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

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

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

I disagree. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Broadway’s Last Acceptable Bigotry appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That line is haunting in light of everything that followed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t it time for a new marriage story?

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

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

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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

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

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

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

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

Later in the movie, another husband shares:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2024 was one of the best years in recent memory for family films. 2025 didn’t have as much to offer, but there were certainly plenty of great films to watch as a family—you just had to know where to look. Many of the best were under the radar or had small releases, which means many families still have the opportunity to experience them together. 

A few films didn’t quite make the cut, but are worth mentioning: Zootopia 2 — more beautiful but less creative and morally sound than Zootopia 1, Unbreakable Boy — a heartwarming based-on-a-true-story film that goes a bit too sappy, and The Colors Within — a beautiful piece of visual poetry with a metaphor a bit too on the nose.

But here, in my opinion, are the ten best movies of the year and where to find them.

9 & 10. ‘Minecraft’ & ‘Dog Man’

I wanted to include both films here to round out the list. Neither is particularly memorable, and certainly they aren’t trying to be important. But they do prove that silliness is its own kind of virtue and that you can genuinely entertain without trying to import ideology to children. Sometimes something that can make you giggle and cheer for 90 minutes is precisely good enough. 

How to watch Minecraft: Streaming on HBO Max 

How to watch Dog Man: Streaming on Netflix

8. ‘Paddington in Peru’

Paddington the bear embodies kindness, manners, and goodness. So whether you’re the grown-up laughing at the misadventures of the adorable cub, or a kid learning from his example, the franchise is a gold mine for families. The latest adventure doesn’t quite reach the peaks of the previous two installments, but the delightful additions of Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas keep the film a lively adventure.

How to watch: Streaming on Netflix

7. ‘The Legend of Ochi’

The Legend of Ochi invites kids and adults into a hand-crafted fairy tale where courage looks like listening to the creatures everyone else is afraid of. With the old-school puppetry and throwback plot, the film feels like an 80s adventure. There is some distrust of authority that comes with the genre, but overall, the film gently nudges viewers toward curiosity, compassion, and making the big, hard choices.

How to watch: Streaming on HBO Max

6. ‘KPop Demon Hunters’

The surprise hit of 2025 KPop Demon Hunters has proven its entertainment chops for kids. This is not a film that can stand on its own; there are a few mixed moral messages about identity formation and shame that you’ll want to talk through with kids. But the thrust of the film about fighting real evil and self-sacrifice as a weighty moral good is worth cheering for. And it even has some meaningful things to say about redemptive vs. toxic empathy, an important counter-cultural lesson. 

How to watch: Streaming on Netflix

5. ‘In Your Dreams’ 

In Your Dreams uses its wild, anything-can-happen dream world to tell a surprisingly grounded story about kids learning they can’t wish their family into perfection. The movie keeps turning the fun imagery and gags back toward a deeper lesson about choosing real, imperfect love over fantasy and control. The villain isn’t just a monster but the temptation to live in a world where nothing is hard and no one ever disappoints you, and the film clearly labels that as a trap rather than a goal. This is a rare contemporary film about divorce that, in the end, rejects divorce and pursues forgiveness and hard work instead. 

How to watch: Streaming on Netflix

4. ‘The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’

The first fully hand-drawn Looney Tunes feature gives Daffy and Porky a world-saving alien-invasion plot that stays gloriously zany while quietly celebrating friendship and responsibility. Amid the bubblegum-factory chaos and a few genuinely creepy B-movie-style moments, the heart of the story is two screw-ups learning to have each other’s backs and to use their oddball gifts for something bigger than themselves. For families who miss old-school cartoons that are silly first and never push the boundaries, this is a blast.

How to watch: Streaming on HBO Max

3. ‘Ne Zha 2’

Ne Zha 2 takes all its record-breaking hype and actually delivers a mythic family story about courage, costly love, and refusing to treat whole peoples as disposable. With Ne Zha and his dragon friend Ao Bing literally sharing one fragile body, the movie keeps turning its huge battles and wild visuals back toward loyalty, repentance, and parents who are willing to suffer rather than abandon their son. It is intense and unapologetically rooted in Chinese mythology, but for families willing to go big and talk afterward, this is one of the richest animated adventures of the year. 

How to watch: Streaming on HBO Max

2. ‘Arco’

Arco begins with a rainbow-suited boy falling out of a peaceful far future into a battered 2075, and turns that simple sci-fi hook into a quietly moving story about friendship, responsibility, and the kind of world we are handing to our children. Iris and her robot caretaker Mikki take this stranger in and, as they race to send him home, the film keeps tying its gorgeous future-shock imagery back to small acts of hospitality, courage, and care for a damaged Earth instead of despair or blame. It is hopeful without being naïve, warning kids about what might come while insisting that love of neighbor and creation can still bend the story in a better direction.

How to watch: Limited Release in Theaters

1. ‘Little Amélie or the Character of Rain’

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain quietly follows a little girl in 1960s Japan as she slowly wakes up to the world around her. We see everything from her small point of view as she tastes new foods, plays by the water, and tries to make sense of big things like war, loss, and God with the help of the adults who love her. (The answers are grounded in Japanese spiritualism, not Christian theology.) The film is gentle, slow, and often very funny in tiny ways, but it treats a young child’s heart and questions with real respect, showing how family love and simple daily joys can teach humility and gratitude. It is one of the year’s rare animated films that truly honors childhood as a sacred season rather than a marketing demographic, which is why it tops this year’s list.

How to watch: Limited Release in Theaters

The post The Best Family Movies of 2025 Came From the Margins, Not the Mainstream appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Bravo’s three‑part limited series Surviving Mormonism with Heather Gay leans into difficult personal stories and pointed criticism of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints. Episode one premiered Nov. 11, with all three parts streaming on Peacock the next day; the trailer and network page frame the project as revealing the religion’s “dark history.” The hook is effective: the testimonies are raw, the stakes high. So how do we address these problems? 

Lessons From Other Institutions’ Hard Lessons

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is far from the first organization to have three or more troubling incidents occur among its membership. Across faith, civic, and community settings, major investigations have revealed troubling stories that have led to the implementation of harm-reducing best practices. 

1) Clear Pathways to Civil Authorities
Every credible blueprint insists on uncomplicated routes to law enforcement. The painful proof came into focus in the USA Gymnastics scandal. For years, athletes reported Larry Nassar’s abuse to coaches, trainers, and officials, only to see their disclosures trapped in internal channels, bounced between organizations, or delayed while leaders worried about reputations and jurisdiction. Congressional investigations concluded that this web of overlapping responsibilities and in‑house handling helped enable his crimes.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales—after seven years of studying abuse in churches, schools, care homes, local authorities, and youth organizations—reached a similar conclusion: confusing internal routes and deference to institutional reputation repeatedly left children unprotected. Both SafeSport and IICSA’s recommendations are built on the same insight. When allegations are routed through slow, internal channels, cases stall and perpetrators move on; when pathways to civil authorities and independent safeguarding bodies are direct, simple, and well‑trained, reports increase, patterns are detected earlier, and children are safer. 

2) “Two‑Deep” (No One‑on‑One) Supervision—Everywhere Youth Are Present
The clearest example of why one‑on‑one contact is so dangerous came in the Boy Scouts of America abuse scandal. As lawsuits and internal “ineligible volunteer” files became public, they showed how serial offenders had repeatedly used solo hikes, tenting arrangements, and car rides to isolate and groom youth with little or no immediate oversight. Part of what made the problem so intractable was structural: the program still allowed adults to be alone with non‑family youth in ways that created predictable opportunities for abuse.

In response, Scouting tightened its rules into a strict “two‑deep leadership” and “no one‑on‑one contact” standard. No adult is to be alone with a child who is not their own in any program setting—at meetings, on campouts, or in transit—with electronic communications governed by the same spirit. The point is not to question leaders’ sincerity but to design the system so that temptation and opportunity are sharply reduced.

