We sat down with Walker Wright, author of the recently published book “Nourishing the Roots: Seeking the Foundations of Latter-day Testimony,” to discuss this pattern and how someone might work through it. Wright’s book lays out an intellectual case for the plausibility of the “roots” of a testimony: belief in the Godhead, belief in the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and belief in the Restoration. In our interview spanning metaphysics, science, history, and epistemology, we explore questions ranging from what the nature and orderliness of the universe might tell us about the plausibility of God to what we should make of the experiences of the Book of Mormon witnesses.

Wright serves as the director of programs for a Yale-based institute and has previously held academic program management roles at public policy organizations in Washington, D.C. His writing spans economics, politics, and religion and has appeared in academic journals and public outlets alike. He holds an MA in government from Johns Hopkins University, as well as an MBA and BBA from the University of North Texas.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style, and Mr. Wright has approved the edits. 

Anna: Good morning, Walker. Thank you for joining Amanda and me today to talk about your new book, “Nourishing the Roots.” Amanda and I both read it and really enjoyed it. We’re excited to jump into some questions about it today.

Walker: Thanks for having me. Appreciate the invitation.

Amanda: Latter-day Saints, especially those who are experiencing a trial of faith, often hear this domino logic: If the Book of Mormon is true, then Joseph Smith is a prophet, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really is Christ’s restored church, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and then God is our Heavenly Father. So all we really need to know is if the Book of Mormon is true. But you started from a much simpler and almost opposite route: why anything at all? Why did you think that was the right place to start?

Walker: Great question. I don’t disagree with the logic that having a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon is the major paradigm shift and the way to truly anchor you in the truths of the Restoration. That’s why I make it the last chapter. I think that is the most fundamental and best way to come to know the truth of it. For most Latter-day Saints, that’s usually how they get their testimony and where they begin. 

My approach is to go all the way back to what we can really know about anything, which goes back to the basic fundamentals of reality. When you start to question these experiences, start questioning all experiences. Go all the way back and start to build again. The hope is that once you get through chapters one through seven—starting with reality, the Resurrection, and the Book of Mormon itself—someone questioning those experiences can say, “Maybe that wasn’t self-delusion. Maybe that was genuine. Maybe I should continue to take that seriously.” 

Or if you’ve never had that experience yourself—maybe you’ve always been a non-believer of some sort—maybe you can get over some of these hurdles that might be blocking you from even trying to have a spiritual experience. Eventually, once you’ve thought through it, you might say, “Maybe I should try this. Maybe I should take it a little bit seriously,” and you might be in a place where you could genuinely attempt to have a spiritual experience. I decided to start at the root because the hope is to help people overcome a number of hurdles and create the context for a genuine spiritual experience.

Anna: I was really interested in your discussion of the intelligibility of reality. That chapter blew my mind because we take so much of it for granted. Math works with physics, but it doesn’t have to. Why that chapter? How does that help form a basis to develop some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs?

Walker: I start there because it is one of the most knowable things: existence. We all exist. It’s one of the most familiar experiences that we have: existing and seeing that things around us exist. As you pointed out, we often take that for granted. Understandably so, because it’s natural. We form these beliefs through sensory experience. 

But if you actually stop to think about existence or being, you realize that it’s pretty weird. You start to ask, “Did things have to exist?” And even if they did, they could have existed in a chaotic form where nothing made sense to us, with no meaning, purpose, or pattern that we could derive from anything. Yet, that’s not the kind of reality that we live in. There is an orderliness and a rationale behind these things. There are laws of physics that we discover. We don’t just project those laws onto a nonsensical reality, but they’re actually woven into the fabric of reality. That’s very lucky, and in some sense, somewhat unexpected. 

It could be a happy accident that we exist. It could also be a happy accident that it’s orderly and rational to some degree. But I don’t know if we really should expect that. Once you start to think about that, it puts a crack in the naturalist worldview—the idea that nature is a closed system that is sufficient to account for itself and that you can explain it all from within that system. This worldview generally sees reality as nothing more than physical processes and mechanisms. There’s no ultimate purpose to these processes. It’s just the machinery of the universe.

But I don’t know if that’s tenable anymore once you start talking about things making sense and that there’s actual sense to be made, because that entails meaning in the way things operate. That indicates a logic to the whole structure. And logic isn’t inherent in any mere mechanism. Describing physical laws assumes lawfulness and order. It smuggles in meaning. And I don’t know that meaning has any place in a strictly naturalist view of the universe. It’s not so much that “why is there something rather than nothing” or “why is the world intelligible” automatically means God, the Restoration, or anything like that. But I think it puts a crack in naturalism. Once you start moving away from that worldview, you start asking, “What are the alternatives? What kind of reality do we exist in?” Eventually, hopefully, you get to the point of asking whether it’s the kind of reality that makes more sense with or without God. This is the first step moving towards a reality that contains the divine.

Anna: That’s really interesting. You also talked about consciousness. I had to read that chapter a few times just to wrap my head around it: the fact that we are conscious and can comprehend that we are. Yet as much as we can describe the neurons firing and the chemicals flowing, we cannot actually understand the subjective experience of consciousness merely through its scientific process. How does that connect to a person’s consciousness or mind in seeking truth and developing a testimony of the roots?

Walker: I see the first three chapters as laying the groundwork for moving beyond a naturalist worldview. You have the strangeness of existence and the intelligibility of reality in the first chapter. You have the fine-tuning of the universe that reinforces this intelligibility of reality. 

What makes that difficult for me to agree with is that once you start to go through the machinery of the brain and think through it, if it is all just physical stimuli and physical processes, then we can easily imagine a world in which those physical processes are still going on, but there’s no subjective experience. In the book, I talk about what philosophers of mind call “zombies,” which basically look like us, act like us, and are in every way, shape, and form the same as us, except there’s no light on upstairs. Or maybe the only conscious experience is white noise. It could have been that way if mind were just machinery, but it didn’t end up being that way. 

One of my favorite thought experiments is the “Chinese nation” by the philosopher Ned Block: let’s say you gave everyone in China very specific instructions about when and what to signal to others, along with a cell phone to carry out those signals. The entire nation ends up functioning like neurons in a brain, flipping certain switches at certain times by use of these signals. Now let’s say that you hook the whole system up to a robot. The people of China collectively function as the robot’s “brain,” and the robot begins to act like a conscious human being because of all these switches. Now, ask yourself, “Is that robot conscious? Does that robot have a subjective first-person experience?” Most people would say no. But if we say that the mind is nothing more than this kind of machinery, then we haven’t really explained why we have conscious first-person experience. We all could have ended up like this robot. But we’re not.

There seems to be a qualitative difference and gap between the physical nature of the brain and the experience of consciousness. Mind is more than machine. I sum it up by borrowing from a philosopher who says it’s a construction error to think mindless particles suddenly become mind: Just like white marble tiles do not suddenly add up to a black, non-marble floor, mindless, impersonal matter does not suddenly add up to a personal, subjective mind. The implication seems to be that the mind must be in the ingredients from the get-go, that it must have always been there. It’s not a latecomer to the universe. It seems to be at the foundation of existence, the ultimate foundation of all things. So now you not only have the strangeness of existence, the intelligibility of reality, and the fine-tuning of the universe, but a mind-like reality where mind is eternal, has always been around, and was there from the get-go. That fits very well with the Latter-day Saint perspective that intelligence is not created or made, and that mind was in the beginning with God, premortality, all that type of stuff. Now you have this strange mind-like reality. Is it the kind of reality that makes more sense with God or without? That’s the groundwork that leads up to God, Christ, and the Restoration.

Amanda: I want to take us back to the Book of Mormon now. You make an interesting comparison between the historical evidence for the Resurrection and for the Book of Mormon witnesses. What do you think a Christian who accepts the Resurrection but quickly dismisses the evidence for the Book of Mormon witnesses actually has to grapple with when it comes to the witnesses? 

Walker: What I’ve noticed a lot of the time in people who have rejected the Book of Mormon witnesses but accept the Resurrection—especially if they’re leaning hard on the eyewitnesses of the Resurrection or the New Testament witnesses—is that I don’t think they’re familiar with the documented evidence. I don’t think they’re familiar with how much we have from these witnesses, how consistent they are, and how early they are in terms of proximity to the actual event. Some are much later, but we have plenty from within a month or so where you have actual signed statements and so forth. 

Many Christians who reject it make elementary mistakes. I’ve heard people in some debates say, “Joseph was the only one who saw them.” That seems to be completely ignorant of the witnesses themselves. Or they’ll say, “It was just a fraud.” What’s your evidence that it’s fraud? That’s the question, isn’t it? Or they’ll say something like, “The witnesses went back on their testimonies,” which they never did. 

What they’re missing is how closely they parallel the ancient witnesses of the Resurrection, meaning that they had plenty of incentives to deny their testimony. They had reputational damage. It cost money in the case of Martin Harris. The witnesses faced persecution, they faced death threats, some were beaten, and some were actually killed. Some left the Church. Some came back, but some didn’t. That is really interesting, because the claim was not, “Joseph was never a prophet,” but for those who left, they said he became a fallen prophet. That is a very important distinction, because ultimately it’s saying, “Angels, God, the Restoration—that happened. I just think it may have gone off the rails later on down the line.” The Book of Mormon witnesses are something a lot of Christians are missing. They’re between a rock and a hard place: they’ll rely heavily on the eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, but then if they take that eyewitness argument seriously, they either have to deal with these Book of Mormon witnesses and take them seriously as well, or they have to undermine their own argument in favor of the Resurrection. 

These critics are missing many of the same incentives the early Christians faced, and they’re overlooking the fact that we have far more documentation from these particular witnesses describing their experiences, and that it wasn’t just one kind of experience. You had the Eight with a very tangible, physical, natural experience, and the Three with the angel. The two of those together, reinforcing each other, make it pretty hard to come up with an overarching explanation to dismiss them.

Amanda: At the beginning of our discussion, you mentioned how people going through a faith crisis are reevaluating their previous experiences and looking for things like how much of this was confirmation bias, how much was emotional manipulation, or a draw from culture. Book of Mormon antiquity is always a big question for people who are struggling. How do you distinguish a good case for Book of Mormon antiquity from confirmation bias, where you’re counting all of the hits while you sort of dismiss what doesn’t work?

Walker: Great question. The biggest thing—and I say this in a footnote, not in the main body of the book—is that critics will ask, “Is there any non-Latter-day Saint archaeologist, Mesoamericanist, or anthropologist who takes the Book of Mormon seriously?” The answer is pretty clearly no. Nobody looks at it who isn’t a Latter-day Saint. I point out that if they did take it seriously, they would probably become a Latter-day Saint, and then they would remove themselves from the critics’ preferred category that was created. 

Second, it’s not just being an expert in a particular geography or field; you also have to be an expert in the text itself. What does the text itself actually claim? That was something that John Sorenson was doing when he created the limited geography model: piecing together what the text itself says about its own geography. That’s just one example. To me, the bad arguments for supposed antiquity usually rest on a whole bunch of assumptions about the ancient world or about the text itself, and sometimes both, instead of what the actual text says and what we actually know about the ancient world. When those two things converge, that’s when it becomes—not a knockdown argument by any means—but definitely one that should raise eyebrows where you say, “That’s interesting.” 

The best ones for me are the most subtle, where the text itself actually makes more sense when you take that ancient evidence into consideration. If you read the Bible straight through, KJV style, you can get a lot out of it, but you can also be confused. Using a commentary that has cultural context can make the text come alive so that you understand why they acted that way and what was going on, because it doesn’t always give you that information. It assumes the audience already knows. Same thing with the Book of Mormon. Anytime I’ve incorporated ancient evidence to give cultural context to the text, it starts to make more sense, come alive, and I understand the text better. It has no business doing that if it’s strictly a 19th-century text, because it should have no coherence with the ancient world. That’s a personal thing for me, where the text begins to actually make more sense when you take into consideration this evidence for antiquity. That’s one of the biggest flags for me.

Amanda: People who are struggling through a crisis of faith often describe feeling dismissed when people offer advice focused on getting back to the basics: read your scriptures, say your prayers, go to church, take the sacrament, fast. When we are supporting those who are struggling, how do we keep this roots-and-branches framework from becoming a way to dismiss real, heartfelt, good-faith questions about issues that may be branch issues?

Walker: Great question. I’ve already seen some responses to my book where I’ve been accused of being dismissive just by promoting the idea that there are roots (primary, fundamental beliefs) and branches (secondary beliefs that are outgrowths of the roots)—just the sheer model of it is offensive in some way. Most of the time, the answer’s not going to be, “You have a concern about Church history. That doesn’t matter. Here’s a book by Walker Wright, go read that.” That’s not the best way to do it. 

A lot of the time, I’ve found that you’ll reach a certain assumption that might not be necessary or justified, or it’s a paradigm about prophets. It’s a gangly branch that could be cut off; it’s not something you have to preserve. You don’t have to believe or think that; you can think about it another way, and that fits just fine in the Church’s teachings. By asking questions and being genuinely interested, you go through these and figure out where they’re coming from. That helps people feel heard, and it helps you both understand where the issue is. It may not resolve it right then and there, but it helps you better connect on where you both are coming from. I have had experiences where I’ve pointed out that they don’t have to hold a certain assumption, and that helped them move on from there. My experience with people has been to always try to figure out how what they’re struggling with connects to these roots and whether there actually is a through line between what they’re struggling with and the major claims of the gospel.

