cultivated primarily through worship.

Learning From Our Catholic Friends

It’s worth noticing: even traditions that have built enormous global service institutions still insist that worship is primary.

The Church of Jesus Christ has focused most of its humanitarian efforts in assisting other organizations. Two of the most prominent are Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services.

In Sacrosanctum Concilium (the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), the Church describes itself as “eager to act and yet intent on contemplation,” and explicitly orders “action to contemplation,” not the reverse. And it says the liturgy is an “outstanding means” by which the faithful express the mystery of Christ and the nature of the Church.

You don’t have to be Catholic to see the wisdom of this approach. Worship is neither a waste nor a reward after the work; it’s the source that motivates the work, and connects the work to identity, rather than mere philanthropy. 

What Worship Actually Does

People sometimes talk about worship like it’s a little more than a cultural habit, a vibe if you will.

But biblically (and in Latter-day Saint practice), worship is much more like alignment.

Worship is what happens when you stop treating yourself as the center of the universe—and deliberately, repeatedly, bodily re‑center on God. That sounds “spiritual,” and it is. But it has very practical effects:

• Worship builds a different kind of person

Humanitarian service requires more than empathy. Empathy is a spark; it flares and fades. Service that persists needs character: patience, chastity, honesty, restraint, long‑suffering, courage, meekness, integrity when you’re not being watched.

Worship is where these virtues are named, demanded, practiced, and—over time—formed into muscle memory.

• Worship builds a different kind of community

A congregation isn’t just a crowd of like-minded individuals. At its best, it’s a covenant community with thick relationships. You notice when someone disappears; you show up when a baby is born or a parent dies; you bring soup; you sit through awkward conversations; you forgive; you get forgiven.

That kind of community is a miracle. It’s also a logistics machine for mercy.

• Worship builds time horizons long enough for real good

Some problems yield to a burst of attention. Most don’t.

Addiction. Poverty. Education. Conflict. Cycles of abuse. Trauma. Refugee resettlement. Loneliness. Generational hopelessness.

If your only fuel is outrage, you burn out. If your only fuel is applause, you quit when the applause stops.

Worship trains people to act from a longer story. It makes sacrifice rational because it places sacrifice inside eternity.

• Worship protects service from becoming ego

Humanitarianism can become vanity. Service can become a way to be seen, to feel superior, to justify contempt for others (“I help people; why can’t you?”), to build a brand, to control.

Worship is where the ego gets humbled. Where you remember you’re not the savior. Where you’re reminded that you, too, are poor in spirit and desperately in need of grace.

The Data Says Worship Grows Generosity

The argument is not only theological, but empirical. 

In the United States, religious participation—especially regular attendance—has repeatedly shown up as one of the strongest predictors of charitable giving and volunteering.

• Gallup reports that Christians (and especially those who attend church regularly) are more likely than the nonreligious to say they donated and volunteered in the past year.
• A widely circulated analysis hosted by the Hoover Institution (drawing on the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey) found large gaps between weekly attenders and secular respondents in both donating and volunteering—differences measured in double-digit percentage points.
• The Generosity Commission summarizes the broader pattern bluntly: declining religious participation is frequently cited as part of the donor-participation decline, and there’s “substantial evidence” that religious Americans are more likely to give and volunteer—including to secular causes, not only religious ones.

Some of these benefits likely come from the fact that believers tend to be part of strong communities. Worship, however, doesn’t just create community; it rehearses a moral story where generosity is expected. It normalizes sacrifice. It turns giving from “extra credit” into “this is what we do.”

And psychologists have tried to probe causation more directly. Experiments have found that subtly priming religious concepts can increase prosocial behavior in anonymous economic games. Meta-analytic work reviewing many studies finds religious priming shows a reliable positive effect on prosocial measures.

You don’t need to overclaim this research to see the headline: religious practice isn’t merely “private meaning-making.” It measurably shapes how people behave toward others.

Which means the critique “Stop worshiping and start serving” is not only spiritually misguided. It’s practically self-defeating. Because the evidence suggests worship is part of what produces servers.

You can say, why do you waste time and money worshipping instead of serving, but in practice those who spend their time and money worshipping are also the ones spending the most time and money serving. 

So What About The Church of Jesus Christ Specifically?

Let’s talk directly. The Church’s religious mission costs money. Meetinghouses, temples, missionary work, youth programs, education, publications, administration, welfare logistics.

Critics sometimes frame this as theft from the poor, as if every dollar spent on worship is a dollar stolen from a hungry child.

That’s a powerful emotional frame. It’s also simplistic in a way that would get laughed out of any serious discussion of how organizations work.

Low overhead is not proof of effectiveness. Some of the biggest organizations in non-profit accountability went to bat to combat this myth in 2013. It remains true today. And the problems that need to be solved won’t be solved by pouring money into them. They require infrastructure, training, and longevity. Looking at just welfare for low-income countries, between 2020 and 2023, nearly $700 billion was spent, and the problem remains far from solved. 

The real question is not, “Could we spend this dollar on something else?” Of course, we could. You can always redirect dollars. The real question is what is the best way to spend that dollar. What system produces the most good for the most time? 

And research suggests that churches that focus on worship and doctrine do a better long-term job of addressing those problems. 

For example, in its “Caring for Those in Need” report for 2025, the Church says it supported thousands of humanitarian projects across nearly the whole world and reports $1.58 billion in expenditures and millions of volunteer hours. In 2024, it was $1.45 billion, in 2023 it was $1.36 billion, and in 2022 it was $1.02 billion. And the projects they choose to spend on are those that will produce a virtuous cycle of improvement in the communities where they take place. Consider the self-reliance push of the Church’s welfare system. Consider BYU-Pathway and the Perpetual Education Fund. When it came to serving in the community, the Church didn’t just have members show up, they created JustServe, to create an engine to help local non-profits find volunteers. And the Church has focused on improving neonatal care by training nurses, and training nurse trainers, creating generations of healthy babies.

As we’ve seen in recent history, a church that forgets worship forgets why it serves. It may still do good for a while. But it begins to hollow out—spiritually, culturally, demographically—and eventually it loses the very capacity it once had to mobilize good.

So when critics say, “Stop spending on worship and spend it all on humanitarian aid,” they are—ironically—advocating to dismantle one of the most powerful known engines of mass voluntary generosity.

Worship is how God turns ordinary people into a durable community capable of extraordinary service.

So yes—celebrate humanitarian giving. Expand it. Partner widely. Be transparent where appropriate. Improve effectiveness. Learn from everyone.

And also: do not let anyone shame you into believing worship is wasted time. 

Mary’s ointment filled a house with fragrance. A room full of people could smell her devotion.

The modern world is hungry for that fragrance—devotion that doesn’t flee from suffering, but also doesn’t pretend that suffering is the only thing worth talking about.

A relationship with Christ is not a side quest. It is the center.

And from that center—when it is real—flows a river of service that can outlast outrage, outlast politics, outlast the news cycle, outlast your own energy.