Over time, youth‑serving organizations across the country—sports leagues, camps, community programs, and churches—have copied this approach because insurers, risk managers, and child‑safety experts all converge on the same conclusion: when adults are never alone with unrelated children, grooming becomes harder, disclosures are more likely to be observed by a second adult, and overall risk drops. Two‑deep supervision is not a cure‑all, but it is one of the simplest structural safeguards to duplicate anywhere children are present. 

3) Mandatory, Role‑Specific Training and Renewal
At Minnesota’s Anoka‑Hennepin School District, nine students died by suicide in less than two years, at least four of whom were gay or perceived to be gay. Investigations and a civil‑rights lawsuit documented a climate of anti‑gay bullying: students were shoved, spat on, urinated on, and told to kill themselves, while staff often minimized or failed to respond. The net effect was a system where harassment flourished, and adults lacked both clarity and skills.

In 2012, the district agreed to a comprehensive, court‑enforced settlement that forced a systemic overhaul. Among other changes, Anoka‑Hennepin hired a Title IX coordinator, strengthened mental‑health support, and—crucially—committed to mandatory annual training for all staff who interact with students, the revised policies, and their duty to act. Peer‑leadership programs and annual student meetings were also required to address harassment and explain how to get help.

The lesson travels well. In a large system with many well‑intentioned adults, problems don’t persist because people are uniquely cruel, but because they are untrained, unclear about their authority, and afraid of “getting in trouble” for speaking up. When training is optional or generic, many adults remain passive bystanders; when every teacher, coach, bus driver, and aide is required to complete targeted, recurring training, the culture shifts, students are more likely to be believed, and dangerous patterns are interrupted earlier.

4) Centralized Records and Portability of Warnings
For years, the Southern Baptist Convention assumed that because each congregation was autonomous, the national body could do little more than issue statements. Survivors who tried to warn denominational leaders were often told nothing more could be done, even as reports accumulated about the same individuals. The 2022 independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions exposed the cost of that “loose polity” model: there was no maintained, denomination‑wide database, no consistent escalation process, and no one charged with seeing patterns across churches. Allegations sat in private files, internal lists documented names that local search committees never saw, and known offenders were able to move from congregation to congregation undetected.

The scandal spurred a shift. In the wake of the report, Southern Baptists created an Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, began work on a public “Ministry Check” database of pastors and leaders credibly accused or convicted of abuse, and started debating stronger, convention‑wide expectations for background checks and information‑sharing. The goal is simple: when a church considers calling a pastor or staff member, it should be able to check a central resource rather than relying only on informal references or word of mouth.

Although the reforms are still developing and remain the subject of intense internal debate, the underlying logic is sound and widely echoed in other sectors: when credible warnings are captured in one place and made available to decision‑makers, it becomes much harder for abusers to outrun their history by simply changing employers or congregations. Even decentralized systems need centralized tracking and escalation if they want to stop perpetrators from starting over in a new community. 

5) Survivor Support and Redress
In Australia, decades of revelations about institutional abuse—especially in Catholic parishes and schools, Salvation Army boys’ homes, and state‑run care—showed a common pattern: when children finally disclosed what had happened, institutions quietly moved abusers on, fought civil claims aggressively, and offered only limited pastoral support. The mounting evidence that clergy and other carers had been shuffled from place to place instead of being reported to police led the federal government in 2013 to establish the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

After five years of public hearings and thousands of survivor accounts, the Royal Commission concluded that such a history could not be addressed by apologies alone. One of its key recommendations was the creation of a National Redress Scheme, funded by government and participating institutions, to provide survivors with a package that includes counseling, a direct personal response from the responsible institution, and a monetary payment as tangible acknowledgment of harm. Many major churches and charities have joined the scheme; institutions that refuse to participate can now be publicly identified and pressured to do so.

Whatever its limits and delays, the scheme embodies a hard‑won consensus: institutions that failed children must contribute to their healing in concrete, material ways—not just in words. These frameworks are sobering reminders that apologies must be joined to tangible care. 

6) Culture and Communications: Humility Beats Reputation Management
Chicago Public Schools is one vivid example of how “reputation first” thinking harms children. A 2018 newspaper investigation and a scathing federal Title IX review documented cases in which students’ allegations of sexual violence were mishandled or ignored, staff failed to notify police, and the system’s main instinct was to protect the district rather than victims.

While no large district can claim perfection, watchdog reports and follow‑up coverage now focus less on cover‑ups and more on whether the new office has enough staff and resources to do its work. Similar cultural critiques appear in IICSA’s Anglican case studies and in U.S. Senate hearings on the Nassar scandal in Olympic sport: institutions minimized or deflected to protect their brand, and only when that instinct was repudiated—and replaced with clear structures and accountability—did real reform begin. In all these arenas, the shift from reputation first to safety first is measured not in slogans but in whether disclosures reach police quickly, victims receive services, and leaders welcome independent scrutiny.

How the Church of Jesus Christ Has Performed on These Six Lessons

With decades of sad lessons learned, how is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doing in implementing these best practices?

1) Clear Pathways to Civil Authorities and Outside Help

As early as the mid‑1990s, the Church created a confidential ecclesiastical abuse help line for bishops and stake presidents. Long before SafeSport or CPS‑style offices existed, local lay leaders had 24/7 access to legal and clinical professionals whose explicit mandate was to help victims and ensure compliance with reporting laws.

By the mid‑2010s, member‑facing resources on ChurchofJesusChrist.org were already teaching ordinary members that if they know or suspect abuse, they should report to civil authorities first and then seek additional spiritual and practical support from Church leaders and professional counselors.

The current Abuse Help Line and “Abuse—How to Help” pages now make this even more explicit: leaders are instructed to call the help line every time they learn of abuse, and members are told to contact legal authorities immediately and then work with their bishop or stake president, who in turn is required to use the help line. The help line is utilized to ensure that proper reports are made directly to the appropriate authorities in line with local privacy laws. Recent updates to the General Handbook and the “Protecting Children and Youth” page in 2024–25 again reinforce that reporting to civil authorities is not optional and that no leader should ever discourage or block a report.

2) Two‑Deep Supervision and No One‑on‑One Settings

Well before many school districts or community programs embraced two‑adult standards, the Church began strengthening its expectations around supervision. By 2006, the Church Handbook of Instructions required two adult supervisors for activities, a policy that continued to be iterated and tightened to cover children’s Sunday School (primary) classes, women and men, and ecclesiastical interviews, among others.  

These principles were built into the 2020 General Handbook and then expanded in the 2025 updates under headings such as “Safeguarding Children,” “Classes for Youth,” and “Adult Supervision.” Region‑specific safeguarding pages (for example, in the United Kingdom) repeat the same standards and adapt them to local legal requirements.

By the time other systems were being forced into similar standards through lawsuits or consent decrees, Latter‑day Saints had already received global, written instructions embedding two‑adult supervision into ordinary ward life. Those standards continue to be reiterated in new training and safety pages, making the Church one of the more structurally safe environments for one‑on‑one adult–youth contact in the congregational world.

3) Mandatory, Role‑Specific Training and Renewal

In 1995, The Church of Jesus Christ had produced training materials for bishops on how to understand and recognize abuse, and then provided step-by-step guidance on how to respond. 

This publication was quoted in later manuals as an early training, though implementation was not mandatory or systematic. The Church provided similar materials for all members in two 1997 publications: “Preventing and Responding to Spouse Abuse” and “Child Abuse: Helps for Members.”

In the early aughts, the Church produced a DVD Responding to Child Abuse to be played at ward and branch council meetings with an associated pamphlet. In 2008, the First Presidency wrote a letter to be read in leadership trainings explaining to leaders how to protect victims. 

Continuing and incremental improvements were made through the 2010s. In 2019, the Church moved to a more formal system with the launch of Children and Youth Protection Training for leaders and volunteers in the United States and Canada, accompanied by a directive from the Priesthood and Family Department that those in relevant callings must complete the training, formally systematizing best practices training.

