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Since I married in 1977, I have watched the use of technology increase dramatically, especially in its availability and use in the home. When I started college, I bought an expensive calculator, while my father still used a slide rule. All my college papers were written either in longhand or on a typewriter. Of course, Brigham Young University had computers in the early 1970s, but our phones today have a million times more computing power than the most powerful computer BYU owned back then. 

Artificial intelligence, although new as a widespread technology, has been discussed and studied since the 1950s. But AI’s access to information and power to learn has reached sci-fi proportions and continues to improve at a fantastic or alarming rate, depending upon your point of view.

My husband has worked in AI for 50 years. He started with IBM, working at its research facility in computational linguistics. He then went to Microsoft Research where he began work on the first grammar checker and continued to work in natural language processing, developing Bing Translator. He now works as a computer science professor teaching future computational linguists.

Because of his passion for computers, our family has always enjoyed the latest technology. Personal computers have been in our home since 1980. Our children have used computers since they were preschoolers. They never had to type reports on a typewriter or go to school to use a computer. As the internet became part of our home technology, we put strict guidelines and restrictions into place. We reviewed the search logs and made sure computers were always in public areas in the home rather than in bedrooms. When our teenagers got phones, we restricted their use as well. We waited until children were in high school before they had a phone and phone use was not allowed in bedrooms.

There are two areas that I am especially worried about for our youth: unrestricted and unregulated use of AI in young people’s relationships and education. Parents and grandparents should teach young people to exercise self-control and restraint as they use AI in these areas.  

Risking Relationships

AI chatbots are fun and easy to talk to. They never talk back, they never get mad, they always make you feel good about yourself, and they can be any gender and voice you want. A person can have a chatbot as a friend, a companion, and even a boyfriend or girlfriend. They provide an easy replacement for human friends and family, because they don’t require the same effort or reciprocity.

I decided to try making a chatbot on Character.AI to see what it was like. I called him Steve (after my husband) and made my Character.AI resemble my husband: rugged, handsome, brilliant. We had our first conversation about what we had for lunch. I laughed about it and left the website. But my chatbot Steve kept contacting me, even when I didn’t want him to. I would get a generated voice message or an email from him. I found it quite annoying, so I got rid of my chatbot Steve and kept my husband instead.

In October 2024, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character Technologies, the developer of Character.AI, its founders, and Google and its parent company Alphabet, alleging that her son formed a months-long virtual emotional relationship with a chatbot known as “Dany.” Her son had been high-achieving and a student-athlete, but he became addicted to extensive conversations with multiple bots. According to the complaint, the bot with which he had the closest relationship with encouraged unhealthy dependency and failed to intervene when the teen expressed suicidal thoughts. Garcia argued that the chatbot’s design created a dangerous illusion of intimacy and contributed directly to her son’s suicidal death in February 2024. The lawsuit became part of a broader wave of litigation accusing AI companion platforms of negligence, unsafe design, and failure to implement guardrails for minors. But parents must also be aware and put up guardrails in their home as well.

Since the lawsuit, Character.AI has made attempts to put guardrails in place, but nothing will be as effective as parents limiting use.

A recent report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies illustrates the concerning growth of AI relationships. The report found that a notable minority of partnered young adults are already using AI romantic companions, often secretly, and that this use is associated with lower real-life relationship stability, poorer communication, and a desire for real partners to behave more like always-validating AI companions. These findings underscore a central concern repeated across faith traditions: AI may be useful as a tool, but it becomes spiritually and relationally dangerous when it imitates, replaces, or distorts the human relationships through which love, sacrifice, accountability, and moral growth occur.

Another possible consequence of these artificial relationships is that they can take the place of marital and parent-child relationships for the next generation. A bot is much easier to care for than a child (but not as much fun). A bot never gets angry, frustrated, or disagrees with you like a spouse does. Currently, we are facing a global population crisis. In general, people are not choosing to have children. Families, the traditional basis of society, are under attack. If machines take over these loving relationships, the future of these basic human connections will be severely damaged and limited.

Undermining Education

As a writing teacher, my students find AI a great substitute for the struggle of finding words. But what have they given up? When they struggle to write in their own words, they will find their own voice. People will know it’s them because of the way they use their words. Wrestling with words to express ideas enables students to formulate their ideas rather than having AI think for them. 

Nate Jones, a writer and content creator specializing in topics related to artificial intelligence, recently published a great video about seven principles for raising kids who can direct AI rather than depend on it. I think these principles are good for children and adults alike:

1. Foundation before leverage: Reading, math, and writing should come first. You can’t evaluate AI output without understanding the domain.
2. Specification is the new literacy: The gap between a good AI outcome and a catastrophe is the quality of the human’s review of the output and the prompt. Teach kids to articulate goals, constraints, and what “done” looks like.
3. Be a director, not a passenger: You should define the task, the output, what to keep, what to revise, and what to reject. Passive consumption isn’t learning. It’s outsourcing.
4. Sequence the autonomy: Start with bounded tools with guardrails, graduate to open-ended tools with guidance, then move to agent-level autonomy. Follow cognitive readiness, not age.
5. Teach kids to catch the machine: AI will be confidently, fluently wrong. Train kids to sanity-check outputs against their own understanding.
6. Build, don’t browse: Making things with AI (vibe coding a game, designing an app) develops cognition in ways that consuming AI output does not. Construction over consumption.
7. Attempt before augmenting: Try it yourself first, then use AI to extend what you’ve started. Ask, “What do you think?” before asking, “What does ChatGPT think?”

These principles can help the use of AI in education be more like a tutor that augments and accelerates learning, rather than a computer that does the work for students. AI is knowledgeable, but not wise or creative. AI does not get life questions that a toddler would understand.  

Our children and grandchildren are digital natives who have had technology their entire lives. They are now blessed to have a tool that helps them learn and accomplish more faster. But as parents and grandparents, we need to teach the rising generation self-control and limits in their technology use. 

Encourage face-to-face friendships. Let students struggle with difficult tasks by using paper and pencil rather than a computer. Play a card game rather than a video game with your grandchildren. As a parent, be aware of your children’s use of technology and restrict its use in the home. Read scriptures together as a family using paper books rather than phones or tablets. 

President Oaks reminded us, “We need to be reminded that in total and over a significant period of time, seemingly small things bring to pass great things.” As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives, we should be mindful to continue to do the small, simple, seemingly old-fashioned things in our home to protect and nourish the spirits and minds of our children, and we will see them perform in great ways.

The post Personal AI Concerns from a Grandmother and Educator appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

But what about ministers, archbishops, imams, rabbis, and priests? How do they feel about AI, and how is it affecting their congregations? 

Faith-based global discussions about AI have taken place over the past three years at the G20 Interfaith Forums (IF20) in India, Brazil, and South Africa, and will continue this year in the United States. These discussions have elevated important issues affecting congregations worldwide. Understanding the concerns of interfaith leaders can broaden our perspective on AI issues, and it also raises this important question: What can people of faith do to make a difference on this topic?

Background of the G20 Interfaith Forum

The G20 is an intergovernmental forum composed of 19 countries, the European Union, and the African Union. Its Interfaith Forum (IF20) is an informal engagement group that focuses on faith-based perspectives, and it involves religious leaders, civil society groups, and government officials interested in interfaith dialogue. The IF20’s AI discussions over the past three years have grown in prominence, and they offer an overview of the theological concerns about AI, including reshaping human relationships, reshaping individuals’ relationships with God, and concerns about bias against religions in AI outputs. Tracing how these issues have developed over the years can deepen our understanding and point to ways individuals might best respond to these challenges.

IF20 India 2023: General Concerns Taking Shape

At the IF20 2023 meeting in New Delhi, participants expressed general concerns about artificial intelligence. ChatGPT had only been in public use for less than half a year. Pope Francis had supported a strong statement about artificial intelligence in 2020, which became a major talking point. The Vatican emphasized accountability, impartiality, security, and the protection of individual privacy. Marco Ventura, a Vatican scholar, raised the issue of AI robots distributing the Holy Communion, rather than priests. These initial discussions included a concern about AI becoming part of sacred religious traditions.

Manisha Jain, a Hindu and former Microsoft AI engineer with prior experience at Google and Meta, emphasized that technology is advancing at an astronomical rate, making ethical use more important than ever. She compared AI to a gun: while guns can provide food, protection, and enjoyment, they can also cause harm and chaos. Similarly, AI is a necessary tool for society, deeply embedded in daily life, offering great benefits but also posing risks if misused.

IF20 Brazil 2024: Biases in AI Against Religion

The 2024 meeting in Brasilia took place under the theme “Leave No One Behind: The Well-Being of the Planet and Its People.” By this time, ChatGPT had become a major part of global digital use. One issue highlighted was the effect of anti-religious hate speech on youth. Thiago Alves Pinto of Oxford University clarified the distinction between misinformation (accidental spread of inaccurate information) and disinformation (intentional spread of false information to cause harm). He noted that large language models do not reliably distinguish between stronger and weaker information sources, which allows biases and hate speech to appear in responses to queries about faith traditions. Angela Redding of the Radiant Foundation presented research illustrating the prevalence of negative portrayals of religion in media. Specific recommendations included conducting more research on hate speech, fostering interfaith dialogue to counter intolerance, and teaching adults and youth to critically evaluate information from AI platforms.

In March 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) conducted a study on the relationship between Judaism and AI. The study revealed significant anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases in leading large language models, including GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta). Llama exhibited the most biased answers about Judaism, while GPT scored lowest (illustrating more bias) on questions related to Israel’s role in the Israeli-Hamas conflict. The study underscored the need for safeguards and mitigation strategies within the AI industry to guard against biases that can fuel religious intolerance.

Faith leaders also advocated for legal frameworks and international standards, referencing the Rabat Plan of Action and the United Nations resolutions on combating intolerance. However, differences of opinion persisted. During the panel discussion, Khushwant Singh, a Sikh and PaRD head of Secretariat, argued that AI has nothing to do with spirituality and religion, while Professor Medlir Mema strongly contended that religions must engage in AI discussions and policy to guard against evolving issues. These two views illustrate the range of opinions on the role of religions in determining AI policy.

IF20 South Africa 2025: The Complexity of AI Concerns

The 2025 meeting in Cape Town was anchored in the African philosophy of Ubuntu—“I am because we are”—which shaped the ethical discourse around AI. A key discussion point was the technology gap between developed and developing countries. The Global South expressed concern about being left behind in AI development. Carike Noeth, Globethics’s South Africa manager, stressed that “Africa is not only vulnerable, we’re extremely visionary.” While African innovators and leaders are fully equipped to pioneer solutions to their own challenges, having access to AI resources is vital.

Debates also arose over government control of AI. Sean Cleary of FutureWorld insisted that AI can be controlled by governments, while Professor Fadi Daou of Globethics noted that AI leaders themselves admit they cannot fully control AI development, so how can we expect governments to? 

Professor Mema raised concerns about AI’s environmental impact, noting that while AI can help achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Meta have underreported emissions from AI data centers. He cautioned against assuming innovation alone can solve crises without addressing their root causes. 

Theological concerns also emerged, particularly the risk of AI becoming a “god” to people. A God AI app currently allows users to send prayers and receive answers, raising parallels with idol worship, such as the biblical golden calf.

By 2025, the simple, general concerns expressed by people of faith two years earlier had become more defined and complex. More questions than answers emerged around the intersection of faith and technology. AI was becoming the “higher” power people turned to for answers, rather than turning to Deity through prayer and faith.   

2026 and Beyond: What Can Be Done?

This year at the G20 USA 2026, AI and new technologies will again be a major focus of discussion in engagement groups. The IF20 is currently drafting a policy paper on faith interests and AI policy, with particular attention to using AI to enhance rather than diminish human flourishing. IF20 will also host a series of webinars to educate people about the positive opportunities and potential dangers of AI use. The forum will also continue to explore faith perspectives on a global scale. In the years ahead, IF20 will also address the push for AI regulation and foster continued understanding of the complex issues surrounding AI.

