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The best family films are more than merely “clean.” They actively form the character of the people who watch them. 

Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, taught, “Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character, evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; … and the greatness of truth. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life.”

In that spirit, I am always searching for great films that can help my children grow in virtue while they are being entertained. There are a great number of films that accomplish this from all over the world, and through the power of streaming, including in many cases on free apps or websites, these films are more available today than ever before.

So here are some of the best films for children that most families have probably never heard of:

‘The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales’

After learning he’s not as intimidating as a big bad wolf, a fox steals three eggs, intending to raise the chicks and then eat them. But when they hatch, they call the fox mommy, and everything changes.

It’s a Belgian film and is animated in bucolic watercolors. 

The film is about turning from a consumption mindset to a stewardship mindset. It is about sacrificing for those we love. The fox becomes something better, not through removing barriers to allow his “true self” to shine through, but by repeatedly choosing to protect someone weaker than himself. 

“The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales” can be viewed on Kanopy, Hoopla, and YouTube.

‘Children of Heaven’

If viewers are willing to read captions, there are hundreds of beautiful family films from around the world to watch. But for many children, the captions themselves are a significant barrier to entry. So I’ve only included this one subtitled film. It is the perfect children’s movie.

A brother loses his sister’s shoes. His family can’t afford another pair, so they have to share. The brother wears the shoes to school in the morning, then races home so his sister can go to school in the afternoon. 

The children are good, but not perfect. But their selfishness is answered with mercy, and their pettiness with compassion. 

The characters grow and change as they focus on being there for their family members. And the climax is really unforgettable. 

While it was nominated for an Oscar, most parents aren’t looking in the Foreign Language Film category for inspiration. This one is definitely worth it. 

“Children of Heaven” can be viewed on Kanopy, Hoopla, and YouTube.

‘Ernest & Celestine’

The premise of “Ernest & Celestine” is that bears and mice fear each other. But a bear and a mouse become friends anyway.

It’s a film about navigating prejudice, but in a way that encourages an internal locus of control, within a story that is pitched in a way that is appropriately gentle for kids.

The film is charming and cozy. It spawned a handful of sequels that are all also worthy films in their own right. So if families love the characters as much as I do, they can spend plenty of time with them. 

“Ernest & Celestine” can be viewed on Kanopy and Tubi.

‘Kirikou and the Sorceress’

This French-made Senegalese film tells the story of a baby, Kirikou, who is born into war and drought caused by an evil sorceress, Karaba. Kirikou goes with his uncle to confront Karaba, whose hatred comes from a thorn in her back. But she doesn’t want to remove it because it has become deeply a part of who she is.

The animation is striking and unlike anything American animation has produced. The tale teaches a deeply important principle about how to make real change in the world.

It is also an opportunity to talk about culture. The film can feel very strange to American audiences because of its pacing, forthright narration, and the fact that the baby Kirikou is naked throughout the film. The film contains frequent nonsexual nudity in its African setting. It does not align with American modesty norms, and it may not be a good fit for families who prefer to avoid all nudity. 

“Kirikou and the Sorceress” can be viewed on Prime Video.

‘A Letter to Momo’

Momo and her father get into a big fight right before he dies. Her internal demons come to life as three demons in her attic. 

By turning the real moral weight of her words into physical avatars, the film makes its rather weighty themes comprehensible to children. The demons are also hilarious. 

The film is not only about learning to forgive yourself, it’s also about letting our feelings of guilt motivate us to become better people. The film undersells just how powerful repentance and forgiveness can be. So I might want to open that up for a conversation with my kids after the film. But it is fairly minor. 

“A Letter to Momo” can be viewed on YouTube.

‘Long Way North’

A Danish film set in Russia, “Long Way North” tells the story of Sasha vindicating her grandfather by going on a grand (sometimes scary) adventure.

The film fits firmly into the modern heroine empowerment template. But rather than it being about discovering herself or proving others wrong, the film is about Sasha being empowered as she becomes useful. She has to work in sometimes humiliating circumstances. She studies a lot. And slowly she begins to gain the confidence of those around her, whom she needs to accomplish her goals.

Sasha is a fantastic example to children of what success often actually takes. Sasha makes some reckless decisions, and while the film usually contains consequences for them, those consequences are rarely clear. This could open up conversations with kids. The movie also includes characters smoking, drinking, and using (non-profanity) name-calling. 

“Long Way North” can be viewed on Prime Video and Roku Channel.

‘Millions’

In this delightful movie from Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, 9-year-old Damian finds a bag of money right before the UK is set to move to the Euro. He and his 12-year-old brother Anthony wrestle with what to do with the cash. 

The film is mostly about generosity. But it avoids making answers simple. After all, the money was never really his. And the film manages to bring the ethics of a question like “What is money for?” to a level that children can engage in it.

The film is also colorful, funny, and imaginative. Among the many sources of Damian’s charity are also a pair of missionaries, providing one of the better depictions of Latter-day Saints on screen.