That’s not an argument against humanitarian work. It’s an argument for why the Church should keep being unapologetically a church.

The post The Church Is More Than A Charity appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The Church’s soft power is built on credibility through collaboration—pairing a global volunteer culture and substantial resources with trusted partners who already have expertise, reach, and on-the-ground legitimacy. In a world hungry for trust, this posture multiplies humanitarian impact—and it quietly teaches the rest of us how to lead with humility, stewardship, and shared purpose.

For the Church, the aim is covenant discipleship and Christlike love; any “soft power” that follows is a byproduct of that faithfulness. In other words, credibility is fruit, not the vine.

Soft power is earned, not asserted.

Soft Power, Reframed as the Fruit of Discipleship

Here I use “soft power” descriptively, not normatively—the Church serves because it follows Jesus Christ; trust accrues because it serves consistently. Humanitarian service is an outgrowth of that discipleship. 

To understand the Church’s “soft power,” we first need to clarify what we mean by the term. In Joseph Nye’s framework, soft power is the ability to shape outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than force or payment. In practice, it runs on one scarce resource: credibility—earned over time through consistent values and reliable action.

Historically, the Church has maintained both an inward-facing welfare system and an outward-facing humanitarian effort—tracing its formal welfare program to 1936 and its broader humanitarian outreach to 1984. The existence of both streams is important: it signals that partnership is not a substitute for institutional capacity. It is, instead, a strategic and moral decision about how to deploy capacity for the widest good.

Why Partnership Is the Strategy—Not the Exception

The Church’s own public framing is revealing. It speaks of a desire to “maximize” impact so that help blesses not only individuals but families and communities—and it explicitly acknowledges “trusted organizations” as part of the ecosystem that makes the work possible.

In this context, partnership becomes more than a practical convenience. It becomes a posture:

• Stewardship: directing resources where they will do the most good.
• Humility: letting others lead when they hold the expertise.
• Unity: working across lines of faith, nationality, and institutional identity.
• Fidelity: cooperating widely without compromising revealed doctrine, standards, or church governance

And just as notably, the Church’s model often aims to serve people regardless of religious affiliation—an approach it states openly in its humanitarian descriptions.

Partnership is not a compromise. Partnership is a multiplier.

Creating a new program from scratch is not always the most compassionate option—especially in global humanitarian work. Building a parallel infrastructure can mean duplicating supply chains, duplicating local relationships, duplicating compliance systems, and, unintentionally, competing with the very organizations already trusted on the ground.

For example, organizations like the World Food Programme have global distribution systems and emergency operations that can be activated rapidly. The Church can amplify those systems faster than it could replicate them.

By contrast, partnering lets the Church contribute what it can uniquely offer—funding, commodities, volunteers, convening power—while relying on others for what they uniquely offer: specialized public health capacity, emergency logistics, refugee systems, school feeding programs, and long-developed accountability frameworks.

The Church’s own communications sometimes name this directly: long-standing work with organizations “recognized for their effectiveness and integrity,” including World Food Program USA, UNICEF, and CARE, is presented as part of how its projects are carried out.

What looks like “outsourcing” can, when done ethically, be a form of respect.

Case Study One: A Logistics Hub in Barbados

Consider a moment that is easy to miss if we only look for dramatic headlines: the Church and World Food Program USA jointly funded an emergency response logistics hub in the Caribbean, supporting construction and operations in Barbados with a combined $4.3 million, including an initial $2 million grant from the Church.

That is not merely a donation. It is an investment in readiness—the kind of capacity that makes the difference between good intentions and timely food, shelter, and supplies when disaster strikes.

Context: influence grows where reliability lives

And that choice keeps compounding. The World Food Programme identifies Latter-day Saint Charities as a partner since 2014, emphasizing measurable progress toward hunger relief.

Implication: soft power that doesn’t need the spotlight

Soft power, at its healthiest, doesn’t demand center stage. It chooses impact over branding, durability over applause, and coalition over control. A logistics hub is, in many ways, the perfect symbol: unglamorous, essential, and quietly decisive.

Case Study Two: Eight Organizations, One Women and Children Initiative

Now widen the lens from logistics to public health.

In a Relief Society–led global effort to improve maternal and child health, the Church announced $55.8 million in support. It is collaborating with eight internationally recognized nonprofit organizations—including CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Helen Keller International, iDE, MAP International, Save the Children, The Hunger Project, and Vitamin Angels—to strengthen health and nutrition programs in 12 high-need countries.

This is a partnership built not as a one-off, but as a deliberate coalition

Context: the Church as a convener, not just a funder

Furthermore, convening is its own kind of power. When a large institution chooses to collaborate across multiple NGOs—rather than selecting one “favorite” or building an in-house global health apparatus—it signals that the goal is not institutional dominance. The goal is reach.

In Helen Keller International’s own public statement about the collaboration, the logic is explicit: scaling “proven” nutrition services, with multiple peer organizations working together, to create lasting change.

Implication: the soft power of “shared credit”

There is a subtle leadership lesson here: the Church’s influence increases when it refuses to hoard ownership. It strengthens other institutions—and in doing so, it becomes the kind of partner other institutions want nearby.

That desire—to collaborate, to coordinate, to trust—is the heart of soft power.

Case Study Three: Feeding the Hungry Through Systems Already in Place

The Church’s partnership approach is not limited to international NGOs. It also shows up in the way it feeds neighbors close to home.

On its own “Feeding the Hungry” summary page, the Church describes a three-part approach: donate to immediate needs, collaborate with organizations focused on long-term food security, and run its own child nutrition program.

The Church reports operating 122 bishops’ storehouses across six countries, using them to care for members in need, and where storehouses are unavailable, it sometimes works with local grocery store chains.

But perhaps most notably, the storehouse system is not treated as a closed loop. The Church states that food and supplies from bishops’ storehouses are distributed to charitable organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada—and that in 2024, more than 32 million pounds of food were donated through humanitarian organizations and food banks (about 32 million meals).

It even offers concrete local examples, including support to Catholic Community Services in Salt Lake City and assistance to El Hogar Buen Samaritano in Spain.

This is one of the clearest answers to the question, ‘Why partner rather than build everything internally?’ Because hunger is not solved by a single pipeline. It is solved by networks—food banks, shelters, grocery chains, local ministries, civic agencies—each doing what they do best.

The Church’s soft power here is the power to strengthen the network without demanding the network become the Church.

Case Study Four: Trust Across Lines—The NAACP and the Red Cross

Soft power is not only global. It is also social: the ability to lower defensiveness and raise cooperation in places where history, misunderstanding, or suspicion might otherwise block progress.

The NAACP partnership

The Church’s relationship with the NAACP, as described in Church Newsroom coverage, began with a joint call for greater civility and racial harmony in May 2018, later developing into education and humanitarian initiatives.

Local and national outlets described scholarship support and related initiatives tied to the partnership. Later, Church News summarized additional education and humanitarian commitments, including scholarships and related efforts.