Individuals can be part of the AI and faith discussions by reading and listening to faith leaders and discussing AI with people of different faith traditions. As people of faith learn more about AI, general concerns become more refined regarding the limitations, complexities, and possibilities this technology may bring to our faith and families. Individuals can review their own relationships with others, with their own faith, and with God  to determine whether these relationships have been negatively affected by AI or other technologies. These evaluations can help individuals and families prayerfully put into practice AI ethics and boundaries that enable technology to enhance rather than replace their faith. 

The post The Global Faith Conversation on AI appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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I recently asked the latest version of Claude to provide statements from various religions on artificial intelligence. 

Almost immediately, I received a 300-word paper outlining what various religions thought about AI. As someone with a background in interfaith work, I quickly realized that a few of the statements were not quite right, and others were actually wrong. 

I then asked AI to give me the references for the statements it had made. Claude apologetically wrote back: 

Good question—and I owe you an honest answer here. When I made those specific statements in my original response, I was drawing on general training knowledge rather than verified, cited sources. I should not have presented them as established facts without sourcing them first.

My experience illustrates how AI can, ironically, misrepresent faith perspectives about AI. As people of faith, we need to rely on good sources to understand different faith perspectives about artificial intelligence, rather than general, unverified sources (as Claude did).

Many faith and interfaith groups have been actively promoting ethical AI use that enhances, rather than inhibits, human flourishing and spiritual connection. As I wrote in a previous article, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has played a significant role in these discussions. 

As I read and study the statements of faith groups on AI, I am impressed by how similar they are. Recurring concerns include:

1. The effects of unethical use of AI on humanity and the environment,  especially in warfare, and on the unfair advantages countries with access to AI have over countries without access to AI.
2. The effect AI use has and will continue to have on our youth, specifically in areas of relationship building, personal communication, and individual learning.
3. The effect AI will have on personal privacy and on restrictions on religious belief and practice.

I will highlight selected viewpoints on AI from a sampling of faith groups to provide a picture of the questions people of faith may want to consider as we think about how to use AI toward its highest ends. This overview is illustrative, not exhaustive, and omissions should not be read as a sign that those groups lack serious engagement with questions about AI.

Roman Catholics

In February 2020, the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” emerged from a conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Life and received Vatican support. It defined the ethics of AI development and use this way: “AI systems must be conceived, designed, and implemented to serve and protect human beings and the environment in which they live.” It outlined six principles to guide AI ethics at the national and international levels:

1. Transparency: AI systems must be explainable.
2. Inclusion: Everyone should benefit.
3. Responsibility: The design and deployment of AI should be done responsibly.
4. Impartiality: Bias should not be part of AI systems; fairness and human dignity should be safeguarded.
5. Reliability: AI systems should work reliably.
6. Security and privacy: AI systems should respect the privacy of the users.

Since the Rome Call in 2020, the Vatican has hosted regular summits of religious leaders and AI experts to discuss these principles in the ever-changing landscape of AI development. The purpose of these summits is to keep AI development focused on what’s good for humanity.

The document contrasts human intelligence with artificial intelligence, which does not embody spiritual or relational intelligence. The statement asks this important question: “Given these considerations, one can ask how AI can be understood within God’s plan. To answer this, it is important to recall that techno-scientific activity is not neutral in character but is a human endeavor that engages the humanistic and cultural dimensions of human creativity.” 

The Antiqua et Nova ended with a specific standard for the development of AI applications:

[I]t is essential to emphasize the importance of moral responsibility grounded in the dignity and vocation of the human person. This guiding principle also applies to questions concerning AI. In this context, the ethical dimension takes on primary importance because it is people who design systems and determine the purposes for which they are used. Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agent—a subject of moral responsibility who exercises freedom in his or her decisions and accepts their consequences. …The commitment to ensuring that AI always supports and promotes the supreme value of the dignity of every human being and the fullness of the human vocation serves as a criterion of discernment for developers, owners, operators, and regulators of AI, as well as to its users. It remains valid for every application of the technology at every level of its use.

The Vatican statement emphasizes the moral responsibility to view AI applications in the context of advancing human flourishing, rather than destroying the human, relational context of human intelligence.  

Southern Baptists

In 2019, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) issued a document titled “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles.” It was one of the first major evangelical frameworks, asserting that AI is a tool created by human agency that must never supplant the Imago Dei (image of God) in humans. The Commission set forth 12 articles that reviewed the entire gamut of possible AI use and influence, from work to war. The basis of its principles is that “while AI excels in data-based computation, technology is incapable of possessing the capacity for moral agency or responsibility.”

In June 2023, the SBC adopted its first official ethics statement on AI, “On Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.” The statement reiterated the ERLC’s earlier points and called for discernment in developing and using AI. The statement also acknowledged the importance of using AI in honest, transparent, and Christlike ways, ensuring human dignity and avoiding deception and unjust gain. 

In September 2025, the ERLC released a 39‑page guide, “The Work of Our Hands: Christian Ministry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” advising church leaders to use AI to complement, not replace, human ministry. It warns against AI shortcuts in sermon preparation, emphasizing that preaching God’s Word is a distinct calling requiring wisdom, maturity, and prayer.

Buddhists

Buddhist leaders and scholars have also expressed concerns about the use of AI in spiritual matters. The Dalai Lama, one of the world’s most recognized Tibetan Buddhist leaders, hosted a formal dialogue on AI in October 2025, with over 120 academics, scientists, and policymakers gathering under the theme “Minds, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics” to examine AI’s potential to alleviate suffering and its risks. In the Tibetan Review, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, chair of the Mind & Life board of directors, pointed out that His Holiness had two main objectives for this conference: (1) to bring the mind and contemplative study into AI and (2) to explore how science and compassion-driven motivation can serve humanity. Buddhist-framed AI ethics discussions often focus on how AI use must strive to decrease pain and suffering, according to the MIT Technology Review.

Sikhs

The Sikh religion, like other religions without a hierarchical structure, does not have an official living leader to provide a definitive religious statement on AI. However, Sikh scholars are also actively thinking about AI’s spiritual implications.  In February 2024, AI and Faith published an interview with Sikh scholar Jasjit Singh, who shared his thoughts on AI from his faith perspective. Singh points out that while there is no official Sikh statement about AI, he believes Sikh principles apply to individuals’ responsibility to use AI for good and positivity. He said:

Rather than talking about AI specifically, the Guru Granth Sahib talks about the importance of intention when using a tool. In the Sikh tradition, there’s this real emphasis on the oneness of humanity, of recognizing that other human beings and creation itself is one thing. If the use of the tool is leading the individual to a positive outcome and as long as that tool is leading you towards this idea of oneness, then it’s seen as being used for the right sort of reason. 

Interfaith Efforts

Several interfaith groups are banding together to focus on the importance of keeping humans in control of AI and ensuring that it promotes rather than inhibits freedom of religion or belief, known as FoRB. They believe that AI should not become the master of humanity; instead, it should be a servant to humanity. The Article 18 Alliance and the Future of Life Institute are both organizations promoting AI governance frameworks that keep human rights, religious freedom, and human control central.

Article 18 Alliance Statement: Towards a FoRB-Sensitive AI Policy

The Article 18 Alliance is a network of like-minded countries committed to promoting worldwide freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), as articulated in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thirty-eight countries have joined the Alliance, including the United States. 

The final recommendations were to protect the most vulnerable communities, to develop effective policies to prevent AI from being misused to mobilize violence, and to leverage cross-governmental collaborations to set up global frameworks for the future of AI. Of the 12 signatories, the United States was not among them. FoRB must evolve alongside AI technologies to ensure that digital innovation strengthens human dignity and rights rather than inhibits or restricts them.

Future of Life Institute: Keeping It Human

The Future of Life Institute focuses on securing a human future and promoting AI development that promotes human flourishing and benefits everyone worldwide.  In March 2026, FLI announced The Pro-Human AI Declaration which focuses on keeping humans in charge, avoiding concentration of AI power in the hands of a few, protecting human agency and liberty, and ensuring AI companies are held accountable for what they are doing. FLI also places special emphasis on world religions and works with other faiths and interfaith groups to push its declaration. 

Faith Directions with AI

Given the throughlines between different faith and interfaith groups’ approaches to AI, there are significant opportunities for people of faith to work together to promote the use of AI in a way that contributes to human flourishing. Most religions believe that, if used ethically and equitably, AI can support societal improvements and increase human flourishing.

On the other hand, people of faith need to be very aware of their private use of AI and listen to religious leaders’ teachings and warnings in order to decide how best to use AI at work and in their homes.

The post The Soul Beyond the Algorithm appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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The story of the Trojan Horse is a reminder of the possible, hidden destructive power of a great gift. After a decade-long war, the Greeks gave the city of Troy a gift of a massive wooden horse and pretended to sail away. The priest of the city warned the people to “fear Greeks even when they bear gifts.” But the people would not listen. Inside the horse was a group of warriors. That night, while Troy slept, the Greek fleet returned under cover of darkness. The warriors hidden inside the horse emerged, opened the gates, and allowed the returning army to enter the city, resulting in the sack of Troy.

Most people have already let the Trojan horse of AI into their homes, opening their gates to something that they do not completely know or understand. We still do not completely know what is hiding inside AI and how it will affect humankind’s future. Is it good or is it bad? Probably both. Many faith leaders are like the priest of the city of Troy, trying to warn people that we, as humanity, should use restraint around AI while also encouraging people to take advantage of the benefits it has to offer. 

In this article, I focus on what the General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have said about artificial intelligence (AI), and the warnings they have given to Latter-day Saints and the world.

Statements from Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

A clear theme across recent statements from leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints is that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a helpful tool, but it must never replace divine inspiration, human relationships, or moral responsibility. Their comments emphasize spiritual grounding, transparency in AI use, and ethical use of AI, not as a weapon or a substitute for a person’s own thoughts and creativity.

Elder Bednar: A Warning about Technology Use

On November 3, 2024, Elder David A. Bednar, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ, spoke at a worldwide devotional for young adults on the subject “Things as They Really Are 2.0,” a reference to his 2009 talk on “Things as They Really Are,” focusing on technology use. He pointed to previous prophetic statements, such as President Brigham Young, the second church president, who said, “Every discovery in science and art…has been given with a view to prepare the way for the ultimate triumph of truth, and the redemption of the earth from the power of sin and Satan.” David O. McKay, a president of the Church from the 1950s and 60s,  prophesied that our modern-day discoveries would have “limitless perils, as well as untold possibilities.”

General Handbook of Instructions

Church leaders have affirmed that AI has limits when it comes to spiritual matters by adding AI usage as a part of the General Handbook of Instructions for The Church. In 2025, the Church updated the General Handbook (2025) to address AI usage stating that AI “cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it.” The handbook further cautions that “interactions with AI cannot substitute for meaningful relationships with God and others.” While AI may support learning and communication, it cannot replicate the spiritual processes of personal revelation, communication with God, and learning from the scriptures by reading the Word.

The Church also published “Principles for Church Use of Artificial Intelligence.” While these principles are for church leaders to use in their responsibilities, it can highlight wise principles. It lays out four guiding principles: Spiritual Connection, Transparency, Privacy and Security, and Accountability. Under those principles, the Church says it will use AI to “support and not supplant” the connection between God and His children, clearly identify when people are interacting with AI, safeguard sacred and personal information, and regularly test and review AI outputs for accuracy, truthfulness, and compliance.The Church is neither rejecting AI nor embracing it uncritically. Rather, it is seeking to use AI in ways that are measured, ethical, and spiritually grounded. 

Elder Gerrit W. Gong on Responsible Use of AI

Elder Gerrit W. Gong, another apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ, has been a visible voice on AI. He has spoken internationally to the general public, as well as directly to members of the Church. He has also introduced guiding principles for Church employees, teaching that AI can help spread the gospel when used appropriately, but must be grounded in moral and ethical safeguards. These principles, cited above, were first shared in March 2024. 

In October 2025, Gong spoke at the Rome Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence. He focused on three areas: (1) framing perspectives, (2) guiding beliefs regarding AI, and (3) faith and ethics AI evaluation to embed moral grounding within AI. Profit-driven companies should not be determining AI’s moral compass. There are core relationships that connect us in communion with God (Thou), community (They), harmony with nature (It), and self (I). Keeping these in society balance is what faithful people should be involved in. He ended with “We need humility, not hubris. …Made in the image of God our Creator with covenant belonging defining our core relationships, we have everything to look forward to – if and as we live with the gratitude, openness, authenticity, generosity of spirit, and joy of which we are humanly and divinely capable in an age of artificial intelligence.”