The ending is suspenseful, and there is smoking and drinking, so this is better for older kids, eight and up, but it is certainly enjoyable for the whole family.

“Millions” can be viewed on Prime Video and Disney+.

‘Okko’s Inn’

This 2018 anime film is a rather straightforward story about grief. Okko loses her parents in a car accident, so she moves into her grandmother’s inn. And there she begins serving the guests and the burdens they carry.

The film teaches that dealing with our emotions is not only about inward processing, but also about turning outward and serving the people around us. She learns to deal with her own wounds while helping others heal theirs. 

This is a very Japanese movie. It is steeped in the culture and traditions of Japanese life, and many supernatural elements come from Japanese folklore. It may require a good conversation with kids to detangle the ideas in the film from doctrine about the afterlife.

“Okko’s Inn” can be viewed on Hoopla.

‘The Painting’

Containing one of the more whimsical premises for a film, the story is set in an unfinished painting. The figures in the painting are all at various degrees of completion, which causes conflict among them. When a completely finished figure falls in love with a half-finished figure, several characters leave the painting in search of the artist who created them to ask him to finish.

It is essentially a Romeo & Juliet tale about love overcoming prejudice, but with a much more accessible back half for children.

The film’s central metaphor also opens up interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between the figures and their creator. Most of the insights about taking accountability for ourselves and those around us are fantastic. But there are certainly takeaways that could feel atheistic. It’s certainly worth asking kids, “What is the difference between our Creator and the painter of the paintings? 

“The Painting” can be viewed on Hoopla and Tubi.”

‘Paper Planes’

A young boy has a talent for building paper airplanes and advances through competitions while his father remains emotionally distant.

It sounds like a setup for a conventional sports underdog movie. It is not. It is borrowing from the trappings of that type of film to ask bigger, more interesting questions, such as, Does winning matter if it’s detached from generosity, family, and friendship? 

The characters often act badly in the pursuit of victory, but the film often recognizes that this is not virtuous and can diminish our ability to be there for the people around us. 

It can become a little bit over the top at times in its discussion of death and depression, so it’s certainly not one for a cheery movie night. But this is the sports movie that provides the moral context for all of the other great sports movies. 

“Paper Planes” can be viewed on Starz, YouTube, and Tubi.

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Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is about a warrior trying to leave war behind. And perhaps the movie’s reception suggests that many of us are ready to do the same. 

When the movie opens, the Trojan War is already over. Odysseus remains a warrior, and much of his survival depends on his warrior instincts. But despite the monsters, storms, and stratagems he faces, the central question of the tale is not whether he can win another battle. It’s whether he can make it home. 

One of the major thematic differences between Nolan’s new treatment of the story and the tale it is based on is how Odysseus feels about war. In the original, Odysseus leaves the war as a braggadocious victor. 

In Nolan’s adaptation, the background to Odysseus’ travels is his desire to distance himself from the war, reckon with the choices he made, and prepare to return home—a place where he will be asked to be a husband, father, king, and community member. At home he will not only need his warrior virtues but also tenderness, patience, fidelity, and mercy. 

In this telling, “The Odyssey” is not just the continuing adventures of Odysseus; it is a metaphor for his struggle to leave war and return home psychologically and emotionally. For all its spectacle, the film is preoccupied with the aftermath of war. Reviewers have recognized this antiwar current and its interest in postwar trauma, guilt, and moral transformation.

That theme may also explain why the public response to “The Odyssey” feels more significant than that of a mere commercially successful summer blockbuster. Before the movie was ever released, it had been drafted into another war, a cultural war. And then, much to the surprise of the people who live and breathe that war, the public largely declined the fight.

A Movie and a Battlefield

Long before anyone had seen “The Odyssey,” the culture warriors were dissecting it. Some commentators complained about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Others complained about Elliot Page’s casting. Some critics complained that the film was ignoring historical coherence in exchange for progressive signaling. Others sought to boycott the film because it was not sufficiently deferential to the concerns of Morocco, Western Sahara, and Dakhla—a conflict described, depending on whom you ask, as either an occupation or a border dispute. 

Then audiences saw it. 

“The Odyssey” earned $264.1 million worldwide during its opening weekend. It’s the largest live-action opening of the year, the largest nominal-dollar opening of Christopher Nolan’s career, and a break in what had seemed like a very down summer for the movie industry.

Audiences gave the film an A CinemaScore, and its Rotten Tomatoes audience score stood at 97 percent at the time of writing. Demand was so strong that some theaters added overnight and early-morning screenings.

Obviously, there were still dissenters. Many of the people who profit from our continued outrage doubled down. But most of the actual audience just watched a movie. The controversy stopped being the main story, and the movie started to be. 

The Culture War

This is not to say that culture-war issues are unimportant. Many of the disputes involve issues of real importance. 

