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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.

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Employees typically feel comfortable discussing fitness routines, cultural heritage, family traditions, or even political causes, but conversations about faith often carry a unique tension. Consequently, workers who wear visible religious clothing, request schedule adjustments for holy days, pray during breaks, or decline to participate in certain activities for reasons of conscience can feel isolated or misunderstood.

Employers, meanwhile, often avoid engaging with religion altogether for fear that any discussion will produce conflict.

That instinct is understandable. Religion touches deep convictions, and Americans disagree profoundly about theology, morality, and political applications of religion. In recent years, many corporate leaders have concluded that the safest approach is to privatize religious identity entirely.

Yet this strategy frequently backfires.

When workplaces treat religion as unwelcome or invisible, employees do not become less religious. Instead, many simply feel pressured to compartmentalize core aspects of themselves. That pressure can produce resentment, disengagement, and mistrust. Increasingly, large American corporations are discovering a different path: rather than suppressing religious identity, they are building structures that allow people of faith—and people of no faith—to work together respectfully.

One of the most important developments in this movement has been the rise of faith-oriented employee resource groups, commonly known as ERGs.

These groups are quietly reshaping workplace culture in some of America’s largest companies.

Why Religion At Work Matters Again

For years, diversity initiatives in corporate America focused primarily on race, gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation. Religion was often missing from the conversation.

But the workforce itself has changed.

Employees increasingly expect to bring their “whole selves” to work, including their moral and spiritual commitments. Younger workers especially want employers to recognize identity in holistic ways—rather than asking employees to fragment themselves into separate public and private personas.

At the same time, globalization has transformed and diversified the religious makeup of many corporations. Teams now regularly include Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, agnostics, and others working side by side across national and cultural boundaries.

As a result, religion has reemerged as a significant workplace issue.

Religious discrimination complaints remain a recurring feature of American employment law. Questions surrounding Sabbath observance, prayer breaks, religious clothing, dietary requirements, and conscience protections continue to appear in litigation and public controversy.

Recent legal developments have reinforced employers’ obligations. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Groff v. DeJoy, which strengthened protections for religious accommodation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Court clarified that to establish “undue hardship,” an employer must show that a proposed accommodation would impose substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business—not merely an inconvenience.In practical terms, this means employers must take religious needs more seriously than many employers previously did.

Yet legal compliance alone cannot create a healthy workplace culture. A company may technically satisfy laws against discrimination while still fostering an environment in which religious employees feel unwelcome, stereotyped, or silenced.

This gap between formal legal protections and lived experience is precisely why faith-oriented ERGs have become so influential.

What Faith-Oriented ERGs Actually Do

Employee resource groups are voluntary, employee-led organizations formally recognized by companies. Most corporations already host ERGs built around shared identities or experiences, including groups for women, veterans, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ employees, or workers with disabilities.

Faith-oriented ERGs apply the same model to religion.

Some are centered on a single tradition, such as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu employee groups. Others are intentionally interfaith, bringing together employees from multiple traditions alongside secular allies.

Critics sometimes assume these groups encourage proselytizing or create ideological division. In practice, successful faith-oriented ERGs usually operate according to very different principles.

Most such groups prohibit coercive proselytizing. Participation is voluntary, and the emphasis is typically on inclusion, education, dialogue, and accommodation rather than theological debate.

The work of these ERGs tends to be remarkably practical. Some help human resources departments understand religious accommodation needs before conflicts arise. Others organize educational events explaining major religious holidays or traditions. Some advocate for prayer or meditation spaces, flexible scheduling during holy days, or dietary accommodations at corporate events.

Perhaps most importantly, these groups create relationships.

Religious misunderstanding often flourishes in environments where employees rarely interact meaningfully across lines of difference. Faith-oriented ERGs reduce that distance. A Muslim employee explaining Ramadan to coworkers, a Jewish employee discussing Passover traditions, or a Christian employee describing Sabbath observance can humanize practices that might otherwise seem unfamiliar or threatening.

This matters more than many executives initially realize. Research suggests that religious literacy reduces prejudice and workplace tension. Employees who understand one another’s beliefs are less likely to interpret religious behavior as strange, hostile, or exclusionary. Simple familiarity can lower social friction.

In this sense, faith-oriented ERGs function less like advocacy groups and more like cultural translators.

The Corporate Shift Toward Faith-Friendly Workplaces

The growth of faith-oriented ERGs inside major corporations has been significant. Recent reporting and research by the World Economic Forum and the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation show that although only a small percentage of Fortune 100 companies had faith-oriented ERGs a decade ago, religion is far more likely to be included in corporate diversity strategies today.

Major companies, including Salesforce, Texas Instruments, American Airlines, and Dell, have publicly embraced faith-friendly initiatives.

Salesforce offers one of the clearest examples.

This collaboration challenged the assumption that religious inclusion would conflict with other inclusion goals. Instead of treating differing convictions as irreconcilable, the company encouraged dialogue rooted in mutual respect, and employees learned how to navigate disagreement without demanding ideological uniformity.

Texas Instruments, which has supported faith-oriented employee groups for more than two decades, provides another notable example.

Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ERGs all operate alongside other affinity groups within the organization. And rather than producing fragmentation, these networks have largely strengthened cohesion. Employees report feeling more respected when their beliefs are acknowledged rather than ignored. Managers gain a better understanding of accommodation needs. Conflicts are often resolved informally before escalating into formal complaints.

Importantly, these companies are not adopting faith-oriented ERGs merely out of altruism but because they increasingly view religious inclusion as strategically beneficial.