4) Centralized Records and Portability of Warnings

Long before the current wave of abuse reporting, the Church built its ecclesiastical life around centralized membership records rather than purely local rolls. That meant that serious concerns raised in a membership council did not simply disappear when someone moved; there was a mechanism to mark records, restrict transfers, and ensure that new leaders received needed background.

In the current General Handbook, those instincts are made explicit. Instructions on membership councils and move restrictions explain how a bishop or stake president can place a hold on a membership record when serious concerns are pending, and how decisions from councils are reported centrally.

The Handbook’s policies on abuse specify that when a person has sexually abused a child or youth—or seriously abused a child physically or emotionally—their membership record is annotated. Members with such annotations are not to receive callings or assignments involving children or youth, are not to be assigned as ministering companions to youth, and are not to be given ministering assignments to households with children or youth. These restrictions follow the member wherever they move because the annotation is part of the central record. In a world where many congregational networks are only now building abuse databases after devastating investigations, Latter‑day Saints have the advantage of a long‑standing global membership system and clear written policies about annotations and move restrictions. 

5)Survivor Support and Redress

For decades, Church leaders have been instructed that their first responsibility when abuse occurs is to help the victim and protect the vulnerable. Gospel Topics essays and counseling resources emphasize that victims are not at fault, that abuse is a serious sin, and that leaders should help survivors access both spiritual care and professional counseling.

Handbook instructions have long allowed bishops to use fast‑offering funds to help members pay for professional counseling when they cannot do so themselves. That principle—combining pastoral care with tangible financial assistance—has been part of Latter‑day Saint welfare practice for years, even if it was not framed in the language of “redress schemes.”

Recent materials have made this more visible and explicit. A 2018 Ensign article and subsequent online lessons on recognizing and healing from abuse gave members and leaders concrete steps for support. A more recent newsroom article, “How Latter‑day Saints Approach Abuse,” states plainly that the Church offers and often covers the cost of professional counseling for victims, regardless of their ability to pay, and directs leaders again to use fast offerings where needed. International safeguarding pages, such as those in the United Kingdom and in responses to national inquiries in New Zealand, repeat similar commitments.

Unlike Australia’s government‑run National Redress Scheme, the Church’s approach is ecclesiastical rather than statutory; it works through bishops, welfare funds, and, where appropriate, legal settlements. But measured against the core survivor‑centric lesson—words must be joined to concrete care—the Church has for many years combined clear doctrinal condemnation of abuse with structured access to counseling and material help. 

6) Culture and Communications: From Reputation Management to Safety‑First

As early as 1978, there was direct condemnation of child abuse during the Church’s general conference. And in 1979, domestic abuse was a consideration in giving a temple recommend.

In perhaps the strongest possible cultural signal within the Latter-day Saint context, questions about abuse of family members were added to the temple recommend questions in 1989, alongside other major cultural and doctrinal signifiers such as chastity and dietary restrictions. 

Between 1976 and 2013, more than 50 news and magazine articles appeared in Church publications condemning child abuse in unequivocal terms and encouraging members to seek help rather than suffer in silence. 

That cultural messaging has remained consistent. Since 2018, that cultural messaging has accelerated. Articles like “Hope and Healing for Victims of Abuse,” online lessons on recognizing abuse, the consolidation of the General Handbook (with entire subsections titled “Safeguarding Children” and “Safeguarding Youth”), and newsroom explainers on how the Church approaches abuse have all pushed in the same direction: make expectations public, normalize reporting, and center the needs of victims rather than the reputation of the institution.

Culture is the hardest thing to measure. There will continue to be local leaders who respond poorly, and media stories will rightly scrutinize those failures. But if we apply the same standard we used for Chicago Public Schools and other systems—Are there clear structures? Are expectations written down? Are leaders being told in public documents that protection comes before reputation?—the answer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints today is yes. The Church was well ahead of the curve in addressing this tragic issue.

Are We Actually Doing Poorly?

Part of the answer is simply mathematical. In a global church with millions of members, hundreds of thousands of local leaders, and decades of weekly contact with children and youth, even an exceptionally small failure rate produces more than enough heartbreak to fill a docuseries. A system can be comparatively safe and still have real, grievous failures. The stories in Surviving Mormonism are painful precisely because they are exceptions in a people who know, instinctively and doctrinally, that children ought to be protected.

The best available research suggests that on both child abuse and the well-being of LGBT+ members, the Church of Jesus Christ performs well above the average. Docuseries such as Surviving Mormonism tell important stories that can help continual improvement, but they can paint a misleading picture by picking exceptional rather than representative cases. This treatment is applied to the Church of Jesus Christ simply because, as a religious minority, there is curiosity. And frankly, the word “Mormon” when combined with scandal sells. 

It is tragic that any of the stories featured in Surviving Mormonism happened at all. Latter‑day Saints should continue to improve training, to enforce the two‑adult rule without exception, to post reporting steps, and to support survivors with compassion and concrete help, always working toward the goal of eliminating abuse. Perhaps the Church can be at the forefront of developing even better policies than we are currently imagining. That said, when we step back and compare reforms across churches, schools, Scouts, and sports, the evidence suggests that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints has built the right safeguards and, in key areas, has been ahead of broader societal trends in implementing them, and has the results you would expect from such forward thinking.

Related Articles

• Attention Is Cheap. Love Is Expensive. It’s Worth It
• When Compassion Misleads: How Faith and Identity Can Coexist
• Netflix’s American Primeval: The Prejudiced Fiction of Brigham Young

The post “Surviving Mormonism” and the Real Story of Institutional Harm appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Seeing Critics of the Church with a Pure Love

Outside the theater after a performance of the musical “The Book of Mormon,” two young women serving as missionaries laugh with a line of theatergoers who had just spent two hours chuckling at their faith. One man teased them, using a phone recording, fishing for a cringeworthy sound bite. Instead of debating, one sister offered him a copy of the book with a smile: “If you liked the parody, you might like the source.” He took it, still smirking. A week later, he messaged them to say he had read a few chapters and—more surprisingly—he apologized for trying to embarrass them. “I didn’t expect you to be kind,” he wrote. Kindness didn’t convert him (conversion comes by the Spirit), but it converted the moment. That impulse—answer a jab with generosity—has quietly become one of our most reliable instincts.

Our critics (and even our enemies) can refine our courage, our clarity, and our hospitality—charity without capitulation.

We do not concede doctrine, outsource discernment, or grant a heckler’s veto to critics. We listen because people are precious, not because scorn is persuasive, and we keep the “pure love of Christ” as both our motive and method. Learning from our enemies, in this sense, means learning how to love them better. Yes, as necessary, we must answer with facts, with consistency and safeguards; those looking for Jesus Christ and His Church deserve that from us. And when waves of attention build, the posture still holds.

#SurvivingMormonism

The upcoming documentary series “Surviving Mormonism” is generating a fresh crest of negative attention toward The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another entry in the well-worn exposé genre of Latter-day Saints, the show purports to reveal the “dark history” of the Church through interviews with “abuse survivors, ex-Mormons and former LDS church leaders.” The show will be hosted by reality TV star Heather Gay, whose exodus story from the Church has been published as a New York Times best-seller.

And, if that guess turns out to be true, then part of an appropriate response to such scornful content is to “heed not.” However, engaging in loving and productive ways can also be appropriate, and may provide different benefits.

Many Latter-day Saints online modeled this in a viral response to the show’s title. In a short period of time, many Latter-day Saint creators have used the hashtag #SurvivingMormonism to poke fun at themselves for the often mild annoyances and idiosyncrasies of church members and culture. Examples included: “Surviving Mormonism, but it’s just me carrying a bunch of chairs to impress girls at my ward,” “Surviving Mormonism and it’s just me having to play basketball on carpet,” or “Surviving Mormonism and its High Council Sunday.”

These examples come in the same spirit as the outreach after the offensive Broadway play, which mocked Latter-day Saints and their faith: disarm hostility with humor, neighborliness, and confidence in the gospel rather than defensiveness.