Amanda: That connects a lot with my own personal experience, where I thought the issue was polygamy, and the more I questioned it, the more I got down to: maybe the reason why polygamy led to me thinking I might be an atheist is because I’m struggling with the nature of God, what God might think, and how my assumptions about the world might be different than the way God views the world.

Walker: Absolutely.

Amanda: After spending most of the book constructing an intellectual case, you ultimately end with personal revelation. Does that suggest that apologetics don’t actually produce faith, or perhaps they can clear intellectual obstacles so that people become more willing to encounter God?

Walker: I think it can be both. Elder (Neal A.) Maxwell (of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles), quoting Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer, said that arguments and reasons don’t produce faith, but they create a context in which faith can thrive. It’s few and far between, but I think there are some people out there where the sheer intellectual argument can do something for them. That really does it for them. But that’s not most people. Most people take reason and their own experience into account. 

I see the book as casting a wide net to those people who might be 95% intellectual, hoping to offer good arguments, reflection, and reasons to take it seriously. None of it is absolute proof; none of these are knockdown arguments that you can’t explain in other ways, but I think someone can walk away saying, “I may not believe it, but it’s not unreasonable.” That’s a move in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. 

For most people, apologetics helps clear hurdles. I hope my book causes people to reflect on how they know things, how their experiences are wrapped up in how they know things, and gets them to think about the world around them, how they make sense of the world, why they should make sense of the world, and if there is sense to be made. To really drill down deep into these existential questions. I jokingly say that if you’re going to have a faith crisis, have an existential one, because an existential crisis makes you ask deep questions about what anything means, what your life means, whether there is anything after death, or if it all just ends there. Those types of questions are the kinds of cracks that God can get into and reach you in different ways. 

Spiritual experiences aren’t just an emotional high. Sometimes it can be enlightenment, where an idea clicks, a worldview makes sense, or you feel pulled toward meaning. There are a variety of experiences that people have. I hope apologetics can reach those few who are intellectually minded, while clearing hurdles and creating a context for others to feel it’s reasonable to rely on these spiritual experiences and safe to attempt to have them.

Walker: For me, it was definitely an afterward thing. I had a spiritual experience in the MTC related to the plan of salvation and the death of my sister from years earlier, but soon after, I was introduced to the work of Truman G. Madsen, to whom the book is dedicated, who taught me that the intellectual pursuit of the spiritual was something that could be done. He made me want to learn and know more. He provided a model of asking questions, seeking answers, learning more, and growing in my faith. Through that, I would come into contact with things that were more difficult than expected: weird history, policies, or people behaving badly. But because I had been anchored by the spiritual experience, I still felt strongly that this was right. 

I would ask how I could make sense of a particular issue and if there was an answer to be found. Some people say, “I put it on the shelf.” Well, at some point you have to take it off the shelf and read it. Work through it, but don’t be so hasty in your judgments and conclusions. That doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a framework that works, but a lot of times people are too quick to pull the trigger: “I Googled over the weekend, and my faith fell apart.” Would you do that with any other academic or intellectual pursuit? If someone Googled a different subject over the weekend and changed their mind overnight, would you take that seriously? Probably not. Then why do that with ultimate questions that people have been wrestling with for thousands of years in philosophy and theology? Take a breath and take time to think through it. 

When it came to the intellectual stuff, especially when I got home from my mission, I found myself struggling with constructing a coherent theological worldview and working through classic arguments about God and religion that didn’t always overlap neatly onto Latter-day Saint theology. Trying to think through these philosophical questions was an intellectual and spiritual struggle, but it anchored me in these big questions. That’s what an intellectual pursuit can do. Some people say that you can or should come to a spiritual conclusion only after you understand everything. I don’t think that’s the case. You can have a spiritual experience, recognize that it seems genuine, and then want to better understand it. That’s what we do with lots of things: we have an experience or observe something, recognize that it happened even if we don’t fully understand it, and then try to better understand it through thought, study, or experimentation. That’s how we learn things. The fact that an experience can give you a reason to believe something doesn’t mean you have finished thinking about it. But it also means that you don’t have to act like that experience didn’t give you legitimate knowledge that you can act on.

Anna: Thank you. I’m excited to share this with our readers. 

The post Nourishing the Roots: An Interview with Walker Wright appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Tithing was also notably present at this most recent General Conference. Elder Patricio M. Giuffra spoke about it in “Trusting the Lord Through Tithes and Offerings,” and Elder Moisés Villanueva addressed it in “Prove Me Now Herewith.”

So, in trying to both answer some of the questions I’ve received and engage with the messages shared in Conference, I thought I would compile my thoughts into a kind of self-Q&A, in the hope that it may be useful to others who have similar questions.

Why should I pay tithing if I need the money more than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Taking care of our families financially is a core religious responsibility. That responsibility does not disappear when we talk about tithing.

Paul organized a collection in the early Church, explaining that people give according to what they have. Although he was discussing a relief collection rather than the modern Latter-day Saint practice of tithing, I see a related principle in proportional giving.

The word tithe means “a tenth.” There is no fixed dollar amount that everyone must pay; the amount varies with income. That allows participation across income levels.

The tension between religious giving and material need appeared in Jesus’ teaching. While at the temple, He warned about scribes who exploited widows. He then watched a widow give two mites and emphasized that, unlike the wealthy donors, she had given all she had to live on.

Paul, in that same letter, explains that our present abundance can meet others’ needs and that their abundance can, in turn, meet our needs when the time comes. 

Instead of seeing paying tithing and supporting our families as competing obligations, we can recognize that as we contribute, we are joining a supportive community that can, at times, provide financial support to help cover our own shortfalls.

God has promised significant blessings to those who have the faith to tithe. So I believe in inviting everyone to seek those blessings while also helping people meet their basic needs.

If paying tithing means I’ll need help buying groceries or paying bills, why wouldn’t I simply keep the money?

In Malachi, God invites His people to tithe and promises to open the windows of heaven. I understand that as a promise of God’s spiritual and physical blessings, though not a guarantee of a particular financial outcome.

I have seen research summaries linking tithing with well-being. Paying tithing requires people to look at how much they make and consider how they are spending it. Those who pay tithing, on average, have lower debt, lower stress levels, better health, and longer lives. They feel more grateful, have greater self-worth, and are happier.

This does not mean God is a vending machine. But biblical prophets have promised that tithing brings blessings. I believe it does, and the data seems to suggest the same.

When people pay tithing while receiving Church assistance, that contribution can still have spiritual meaning. It can preserve a sense of participation and allow people to see themselves as contributors, even during a season when they need more help than they can provide to others.

Because I believe tithing has spiritual value, I would not want to withhold that invitation from people who are struggling financially. Teaching people not to pay tithing when they are currently struggling financially would ultimately be a great disservice to them.

Does that mean you expect paying tithing to bring financial rewards?

I know people who have had miraculous experiences with tithing. I haven’t. And that’s okay.

Some people preach what is sometimes called a prosperity gospel, teaching that giving to a church will result in direct financial rewards.

That’s not what I believe. I do believe God blesses His people, and I do believe He asks us to pay tithing. But the purpose of this life is not the acquisition of material wealth, so we shouldn’t see tithing as a magic dollar-multiplication machine.

Why couldn’t I fulfill the same spiritual purpose of tithing by helping a neighbor or donating to another charity?

Giving to trusted nonprofits that relieve suffering is an excellent practice. In addition to its own programs, the Church often carries out humanitarian work through partnerships with other organizations.

Each year, I choose one local and one international organization for charitable giving. But that is in addition to tithing.

Tithing is part of my relationship with God. The Church does humanitarian work, but it is also God’s organization on earth. It has a strictly religious mission. Latter-day Saints believe that this mission must be carried out under the appropriate priesthood authority restored to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Tithing helps support missionary work and the places and programs needed for worship, religious education, and ordinances. Other organizations can do tremendous good, but, in Latter-day Saint belief, they cannot take the Church’s place in carrying out that particular religious mission.

That mission has practical costs: chapels and temples, curriculum, seminaries and institutes, utilities, and many other expenses.

To me, the distinction is a little like the difference between paying a water bill and donating to a well-building project.

Building wells in Mozambique is important work. Please, when you can, support projects like that. But even though both expenses involve water, they serve different purposes.

They are two worthwhile uses of money, but they are not necessarily interchangeable.

Does the Church pressure people to give or encourage them to make a show of their donations?

The Church’s formal tithing practices avoid high-pressure fundraising tactics. We don’t pass around a collection plate. When I was a kid, we handed in tithing envelopes privately. Today, many members donate online.

Jesus criticized those who made a show of religious giving and taught His followers to give in secret. Private giving is consistent with that teaching. It can reduce the social incentives that turn giving into a performance.

But doesn’t tithing declaration itself create pressure?

Each year, Latter-day Saints are invited to meet with their bishops for tithing declaration and state whether they are full-tithe payers. In 2022, the Church changed the name of the annual meeting from “tithing settlement” to “tithing declaration”.

An annual meeting can serve practical purposes: reviewing donation records, correcting discrepancies, and discussing questions about income and giving. For people whose income fluctuates or is realized mainly at certain times of the year, an annual review may be particularly useful.

It can also provide an opportunity for individuals and families to talk with their bishops about their spiritual lives and their circumstances. I know people who have had such a good visit that they remembered to mention tithing only as they were leaving.

For me, there is spiritual significance in meeting with my bishop each year. I would hope that the meeting offers others an opportunity for encouragement, honest conversation, and support—not embarrassment or humiliation.

Does connecting tithing to temple attendance amount to paying for access to sacred ordinances?

I understand why someone might see it that way, since full-tithe status is part of the temple recommend process. But I do not understand tithing as purchasing an ordinance. I see it as a spiritual commitment expressed through financial choices.

The amount depends on income rather than a set price for admission. Still, calling tithing a spiritual commandment does not remove its financial consequences, and the possibility of receiving assistance does not make those consequences unreal.

People can choose not to pay tithing, but in Latter-day Saint practice that choice has religious meaning; it is not treated merely as a financial decision.

The commitments made in the temple involve aligning our goals and actions with God’s. Because temple covenants include the principle of consecration, I understand tithing as part of preparing for those commitments.

At the same time, financial difficulty does not, by itself, tell us how much faith someone has or how willing they are to make temple covenants.

I see the requirement much as I see other temple requirements: not as a purchase price, but as part of spiritual preparation for temple worship.

What would you say to people who ask why the Church spends money on beautiful temples when it could help people who are suffering?

I would begin with Jesus’ words at Bethany, where He defended an act of costly devotion: “For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.”

I do not read that as permission to neglect people in need. In Mark’s account, Jesus also says, “and whensoever ye will ye may do them good.”

We are Christians. We are called to love and care for the poor. But I do not believe that obligation displaces every other religious responsibility.

I believe there is real value in devoting material resources to worship and religious life. Places of worship can help form communities whose commitments include caring for others. That does not mean every building expense is automatically justified; stewardship still requires careful choices.

Matthew 23:23 helps explain how I understand this balance. Jesus criticized the Pharisees for tithing on their herbs while neglecting the weightier matters of the law: judgment, mercy, and faith. He did not tell them to abandon tithing. He taught them to do both.

That passage challenges the idea that devotion and care for the poor must be competing obligations, only one of which deserves resources.

Making long-term progress against poverty does not end the obligation to relieve immediate suffering. We need to respond to immediate suffering and cultivate communities committed to addressing it over the long term.

For me, caring for the poor and providing places for worship are both parts of the Church’s mission. The difficult question is how to fulfill both responsibly.

Why accumulate substantial investments instead of spending more now?

If you believed you were responsible for preparing a worldwide church to endure severe future disruption, building reserves would not be hard to understand.

I have heard the joke that the Church doesn’t have a “rainy day” fund; it has a “hurricane” fund. I have read the scriptures, and I understand the impulse to prepare for more than an ordinary downturn.

If prophets and apostles believe that building reserves is what the Church needs at this point in its mission, I support that vision. But explaining why reserves are useful is not the same as establishing exactly how large they should be.

An organization that intends to operate indefinitely has reasons to preserve resources for future needs rather than spend every dollar it receives. The appropriate reserve depends on its obligations, expected income, investment risks, and the disruptions it is preparing to withstand.

For illustration only, if an organization wanted a fund capable of supporting $9 billion in annual withdrawals at an assumed spending rate of 4–5 percent, that would correspond to roughly $180 billion to $225 billion in assets.

That is an arithmetic illustration of the Church’s hypothetical required reserve. A spending percentage is not a guarantee of sustainability. Investment returns, inflation, and changing needs can all affect what is needed. 

If ongoing tithing covers the Church’s expenses, why also maintain reserves large enough to support its operations?

Growth is one possible reason. A growing church may need new buildings, educational programs, and continuing support for congregations whose local contributions do not cover their expenses.

The Church developed in the United States, and its worldwide mission extends to places with very different economic circumstances. I do not believe the ability to sustain religious life in a community should depend entirely on the wealth of its local members.

Perhaps the Lord is preparing His Church to support that work over the long term. Reserves can help make such support possible, especially when needs and contributions do not rise at the same pace.