Retention improves when employees feel respected; recruitment from diverse talent pools becomes easier; and global business operations benefit from stronger cultural literacy. Companies serving international markets recognize that understanding religious diversity is valuable not only psychologically but also commercially. In other words, making workplaces faith-friendly is not just a moral project but also a good organizational strategy.

The Deeper Cultural Question

The rise of faith-oriented ERGs reflects a broader cultural debate unfolding far beyond corporate America.

Can institutions sustain genuine pluralism in an era of deep moral disagreement?

Modern workplaces bring together people who hold profoundly different views about truth, identity, sexuality, politics, and human purpose. Many organizations struggle to determine whether peaceful coexistence requires suppressing these differences or learning to navigate them openly.

Faith-oriented ERGs represent one answer to that challenge.

At their best, they reject two extremes simultaneously.

On one side lies aggressive secularism, which treats religion as inherently divisive and therefore inappropriate in public institutional life. On the other side lies sectarianism, which seeks dominance rather than coexistence. Healthy faith-oriented ERGs instead operate on a pluralistic model: employees may disagree deeply while still working together respectfully.

This principle sounds simple. In practice, however, it requires institutional habits that many Americans have lost.

Pluralism is not relativism, and employees do not abandon their convictions to participate. Nor does pluralism require pretending that moral disagreements are unimportant. Rather, pluralism requires learning how to live and work alongside people whose convictions differ from our own without treating disagreement itself as hostility.

That is increasingly difficult in American society.

Public discourse often rewards outrage, ideological sorting, and suspicion. Social media amplifies conflict. Many institutions have become uncomfortable with substantive moral disagreement.

Against that backdrop, faith-friendly workplaces may provide an unexpected civic benefit. They create environments where individuals practice the ordinary disciplines of democratic coexistence: listening, accommodation, restraint, compromise, and mutual respect. Employees who learn to navigate religious diversity constructively at work may carry those habits into families, congregations, neighborhoods, and civic life.

In this sense, corporate culture can influence broader social culture.

Legitimate Concerns—and Necessary Safeguards

None of this means faith-oriented ERGs are without risks.

Poorly managed groups can become exclusionary, politically polarized, or dominated by a single ideological perspective. Religious employees may sometimes fear that participation could affect their professional advancement. Others worry that companies could privilege certain beliefs over others. These concerns are real.

Companies must maintain strong nondiscrimination protections for all employees, and participation in religious groups should remain voluntary. No employee should feel pressured to engage in religious activity—or pressured to hide sincere beliefs.

Leadership also matters. The healthiest faith-oriented ERGs tend to emphasize humility, service, and relationship-building rather than activism or culture-war confrontation. Many deliberately include interfaith dialogue and collaboration with secular colleagues.

Importantly, protecting religious freedom in the workplace must also protect employees who are not religious. A genuinely pluralistic workplace recognizes conscience broadly. The goal is not religious dominance but institutional fairness.

That balance can be difficult. But it is achievable.

Why This Matters For Religious Freedom

Americans often think about religious liberty primarily in constitutional or political terms. We debate Supreme Court decisions, public-school controversies, and government regulation.

But most people experience religious freedom daily in ordinary institutions such as schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

Employment is especially significant because work occupies such a large portion of adult life. When employees feel forced to suppress their religious identities in professional settings, religious freedom can become an abstract concept rather than a lived reality.

Faith-oriented ERGs help bridge that gap. They translate legal protections into everyday organizational practice. They create channels for accommodation before conflict escalates. They normalize respectful discussion of religion within institutions that shape millions of lives.

And most importantly, faith-oriented ERGs remind corporations that human beings are not merely economic units.

People bring moral convictions, spiritual commitments, rituals, traditions, and community ties to work, and attempts to erase those realities rarely produce neutrality. More often, such attempts create environments in which only people with certain identities feel safe expressing themselves openly.

The ideal solution is not religious uniformity but principled pluralism. American corporations and society more broadly are still learning what that looks like in practice. Some efforts will fail, and others will become politicized or superficial. But the broader movement toward faith-friendly workplaces reflects an important insight: durable institutions cannot be built by demanding that employees abandon core dimensions of identity at the office door.

Healthy workplaces do not require employees to become less religious—or less secular—to cooperate. They require learning how to disagree without exclusion.

At a moment when American society often seems unable to sustain that balance, the quiet rise of faith-oriented ERGs inside major corporations offers a surprisingly hopeful model.

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For many religious individuals, faith plays a central role in their lives. In many faith traditions, members are required or encouraged to freely contribute their time, effort, and money, a concept known as religious giving.

But how do individuals actually feel about religious giving? How does religious giving affect their marriages and families? An in-depth qualitative study from the American Families of Faith Project addressed that question by interviewing 184 highly religious families about their beliefs. We will review four insights that emerged. 

Reframing Sacrifice as Giving

Financial contributions to religion are not a sacrifice, but a gift. This is what many participants in the study said about their giving.

Participants tended to reframe sacrifice as giving or charity. They saw their giving as deeply and inherently relational, strengthening their connection with God and with their sisters and brothers in the human family. 

Building Faith Community Bonds

Giving also increased many participants’ sense of meaning. They felt better about life for having given. 