Under normal circumstances, this kind of response softens hearts and builds goodwill. But because Latter-day Saints remain an out-group in many attention markets, these are not normal circumstances, and goodwill is not always reciprocated. The duty remains the same either way: meet caricature with Christlike love without ceding truth.

In the same spirit of not reacting defensively, we can go even further to recognize that every incoming volley is being fired by a human being—a fellow brother or sister in the family of God. The Savior’s example and modern apostolic counsel make clear that accusations and sensationalized personal apostasies sometimes merit our response as directed by the promptings of the Holy Ghost. But when we are called to defend truth, virtue, and the Kingdom of God, we should ensure that we are defending it in the Savior’s way, which means that our responses should always be motivated and shaped by what the Book of Mormon calls “the pure love of Christ.”

Old Bigotries, New Veneers

To understand why this pattern keeps resurfacing, zoom out from one show to the longer storyline. Across two centuries, Americans have recycled the same basic image of Latter‑day Saints with different lighting. In the 19th century, the Saints were cast as a wicked cult—socially alien, politically suspect, theologically off. That caricature licensed extraordinary measures and mob violence. From the mid‑20th century through the early 2010s, the image softened to false religion; good neighbors: Scout troops and service projects, civic leadership, and the 2002 Olympics—the so‑called “Mormon Moment.” For many, the Church read as rigorous but ordinary.

Over roughly the last decade, the mood darkened again—not because the Church pivoted into menace, but because the storytellers and their incentives changed. Prestige docudramas and true‑crime packaging blurred a fundamentalist offshoot into the main body; algorithms prized moral threat; headlines chased sharper edges. The label did the work that the evidence did not. Put simply: the attention markets transformed; the Church didn’t.

That is why yesterday’s bigotries can return in new veneers. Where 19th‑century broadsheets warned of polygamy and “secret oaths,” today’s packages spotlight weird underwear, money, and abuse. The old charge was alien. The contemporary brand is algorithmic alien. And conflation does the rest.

Meanwhile, what actually changed inside the Church in the last twenty years? Not a lurch into danger, but a remarkably steady picture: mission service and global humanitarian work; lay leadership; a plea for accurate naming; a familiar drumbeat on family, chastity, and service. 

So why did the temperature rise now? Several gears meshed at once. From 2012 to 2016, social feeds became the front page; the content that thrived honed villain arcs and moral bite with faster payoff loops. 

Streaming fought for differentiation with “based on a true story” limited series that collapsed an offshoot into the whole or an era into the present because simplicity binge‑watches better than footnotes. Investigations—sometimes vital—fed advocacy appeals, which seeded more coverage, which kept the story hot. 

And as national institutions lost trust, local communities with strong norms looked suspect by contrast; what used to read as civic virtue now reads as control to audiences trained to equate restraint with repression.

Put bluntly: the villain economy found a familiar mask. 

Ministering to Deep and Unmet Needs

That context can help us be less defensive. The people sharing their stories are not attacking Latter-day Saints or their way of life; they are being used by entertainment producers to maximize attention by exploiting their stories to fit into the package that sells today. If attention markets reward heat over light, disciples must choose the Savior’s incentives instead. 

In his 1977 talk, “Jesus: The Perfect Leader,” President Spencer W. Kimball taught that “Jesus saw sin as wrong but also was able to see sin as springing from deep and unmet needs on the part of the sinner … We need to be able to look deeply enough into the lives of others to see the basic causes for their failures and shortcomings.” 

This counsel to “look deeply into the lives of others” stands in a constructive sort of tension with the Book of Mormon’s depiction of giving no “heed” to mockery and scorn. In the day of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the word heed meant partly “to regard with care.” Then, Latter-day Saints must learn to carefully regard every soul who points the finger of scorn while disregarding the offensiveness of scornful language itself. This can be a difficult line to walk, but it is also the one encouraged by those who seek to follow Jesus Christ. 

One practical help here is that our perception machinery is biased by availability cascades (what we keep seeing feels typical) and out-group homogeneity (we infer “that’s how they are” from one vivid case). Knowing that these are human tendencies—not personal attacks—lets us choose slow empathy over quick certainty. And because familiarity often breeds warmth, not contempt, it is good discipleship (and good social science) to actually know the neighbors we’re tempted to reduce to headlines.

To put this another way, we must learn not to be fragile conflict-avoiders who passively stay out of trouble, but Christlike, antifragile peacemakers who actively strive to bring peace to troubled souls. President Russell M. Nelson reiterated his prophetic call for us to become peacemakers until, as it were, his dying breath, highlighting the significance of our efforts while recognizing our ongoing need for improvement. As we recognize both our own parochial concerns with public sentiment against Latter-day Saints and our broader sociopolitical environment of divisiveness and extremism, it is easy to see why peacemakers are needed and will continue to be needed.

Learning from Our “Enemies”

That posture doesn’t just restrain us; it teaches us. The host and individuals who will appear on the screen are children of God. Their stories matter. Our task is to keep clarity and charity together—refusing caricature, refusing contempt, and refusing to let the market’s heat stand in for moral light.

Latter‑day Saints in general are renowned for being enthusiastically kind people, both to outsiders as well as to each other. Yet we, like all faith communities, have our blind spots, and those blind spots tend to enlarge when we are in the majority. And who better to help us learn how to better prevent the lapses that sometimes happen in our policies than those who previously fell victim to them?

The landmark book “The Anatomy of Peace” explains that the individuals and groups we consider our most bitter enemies can also teach us about some of our largest moral blind spots. In one of the book’s exercises for “recovering inner clarity and peace,” the authors invite us to ask ourselves a series of introspection questions such as how we, or a group with whom we identify, have made our enemies’ lives more difficult, and how progress toward peace with them might be hindered by our own pride, our feelings of victimization and entitlement, and our desires for validation, status, or belonging. Conducting this kind of searching inventory of our attitudes and behaviors and of those in our faith community is difficult soul‑work, but it yields hearts and congregations that are kinder, more inclusive, and more unified in our quest to build Zion. The alternative is to be damned to continue with our moral blind spots—talking past one another, disregarding or downplaying each other’s needs and pains, and grieving in the gridlock of our seemingly irreconcilable differences.

Because “the pure love of Christ” is so far above and beyond mere human capacity to obtain, we are exhorted to “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart” to receive this love. We know we are receiving His love as we begin to “look deeply” into the lives of others and see their divine worth, hear the cries of their hearts, and offer them our peaceful presence and care without mixed feelings and motivations. Through faithfully living by the doctrine of Christ and practicing “diligence unto prayer,” Christ’s pure love may endure with us.

When criticism comes: (1) Heed not the mockery—don’t amplify heat. We know why this happens. (2) Regard the person with care—see “a blessed being of light, the spirit child of an infinite God.” (3) Respond in the Savior’s way—facts with fairness, humor with humility, love without capitulation. As we pray “with all the energy of heart,” His pure love will reshape both our moments and our ministries.

The post Attention Is Cheap. Love Is Expensive. It’s Worth It appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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During the summer of 2025, we’ve seen a notable shift in the narrative style of superhero films. 

Since 2002, superhero films have centered on origin stories—plots that trace heroes from ordinary individuals to extraordinary agents of justice and good. But James Gunn’s rebooted film Superman and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s introduction of the Fantastic Four both notably start in the middle of their characters’ stories. These characters are fully formed, and their backstories are assumed and deemphasized. 

This shift reflects more than just storytelling evolution; rather, it reflects a deeper cultural transformation in how we are responding to the crises around us, how we conceive of agency, and how we imagine heroism.

In the same way the origin story rose as a response to our cultural processing of 9/11, this shift away from them reflects the breakdown of shared national narratives and a desperate search for safety in an age of uncertainty. 

Pre-9/11: Action Without Introspection

Before the events of September 11, 2001, American action cinema largely operated within a confident moral framework. The genre thrived on spectacle, propulsion, and clarity, rather than introspection or psychological depth. Heroes were rarely burdened with complexity; they were good simply because they were good. Audiences accepted this simplicity not as a narrative deficiency, but as a feature of the genre’s moral architecture. The focus was on what the hero would do, not why they felt compelled to do it.