They can also provide a buffer against interruptions in donations or unexpected expenses.

Those considerations help explain why ongoing tithing and financial reserves are not necessarily redundant. 

How does owning commercial real estate and profit-making businesses fit with the Church’s religious mission?

If the Church maintains reserves, those resources need to be managed responsibly. Commercial real estate can be part of an investment strategy when it offers appropriate returns and diversification.

Diversification also gives an organization a reason to hold investments across different industries rather than concentrate all its holdings in a single asset class.

I would not say that commercial real estate is, in and of itself, part of the Church’s religious mission. I believe it can support that mission.

For example, I can see how a development such as City Creek Center, near Temple Square, might serve commercial purposes as part of the Church’s investment stewardship while also helping the surrounding community. That potential helps me understand why an investment near Church Headquarters could have strategic value beyond its financial return.

Whether a particular investment accomplishes those goals should be evaluated rather than assumed. But pursuing more than one worthwhile objective with an investment makes sense to me.

Is it appropriate for Church leaders to receive financial support, and where is the line between supporting their service and using religion for personal gain?

Many people have used religion to benefit themselves, so this is a fair question.

People who leave careers for full-time Church service still have living expenses. I do not object in principle to providing a living allowance for that service.

To me, the important distinction is between support that enables someone to serve and arrangements that turn religious authority into an opportunity for personal enrichment. The amount, purpose, incentives, and oversight matter.

The Book of Mormon condemns priestcraft as preaching to obtain gain and worldly praise rather than seeking the welfare of Zion. I understand that warning as a serious caution against making religious teaching serve the teacher’s ambitions.

Financial incentives can encourage religious teachers to tell audiences what they want to hear, as pleasing them may increase their income or influence.

A fixed living allowance for full-time service is not, by itself, evidence of that kind of enrichment. But financial support should still be reasonable and accountable.

What financial information should members reasonably expect the Church to share?

I think members can reasonably ask how their contributions support the Church’s mission, how funds are safeguarded, and how significant financial failures are corrected. That is different from expecting every financial detail to be public.

Scripture contains examples of discretion serving legitimate purposes. Esther did not initially reveal her Jewish identity, and Jesus sometimes instructed those He healed not to publicize what had happened.

For me, those passages show that discretion can be consistent with discipleship. They do not, by themselves, settle what financial information a religious institution should disclose.

But the possibility of criticism does not eliminate the importance of accurate reporting or make members’ sincere questions unreasonable.

I support appropriate discretion while also believing that questions about stewardship deserve serious, respectful answers. Privacy and accountability are not necessarily opposites.

Ultimately, Jesus teaches that “nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest.” I take that as a reminder of ultimate accountability, not as a reason to set aside present responsibilities.

How do you understand the mistakes acknowledged in the Securities and Exchange Commission episode?

I hold the Church to a very high standard. I also believe that well-meaning people and institutions can make serious mistakes. But describing something as a mistake should not obscure what happened.

According to the SEC’s February 21, 2023 announcement, Ensign Peak used shell companies to file disclosures that obscured the Church’s investment portfolio and misstated Ensign Peak’s control over investment decisions. The SEC also found that Church leadership approved the approach.

Ensign Peak and the Church agreed to pay penalties of $4 million and $1 million, respectively, to settle the charges without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings.

The complexity of securities reporting is significant and likely plays a major role in what occurred, but it does not, by itself, answer the concerns raised by those findings.

The episode remains significant because members reasonably expect the Church to meet a high standard. I do not think defending my faith requires minimizing that expectation.

What matters to me is that failures be acknowledged accurately, corrected, and prevented from recurring. Paying penalties and changing procedures matter, but so does understanding what went wrong.

I can continue to believe in the Church while also expecting its financial administration to meet legal requirements and high ethical standards.

What would you want someone who remains uneasy about Church finances to understand about why you keep paying tithing?

For those who struggle with tithing, I get it. Money is deeply personal. It can represent our time, our labor, and the value the world assigns to them, all put into a tangible form. It is also one of the clearest ways we influence the world.

For me, that is exactly why I choose to pay tithing. It is a way of putting God first and expressing my testimony of the Church’s unique role in fulfilling His plan.

That choice does not require me to pretend that every financial question has an easy answer. It reflects the faith and commitments that guide my life.

Being part of that work fills my heart. Paying tithing gives me a sense that I am contributing to the work of the Church that has shaped my entire life.

The post Answering Tough Questions About Tithing appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

While we should always be careful to avoid saying “all is well in Zion,” the newest report shows a church whose members are becoming increasingly diverse, living happy lives, increasing their educational attainment, and contributing to their communities.

I wanted to highlight six of the big takeaways I had from the report, supplemented by some of the other recent news around the health of the Church. 

Latter-day Saints are Distinguished by Their Service

Nearly three in four Latter-day Saints surveyed (72%) said that they volunteered in the previous year. This compares to 41% of Americans overall. 

In my own analysis of Pew’s public data, 42% of former members reported volunteering in the previous year, in line with national averages. This seems to suggest that there may be something about the practice of the religion itself that is inspiring these volunteerism rates.

This comes as little surprise, as the Church recently reported reaching 90,000 currently serving full-time missionaries, an all-time high. The willingness to make substantial volunteer commitments appears to me to be something that is inculcated in our religious beliefs and practices.

Faith is Associated with Happiness and Gratitude

The survey distinguished those who were raised as Latter-day Saints and continue to affiliate with the Church from those who were raised as Latter-day Saints but no longer do. This led to some interesting observations. 

Among the American adult population at large, 28% report being very happy. That number rises to 37% among Latter-day Saints. Among those who have left the faith, meanwhile, 21% report being very happy. This means that, among those raised as Latter-day Saints, those who stay in the faith are 76% more likely to report being very happy than those who leave. 

This pattern is especially pronounced among women. Thirty-eight percent of women who were raised in the Church and still identify as Latter-day Saints are very happy, compared with 27.5% of the total U.S. adult population and 17.1% of those raised in the Church who have since left.

This is also true at the bottom of the rankings. Fourteen percent of U.S. women say they’re not at all happy, compared with only 9.4% of women in the Church, and 27% of women who were raised Latter-day Saint but have since left the Church. 

A similar pattern shows up for gratitude. Seventy-eight percent of Latter-day Saints report having a strong sense of gratitude or thankfulness at least weekly compared to 62% of U.S. adults and 55% of former Latter-day Saints. 

As Latter-day Saints, we understand that the Lord’s blessings come in His own time and way, but there does seem to be a real association between keeping the commandments and recognizing the blessings that come as a result.

Family Life is Very Good

The public perception of Latter-day Saints is that they tend to have strong families, and the Pew data continues to back up this impression. Thirty-one percent of Latter-day Saints describe their family lives as excellent, and only 1% say they are poor. This compares with 23% of the U.S. population who rate their family life as excellent and 3% as poor. And among those raised as Latter-day Saints who have since left, 19% rate their family life as excellent, and 6% rate it as poor. 

As with the happiness numbers, Latter-day Saint women fare much better in comparison. But even Latter-day Saint women rate family life as very good at lower rates than Latter-day Saint men. 

And religion seems to be a core component of what bonds these marriages. Thirty-seven percent of married Latter-day Saints discuss religion with their spouse every day, more than twice the rate among married U.S. adults overall. 

It seems to me that The Church of Jesus Christ’s emphasis on eternal relationships gives a larger purpose to what can be the sometimes dull work of marriage and parenting, which helps Latter-day Saints find greater satisfaction in those activities. Regardless of the reasoning behind the data, it is encouraging to find that the family life of so many Latter-day Saints is going well.  

Education is Associated with Religious Conviction

Among Latter-day Saints, higher levels of educational attainment are associated with greater levels of religious conviction. Eighty-five percent of Latter-day Saints with a bachelor’s degree say that religion is very important to them, compared with 65% of those without a bachelor’s degree. Among those who stay in the Church, 41% of lifelong Latter-day Saint adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 28% of former Latter-day Saints. 

Women have seen particularly large increases in their levels of educational attainment. In 2007, 25% of Latter-day Saint women had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40% in the most recent survey. 

We also see this desire for education reflected in the Church’s seminary and institute enrollment figures. In March 2026, Church seminary and institute enrollment surpassed 1 million students for the first time. 

It is largely a good sign that higher education among Latter-day Saints is associated with stronger religious commitment. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is not reserved for those who attain higher education. And clearly there is something that is not quite connecting as consistently or as effectively with those who have not pursued higher education. It is certainly a trend to keep an eye on. 

Faith Leaves Room for Trust and Diversity

Latter-day Saints stand out in the recent survey data for their trust in others. Forty-eight percent say most people can be trusted, compared with 34% of Americans. That places Latter-day Saints among the most trusting religious groups surveyed. 

Latter-day Saints also believe that diversity strengthens American society. While 71% of U.S. adults agree that racial diversity strengthens the United States and 52% say the same about religious diversity, 76% and 65% of Latter-day Saints, respectively, believe the same. These attitudes are also found among those who were raised in the Church but have since left. 

For members of a minority faith, it is natural that there would be a connection between cherishing our own religion and appreciating a country where others can do the same, but that often comes with an insular attitude. But the high rates of generalized trust among Latter-day Saints complicate that stereotype. 

The American Church is Becoming More Diverse

Worldwide, The Church of Jesus Christ is becoming much more diverse. But Pew’s survey included only Americans. Within that group, we see that those who were born in the faith are less likely to remain in it than they were twenty years ago, while at the same time, a racially and ethnically diverse group of converts is also joining the ranks of the Church. Since the 2007 survey, the share of Hispanic Latter-day Saints in the U.S. has increased from 6% to 12%, and the share of Black Latter-day Saints has tripled from 2% to 6%. About 26% of Latter-day Saints were raised in another faith or with no faith. 

I am no social scientist. I’m a writer who read a report. I’m sure there are lots of complications surrounding questions of causation. And certainly there are real concerns here to examine and areas in which we can improve, especially in helping to reverse broader secularization patterns and engaging those without a bachelor’s degree.

But Pew’s methodology tends to be among the best in the business. And the takeaways, at least for a layperson, seem to be that for those who commit themselves to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the plan is working. Latter-day Saints are happy, trusting, community-oriented, and have good family lives. 

The post Pew’s Surprising Portrait of Latter-day Saints appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Trusting God with the Story You Didn’t Choose

Anna Bryner

When we face problems we cannot fix and changes to our life plans we never could have anticipated, how do we trust Christ? This theme emerged again and again in conference. 

From Sister Tamara W. Runia:

“But what if you had a beautiful story you thought your life was going to tell and instead you’ve had to surrender that story? That sting is real and that wound is wide. It will take your finest faith in Christ to keep putting together the pieces, the ones that make sense, but also the ones that don’t.” 

From Elder Kevin J. Hathaway:

“The Lord is not delayed, distracted, or derelict in His deliverance. He has not forgotten you. He does not take joy in your suffering. However, He knows that lessons learned while waiting can bring converting growth that an earlier rescue might not produce.”

From Elder Matthew J. Eyring:

“It is important to not allow our challenges to negatively impact our faith. Our Savior Jesus Christ suffered for us. He knows exactly how we feel, especially in our darkest and most trying times. … Someday we will more fully realize how generous and kind the Lord has been to each of us. We will better understand and appreciate the depth of the Savior’s sacrifice and the reality that he and the Father are truly givers of good gifts.”

Finding God in the Silence

CD Cunningham

Elder Neil L. Andersen quoted from David O. McKay’s 1967 General Conference talk: “The greatest battle of life is fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.”

Elder Andersen began his remarks by talking about his early life on a dairy farm in Idaho. He would travel with the cows to the fields and wait with them there all day. He had no music, no cell phone, nothing but himself and his own thoughts—and the cows.

I have found in my own life just how easy it is to use the ever-present distractions to avoid ever listening to the “silent chamber” of my soul. 

Much of what we find on our phones these days has been specifically designed to distract and upset us. What am I doing to overcome those powers and find the silence that Elder Andersen taught is needed to build our faith in Jesus Christ?

God Knows Where You Are

Amanda Freebairn

Often, the General Conference talks that speak to me most are the ones that offer concrete invitations and challenges I can begin applying in the coming months. In that vein, I saw a thread through the talks given by President Chibota, Sister Spannaus, and Sister Runia. 

President Rosemary K. Chibota of the Primary General Presidency spoke of the importance of remembering our identity as children of God and viewing others through that same lens. She said:

“Your Heavenly Father sees you. Your Savior Jesus Christ sees you. They know your name, your circumstances, your gifts, and your divine potential. As we learn to see ourselves and one another as They do, our homes, wards, schools, and communities will become places of belonging, healing, and love.”

Sister Andrea Muñoz Spannaus, second counselor in the Young Women General Presidency, laid out a path for young women, but one that is really applicable to men and women of every age, for how to make life decisions and plans while trusting in God and being prepared to follow the Spirit. She said:

“The Lord knows where you are. He has your exact location and can guide you. He knows your dreams and your gifts. He knows when you feel alone and what your questions are. He knows your challenges and how to turn your weaknesses into strengths. He knows everything, and knowing everything about you does not make Him love you less.”