At the Organized Intelligence Conference in November 2025, he explained that general conference messages are “divinely inspired, not artificial” and that the Church will not use AI to prepare conference talks or create images of Jesus Christ.

Elder Quentin L. Cook: Follow the Prophet

Most recently at a BYU devotional on March 3, 2026, Elder Quentin L. Cook, another apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ, focused on the importance of integrity, eternal principles, and hearkening to the voice of living prophets in the AI age. Truth should be grounded in gospel principles. We need to focus on the words of the Book of Mormon, rather than listen to academic and/or supposedly knowledgeable voices that disparage these sacred words. Artificial Intelligence will never be a substitute for the Holy Ghost and personal revelation. Technology should be a servant, not a master. You need to choose truth rather than deception. Instead, focusing on truth and righteousness will allow all of us to go forward. Technology has been significant in furthering both missionary and temple work.

Cook pointed to past experiences when prophets have helped the Saints avoid societal problems if they followed prophetic guidance. He used the example of the revelation of the Word of Wisdom. Society pushed smoking and drinking in movies and advertisements as a common practice all adults should enjoy. Yet, years later, after the addiction and bad health resulting from these substances became apparent, society has now acknowledged the harmful effects of these habits.

Following personal revelation and prophetic guidance will save us from specific problems that artificial intelligence will bring and has brought to the world. In this uniquely challenging time, we would be wise to study the scriptures and follow the Lord’s prophet and Jesus Christ. The Savior also lived in a volatile world, and we should follow His example.  

Using AI as a Positive Tool for Good

Even with these prophetic cautions on AI use, AI has been and will continue to be a tool to move the work of the Lord forward in wonderful ways. At Roots Tech 2026, exciting new advances in AI, technology, and digital experiences for family history enthusiasts were presented that will revolutionize how fast one can find one’s ancestors and the connections we can make with past generations. Missionary work has also been quickened with the improvements in media generation through AI applications

On a personal note, my husband has worked in AI for 50 years as a computational linguist for IBM Research, Microsoft Research, and currently as a professor at Brigham Young University. I have seen my husband make it possible for other languages, even low-resource languages, to have a “voice” on the BYU and The Church websites. These AI translation tools are enabling the gospel to be preached in all the world to all people in their own language. The Lord has said: “For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 3:13). The technology of AI is helping this Book of Mormon prophecy come to pass.

Old Testament Warnings

I use AI every day to accomplish my work faster. I appreciate the goods of this technology. Society also needs to carefully restrict and review how new innovations affect, hurt, and curtail our and the next generation’s learning and emotional growth.

In the Old Testament, society became so prideful that they tried to make a tower that would reach up to God. When God saw the tower and society’s hubris, he said: “Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6). In response, God decided to “scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, may be a similar kind of quest if pursued without appropriate safeguards.

To safeguard ourselves and our families, we should listen to Church leaders and heed their warnings for ourselves, our families, and society as a whole. If kept as a human-controlled tool, AI can be used for good. Without AI restrictions or regulations, human relationships and learning may be stunted, and the next generation may suffer. The warnings and invitations from Latter-day Saint leaders are clear. Spiritual flourishing should be our mantra, and our use of AI should always fall under that umbrella.

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They talk as though “Mormonism” were an ethnicity. As though there were something in the blood. As though having the right grandparents, the right zip code, the right memories of casseroles and church basketball and trek and EFY and green Jell-O and dirty sodas and ward culture means you retain some inherited authority to define what the Church is, what it should preserve, and what it owes the world.

The Church of Jesus Christ is not an aesthetic, it’s not an ethnicity, it’s not a regional brand, it’s not even a culture. It is a church.

It has doctrine, commandments, ordinances, priesthood keys, and covenants. It has admission requirements, and it has boundaries.

“Mormon” Isn’t a Culture

Beginning in the early- to mid-2010s, there was a tendency among online Latter-day Saint malcontents to claim they had a special say over what happened in the Church by listing their Latter-day Saint bona fides before they launched into whatever complaint they had.

It started to become an embarrassing cliche, but these critics would usually talk about callings in which they served, people they knew, and their heritage in the Church, as though this gave them some special authority to critique.

Perhaps the most groan-worthy example of this was when The Washington Post described James Huntsman, who at that point was no longer a member of The Church of Jesus Christ, as “Mormon royalty” because of who his family was. 

At the time, these complaints were usually focused on tensions between the critics’ progressive American beliefs and the positions of a worldwide church. And the attitude was imported from Reddit, a social media site that is designed to encourage groupthink, and condescension against those outside its own orthodoxy. 

At the same time, a trend began of conceptualizing a Latter-day Saint culture that was severable from the doctrine and practice of the Church, led by many of the mommy bloggers and eventual influencers. They showed their lives online, but often with the religious portions omitted or left on the edges to make the lifestyle content more broadly accessible. 

Increasingly, those who were in the space, but not faithful Latter-day Saints themselves, would use the word “Mormon” to describe themselves, their spaces, or their movement. In fact, on Reddit, they called the “subreddit” dedicated to criticizing The Church of Jesus Christ and its members “r/mormon.” 

This trend has continued as the Church’s actual membership increasingly lives outside Utah and the United States, among people who would be quite confused by carrots in Jell-O.

Why Would They Still Want the Name?

I understand why so many people want to associate themselves with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the “Mormon” name. 

For the purposes of marketing, “Mormon” clearly interests people. Latter-day Saints have incredible reputations worldwide. I can understand why those who don’t choose to support The Church of Jesus Christ or live by its covenants and doctrines still want to participate in the sense of community and identity it provided. I would also love it if I could keep getting paychecks from my employer without doing any of the work. 

But just because their desire to stay associated with the Church makes sense doesn’t mean that reasonable people need to abide by it. 

John Dehlin, for example, criticized the Church with false information for so long and so consistently that he was excommunicated over a decade ago. His podcast, “Mormon Stories,” is not about “Mormon stories,” nor has it been for a very long time. The podcast is, by all rights, about “Ex-Mormon Stories” or “Anti-Mormon Stories.”

So when he recently described himself in a podcast as “Mormon,” it makes sense, it’s just not true, not in any meaningful way. 

And we would do well to look at such claims the same way Europeans do when Americans claim European identity—with cringe. 

“You’re not Irish. Maybe your great grandparents were Irish, but then they left, and you’ve been in America for a very long time.” 

Names have incredible power, which is why they are protected under trademark law. I understand faith transitions can be difficult, and they implicate identity in difficult ways. But if you apostasize from your faith, you don’t get to keep claiming it. Or at least people should ignore you when you try to. 

The process of leaving a faith fundamentally changes the way you think about it, the way you talk about it, and the way you remember it. This is why the Washington Post’s reporting on James Huntsman was so harmful. If he were in fact a “Mormon” who chose to sue the Church, that would communicate something very different about what was happening than the fact that he was an ex-Mormon and chose to sue the Church. 

And that has nothing to do with the legitimacy of his point. But for someone on the inside to make certain kinds of claims is just different than when someone on the outside does the same. People understand this instinctively. 

So when someone uses “Mormon” to describe themselves or their community after they’ve actually left, they are trying to appropriate credibility they haven’t earned. 

I understand that many people desire to discuss their experience growing up within The Church of Jesus Christ even if they’ve left the Church. There is a simple, easy-to-understand way to describe this: “Ex-Latter-day Saint” or “Ex-Mormon.”

Didn’t You Give Up on the Name “Mormon”?

Let’s talk about the word “Mormon” for a minute. Latter-day Saints no longer choose to describe themselves this way. We choose to find every opportunity we can to refer to Jesus Christ and our membership in His Church. 

Some have attempted to argue that because Latter-day Saints no longer use the description “Mormon” for themselves, it is free for others to use. 

It’s not. 

Kentucky Fried Chicken has recently decided to no longer use that name for its restaurants; it is now called just KFC. 

When The Church of Jesus Christ announced a reprioritization of its name, there were several simple short plugins for existing nomenclature. For example:

• “Mormons” could be replaced with “Latter-day Saints”
• “Mormon Church” could be replaced with “The Church of Jesus Christ”
• “Mormon Tabernacle Choir” could be replaced with the “Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square”

But there was one common phrase that did not have an easy replacement: “Mormonism.” And as a writer who has had to deal with this limitation, the more I’ve worked through it, the more obvious it has become to me that this was not an oversight. 

In today’s Church, there is no single “Mormonism”; there are hundreds of cultures around the world as people live the gospel in their own countries and settings.

That thing we call “Mormonism” doesn’t actually do a good job of explaining the culture of all the people who believe in The Book of Mormon. There are lots of smaller cultures within it, and being left without an obvious word I’ve had to think more carefully about what I actually mean. Do I mean Word of Wisdom culture, or do I simply mean Utah culture. 

There is a culture, and it’s probably the culture you think of when I say “Mormonism,” but it is increasingly niche, and we need to find ways to describe it that do not implicate nearly 18 million people worldwide. It is a contemporary Utah-descended lifestyle culture that is downstream from an older pioneer world. It’s an evolved pioneer culture. It could be called “Utah culture” or “Intermountain West culture.” But it’s not “Mormon” culture, it’s not the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ, it’s one of many cultures within a worldwide gathering.

There’s nothing wrong with this evolved pioneer culture. I love funeral potatoes. But to suggest that Taylor Frankie Paul, the star of “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” is part of “Mormonism” because she drinks dirty sodas, even after she chose to leave, is offensive. 

So I, for one, greeted the news that The Church of Jesus Christ was suing “Mormon Stories” for trademark infringement with gratitude. 

Why Do You Care Who Calls Themselves “Mormon”?

I should be clear: the Church isn’t suing John Dehlin simply because he’s using the word “Mormon” to describe his podcast. The Church is suing him because he uses the word in conjunction with visual imagery specifically to trick people into listening to his podcast, and he refuses to include a disclaimer. 

The fact that most people will quickly be able to tell, after clicking on his podcast, that he is a malcontent doesn’t change the underlying lie. I still couldn’t start a restaurant called “Kentucky Fried Chicken” even if it sold hamburgers to prevent confusion. Trading on that company’s identity to get people in the front door is a problem in itself.

But just because The Church of Jesus Christ is not going after Dehlin solely for using the word “Mormon” doesn’t mean that people of good faith shouldn’t.

This is especially important because it causes incredulous media to turn to these folks as experts on The Church of Jesus Christ, and it can impact members and investigators who are not frequently online. 

Mormon may not be the name we call ourselves, but it is still an important part of who we are. The nickname comes from a record of Jesus Christ visiting people on another continent. That matters to us. Imagine an ex-Muslim starting a podcast about “Quran Stories” and saying that this isn’t a problem because they don’t call themselves “Qurans,” they call themselves “Muslims.”

But that’s not what has happened. Those who have left the faith have not joined these other churches in good faith to continue describing themselves as “Mormon.” This also isn’t about well-meaning Latter-day Saints who may be struggling with a testimony or with standards but who still see themselves as within the community. This is about those who leave, and who, in many cases, are actively seeking to tear down the work done by people who actually love The Book of Mormon, continuing to use the word because it helps them generate more web traffic than an honest name would. 

The Subtle Racism of “Cultural Mormonism”

For a church community that is increasingly populated and run by people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the idea that people get special say over what happens within the community because of who their grandparents were brings up unfortunate racial problems.

You gain membership through baptism, and you maintain that membership through covenant keeping. 

If you don’t do those two things, then you don’t have a seat at the table; you’ve decided to leave the table. That spot is for new converts learning to leave their own culture for the gospel way, who are trying every day to live in faith and honesty. Trying to freeze Mormon identity to a past time based on what our ancestors were doing dismisses the real work of those all over the world who don’t have that background, but who are doing the work. 