Similarly, in Independence Day (1996), Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is a hotshot fighter pilot who defends the planet from extraterrestrial annihilation. The film offers no biographical backstory to explain Hiller’s courage; it simply presents him as the kind of American who rises to meet the moment. 

In addition, Top Gun (1986), with its swaggering fighter jocks and Cold War subtext, gives us Maverick (Tom Cruise), a thrill-seeking pilot who competes to be the best. Top Gun is notable because it does nod to the mysterious death of Maverick’s father, but it does so without mining the event for psychological motivation. It presents it not as formative for our character, but as part of his formed character. We never ask what made Maverick crave speed. 

These characters are fully formed at their introductions. There is no demand for narrative justification or psychological realism.

Even in the emerging superhero genre of the era—where one might expect more elaborate treatments of identity and origin, in line with their comic book form—this tendency persisted. The villain was often the one with a backstory, not the hero. Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) gives Jack Nicholson’s Joker an origin as a mob enforcer named Jack Napier, whose disfigurement and descent into madness offer a form of explanation for his violence. Batman, in contrast, is defined primarily through action and mystique. In X-Men (2000), the audience is given a haunting origin for Magneto, who, as a child, survives Auschwitz and emerges with a militant view of mutant survival. The heroes—Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey—are just there. Even Wolverine, the film’s breakout antihero, is more defined by his amnesia than a deeply explored past.

In places where we do see origin-like elements, they are treated as flashbacks after which we catch up with our heroes mid-story. We see this approach in the brief flashback to the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in the 1989 film. Perhaps the clearest example of this narrative economy can be found in Superman: The Movie (1978). The film opens with the destruction of Krypton and young Kal-El’s escape to Earth. But these sequences are delivered in brisk montage and are more interested in Zod, the villain. We quickly skip ahead to a point where Superman is already the embodiment of American virtue.

Post-9/11: Origins as Ontology

In the years following 9/11, that changed. As American society absorbed the trauma of watching its symbols of power collapse live on television, it entered what we might call a hermeneutic age—an era defined by interpretation, inquiry, and a pervasive sense that nothing can be taken at face value. The cultural response was a desperate turn toward explanation, particularly in cinema.

The turn toward psychological realism and its expression—the origin story, arguably began with Spider-Man (2002). Released less than a year after 9/11, Sam Raimi’s film offered a superhero origin story steeped in trauma, guilt, and reluctant responsibility. Peter Parker isn’t simply bitten by a radioactive spider; he wrestles with the moral implications of power, the weight of his uncle’s death, and the crushing burden of his double life. The story insists on the interiority of its hero. And for the first time, where our superhero came from wasn’t a footnote; it was the story itself.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) exemplifies this shift. Rather than drop us into the action, the film spends nearly an hour exploring Bruce Wayne’s childhood fears, the trauma of losing his parents, and his training with the League of Shadows. The film doesn’t hint at his backstory; it is his backstory. Batman becomes not merely a symbol of justice but a complex psychological case study. And while the latter two films don’t repeat his origin, they continue to build on the themes of what caused him to be who he is. In The Dark Knight (2008), the Joker is terrifying precisely because he is inexplicable.

This trend wasn’t confined to traditional superheroes. Consider Casino Royale (2006), which reboots James Bond not for the next adventure, as he had been rebooted four times before, but at the beginning of his story. Here, he doesn’t begin as the suave, infallible operative of earlier films, but as a man learning the emotional and moral costs of espionage. Even Sonic the Hedgehog got an origin story!

Iron Man (2008) launches the Marvel Cinematic Universe not with world-saving action, but with Tony Stark’s reckoning with the consequences of his own weapons empire. Every character must be wounded, conflicted, and from somewhere. It is no mistake that Tony Stark’s origin focuses more on his alcoholism and troubled romantic life, which could resonate with the audience, than on his extreme wealth.

As audiences, we wanted to feel like anyone could rise up and become the hero, and by seeing these heroes begin as people like us, we felt empowered, putting ourselves into their shoes. 9/11 showed that our external heroes could fail, and the intimate experience of seeing the tragedy in our own living rooms made each of us want to feel empowered. For all the fantasy special effects, these films were at their heart a playbook for how each audience member could become a hero. It’s no surprise that during this period, it was our least human superheroes that struggled to resonate with audiences, Superman Returns, Man of Steel, the first two Thor films, and Eternals. These characters didn’t become heroes; they were born as heroes, so audiences didn’t need them.

A New Kind of Hero Post-COVID

Today, we are no longer reeling from a singular, unifying trauma like 9/11. Instead, we inhabit an age of chronic disillusionment. The COVID-19 pandemic became not a rallying point but a breaking point—exposing fractures in our civic trust, political institutions, and even basic consensus about reality. Where the post-9/11 era yearned for heroes we could become, the pandemic era has left us longing for something else entirely: the comfort that someone, anyone, in a position of responsibility will simply do their job.

We can see this anxiety in the fractured multi-verse style stories that began to take hold. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) captured this feeling in the prestige market, while it took over in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). The progenitor of this trope, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), went from novelty project to cultural behemoth post-COVID in 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse.

But while this reflected the moment in a way that clearly intrigued audiences, it didn’t speak to their desire for something soothing. Consequently, the appetite for the 9/11 generation of superheroes has waned. While the studio system kept producing more of the same, it was the throwback exceptions like Top Gun: Maverick (2022) that captured attention and rose to the top. This film succeeds precisely because it returns us to a world where competent people lead, where moral clarity is possible, and where action matters more than angst. Rooster doesn’t need an origin story; he needs to hit the target. And he does.

Audiences seem tired of watching characters endlessly become. They want to see them do their jobs.

This brings us to the superhero season of 2025. Although Marvel released Thunderbolts*, widely regarded as their best film in years, the reveal that it was another origin story about a superhero team ultimately turned off audiences, who then didn’t show up.

Audiences instead have shown up on the superhero front for Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Both stories drop us into the action in media res, asking us to keep up with the characters who are already competent and decisive. We meet our newest Superman after a fight. 

Superman is notable here because his story does hint at his origin, but the film’s plot involves how he manages and subverts that in the present moment. One of the film’s major themes is how his origin does not define him. 

Both Clark Kent and Reed Richards have extreme powers—they have been entrusted by the people of their universes to protect them. Both of them fail and then [spoiler-alert] ultimately emerge victorious as they combine their deeply moral hearts with their advanced competences.

They care about people, so they protect them, and that’s a good enough reason. 

Today, America wishes our leaders and institutions would do the same. In the absence of that, we go to the cinema to see our fantasies and salve our wounds.

The post-9/11 era transformed not just geopolitics but the grammar of our storytelling. American films, once comfortable in moral simplicity, turned inward, seeking explanations, origins, and ontological justifications for every mask, every motive. That desire was understandable. In times of trauma, we reach for coherence. But as our culture has moved into its next phase, it has grown weary of explanation and demands action. We do not always need to know why someone became a hero. Sometimes, it is enough that they are one.

The post How We Lost Faith in the Hero’s Beginning appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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For a Latter-day Saint, I’m unusually interested in alcohol.

I’ve rarely felt tempted to drink it; I know myself well enough to know it wouldn’t end well—when the Word of Wisdom speaks to “the weak and the weakest of all saints,” I smile and say thankfully, “That’s me.” And yet the names of unfamiliar spirits can send me down Wikipedia rabbit holes, seeking strange knowledge like the difference between “liquors” and “liqueurs,” or ales and lagers, and why James Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred.

It’s the culture of the thing that attracts me: the history, the creativity; the vineyards from the Renaissance still run by the same families and the beers hand-brewed by monks; it’s the way a beverage (Scotch, bourbon, absinthe) can represent a place or a people or an era; it’s all the bottles in all the cellars of the world, filled decades ago by men now dead, waiting to be opened and emptied in an evening.

And we teetotalers get … Sprite? No, thanks. I’ll just have water.