And maybe it’s OK that Christopher Nolan asked his old friend to be in his movie, regardless of whether we agree with the decisions that friend has made. 

Maybe we can feel real concern for the current situation of the Sahrawi people without making this film bear the weight of the entire controversy just because of its filming locations.

These concerns, along with the hundreds of others, should not simply be wished away. And I’m certainly not calling for us to surrender on them in the hope that doing so will create peace. The tragedy was that the method of war began to consume the very things we were trying to protect. The conflict stopped being about whether ideas were right or wrong and became about whether people were good or bad. Every casting choice was framed as existential. It divided families, friendships, congregations, communities, and nations. Having the wrong opinion was not a conflict to work through, but a danger to be squashed. Our ideological opponents were reduced to avatars to humiliate.

And because war needs soldiers, first our news media and then our social media began using propaganda to enlist us. And many of us have. We’ve fought about Dr. Seuss, gas stoves, Mr. Potato Head, the OK symbol, the green M&M, the Cracker Barrel menu, the Little Mermaid’s hair, elves’ skin tone, Gillette razors, Looney Tunes, Keurig coffee makers, the Chinese word for “that,” the police dog in “PAW Patrol,” and dozens and dozens more. 

“The Odyssey” was shaping up to be the next battlefield. The battle lines had been drawn. And then we just didn’t. We let it go. We went and watched a fun movie. And we probably watched it while sitting in a theater with someone who believed some of the wrong things. 

Toward Ithaca

But it’s not nothing. 

Maybe it’s just a temporary “Christmas Day truce” because the movie really is that good. Or maybe “The Odyssey” is revealing a change in appetite, a change of heart.

Perhaps we are tired of being told what we are allowed to enjoy. Perhaps we are sick of so many of the things that make life worth living becoming another test of tribal allegiance. And maybe we’re tired of living in a world where nothing can simply be. 

Our culture did not resolve the disputes surrounding the movie. One side did not emerge victorious. It did something smaller. It didn’t give the final word to the culture war. 

Odysseus’ journey reminds us that wars end before warriors learn how to live in peace. Coming home is its own discipline. It requires us to lay aside identities formed entirely through opposition and recover the relationships that conflict pushed to the margins.

We have not reached Ithaca. Our disagreements remain. Many of them matter, some deeply.

But perhaps we are beginning to understand that a meaningful life cannot be built entirely around fighting them.

The post Odysseus and the Culture Warriors appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

While this question is legally significant, it is the wrong question for improving educational outcomes and fostering upward mobility and civic engagement for American students.

By focusing on control—who governs schools, who receives public funding, and where the line should be drawn between church and state—the current debate obscures an urgent matter: how religion can be a resource that enables public schools to expand opportunity and bridge social divides.

Since their founding, US public schools have aspired to provide children of all backgrounds with an equal opportunity to learn. Horace Mann, credited with expanding tax-supported, universal schooling in the 19th century, wrote that public schooling in America would become “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Though we’ve made important progress, our public education system is failing to meet this promise. Gaps in learning opportunities persist across lines of students’ race and family income, and many teachers leave the profession they love because of poor working conditions and limited support.

Our recent report, “Faith in Educational Renewal,” from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Leadership Initiative for Faith and Education at Harvard University, finds that religious participation is linked to higher academic achievement, school completion, and college aspirations—especially for students from working-class families. These benefits often flow through the moral values, study skills, and social networks that students gain from participating in religious life. Of course, students can develop values, skills, and networks elsewhere, but it is difficult to replicate the stable communities that religious organizations sustain.

Faith-based organizations also improve student learning outcomes through partnerships with public schools. These partnerships provide tutoring, mentoring, and college preparation, all of which can improve student literacy, social-emotional development, and family engagement with the school.

The faith of teachers also matters. Teachers are more likely than other professionals to be religious. Many describe their work with students as a calling. According to research, when teachers sense a calling to their profession, it deepens their professional commitments and amplifies their unique professional talents. Teachers often draw on their spirituality to stay committed and effective in challenging classrooms. Religious faith can strengthen teachers’ belief in their ability to reach even the most disengaged students.

How can we support more of these voluntary partnerships? How can we expand their impact without inhibiting or promoting religion? How can we help public school educators draw on their faith and spirituality to be more effective and find greater meaning in their work with students and other educators? How can religion contribute to—rather than control—public schooling? These are the questions we should be asking.

Skeptics of this work will raise legitimate concerns. Some secularists want no entanglement between faith and public education. But decades of evidence show that public schools alone are not closing opportunity gaps. When we exclude faith communities from partnerships, we ignore a valuable resource in our battle against educational inequality.

Our choice is not limited to sectarian education or the exclusion of religion from public education. We recommend a third way for schools to partner with faith communities. The question is not whether religion should run public schools—or even whether faith communities should partner with them. They already do. The right question is how to expand and deepen partnerships that draw on community, human, material, and moral resources available through religious pluralism to provide every student with a fair chance.