Whatever one’s perspective on institutional history, the partnership model here communicates a clear principle: we do not wait for perfect alignment before we begin building shared good. Such collaboration proceeds under prophetic direction and clear boundaries. Partnership does not equal endorsement of every position; we work together where concrete objectives align with the gospel and established Church policies.

The Red Cross collaboration

Similarly, the Church’s collaboration with the American Red Cross is framed—on the Church’s own regional humanitarian summary page—as having “staying power” because of shared values like humanitarian spirit and trust.

And the Red Cross itself publicly describes Church donations supporting Red Cross efforts, situating them as part of a longer pattern of giving.

The Personal Lessons: How to Practice “Soft Power” Without Losing Your Soul

Institutional examples matter because they give us patterns to imitate—not in scale, but in spirit.

Here are the takeaways that translate most directly into ordinary life. Our influence grows when our service is dependable.

Lesson 1: Choose contribution over control

In families, workplaces, wards, and neighborhoods, we are often tempted to help in ways that keep us central. The Church’s partnership posture suggests a different path: support what already works, and let others lead where they’re strongest.

Lesson 2: Let “shared credit” be your leadership style

Soft power in personal life is rarely about charisma. It is about trust—built through consistency, humility, and credit-sharing. The Church’s collaborations—from global NGOs to local food banks—model a way of doing good that doesn’t require ownership.

Lesson 3: Build ecosystems, not just moments

A single act of service can be beautiful. But durable influence comes from strengthening systems: the food pantry, the school, the shelter, the community volunteer network.

In this light, platforms like JustServe become more than a scheduling tool. They become an institutional habit of connecting people to organizations that can sustain service beyond one weekend.

Lesson 4: Measure what matters—then tell the truth about it

The Church’s annual summaries are not perfect proxies for every form of generosity, but they reflect a principle: service should be reportable, accountable, and visible enough to build trust. We count to improve care, transparency, and wise use of sacred funds—not to keep score. And we remember that many of the most important outcomes—conversion, dignity, belonging—resist quantification.

In our lives, that can look like simple clarity: following through, closing loops, showing receipts (sometimes literally), and making outcomes legible.

Lesson 5: Keep the moral center clear

Finally, partnership only works when your values travel intact. The Church repeatedly frames its humanitarian collaborations as rooted in Christlike love and a desire to bless communities broadly.

For us, the equivalent is straightforward: serve in ways that are clean, respectful, and non-transactional—without turning people into props for our identity.

Soft power is often misunderstood as image management. But at its best, it is something far more demanding: the disciplined practice of becoming trustworthy.

The Church of Jesus Christ demonstrates a version of that discipline through its partnership-centered humanitarian work—mobilizing volunteers, funding, and commodities, while collaborating with organizations that bring specialized expertise, local legitimacy, and global reach.

And the institutional example returns to us as a personal invitation: to live in a way that multiplies good—through humility, collaboration, and a steady willingness to build trust.

The post The Quiet Multiplier appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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When I was thirteen, my father and I would watch Saturday morning cartoons. It was like a comforting ritual. It was on one of those quiet, gentle mornings that my world was shattered. There was a pound on the door. I opened it and was surprised to find officers with weapons drawn, the air thick with confusion and accusation. Together we woke the rest of the family. Together we watched strangers go through our home. It was not long after that my father was arrested.

For four long years, the courthouse became my second home. Week after week I sat on wooden benches, praying my father would not be swallowed by a witch hunt of lies. And then, one summer afternoon, the world became still. The jury declared him guilty of a crime he did not commit. I left the courtroom without saying goodbye.

A few weeks later, I sat in church, trying to do anything to fill the void in my heart. A teenage girl—about my age—was speaking to the congregation about the power of God to answer prayers. She spoke about how she lost her keys, searched everywhere, and finally prayed to know where her keys were. “As soon as I prayed,” she said, “I knew exactly where they were.” 

I remember sitting there absolutely stunned. My father had been convicted and sentenced just days before, after years of prayers. Why had heaven opened for her but not for me? Surely a set of keys was not more deserving than a boy in need of a father. Was her need somehow greater than mine? 

Why does God answer some prayers and not others? Why did Christ heal one soul but walk past another? Why does relief come to some but not to me, even when I know He can give it? These are mysteries I do not pretend to solve. 

Could it be, however, that the mystery itself is a whisper of grace—the quiet grace that sustains us while we wait for the answer to such questions? As we wait for our own “miracle”?

She waited twelve years. Joseph waited thirteen years in slavery and prison. Abraham waited twenty-five years for Isaac. Moses waited forty years to reach the promised land—and died before entering. Adam waited one hundred and thirty years for Seth after losing Abel by the hand of Cain. The woman at the well waited through five husbands before meeting the Messiah and finally feeling seen. I waited four years for my father.

It seems that the Lord has always asked His children to wait. Why would we be an exception? 

Hebrew has a beautiful way of providing new insights into words and meanings. I am no linguist, just a student, but one Hebrew word for “wait” is qavah. It appears in the psalmist’s cry, “Let none that wait on thee be ashamed.” The same root word can also mean “expect” and is often associated with tension-filled waiting for the expected promises of the Lord to be fulfilled. For example, Isaiah uses qavah to foreshadow the long-awaited gathering of Israel, “I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding His face from the house of Jacob, and I will put my trust in Him.” (Isaiah 8:17). The word is derived from a concept of binding two things together in a cord, pulled tight with expectation and anticipation. We are able to wait on the Lord for salvation, or healing, or redemption, or whatever it is we are waiting for because those specific concepts are concomitant with the promises of God. We cannot have healing without the Healer, or salvation without the Savior, or redemption without the Redeemer. Qavah is not the uncertainty of wondering if something will happen, but the quiet assurance that it will. 

Another Hebrew word for “wait” is yachal—often translated to “hope.” It is the word used by Job in his famous lament, “Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him.” (Job 13:15). The connection between waiting and hoping amidst suffering paints a picture of responsibility. Hope is not merely the denial of suffering, but the denial of despair amidst suffering. We must guard the sacred time we spend waiting, protecting the heart from bitterness and bolstering our faith until the dawn of our miracle comes. One’s integrity does not shine until it is tested. The time to shine is in the waiting. So, what are we doing to protect the sacred time we are given while waiting?

The woman with the issue of blood waited in this way. She took responsibility for her waiting. She did not let resentment in, like poison. She protected the fragile place between promise and fulfillment, and when the Savior walked by, she was ready. Waiting, then, mustn’t be a passive suspension of time but a deliberate intention of the soul. Whether we think of qavah—the expectation of God’s promises—or yachal—hope amidst suffering—we discover that waiting is itself a form of discipleship. It is the space where character is shaped, where trust is tested, and where our deepest commitments are revealed. We wait not because we are uncertain, but because we are tethered to something sure, the sure foundation of a promise made by Christ. In the quiet stretch between promise and fulfillment, we learn who we are becoming. And perhaps that is the quiet miracle of waiting: it gathers us, guards us, and prepares us to become the person we were always meant to become.