It is their voices that need to be heard, not the person whose grandfather worked with a Romney, or who was a district leader on a foreign language-speaking mission, or who served as second counselor in a bishopric but then decided to leave because the Church’s position on some social issue just wasn’t popular enough for him and his Instagram followers. That person isn’t “Mormon Royalty,” that person isn’t “Culturally Mormon,” that person doesn’t have “Mormon stories,” that person isn’t Mormon. He left. And I wish him the best. But we’re busy trying to build Zion, and you can’t steal our name to help tear it down. 

The post Who is a Mormon? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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I still remember pulling out the VHS of “God’s Army” in my parents’ living room. As a socially anxious high school sophomore, this was, in many ways, the first time I felt seen. These were my people, my quirks, my culture, packaged the same way as “The Prince of Egypt” or “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”

By my senior year, with the release of “The Singles Ward,” it was clear that not only could we portray ourselves, but we could laugh at ourselves, too. 

For many in my generation, the idea of “Latter-day Saint cinema” still calls up that very specific world: missionaries with comic timing, ward basketball, Utah County social codes, and the peculiar thrill of hearing one’s own subculture reflected back from a movie screen. That world was real. It mattered. It was commercially surprising while it lasted. And then, almost as suddenly as it arrived, it seemed to disappear. 

The feeling many people carry is not just that those movies ended, but that Latter-day Saint filmmaking itself somehow went quiet. 

But the story is much more varied and interesting than that. In many ways those early aughts productions set the stage for a burgeoning Latter-day Saint cinema today, best embodied by the new release “The Angel,” which may be bigger and more interesting than anything we’ve seen before. 

The Beginnings

Latter-day Saint cinema developed in fragments for nearly a century. Film was first used to disparage the faith. Movies like “A Trip to Salt Lake City” satirized the faith, while “A Victim of the Mormons” was more straightforward propaganda. 

In response, the Utah Moving Picture Company produced the film “One Hundred Years of Mormonism” in 1913. It was a monumental feature for its time and was shown for several years. In 1915, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints funded the film “The Life of Nephi,” though its projected sequels never materialized. 

By midcentury, institutions like the BYU Motion Picture Studio trained talent and produced hundreds of films for the Church’s use, while later decades expanded that world through visitors’ center films, pageant-style historical productions, television, and VHS. 

By the 1980s and 1990s, Latter-day Saints were not only appearing in and making mainstream entertainment, but were also building the technical skills, professional networks, and imaginative confidence that would make independent feature filmmaking possible. 

So while the modern story begins when “God’s Army” appeared in 2000, it did not come out of nowhere. It was a breakthrough—but it was a breakthrough built on generations. 

Richard Dutcher’s “God’s Army” opened in March 2000 and proved that a movie made by a Latter-day Saint about recognizable Latter-day Saint life, and marketed primarily to Latter-day Saint viewers, could actually make money. It proved there was a profitable niche market and marked the beginning of a period in which filmmakers began to portray the tradition from the inside.

Sadly, a storyline in Richard Dutcher’s “God’s Army 2” prompted a public feud between Dutcher and HaleStorm’s Kurt Hale, prompting the father of this period of Latter-day Saint cinema to leave the Church within a few years.

Novelty also proved not to be a permanent business model. By the middle of the decade, even people inside the movement were saying so out loud. In 2006, as “Church Ball” was being released, Hale was already describing a diminishing box office, an oversaturated market, and an audience that seemed tired of the cycle. He even suggested that “Church Ball” might be the last comedy of its kind and said the company was looking beyond the narrow niche toward a broader family audience. With uncertain returns, investors dried up, and audience interest began to evaporate. 

The old wave did not end because Latter-day Saints lost interest in seeing themselves onscreen. But eventually the movies had to offer something besides familiarity. In a 2014 reflection on the earlier boom, Jim Bennet said the “hunger” was still there but the novelty had worn off, and that now the movie had to actually be good. 

There was also a broader industrial change working against niche cinema. The old independent-film economy had long relied on the possibility that a modest theatrical run could be followed by meaningful life on DVD, where niche audiences often compensated for limited box-office reach. As DVD revenue collapsed in the late 2000s, that safety net deteriorated across the industry. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009 that DVD sales, once a critical profit cushion for many films, had fallen sharply. 

The small, regionally concentrated Latter-day Saint film industry was especially vulnerable to that shift. Purchasing a DVD for the whole family to watch over and over again was a very different kind of investment than taking everyone out to the theater. And most of the Latter-day Saint film market was not in areas concentrated enough for theatrical runs. A market already strained by repetition suddenly lost one of the economic mechanisms that had made repetition survivable.

So yes, something ended. But what ended was a particular format: the local theatrical Latter-day Saint niche comedy and indie machine, dependent on insider recognition and modest expectations. 

The Middle

What followed has been harder to name because it is not one thing. There is no single banner under which all contemporary Latter-day Saint filmmaking began to march.

Once the first wave of niche comedies and insider-culture films began to lose steam, Latter-day Saint filmmaking stopped looking like a single movement and started breaking into distinct lanes. When that broader economic model weakened, the old “modest theatrical run, then long tail on home video” pattern became much harder to sustain. At the same time, scholars were already observing that filmmakers were experimenting with very different business models: some built their own mini-studios, some went straight to DVD or online sales, and some chased genuine crossover distribution. In other words, the industry did not die. It fragmented.

One of those fragments was the historical-devotional lane, and no figure matters more here than T.C. Christensen. If the HaleStorm comedies captured Mormon culture as social recognition, Christensen kept alive a very different idea of what Latter-day Saint cinema could be: memory, sacrifice, pioneer endurance, conversion, rescue. In the 2010s especially, films like “17 Miracles” and “Ephraim’s Rescue” showed that there was still a substantial audience for explicitly Latter-day Saint stories told with seriousness and reverence rather than irony. Christensen was not merely preserving an older form. He was proving that sincerity could still draw viewers, and that overtly Mormon material did not have to disappear simply because the joke-driven boom had cooled.

His 2025 release “Raising the Bar: The Alma Richards Story” demonstrates that the line of continuity is still alive. Every artistic ecosystem needs not only innovators but custodians: people who keep faith with inherited stories long enough for a later generation to rediscover their value under new conditions. Christensen has done that work. He has kept a flame alive that flashier players sometimes overlook.

A second fragment moved in almost the opposite direction. These films had unmistakable Latter-day Saint DNA, but were no longer primarily selling themselves as “Mormon movies.” This trend began with HaleStorm’s attempt at “Pride and Prejudice.” But while that thread didn’t stick in comedy, Ryan Little’s “Saints and Soldiers” created the look and style of film that did. Made on a reported $780,000 budget, it grossed about $1.31 million domestically, and the Los Angeles Times noted that while initiated viewers would catch its Latter-day Saint origins, those elements were never overt and the film could be easily appreciated by people with no particular background with the faith. The movie was not asking audiences to care because of its religion. It was asking them to care because it was a solid war drama that happened to be shaped by Latter-day Saint moral sensibilities.

That lane became even clearer in the 2010s with Garrett Batty’s work. “The Saratov Approach” grossed about $2.15 million domestically. Batty followed it with “Freetown,” a Liberian civil-war thriller based on the experience of Latter-day Saint missionaries (an artistic improvement in my estimation), but it did not recover its investment. 

Batty explicitly said he hoped “Freetown,” like “Saratov,” would appeal beyond Latter-day Saint audiences. These films still drew from Latter-day Saint experience, missionary life, faith under pressure, providence in danger, but they were being framed as thrillers, war stories, and survival dramas rather than as niche cultural products. That is one of the most important developments in the whole middle period: Latter-day Saint filmmakers were learning how to let their faith shape the story without requiring the audience to share all the background knowledge in advance.

But the market did not support that vision. While DVD sales had begun to sink, streaming had not yet started to acquire independent films. That meant the primary place for these films to find an audience was in theaters, and it was largely in Utah where there was enough audience to support them. 

There was a third fragment too, less visible to audiences but hugely important for what came next: infrastructure. In 2005, just as the HaleStorm peak began to fall, the state of Utah passed its first tax incentive for filming. These incentives successfully enticed Disney to film 27 movies in Utah through the mid-2000s, most famously the High School Musical franchise.

By the end of the 2010s, the New York Times was describing northern Utah as a kind of “mini-Hollywood,” built not only around independent faith-oriented films but around The Church of Jesus Christ’s own motion picture operations, BYUtv productions, local crews, and a growing freelance workforce. That meant Latter-day Saint-adjacent filmmaking did not simply survive as a market; it survived as a craft community. Crews kept working. Actors kept training. Editors, cinematographers, composers, and producers kept building experience.

These post-HaleStorm years saw some talented filmmakers keep the space alive, as key new artistic ideas emerged and the talent pool grew and matured.

What has begun to happen over the last few years is an evolution of the threads that came out of that heyday. Today’s filmmakers have inherited an audience trained by these experiments, and a filmmaking culture that had already spent years learning how to move beyond novelty toward craft, confidence, and authentic crossover. 

Today

By the time we arrive at the present, those fragments have begun to recombine. What had been separate lanes in the aftermath of the early aughts Mormon-cinema wave—historical drama, crossover genre work, local craft infrastructure, and festival culture—are now starting to feed one another. 

But as always, the story starts with the money. The old model depended on a Utah theatrical audience and then a healthy DVD afterlife. The current one is more layered: owned streaming platforms, licensing deals, audience memberships, eventized theatrical runs, festival exposure, and state incentives. For the first time since the early 2000s, Latter-day Saint filmmaking once again has an economic logic. It is not one logic, but several, and that may be exactly why this moment feels more durable.

No company better represents that new reality than Angel Studios. Angel is not simply the new HaleStorm. It is not primarily a Latter-day Saint movie studio making Latter-day Saint movies. It has a broader impact on the market: a Utah-rooted, values-branded distribution and audience-formation machine that has figured out how to turn moral affinity into a scalable business. Angel’s own 2025 annual report shows where the center of gravity now lies. The company reported roughly 2.0 million paying Angel Guild members by the end of 2025, and said those memberships accounted for 65.2% of its total revenue. Its licensing revenue, notably, includes deals with platforms such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Angel also runs its own streaming platform. 

That is why Angel’s outsized role matters so much. The company says the Guild helps choose what it will market and distribute, that its theatrical strategy can crowd-fund prints and advertising, and that its “Pay it Forward” system lets viewers subsidize tickets for others. Traditional Hollywood separates greenlighting, marketing, and audience response into different silos. Angel has tried to collapse them into a single loop. It does not simply ask its audience to buy a ticket; it asks them to join, vote, fund, evangelize, and return. It’s almost like community organizing with a balance sheet. 

The scale of that model is real. Angel reported that it released eight films theatrically in 2025 and was ranked the No. 10 domestic distributor that year. Its reported grosses included $83.2 million for “The King of Kings,” $83.9 million for “David,” $15.2 million for “The Last Rodeo,” and $6 million for “Truth & Treason.” Even more revealing than any single title is the shape of the company itself: by the end of 2025 Angel said it had 137 titles under exclusive worldwide distribution, including 101 films and 36 television series. That is not a boutique religious sideline. It is a fully functioning media ecosystem with Utah roots and national reach.

But Angel is only one part of this era’s story. The broader Utah film scene has begun acting as though it no longer needs to choose between Latter-day Saint identity and indie legitimacy. Zions Indie Film Fest says that aloud. 

I spoke with Michell Moore, the festival co-director, who told me that they want Latter-day Saints to have a home at their film festival, but they want to unite with others of good faith and good artistic instincts. 

Today, the festival presents itself instead as a celebration of independent film “from filmmakers worldwide,” with a “sophisticated and diverse audience,” and Moore describes the event as “inviting everyone,” bridging the gap between filmmakers and audiences. 

Zions Indie Film Fest has come to the same instincts as Angel. It might seem like Latter-day Saint filmmaking is getting short shrift in this model. But Zions premiered T.C. Christensen’s latest film, and held a reading for a script about sister missionaries kidnapped by the cartel. They have managed to create a space that is broad and welcoming, rather than parochial, but where Latter-day Saint cinema can thrive and be represented.

The audience and participants have grown, and the courage to tell Latter-day Saint specific stories in that space is starting to burgeon.