 States can highlight promising partnerships that already exist. School leaders can identify specific student needs and invite faith-based volunteers to offer tutoring, mentoring, family support, or other resources. Faith communities can approach schools to offer services that benefit all students, regardless of their beliefs. School leaders and educational authorities can help teachers draw on their spirituality to navigate thorny challenges and find greater fulfillment in their classrooms. By focusing on collaboration rather than control, public schools can tap religious faith as an underused resource to transform learning opportunities for all students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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That small moment in a classroom tells us something larger about the modern world. With a phone, there is so much to read, watch, and listen to—right at our fingertips. This technological and informational boom has in many ways been a blessing. We can communicate with loved ones quickly. We can share hope, peace, and God’s love around the world in the blink of an eye. 

You and I already know, though, that our tools of technology have been bringing a little more division than unity in recent years. For disciples of Jesus Christ, the question is not whether technology is good or bad. The question is whether we are actively using it as a tool, or whether the “tool” is quietly training us.

Just because technology can fill the world with light and hope does not always mean that it will. Like other tools, it has been designed for a specific job. Just as a hammer is better at pounding nails than a screwdriver, different types of technology are better suited to different tasks than others. Gaining an understanding of how these tools guiding our digital lives are designed, particularly social media, will help us better understand the increase in polarization and disunity in our communications and our communities.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory recognizes that social media can provide connection, while also warning that current evidence points to meaningful risks and unanswered safety questions for children and adolescents. 

A Tool Built to Hold Our Attention

The first thing we should remember about social media is that it is a profit-making tool. This can be easy to forget as we, the users, never have to pay to use the service. Instead, social media companies make money by selling our attention to advertisers. This is called the attention economy.

Not only do advertisers pay to get ads in front of us, but they will pay even more if they can target those ads to the people most likely to buy them. This is a big reason why social media companies track so much of what we do on and around their platforms, from each click and search to how long we wait before we scroll away. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission reported that major social media and video platforms collect, track, and use personal information to determine ads and content—often through feeding said data to algorithms, AI, and data analytics.

Engagement is their key metric: both time in the app and how much we interact with it. This means that anything and everything that social media companies can do to increase our engagement will pay off for them financially. So it should come as no surprise that Netflix, while not a social media company, built its financial incentives around the attention economy—so strongly that its then-CEO Reed Hastings once called sleep its “primary competitor.”

Other apps are often faced with similar competition, sending notifications during school hours and late at night: everything they can to get users back onto their platform. A 2023 Common Sense Media report found that more than half of young participants received 237 or more phone notifications per day. 

They don’t just want to get us onto their sites, but to keep us there.

When a Tool Trains Our Habits

There are many other technological tricks and design choices made to keep us engaged as long as possible. From daily streaks to personalized endless feeds, social pressure, likes, and bright colors, social media sites are designed to be habit-forming.

Just like a slot machine, you never know if that notification is going to bring good news, irritation, embarrassment, attention, or a near miss. These intermittent and instantly-gratifying rewards can resemble patterns that make habits hard to break. Social media is not unlike a casino, except that instead of money, we often pay in time, and instead of a payout, we may walk away with a dizzying sense of loneliness.

Just as casinos are window-less to obscure the passage of time, social media has autoplay and infinite scrolling so you don’t need to look up to keep partaking.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we take special care not to partake of addictive substances in our physical diets. Social media, however, has taken over many of our informational diets with habit-forming patterns that shape our attention to bring us back the next time a notification arrives.

With every scroll and every click, we may be handing our attention to the machines we carry around in our pockets. 

Agency in the Attention Economy

Our perspective on the damage caused by addiction inform us, even beyond the commandments, not to partake of harmful substances. Agency is a cornerstone of the Latter-day Saint worldview. The Church teaches that moral agency gives us “the power to act for ourselves” and to take responsibility for our choices.

In the premortal life, Satan wanted to take away our agency to gain glory unto himself. Christ, however, offered Himself for a better way forward, preserving our power to choose. We all chose Him over the arguably more “comfortable” route of letting outside forces control our destiny. The Church’s Gospel Topics guide teaches that Satan “sought to destroy the agency of man,” while those on earth had used their agency to accept God’s plan.

This comparison should make us careful. A platform is certainly not Satan, and a phone is not evil. But any system that narrows our choices, claims our time without our intention, or nudges us toward impulse instead of covenant can weaken the good habits agency requires. The addiction-forming patterns of social media can take our thoughts and time away from all the good that we could do with our agency.

As a secondary school teacher, I can attest to the powerful nature of the devices we allow our children to carry everywhere they go. When I ask students what they did over the weekend, a surprising number will simply say they communicated with friends through their phones. These tech companies have strong financial reasons to make sure that our favorite way to pass the time  (and our children’s favorite), keeps drawing us back to the screen.