The post Miracles in the Waiting appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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The first time I really noticed it, I wasn’t in a chapel or a chemistry class or even a quiet moment. I was just thinking about clapping.

Picture someone standing in the middle of an empty room, alone, with no music playing, and no performance ending. And they start applauding. Not once, not as a joke, but like it means something.

It’s wrong, and you know it’s wrong. Not morally wrong in the “someone needs to be punished” sense. More like, wrong in the way a sentence feels wrong when it’s missing a subject. The rhythm might be there, the hands might be moving, but the action is looking for a receiver. 

Applause is built for an audience. It’s shaped like a response. Gratitude is like that, too.

I’ve been thinking about this because of a conversation I had with a friend at school. He is the smart, calm type—and an atheist. He doesn’t believe. Not in a rebellious way, not in a “look at me” way. He just doesn’t see it.

I was driving him to campus as we scanned the rows for a parking spot. When we finally saw an open one, my friend laughed and said, “I’m grateful there’s such a good spot.” 

It was such a small moment that it almost slipped past, but I felt something in me pause. Not because he said “grateful”—people say that all the time—but because he said it like he meant it. So I asked him, half curious, half teasing, “Grateful to who?”

He looked at me like I was insane. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean,” I said, “you don’t believe in God. So when you say you’re grateful… who is that for?”

He shrugged, “It’s just… a feeling, don’t overthink it.” 

After all, he knows I wish he would become a Christian. And the thing is, I don’t think he was being internally inconsistent when he said he was “grateful.” I think he was being deeply human.

Because even if we pretend otherwise, we all know gratitude has a direction. When we observe the good in the world, good that bends toward us, we feel that gratitude, even if we don’t know which direction it should go.

It’s the feeling you get when someone holds the door. When your mom texts you at the exact moment you need it. When you pass a test you were sure you failed. When you find the open parking spot after circling like an exhausted shark. It’s not just “nice.” It’s receiving something. And receiving automatically raises a question: from where? That question doesn’t always show up as words. Sometimes it’s just a little inward tilt, like your soul is turning its face toward something. Sometimes it’s only a breath: thank you. Sometimes you don’t even say it out loud, because saying it out loud would make you feel exposed. But you still feel it. That’s what’s interesting to me: how natural it is. 

We can be cynical about almost anything, but we still get grateful by accident. We still feel it leak out of us in moments we didn’t plan. My friend didn’t “choose” gratitude as a philosophical statement. He didn’t sit there and decide, “I will now experience an emotion that implies a giver.” He just felt what a human being feels when a small mercy appears.

If you want to argue about God, you can start with the usual categories: cosmology, morality, suffering, science, history. People do. And sometimes those arguments help, and sometimes they just create arguments.

But gratitude is different. Gratitude is not a debate tactic. It’s an emotion that shows up uninvited. It’s one of the ways reality touches us from the inside. So what do we do with that?

Gratitude is not just a social lubricant. It’s not just an “adaptive behavior.” Gratitude has an object built into it. It reaches outward. It points. And when you try to keep it strictly impersonal, you run into what I can only describe as a missing target problem.

It’s like shooting a basketball without even imagining a hoop you’re aiming for. Your body still knows the ball is supposed to be aimed. Your muscles still commit to a direction. But there’s no place for it to land. Try it. Seriously. Try being intensely grateful and keeping it strictly impersonal. Imagine the thing you are grateful for. Now say: “I’m grateful to… nobody.” It feels off in the same way applauding to an empty room feels off. The motion exists, the emotion exists, but the relational shape has nowhere to go.

Some people solve that discomfort by refusing to feel gratitude at all. They turn it into entitlement, or into a kind of numb self-protection: “I earned everything I have. Nothing was given. Nobody helped. I don’t owe anything.”

The other option is to let gratitude be what it is: a signal.

When you’re thirsty in the desert, your thirst is not an argument in a debate. It’s not “evidence” in the courtroom sense. It’s a clue about your body and your environment. It suggests you were made for water. It nudges you to look for a source.

Gratitude feels like that to me.

It’s an inward thirst that says, “Something good happened, and it wasn’t just me.” It doesn’t always tell you the whole story. It doesn’t automatically answer every question about suffering or silence. But it does carry a kind of pointed direction to something that I don’t think is accidental.

I’m not saying that if you feel grateful, you secretly believe in God. My friend’s gratitude wasn’t a trapdoor to make him lose an argument. But maybe the better question about gratitude and God isn’t “Does gratitude prove God?” Maybe the question is: “What kind of universe produces creatures who keep wanting to say thank you to someone?”

A universe where gratitude is purely accidental is possible, I guess. You could argue it’s just neurons doing neuron things. But then you still have to account for why the feeling is shaped like a response. Why it wants to land somewhere. Why, in our best moments, gratitude doesn’t just make us happy, it makes us humble. Why it makes us want to be gentler. Why it makes us want to share. That moral effect matters.

My friend might not have had a name for the “who” of his gratitude, but he still felt the pull. And I think that pull is one of those small invitations that shows up in ordinary places, parking lots, hallways, and text messages.

So what do we do with that? Try this the next time you feel genuine gratitude: don’t rush past it. Don’t immediately turn it into a joke. Don’t file it away as random luck and move on. Pause. Name it: I’m grateful for this. Then, just for five seconds, let it have a direction. If you believe in God, aim it there. If you don’t know where to aim it, use it as an urge to begin looking, thinking. Just one small step.

Maybe gratitude is more than a pleasant emotion. Maybe it’s a compass. And even if it doesn’t hand you certainty on a silver platter, it can still tell you something true: that you were made to receive goodness, and be grateful to someone.

I can’t prove that with a parking spot. But I’m convinced gratitude is one of the quiet clues that reality is personal at the deepest level. And if that’s true, then the most honest thing we can do with gratitude is not to silence it or flatten it into impersonal randomness, but to follow it.

The post To Whom Thanks Belongs appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

That cluster of ideas is what some describe as body-self dualism or mind-body dualism: the tendency to treat the self (mind, soul, identity) and the body as two different things with two different destinies—one high, one low; one essential, one disposable; one “me,” one “mine.” 

Body-self dualism can appear harmless, even useful. It seems to protect our dignity against sickness, disability, aging, and social judgment. It can sound like the spiritual truth: “I am more than my appearance.” Yet the same idea can smuggle in a much stronger claim: that my body is not part of my person in any deep or eternal way. And that stronger claim collides head-on with the gospel of Jesus Christ—and, in especially pointed ways, with the restored gospel’s doctrine of what human beings are and what salvation ultimately means.

Where does dualism come from, why has it spread, and how has popular art helped make it feel like common sense? And how does it disrupt restored Christian doctrine, and subtly shrink our spiritual horizon—keeping us from the very fullness of life the gospel promises?