This essay isn’t about alcohol. It’s about storytelling, and my vehicle for conveying my thoughts is Star Wars’ Andor, about to begin its second season on Disney Plus.

And then, a bit later, I realized something interesting was going on.

If you haven’t watched Andor, ask yourself: how would Hollywood usually treat these deaths? The guards were bad guys. They worked for the Empire, if only indirectly, and they were telling the protagonist at gunpoint that he had to give them money or go to jail. If they were in the original Star Wars trilogy, the movie would make sure you forgot them immediately—their dialogue would be limited to “Stop right there!” or “You rebel scum,” they’d be wearing helmets to cover their faces, and their voices would be distorted to help you pretend they’re not human. For allegedly antifascist art like Star Wars, it’s an awfully fascist way to treat people.

In Andor, these guys have faces, and their deaths have consequences.

While our protagonist anxiously builds a false alibi, we learn there are detectives on the case—two of them, the inspector and his deputy. The deputy has stayed up all night gathering evidence and thinks he can find the killer in a matter of days, but his boss is about to leave for a performance review where he has to report his crime statistics to the Empire. He knows what will happen if he ends his report with, “And by the way, two of my own were bumped off last night.”

The inspectors’ dialogue deserves an essay of its own. It’s an argument between youth and age, zeal and world wisdom, between an Imperial true believer and a very mild sort of Rebellion—it’s even a philosophical contest between deontology and consequentialism—and it’s all carried off with a mixture of wit and realism I can’t remember Star Wars ever achieving before. Both inspectors make good points; each is self-serving in ways he won’t admit, and if you think it’s obvious which decision they should make, then you probably haven’t thought the thing through.

And remember, these are the bad guys—low-ranking bad guys, no less, invested with agency, intelligence, and humanity. And they’re not the only ones.

Prison guards? They have faces, too. We see their sadism, yes, but also their fear of their victims and their mundane frustrations with being understaffed at work.

Imperial soldiers? We see their disappointment with bad assignments and their hope for a better life; we see their heroism, as when an Imperial colonel dies trying to save civilians.

Even in the Empire’s Gestapo, we see humanity: a rare woman in the officer corps, determined and talented, her eyes locked on whatever floats beyond the glass ceiling; a senior officer, undoubtedly a wicked war criminal but also a very good boss; a man—just one would-be righteous man—who’s realized what he’s involved in and desperately wants out.

We’ve come a long way from “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.”

Now, back to alcohol.

There was a golden age of TV recently, or so I’ve been told. The mostly episodic shows of my childhood were replaced by a new era in which entire multi-season series were planned out before their pilots aired. Successful shows could become something like 40-hour movies, and writers used them to develop characters and themes in ways no visual medium had ever allowed before.

The golden age’s brightest gems could usually be found on HBO, whose The Sopranos and The Wire often appear as numbers 1 and 2 in rankings of the best TV shows of all time, with AMC’s Breaking Bad also in the conversation. If you follow publications that review pop culture, you could probably name another dozen acclaimed series from the era: Mad Men, parts of Game of Thrones, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Girls, Fleabag, The Americans, and so on.

And we teetotalers get … Marvel? Disney? I love Encanto and Coco, but I get tired of choosing between movies for children and movies for perpetual adolescents; why is it so hard for a Latter-day Saint grown-up to find a grown-up movie?

No—really. I know some of you just rolled your eyes: “Where does this guy get off calling my favorite movies adolescent?”

But ask yourself how the typical PG-13 blockbuster presents the world lately, and especially its protagonist. He’s usually young and attractive—I say “he,” but “strong female characters” often fit the type—and he’s defined by two things: some special gift and some dream or destiny implied by the gift.

The gift and destiny define the story, too: maybe the protagonist knows his destiny, and the story will tell how he and his gift overcame the haters and doubters to attain it; or maybe he doesn’t know his destiny, and the story will tell how he discovers it. Either way, the decisive moment comes when the protagonist chooses once and for all to believe in his destiny and believe in himself.

What time of life does that story symbolize, if not adolescence, the age of discovering your talents and choosing your career? The story’s not about children, who define themselves by what they love and not yet by gifts and destinies; it’s not about the elderly, who have only one grand destiny left and yet often say they’re in the happiest time of their lives. It’s certainly not about the middle-aged, who are defined less by gifts than by burdens, and the many people who depend on them.

No: today’s typical blockbuster, in part for the most practical of box-office reasons, is about the most self-centered decade of American life: 15 to 24, the age when childhood dependency is ending and adult commitments aren’t yet formed—when you can choose whatever future you wish, and anything seems possible if you just want it hard enough. In fact, it’s the age portrayed by the original Star Wars, the age of Luke yearning to escape his uncle’s farm and “Do or do not, there is no try.”

There’s nobody like that in Andor.

In Andor, the rebels’ leader is daring and devious, but he can’t fight or even know what’s going on without his network of guerrillas and informers, any one of whom, if caught, could mean the end of him and all his schemes. The rebels’ financial backer has plenty of money, but she needs help to cover up what she’s doing; the Empire is closing in, and we watch in heartbreaking real time as she discovers she has already sacrificed her family to the cause.

Like human beings, Andor’s characters need each other. Like grown-ups, they know it. And so, when they interact—speak, touch, trust, doubt, betray—it actually matters.

Does it make each character less important not to be self-sufficient, not to make a difference by himself—not to have the one gift to rule them all?

Much the opposite. Let me ask you: when was the last time you saw a movie or series whose hero was elderly? I don’t mean a show with Harrison Ford or Samuel L. Jackson in his mid-70s, with directors and stunt coordinators straining the limits of their art to pretend he can still beat everyone up. I mean an old person behaving like an old person; in fact, I mean the true hero of Andor, the protagonist’s mother, Maarva, a sick old woman hobbling about on a cane.

She hasn’t always hobbled. In a flashback, we see her in an adventurous middle age, stealing salvage from a crashed ship minutes before the navy arrives and then risking her life to rescue an orphan from certain death. Later we hear she was the president of some big civic organization. But those days are long past when the show starts, and now she spends most of her time resting in a chair, nagging her aimless son when he’s present and fretting while he’s away.

Most blockbusters that included such a hero—and there aren’t many—would force her through the same adolescent character arc as their protagonist. Her incapacity is all in her mind! She just needs to believe in herself! Then she can prove she’s still got it, that she’s not so old after all.

Maarva might be the first elderly character I’ve seen whose heroism doesn’t require her to become young again, who conquers with the powers appropriate to old age. It’s her experience and wisdom—and even her day-to-day uselessness—that let her see the truth while her younger friends, blinded by daily cares, treat Imperial occupation as just one more of life’s hassles to be put up with and outlasted. And when she speaks, it’s the love she’s earned through a lifetime of service that makes her friends listen.

Not that they want to, not at first; at first, they don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What she’s taking on is so comically beyond her strength and so likely to cost them her life—forget spies and stormtroopers; if she doesn’t stay warm and take her medicine, she’s not going to last long enough to be captured. But once again, she sees what they don’t: the worth of what’s left of her life and the worth of what she can do with it.

* * *

Alcohol won’t always be dangerous. I don’t know whether its nature will change or ours will, but there will come a day when the saints and their Master drink of the fruit of the vine in their Father’s Kingdom, and no alcoholism or drunk driving or domestic violence will follow.

Someday, storytelling will be safe, too. Someday, “adult” won’t mean “pornographic,” and “mature” won’t mean “nihilistic”; someday, our culture won’t ask us to choose between childishness and wickedness.

In the meantime, though, I’ll be grateful that healthy grown-up stories aren’t quite as rare as Word of Wisdom–compliant grown-up drinks, even if, for the moment, our culture shows little interest in either. Star Wars looks set to move on as if Andor had never happened, and I expect it to keep spinning out mostly bad, mostly adolescent stories as long as people will still watch them, after which it may well be replaced by something still worse and more adolescent. (Probably something distributed on TikTok.)