What Our Feeds Teach Us About People

One of the most subtle ways these platforms train us is the way they teach us to view one another. Because their bottom line is tied to engagement, algorithms often reward content that keeps us clicking, including content that is shocking, angry, depressing, disturbing, or rage-worthy.

A 2025 PNAS Nexus study of Twitter’s engagement-based ranking found that, compared with a reverse-chronological feed, the engagement-based algorithm over-represented emotionally charged and out-group hostile content, and that political tweets selected by the algorithm made users feel worse about their political out-group.

This effect is in direct opposition to the directive of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who teaches that we are all children of God. God is no respecter of persons. We, who are disciples and saints within these latter days, are admonished to follow the Savior. Perhaps we should consider how much time we think Jesus would spend on social media, if any at all? What types of posts and comments would He write or share? Wherever this thought experiment leads us, we need to go and do likewise.

Preach My Gospel states that “Through repentance, we develop a fresh view of God, ourselves, and the world. We feel God’s love for us anew as His children—and our Savior’s love for us.” If  we gain a fresh view of the world by repenting, that must mean we are viewing our brothers and sisters in this human family with greater love, as God views them.

This is God’s way, and it is a clear opposite of the way of contempt, misrepresentation, and endless outrage.

A More Christian Digital Diet

As we move through this mortal journey, we Latter-day Saints know of the importance of maintaining the presence of the Holy Ghost. We can walk with God on earth as we keep our covenants and serve others. Christ taught that if we love Him, we must feed his sheep. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to mourn with those that mourn, comfort those in need of comfort, and stand as witnesses of God.

Social media is designed in such a way that it can suck our time away from this important work and twist our brains into believing the worst of our brothers and sisters. While much good can be brought about as we share righteousness and bring light to the world, we must remember that the platforms themselves are financially incentivized to maximize engagement, even when our engagement is done is wisdom, peace, or discipleship.

In recent general conference messages, President Dallin H. Oaks taught both the importance of the family-centered gospel and the need for followers of Christ to use the “language and methods of peacemakers.” President Oaks was announced as the 18th President and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on October 14, 2025, and the same month he reminded that the Church is “a family-centered church.” And in April 2026 he urged followers of Christ to forgo contention and avoid what is harsh and hateful.

I believe we should think carefully about the role social media has to play in our daily activities and the examples we set for our children. May our digital diets reflect all things virtuous, lovely, and of good report. And may we remember to follow the Savior when it comes to how we hold our human family within our hearts.

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A new book about deconverts from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has successfully made its way into the broader conversation. Jeff Strong’s “Torn” has been relentlessly marketed, and many have presented it as either dangerous or groundbreaking or both. I am not convinced.

It is not the long-awaited key to Latter-day Saint disaffiliation. It is not some groundbreaking new approach. It is a sometimes useful, often sincere, frequently repetitive book about being nicer to people who struggle with faith. And it’s wrapped up in data that tells us far less than it intends.

That wrapping is important to consider. Strong has consistently advertised his book as “research-grounded.” He has spoken at length about the number of survey responses he has collected.

Like Jeff Strong, I am not a social scientist. I have also occasionally used surveys to attempt to support ideas I’m writing about. But when I do, I constantly hedge because my data isn’t well collected. I explain over and over which groups the data actually covers. I explain that the data is not representative. I explain that while the data may be an interesting window, the takeaways from it are inherently limited.

Strong has taken another approach, not only trumpeting his data, but building an entire worldview around it. And honestly, without the aura of “data-driven,” “Torn” would just be a familiar Latter-day Saint pastoral plea: listen more, judge less, be warmer, make our wards more welcoming. The kind of plea that Latter-day Saint leaders have been making for decades. 

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates handled the basic statistical problems in their own review of “Torn.” The basics are that Strong specifically took the survey to online groups of Latter-day Saints, particularly disaffiliated ones, and they shared it with those who shared their worldview. The survey was very long, so only those with some motivation to finish did. They compared his results to representative samples collected in the past, and unsurprisingly, Strong’s results are very different from the better-collected data.

In Strong’s defense, his poorly drawn sample is very large. While Strong has agreed with these limitations when pressed, his book and its marketing rely on the assumption that the data is much more representative than it is.

But it’s not just the data that is a problem. Ralph Hancock has provided the philosophical critique. Hancock points out that Strong shifts from trying to listen and learn from those who have left the Church to not considering the possibility that they may be in the wrong. Strong presents deconverts as always perfectly innocent and wise. He tells us that sin or laziness cannot be the reason people leave the Church, because those who left did not report that as the reason in his survey.

That goes well beyond Strong’s sampling problems, to a kind of baked-in gullibility. 

I spoke of a similar problem in an essay called “The Fiction of Self-Knowledge,” explaining how accepting individuals’ self-reports uncritically, as Strong has done, is bad social science. It’s not that these people are lying or attempting to trick us. It’s just that human beings do not fully and reliably understand their own motivations.