What Body-Self Dualism Is—and Why It’s Attractive

Dualism is not merely the claim that body and mind are different. That much is obvious: thoughts aren’t bones, and love isn’t liver tissue. Dualism becomes a worldview when it turns “different” into “separable,” and then “separable” into “ranked,” so that the self is the “real” person while the body is a tool, costume, prison, or accident.

This is attractive for understandable reasons.

• It promises control. If “I” am essentially my inner self, then the body becomes something I can manage, optimize, discipline, or transcend.
• It promises safety from loss. Bodies get sick and die. If the core self is detachable from the body, then the worst facts of mortality can feel less threatening.
• It promises moral purity. If the body is the source of appetite, weakness, and shame, then separating “me” from “my body” can feel like separating “me” from “my sins.”
• It promises a clean identity. If identity is an inner essence, then the body is just a presentation layer—helpful when it aligns with inner experience, oppressive when it doesn’t.

The problem is not that these longings are wrong. The problem is that dualism often answers them by making the body a theological second-class citizen.

A Christian Detour: When “Body Bad” Entered The Story

If body-self dualism feels “Christian,” that is usually because Western Christians inherited (and sometimes amplified) non-Christian stories about matter. The New Testament’s baseline is stubbornly embodied: creation is declared good; the Son of God takes flesh; salvation is accomplished through a wounded body; and the great hope is not escape but resurrection. When Paul contrasts “flesh” with “spirit,” he is not preaching against the body, but diagnosing a fallen orientation—the human tendency toward selfishness, ruled by disordered desire. In Greek, Paul uses sarx (“flesh”) and sōma (“body”) differently. Sarx, which Paul uses in contrast to spirit, references the fallen human condition. Sōma, to the contrary, he calls a “temple.” Later readers, translators, and preaching sometimes collapsed “flesh” into “body” as one concept, turning a moral diagnosis into a metaphysical one.

The earliest, sharpest “body bad” intrusion into Christian imagination came through gnostic and docetic currents in the second century and after. In those worlds, matter is a mistake (or a trap), salvation is the soul’s liberation from physicality, and Christ is reimagined as only seeming to be embodied. The mainstream church rejected these moves precisely because they unraveled the gospel: if the body is evil, the Incarnation becomes scandalous rather than glorious, and the resurrection becomes unnecessary or incoherent.

Two exaggerations then fed each other. First, critics of Christianity began to describe the faith as essentially hostile to the body, as though the tradition’s occasional rhetoric of renunciation were its center. Second, some Christians—especially in more anxious or moralistic moments—began to act as though holiness meant becoming less embodied: less needy, less affectable, less physical. Both exaggerations obscure the deeper continuity: historic Christianity has always carried an embodied core (incarnation, sacraments, resurrection), even when its surrounding culture tempted it toward a “spirit good / matter bad” shortcut.

By the time we reach the early modern period, this long tension has set the stage for something new. The scientific revolution increasingly described nature in mechanical terms, and the body began to look less like a mysterious living unity and more like a complex machine. Once the body is imagined as a mechanism, it becomes psychologically tempting to relocate the “real me” entirely inside—into consciousness, thought, and will. 

Descartes And The Modern “Split”

Body-self dualism has older roots than René Descartes. You can find strains of it in Plato’s suspicion of the body, in certain ascetic traditions, and in recurring “spirit good / matter bad” patterns that Christianity has had to repeatedly correct. But Descartes is pivotal because he gave the modern West a powerful, system-building version of the split—one that fit the emerging scientific imagination.

In the 17th century, Descartes attempted to rebuild knowledge on certainty. His famous method of doubt led him to a conclusion that seemed irrefutable: even if everything else is uncertain, I cannot doubt that I am thinking. From there comes the celebrated “cogito” (“I think, therefore I am”), and with it a defining move: the “I” is discovered first as a thinking thing.

Descartes then described reality in terms of two fundamentally different kinds of “substance,” mind and matter. 

In this picture, the body is a kind of machine in space—measurable, divisible, governed by mechanical laws—while the mind is non-spatial, indivisible, and known directly through introspection. The two interact, but they are not two aspects of one integrated being; they are two different types of being.

That conceptual architecture mattered historically because it did something culturally explosive: it allowed nature—and the body—to be studied as a mechanism without immediately threatening the idea of a soul. You could dissect muscles like gears and still speak of a “true self” that is invisible and inward. Whatever else one thinks of Descartes, his framework helped make modern science feel metaphysically safe. But it also made a divided human being feel metaphysically normal.

And what began as a philosophical solution became a cultural instinct. Over time, many people stopped reading Descartes while continuing to live inside his basic picture: I am an inner self piloting a body.

Why Dualism Keeps Getting More Popular

If Cartesian dualism were just an old theory in philosophy seminars, it wouldn’t matter much. But body-self dualism has only grown more culturally intuitive, because modern life supplies it with metaphors that feel obvious.

The body as hardware, the self as software. Industrial and technological societies train us to treat physical things as replaceable components. We upgrade devices; we swap parts; we outsource labor; we “hack” systems. It is a short step to imagining the body as hardware and the self as software—portable, copyable, and (in fantasies of mind-uploading) potentially immortal.

The medicalized gaze. Modern medicine brings genuine blessings, but it can encourage a way of speaking that quietly distances the person from the body: the body is the patient, the body has symptoms, the body is managed. This can be useful in crises—some psychological distance can reduce panic—but it can also reinforce the notion that the body is not truly “me.”

The curated digital self. Online, we learn to present an identity through text, images, avatars, and profiles. In digital space, the self feels less like a body and more like a brand, a voice, a “presence.” The body becomes either an obstacle (something you can’t fully control) or a raw material for self-construction (something you can endlessly edit, filter, and reframe).

The therapeutic slogan culture. Even healthy truths can be flattened into dualistic clichés. “You’re more than your appearance” can quietly mutate into “Your appearance is irrelevant to who you are.” “Listen to your body” can mutate into “You are separate from your body, and the body is a strange animal you manage.” A culture hungry for quick healing often grabs a phrase that works in one context and universalizes it unknowingly into metaphysics.

So dualism rises not only because people argue for it, but because people practice it—through technology, institutions, and habits of speech.

Popular art, meanwhile, rarely teaches philosophy directly, but it trains our imagination—especially about what a person is. Cartesian dualism, and the types of explorations its framework allows in fiction, have become part of our cultural vocabulary.

Consider how many beloved stories depend on the idea that the “real self” can be detached from the body:

• Body-swap comedies and dramas (“Freaky Friday” and its many relatives) treat the self as a transferable occupant.
• Virtual reality narratives (such as The Matrix) imagine that lived experience belongs primarily to the mind, while the body is either a battery or a pod-bound inconvenience.
• Mind-uploading and replaceable bodies (seen in various science-fiction worlds like Altered Carbon) portray bodies as “sleeves” you can change while the self persists as data.
• Ghost-in-the-machine stories (like Ghost in the Shell) press the question: if consciousness can live in different bodies—or in no body—what is a body for?
• Astral projection and disembodied heroism (common in superhero and fantasy genres) dramatize spiritual power as a kind of leaving-the-body skill.
• And for a generation raised on Scholastic book fair “Animorph” books, we saw a self seamlessly move between body forms, almost entirely intact.