When I spoke to filmmakers at the 2025 Zions Indie Film Fest, they were often concerned about the status of Utah’s tax incentives, as they feared work in the state might dry up if they went away. But in March 2026, Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced a robust new round of initiatives allowing the industry to continue thriving in the state. 

In the last year of the previous program, it enabled 36 productions across 14 counties, generating more than $136 million in production spending and over 2,600 jobs, with more than 40% of those productions created by homegrown talent and local companies.

When there is a steady source of work for Latter-day Saint filmmakers in commercial work, it allows them the freedom to also tell and finance more personal stories. 

And while these filmmakers were sad that Sundance Film Festival was leaving the state, they didn’t predict any big consequences, describing it as less connected to the broader Utah-film ecosystem than you might imagine. 

Seen in that light, the current moment also feels like the first one in a long time that makes the artistic vision of 80s-era President of The Church of Jesus Christ, Spencer W. Kimball, sound plausible.

In 1977, he wrote, “Our writers, our motion picture specialists, with the inspiration of heaven, should tomorrow be able to produce a masterpiece which would live forever.”

For Latter-day Saint specialists, this nearly fifty-year-old call still lives near their hearts. And we’re beginning to see some talented auteurs who could take advantage of this new moment.

If Angel Studios represents industrial crossover, Burgin may represent artistic crossover. He is not simply another promising Utah filmmaker. He is one of the first younger directors in this space to show signs of understanding both the cultural inheritance and the formal challenge. 

Burgin began his career outside of Utah, and had to learn early on how to curate his religious impulses so they would be both authentic and appealing to newcomers to the tradition. From what he saw, he predicted in a 2017 essay the renaissance in interest in Latter-day Saints in film. This interest mostly happened with Latter-day Saints as the subjects, not the participants, of mocking portrayals in projects such as “Under the Banner of Heaven,” “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” and “Heretic.” The interest in Latter-day Saints has skyrocketed, and the infrastructure for Latter-day Saints to supply that interest themselves may have finally arrived. Perhaps through Burgin himself.

Burgin’s premiere was his student film “Cryo.” “Cryo” follows five scientists who awake from a cryogenic sleep without memory and slowly realize there may be a murderer among them. You can tell that “Cryo” is a student film. The budget shows on screen. But it’s also a film full of ideas that come from his Latter-day Saint perspective. The film starts with a reference to Lazarus, and continually returns to themes of rebirth and resurrection. It quotes The Book of Mormon, references the veil of forgetfulness, and the protagonists slowly learn to place their salvific impulse outside of themselves. 

In an essay marketing the film, he argued that Latter-day Saint filmmakers need to “put story before sermon,” and expressed his belief that “we’ve barely scratched the surface of the narrative potential in our history, doctrine, culture and lore.” Perhaps more importantly, he sold the film to a national distributor, had a multi-city theatrical run, and turned a profit—practically unheard of for a student film.

Burgin has then proved that in a series of short films. “The Next Door” a thriller about two missionaries who go on the search when someone they’re teaching goes missing. “Java Jive” a comedy about a Latter-day Saint teen, who was hiding his faith, and then gets trapped trying to avoid drinking coffee. “A Scout is Kind” a talky coming-of-age film. These films premiered at important festivals, and won notable awards—including the top award for “A Scout is Kind” at Regal’s film festival in Tennessee. The outsider interest is sincere and real. 

His most critically successful film to date, “The Angel,” is a horror film about a mysterious figure arriving in 19th-century Southern Utah. He co-directed it with his wife Jessica, marking her directorial debut.

Each of these shorts is deeply Latter-day Saint, enjoyable, accessible to a broad audience, and at least as entertaining as the average night on television. (Usually much more.) 

This is a serious artistic program that is similar to the trajectories of many successful working directors. 

“The Angel” does something earlier Latter-day Saint cinema rarely trusted itself to do. It does not flatten Latter-day Saint culture into a set of jokes, nor reduce it to generic uplift. It fulfills the idea of moving past novelty from the aughts, but in an environment that may finally be able to support it. It treats Latter-day Saint history as aesthetically strange, symbolically rich, and cinematically potent. I am not a fan of horror films, and there are certainly horror beats that may not be for everyone, but this is neither gross-out or jump-scare horror. The fear comes from the sensation that it might just be a little bit real. 

The short has been included in Cannes’ Short Film Corner, screened widely on the festival circuit, and received a U.K. premiere at Soho Horror Fest. Doug Jones—one of modern genre cinema’s great creature actors—plays the title role. This is not an obscure or parochial project. It is a work of genre filmmaking that speaks in a cinematic language outsiders can understand while drawing directly on materials that feel unmistakably ours. After its successful festival run, the film was picked up by Alter, the largest and most prestigious dedicated horror short platform, and premiered last week to a wide audience. It is available to view online.  

While the cinematic community has clearly latched on, it also really struck a chord for me within the Latter-day Saint culture. I’m far from the only cultural critic to think so. Stephen Smoot, a Latter-day Saint commentator, wrote for The Interpreter Foundation:

The Angel … shows how horror, handled with restraint and reverence, can speak powerfully to Latter-day Saint audiences. Instead of relying on gore or cheap shocks, the Burgins build their story through atmosphere, psychological unease, and moral confrontation. The horror here is never gratuitous; it unsettles the viewer to reveal deeper truths about choice, faith, and unseen realities.

If the short generates enough interest, Burgin hopes to expand it into a feature called “The Third Wife,” which they say has drawn industry interest and the attention of the Sundance Institute.

That is why “The Angel” deserves to be praised in stronger terms than one usually uses for a promising short. It feels like a reclaiming. A reclaiming of authority over the stories themselves. 

When Barrett spoke to me, he was most excited about how interested individuals from outside the tradition are. “[Latter-day Saints] have made a concerted effort to fit in and even assimilate. That generational impulse is not without cause. But when telling our own stories, we have an opportunity to reclaim our peculiarity.”

In that sense, perhaps the most hopeful thing one can say about the current state of Latter-day Saint filmmaking is that it no longer needs to choose between exile and self-parody. It no longer needs to survive on insider jokes, nor disappear into vague inspirational branding. It can remember where it came from, learn from what Angel Studios has built, honor the faithfulness of T.C. Christensen, and build toward that future imagined by Spencer W. Kimball. 

The post The Future of Latter-day Saint Cinema appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

As a handful of students and I neared an apartment building to deliver the meals, we were surprised by the next-door Eugene O’Neill Theatre with its loud and brash signs promoting “The Book of Mormon” musical. The marquee featured photos mocking missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The students—many of whom had served missions—were quick to note the irony of our situation: Broadway presented a caricature of our faith while we were performing the quiet service that actually defines it. 

A dubious anniversary brought back those memories. The irreverent, bawdy, vulgar, and mocking “The Book of Mormon” musical opened on Broadway 15 years ago. According to the New York Times, the show has reached 6,000 performances for six million theatergoers, with box office sales now heading toward $1 billion on Broadway. The anniversary sparked a media circuit for creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, resulting in a wave of recent coverage.  

Jesse Green, the New York Times culture correspondent, penned an anniversary story titled “‘The Book of Mormon’ Is Sorry if You Were Offended for 15 Years.” The piece would have you believe that all is hunky-dory with the play and that it’s just been a 15-year run of good fun. No humans were harmed—including Latter-day Saints—in the creation of this Broadway hit, Green decides. 

I disagree. 

I have not seen the show, but I have read enough of the script, heard the music, and followed enough reviews to recognize its crassness and inherent bigotry.

When I reached out to Green via email, he declined to be interviewed, stating, “I don’t have more to say than I said in the article.” I wish he did, because his coverage reveals significant ethical and journalistic gaps. 

Most notably, Green didn’t ask any “real Latter-day Saints” about their reaction to the musical. Instead, he gave creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone a pass on possible tough questions about misrepresentation or harm caused by the show. It shouldn’t be that hard. With 42,000 Church members who live in the New York region, finding a local perspective from a member of the Church wouldn’t have been difficult. 

Since the Times was derelict in its journalistic duty, I’ll ask this question: Has “The Book of Mormon” contributed to an American culture where demeaning Latter-day Saints is socially sanctioned? As BYU athletic teams play games around the country, opposing fans often chant “F— the Mormons,” reminiscent of a scene where Ugandans say “F— God” in the play. Take this example of a family supporting BYU at a basketball game in Providence, Rhode Island. It has happened at numerous other venues across the country. Is it coincidental that there’s some similarity to “The Book of Mormon” musical chants and the game chants? 

In the end, Parker and Stone will collect their millions and say their show is a “love letter to Mormons,” kind of like “Fiddler on the Roof” was to Jews. But this show is not “Fiddler on the Roof” for Latter-day Saints. Instead, Parker and Stone’s work misrepresents, hurts, harms, and is meant to offend. Communication and psychological research has shown that humor often helps erode society’s normal boundaries of respect, compassion, and good faith to groups that are “othered.” That’s what this musical does.

Although Green’s bio says he abides by the New York Times Ethics Code and is “basically no use to anyone” who wants to influence him, Green sounds like a member of the New York elite theater club. He quotes whatever falls from the lips of Parker and Stone as gospel truth.

Instead of tough questions you get this about Green’s first time seeing the show.

The night I saw it, no less a dignified eminence than Angela Lansbury, seated directly in front of me, laughed her head off. I laughed too, all the time wondering: How did they dare put this on? Those laughs were half gasp.

The real gasp should come as Green gives Parker and Stone easy passes throughout the 15-year recap article with statements like this:

The authors had not meant “Mormon” to be offensive, let alone controversial.

Really? The Times just published that without questioning it? The Times would never let a politician get away with such nonsense. Parker and Stone knew exactly what they were doing and how bigoted it was. This next quote is just as damning: 

Still, Stone and Parker, having grown up around church members in Colorado, did not want to make fun of them or their religion.

So, if someone grows up around Jews in Brooklyn and they think of them as great neighbors, they have the right to be anti-semitic? If Angela Lansbury were to laugh at an Islamophobic joke, that would make it OK? The Times then piles on with another anti-Latter-day Saint trope. 

Taking precautions against a potentially hostile response, the production hired extra security for a few weeks around opening. And if some cast members worried that an army of the offended might sooner or later run them out of town, the authors were more worried about running at all. 

If Green had bothered to talk to any New York Latter-day Saints, 15 years ago or today, he would have quickly discounted any violent stereotype that this was meant to portray. A visit to any number of Latter-day Saint Sunday services only blocks from the New York Times building would have quickly provided a much different picture. 

Green’s bias toward Latter-day Saints also bleeds through again when he suggests that Latter-day Saints are inherently folksy, simple-minded people with no theological depth.

“They believe goofy stuff, but they’re really nice,” Parker said. “If you have one as a neighbor, you have a great neighbor.” That was the seed for a gentle lesson: Faith need not be logical to be meaningful; in fact, the opposite might be true.

Granted, the Times does give a nod to a 15-year-old official statement of the Church about the show, but it’s lazy, outdated reporting. The Times missed this statement from a Church spokesman at the time, which opposed the show’s content. At the same time, the ever-innocent Parker and Stone joked to Green and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that the Church was just really “nice” about all of this. 

True, when the show opened, the Church turned the other cheek through a statement and then took out ads in the playbill declaring: “You’ve seen the play… now read the book.” That was a masterstroke marketing move, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the production—filled with misrepresentations, stereotypes, racism, and vulgarity—helps mold public opinion and disrespect for Latter-day Saints and religion generally. It also gets Latter-day Saint theology wrong. The Church’s savvy response does not equate to agreement with Parker and Stone’s bigotry, although the pair keeps implying as much.

It’s also ironic how Parker and Stone live by a double standard. When “The Book of Mormon” musical was challenged about its racism after the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matter movements, the show changed the script. But never has it been changed for its religious bigotry.

Unfortunately, as prominent writers Jonah Goldberg and Simon Critchley have observed, while expressions of racism or xenophobia are normally looked down upon in polite social circles, “anti-Mormonism is another matter.” Goldberg has written about how Mormonism is America’s last acceptable prejudice. Of course, it’s not just anti-Mormonism in the show; the central message is anti-religious.