And in perhaps the best explanation of the book, Dan Ellsworth points out some of the underlying worldview embedded in Strong’s questions. The issue is not merely that Strong asked the wrong people, but that he is asking the wrong questions. Throughout his questions, “church culture” becomes the load-bearing explanation for nearly everything. Ellsworth’s point is that this is not a neutral analysis. It is a worldview. Strong’s framing repeatedly treats the central problem as a conflict between a protective, boundary-conscious church culture and a more open, nourishing, Christ-centered one. But that binary is doing more work than the data is. Once the options are framed as fear or love, exclusion or belonging, you’ve forced the respondent into an answer.

Strong also never attempts to compare Latter-day Saint deconversion rates to other religious organizations or explain why there are comparatively fewer deconverts than most other US religious bodies. Strong tries to tell us that there is something wrong with Latter-day Saint culture, but never tells us what culture he is comparing it to. It would be like criticizing baseball player Shohei Ohtani for getting out over half the time he goes to bat. Sure, that leaves a lot to criticize, but it would also be wildly off base. 

So the case against “Torn” is fairly straightforward. The data is weak for multiple reasons. The conclusions are overdrawn. And the book’s main message seems to have been imposed on the data rather than taken from it. 

But there is real good in the book. 

Strong is right that Latter-day Saints should be kinder to those struggling with their faith. He is right that we shouldn’t automatically assume that those who struggle are lazy, shallow, wicked, or easily offended. He is right about the value of listening.

But the reason I’m confident he’s right is that none of this is new. 

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf said in 2013 that we sometimes assume people leave because they have been “offended or lazy or sinful,” and then immediately added, “Actually, it is not that simple.” Elder M. Russell Ballard told Church educators in 2016 that students cannot be brushed off with “Don’t worry about it,” and urged teachers to know the Gospel Topics essays thoroughly enough to give thoughtful answers. President Russell M. Nelson taught in 2023 that a teenager who doubts his testimony does not need judgment, but the pure love of Jesus Christ reflected in our words and actions. 

The Church’s resource on “Helping Others with Questions” tells members to respond with love, humility, kindness, and patience. It suggests avoiding dismissiveness and preserving relationships. 

The parts of “Torn” that are good are basically a regurgitation of the best advice church leaders have been giving on this topic for over a decade.

So yes, be kind, be warm, listen. Every question isn’t rebellion. Allow people to belong while they are learning, growing, and uncertain. 

But it raises a more interesting question. If the data is poor, the reasoning so overextended, and the best counsel regurgitated, why has “Torn” so effectively captured the attention of the Latter-day Saint conversation?

The answer is that for many people, “Torn” is not being read as research or advice. It’s being read as a way to shift accountability for deconverts’ decisions away from themselves and onto a nebulous “culture.”

I remember as a student, when I wrote editorials, I had a terrible tendency to attribute problems to “they”—this thing I felt, but that didn’t actually correspond to any specific person or group. They were saying this. They were doing that. I was permitting myself to react to a phantom of my own making.

“Torn” reveals a community anxious about losing people. We want answers. We want ways forward. And while the advice is good and can continue to improve our spaces, making them better and more welcoming, for so many others, it gives them language to excuse choices they still feel defensive about because “they made me do it.”

“Torn” is frustrating. Its heart is clearly in the right place. But it seemed to have its conclusion locked and loaded before the start. And I think, unfortunately, because it externalizes control so thoroughly, it is likely to have the opposite effect from the one its author hopes for. I hope someone finds a better, more circumspect use for the copious data Strong collected. 

In the end, what’s new in the book isn’t that good, and what’s good in the book isn’t that new. Read it if you want to know what everyone is talking about, but if you don’t, you’re not missing much of anything.

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In a recent article, I wondered what would happen if we met aliens and they were not predators or imperialists, but actually more righteous beings than we are. What if the terrifying thing about extraterrestrial life was not that they wanted to destroy us, but that they were kinder, wiser, more truthful, and more loving than we imagined?

Steven Spielberg’s newest alien movie “Disclosure Day” begins with that premise and then builds a surprisingly religious sci-fi thriller around it. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel, a contractor who has fled a private defense operation with video proof of alien life and an alien artifact taken from the operation.

Emily Blunt plays Margaret, a weather reporter who can somehow channel the aliens and understand both where she needs to go and the inner needs of every person she meets. Colin Firth’s Noah represents the argument for secrecy: humanity is not ready, and if given access to alien knowledge, it will abuse it. He is also wounded by the loss of his own wife. Colman Domingo’s Hugo represents the counterclaim: truth doesn’t belong to a frightened organization, but to all people, who all deserve to know. 