Sister Tamara W. Runia, first counselor in the Young Women’s General Presidency, spoke about what to do when the inevitable trials of life throw wrenches into those plans. She said:

“It is precisely because He loves us that we’re having these tempering, refining experiences. God knows, and we are here to learn, that we must become like Him so we can live with Him. And a godlike life is carved from the very things that make it hard—the gut-wrenching things that happen and the righteous desires that haven’t.”

Taking Our Discipleship Seriously

Marilia Gabriela

Across the sessions, I noticed a common invitation: to take our discipleship seriously while also remembering that God knows us individually. We are still learning. We do not always understand. We face weaknesses and difficult circumstances. But the answer is not to give up. The answer is and always will be Jesus Christ. 

He taught about how our discipleship is connected to the temple’s sacred ordinances and covenants. He taught: “For disciples of Jesus Christ, receiving priesthood ordinances and entering into sacred covenants are essential steps in the ‘quest of a lifetime’ to align our hearts, minds, and lives with God’s will.” 

I hope his message inspires all of us to do better and to remember the promises we made in the temple.

And to those who are suffering because of their spouse’s choices, Elder Bednar made it crystal clear that “unrighteousness by one person cannot hinder or thwart the flow of God’s love, strength, and blessing to another person.” Let yourself find peace in Christ, because “the power of the Lord’s infinite and eternal Atonement can overcome all things, all the time, everywhere, for every person who holds fast to their covenants with Him.”

I also loved President Dallin H. Oaks’ talk. He said: “This is the Church of Jesus Christ, so named because it is His Church with the restored fulness of His doctrine and authority in these latter days.” To me, this perspective explained why this conference felt so centered on Jesus Christ and His doctrine. Whenever we talk about the gospel, we should have Jesus’ name and life in mind. He guides His Church, and to me, listening to General Conference talks that address current issues is evidence of that.

The post The Answer Is Jesus Christ: October 2026 Conference Roundup appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Sanford appeared to be motivated by anti-Latter-day Saint bigotry, potentially exacerbated by mental illness and drug use. Four congregants were killed in the attack—two from gunshot wounds and two from the fire—and eight more were wounded. The meetinghouse itself was destroyed. Many victims were lauded as heroes, including two young congregants, both fourth-year emergency medicine resident physicians from nearby Henry Ford Genesys Hospital, who ran back into the burning building multiple times to help others escape. 

Within 48 hours of the attack, Utah resident and Latter-day Saint author Dave Butler, who has no connection to Grand Blanc, started a GiveSendGo fundraiser—not for the victims of the attack (there were already several of those), but for the shooter’s family. You see, Sanford left behind a wife and a young son with a rare genetic disorder that had required multiple surgeries and careful, expensive medical care. Donations flooded in, with many donors indicating that they were Latter-day Saints and that their faith inspired their donations. 

It would have been an extraordinary response to religious hatred even if the story ended there. It didn’t.

Eight weeks later, the BYU football team was scheduled to play the University of Cincinnati. As part of its Cougs Care initiative, which organizes service projects at each of the BYU football away game locations, the BYU Alumni Association held a coat drive with the NAACP that collected more than 600 coats for local children. In addition, The Church of Jesus Christ donated 27,000 pounds of food to Cincinnati’s on-campus Bearcats Pantry to support students facing food insecurity.

Jared Hicken, one of the heroic medical residents in Grand Blanc, and his wife Brandi attended the BYU football game at the University of Cincinnati. Brandi later recalled that after the attack, in which she, Jared, and their 5-year-old had all been wounded by gunshots or shrapnel, she was nervous to be publicly identified as a member of the Church. But she was excited for a “much-needed date night” with her husband, and wanted to “move on from the attack on our church.” She wrote, “We came. We smiled. We cheered. We enjoyed ourselves.” Until what has since become a familiar chant rang out from the student section: “F— the Mormons!” 

Twenty-seven thousand pounds of food. Hundreds of winter coats. Only two months and a few hundred miles away from a mass shooting and arson attack. And still, “F— the Mormons.”

In a 2022 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, only 15% percent of American respondents reported having a favorable view of Latter-day Saints, making them the lowest-rated religious group. Twenty-five percent of respondents reported an unfavorable view, with the remaining 59% indicating either a neutral rating or that they “[didn’t] know enough to say.”

Conversely, Latter-day Saints tend to view members of other faiths quite favorably. Fifty-four percent of Latter-day Saints expressed a favorable view of evangelical Christians, for example, while only 15% of Evangelicals expressed a favorable view of Latter-day Saints (and 27% viewed Latter-day Saints unfavorably). 

The bigotry that members of The Church of Jesus Christ face is nothing like what early Latter-day Saint ancestors faced. And many religious groups, both in the United States and abroad, still presently face serious safety threats and religious persecution. Fortunately, the horrific Michigan shooting was an anomaly, and the football chants, as nasty as they seem—well, we can probably just keep rolling our eyes. 

On the other hand, many Latter-day Saints may look at these events and wonder how we are supposed to respond. We could lament our neighbors’ misunderstanding. We could work harder to correct misconceptions. We could point to the 27,000 pounds of food and ask, What, exactly, can we do more?

But a year after Grand Blanc, here’s a different question to consider. What does our faith ask us when our neighbors don’t seem to like us very much?

A decade before the brutal Michigan attack, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught us about the cost—and blessings—of discipleship:

If you haven’t already, you will one day find yourself called upon to defend your faith or perhaps even endure some personal abuse simply because you are a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Such moments will require both courage and courtesy on your part.

Elder Holland did not counsel us to be passive. “Defend your beliefs with courtesy and compassion, but defend them,” he said. Religious bigotry isn’t harmless, and we can respond with more than niceness when it happens. We can correct falsehoods about our beliefs, insist that universities that host Latter-day Saints not allow their students to hurl profanities at us, and defend ourselves when we become targets of religious hatred. 

But even still, none of this releases us from the Christian obligation to love the people reviling us. Jesus Christ was unequivocal on this point: “Love your enemies … do good to them that hate you.” Why?

Sharon Eubank, director of Latter-day Saint Charities, once said of the Church’s humanitarian work, “We do this out of our faith in the love of Jesus Christ. We want to give evidence that we love God by loving our neighbors.” The good we are doing is not a transaction. We love the Lord our God, and that is enough. 

We do not stock a Catholic food pantry so that Catholics will think better of Latter-day Saints. Nor do we partner with Muslims on disaster relief efforts so they will defend us when someone attacks our faith. We do not give 27,000 pounds of food to university students in exchange for respectful behavior from their student section. We feed people because they are hungry. And if they don’t like us afterward? We feed them anyway. 

Religious service can easily become tangled up with our desire to be liked and understood. Latter-day Saints are human—we want to be liked, we want to be included. But Christian charity is not public relations work. The person receiving our love does not need to return it for that love to have been worth giving. 

But sometimes something interesting happens anyway.

Last year, Emma Simon, a Jewish student at Princeton University and a fellow with the American Jewish Committee, traveled to Salt Lake City as part of AJC’s Interreligious Mission. Simon came to Salt Lake knowing a little bit about our faith. She had spent weeks researching Church history, beliefs, and practices in preparation for the trip. In an article about her trip, she later explained that her feelings about our religious beliefs were “not simple. I am challenged by some of the political and social policy positions they take.”

But then she visited Welfare Square and the Church’s Humanitarian Center. And there, she encountered a religious community at work. “The amount of good the Church does is undeniable,” she later wrote. After her visit, she did not join the Church, nor did she change her beliefs on the conservative policy positions that the Church takes. But she did leave knowing us a little better.

I think sometimes we expect interfaith relationships to develop in one sort of way—we talk, we understand each other, we trust each other, and if all goes well, we cooperate. But sometimes that process goes backward. Sometimes we cooperate first. Catholic Charities of Oregon, for example, operates nine food pantries stocked with food from the Latter-day Saint bishops’ storehouse. Those pantries serve nearly 400 people each week. Latter-day Saint volunteers also work with Catholic Charities to resettle refugees, meeting newly arrived families at airports and helping prepare their apartments. Catholic Charities calls the two organizations “close partners.”

The Church has been working with Islamic Relief USA for more than two decades. In 2004 alone, the two organizations worked together to send millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Iraq, Sudan, and Bangladesh. They partnered again after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Islamic Relief later described the Church not merely as its oldest interfaith partner, but as its “oldest partnership.”

In Albuquerque, Catholic Charities runs a summer program for refugee families from Arab, Afghan, and African communities. Many of the families are Muslim. The program takes place in a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, with church members volunteering alongside Catholics. On many summer days, the building fills with cooking workshops, sewing classes, art classes, and people speaking different languages and practicing different faiths.

And in my favorite example: the Christmas before the Grand Blanc shooting, Detroit received its first Giving Machine. Using the machine, visitors could donate money toward:

• Zaman International, a Michigan-based Muslim nonprofit organization that supports women and children in extreme poverty. Money donated to Zaman went to healthy halal meals for local Muslim families in need, ESL instruction, winter coats for single mothers and their children, and refugee housewarming kits.
• Catholic Charities of Southeast Michigan. Giving Machine donations funded their Walking with Moms in Need program, providing critical resources, clothing, and basic necessities for mothers and infants. 
• Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County. Donations funded kosher meals for local Jewish families in need, emergency overnight shelter services, and gas cards for people who are newly employed after a period of unemployment.
• The Pope Francis Center, a support center in Detroit for the chronically homeless. Donations went to warm winter socks and boots, clean clothes and bedding, and warm shoes and bus passes. 

Nobody has to settle the nature of the Trinity before unloading a truck or agree about prophets before packing a box of food. It is actually liberating to have a problem outside of ourselves to solve together. Maybe we are approaching interfaith understanding backward. We assume that understanding must precede cooperation. But often cooperation produces familiarity, familiarity produces trust, and trust makes true understanding possible. It doesn’t always work. But sometimes.

After the Grand Blanc attack, we as Latter-day Saints truly had many friends who mourned with us as we mourned. Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and other religious communities condemned the violence and reached out with a hand of support. 

And then about six months later, another Michigan house of worship was attacked—Temple Israel in West Bloomfield. The FBI director described it as targeted violence against the Jewish community. 

Now it was our turn to mourn with them. At an interfaith Seder later shortly after the attack, Amy Sapeika of the American Jewish Committee’s Detroit office said that interfaith partners immediately reached out to her with calls, texts and emails expressing solidarity and condemning the attack, and she specifically identified Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc among those who reached out with comfort and offers to help. “We’re really grateful for their friendship,” she said.

No theological disagreements had disappeared, but instead of seeing each other as organizations with competing religious claims, they recognized each other as neighbors. 

Elder Holland said that “pure Christlike love flowing from true righteousness can change the world.” And sometimes we get to see that change. A Jewish college student comes to Utah skeptical of our beliefs and leaves with something new to think about. Catholics and Latter-day Saints with very different doctrines spend years side by side feeding hungry families. Muslims and Latter-day Saints find common ground as they support refugees coming to the United States to start a new life. 

And sometimes we will still get “F— the Mormons.” The Christlike love we give should not depend on what response we get. Because the better measure of interfaith service is not whether our neighbors understand us better when we are finished. It is whether we have loved them better. Sometimes understanding and friendship follow. Sometimes they don’t. 

Keep serving anyway.

The post Feed Them Anyway appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Kellie Leavitt and Lacey West share a lot in common. They’re both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Southeast Idaho, they’re both raising young children, and they both moved to Grand Blanc, Michigan, in 2023 for their husbands’ residency trainings.

They were also both attending church with their young families one year ago in Grand Blanc when an attacker rammed a truck into the building, set it on fire, and shot at church members as they fled the burning building. 

In the year since, they have worked hard to process and move on from the horrifying events of that day. In this interview, they share what healing through Christ has looked like for them and their close-knit congregation since the attack.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style, and Kellie Leavitt and Lacey West have approved the edits.

Anna Bryner: Your families were both there with you that day. What were those next few weeks like as you tried to pull the pieces back together for your families and also for the ward?

Kellie Leavitt: So the first couple of weeks kind of felt like we were in limbo. Everybody taking time off work, trying to figure out our new normal, figuring out next steps—where we were going to meet again, what plans were going forward. And then we had four funerals in the next couple of weeks. So it was kind of this weird limbo time where we weren’t doing our normal thing, kids weren’t doing their normal things.

But we all would find each other at every little meeting that we had. I think we ended up at somebody’s work doing food and coloring pictures for the first responders, and there were little gatherings like that over the next few weeks. Every time we would end up there, it was like hugs all around. You hugged every person you saw.

One particular phrase you’d say or someone else would say to you is “I’m so glad to see you.” And it took on this whole other meaning. It was a time of really coming together and getting closer to each other, for sure.

Lacey West: Yeah, I would definitely agree. Lots of very heartfelt and sincere, “I’m so glad to see you,” or, “I’m so grateful you’re here.”

Everything that Kellie said—that weird limbo. Kids weren’t really going to school because they were scared, and as a parent, I was scared to send my daughter to school. We weren’t really going to church because we didn’t have a building anymore, and people were taking work off. So limbo is a really, really good way to describe it.