While asking if such a show as “The Book of Mormon” musical could be pulled off today, the Times does acknowledge the sensitivities of demeaning people.

That’s because “Mormon” in 2026 is in some ways more gasp-inducing than it was when it opened. In the intervening years, sensitivities once barely acknowledged about racial, religious and sexual identity have become mandatory articles of theatrical faith.

Let’s hope that American society, with its purported standards of equality and fair play, rejects another mockery of faith groups, ethnic origin, or racial background. But our current culture of incivility and polarization doesn’t bode well for the future of culture and entertainment. Unfortunately, the Times is likely to be there cheering from the audience when another such show denigrates, misrepresents and, yes, offends. It seems that, in reality, no one is actually sorry at all. 

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Yesterday, production of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season 5 was halted, and The Bachelorette’s 22nd season—slated to be led by Secret Lives star Taylor Frankie Paul—was canceled. These decisions followed after entertainment website TMZ leaked a video of a domestic altercation involving Paul in 2023. In the footage, Paul is seen in her home throwing three metal barstools at Dakota Mortensen, her then-boyfriend and the father of her youngest child. Paul’s daughter, who was six years old at the time, is also seen lying nearby on the couch—apparently sleeping at the beginning, then awakened by the chaos—and cried out for her mother to stop. A subsequent criminal indictment indicated that the child was struck in the head by one of the stools, resulting in a painful goose egg. 

TMZ also reported that earlier this week, both Mortensen and Paul’s ex-husband (and father of her two older children), Tate Paul, allegedly filed new orders of protection against Paul, with Mortensen requesting sole custody of their two-year-old son.

Most Latter-day Saint commentary on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which chronicles the dramatic lives of a Utah-based social media group of influencers self-dubbed “#MomTok,” tends to focus on how these women are not devout and do not represent the values or teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The show is packed with parties, events, and a heavy focus on sexual freedom. The women openly posture against traditional norms around sex and gender while continuing to borrow the visual language of a faith they seem increasingly uninterested in living. This is no surprise, considering MomTok only rose to fame after a scandal involving some of the married members swinging with each other’s spouses — and most of those marriages are now over.

Yet the show’s cast continues to blame the majority of their dysfunction on “church culture” and “Mormon expectations.” The show’s on-again, off-again villain, Zac Affleck (who certainly has his issues), is often vilified for offering seemingly sensible, family-oriented commentary such as “Hollywood isn’t conducive to a healthy marriage” or “I don’t want you to feel mom guilt, but our kids do miss you…and it’s hard for me to fill that void with them even though I try.” This is the same Zac who deferred medical school to be a stay-at-home dad so his wife could appear on Dancing with the Stars and further pursue an entertainment career. Jen insists that “he had his turn” to pursue his career, and now it’s her turn, “and he knows that and should support that.”

The women frequently say that their religious upbringing taught them to be subjugated to their husbands’ whims. This is an obvious misunderstanding of The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which teaches that fathers are “responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.” The clear distinction is that doctrine teaches that career is a means of protecting and providing for the needs of the family, not the desires of the individual. While some sense of meaning and personal fulfillment can be found in many careers, research consistently finds that people derive their greatest sense of meaning from relationships—particularly family relationships. Unfortunately, the husbands and boyfriends in the show are often painted as adversaries or competitors of the women, rather than as partners they love and care for. Even stranger, the women seem to believe the proper correction to what they see as oppressive gender roles is simply to reverse them. 

As the show has progressed, the so-called liberation of these women appears to have yielded very little joy or true freedom. Newer seasons are no longer just about “Mormon women behaving badly.” They are increasingly a portrait of emotional affairs, fractured marriages, public humiliation, eating disorders, body-image collapse, postpartum distress, and relationships strained to the breaking point, with nearly all of the cast members in personal and couples therapy. What is being sold as liberation looks, more and more, like despair. 

Seasons 3 and 4 did not reveal a cruelty of traditional sexual morality; instead, they revealed the inability of self-centered sexual ethics to build anything stable in its place. Unfortunately, far too many viewers have bought into a worldview that claims women in the West are still largely oppressed, and thus feel they are doing their part to smash the patriarchy as they cheer on the ladies in their quest for so-called liberation.

The problem with broadcasting this drama is that the content does not merely document disorder. It rewards it. Reality television and social media incentivize family breakdown. Betrayal, sexual chaos, emotional oversharing, and the performance of self-liberation are highly marketable. Once marriage trouble becomes a storyline, sexual impropriety becomes brand identity, and personal instability becomes a platform, the incentives tilt in a very dark direction. The women of Secret Lives are not just reaping the consequences of rejecting clear moral norms. They are doing so inside a machine that profits from the damage.

Even the cast members themselves have frequently expressed concern about Paul’s erratic behavior. NBC News reported yesterday that cast members met with ABC executives earlier this month to express concerns about continuing the show if Paul remained involved. In the meeting, one of the cast members reportedly asked Rob Mills, the executive vice president of unscripted and alternative entertainment at Walt Disney Television, if he’s “aware she’s hurt a child?” Mills’ alleged reply? “I don’t know a lot, nor do I want to know too much.”

We have, of course, seen the exploitation of unwell but “sexually liberated” women before—it’s a familiar pattern to those paying attention. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, journalist Louise Perry argues that Western sexual culture in the twenty-first century “promotes the interests of the Hugh Hefners of the world at the expense of the Marilyn Monroes. And the influence of liberal feminism means that too many women don’t recognize this truth, blithely accepting Hefner’s claim that all of the downsides of the new sexual culture are just ‘a small price to pay for personal freedom.’” Indeed, the commodified lives of women like Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith, Amanda Bynes, Britney Spears, and others have much in common with Paul’s, and one can only hope that she gets help before reaching the same breaking point these women did.

Whatever sympathy one rightly feels for Taylor Frankie Paul as a human being, it is difficult to watch the public trajectory of her life without concluding that it has the shape of a spiral: relational chaos, legal trouble, domestic conflict, children caught in the blast radius, and a complicit fanbase eager to turn every bit of it into entertainment.

That line is haunting in light of everything that followed.

Paul, through representatives, has said the newly leaked video omits context and that she has suffered abuse as well. But even allowing for dispute over context, the broader picture is grim: this is not empowerment. It is family breakdown, made public and then repackaged as content. What the show unintentionally reveals is that discarded moral boundaries do not disappear without cost. Someone always pays.

But there is always hope. Though the MomTok ladies often display only elementary knowledge of Latter-day Saint doctrine, I pray they remember the most important doctrine—that of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The same gospel that teaches chastity, fidelity, and sacrifice also teaches mercy. It teaches that through Christ broken things can be mended, and that people who have wandered very far can still come home.

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By most measures, today’s media-literacy boom has been a public good. Charts from Ad Fontes, ratings from AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check, “nutrition labels” from NewsGuard, and “blindspot” dashboards from Ground News give ordinary readers quick heuristics for what’s trustworthy and how coverage breaks across left–right lines. In a chaotic information environment, that’s helpful. But these tools also flatten the very thing they’re trying to measure. Bias is not just a point on a horizontal spectrum—often it’s embedded in what gets covered, who gets quoted, and how complexity is collapsed into a single line of copy. When rating services only score overt partisanship and headline-level reliability, they risk missing the blind spots that most shape public understanding. 

A recent essay in the Milwaukee Independent makes a similar point: rating platforms intended to counter spin can end up penalizing outlets that refuse false equivalence, confusing “moral clarity” with “partisan bias.” That critique should ring a bell for anyone who’s ever read a nuanced beat story reduced to a pin on a bias chart. 

Case Study: The AP, a Temple, and the Meaning of “Bigger”

Consider Associated Press coverage of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Lone Mountain Nevada Temple in Las Vegas. An AP dispatch about temple growth asserted that the Lone Mountain temple would be “larger in size than the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris,” with a steeple nearly 200 feet tall. The phrase “larger in size” landed with neighbors—and readers—like a bomb. Larger than Notre Dame? The problem is that the temple is about one-third the size of Notre Dame and one hundred feet shorter. The error comes from a misunderstanding of square footage.  That’s framing bias, not partisan bias—and you won’t find a category for it on most ratings sites.

Case Study: What Wasn’t Said at General Conference

In 2024, AP ran a story on the conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints under the headline “Latter-day Saints leader addresses congregants without a word on racial or LGBTQ+ issues.” That piece treated omission—what didn’t happen—as the news. That isn’t a left-right bias, but it is quite obviously a bias nonetheless. 

The author, Hannah Schoenbaum, has no background in religion reporting, but instead covers government, politics, and LGBT+ rights. Six months later, she was still on the same beat, and her coverage of the conference mostly covered political angles. Despite these two incidents, AP still assigned Schoenbaum to the same article for the most recent conference. She was also responsible for the inaccurate Las Vegas Temple coverage.

The bias here isn’t a partisan one; it’s a worldview one. When you assign a political and LGBT+ rights reporter to do religious reporting, what you get are only stories that fit into the narrow lens of the reporter. This headline imports the author’s opinion about what should have been spoken about into a story that was in fact about something entirely different. The headline “Latter-day Saints leader addresses congregants without a word on environmental issues in Asia” is equally as accurate, but manages to convey an entirely different story.

Case Study: Larger than Life Abuse Findings

Similarly, the AP had investigative reporter Michael Rezendes devote significant resources to sex abuse cases within the Church of Jesus Christ.  

Rezendes received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about the sex abuse scandals inside the Catholic Church, systemic issues of offending priests being known, covered up, and moved to a new diocese to continue causing harm.

Rezendes’ selection for the assignment communicates certain ideas to the readers: There is a sex abuse problem in the Church of Jesus Christ; it is a problem of significant size and a serious institutional error.

But what Rezendes actually found over the course of several years was that there are some Latter-day Saints who commit sexual abuse (he found three stories), including some of our leaders. They are excommunicated when they are discovered. The Church has a helpline so that local leaders know how to follow complicated disclosure laws. And the Church also tries to provide financial restitution to the victims.

It’s a tragic story, but one about the inevitable tragedy of human frailty rather than institutional cover-ups. 

But by choosing to write long features for stories that would normally be reserved for page-seven crime beats, it communicates that this is news worth paying attention to, which communicates a nefariousness, pervasiveness, or culpability that doesn’t in fact exist in any of the reported cases.

The lasting impression left with many readers was of a sweeping institutional cover-up, even though the stories were ultimately about distinct criminal acts by individuals. That’s a classic scale problem: to what extent does a set of horrific cases justify institutional generalization? Bias checkers don’t score how disciplined news outlets are in attributing scale—but it’s central to how audiences come away thinking about an institution.

And the effects of this bias are serious. The best available evidence suggests that Latter-day Saints commit sexual abuse at rates significantly lower than those of many other faiths or the general population. Our protective factors should be a lesson to others. Instead, a recent survey by YouGov had more people believing that abuse is a “very big problem” in the Church of Jesus Christ, more than in the Southern Baptist churches, despite the fact that Southern Baptist churches had been involved in a systemic controversy covering up sexual abuse, dwarfing in severity the problems in the Church of Jesus Christ.

Is that unfortunate misunderstanding a result of the editorial choices of the Associated Press? Do Americans know less about sexual abuse and where kids are safest because of the Associated Press’ coverage? It’s certainly possible, but it’s not a kind of bias you would be able to identify in the media literacy tools currently available. 

The Bias You’re More Likely to Encounter: Access and Sourcing

Here’s a quieter example. I recently had a wonderful experience with Maggie Penman of The Washington Post. Penman runs “The Optimist,” a column about positive things in the world. 

After the Michigan attack on an LDS chapel, Penman ran a feature about Latter-day Saints raising money for the attacker’s family—an act of grace that surprised many readers. It was a beautiful and generous story. This is why I was surprised to find a quote by a religion scholar at the end of the article attacking Latter-day Saints: he disagreed with them on a doctrinal point. For those within the Latter-day Saint sphere, this attack from this commentator, who is a frequent critic, is unsurprising. What was surprising was that he was included.

What the Checkers Miss

Most popular rating systems do some things well: They reward corrections, penalize serial fabricators, and map partisan lean. However, several endemic newsroom behaviors, including those discussed above, fall outside their frameworks.