But so what? I don’t have to watch all that. And if Andor’s moral revolution in Star Wars was doomed to fail, at least it had—like Maarva—the wisdom to know it should still try.

The post Why Andor’s Grown-Up Heroes Matter to Faithful Adults appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Hulu’s recent series Devil in the Family tells the tragic story of Ruby Franke, a Latter-day Saint family vlogger who seemed to have it all until she was sent to jail for child abuse. Franke amassed millions of followers and more than a billion views on YouTube with fun and relatable videos of her family. But Hulu, armed with more than 1000 hours of Franke’s unseen footage, showed what was happening between the picture-perfect takes that made it to YouTube. It is painful to watch in more ways than one. 

There are things we could quibble with about how Latter-day Saints are portrayed in the series, such as the emphasis on Christ’s Second Coming and statements from church leaders and members, which are taken out of context. But in our conversations with Latter-day Saints, one of the most common themes we’ve heard is how relatable the Franke family seems. It’s easy to imagine Ruby, her (now) ex-husband Kevin, and their six children living on your street, attending your ward. We recognize the neighborhoods, the faith, the cultural pressures. More disturbingly, many Latter-day Saints see Ruby and Kevin in themselves. The resemblance, for some, is uncanny and unnerving. The series raises a troubling question: If this can happen in the Franke family, what can happen in mine? 

We do not think that Ruby’s story is somehow “representative” of Latter-day Saints in Utah or elsewhere. Few Latter-day Saints will go as far as Ruby did. But Ruby’s story provides a useful opportunity for self-reflection and self-evaluation.  As part of that reflection, we explore a few pressures and temptations which are relevant to the Franke case but which also apply to many others, both in the Church and out. Our observations and insights are limited by the information available, and our goal is not to pass judgment but to learn from this cautionary tale.

Perfectionism

One of the most relatable and disturbing aspects of the Franke story is not just the pursuit of perfection but the obsession with the image of looking perfect—happy, fulfilled, wholesome, airbrushed, aesthetic, and flawless. Even a ten-year-old knows the right angle to hold the camera for a selfie. This is not an issue found only in church culture. Western culture breeds it. We just happen to marinate in it in a way that confuses “be ye therefore perfect” with “be ye therefore polished.”

That distinction–seen as perfect rather than being good—matters. 

In a world where so much is being broadcast, or at minimum documented, there can be great pressure to want to look as if “all is well in Zion.” As a public-facing family with a broad audience, the pressure to maintain the image of perfection could feel even more extreme. But we should not let the desire to look perfect overpower our commitment to doing good. 

Perfectionism tends to conflate being righteous with being flawless, an impossible standard that sets us up for unhealthy self-criticism and disappointment. The emphasis on avoiding all mistakes (or at least the appearance of mistakes) can lead us to shame-based coping or discipline strategies. Jodi Hildebrant, Ruby’s friend, therapist, and later business partner, unfortunately, employed many shame-based tactics for behavior change within the Franke family. Despite the pretense that such strategies take misbehavior “seriously,” recent research shows that shame is not very motivating. If we really want to change ourselves or others, we should reach for other strategies. 

There tends to be very little forgiveness or grace in perfectionism. Any minor mistake, any flaw, is magnified to the point where we can no longer see the good in ourselves or others. And when we extend the expectation of perfection to our children, we overestimate our ability to control their behavior as well as their ability to live flawlessly. For example, most parents can relate to the experience of having a child throw a tantrum in a store. We may worry and think, “What do other people think of my parenting?” We mistakenly believe that good parents would not have children who act out in such public displays. However, the truth is that … kids are kids. All humans are imperfect and in a state of becoming. We all make mistakes, we all fall short. But our mistakes and shortcomings do not define us. 

As Dieter F. Uchtdorf has taught, God is not surprised by our mistakes, nor does he relish the thought of punishing us for our fallen nature. He wants us to learn and grow, and that process will include many mistakes: 

“We have all seen a toddler learn to walk. He takes a small step and totters. He falls. Do we scold such an attempt? Of course not. What father would punish a toddler for stumbling? We encourage, we applaud, and we praise because with every small step, the child is becoming more like his parents.” 

He continues:

“I believe in a Heavenly Father who is loving and caring and who rejoices in our every effort to stand tall and walk toward Him. Even when we stumble, He urges us not to be discouraged—never to give up or flee our allotted field of service—but to take courage, find our faith, and keep trying.”

Hildebrant’s counseling approach, which Ruby evidently adopted, distorted religious principles as she taught that “truth” required complete control, rigidity, and perfection. Further, when people fell short, Hildebrant thought the result should be extreme discipline (which became life-threatening in the case of the two youngest Franke children) or cutting off relationships. This is clearly a distortion of Latter-day Saint teaching and practice.

Perfectionism doesn’t allow for inevitable struggles, mistakes, and vulnerability of humanity. It hollows us out, leaving us empty and exhausted in our relentless pursuit of an impossible standard. But Christ does not demand that we be flawless—He invites us to come to Him. His perfection is not a measuring stick for our failure but a gift that bridges the gap between us and our Heavenly Father. Where perfectionism isolates us, Christ’s wholeness connects us. Where perfectionism shames, Christ redeems. When we let perfectionism go, we open the possibility of truly connecting with Him and others. 

Outsourcing Moral Responsibility

A challenge Kevin faced was different, nonetheless just as relatable for many. Early in the series, Kevin says he was very insecure.  He said he was “willing to do anything to keep” his relationship with Ruby, even when this meant leaving home and not contacting his wife or children for an unspecified amount of time. (From what we can gather, it seems that Kevin needed to prove to Jodi that he had changed in order to be let back into the family.)

This, tragically, opened the door to the worst abuse that the Franke children suffered. With Kevin out of the picture, Ruby and Jodi resorted to more extreme methods of discipline and punishment. When Kevin received a call from Ruby on the day the police raided Jodi’s house, Kevin said it was the first time he had talked to his wife in a year.

“A lot of people will look at me and say, ‘How could he ever do that?’ but for those who respectfully ask me about it and say, ‘How could you?’ my response to that is ‘Who do you love more than anybody?’ And I say, ‘Well, what would happen if that individual that you love more than anybody started to go another way and started inviting you and encouraging you to go with them?’ Would you be able to easily say, ‘Goodbye, you’re out of my life?’” 

No doubt, it is a difficult dilemma. Many of us probably would have responded the same way that Kevin did. But it seems that Kevin’s desire to stay connected with his wife overrode his best judgment about his family’s needs and moral responsibility. At one point Kevin said he was “1000% compliant” to what Ruby and Jodi told him to do with the hope that he could save his marriage. This willingness to do anything to preserve a relationship (or what’s left of it) is a dangerous place to be.

In 2 Nephi 2:14, Lehi teaches that God “created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.” When we outsource moral responsibility to other people in the hopes of gaining or keeping their approval, we give up our birthright as beings who are free to act. As painful as it may sometimes be, there should be lines that we are not willing to cross—not for our friends, not for our family members, not for people who threaten us with rejection for following our conscience.

This can be difficult because belonging and connection are innate, natural human needs. Family and friends can form the fabric of our lives. We need each other to thrive. At the same time, we must remember the first great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). All other desires or goals are secondary. The desire for approval must not lead us to outsource our moral responsibility.

Following Flawed Influencers 

Finally, it seems that Ruby and Kevin allowed themselves to be unduly influenced by Jodi. The Franke’s (and many others) saw her as special, chosen—someone who had rare access to spiritual wisdom and knowledge. Jodi provided a kind of certainty and “answers” to issues that the Frankes were facing with parenting and life in general. (We note, in passing, that Jodi’s professional license had been suspended beginning in 2012 for unethical conduct. She was not a therapist in good standing when she began to advise the Franke’s.) Tragically, the more the Frankes let Jodi in, the more their lives fell apart.

Reflecting these broader cultural trends, Latter-day Saint influencers have also expanded their reach, amassing millions of followers and using these platforms to share content (hopefully positive) ranging from therapy to homesteading—all through a faith-centric lens. Their growing influence even led to 2024 being dubbed ‘the year of the Mormon women.’