But the benefits didn’t stop there. The act of giving also tended to form a stronger bond between givers and their faith communities, leading them to feel more fully supported by their faith communities. A Christian woman named Joyce, said, “When I was going through a really—I mean a really, really—bad financial time, I never ever had to want for anything, because someone from my church family was always there helping out, giving me something.” A father from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints added another story of profound help. He explained,

There was a time in the 1970s when we had three kids in cloth diapers that had to be washed daily and our washing machine gave out … and I didn’t even have money to have the thing fixed, and I certainly didn’t have money for a new one… My wife came home from running the errands… and there was a washing machine sitting on the porch with a hundred dollar bill in an envelope taped to the lid, and boxes of laundry detergent from church…. Somebody obviously understood the principle of charity where you don’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing…. God bless them!

Adjusting for inflation, that $100 in the mid-1970s would be the equivalent of more than $600 today. The experience left this couple with a burning desire to give in similar ways to others, and they have done so across the decades since as they try to “pay it forward.” 

Many participants shared similar feelings and stories about the financial support they received from their faith communities. Sarah, a Jewish mother of two, is a great example of being a support to others. She shared, “It’s a real comfort to feel like you’ve provided a meal for someone or given money for a good cause. You walk away from that feeling that all is right with your little part of the world, that you did your piece. It may be stressful, but the majority of the time you walk away feeling comforted.” 

Effects on the Marital Relationship

Many participants reported that their marriages also benefited from their financial giving, but others emphasized that religious (and other) giving can strain the marital relationship if it is not a shared financial goal. A Latter-day Saint father named Todd said, “Sometimes money can be divisive but through our religious faith we know that the money’s not ours and we know that it’s a tool.” When couples share this vision, they do well. This concept was explained thoroughly by Doug, a Christian husband and marriage counselor, who reported, 

I think the number one reason we have a strong marriage is God. The number two reason is the ability to agree financially on issues, because finances are the number one killer of relationships. Many married people disagree about money…. The fact is, we have the same financial goals and priorities. Money is the number one fight—money—and if you can navigate that particular obstacle, you will do well in marriage. 

For couples like Doug and his wife, shared commitments to giving and serving can become a strength for the marriage. However, the ideal of selflessness is difficult to attain, and many participant couples admitted to arguing about money. 

Religious Giving and Children

Takeaways 

As believers, these findings can help us navigate the blessings and challenges of religious giving in our own financial situations. Key insights include:

Reframe sacrifice as giving. Highly religious individuals viewed their financial contributions not as sacrifices but as gifts and priorities rooted in faith, which reinforced their sense of purpose and moral identity. As believers, we can also strive to elevate our perspective and reframe faith-based financial sacrifices as opportunities to put God and others first.

Avoid letting money become divisive. We can be aware of how money can potentially divide relationships and cause stress, and ultimately remember that money may not be what matters most. When we focus on our connection with the divine and serving others, financial giving can be a source of relational strengthening for all involved, instead of a source of division. This awareness can remind us of what truly lasts.

Grow in service and faith. We can consider how we might invite more faith, unity, and purpose into our financial decisions. Whether we are giving time, money, or support, we can try to view these acts not as burdens but rather as sacred opportunities to grow closer to God, strengthen our relationships, and to serve others with love.

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On July 20, 1969—almost exactly fifty-seven years ago—the Eagle landed on the moon, crossing the threshold of worlds and placing feet on ground that, for nearly all of history, had seemed permanently beyond our reach.

On July 20, 2026, my children and I are going to eat moon pies, carve the phases of the moon into Oreo cookies, and watch an Apollo 11 documentary, just as we have for more than a decade. We call it Moon Day.

It’s not a holy day. It’s a family day. It’s an occasion to reflect on what inspired human beings can accomplish and to turn my children’s attention upward.

And it’s that upward turn that causes me to continue celebrating. Children spend so much time looking down—at desks, assignments, devices, and anxieties. Moon Day has come to interrupt that. It reframes the moon as not just a light in the night sky, but as a physical world—a place of mountains, craters, dust, gravity, and darkness. A place that is distant but not unreachable, mysterious but not inscrutable. 

It gives my children an opportunity to merge their physical world and their theological one. Science does not drain the holiness from the moon, nor does our understanding of God’s majesty absolve us of our obligation to learn and investigate. The facts enlarge the majesty, and the majesty inspires us to learn.

Faith Big Enough for the Universe

I’ve written a fair amount recently about the implications of the vastness of the universe for religious belief and how the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accommodates this expansiveness.

The restored gospel may not give us an astronomy textbook, but it does give the immensity of creation a remarkably prominent place. In the opening chapter of Moses, God does not merely tell Moses that He is powerful; He demonstrates it by showing the workmanship of His hands. Moses beholds the earth and learns of innumerable worlds.

Moses collapses after the experience, concluding that “man is nothing.” But God teaches him a better lesson, explaining that Moses is also the son of God. The massive universe does not push God further away. 

Doctrine and Covenants 76 expands on this vision, testifying that worlds were created through Jesus Christ and that their inhabitants are children of God. Doctrine and Covenants 88 speaks of the Light of Christ filling “the immensity of space” and powering the sun, moon, and stars. 

And Latter-day Saint belief about creation means that there is no reason for God to be embarrassed by the physicality of creation. Matter, embodiment, and resurrection are all central to our understanding of creation.

None of this tells us whether Europa’s ice covers microbial life or which propulsion system Congress should fund. But it does give us a posture toward curiosity. 

There is a reason that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both speculated about life beyond our world. The majestic theology they were receiving whetted their curiosity. 

I have seen that same kind of curiosity power my own children’s imaginations. It joins wonder to discipline. All the mathematics in the world could not get a rocket off Earth if someone hadn’t first imagined it. And all the inspiration we can muster accounts for nothing without a mastery of the physics that powers it. In my experience, space is the perfect early vehicle to help children see how their imaginations can be powered. 