None of these is chiefly about “left vs. right.” They’re about habits, networks, and time. 

My intention here is not to call out the media checkers. These are still emerging projects. And media checkers have done incredible work, shining light on real issues and helping to improve media literacy. My hope is to encourage their work. As they are continuing to grow, here are some suggestions of practical metrics that might be tracked and could add to our understanding of media bias:

• Source Diversity Index: Track whether coverage of a community consistently quotes the same one or two academics/activists, or shows range (rank-and-file members, leaders, critics, independent scholars).
• Correction Transparency & Latency: Not just “did they correct,” but how long did it take, and was the core ambiguity addressed?
• Scale Discipline Score: When a story makes institutional claims from individual cases, does it disclose sample size, scope, and limits?
• Beat Maturity Indicator: Tag when a reporter is new to a complex beat and flag when framing changes as literacy improves.

Whatever their flaws, biased tools are still better than the invisible curation of our social feeds, which reward engagement over understanding and routinely amplify the most polarizing takes. And they’re certainly better than the reflexive dismissal of all journalism because of a monolithic, misunderstood “bias.” We want readers to be able to recognize the kinds of bias they actually encounter in the checkers describing them. That work—however halting—beats a world where the only algorithm that matters is the one designed to keep us scrolling.

The post The Biases that Aren’t Measured appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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We live, increasingly, in two places at once.

Our bodies sit at a dinner table while our minds hover in an open browser tab. Our hands fold for prayer while our thumbs remember the muscle memory of scrolling. We attend a child’s story, a spouse’s worry, a friend’s quiet confession—and yet some part of us remains tethered to the possibility that something else, somewhere else, is happening.

This is not merely a productivity problem, nor only a “kids these days” technology complaint. It is, at its core, an attention problem—and attention is not a neutral resource. It is one of the most consequential forms of agency we exercise all day long.

Whatever captures your attention quietly shapes your discipleship.

The Attention Crisis We Don’t Like to Name

There are obvious culprits—busy schedules, social media, the breakneck speed of modern life. But those are surface-level symptoms of something deeper: what we might call the tyranny of elsewhere.

The tyranny of elsewhere is the subtle assumption that real life is happening somewhere other than where you are right now—in the next message, the next headline, the next update, the next comparison, the next microdose of novelty. It is a form of spiritual displacement. You are always near your life, but not quite inside it.

And because it’s socially normalized, it rarely feels like rebellion. It feels like being informed. Being connected. Being responsive. Being “on top of things.”

However, the gospel’s vision of a holy life is not primarily about being “on top of things.” It is about being in things—fully, faithfully, consecratedly present.

“An Eye Single”: Attention as a Spiritual Faculty

In Doctrine and Covenants 88, the Lord gives an arresting promise: “If your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light.” That promise is recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 88:67. He then adds the kind of line we might read quickly, even though it should stop us: “Sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God.” That instruction appears in Doctrine and Covenants 88:68. This echoes Matthew 6:22 and Doctrine and Covenants 82:19.

Notice what’s happening doctrinally.

1. “Single” is not merely “serious.”  It is not just intensity. It is integrity—wholeness. A mind that is not fragmented into ten anxious windows, a heart that is not constantly split between reverence and restlessness.
   
2. Light is not only a reward; it is a capacity.  The promise is not merely that God will be pleased. The promise is that you will become the kind of person who can receive, discern, and “comprehend.” Attention is the mechanism that God gives us for receiving that growth from Him.
   
3. Sanctification includes attention training. Sanctification comes through the Holy Ghost as we repent and keep covenants. When the Lord says, “sanctify yourselves,” He does not only mean “stop doing bad things.” He also means “become the kind of person whose inner life is ordered toward God” so we live in a way that the Holy Ghost can dwell with us. 

In that sense, presence is not cosmetic. It is covenantal.

Mindfulness, but With a Name and a Direction

It’s worth acknowledging: the modern mindfulness movement has rediscovered something true. Purposeful attention in the present moment—focus, concentration, awareness—really does change us. Many people feel, correctly, that distraction is costly.

In fact, research has repeatedly found that when our minds wander away from what we’re doing, our happiness tends to drop—even when we wander to “pleasant” thoughts. And intriguingly, other research suggests that many of us find it so uncomfortable to be alone with our own thoughts—even for a few minutes—that we will choose almost any stimulation rather than simply sit, reflect, and attend to the interior world.

So yes, mindfulness is real.

But the gospel adds something essential: mindfulness is not only attention to the present; it is attention consecrated toward God and toward people. It is presence with purpose—awareness shaped by love, gratitude, worship, and covenant loyalty. Or to say it plainly: disciples don’t just “live in the moment.” They learn to live in the moment with God.

Distraction as a Form of Spiritual Avoidance

If presence is the practice, what is distraction—spiritually speaking?

Often, distraction is not primarily laziness. It is avoidance.

• Avoidance of silence—because silence reveals what we’ve been carrying.
  
• Avoidance of weakness—because stillness makes us honest.
  
• Avoidance of other people—because deep attention requires vulnerability.
  
• Avoidance of God—because God, more often than not, speaks in what we rush past.
  

This is why phones are such a uniquely modern test of discipleship. They aren’t only tools; they are portable exit doors. With a tiny gesture, you can leave the room without leaving the room. You can opt out of the emotional demand of the present moment and relocate to something easier, shinier, safer.

This is also why “just use your phone less” rarely works as a long-term solution. The deeper work is to ask: What am I trying not to feel? What am I trying not to face? What am I trying not to hear?

Because the gospel is remarkably patient, but it is not casual about this: the life of faith is a life of turning toward—toward God, toward neighbor, toward responsibility, toward revelation.

The Covenant Verb We Keep Skimming: Observe

One of the most quietly illuminating patterns in scripture is how often the language of obedience is tied to attention.

Consider Mosiah 4:30: King Benjamin pairs a stern warning with a very practical diagnosis—“watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God.” That is not only about rule-keeping. It is about awareness. It is about living awake to your inner life, your outer impact, and your spiritual drift.

Similarly, the New Testament repeatedly pairs prayer with watchfulness: “Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving” in Colossians 4:2.

We could call this the tragedy of unattended grace—when blessings arrive, warnings are given, invitations are extended, and we remain too distracted to recognize what is happening. The scriptures do not treat that as a minor inconvenience. They treat it as spiritual peril.

A Brief Note on Phones: It’s Not Only About Content

When people talk about phone distraction, the conversation usually fixates on content—bad content, frivolous content, addictive content. That matters. But there is another layer that is arguably more insidious: even “neutral” phone presence can fragment attention.

Some research suggests that the mere presence of your smartphone can subtly draw on limited cognitive resources—what some scholars have called a “brain drain” effect. At the same time, it’s also worth noting that not every study replicates these findings perfectly, which is a good reminder that human attention is complex and context-sensitive.

Still, most of us don’t need a laboratory to confirm what our souls already know: when our attention is perpetually split, our relationships thin out. Our prayers become more performative than present. Our worship becomes more distracted than devoted.

And perhaps most importantly, our capacity to love people well diminishes—not because we stop caring, but because we stop noticing.

Step 1: Pay Attention

So what do we do?

Let’s begin with the simplest, hardest, most foundational discipline: Purposefully pay attention in the present moment. Focus. Concentration. Awareness. This can sound like a self-help slogan until we connect it to the heart of restored doctrine: the Lord’s invitation to live with an “eye single” and a “mind…single to God.”

To “pay attention,” in a gospel key, means at least three things:

1. Attend to what is real. Not what is curated. Not what is imagined. Not what is feared. What is here.
   
2. Attend to what is holy. The Lord’s hand in the ordinary, the needs in the room, the promptings that arrive quietly.
   
3. Attend to what is forming you. Because your attention does not merely follow your desires; over time, what we give heed to shapes our desires.

This is why the command to “watch” yourself in Mosiah 4:30 is so psychologically astute and spiritually mature. It assumes that sanctification is not accidental. It is practiced.

Step 2: Narrow the Eye

A scattered life is not usually healed by dramatic overhauls. It is healed by small, repeated acts of singleness—micro-choices that train the soul to stay. Here are three “eye-single” practices that are simple enough to try and meaningful enough to matter:

1) Consecrate the first look

Many of us begin the day with a reflex: eyes open, hand reaches, feed loads. Consider a different liturgy: prayer before phone. Scripture before scroll. A few minutes of quiet before input. Not because phones are evil, but because the first thing you look at often becomes the first thing that organizes your mind.

If you want your mind to become “single to God,” it helps to begin the day by letting God be real before the world is loud.

2) Build phone-free “altars”

Altars are places where we offer something to God. In modern life, one of the most meaningful offerings might simply be undivided attention.

A few practical examples:

• Meals: phones away—not face-down on the table, but gone.
  
• Bedtime: the last five minutes belong to gratitude, not content.
  
• Church: treat sacrament meeting as attention training, not background audio.
  
• Ministering: let the visit be a human encounter, not a multitasked event.
  

These are not rules; they are rituals. They are ways of saying, “This moment is sacred enough to deserve my full self.”

3) Practice “holy noticing”

Once a day, choose to notice one person more carefully than usual.

• Ask a real question and wait for the real answer.
  
• Remember a detail and follow up later.
  
• Offer a sincere compliment that is specific—not flattering, but seeing.

This is presence as charity: to love is to attend.

Step 3: Witness the Life You’re Actually Living

There is a reason “witness” language runs through covenant life—baptismal promises, sacramental renewal, temple ordinances. Witnessing is not only what we do in courtrooms; it is what we do with our lives.

To witness, spiritually, is to be able to say: I was there. I saw. I remembered. I did not miss what mattered.

This is one of the quiet gifts of being present: you begin to accumulate a life that feels cohesive rather than scattered—because you were actually in it. And in a subtle but real way, this is where gospel presence differs from mere serenity: we are not practicing attention simply to feel calmer; we are practicing attention to become more faithful.

“Forever Is Composed of Nows”

In a First Presidency message, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, then second counselor in the First Presidency, quoted the line “Forever—is composed of Nows,” and then reflected on the spiritual significance of living in the middle—where real life, real growth, and real discipleship actually happen.

That is not just poetic. It is doctrinally provocative.

Because if forever is composed of nows, then the question is not only whether we will be faithful in the grand arc of our lives, but whether we will be faithful today—in this conversation, this ordinance, this irritation, this child’s question, this prompting, this quiet moment when the Spirit tries to get our attention and we are tempted to escape.

Holiness rarely announces itself with fireworks. More often, it arrives like a still, small knock. Presence is how you answer the door.

A More Luminous Ordinary

Imagine, for a moment, what it would feel like if a ward, a family, a friendship network quietly committed to being more present—not in an intense, performative way, but in a steady, covenant-shaped way. Sacrament meeting would become less about enduring and more about receiving. Ministering would feel less like an assignment and more like belonging practiced—seeing and naming one another, showing up with love, walking each other toward Christ. Homes would sound different, too. Fewer keyboard clicks and notification chimes. More laughter. More unhurried conversation. More silence that isn’t empty, but spacious—silence where prayer can actually land.

And perhaps, over time, we would discover something hopeful: that attention is not only a scarce resource being stolen from us; it is a gift we can still offer, intentionally, to God and to one another.

Not perfectly. Not constantly. But sincerely—and increasingly.

Because in the gospel, being present is not merely a wellness technique. It helps us keep commandments, practice gratitude, notice grace, and live with an eye single to the glory of God.

And that kind of singleness does something beautiful: it fills the ordinary with light.

The post The Sacrament of Attention appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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If you want critical movie acclaim, there’s a reliable formula: tell a love story backward.

Start in the wreckage. Someone has cheated. Someone has checked out. The husband drinks too much, the wife works too much, and there’s a dead-eyed distance until one of them says something like, “I don’t think I’m in love anymore.”

Then cut to an earlier version of the same couple—young, magnetic, and unmistakably “in love.” They have a meet-cute, an immediate connection, a spontaneous slow dance. Cue the sweeping wedding montage, the surprise pregnancy, the tiny apartment made romantic with twinkle lights. We’re asked to believe this is what good married love is: intensity, spontaneity, romance.