None of these works is “bad,” and many are profound. These metaphors allow us to think about important issues in unique ways. The point is simpler: we are repeatedly entertained by narratives in which the self is detachable. It allows us to take a concept that is useful for dissecting ideas, and begin to assume it also has metaphysical credibility. These stories make dualism emotionally plausible. After enough repetitions, it becomes hard not to feel, at least subconsciously, that embodiment is optional—maybe even a burden to be overcome.

Art, in other words, takes the seed of an idea and transmits it until it seems obvious and inevitable. 

The Restored Gospel’s Anthropology: The Soul Is Embodied

At first glance, body-self dualism can sound like spiritual wisdom. It can motivate people to resist superficial judgment and to anchor dignity in something deeper than appearance. It can help someone endure pain: “This suffering is real, but it is not the whole of me.” It can even protect against despair in aging: “I am still me.”

There is a legitimate insight here: a human being is more than chemistry and biology. The gospel itself insists on meaning, agency, and eternal worth.

But dualism doesn’t stop at “more than.” It tends to become “other than”—and then “apart from.”

And that is where it begins to clash with Christianity at the root, because Christianity is not a religion of escape from embodiment. It is a religion of incarnation and resurrection.

As discussed above, classic Christianity already resists dualism more than many people realize. The story is not “souls trapped in bodies learn to float away.” The story is: God creates a material world and calls it good; God takes on flesh; God saves through a crucified body; God raises that body; God promises the resurrection of the dead.

The restored gospel presses this even further, not only by affirming bodily resurrection, but by giving a remarkably strong doctrine of what a “soul” is and why bodies matter eternally.

In Latter-day Saint scripture, the human being is not a spirit that happens to have a body. The scriptures define the human soul in a way that refuses the split: “The spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15).

That is not a minor phrasing choice. It means the “real me” is not just the spirit and not just the body, but the union.

And the Restoration goes further still, “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure…” (D&C 131:7–8). This teaching directly undercuts the assumption that “spiritual” means “non-material” and therefore “more real.” In restored doctrine, spirit is not a ghostly opposite of matter. The universe is more continuous than Cartesian dualism imagines.

In the restored view, receiving a body is not a temporary inconvenience; it is a major purpose of mortality. It is tied to agency, growth, covenants, family, and joy. Doctrine and Covenants 93 teaches that a fullness of joy is connected to embodied union, “For man is spirit. The elements are eternal… spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.” (D&C 93:33).

In other words, the body is not merely a testing ground you outgrow. It is part of the shape of eternal joy.

The heart of the gospel is not that Jesus proved the soul can survive death. Many religious and cultural beliefs at the time already believed that. The scandal and glory is that He rose bodily, and that this bodily resurrection is the pattern of our future. The victory is not the soul’s escape, but the defeat of physical death.

Restored scripture (like the Book of Mormon’s sustained emphasis on resurrection) treats the reuniting of body and spirit as essential to justice, mercy, and wholeness (see, for example, 2 Nephi 9’s teaching that resurrection overcomes the “awful monster” of death and hell).

From a restored perspective, then, body-self dualism is not merely a mistaken psychological metaphor. It is a rival story about what salvation is.

Theological Problems Dualism Introduces

Once body-self dualism becomes the default way we imagine the self, it creates a set of pressures inside our theology. These pressures often don’t announce themselves. They show up as confusions, imbalances, and quiet mismatches between what we say we believe and what we emotionally expect.

Here are several of the most serious.

It turns resurrection into an optional add-on. If the “real me” is my inner self and the body is just a vehicle, then resurrection can feel like a nice bonus rather than a climax of redemption. Death becomes a release: the soul is finally free. But in restored Christianity, death is an enemy, and resurrection is not decorative; it is part of the gospel itself.

Dualism makes it harder to feel why resurrection matters—not as theology on paper, but as hope in the bones.

It quietly slides toward a “spirit good / body bad” moral psychology. Many disciples already struggle with shame around appetite, sexuality, fatigue, and mental health. Dualism can legitimize that shame by teaching us to interpret bodily life as a lower realm.

The result is often a tragic pattern: people try to become holy by becoming less human—less needy, less vulnerable, less physical. But the gospel does not sanctify us by amputating our humanity. It sanctifies us by redeeming it. The body is not the villain of spiritual life. It is one of the main places spiritual life happens.

It makes ordinances feel oddly external. Restored worship is profoundly embodied: baptism, the sacrament, laying on of hands, temple ordinances—covenants enacted through physical signs. If the body is peripheral to the “real self,” ordinances can begin to feel like mere symbols performed on the outside, while the “real” spiritual work is purely internal.

But restored theology treats ordinances as more than outward theater. They are covenantal actions that involve the person as an embodied soul. Dualism makes that harder to grasp—and easier to neglect.

It can fracture discipleship into “spiritual” and “physical” compartments. A dualistic imagination encourages a split life. Scripture and prayer belong to the “real me.” Sleep, food, exercise, and sexuality belong to the “body.” Work with hands, service with time, care for health, and patience with limitations become second-tier concerns.

But the gospel aims at consecration, not compartmentalization. The command is not “give God your inner life while managing your body on the side.” It is “present your whole self”—a living sacrifice in the full, integrated sense.

It truncates the purpose of life. If a spirit alone constituted an entire self, why even come to earth from the pre-mortal life? The reasons exist, but are narrower, and can paint a picture of a God more manipulative than exalting.

It weakens a doctrine of divine embodied destiny. One of the Restoration’s most distinctive teachings is that God is not an abstract force and that exaltation is not absorption into a featureless spiritual ocean. Our destiny is personal, relational, covenantal—and, in Latter-day Saint teaching, inseparably tied to glorified embodiment and eternal family life.

If we become convinced that bodies are ultimately non-essential, we begin to lose the emotional logic of exaltation. “Eternal increase,” eternal relationships, eternal joy as something lived—all of this becomes harder to picture and therefore harder to desire.

How Dualism Can Shrink Our Spiritual Potential

Ultimately, dualism can keep us from our full potential. Here the danger is subtle: dualism can masquerade as spirituality while quietly reducing the scope of sanctification.

The gospel’s path is usually different: not disconnection, but redemption; not escape, but transformation; not “less embodied,” but “more whole.”

If the body is merely an instrument, then growth becomes a war of mind against flesh: the self issues orders and the body either obeys or betrays. That can produce either pride (“I have mastered myself”) or despair (“My body is my enemy”).

The restored gospel frames agency more relationally: spirit and body are meant to be unified under Christ, with desires refined, not erased; with weakness turned into humility and strength; with the whole soul learning holiness.

Charity is embodied love: meals delivered, hands held, burdens lifted, work done, presence offered. A dualistic spirituality can become thin—rich in ideas, poor in incarnation. But the Savior’s ministry was not primarily a set of correct abstractions. It was a life of bodily presence: touching lepers, weeping at graves, eating with outcasts, bleeding in Gethsemane, rising with wounds still visible.