So for us, Moon Day is not nostalgia for 1969; it’s a promise for how we see the world and intend to work toward the future. 

Would Zion Look Up?

In my opinion, Zion will include a budget for space exploration. 

This is not to say every appropriations bill is wise, nor that every rocket is inherently righteous. But when we think of the perfect future society, that society represents more than the elimination of suffering. 

Imagination is a public good. Those who defend space exploration often focus on its practical benefits and the many ways it has benefited life on Earth. And those are certainly real.

But just as real is an orientation toward the future that lifts up everyone. A sense of purpose and progress. Much of contemporary life trains us to view the future as a collection of approaching catastrophes. Without reducing the importance of any of those, space exploration adds a message on top: the future will contain discovery, wonder, and growth. There are still things to learn, places to reach, projects to build, and questions to answer. Life is more than just dodging one doomsday after the next. 

Zion would not need to choose between compassion and wonder. It would instruct everyone in “things both in heaven and in the earth.” Peaceful, cooperative, truth-seeking exploration belongs naturally within a Zion imagination. 

How I Celebrate Moon Day

The best Moon Day activities make space tangible, invite wonder, and connect that wonder to our Heavenly Father.

Here are some of the things I do to celebrate:

Look at the moon. Pull out the binoculars or a small telescope, take a drive outside the city, and simply look at the moon. I like to point out specific features to my kids and wonder what it would be like to walk on or around them.

Watch the Eagle landing. This year we’re going to watch a full documentary, but even in years we don’t, we’ll usually watch a five-minute clip of the first humans walking on the moon. It never fails to inspire some awe. 

Build a moon, lander, or rocket craft. We’ve made papier-mâché moons, built popsicle-stick-and-aluminum-foil landers, drawn pictures of an imagined world, and simply made rocket ships out of LEGO bricks to show how we would go to Mars, or Europa, or another location in space.

Learn about moon phases. We’ve used basketballs, tennis balls, and flashlights to show how the moon phases work. Sometimes we’ll draw the moon phases, or this year we’re carving them out of the icing inside an Oreo.

Go to the museum, observatory, or planetarium. Look up where you can go with your kids to learn more about space. My family often goes to our local community college planetarium to watch a show for Moon Day. 

Moon dinner. Our family does our scripture study at dinnertime, so I usually focus on verses like those I shared above for that day’s study. We also usually eat something like pizzas, meatballs, or crescent rolls for dinner. One year, we set up a picture of the moon and made pancakes, and then the children used various toppings to decorate their pancakes to look like the moon. 

Turning Our Eyes Up

Human beings are not only problems to be solved. We are minds that seek wonder and truth. We are creators and explorers. Our quest for space honors and trains those intuitions. 

On Moon Day, I think about my children. I want them to understand that our theology pushes us upward and outward and that each new discovery can help us learn more about the God who made it all. 

So on July 20, we remember that human beings once looked up to the moon and learned how to cross the distance. I hope you and your families find wonderful ways to celebrate! Happy Moon Day!

The post Zion’s Gaze: Upward and Outward appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Social media has taught Christians a dangerous half-truth: if you are not using your platform to publicly denounce evil, you are complicit in evil.

I understand that instinct. But in many ways the demand for denunciation does more harm than good.

Sometimes disciples must speak, fight, draw boundaries, protect victims, and use lawful power against corruption. And in some cases, it may even be appropriate to do this on social media.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has boundaries, beliefs, and practices. Members must adhere to them in order to remain in full fellowship. For example, when Alma established the Church, he received those who repented and removed those who would not. 

But notice who did the removing.

The Lord gives pruning shears to gardeners, not spectators. The internet is not a bishop’s office. A pile-on is not a membership council. And public humiliation is not church discipline. The loudest person in the room is rarely the person with stewardship.

We see this sometimes when Latter-day Saints confuse the Church’s public communications with the Church itself. Imagine the Church is a house. There is certainly a door, represented by baptismal interview questions. And those inside the house can be escorted out. But digital communications is the porch. Its role is to be inviting and welcoming. That should not be the entire function of the house, but that is the function of the porch. 

And in the ministry of Christ, the function of the porch is clear: to welcome everyone. Yes, He also called people to repentance, and yes, not everyone was fit to be counted among His disciples. But first, everyone was invited. 

So how should we use our voices in social media spaces when we feel like boundaries of faithfulness are being broken? 

The scriptures present two different paths. I discussed this in some detail in a 2022 essay. 

Christ taught the parable of the wheat and tares, teaching that we don’t need to pluck out the tares from the wheat. Rather, we should let them grow together until a final reckoning. This aligns with Paul’s later instructions suggesting that the Lord’s servants should not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone. And the faithful in Lehi’s vision did not engage with those in the great and spacious building, but “heeded them not.”

But in another parable, Christ taught that His servants are blessed for remaining watchful at night to stop a potential thief. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ also told His followers to watch for wolves in sheep’s clothing. Paul similarly taught that members of the Church should “mark” those who use “smooth talk” to create division. And the Anti-Nephi-Lehies were praised as “more wise” for expelling Korihor from Jershon.

The distinction appears to be whether the individual is merely present or attempting to influence others. The tares do not directly harm the growth of the wheat when they mingle together in the field. But the thief does harm the home. And the distinction for Paul appears to be whether the individual is harming the body of Christ or not. 

The question, then, is not whether we should fight or be complicit. The better question is: What action is faithful in a given circumstance?

If time and resources were unlimited, fighting every injustice and wrongdoing we come across might have merit. But they’re not. And often, the more fruitful work is disengaging from online controversy and focusing on building our families and our wards.