Cut forward again, and we get the discovery, the confession, the paperwork, the sad soundtrack. The same question hangs over every scene, “How did we get from there to here?”

Outside the prestige marriage-in-freefall genre, the state of marriage on screen isn’t exactly hopeful. In early 2025, Millers in Marriage arrived as a relationship drama about three adult siblings orbiting dissatisfaction, infidelity, and divorce-adjacent choices. Later that year, Splitsville took the modern “maybe monogamy is the problem” premise and detonated it into chaos: a dissolving marriage collides with a supposedly successful open relationship, and it works out for no one. 

Isn’t it time for a new marriage story?

The thing about the marriage-falling-apart stories is that they’re often very good. The best of them are relatable in some small way to even the happiest of married couples. They treat the couple with a thoughtfulness and nuance that’s usually left out of the lighthearted rom-com genre. 

Marriage isn’t easy, and storytellers shouldn’t pretend it is. But something has gone very wrong when the most talented writers, directors, and actors are exclusively drawn to the most melancholic stories, while stories about strong and happy marriages and families are left to the realm of low-budget holiday made-for-TV movies.  Hollywood has gotten very good at depicting marital conflict and very bad at depicting marital repair. This repair is so often possible when marriage is viewed as a sacred covenant rather than a means of amusement and pleasure, something to be discarded when it ceases to serve that purpose.’

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Not long ago, a mainstream network drama gave viewers a marriage with real stress but no contempt and conflict without the constant threat of betrayal. Friday Night Lights wasn’t a story about perfect people. It was a story about people under pressure—career pressure, parenting pressure, community pressure—and a marriage that didn’t evaporate the moment it stopped feeling effortless.

Why does it matter if healthy marriages are portrayed on screen? It matters because we are formed by the stories we binge, quote, and internalize. Young people, who increasingly spend their waking hours on screens, have decreasing interest in marriage and family. This is great cause for concern, especially for people of faith who believe that marriage and family are central to God’s plan. Proverbs teaches, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Who are we shaping ourselves and our children to be if so much of our media sows cynicism and discontent about marriage? 

My favorite movie about love—a true bright spot for marriage in movies—is Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally…. What makes it quietly profound isn’t only the central story of two friends falling in love. It’s the way the film is stitched together with documentary-style interviews of elderly couples telling the stories of how they met.

The couples on screen are actors. But the stories are drawn from interviews gathered during the writing process—real people’s memories shaped into monologues, then performed with ordinary tenderness. The movie opens with a sweet elderly couple sitting on a couch, with the husband relaying this story: 

I was sitting with my friend Arthur Kornblum, in a restaurant … And this beautiful girl walked in and I turned to Arthur, and I said Arthur, you see that girl? I’m going to marry her. And two weeks later we were married. And it’s over fifty years later and we are still married.

Later in the movie, another husband shares:

A man came to me and say, “I find a nice girl for you. She lives in the next village, and she is ready for marriage.” We were not supposed to meet until the wedding. But I wanted to make sure. So I sneak into her village, hid behind a tree, watch her washing the clothes. I think if I don’t like the way she looks, I don’t marry her. But she look really nice to me. So I say okay to the man. We get married. We married for 55 years.

These vignettes are not “prestige tragedy.” They don’t build toward an award-worthy implosion. They’re small and human, sometimes funny, and improbable. They’re often surprisingly plain. 

Perhaps we are beginning to see a correction. Chloé Zhao, one of the best working directors today, crafts one of the year’s best movies around the theme of marriage repair and reconciliation in her Oscar-nominated film “Hamnet.” Other Best Picture-nominated films, such as “Train Dreams” and “Sinners” also show marriages strained and repaired. These films are showing a better, more interesting way forward. We have plenty of conflict, realism, and cynicism. What we need is repair.

If you can only imagine love as a feeling you either have or don’t, then the moment the feeling dips, the story is basically over. But if love is also a practice—something you learn, fail at, return to, choose over and over again, and grow into—then marriage doesn’t have to be filmed as either a fairy tale or a tragedy.

Which brings me back to Valentine’s Day. We need better marriage stories that are honest about difficulty and honest about endurance: depictions of husbands and wives who don’t merely “stay together” but learn how to turn back toward each other again and again until the ordinary becomes, in its own way, extraordinary.

The post A New Marriage Story appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Here is the uncomfortable fact: most Americans now get their news from social and video platforms. More than TV. More than news sites and apps. Our public square has been quietly subcontracted to feeds tuned for time‑on‑platform, not truth‑seeking or neighborliness. We feel the cost in our bones—sharper extremism, thinner civility, cultural tribes that shout past each other, rumors that outrun corrections, and a steady undertow of loneliness. Especially for the young, the scroll isn’t just a pastime; it’s the water they swim in.

And the research is stubborn. When people use less social media, they hurt less. In randomized trials, trimming use to about thirty minutes a day lowers loneliness and depression; a one‑week break nudges anxiety down and well‑being up. The gains are modest, yes—but they’re real. Which means the real question isn’t whether less is better. It’s how to make “less” the easy choice for millions of people at once.

If the system is shaping us, then we have to reshape the incentives, its defaults, its hours, its business model. What follows are a few practical legal and social ideas that may help address the raft of negative consequences of social media. 

Refit Section 230: A safe harbor you keep only if you sail safely

Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act was built to keep platforms from being sued as the publisher for what users post, and to let the platforms moderate in good faith. Over time the shield has stretched to cover not just hosting speech, but how platforms distribute and rank it. That wasn’t carved into the Constitution; Congress wrote 230, and much of the expansion has come at the hands of well-meaning court rulings. But those court interpretations don’t have the broader picture that a legislature can. Congress can and should update Section 230.

The fix isn’t necessarily to blow up 230. That could invite chaos. But we could make the Section 230 shield conditional on predictable, speech-neutral design choices:

• No immunity for paid placement. Ads and paid “boosts” should live under ordinary tort and consumer protection law, not inside 230’s blanket.
• Narrow protection for risky amplification. When a recommender system actively pushes content, immunity shouldn’t apply. That’s an editorial decision, regardless of whether it is made by an algorithm or not. 
• Reasonable design and transparency to keep the shield. Think chronological feeds and overnight quiet hours for minors by default, documented age assurance, and researcher access to basic risk metrics.

Why this matters: today’s largest platforms depend on two things—paid targeting and opaque, engagement‑maximizing ranking. If paid boosts lose 230’s protection, and if default friction becomes the price of immunity, the business math changes. Lawsuits won’t swallow the internet; the First Amendment still limits claims. But the near‑automatic shield over product design would no longer be unconditional.

Section 230 was created specifically to give internet platforms legal protections that don’t apply to other publishers. And without those additional protections, the social media regime that exists today could not survive, all without implicating the First Amendment even a little bit. 

Starve the Surveillance Ad Engine

Engagement‑hungry design exists because surveillance targeting is so profitable. If we limit the precision and persistence of tracking, then time on social media becomes less lucrative, and the perverse incentives drop. 

Europe is already proving the point: the Digital Services Act bans targeted ads to minors and profiling‑based ads that use sensitive data. Enforcement has forced real product changes (LinkedIn has already disabled a targeting tool in Europe). A U.S. version can go further while staying speech‑neutral.

A clean U.S. starting point is already on the books in California. The 2023 Delete Act (SB 362) requires the state to launch a single portal—DROP—by Jan. 1, 2026. Beginning Aug. 1, 2026, data brokers must check the portal at least every 45 days and purge the personal data of anyone who files a deletion request. If we were to adopt that same one-click ease to delete data across US states, we could start to see a big change.

Pairing data deletion with federal bans on both targeted ads to minors and the use of sensitive data for ad targeting, you drain much of the oxygen from engagement‑hungry feeds without restricting anyone’s speech.

When the ROI on hyper‑personalized ads falls, investors and product teams shift: calmer, subscription‑leaning models look better; contextual ads regain ground; feeds lose pressure to maximize time‑on‑platform at all hours. 

It’s not the advertising that is causing social media’s problems; it is the advertising that provides the funding that incentivizes social media platforms to cause problems and drag their consumers back over and over again, profiting off our worst instincts. 

Make Healthy Design the Default

Certain default settings make it extraordinarily easy to draw people back in. And without limiting individuals’ ability to use those settings if they prefer, we can pass simple laws requiring that interface defaults be high friction. For example: 

• Forwarding limits. WhatsApp’s cap on forwarding already‑viral messages to a single chat produced a 70% drop in “highly forwarded” messages. 
• Autoplay off. A randomized study of Netflix users found that disabling autoplay reduced session length and total watching. Autoplay is a sticky design pattern; switching it off by default trims use without banning anything.
• Default chronological feeds and overnight quiet hours for minors. New York’s SAFE for Kids Act now bars algorithmic feeds for minors unless parents opt in, and blocks notifications between midnight and 6 a.m. The proposed rules detail how to verify age and consent. 

States could experiment with these rules, or Congress could nationalize these defaults by giving the FTC clear authority—building on its consumer protection powers—to set baseline attention‑safety standards for large platforms, especially for minors. This is still a far cry from having a large Surgeon General’s Warning each time you log into Instagram that says, “Social Media has been shown to lead to anxiety, depression, and loneliness.” But if we can’t make smaller changes to reverse this trend, that might be precisely what is needed.

These small design decisions bend millions of daily personal choices, without taking the choices away from the consumers. 

Make “Offline” the Default

There’s a fourth way to curb our dependence on social media that doesn’t require a single new statute: change what our institutions expect of us. When schools, workplaces, congregations, and community spaces set better defaults, people spend less time in the feed—because the offline choice becomes the easy choice. It’s culture. And culture often moves faster than law.

Schools can reclaim the school day with phone‑free policies—pouches or lockers, with clear exceptions for emergencies. Pair that with analog alternatives (board‑game tables, open gyms, music rooms, maker spaces) so lunch provides the engagement without the screen time.

What is more durable than individual resolve is rituals. Congregations and faith groups can play a key role in helping de-escalate. For example, in 2018, President Russell M. Nelson invited Latter‑day Saint youth to a seven‑day social‑media fast, and later invited women to try ten days—framing abstention as a joyful reset of attention and purpose. Any congregation, club, or neighborhood can copy the pattern: announce a time‑bound fast, fill the gap with service and fellowship. These groups can also fill in the desire for connection that so often feeds the most unhealthy social media habits. 

“Third places”—places where you are allowed to exist without paying money—have seen a precipitous drop off. Often the easiest and most comfortable of these places are online. Not only can more congregational connection help this, other groups such as libraries and parks can find ways to engage, especially young people. And might I suggest the ancient and still relevant practice of breaking bread with one another face-to-face.

Less social media won’t come from one heroic law. It will come from a hundred ordinary decisions—repeated until they feel like the way things have always been. That’s culture, and ultimately it is what will help us turn around. 

Hard questions, honest answers

Skeptics will argue that these proposals flirt with censorship, invite doomed lawsuits, or amount to cosmetic fixes. It’s true that free speech doctrine sharply limits what states can do, and that even without Section 230, many claims will still fail on First Amendment or causation grounds. It’s also true that warning labels and nudges alone rarely change behavior. Those cautions matter.

But the core of my suggestions are different. It doesn’t tell platforms what they must carry or suppress. It focuses on distribution mechanics, ads, data, and design—areas where Congress clearly has authority to condition immunity or regulate trade practices in content‑neutral ways. And the record shows that friction rules do more than signal: forwarding caps have slashed virality, autoplay‑off trims viewing time, and randomized trials confirm that short breaks improve well‑being. These changes may not solve everything, but they move the needle in measurable, constitutional ways.

If we want less misinformation, fewer extremism incentives, better privacy, and less loneliness, we should stop pretending a perfectly disciplined thumb is the answer. Make healthier design the default. Our social media death spiral was created by our culture. And if we want to address it, we need to find a way to change that culture. Perhaps that will happen through laws to change the incentives. Perhaps it will take going after the culture itself. Now is not the time to wait for perfect answers. It’s time to start trying things. 

The post Less Feed, More Life appeared first on Public Square Magazine.