If our picture of salvation does not make room for that kind of embodied love, it is not yet fully Christian.

A Better Alternative: Sacred, Covenantal Embodiment

Rejecting body-self dualism does not require us to deny spiritual life, inner depth, or transcendence. It requires us to tell a more Christian story about what the self is.

A Restoration-shaped alternative might be called sacred embodiment:

1. I am not a soul trapped in a body. I am an embodied soul: spirit and element together.
2. Pre-mortal spirits are incomplete waiting for and requiring earthly embodiment, and our help in providing it.
3. My body is not my enemy. It is a divine gift and a field of discipleship.
4. Holiness is not less physical. Holiness is more whole—body and spirit reconciled in Christ.
5. Resurrection is not a metaphor. It is God’s declaration that bodies matter forever.

This reorientation has practical consequences. It changes how we think about rest, health, sexuality, aging, disability, and even worship. It invites a spirituality that is not embarrassed by the body, and not obsessed with the body either, but grateful for the body as a site of covenant life.

It also reframes repentance. Repentance is not the inner self apologizing for what the body did. Repentance is the whole soul turning toward God—habits, hungers, thoughts, relationships, and physical practices included.

The Gospel Does Not Save Us From Bodies; It Saves Us As Embodied Persons

Body-self dualism did not become popular because people are foolish. It became popular because it offers relief: relief from pain, from shame, from mortality, from limitation. Descartes gave the modern world a conceptual map that made that relief feel intellectually respectable; modern technology and popular art have made it feel emotionally intuitive.

But the restored gospel invites us into a different kind of relief—not the relief of separation, but the relief of reconciliation. Not “my body doesn’t matter,” but “my body can be redeemed.” Not “salvation is escape,” but “salvation is resurrection.” Not “I am a ghost in a machine,” but “I am a soul, spirit, and body, created for a fullness of joy.”

In that light, body-self dualism is not just a harmless idea. It is a quiet counterfeit of hope. It offers transcendence without incarnation, survival without resurrection, spirituality without covenantal embodiment. And it is precisely there—where it seems most comforting—that it can most effectively shrink our faith.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is bigger. It is not afraid of matter. It is not embarrassed by flesh. It does not treat the body as an unfortunate container for the real self. It proclaims that in Christ, the whole self—spirit and body—can become holy.

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For many lovers of classical music, Handel’s Messiah represents the pinnacle of both artistic and spiritual excellence. It is almost temple-like in its ability to create an intersection between the human and the Divine. Handel’s work has helped countless listeners to internalize the message of the Savior’s birth, Atonement, and Resurrection. 

Scripture is clear that inspiration is necessary to bear witness of the Savior. The Apostle Paul wrote that “No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.” Restoration Scripture adds the further insight that “you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.” Handel’s music, combined with the biblical texts that librettist Charles Jennens selected for the work, bears witness that Jesus is the Lord. I believe the scriptures when they say that “every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ.” My own faith in and desire to follow the Savior is strengthened whenever I listen to or sing the Messiah. Because the Messiah bears witness of Christ, I conclude that it was inspired by God. 

Some scholars have cast doubt on whether Handel’s  Messiah was divinely inspired because of what is known about the composition process. However, because of its inspired witness of Christ, I believe it would be more fruitful to reframe our idea of what it means for an artist to be inspired rather than rejecting inspiration altogether. A closer look at Handel’s process of composing the Messiah suggests that divine inspiration often draws on previous experience, comes “line upon line,” and may manifest as an enabling power. 

Preparation and Previous Experience

Handel’s  Messiah came at a pivotal point in Handel’s career. Four years earlier, he had been restored to health after a dangerous stroke, defying an initial diagnosis that he would never again play the organ or compose music. But after his stroke, he struggled to find success. Handel’s signature Italian operas were falling out of favor with his British audience. His personal debts were mounting, raising the threat of debtor’s prison and increasing his stress. Considering the pressure that Handel experienced during this time, he likely felt an increased dependence on the Lord. Despite his talents, he may have felt that he needed help from on High. It is possible that such a sense of urgency and “real intent” made it possible for him to receive inspiration. 

Handel had essentially mastered the composition process, including the common 18th-century practice of writing a large quantity of music in a relatively short time. Researcher Calvin Stapert noted that Handel’s pace of 24 days for composition “was more or less typical for Handel.” To Stapert, this meant Handel was not inspired in his composition. Stapert wrote: “Romantic notions notwithstanding, it cannot be taken as a sign of exceptional or, as some have believed, divine inspiration. Like most of the composers of his time, Handel was capable of turning out a prodigious amount of music in a relatively short span of time … He was following his normal work pattern of composing new works in the gap between concert seasons.”

But the fact that the composition timeline was typical for Handel does not mean he was not inspired. Although the rapid composition of the Messiah was typical of Handel, the finished product stands out from the rest of his work for its spiritual qualities. Shortly after composing the Messiah, he wrote another oratorio, Samson, in about the same amount of time. It is worth listening to (I particularly recommend the 2009 BBC Proms performance), but it has nowhere near the same depth and spiritual power as the Messiah. Something was different about the process of composing the Messiah. I believe that divine inspiration entered into Handel’s routine and elevated what he was able to create. Honing his creative process over the years prepared him for his most inspiring and inspired work. 

Handel drew on prior preparation not only in his composition speed, but also in the musical qualities of the Messiah. Since 18th-century composers like Handel needed to produce a great deal of music quickly, they frequently recycled music from their own earlier compositions or borrowed from others. This behavior was culturally acceptable at the time, partly because facility and craftsmanship were prized more than originality, and partly because many people didn’t notice. Recordings weren’t possible, and the idea of a classical repertoire of pieces played on a regular basis didn’t yet exist. (Messiah may actually be the beginning of the classical repertoire, since it is the first piece to be performed regularly year after year.)

Handel was no exception in his borrowing; he borrowed from his own previous work and from that of other composers. In his Messiah, for one example, he drew from a forgotten madrigal he had previously written to write a duet and chorus. He also used ready-made material: the main melody of “And with His Stripes” was used by both Bach and Mozart, leading one researcher to call it “public property.” The same researcher notes that the Pastoral Symphony “is based upon a bagpipe tune played at Christmas by the pifferari of Naples and Rome,” but Handel acknowledged this by his abbreviation pifa at the beginning of the movement. 

While some might argue that Handel’s borrowings rule out the idea of divine inspiration, I suggest they merely change our idea of how inspiration works. Inspiration is not always about receiving completely new ideas. The Savior spoke of the Holy Ghost’s ability to “bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” Memory, discovery, and organization are all part of inspiration.