This calculus can become complicated for people who are themselves building platforms and seeking audience engagement and buy-in. In that space, “stirring up” people is the bread and butter of algorithm bait.

In the Book of Mormon, Satan is forever stirring people up—stirring them up to anger, fear, pride, and resentment. Prophets, on the other hand, spent much less time telling the faithful to panic about enemies and boundaries.

In our social media spaces, we can oppose evil and still become useful to it. We can drive feelings of grievance, division, fear, and anger. Confident disciples can be fierce without being frantic. We can choose our ground where we can make a real difference in the world. We can understand our role and our sphere of influence. And we can refuse to let our enemies dictate the disposition of our spirits.

Roles are important here. The gospel commands mercy and justice, but not always from the same person. When I am insulted, my role is to turn the other cheek, and Christ’s is to provide justice. But when I’m responsible for someone’s safety, my role may require more direct and immediate intervention. Parents, bishops, congregants, social media influencers, apostles, and Church communications specialists each play different roles in the kingdom of God’s larger mission. When we demand that communications specialists act like apostles, or when social media influencers take it upon themselves to act like bishops, we are ultimately making it more difficult for the work of God to move forward.

Paul teaches a similar principle to the Corinthians in his extended metaphor comparing the church to a body. He says that if eyes were trying to be ears the body wouldn’t function. And in his follow-up epistle he explains that we should remain, “within the limits of the sphere which God appointed us.”

Evil, for all its swagger, is parasitic. It creates nothing. It steals, corrupts, and consumes. The Gadianton robbers survived only while there were productive Nephites to steal from. Once good Nephites disappeared, so did the robbers. 

Goodness works differently. It generates. It feeds, heals, teaches, builds, shelters, ministers, and multiplies. Its most important work is quiet. But it produces the kind of durable realities that evil simply cannot manufacture. 

That doesn’t mean evil is bound to disappear any time soon. In fact, we know it will disappear only in the end times. And in the meantime, it crushes people. Protection, law, boundaries, and discipline are necessary. 

But to come back to our initial metaphor, pruning should be done by a gardener. A wise gardener understands the importance of pruning, but also doesn’t overreact and harm the overall integrity of the plant. Most gardening isn’t pruning, after all; it’s watering, feeding, strengthening, and waiting. 

Building the Church is the same. 

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I sometimes wonder if some Latter-day Saints—myself included—are a little too casual about the truth of eternal families. Perhaps we are a little too comfortable with this doctrine, taking it for granted and rarely feeling the awe it should inspire. Is it possible that sometimes we are even under condemnation for treating this sacred doctrine too lightly?

“The Family: A Proclamation to the World” boldly articulates the doctrine that the family is an eternal and divine unit originating with a divine heritage:

Each [of us] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. … The divine plan of happiness enables family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave. Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for . . . families to be united eternally.

The fact that our families can be eternal, not just mortal, is one of God’s greatest gifts to those who choose the covenant path. One reason for this is that difficult life circumstances, both historically and in the present, have often made it hard to fully realize our aspirations for our marital and family relationships in this life. Eternity can give us the “time” and “space” we lacked in mortality to build the deep and loving bonds we yearn for. 

When Mortal Life Ends Too Soon

For most of human history, the specter of death haunted family relationships. The very act of bringing life into the world was fraught with mortal danger; the risk of death for women from multiple pregnancies was much higher than it is today. I see this phenomenon reflected in my own genealogical records. I have great-great-grandparents who lost each of their first four children within a few days of birth. The promise of eternal family relationships must be especially sweet to our ancestors who often had precious little time together in this mortal life.

And it’s not just children who leave us early. My ancestor Lydia lost a beloved husband. After Lydia’s conversion in the early days of the restored Church, she met Newel Knight in Kirtland, where he was laboring to build the temple. Lydia married Newel, and their marriage helped to bring her out of a deep depression from the early death of her first child and abandonment by her abusive first husband. Before leaving Nauvoo in that cold winter of 1846, Lydia and Newel were sealed as an eternal family in the half-finished Nauvoo Temple. But a year later, in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, Newel became deathly ill while living in a dugout hillside shelter. Lydia pleaded with the Lord to heal her beloved husband, as He had raised her from her deathbed on two previous occasions. But no miraculous healing was granted, and Newel begged Lydia to let him go. She relented, and Newel soon died, leaving Lydia, who was pregnant with their seventh child, and six children. The hope of an eternal reunion for Newel and Lydia after a mortal marriage cut short is another reason we can appreciate the gift that our families can continue in eternity.

These experiences remind me that I don’t want family relationships to be reduced to memories. Memories are mechanisms to bridge the time until we can experience those relationships again, coupled with eternal glory.

What Eternity Still May Repair

In my studies of the social history of families, the concept of romantic marriage, although present in many cultures throughout history, was not a pervasive cultural expectation until the 19th century, when Lydia and Newel married. The conditions of marriage and family life throughout much of human history gave many couples little chance of becoming one as we understand it today. Will their eternal lives be a continuation of the relational austerity of their mortal circumstances? I don’t think so. I sense that beyond mortality they will enjoy the blessing of building the warmth, affection, and oneness with one another that too often had to remain a distant priority in their mortal lives. As I perform proxy ordinance work on behalf of ancestors, I can better appreciate what this work could mean to them, and how it can facilitate building exalted family relationships.

I remember a comment my father made many years ago upon the death of my grandmother, a few years after my grandfather had passed away. He said he hoped they would now find the intimacy and warmth that eluded them in the difficult circumstances of their mortal life together.