Spielberg wants to play with religious fire in this film. He makes Daniel’s girlfriend a former nun and has her visit her former convent on several occasions. Hugo, in a speechy monologue, says the problem with the world is that we’ve lost our empathy. By contrast, we see that the nuns are always there to be supportive. And the aliens’ mind-manipulation technology is resisted through religious willpower. But rather than leaning into that as a solution, Spielberg seems to set up the aliens as a new kind of god.

Spielberg recognizes that most world religions would adapt more easily to the existence of extraterrestrial life than the secular imagination might assume. But he also suggests that having a superior being in front of us might challenge some religious assumptions. There are even scenes when Margaret, channeling the aliens’ powers, is worshipped. While Margaret rejects the veneration, the implication is not only that the aliens might be worshipped, but also that because they are so superior in their empathy, they might be worthy of it. 

Spielberg is not contemptuous of religion here. But he does seem more interested in replacing it with alien compassion than deepening it. The result is a movie that invokes theology, while often settling for therapeutic awe. 

But the ending works. And when disclosure finally happens, Spielberg finds the image the whole film has been driving toward. It is a much longer ending sequence than you would expect, but it is transporting. The television anchors’ reactions in the scene, captured in real time, are evocative and shockingly emotional. For a few minutes, the film stops telling us what disclosure means and starts letting us feel it instead.

“Disclosure Day” is not nearly as profound as it thinks it is, but it’s not shallow either. It manages to assemble a meaningful film from the alien mythology of the last 75 years. And for the most part, it sticks the landing. There is a good chance this film becomes the definitive version of that mythos. 

Its deification of the aliens muddies its conclusions, and its gospel of empathy is too familiar to bear all the metaphysical weight Spielberg places on it. But as a movie about truth and love arriving together, as both a gift and a judgment, it has a real and haunting charge. 

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Education policy observers are carefully watching a renewed debate about religion in public schools. With new federal guidance on school prayer and state laws about religious symbols or texts in schools popping up, it’s not surprising to see headlines that ask questions like “Where is this headed?”

A recent Washington Post article frames the momentum as “religion being injected all over the place.” But a more precise description might be that the long-established boundaries between religion and public education are simply being reassessed.

When people think of public education, many picture a purely secular institution where mentions or expressions of religion are unwelcome. In fact, some believe that any formal interaction between religion and public education is legally forbidden.

While this belief is oversimplified, it is also understandable, given recent decades of increasingly strict policy and legal developments pushing the two apart. For years, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down rulings that prohibited school-sponsored prayer, banned reading the Bible in schools, said the Ten Commandments couldn’t be posted in classrooms, struck down moments of silence designed for prayer, and prohibited clergy-led prayers at public school graduations. As a result, much of the public accepted the truism that “never the twain (religion and public education) shall meet.”

But is that really the case? The legal and legislative landscape of recent years suggests a shifting dynamic between religion and public education, one that appears increasingly complex—and potentially more accommodating. Certainly, new challenges to parents’ rights and religious liberty in schools have arisen amid a changing culture, but we are at a moment when we might reach a more thoughtful policy outcome.

With courage to engage civilly, we can preserve the prudent policies we already have and build upon educational pluralism, in which students’ religious identities play an active role in their education, and where the benefits of religion support public education in constitutional ways for all.

I turn now to four developments reshaping the relationship.

The Growing Acceptance of Religious Accommodations

Religious accommodations that account for pluralism are on the rise.

Pluralism refers to the belief that diverse groups or categories can and should exist simultaneously. In addition to being an ideal, pluralism is simply a reality in public schools, where students come from families with different worldviews, religious beliefs, academic goals, and political perspectives. As a result, each student and family will have different experiences within the same educational system. Some of these differences can cause deep conflict, often because of religious beliefs.

Accommodation—or legal exception—is an important public policy that can serve as a pressure-release valve for those caught in these conflicts between religion and law, especially in public education.

Just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, ruled in favor of parents’ rights in education, protecting their right to be given notice and to opt their children out of instruction that violates their religious beliefs. This case will likely create a ripple effect, influencing other states as they consider legislation that better accommodates the religious families they serve in public education.

In recent years, Utah’s legislature has taken the lead in creating new accommodations for students. The state created “participation waivers” from “any aspect of school that violates the student’s or the student’s parents’ religious belief or right of conscience.” This bolstered parental notice for instruction on sensitive materials, allowing parents to be the decision-makers on moral issues, even while their child is enrolled in public school. Utah has also passed workarounds, allowing students who play school sports to wear religious clothing with their required athletic uniforms. 

As much as people strive to keep public education neutral, a particular set of values is always ultimately adopted and diffused throughout the system. And, since a single value set won’t fit everyone perfectly, accommodations are crucial to make public schooling work for a pluralistic population. These types of policies may seem to be matters of common sense, but they still require courage from legislators to enact.

The Expansion of Education Choice

The rise in education choice programs across the nation has been another policy trend offering relief to parents facing conflicts between religious values and education. While “education choice” is a broad term, encompassing options in both public and private settings, in recent years it has focused on state-sponsored programs that subsidize families’ private education choices.