There were meetups at parks, and people saying, “Hey, these wards from all across the U.S. have sent toys for the Primary kids—coloring books, crayons, busy boards, and all this stuff.” So we’d go to the park and walk away with a ton of new toys and things for the kids. The outpouring of love was amazing. Even now, our Primary especially is still getting sent gifts from other wards, hand-drawn cards, and pictures. There were tons of little get-togethers for, “Hey, a ward sent this for the Relief Society,” or, “Hey, all the youth meet here, because there was a gift sent to you from this ward.” Just so much service and so much was being done to try to provide comfort to all of us in such a difficult time.

Kellie: I would even say, within our ward itself, we were trying to find ways to serve each other. Obviously it wasn’t necessary, but I went to a sister’s house who had just had a baby, and I took her dinner because I wanted to—it was a way for me to help serve and try to provide comfort. In that short time I stopped by, there were three other people there checking on them, too! It was like that with everybody. So much love and outpouring from everyone, including members of our ward, which is part of what made us draw so much closer.

Anna: How would you say that you and your families have worked through the fear that came after this?

Lacey: I think for me, it mostly came down to trying to be brave enough to do it and to go out, reminding ourselves that this is not the norm. There’s definitely people out there who hate the church, sure. There are people who don’t like it or have really strong opinions about us. But at the end of the day, most of those people would never act the way that the attacker did. Reminding myself of that helped. While there is a lot of hatred out there, that was not the norm and that’s not something that’s going to happen all the time.

There were lots of prayers said:  just asking to have the bravery to go out and face the world and do things again. At the end of the day, the world keeps turning and life keeps happening. So it’s either hunker down and sit in your house and be scared because you had a bad experience, or you stand tall, “be strong and of good courage,” and walk outside. You say, “Okay, we’re going to keep living life. I’m not going to let this person who did something horrible win by making me afraid to go out, live my life, share the gospel, and let people know I am a member of the Church and I’m proud of that.” If I were to go hide away in my house, then he wins, or people like that win.

So just lots of prayers to have that bravery and courage to go out. And I say that, but I am still a little scared sometimes. It’s not like I just decided to be brave and now I am. I’m still scared, and there are still lots of things that are hard to do and hard to approach after an experience like that. We’re a year away from that event, and there are still lots of prayers being said for bravery and courage. I’m sure there will be even more.

Or silly things—I was sitting in church one week, probably like three months ago, and I had a diaper bag next to me blocking the end of the aisle. In my mind, I’m like, That bag is in my way if I need to run. Things like that do still come up, but you kind of have to force yourself to do these things so you can get back into it, be comfortable, and be confident going back to church again.

That first Sunday that we went back to church was hard, but we knew that was something that we wanted to continue to have in our lives because it was important. So you have to give yourself this push to get there, to make yourself used to it again, and to know that—like Lacey said—it’s not the norm to have something like that happen. Millions of people go to church every week and it never happens to them. It just so happened that it happened to us. So you have to realize that it’s going to be okay most of the time.

We’ve just had to lean on people, lean on God, and trust that we’re going to be okay again. It takes time, but it’s getting there.

Anna: In the last year, as you’ve worked through all the emotions of this, what have you learned about Christ?

Kellie: We had a devotional Tuesday night after the attack, and Elder Bednar came. He said a lot of wonderful things, but what I remember most specifically is he told us he wanted us to sing “Gethsemane,” and we were going to sing it two times. He gave us his apostolic blessing that as we sang, we would find something in the song to help us start healing. Specifically in the song, it talks about Jesus dragging His feet—His steps were heavy and slow—and He took all that was bad, wicked or sad, all the pain we would ever know.

To me, during that song, it solidified that Christ knows all of our pain—not just what we do to ourselves, but things that other people do to us. It wasn’t easy for Him, but He chose to do it. That’s what I think makes it so powerful. Being able to give Him the fear, the pain, and the sadness has made a world of difference. It’s probably made the difference between being where I am now and being in complete depression and utter fear.

Lacey: Yeah, I definitely agree with all that. For me, a big one is that healing—even healing through Christ—takes time.

At the beginning, within the first few weeks after everything, there were some people who had these rock-solid testimonies and all this faith, and were in such a peaceful place. I remember thinking, Wow, I must not have enough faith, because I just don’t feel that way at all. I don’t feel like I’m in a good place. I’m scared. I’m still having such a hard time. Maybe I’m just not faithful enough.

I’ve come to know through my own journey of healing that it’s not a lack of faith, and it’s definitely not a lack of God in my life. It’s just that sometimes healing takes time. You see the scripture stories where people touch Christ’s garment or say they have faith, and He heals them instantly. Sometimes we think that’s how it’s supposed to be: I have faith, so I should just be healed from this. The reality is that’s not always the case. Healing takes time, even when you have Christ as your constant companion through that healing.

Like Kellie said, I know Jesus Christ suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane not only for my sins, but also for all the pain I would ever feel—so that when I went through this, He could look at me and understand perfectly how I felt. He knows that bone-deep fear. He knows that feeling in your gut of, I don’t know what to do next, I’m scared. He felt it with me through the whole experience and through this whole healing process. He is still very much by my side.

The scriptures teach us to endure to the end. If the end was supposed to be just a few faithful prayers and a good night’s sleep away, then there wouldn’t be much enduring happening. Enduring means long-term sometimes. That means healing is going to take a while, and that doesn’t mean that the Lord’s not there with you. It just means that maybe you need some time, and that’s okay. He’s going to be with you that whole time, guide you through it, and be your constant companion. He is going to walk that road with you patiently, go at your pace, and help you through it—no matter how long it takes.

Anna: Those are both such beautiful experiences. I’m curious: Based on what you’ve learned, if you could go back a year and tell yourself something right after this happened, what would it be?

Lacey: I think I would just want to remind myself to be patient with the process of healing, not try to rush it, and just have faith. They say “have faith in the Lord’s timing,” and I think that’s so much easier said than done when you’re actually waiting on the Lord’s timing! But the Lord is with you through that whole healing process, no matter how long it takes.

You have to be patient with yourself, be patient with the Lord, and understand that through this, you are becoming stronger. Through this pain and sorrow, you are growing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. You’re not going to be afraid of the world forever. You’re not going to be afraid to go to church forever. You’re not going to be afraid every time you hear a loud noise forever. It’s going to stop, it’s going to go away, and it’s going to be okay. You just have to be patient with yourself, with your faith, with your healing, and with the Lord.

Kellie: Those are great points. Healing is not perfectly linear, that’s the big thing. I think I would tell myself to be patient on those days that it’s hard again. 

Anna: Now that we’re a year out from the attack, where would you say the ward is at? I’m sure everybody is individually at a different place with how they’re healing, but where do you feel like the ward has landed in terms of recovery? 

Lacey: I would say there’s a wide range of emotions. There are people who are feeling rock solid—bearing their testimonies, feeling strengthened, feeling good, and having fully forgiven the things that happened. And there are people on the other side of that too, who are still angry or sad. There are people still grieving, of course, and grief is one of those emotions that you carry for your whole life in different ways.

So there’s a wide variety of emotions, but the thing you see as a constant with everyone is that there is just a desire to take care of each other. Even the ones who I think are struggling the most just want to take care of people and help each other through this. That speaks volumes of what our Church stands for in general—that we don’t just show up and go through the motions of sacrament meeting and second hour and then go home. We show up and we are a family. We’re a community. We’re going to look out for each other, provide meals, and sit with each other and listen when you need someone to listen.

I always think about how Christ is the one who does the work and changes hearts, but as members of the church, we get to be His hands when it comes to serving others. Regardless of where members of the ward are in terms of healing from the pain, grief, sorrow, or anger, one thing we all have in common is that everyone just wants to really take care of the ward family and look out for each other. That was an attribute that was already in our ward before, but it has doubled since the event.

Kellie: Adding to that, there has been no lack of faith in God and faith in Christ. I think we all kind of expected there to be a few people that quit coming to church, but that was not something that I noticed. Everybody still came every week that they could. Everybody still has a strong testimony of Christ. There were so many things that happened following the attack that strengthened everybody’s testimony in Christ and faith in God in some small way. There was no wavering, no lack of faith in that way.

I do feel like we felt displaced, and I’m sure everyone still is feeling displaced just because the ward started going to the Flint building, which is a smaller building. It doesn’t quite fit all of us, so it feels tight, and we know it’s a temporary thing. But we are grateful that the Flint Ward was so accommodating and willing to move over, make room for us, and bring us in. It has become our second home, but it’s a little rocky while we wait to get back to normal, if that makes sense.

Anna: You mentioned that so many things happened after that strengthened faith. Are there any stories or experiences that stand out from that?

Kellie: There were so many people who felt so compelled and called to serve, and you’d feel them reach out to you at the right moment. On days that felt so much harder, I’d get a letter in the mail from somebody I hadn’t spoken to in eight years expressing their love, or I’d get a call on a random night when I was having a hard time. It always felt like there was somebody reaching out and lifting you up right when you needed it.

There were a lot of stories coming from others in our ward—and I won’t share names for their privacy—who described doing something that day they wouldn’t usually do. They thought, Huh, that’s weird, why did I do that? Then looking back later, you realize God put you there for that reason to help somebody, or God put a person in a certain spot so they could avoid the attacker.

Lacey and I left together. We had our cars parked right next to each other, and that day, my husband parked backwards from how we usually do. Usually we would pull in facing the building behind somebody, so when we left, we would have to back out. But instead, he backed in, so all we had to do was hop in and drive!

So we got out to our car, and Lacey was right next to us in her car. We hopped in the car and started driving out. It’s little things like that where I know God guided us so that we would be out of harm’s way.

Lacey: 100%! That day, I wore pants to church. I don’t think I’ve ever worn pants to church a day in my life, but randomly I was just like, “Yeah, that sounds like a good outfit.” I wore flats—I never wear flats! I always wear heels, I’m a heels girlie, but I wore flats that day.

My son was only eight weeks old. Usually I would get to church and nurse him in the mother’s lounge before going into sacrament meeting, but that day I decided to nurse him before leaving the house. Because of that, I was in the chapel, meaning I was much more aware of what was happening than if I had been in the mother’s lounge, which is closed off and hidden away in the bathroom. We very likely would have been trapped in the building while it was burning.

Just those little different decisions! The fact that Kellie and I parked next to each other. When the attacker rammed his truck into the building and I realized something was wrong, I grabbed my five-year-old daughter in one arm and my eight-week-old in the other and ran out. In the chaos of grabbing both kids, I forgot to grab my keys out of the diaper bag. If I hadn’t been parked next to Kellie and Chase, I don’t know what we would have done! I got to my car, told my daughter to hide on the floor, and thought, We’re just going to have to hide in the car, I don’t have a way to get out.

The fact that we happened to park next to Kellie and Chase—I happened to be out of the building before them so I could see them running to their car and realize, Oh, they’re right next to me, they’ve got their keys, I’m going to get my kids and hop in with them! Every little detail about the timing was so—it seemed like such little nothing things at the time, but afterwards I realized: If I had worn a dress or heels, would I have been able to run as fast? If I had parked anywhere else, what would I have done?

I lost my dad a year before the shooting. We were close—like talking on the phone every day close. He was my best friend. After the shooting, I just wanted to call him and talk to him so bad, and obviously I couldn’t. A few days later, my kids were in bed, it was late, and I was saying a prayer: “Could You just tell my dad what happened? I’m sure he saw, but can You let him know what happened and tell me, was he worried about me? What was he thinking?”

I got one of the strongest promptings I’ve had in my whole life: Lacey, he was there, and he held you. I got this image in my head of me running down the hall with my kids, and my dad behind me pushing my kids in tight to me. When I was running, I remember feeling like my kids were being squeezed into me, but I hadn’t put together what that really meant until that spiritual moment. Of course there were angels there!

I’ve heard other members of the ward say the same thing—that they felt like there were angels that helped them run faster, or told them, “Go out this door, not this door,” guiding them to take the path that got them out of harm’s way. It makes me realize how thin the veil really is. There’s no doubt in my mind that there were heavenly presences there that day guiding our steps to protect everyone.

Anna: Wow. That’s amazing. Is there anything else that you wanted to share about this last year or that experience that you haven’t had a chance to yet?

When I think of my own journey, He is the Good Shepherd leading me through this field of grief, sorrow, pain, and fear. It’s still a big field and a big journey ahead. Just because He’s our Shepherd doesn’t mean the field or threats disappear. There are still going to be hardships, pain, and days that PTSD flares up worse than others. But the Shepherd never leaves. He’s still guiding His flock.

For those who maybe struggled the way I did—feeling like a lack of fast healing was a lack of faith—I cannot stress enough that is just not the case. The Lord did not abandon us that day. He was there. Just because that didn’t stop the attack from happening doesn’t mean He wasn’t there protecting us, just as a good shepherd should. We will never understand why everything happened as it did, or why some people were hurt or lost their lives, and others didn’t, but we can understand that the Lord still sought to protect us and help us.

Psalm 23:4 talks about, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” Sometimes you have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. That’s just reality. Having faith doesn’t mean you will never walk through that valley, but you don’t have to be afraid, because He is right there with you.

If right now you are in that valley or in the trenches, you are not alone. Keep looking to Him. He knows your pain so perfectly; He would never leave you in that valley alone. He is going to guide you through it and walk with you the whole way.

Kellie: That’s so beautiful. Right after it happened, one of our friends’ little girls said, “Mom, we’re supposed to be safe at church.” That absolutely broke my heart, because I agree with that. We assume we go to church and we’re safe.