In our modern times, too, life’s circumstances can make it difficult to become fully one in marriage. I have met spouses who, having discovered that they did not marry Prince or Princess Charming, still choose each day to treat each other as a person of divine heritage and destiny. Out of such actions come the blessings of heaven and deeper feelings of love. Mortality for us—and for our ancestors—is fragile and hard. Marriage is hard, too. I believe this is by design. Our greatest growth comes from gaining the Christlike virtues demanded by the intimacy and constancy of living with the imperfect person we are bound to. I am grateful that we, like our ancestors, will have eternity to overcome imperfections and deepen our marital love. With such hope in mind, I don’t want to be casual about my faith in eternal family relationships.

Binding the Generations

A few years ago, my wife, Lisa, and I went to the temple to seal her father to her mother and herself to both parents. Lisa’s parents divorced when she was young, and she had a very strained relationship with her father. But Lisa was elated to do this temple work. She wasn’t focused on her parents, however, who are unlikely to accept the marriage sealing ordinance offered to them. Instead, she was thrilled to complete the links of the chain of her family’s generations, to be linked as an eternal family to her ancestors. As a convert to the faith, Lisa had, from her earliest years as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, faithfully devoted herself to family history research and temple work for as many of her ancestors as she could find. Now, she is connected to them in an eternal family unit. This has brought tangible joy to her soul.

A brief caveat as I conclude: I know that some feel ambivalent about eternal family relationships. Perhaps you have experienced neglect or serious abuse from a spouse, parent, or sibling, and you don’t yearn for an eternal connection. I don’t pretend that I have the perfect helping words to say. But maybe I can just offer this perspective. First, agency is an eternal, overriding doctrine. All family relationships in eternity will be freely chosen. And I also believe that the healing powers of heaven are powerful and can bring sincere understanding, repentance, forgiveness, and healing, leading to an eternal, perfected love that is hard to achieve in our mortal lives.

Eternal family relationships are a beautiful truth of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Even in a time when fewer children die in infancy, and many married couples enjoy prosperous circumstances that facilitate intimacy, we can all be more grateful for the blessings of eternal family relationships and exalted love.

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When Texas state representative and current U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico said in a 2021 floor speech, “God is nonbinary,” he was certainly trying to be provocative. 

Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, was speaking during a heated political debate about transgender athletes. He described God as “both masculine and feminine and everything in between” before summarizing his point in the phrase that has since gone viral: “God is nonbinary.”

The controversy that followed underscores how the truths of the restored gospel speak to the hearts of so many individuals. For many Christians, the phrase sounded downright blasphemous, even though it represents the rather uncontroversial theology of most Christian denominations, including Presbyterianism, Catholicism, and The United Church of Christ.

I should add, as an aside, that Christians in those traditions might well understand that their doctrine is that God transcends sex and still feel upset that Talarico described that understanding as “non-binary” since that description has become a controversial description of human gender identity. But while it may have evoked controversial phrasing, the actual idea, that God is neither male nor female, is both widely accepted and apparently deeply controversial. 

Enter the restored doctrine of Jesus Christ.

Latter-day Saints React Differently

Latter-day Saints have good reason to be uneasy with the phrase “God is nonbinary.”

For us, God is more than a transcendent spirit or an ultimate reality, He is a literal father. We believe God is personal, embodied, parental, and knowable. We don’t pray to Him as a metaphor, but in relationship with Him. And that conviction is not a footnote to our faith; it is foundational to the way we understand and worship God.

In our worldview, embodiment is not a limitation to overcome, but part of becoming more like our Father in Heaven. And when Genesis proclaims that we are created in the image of God, “male and female,” we believe. And we believe that a gendered embodiment is an essential characteristic of eternal identity.

So when Latter-day Saints hear a statement such as “God is nonbinary,” we don’t just feel a generic discomfort. We understand precisely how and why it is inaccurate to our eternal worldview.

Of course, Latter-day Saints can still choose to vote for Talarico, because they prioritize avoiding corruption or policy alignment over doctrinal agreement. But when it comes to the doctrine, it’s clear that we simply don’t agree, and we know why.

Something Deeper

Romans 8:16 teaches that “The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” When it comes to our relationship with God, our instincts often go deeper than theological argumentation or doctrinal lists. God’s children understand a relationship with our Creator instinctively. In our most vulnerable moments, we understand that relationship as parental. When we cry, plead, and worship, we feel the kinship of a child to its parent. We call Him Father not because it is merely one more metaphor, but because He is our Father.

A good number of those who have been scandalized by the phrase formally belong to religious traditions that already deny that God the Father is embodied, biologically male, and physically sexed. In my view, this most likely comes because the objection to Talarico’s declaration goes much deeper than mere doctrine to something so many of us feel instinctively. 

A Restored Answer

This controversy is an opportunity for Latter-day Saints to enter a religious conversation to witness, rather than to mock.

The restored gospel offers answers to the questions that undergird this debate. It answers the longing of so many hearts. 

Is God personal or abstract? Is the body temporary or eternal? Do I have a Father in Heaven? Am I made in God’s image? Is God gendered?

Latter-day Saints have unusually powerful answers to these questions. And we have a unique opportunity when the public square offers a forum to provide those answers. But only if we can avoid the temptation to try to score points for whatever side of the political debate we are on.

The controversy over Talarico’s phrase will likely continue in the usual ways. People talking past each other. Lots of political parties shouting, so no one notices their own candidate. Clipped videos, angry posts, defensive interviews.