Though it had been bubbling up for years, education choice legislation exploded starting in 2020, with 2021 dubbed the “year of school choice.” When the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in school closures in 2020, families grew increasingly frustrated, and legislatures quickly began adopting policies such as education savings accounts, which allowed families to use state funds at a school of their choice or to educate their children at home through an à la carte version of homeschooling.

Many of these private options are religious schools or faith-based homeschool curricula, which families choose explicitly because they align with their religious beliefs. Pew Research Center data from last year showed that 75% of parents who choose to homeschool do so because they prefer to provide moral instruction, and over 50% do so because they prefer to provide religious instruction. Even before the pandemic, research showed that parents weren’t always choosing private schools for test scores; 64% of families that chose private schools did so for “religious education.”

Education choice programs that help families access private options are politically controversial and regularly challenged in court, but have most often been found constitutional. This is especially true when challenged on a basis state constitutional provisions, attempting to bar public funds from flowing to religious schools, since parents, not the state, select the schools.

Furthermore, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue the U.S. Supreme Court held that the state cannot withhold public funds from religious schools or organizations because of their religious affiliation. And in Carson v. Makin, the court held that a state cannot exclude a school from a state program based on the school providing religious instruction.

Considering current legislative and legal momentum, we can anticipate that state-sponsored education choice programs that allow families to pay for religious schools or home instruction will expand, potentially resolving religious liberty issues for another subset of families.

The Widening Gray Area for Religion in Public Schools

Still, not all public policies being passed right now are as clear as accommodations and new choices for families. Policies currently advancing religion in public education across various states have raised debates that may redefine legal boundaries. These issues typically center around the question, “How far does voluntary space for religion in public schools go before it becomes coercive and unconstitutional?”

An important legal line that should not be crossed for state action—or public-school policy—is whether something violates the Establishment Clause by coercing students into religion or a specific religion, essentially establishing a religion through policy.

But even this area has been changing. Where once the “Lemon test” was the rubric (stemming from the Lemon v. Kurtzman case), the court now looks to “historical practices and understanding,” thanks to the 2022 case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

Texas also passed a law requiring districts to vote on the allowance of dedicated time for voluntary prayer and reading of religious texts. While the contours of the law appear to make it fully optional for districts to offer and go to great lengths to make it nondenominational, as well as entirely subject to parental opt-in, the law raises questions about what point voluntary, non-school-sponsored time for religious expression becomes coercive for students.

States have also advanced non-devotional instruction about religion. For instance, Utah just passed a bill allowing passages of the Bible to be read as part of social studies. Another Utah bill requires teaching the “primacy of religious liberty” in American constitutional governance and the “fundamental role of religion in the history” of the nation. While these are intended to be non-devotional in nature, some critics still feel these measures violate the Establishment Clause, if not its spirit.

Just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court was tied on a vote on the legality of what would have been the first religious charter school (which ultimately kept the lower court’s holding that it was unconstitutional), and it looks like another case is coming on a very similar issue. The creation of explicitly religious charter schools would be an enormous change and would create considerable uncertainty about how religious a state-funded school could be.

While each of these issues is distinct, none has a straightforward answer. The point is that this is a moment to revisit assumptions about religion and public education.

Increasing Faith-Based Support for Education Communities

Some trends in the intersection of religion and public education are less thorny. In March 2026, Harvard and BYU released a joint report that advocates a “third way” of approaching religion and public education, one “that avoids the two extremes of endorsing religion in schools, on one end, or entirely excluding it from the work of schools, on the other.” That approach is “non-sectarian partnerships” between public schools and faith organizations to meet the needs of underserved students and to improve their learning opportunities.

In accordance with their aim to do good, faith organizations often provide services that benefit the public and public schools. The report notes that “Educational programs of faith organizations offer a wide range of services such as donations of school supplies, parent education classes, student tutoring, mentoring, college preparation (e.g., entrance exam training and help with scholarship applications), anti-suspension initiatives, and youth classes that address topics like social competence, student motivation, and study skills.” While there are few studies on the impacts, some research shows evidence of benefits for students from these partnerships.

The report also highlights the benefits of “religiosity”–engaging in private prayer or participating in public rituals and services–which is correlated with student achievement, educational attainment, and goals for higher education. In fact, working-class families benefit more than higher-income families do, and male students benefit more than their female peers.

All this is to say that religion and education can bolster one another. Furthermore, the report suggests that the role of religion in public education need not be coercive at all, but that it can be supportive and complementary in ways that are desperately needed.

For education analysts wondering where these movements might be headed, it is hard to say definitively. But it’s clear that a new moment is upon us, with opportunities to get closer to a pluralistic view of public education. If so, we may build a public square within public schools that better acknowledges the role of religion in the lives of the individuals it serves and in our society at large.

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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. 

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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.

The post The Trojan Horse of AI appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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. 

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