It happened because people have agency. The man that attacked us had his agency, and God had to let him do what he was going to do. But like Lacey said, we were not abandoned, and we were not alone. As long as we remember that He is there for us, you’re going to feel His presence.

The other thing I would say coming out of this whole experience: It is so important to record your strong spiritual experiences and your testimony. A week or two after the attack, I made a voice memo talking myself through the timeline, the devotional, and all the spiritual experiences we had. There were so many little details I had already forgotten that reaffirmed everything and made it so much more powerful. I firmly believe in writing down those things as they happen so that when you’re having those tougher days, you can look back on it and let it boost you again.

Anna: I have been so touched by everything you both shared. Thank you both.

The post Healing After the Michigan Attack appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

As an eight-hour weekend event, General Conference can feel both joyful and overwhelming. On the one hand, our hearts can feel full of joy as the Spirit touches our hearts during hours of messages. But with so many messages and invitations, it may also feel like we’re being told an infinite number of things to do and become, sometimes leaving us discouraged.

I don’t believe that this is what Heavenly Father wants us to feel. Although we should take the counsel given seriously and honestly identify how we can improve, I believe that General Conference is meant to give us instruction to help us become who God knows we can become, not to shame us for our shortcomings.

In seeking to keep General Conference a joyful experience rather than an overwhelming one, I try to focus on what the prophet teaches and make it my top priority to follow his counsel. Beyond that, I have found some other principles that have helped me approach General Conference in a healthier, happier way.

1. Remember that spiritual progress in one area reinforces progress in others.

When I was younger, I used to listen to General Conference and make myself a very long list of things to change. I’d plaster my room with note cards of inspirational quotes and hope that I’d be able to become all of these things. 

Sometimes I made good progress on a few things. But many of my goals went unmet because I couldn’t focus on so many goals at once. I finally admitted that my approach wasn’t working. 

The late apostle Robert D. Hales taught that developing one Christlike attribute actually helps us develop others. “The attributes of the Savior … are interwoven characteristics, added one to another, which develop in us in interactive ways,” he said. “In other words, we cannot obtain one Christlike characteristic without also obtaining and influencing others. As one characteristic becomes strong, so do many more.”

For instance, in my efforts to follow President Nelson and President Oaks’ call for us to develop the gift of charity and become peacemakers, I have noticed that I have been growing in the spiritual gift of patience (which I desperately needed!). And as I feel Christ’s love for others, my faith in Christ grows, leading me to want to better follow Him. 

Scripture frequently teaches about how spiritual gifts, the doctrine of Christ, and Christlike attributes are all interrelated. “Faith unto repentance.” “If a man have faith he must needs have hope.” These phrases show that focusing on one area will inadvertently lead to improvement in another.

2. Pace your progress.

Imagine listening to 1 Nephi through early Alma in a weekend, then trying to implement everything you learned from the stories, teachings, and invitations.

That is roughly the same amount of time that we spend listening to four sessions of General Conference. Sure, we have music and prayers mixed in to break up the talks. But it is still a lot of information!

We don’t have to change everything at once. Although we tend to think of General Conference as a one-weekend event, it can be helpful to view it as the start of a six-month study period. The talks are delivered all at once initially, but we can then give each talk its own study and focus in the coming months.

The Lord does not expect us to “run faster than we are able.” He does ask us to identify what is “needful.”

If we focus on studying 1-2 talks per week, we can realistically work through all of them before the next conference. That is a slow enough pace to make progress on understanding each talk and applying at least some of its principles. 

The new Sunday schedule provides increased opportunity to study each of these talks and learn from our ward members about their insights. We can also study talks in the order we feel we need them in our lives at a particular time. The progress is expected to be gradual, not all at once after Conference Weekend.

3. Find hope in the stories.

Sometimes the stories in General Conference may feel like they would never happen to us. We often hear stories that have reached a resolution, while our own might not have yet. Or we may hear of someone handling a challenge better than we think we would. While the stories are true, the limited time in which they are told may not account for all the patient waiting, complexity, and emotional difficulty that were part of them.

Sometimes, when we hear the stories in General Conference, we imagine they are only happening to people who meet an impossible standard of righteousness we will never attain. But this is not true. Over time, I have come to know a few of the people in General Conference stories. This has given me a more realistic view; the people in them are sincere and good Latter-day Saints, but they are not perfect, either. They are usually just ordinary people trying to follow Christ. This reminds me that the Lord can work miraculous things in my life, despite my shortcomings.

I am grateful that General Conference contains inspiring stories. If it didn’t, how encouraging would that be? But rather than comparing our stories to others’, we can take strength and inspiration in seeing that God works for the good of His children. I sometimes find myself in circumstances where these stories inspire me to handle a challenge a little more like Christ, even when it feels much easier to let the natural (wo)man rule.  

4. Be open to messages affecting you later.

Sometimes, because of where we are in life when we watch General Conference, certain messages might not immediately touch us. Some might even upset us. I have had to learn that my emotional reaction to a talk doesn’t determine its truth or its relevance. 

We may hear the true principle that God answers prayers but feel frustrated because we are still waiting. We may hear the principle that God’s plan is a plan of happiness but feel angry that we are experiencing grief. We may hear messages about eternal families but feel disappointed that this goal feels out of reach.

Receiving the messages from General Conference in our hearts takes humility. In his first worldwide address as prophet, President Dallin H. Oaks taught, “[Humility] will help us overcome questions about the Lord’s doctrine. When we are humble, we can more clearly hear the Lord’s voice.” I often need to pray for a softened heart before the Lord will let a spiritual truth sink into my spiritual understanding. 

We should also remember that although General Conference talks are intended to help us as individuals, they are also directed to the entire Church. With so many different circumstances that Church members face across the world, some talks may feel more or less naturally relevant to us. In addition, General Conference talks in more recent years have often focused more on broadly applicable principles of following Jesus Christ than providing highly specific direction. This is probably also due to the Church’s internationalization and to the effort to find higher and holier ways of teaching. Instruction is often more principle-based and less application-based, similar to the approach to the new For the Strength of Youth manual. Sometimes I feel disappointed that the talks are not more directed to my personal challenges. Yet I have come to realize that, often, they are: I just need to do the spiritual work of understanding the principles well enough to apply them to my particular circumstances. 

Approaching General Conference with Joy

I am looking forward to General Conference with great anticipation. I hope that, by applying these strategies, we can avoid General Conference overwhelm and instead feel the simple joy that following the Gospel of Jesus Christ provides.

The post Conference Without the Checklist appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In Disney’s “Up,” the quiet love story of Carl and Ellie captures the essence of fidelity and integrity within marriage. Their journey—from childhood friendship to lifelong partnership—is a testament to enduring love, mutual commitment, and shared values.

Integrity and fidelity are central to flourishing marriages. In fact, the virtues of integrity and fidelity were recently described by one research team as the “twin virtues” of marital commitment that represent not only sexual exclusivity but also emotional devotion, honesty, and accountability. The American Families of Faith project—a qualitative study exploring exemplary Christian, Jewish, and Muslim married couples across diverse races—sheds light on how these values are cultivated, sustained, and lived out in everyday life. 

Drawing on findings from this study, the present article explores how these racially and religiously diverse couples define and practice integrity and fidelity, offering four insights into how these principles strengthen their marriages.   

Integrity and Fidelity Matter in Marriage

For many American Families of Faith participants, fidelity involved more than refraining from extramarital relationships—it included emotional and spiritual unity. In “Up,” Carl and Ellie’s life together showed that fidelity encompasses more than sexual exclusivity—it also includes emotional devotion, honesty, and alignment in life’s core vision and goals. Their shared dream of visiting Paradise Falls, while never realized in the way they envisioned, symbolized their mutual commitment to one another.

 Similarly, Ron (pseudonyms are used to protect participant’s identity), a white Jewish husband from the American Families of Faith study, reflected on how honesty shaped his marriage:

I don’t hide anything from her, and that means that I can’t do anything that I need to hide from her, ’cause I won’t hide anything from her. … That influences every moment of my marriage. How many times a day [do I think], “Is this something I would not want to tell her?” … It’s really part of my consciousness all the time.

Sebastian, a Hispanic Christian husband, similarly emphasized the ripple effect of fidelity:

[One] thing that is very important in marriage is fidelity. When you’re not faithful, it doesn’t matter what [else] you can do or how sweet you can be or how loving you can be. … [If you are] cheating on your wife or vice versa, no matter what you do, it’s hard to put the pieces back together. For me, I have to know how to be faithful [while I’m] … at home and [when I am] not … at home. So, fidelity, integrity has a lot to do in the relationship of the couple. Also, in the relationship of the children, if they see [your faithfulness to each other], they will want to emulate the example, they will want to live it—because they will see that regardless of the challenges and problems, there was fidelity.

Integrity as a Core Marital Value

In their in-depth interviews, American Families of Faith participants repeatedly described integrity as essential to the health of their marriages. Beatriz, a Hispanic Christian wife, succinctly stated, “Loyalty, fidelity, integrity are key.”

Couples discussed a wide array of challenges related to stress in their work or personal lives, in-laws, conflict, parenting, illness, and even family deaths. However, their ability to navigate these hardships together demonstrated the resilience that fidelity helps foster. Idris, an African American Christian husband, said:

Character and integrity in a marriage is everything. [They are] … the most important source of strength [to our marriage]. ’Cause if you really don’t have that, you don’t really have a relationship. … You [could] just be an aimless wanderer [and] be blown in the wind anywhere when something comes along. When you have character and integrity in a relationship, then you’re trustworthy. Then your mate, your spouse, has no worries, no hang-ups about where you’re at, what you’re doing. …[T]rust is crucial in a relationship.

The Role of Religion in Teaching Fidelity and Integrity

For most of the wives and husbands interviewed, religious faith reportedly played a critical role in shaping their understanding of fidelity and integrity. Many couples, for example, emphasized that their religious beliefs and practices motivated them to remain faithful and honest with each other. Tanner, a white Orthodox Christian husband, explained how his faith helped him resist temptation. Discussing his job, he said, “I spend two weeks a month on the road. There are temptations out there that I’ve never succumbed to, and one of the reasons is my faith gives me the strength not to do that.”

Enoch, a white Presbyterian husband, elaborated on the promises he made with his wife:

We made vows to be a couple, to be true to each other, so I have a commitment to monogamy and fidelity. I think it would be easy to rationalize out of that if a person didn’t have some beliefs to base that on.

For other participants, fidelity was tied directly to accountability to God. Fu, a Chinese Christian husband, shared, “To keep your marriage holy is your responsibility to God; otherwise you are ashamed to face God. Betray[ing] your spouse is betraying God.”​

One white Latter-day Saint couple described the role of a covenant with God and each other as follows:

Evan: When we were married, we covenanted with each other that we would be faithful to each other and that we would also look to God … and remember Him, and so a covenant is a very vital part of our relationship.

Tara: It’s … a three-way partnership, with God being … a party to making this marriage work.

Coming together by remembering the promises that they made to each other before God reportedly put fidelity and integrity at the forefront of these couples’ relationships. 

Challenges to Integrity and Fidelity

While the majority of participants described fidelity as a source of strength, some acknowledged challenges. Orlando, an African American Christian husband, noted the pressures of living up to marital vows in a world filled with distractions and said:

This world … has a way of testing if you mean what you said [when you got married] or were you just sitting up there ’cause everything was rosy that day … Are you going to hold your sacred vows [when it gets hard]?

The question posed by Orlando does stimulate reflection within marriage—including (and especially) when the challenges come. If marital fidelity is defined by one question, perhaps Orlando nails it with Are you going to hold to your sacred vows when it gets hard?

Imperfect But Striving

The animated story of Carl and Ellie in “Up” illustrates how integrity and fidelity create a foundation for enduring love. However, the American Families of Faith project documents the experience of hundreds of couples who view these virtues as essential for marital stability and satisfaction in their own marriages. These couples have been married for an average of more than 20 years.

In a touching moment from the film, Carl says, “You’re my best friend, Ellie.” Similarly, a father in our project said of his wife’s integrity and fidelity, “She was married to marriage long before she was married to me.” The same father also wrote of his wife of more than four decades, “I can imagine no heaven without her … and with her, even hell would be tolerable.” 

The insights from the imperfect but exemplary marriages studied in the American Families of Faith project reveal that fidelity and integrity are not just ideals but lived virtues that sustain many strong marriages through a sacred sense of shared purpose. For many couples, these virtues are deeply intertwined with their religious beliefs and practices, which provide both motivation and practical tools for navigating challenges.

 The imperfect but striving women and men in the American Families of Faith project underscore that fidelity and integrity are more than individual actions; they are the cornerstone of enduring, meaningful partnerships. By striving to live out these ideals, couples create relationships that not only withstand life’s trials but thrive in their shared commitment to each other.

The post The Virtues That Sustain Marriage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In the 2015 movie “Cinderella,” Ella’s mother tells her to “have courage and be kind.” Ella, later known as Cinderella, endures cruelty yet responds with kindness and forgiveness, inviting us to reflect on our own capacity to find the courage to forgive. Her struggle to forgive her stepmother and stepsisters might be more dramatic than most family conflicts, but it still speaks to even the most ordinary family relationships. 