But behind it are people hungry for a God who is more than an idea. They may not have a theological language for that hunger, but Latter-day Saints do. And we can offer it to them. 

The world is full of abstractions. The restored gospel gives us a Father.

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“God would cease to be God.” 

This interesting phrase appears multiple times in the Book of Mormon, often in reference to the balance between opposing forces.

Indeed, the gospel of Jesus Christ consists of many ideas that may appear incompatible. Justice and mercy. Grace and works. Love and laws.

With recent messages from leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about becoming peacemakers, it is the balance of love and laws that I suggest requires more of our focus.

Christ’s Pattern of Love and Truth

We live in a world of polarization, in which we are constantly asked to pick sides. However, we have been taught by prophets, apostles, and the scriptures to love God and love our neighbor—a concept described by President Nelson as upholding both the laws and love of God.

Just recently, President Dallin H. Oaks, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,  taught: 

This balancing is not easy. When we seek to keep all the commandments in our personal lives, we are sometimes accused of having no love for those who don’t. When we show personal love and support loving causes, we are sometimes misunderstood as implying support for results that contradict our other religious duties. But as followers of Christ, we should seek to live peaceably and lovingly with other children of God who do not share our values and do not have the covenant obligations we have assumed.

When we over-focus on one side of the equation, we risk both becoming indifferent to people who need our support and connection and failing to be diligent in our discipleship and defense of eternal doctrines. Both of these traps are inconsistent with the love and character of Christ. Throughout His ministry, we see Christ acknowledging sin as wrong, yet choosing to associate with sinners and form connections with those who would otherwise be outcasts.

Learning What We Lack 

It is so easy to notice in hindsight that the treatment of sinners, publicans, and diseased people in the New Testament by the scribes and Pharisees was wrong, but it can be more difficult to recognize that we sometimes still marginalize or “other-ize” friends, families, and communities today. This may include people who choose to participate in elective abortion, those who identify as LGBTQ+, or even just people who subscribe to different religions, some of whose beliefs may contradict or show contempt towards our own. 

Similarly, it is easy to agree with Christ’s support of His Father’s doctrine and His condemnation of false beliefs in His interactions with hypocritical religious figures and sinners alike. Yet it is sometimes difficult to stand up for those same doctrines when they challenge our worldview or appear to cause pain for people we love. 

How do we actually accomplish this feat? 

It starts with prayer, introspection, and personal revelation. I would propose, in accordance with Dr. Ty Mansfield, that we consider, with the Lord’s help, which side of the equation each of us needs to focus on.

When We Need More Love 

You may discover that you need to increase your implementation of the love of God. As you do, you may find that you can be firmly pro-life and yet empathize with single women who may feel terrified and trapped in their unplanned pregnancies. You may find that you can believe in the divine nature of gender, and still choose to connect and associate with members of the LGBTQ+ community or youth struggling with gender dysphoria who feel marginalized or shunned by religion or society. 

If you feel you don’t struggle with these issues, increasing love for others can take smaller forms as well. For example, perhaps you feel a greater drive to take care of the poor and needy, repair family or ward relationships that have previously struggled, pray more intentionally for a spouse, child, or sibling, or avoid angry retaliations to misinformation online.

When We Need More Law

On the other hand, you may discover that you need to become more diligent in upholding God’s laws. Through diligent prayer and study, you may encounter a growing testimony of the family as essential to God’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children. You may feel an increased faith in and appreciation for temple ordinances, even if they still don’t completely make sense to you, or an expanded comprehension of Jesus Christ’s Atonement—what He suffered for you.

You may feel more confident in sharing your beliefs online or grow less concerned about how others will react to your witness of gospel principles. You may even learn to love and stand firmly behind points of doctrine that have been previously difficult to accept because of their implications for friends, family members, or associates.

Through personal revelation, I discovered that I more often struggle to uphold the laws of God in my concern for other people. For example, I had trouble with some of the Church’s policies surrounding the LGBTQ+ community. Luckily, I found myself in classes at BYU that forced me to dive in and truly study “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” from both secular and religious perspectives. Studying these beautiful doctrines gave me an increased understanding of God’s plan and our place in it and allowed me to find peace between the doctrines I have learned to love and the policies and procedures that still affect me and the people I love.

Perhaps (and likely often), we feel that in some cases we need to focus more on love, while simultaneously in others, the laws of God need more of our attention. The Lord wants us to progress, and I believe He will show us which matters need more of our attention.

In this quest to live as true disciples of Jesus Christ, we do not work alone. The enabling power of His Atonement allows us to become more than we ever thought possible. God operates in a space of balance between opposing forces: “If these things are not there is no God.” In our quest to be like Him, let us learn to live within these seeming incompatibilities, building bridges between God, ourselves, and others. This is the work of becoming true peacemakers.

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It matters what kind of God we believe in. Mortality can feel heavy. Bodies hurt, hearts break, and even the most faithful can feel worn down. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints worship a God who is not distant, abstract, or unknowable, like in much of creedal Christianity. 

Yet our ability to imagine a God who can literally hug us has become almost common, so ingrained in our imaginations and beliefs, that we may not always notice how deeply it shapes our worship, our understanding of our body, and our sense of divine identity. The truth that God is embodied offers more than a theological quirk to Latter-day Saints and also provides intimacy, dignity, and hope. 

In practice, it may seem as if belief in an embodied God does not make a difference in religious life. The physical act of prayer doesn’t appear to change whether the believer holds an image of God as an embodied being, or as the feeling or presence of love, support, or guidance. Commandments don’t read any differently whether they were spoken by God’s voice or given through inspiration. 