In Handel’s case, it appears that inspiration involved helping him to recall, select, and improve preexisting material. This may actually coincide with the understanding of the Creation process revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith. The Book of Abraham, for instance, redefines the Creation as “organizing” preexisting matter, rather than creating out of nothing. Handel’s recycling of prior works was not a passive copy-and-paste approach; in each case, he elevated the material. This is most clearly seen in the fact that one of the oratorio’s most beloved choruses, “For Unto Us a Child is Born,” is built out of material he had written for a forgotten Italian duet and a madrigal. The final result is not a similarly forgettable work but a masterpiece that offers spiritual nourishment to audiences all over the world. The borrowings and recyclings of prior work that were ordered to testify of the Savior attest to Handel’s inspiration, rather than disproving it. 

Line Upon Line 

Although the initial composition process took twenty-four days, Handel spent a great deal of time revising the Messiah. An editor of one version of the score, Watkins Shaw, notes that “no fewer than 11 movements … were subject to re-shaping or complete recomposition by Handel, some of them more than once, following original composition in 1741 and first performances in 1742.” Another researcher, Robert Manson Myers, notes that Handel “ultimately devoted more time and thought to Messiah than to any other single composition.”

The Messiah did not come all at once, fully formed and unchangeable. It came filtered through a mortal instrument through trial and error. The process accords with what scripture teaches about revelation: “For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom⁠; for unto him that receiveth will I give more⁠.” Inspiration and creation do not happen all at once. Handel’s experience shows that the process takes time and progresses gradually. It often includes inspired revision. 

An Enabling Power

Handel’s inspiration process did not shortcut the time and effort necessary for the creative process. Instead, it was a force that lifted and sanctified his efforts. Elder David A. Bednar, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has spoken of Christ’s “strengthening and enabling power” that “strengthens us to do things we could never do on our own.” I believe that this divine power played a role for Handel in the process of composing the Messiah. 

For Dr. Nelson, the hand of heaven was not seen in doing something unfamiliar, but in performing work he was experienced in at an extraordinarily effective level. The Messiah occupies a similar place in Handel’s career. He was enabled to create his most accomplished, most beloved work because he set out to bear witness of Jesus Christ. Like Dr. Nelson, Handel gave the glory to God, not only through a chorus that literally sings those words, but by inscribing at the end of the score S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria—“To God Alone be the Glory”).

There is a frequently quoted account from a servant of Handel that the composer once said that while working on the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” While we should use caution with source verification, it suggests Handel understood he was under the influence of divine inspiration. Handel’s claim is modest. His language (“I did think I did see”) emphasizes the subjective nature of the spiritual experience he had. That composing the chorus was a spiritual experience is not hard to believe, because listening to and singing it is a spiritual experience. 

Perhaps inspiration, then, served both to enable Handel to create his best artistic work and to inject a powerful moral and spiritual influence into his work, breathing the Spirit into the work that Handel created. It is that Spirit that continues to animate the work and, after nearly three hundred years and despite trends of secularism, continues to move us to stand and sing “Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.”

The post The Divine Inspiration of Handel’s Messiah appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Danny Frost

President Dallin H. Oaks again turned to the topic of peacemaking—a key part of his teachings, as well as those of President Russell M. Nelson. The repeated prophetic calls for peacemaking suggest that this is one of the key issues of our time. Christians should know better than to indulge in the contempt and hostility that are all around us. 

I appreciated how President Oaks indicated that peacemaking often means doing several things well at once: showing love and compassion for those who are different from us even as we stand up for the truth as we understand it. President Oaks also emphasized that personal virtue must be at the core of enduring peace. He noted that missionaries act as peacemakers when they “preach repentance from personal corruption, greed, and oppression, because only by individual reformation can an entire society eventually rise above such evils.” 

Peacemaking can include many other things such as bishops’ efforts to help marriages and resolve personal conflicts, service to others, reducing suffering, increasing understanding between groups, and raising children (including foster children). Peacemakers heal and uplift. President Oaks’ closing words are a powerful invitation to be better peacemakers: “Let us follow Him by forgoing contention and by using the language and methods of peacemakers. In our families and other personal relationships, let us avoid what is harsh and hateful. Let us seek to be holy, like our Savior.” 

Charity and Enduring to the End

Anna Bryner

Elder David A. Bednar delivered a great insight about how “enduring to the end is linked inextricably to the spiritual gift of charity.” He taught that “charity is the very essence of the end toward which we are enduring: becoming new creatures in Christ.” In other words, charity is not only a spiritual gift that will help us endure to the end, but the very substance of the kind of person we are to become: one who “suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

I thought Elder Bednar’s talk paired well with President Dallin H. Oaks’ talk about relating to one another as children of God. This is the practical work of charity—to allow Christ’s love and righteous desires to fill our hearts and transform the way we interact with others. Peacemaking can start in each of our hearts as we seek the spiritual gift of charity from the Father.

Faith Through the Highs and Lows

Lauren Yarro

President Emily Belle Freeman shared a powerful perspective that both our good days and our hard days are part of God’s plan. In her talk, she uses Peter’s story to show that faith isn’t built in one defining moment, but over time through both the highs and the lows of life. Peter had moments of bold testimony and moments of fear and failure, and he still became who the Lord needed him to be. President Freeman reminds us that Christ is not distant in our hardest moments. He is right there with us, strengthening us and reminding us that our worst days are not the end of our story.

I needed the reminder that both the best days and the worst days are shaping us into who the Lord needs us to become. She taught that holding onto the eternal truths and the promised blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ allows us to draw upon the power of God in our lives. Her closing reminder was that “joy is not the absence of sorrow in your life. It is the presence of Jesus Christ in your life.” 

Ministering in the Savior’s Way

Amanda Freebairn

This general conference was a reminder to me of the many storms the people around us are facing. Elder Ronald A. Rasband shared about the short life of his grandson who was born with chromosomal abnormalities. President Emily Belle Freeman explained that recently, during the excitement of planning her daughter’s wedding, her beloved husband found out his cancer had returned. Elder Thierry K. Motumbo told the story of losing four children. 

But along with these heartbreaking stories emerged a theme of love and ministering, and the impact ministering can have on the lives of those we minister to. 

Sister Kristen Yee shared that her father, who had been at one point emotionally abusive, began to heal through the Savior when a ministering couple invited him to attend the temple weekly. She also explained that “ministering by the Spirit invites the Spirit into our lives and the lives of those we minister to. I often find peace, clarity, healing and purpose when I minister. I find the Savior when I minister. This is by divine design.” 

Both President Dallin H. Oaks and Sister Yee testified that through the Savior, we can come to love in ways that we never thought possible. Elder Patrick Kearon said since his calling to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “I’ve learned that I can love even more…We don’t serve people we really love, rather, we come to love people as we serve them.” 

President D. Todd Christofferson taught that as we cultivate the pure love of Christ, lift and minister to others, and exercise devotion to the will of God, we can little by little enact change in the world.

“We tend to underestimate the influence of Christlike individuals in the world. But working one by one has always been Jesus’ approach to a changing society and establishing his kingdom. It is the aggregation of individual choices over time that forms and changes societies for good or ill. No one of us alone can change the world but each of us can have an influence in the world.”

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