Adapting the counsel in “Cinderella,” we focus on a related invitation that helps families thrive:  “have courage and forgive.” In religious families, forgiveness is both a demand and a blessing. Drawing on interviews with members of about 200 families from diverse racial and religious backgrounds, we uncover why forgiveness remains central to reconciliation and relational healing, despite how challenging it can be.

The findings come from a study of relational reconciliation in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families in the American Families of Faith project. We consider both why families choose to reconcile and the processes through which they do so.

Why Families Reconciled

Participants described three key reasons for reconciliation: (1) their religious beliefs, (2) their ability to see a “bigger picture,” and (3) their own experiences of God’s love and forgiveness. 

Religious Beliefs

Many participants said their faith created an expectation that they would forgive and reconcile, shaping their responses to conflicts. Briana, an African-American Christian wife, reflected on how scripture motivated her during disagreements with her husband:

Scripture tells us, you may get angry, but sin not. Because we are different, we’re not going to always agree, but being in the church, that’s a benefit for us. We’re able to hear something in Bible study or Sunday service … . God is always going to bring a word back to our memory that makes us realize and ask Him for forgiveness. Then we come back and ask each other for forgiveness.

Cynthia, a teenage daughter of Latino and Caucasian Latter-day Saint parents, shared:

Through the hard times … we’re all kind of going our separate ways, but then I know that each of us think about [our] religion and we’re all like, ‘Yeah, we’re supposed to make up—that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ That’s what we do, and we feel better about it.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

Participants frequently described how their faith helped them see beyond immediate conflicts to a “bigger picture” or a “long-term perspective.” Saul, a Caucasian Jewish husband, highlighted how religious observances like Yom Kippur encouraged him and his wife to reflect on their relationship:

Both of us always have something [in our Yom Kippur goals] about being a better spouse—stop yelling at each other or whatever we do. There is some sense that a religious observance helps us to keep our focus on the big picture and reminds us of things we want to change. If we didn’t do that ritual, I don’t think we would have the opportunity to say, ‘These are things I want to do better.’

An adolescent daughter named Alecia, a Caucasian member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explained her perspective:

If we fight here, it’s like we fight and get over it in like an hour. Most people in our family don’t stay mad at each other for weeks and weeks. Knowing that our scriptures say we are going to be together forever … that we are bound forever, that we have that bond, fighting here seems trivial when you think about it.

God’s Love and Forgiveness

Participants also described experiencing God’s forgiveness as another powerful reason to reconcile within their families. Many said that recognizing God’s grace in their lives inspired them to extend forgiveness to others. Chen, an Asian-American Christian husband, reflected: “I am a forgiven sinner by God—and if God can forgive me, I can forgive her.”

Similarly, Shawn, a Black Baptist husband, connected God’s forgiveness with his approach to marital conflict:

We intend that God … be the center of our marriage, so that our commitment to each other is an outgrowth of our commitment to Him. Also, in the practicalities of living together, needing to exercise forgiveness and grace toward each other, because we receive grace and forgiveness from God—we can extend that to each other.

Having discussed three reasons why families forgave, we now turn to four processes that reflect how they forgave.

How Families Reconciled

Reconciliation involved four interconnected processes: spiritual, personal, relational, and practical. These processes often overlapped, reflecting a dynamic approach to resolving conflicts.

Spiritual Processes

Prayer emerged as a foundational spiritual practice that guided families toward reconciliation. Participants often turned to prayer to seek clarity and guidance and to regain calm. Angela, an Italian-American Catholic wife, described resolving conflicts with her husband as follows:

In times when we have conflict about anything … we both are always open to either one of us saying, ‘Let’s just pray about this.’ … That ability to come together in prayer and ask for each other’s forgiveness or God’s forgiveness and discernment and direction is something that, again, I don’t know how people can get through without having that.

Prayer also helped individuals acknowledge their own mistakes. Yul, an Asian-American Christian husband, said, “Prayer is very helpful. When we have conflicts and arguments, prayer can calm us down … . God leads us through prayer to recognize our sin and to improve our marriage.”

Personal Processes

Participants described self-examination and admitting mistakes as additional personal steps toward reconciliation. These actions often required humility and introspection. Bekah, a Caucasian Jewish wife, emphasized the importance of personal responsibility:

I think one of the strong points of Judaism is the sense of personal responsibility and certainly in any conflict we’ve had, it’s been really important to own up to whatever part we have in the conflict. And that’s something that comes straight from Judaism.

Apologizing was another key practice. Brent, a Caucasian Jehovah’s Witness husband, described how saying “I’m sorry” often helped resolve conflict in his marriage:

I’ll have regrets afterward and say, ‘Why am I making such a big deal of such a little thing?’ And she’s having the same feelings of regret. And then we’re like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ And then it’s over.

Relational Processes

Participants frequently described forgiving and being forgiven as relational acts that fostered understanding and acceptance. A Caucasian Latter-Day Saint husband named Stewart shared:

I think one of the basic teachings of the Savior is forgiveness. So … if you want to be forgiven, the Bible teaches that you need to forgive other people. And obviously, we’re imperfect and we want to be forgiven, so I think both of us bring that idea or that principle into our marriage relationship. We see that we have to be willing to forgive the other person. I think that influences our ability to … forgive a little bit sooner than we normally would have, because we know and we believe that forgiving is a good thing.

Parents also modeled forgiveness for their children. Shawn, a Black Baptist father, said:

Our kids … see Emily and I not always get it right and we have to hash things out, but then extend forgiveness to each other. I’ve had to ask my kids for forgiveness. So I hope they see that we’re real people, we haven’t got it all together, but we can accept and love each other because we extend forgiveness of God and the grace of God to each other. And we each know that we need it desperately. 

Practical Processes

Families often took practical steps to repair relationships and prevent conflicts from escalating. These steps included communicating thoughtfully, using strategies to de-escalate conflict, and making amends. Aashif, an Arab-American Muslim husband, described how he and his wife approached disagreements:

At the beginning of our marriage, we had so much more conflict. The religion part is that we say, “It is okay, let’s stop here and discuss it later. Let’s go to pray or leave things for later.” We control ourselves by the faith … so we do not exaggerate the problem and make it like a snowball and make it bigger and bigger and reach the point of disagreement that makes us two parts. We definitely say, “We need to stop, we need to think about it.” We have this limit that we do not cross.

For others, practical action meant repairing ruptures quickly. Jeffrey, a Caucasian Christian husband, explained:

While I am quick to explode, I’m also quick to try and heal that explosion. … I think that a lot of that has been key in our relationship because a lot of times things boil over. Being quick to try and come back and fix the rift is important.

Together, these overlapping processes illustrate the dynamic and multifaceted nature of reconciliation in families. Each step, whether spiritual or practical, contributes to repairing and strengthening relationships.

Our adaptation of the counsel in “Cinderella” to “have courage and forgive” echoes the experiences described by participants in the American Families of Faith project. Motivated by faith, a focus on the bigger picture, and the experience of divine grace, these families seek to make forgiveness a core part of their family dynamics. Through prayer, personal accountability, relational repair, and practical action, participants described forgiveness as fostering healing and deeper connections. Just as Cinderella chose kindness over resentment, these families show that the courage to forgive ultimately strengthens relationships and brings peace. 

The post The Courage to Forgive appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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One of my earliest memories at a chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is of walking around its exterior. The building had a detached steeple. I stood at its brick base, looking up to the tip of its spire. The sun was high, and I squinted at how bright it was. 

Growing up, my closest temple was in Los Angeles. My sister once got down on the grass to take a picture. The bottom of the picture was dark and shadowed. Toward the top of the photo, near the peak of the steeple, it brightened. She turned it into a painting I keep in my house to this day.

No one ever told me the steeple was important. It wasn’t addressed in lessons. No one asked about it in temple recommend interviews, but since those earliest days, I have associated it with lifting my eyes, light, and the Church. 

And I didn’t just associate the steeple with my own faith’s houses of worship. I came to instinctively feel a sense of peace and hope whenever I saw a steeple, as it represented people in my community seeking their God.

Where Do Steeples Come From?

My experience with steeples is not revolutionary. In fact, for hundreds of years, religious architects have understood the steeple’s symbolism and used it to create experiences like mine. 

As a result, Christians have learned to read the vertical line of a church as an invitation to look beyond.

The steeple developed from several distinct elements of medieval architecture. The first was the bell tower. Bell towers were built tall so their bells could be heard across the town. Over time, those bell towers were incorporated into the church building, and many eventually received roofs topped by increasingly slender spires. As that silhouette became associated with worship spaces, it was integrated even in the absence of a bell tower.

In 12th-century France, Abbot Suger oversaw the rebuilding of the church at Saint-Denis. The project included what he called “high and noble towers” and helped establish what became known as Gothic architecture.

On one of the church doors, Suger inscribed a poem:

Marvel not at the gold and the expense,
but at the craftsmanship of the work.

Bright is the noble work;
but, being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds,
so that they may travel through the true lights
To the True Light where Christ is the true door.
In what manner it be inherent in this world
the golden door defines:
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.

Suger understood his work to be explicitly symbolic. He saw the material forms he used as a means of directing congregants’ minds to the truth.

It was a century later that the bishop of Mende, William Durandus, wrote an extensive treatise on church architecture and its connection to Christian worship. He wrote of the steeple, “The pinnacles of the towers signify the life or the mind of a prelate which aspireth heavenwards.” Durandus saw the vertical architecture as a symbol of spiritual ascent.

The symbol became ingrained through repetition. No declaration was needed: for generations, the appearance of the steeple was the first visible marker of what the building was. 

St. Paul’s Church in Harlow, Essex, England, was built in the 1950s. It included a low, detached bell tower, but the main building also bore a spire that the architects described as a “symbol for the church.”

The tower’s practical and symbolic functions had become fully separate. 

Latter-day Saint Architecture

The steeple was an early feature of Latter-day Saint architecture.

Despite the Church and many of the early Saints experiencing poverty, the Kirtland Temple, the first temple built by Latter-day Saints, featured a white tower spire and weather vane. Similarly, the Nauvoo Temple’s steeple was finished in the midst of the exodus. The decorative element was finished just five days before the early Saints left the city. 

President George A. Smith, who served in the First Presidency, said of the Salt Lake Temple’s spires, “Every one points to a moral lesson, and all point to the celestial world.”

Folk stories have also developed around the importance of steeples. As the St. George Utah Temple neared completion, Brigham Young Jr. wrote that his father was unhappy with the tower because he believed it was too short. Soon after Young Sr.’s death, lightning struck the steeple. And when the workers rebuilt it, they made it taller. The folk interpretation has long been that Young Sr. directed the lightning after his death. 

Every temple completed by The Church of Jesus Christ in the first 89 years of its history included a steeple. Then, between 1919 and 1927, three temples were built without steeples. 

Every temple once again included a steeple for 90 years until the 156th temple was dedicated in Paris, France, in 2017. Today, 97% of temples include a steeple.

The exceptions are also illustrative. The three temples in the early 20th century were each built to suggest Solomon’s temple in ancient Jerusalem. Hyrum Pope, one of the architects of the Cardston Alberta Temple, explained that the architects wanted to evoke a sense that the design was “ancient as well as modern.”

At the time, a new movement in sacred architecture was emerging, typified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple. 

Pope drew on this language to communicate the power of God. But the symbolism of ascent remained within the structure. Each ordinance room was placed half a story higher than the previous one. The temple was also precisely aligned with the four cardinal directions, symbolizing spiritual orientation. The other early 20th-century temples without spires followed similar designs, communicating religious symbolism in a language appreciated by the people worshipping there. 

While Wright’s design style for churches eventually faded, the longer tradition of the steeple has remained. And according to some estimates, about 80% of Christian churches in the United States have steeples. 

Steeples and Worship

As a small child, I had the kind of experience that generations of architects sought to create. I saw a steeple, I looked up, and I saw light.

But it is more than just decoration.

Worship has never been limited to the minimum physical actions required to make an ordinance valid. Worship forms our attention, memories, and imaginations. 

The steeple encapsulates a temple’s teaching and purpose. It transforms the temple’s work of bringing us closer to the divine into a material form, a visible movement. 

There is a reason why steeples appear in drawings, wedding announcements, flyers in the foyers, family photographs, and in the memories of millions of Latter-day Saints. They are a part of how we imagine our interaction with God. 

We don’t talk about them because we don’t have to. A church has pews so we can sit, and it has a steeple so we will look up. 

Today, there are occasional conflicts about the steeples on our temples. And we should work to make sure our temples fit into their communities. But steeples are worth defending. And we should be grateful for the legal protections that enable us to build them. 

The post Steeples Are Worth Defending appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

No one likes feeling negatively judged. For a few years, I ran a website called LDS.net. We had a robust internship program. Three semesters a year, I would welcome between four and ten college juniors and seniors and teach them how to write at a professional level. 

About a week into the semester, the interns would begin brainstorming their first article. In their first batch of proposals, about 90% wanted to write about how their coreligionists should stop judging them.

In the beginning, I was curious about these experiences and what had happened. The interns usually told me about something they felt defensive about—often, a lifestyle choice that was within the bounds of Latter-day Saint doctrine but outside the norm. 

I asked them how this judgment played out in their lives. There were two main sources of these young authors’ certainty that they were being judged. One was nonverbal signals. They would notice another person’s eye movements or hear an unusual breathing pattern. 