The vast majority of people who have ever lived, even those who believe in a corporeal God, have not seen or interacted with Him physically, nor do they expect to, until after their own physical life has ended. That being the case, why is this doctrine of an embodied God so important, and how does it change Latter-day Saint worship and understanding of our own divine physical identities?

What Is Corporeality?

Corporeality, or embodiment, points to the form and physicality we are familiar with in our own bodies and suggests the capability for interaction. Corporeal beings can share a location in space, exert influence on, and be influenced by, physical surroundings, and communicate through sound, touch, and motion.

Though we don’t know exactly what embodiment entails for divine beings, Genesis 6:6 and Moses 7:28 describe God experiencing grief and weeping over the wickedness of His children. Other scriptures describe His anger and jealousy—negative emotions rooted in disappointment towards His children’s rejection of Him. God’s work and glory in bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man is not a pain-free experience, even for Him. 

God, of course, is not miserable in His work with His children, and is said to rejoice alongside heaven in many scriptural instances. 

These emotional elements, along with the physical qualities of corporeality, allow for radical closeness and  between humans and divinity through shared form and varying degrees of shared experience. The doctrine of a corporeal God changes the nature of the relationship a human being can have with their creator, lessening the gap between us and the divine.

Our Understanding of God’s Embodiment

However, because we are fallen humans living in a mortal world, this view of God comes with some problems. By relating too closely to Him, we can make “God in our own image,” and assign Him inappropriate expressions we see in our fellow mortal family members, friends, and associates. In this way, the doctrine of corporeality can lead us to lose the sense of wonder, respect, and even fear for the greatness of the Divine that inspired Isaiah to cry “Woe is me,” and Moses to declare “man is nothing,” along with the praise, celebration, and adoration expressed through psalms, poems, and hymns. God may have a physical body, but His glory exceeds our familiar mortal experience. Recognizing this difference inspires the awe and desire necessary to worship Him reverently.

The exact nature of divine embodiment hasn’t been revealed to us, but we see suggestions of its nature in the scriptures. Doctrine and Covenants 93:34 tells us that we are incapable of receiving a fullness of joy unless our spirits and bodies are united. Resurrected bodies will be immortal and perfectly restored, down to the very hairs of our heads.

Despite this, Jesus Christ’s resurrected body retained His scars. Following His resurrection, Christ was also capable of eating food, feeling troubled, and changing his mind. We don’t know exactly what perfection in bodily form looks like, but the Greek word teleios, used in the Bible to convey perfection, can also be translated as complete or mature, suggesting similarity and continuation of experiences in mortality.

Does God Deserve Worship?

God inspires intense respect for His majesty and power. His love and compassion for his children also inspire reverence. These qualities move Latter-day Saints towards the worship of Him. The etymological source of the word “worship” originates in the Old English weorðscipe, from its root weorð, meaning “worthy.” To worship is to give reverence and respect to the being we recognize as worthy of our devotion. The nature of what and who we worship is therefore tied to the nature of that being.

A person could, in theory, worship a god who is cruel, as long as that god was also powerful enough to inspire devotion and respect purely out of fear. However, while this god could reward his followers for their adoration, he would not inspire a genuine relationship, nor would he be likely to inspire the qualities of love and compassion within them. In the case of our God, both expressions of the qualities we already respect, often referred to as spontaneous worship, and commanded worship, directing us towards what we ought to revere, are both possible.

Our rational minds may be imperfect and liable to error, yet we were given the ability to recognize and seek truth by God, for the purpose of understanding Him and His plan. The image of a god completely outside the realm of human understanding is a god that is difficult to relate to, emulate, and even obey.

How Can You Worship an Embodied God?

To worship a corporeal God is to adore, respect, and honor Him in his corporeality, which can be extended to inspire honor and respect of our own corporeality. Through this, we can more actively and intentionally strive to emulate God. Instead of seeing our bodies as a source of separation, we can see them as a source of connection between Him and us. In a sense, we are divine (or like God) because we are embodied. To mutilate, abuse, or mistreat our bodies denigrates an aspect of our inherent divinity.

Beyond our physical bodies, this respect can extend to all aspects of our embodied experience, including our emotions and sensations. We connect with divinity in our ability to feel both joy and sadness, to see beauty and mess, and to hear harmony and discord. In Matthew 5:48 and 3 Nephi 12:48, we are commanded to be perfect like our Father, or if the alternative translation is used, to be complete or mature. The best aspects of being embodied on this earth—sensations, emotional intimacy, our capability to move, create, and work—as well as pain, must also be similar to the completion or maturity that comes with godlike perfection. As Latter-day Saints, our worship includes obedience to a health code, showing respect for sexual intimacy, and providing for the needs of others when we are able to. This lifestyle encourages respect for our bodies and becomes more clearly inspired when our corporeality is viewed as a connection to the divine.

In addition to the unique ways in which we approach the embodied experience, the worship of our corporeal God encourages prioritization of human relationships. To know that God feels with us and works with us to overcome the challenges of mortality on a physical level allows for a closer and more personal relationship with Him. In the best cases, our relationships with other humans can mirror the attributes of a corporeal living God. Through our belief in an embodied God, we are more able to view ourselves, in our own corporeal state, as capable of becoming like Him.

Though imperfect, our attempts to emulate these qualities in our worship lead us to treasure the good and work through the bad in our human relationships, for the “same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there…coupled with eternal glory.”

 The worship of a corporeal God inspires the kind of relationship with Him and with our fellow human beings that can transform both our mortal and eternal corporeal existence.

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