The other came from things that didn’t happen. They were certain that they were not asked on dates, or given certain callings, or included in friend groups, because they were being judged.

Here are a few examples I heard over the years. 

One writer complained that a group of women in her ward regularly judged her body. As an example, she recalled a conversation at a ward activity in which one of the women mentioned going on a morning run. My writer was sure the woman meant the comment as an implied criticism.

Another told a story about going to church with an older sister. This older sister had decided to wait to have children. A friend from their childhood, who was the younger sister’s age, was at church that day and mentioned she was “finally” expecting. My writer said that the friend’s emphasis on “finally” conveyed judgment about the older sister’s decision to delay having children.

One writer told me that he was judged by a young woman in his ward for having facial hair. He based this conclusion on an encounter after church. When he approached her to chat, she spoke abruptly and then left, but only after her eyes fell on his scruff. He assured me that her downward glance was “pointed.”

What interested me was that these stories were aggregated and presented to me as a common experience. My writers felt judged, or more often, believed that the people around them were judgmental. The details were subsumed in that description of the experience.

I know inappropriate judgment exists. People are fallible, even the ones I go to church with. But I also noticed that many of the specifics my writers used felt thin to me. I admit I didn’t know the context or the nonverbals, but most of these interactions seemed innocent to me as an outsider. Yet in the minds and hearts of these interns, these incidents amounted to such a strong and persistent problem that they warranted an essay directed to the general church membership. 

My purpose in approaching this subject is not to tell my former interns that I think they were wrong. Honestly, I don’t know. Negative sentiment is often communicated subtly. People can be cruel, status-conscious, self-righteous, gossipy, and exclusionary. Latter-day Saints are not exempt from these behaviors. And I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment.

But part of me wonders if, in addition to the many real cases of judgment, something broader is happening that makes the experience feel more pervasive than perhaps it is. 

What if much of what we experience as “feeling judged” arises from the interaction between another person’s ordinary effort toward a goal we share and our own unresolved insecurity? 

For example, if I feel insecure because I know I can be thoughtless, and I assume other people recognize this about me, then, when someone thoughtfully offers me a kind favor, I may begin to interpret the person’s tone or volume as a signal that their offer was actually a form of judgment for my own shortcomings. 

Or if I feel defensive because I am not shaving as often as I believe I should while a student at BYU, and someone doesn’t want to talk to me, I may begin looking for signs that my shaving is the reason. 

Because we are intensely aware of ourselves, we assume others are intensely aware of us, too. And because our coreligionists share so many of our aspirations, it is common for us to encounter people we judge to be doing better than we are. And we project our own judgments onto their sighs, comments, and eye movements. 

Our Own Judgment

Insecurity is unreliable. It can interpret difference as disdain. It can interpret excellence as accusation, silence as contempt, and conviction as diagnosis.

I felt this keenly in the wake of my divorce. Although the cause of my divorce was rather obvious and entirely beyond my control, I felt like a massive failure. My children suffered daily as a result of my failure to keep my family together. And I was certain that the many happy families and successful husbands in my new ward would note this failure in their assessment of me. 

And one truly thoughtless comment, such as “Divorce is usually two-sided,” would then take on a life of its own, confirming in my mind that whenever people walked into the chapel and sat somewhere else, they must have been thinking about my failures. 

I interpreted everyone’s behavior in relation to me. 

In many ways, I was fortunate. I determined early on that Jesus could not be taken away from me by anyone. So I decided to try to ignore what I saw as everyone else’s judgments, because, in my case, they weren’t going to affect my behavior.

As a result, I became less hyperaware of others’ judgments. And soon it began to seem that there was much less judgment. Many of the acts (or lack of acts) that I had previously attributed to judgment, I now ascribed to people being busy, or self-consumed, or any of a million other reasons that had nothing to do with me. It soon seemed that almost no one was really judging me in a sustained, cruel, or unfair way. 

I still think there was some judgment. There are a few people whose patterns of statements make me think they still see me as less than. But once I had learned to limit the problem, it didn’t seem very big. What did I care if a couple of people in a ward of two hundred people didn’t like me? 

My feeling of being judged was real and pervasive. But within about a year, I felt the judgment was largely in my head. 

The feeling of being judged is internal, but it attempts to explain the external world. When I felt shame, my mind searched for the cause. And there were lots of sighs and eye twitches I could point to as signs of judgment.

I don’t think every instance of feeling judged is imagined or self-imposed. But in my case, I eventually concluded that was most of what had happened. 

Social Spotlight

Feeling more judged than we are is actually a pretty well-known phenomenon in social psychology.

Researchers use the term “spotlight effect” to describe the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance and behavior. Relatedly, researchers have identified what they call a “liking gap,” in which people underestimate how much their conversation partners enjoyed their company. We tend to remember our awkward pause or failed joke more vividly than others do. Adults readily recognize an exaggerated form of this tendency in teens, but it continues into adulthood. 

This doesn’t mean every fear of judgment is misplaced. Genuine cruelty, self-righteousness, exclusion, and gossip exist. I’ve witnessed instances of pervasive and inappropriate judgment. But it does mean our social perceptions are not nearly as neutral or accurate as we think. We may be poor judges of just how often others judge us negatively.

The therapeutic tendency to validate others’ observations can create a cycle. It starts when we feel judged, and others in our circles then validate that observation in their efforts to make us feel better. In turn, we double down on the narrative our circle has validated, which can make us even more certain that we were judged. 

This tendency is a form of self-focus, but not necessarily selfishness. We each live within our own consciousness. Our anxieties are loud to us, while other people’s anxieties are mostly hidden. When we enter a room, we are preoccupied with what people are thinking about us, while they are also thinking about what people are thinking about them. We can interpret this distraction as disapproval, while they may be concluding the same. And a room full of people worried about being judged may well be a room full of people too busy to judge anyone else.

Leaving the Imaginary Courtroom

Latter-day Saints are in many ways yoked together in a great work. We are not adversaries trying to outdo one another. 

Just as judgment can be corrosive, so too can the rhetoric around judgment.

The next time we feel judged, perhaps we can start by wondering whether the source of that judgment is internal. What insecurity do we have—what in our own lives do we feel defensive about—that we are putting into the minds of others without their permission?

This does not mean our experiences of judgment aren’t real, but given how many pressures there are to see judgment where it doesn’t exist, perhaps an honest gut check in the other direction can help us see things as they really are.

I am unaware of any comparative evidence suggesting that Latter-day Saints are any more judgmental than any other group. But there are reasons why we might feel that they are. Part of the project of The Church of Jesus Christ is personal improvement, which gives us many opportunities to recognize the gap between where we are and where we strive to be. 

Ultimately, I succeeded in pushing through my own feelings of judgment in my new ward by redirecting my attention. Rather than being concerned about what they thought of me, I started thinking about who in my ward needed my friendship and attention—who was lonely or in need of help. I stopped complaining that I was the one lost sheep, wondering why no one was coming to minister to me as Jesus would, and I started looking for the other lost sheep around me. I started inviting other rather than wondering why no one was inviting me. 

One of the greatest freedoms Jesus offers is a secure identity. We no longer have to appoint everyone around us as judges that we have to please. Human approval matters, especially within relationships, but it does not create or destroy our divine identity. 

That understanding releases us from the impossible task of managing and worrying about every opinion in every room. 

Most people aren’t judging us. They are worrying about their own lives. Their own groceries, deadlines, bodies, disappointments, and families. 

And once we can grasp that, we realize that we’re not going to church with a jury, but a congregation. A bunch of imperfect people, trying their best. Just like you.

The post Maybe They’re Not Judging You appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Drawing on a study from the American Families of Faith Project, we explore how women from Abrahamic faiths navigate marital challenges. The study consisted of 113 wives from highly religious Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities across the United States. Based on this study, we identified two ways faith in God shapes their responses to conflict. 

Theme 1: God Is Central to The Marriage

Our participants shared that a central focus on God in their lives contributed to positive outcomes in their marriages. Like Ruth, who chose loyalty and faith in God over familiarity and personal security, Halimah, a Muslim wife, emphasized that religion guided her toward wise and compassionate decisions in marriage. She explained, “Religion encourages both partners to take decisions wisely and not degrade the other person. That’s how I think religion helps us not to have conflict.” Other women of faith in the study said that God helped them to work through difficulties. Yi, a Christian who had been married for more than two decades, said:

Now, our conflicts are fewer and fewer. There were more conflicts before … much more, before we came to believe God. We always thought of ourselves and tried to argue, even if we were wrong. After we came to know God, our life has been different. We have fewer and fewer conflicts now because … we think in a similar way. Sometimes we have different opinions … okay, no problem, but we let it go, and we don’t want to argue.

Wachiwi, a Protestant woman, explained that God held her marriage together: “I don’t think you can hold a marriage together alone because there are times we hit a hard spot … and God was our salvation. He was always the way to work through things. Without Him we would fall apart.”

Similar to Ruth, who chose God even when it meant stepping into the unknown, these women showed that placing God at the center of their lives made a difference in their marriages. Their stories, whether of hard conversations, quiet sacrifices, or decisions to stay when it was difficult, point to the same source of strength. In moments of tension or uncertainty, they turned to God.

 Theme 2: Belief in God Leads to Internal Changes That Benefit The Marriage

Many of the women we interviewed described faith-inspired changes—sometimes significant transformations—in themselves, their partners, and their marriages across time. Joelle, a Christian said:

I think you have to trust God. You have to be able to hear His voice and practice that above anything else. Practice that [even] more than praying, practice that more than going to church, practice that more than singing [and] praising. Learn to hear His voice so He can always talk to you and tell you what He really wants you to do.

Learning to understand God and hear His voice was a focus for many of these women. Belief in God also seemed to deepen the women’s commitment to their marriages. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints named Sarah said:

Well, the fact that we were committed from the outset to make it work was, I think, an important factor. Obviously, all couples have conflict in their marriage, and that’s part of the package. You cannot expect to have a marriage free of conflict, or any relationship free of conflict. But the commitment we had for each other, and believing that we had an eternal marriage if we abided by the contracts we’ve made, I think helped a great deal in overcoming any conflict that we had. Being able to discuss any conflict that we had certainly was helpful to us as a couple.

These women also emphasized the importance of covenants and vows made in marriage. An Orthodox Christian named Alisia said,

For me, my religious beliefs … it reminds me of my commitment with my husband that I married in the Church. And of the blessings God blessed us with. It helps me to think about the meaning of our relationship and our commitment to one another. What did we say on that day that we were going to do, regardless of the health and illness and the good and bad? We do all of this just to obtain, to try to solve conflict, with the idea of maintaining and preserving this family together.

These women viewed marriage through a lens of faith and saw it as a divine gift. Li-Fen, a Christian wife, shared her perspective that:

God created marriage, let no man separate. We would not think about divorce, no matter how big the difficulties are. We must work out and resolve the difficulties in the Lord. We would not address divorce easily. This idea [of divorce] cannot emerge into my mind.

Other participants echoed the belief that divorce is typically not an option to overcome marital hardships. Their faith also inspired these women to willingly work on their shortcomings and to cultivate virtues. Charlotte, a Christian wife, recognized that marital growth takes significant time and effort. She reflected:

One of the deepest things that has come to me as I’ve struggled with developing a relationship into a better relationship is … not to be discouraged with what your spouse isn’t, but to realize that they have eternity to develop into who you know that they could be and who you want. Nobody is going to have every quality. You don’t have every quality, so be patient with your spouse and be patient with yourself.

This mindset also led women to realize their need for self-improvement. They viewed personal flaws as opportunities to develop humility and to become more faithful. Jennifer, a Jehovah’s Witness, said,

If I had a problem with temper, and I got married, and I found myself getting irritated with my husband, part of handling that would be, God doesn’t want me to have temper tantrums. You know? In fact, I should have been working on that. I would have been having to work on that as a single Witness, right?

These internal changes led to outward actions, such as deliberately forgiving their husbands, repenting to God, and saying, “I’m sorry.” A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Consuella, said:

I just feel like the Lord comes to me and tells me, “You gotta at least say, ‘I’m sorry.’ You cannot be good with me,” the Savior will say, “if you are not good with your husband.” It is better to solve those confrontations … God has taught me that it’s okay to say, “I’m sorry,” and it’s okay to change.

        A Catholic woman named Amy also shared her view that her relationship with her husband was dependent on her relationship with God. She said:

If my relationship with God isn’t right or if I don’t keep trying to make that better, then I’m not as good with my husband. There’s times … when I’m not being [my best], I’m not focused, I’m not centered. My relationship with God is very important to be able to be a good spouse.

Like Amy, Consuella, Charlotte, and Jennifer, many other women we interviewed in exemplary long-term marriages similarly attributed their marital success not to an easy path but to divine guidance as they faced ongoing challenges.

Ruth chose to follow God amid difficult circumstances and eventually built a new life in Bethlehem. Likewise, the highly religious women interviewed for the American Families of Faith Project looked to God for direction, comfort, support, and strength as they navigated hardships in their marriages. In both ancient Bethlehem and in modern homes across diverse faith traditions, a recurring pattern emerges: when women center their lives on God, they find strength to serve, courage to grow, and grace to endure the inevitable struggles of married life.

The post What Faith Changes in Marriage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.