President Russell M. Nelson has addressed the importance of managing our digital consumption and being mindful of online influences. Addressing the youth in June 2018, he challenged them to embark on a seven-day social media fast. He encouraged them to observe how this hiatus could affect their priorities and deepen their relationship with the Savior. Later, he extended a similar invitation to the women of the Church asking them to participate in a ten-day social media fast, emphasizing the need to reduce distractions and focus on spiritual matters. He also invited men to review their online habits in an inspirational call to do and “be better”. The message is clear: the world is full of competing voices vying for our attention, but we can be intentional about what we allow to shape us. We don’t have to be slaves to the algorithms.

It’s also worth remembering the non-digital ways we can influence others. Carol reflects on her own mother’s impact:

She wasn’t famous. Seeking attention wasn’t her way. But she had a unique gift for finding those in need of friendship, welcoming them into our family circle, and right up to our dinner table. In later years, I’ve come to understand more clearly the sadness she carried and the insecurities she battled. She struggled with her image, yet she continued to offer herself—first to bring me and my siblings into the world and then to care for us through a lifetime of devotion.

I can’t begin to count the hours she spent giving us rides to activities, wrangling younger siblings while watching me perform in a play, or with my shaky, squeaky violin in a school orchestra. Then, hurrying home to make dinner (which, to my shame, we often complained about), only to still manage to pull us into folding clothes and keeping the house clean—ensuring it was always comfortable enough for friends to drop by unannounced.

She had one driving passion—one she shared with us, imbuing us with a love for family history. As the only child and only member of the Church in her ancient family line, she breathed life into our ancestral past and inspired me to consider my own legacy.

She fought her battle with cancer to her last ragged breath, not in defiant resistance, but in love.

She didn’t curate a “feed” or seek validation through likes and shares. She simply lived—a life of sacrifice, service, and steadfast love. She wasn’t perfect, and she would be frustrated by any attempt to paint her that way. But somehow, her unseen efforts—those small, daily acts—shaped me more than any algorithm ever could.

My mom built something real, something lasting—she built me.

In a world obsessed with platforms and personas, algorithms may decide what appears on our screens, but we decide whether or not to look. We can seek out influences (digital and otherwise) that are quiet, unpolished, unseen by the masses—but real. We each have agency.

At the very end of Devil in the Family, Kevin reflects on the meaning of his story. He concludes by saying, “Ultimately, it’s a story of faith. If you put your faith in the wrong hands, you can lose everything.” As he says these words, the viewer is flown over a statue of the angel Moroni on the top of an LDS temple. The producers’ implication seems clear: the Frankes trusted their religion too much, and this led to their downfall.

That is not how we would sum up these lessons. What stands out is not just the cautionary tale of a family unraveling under pressure but the deeply personal challenge of self-examination. It is easy to watch someone else’s story and opine about where they veered from their values. It is far more difficult to be honest about where we might be doing the same.

If we care more about reflecting God’s image than curating our own, we will be less tempted to mask our struggles with a performance of perfection. If we have the integrity to act in ways that align with our values—even when it’s inconvenient or unpopular—we will be less likely to hand over our moral responsibility to others. And if Christ and His teachings are our greatest influence, we will be less susceptible to the voices that would distort, manipulate, or diminish our ability to truly love and lead.

The devil gets in where there is pretense, where there is self-deception, and where there is fear. But where there is truth, integrity, and divine influence, he has no foothold. That is the lesson worth taking from this story—and it is one of faith.

The post Influenced: The Troubling Familiarity of Ruby Franke’s Story appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

For Valentine’s Day, I looked at five recently released films that attempt to define love for modern audiences. These movies, spanning genres from romantic comedy to action thriller, offer a revealing snapshot of contemporary views on relationships. What is the state of love at the movies? And what does that offer as a commentary about love in today’s world? 

The five films each have several romantic relationships. They cross genres, platforms, and creative teams: 

• “You’re Cordially Invited,” the Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell romantic comedy, about two weddings scheduled for the same venue.
• “Kinda Pregnant,” the Amy Schumer comedy about feeling jealous about her pregnant friend and meeting the man of her dreams.
• “Love Hurts,” the Ke Huy Quan action film about a lost love taking him back to his organized crime days. 
• “La Dolce Villa,” a Hallmark-style romance on Netflix starring Scott Foley and set in Italy.
• “The Gorge,” a horror-thriller about two military operatives who fall for each other while guarding opposite sides of a mysterious gorge.

These are not the best romance films, nor do they represent the entirety of the industry or perceptions of romantic love; they are intended to be a snapshot. What’s notable is that despite how different the films are, there were several notable trends that were present across the films.

The Path of Attraction

Across these films, a distinct four-step pattern emerged in how the romantic relationships develop.

1. They have something in common

2. One person likes something groan-worthy about the other person 

3. They do something transgressive together 

4. The man does something to win the woman’s favor

The first step is establishing a shared connection. This is a long-established trope across genres from “When Harry Met Sally” to “The Matrix.” In our films, the similarities range from comparing the longest sniper shots to bonding over a busy lifestyle.

Step three involves sharing in a transgressive act. “You’re Cordially Invited” involves our two romantic leads involved in escalating bad behavior, but it’s only when they join together near the film’s end that the romance starts. “La Dolce Villa” has plenty of romantic moments, but the relationship doesn’t gel until they break into a booked venue to take pictures. “Love Hurts” has our two leads go back to the mob boss, against all good sense. This step establishes that it is our two characters against some other broader source. Sometimes this is defined—like our characters in “The Gorge” sharing their name in violation of orders. Other times it is more general, such as in “Kinda Pregnant,” where our characters have sex with the garage door open, scandalizing the neighbors.

Finally, the woman in the relationship sets terms the man must meet. Amusingly, in both “The Gorge” and “La Dolce Villa” this was the men agreeing to try and dance. The required terms are not always so anodyne (or positive.) In “Love Hurts,” our main character’s long lost love insists he gives up his peaceful life in real estate to return to the mob. This dynamic managed to stay intact even in “Kinda Pregnant,” where it is the female lead who betrays the male lead with her lie about being pregnant, and yet he’s the one who returns with the grand gesture to win her back over at the film’s end. This is repeated also in the married relationships we see. In “Kinda Pregnant,” both wives with children stayed in relationships with their husbands because of the child care they provided. And in “Love Hurts,” the C plot involves a grunt figuring out how to apologize appropriately so that his wife would take him back. 

This pattern is far from new, but it remains durable in the way we conceptualize the development of new romantic relationships. 

A Lack of Purpose

One of the striking similarities across the majority of these films is the absence of a greater purpose in the relationships they depict. While romance in film has historically been intertwined with larger ambitions—building a family, pursuing a shared creative endeavor, or overcoming an external challenge—these stories frame relationships as primarily a means of fulfilling adult emotional needs rather than contributing to something larger. 

“Kinda Pregnant” is the only one of the films that connects romantic relationships with parenthood, but it largely attempts to show why they do not need to be connected. Still, the longing of the protagonist Lainy, suggests a hard-to-entirely-dismiss desire to merge them.

“The Gorge” makes an interesting counterexample. Our main characters are set in a dangerous world and discover they are better able to survive when they help protect each other. It’s a subtle but poignant lesson that seems to be largely lost in the nearest romance films. 

Physical Binary

A notable trend in the five Valentine’s season films is the way they handle physical intimacy. The first kiss and the first instance of sex occur within the same moment, creating a stark physical binary. This means there is no build-up—no initial kiss, no gradual increase in physical intimacy that allows for tension and anticipation. Instead, the films present physical romance as an all-or-nothing event, where characters transition instantly from not in a relationship to in a sexual relationship. 

“La Dolce Villa” is a notable example because, in many ways, it hits the traditional beats of romantic comedy. But when they finally decide to set aside their professional conflicts, they kiss and immediately proceed to bed. There are no intermediate physical moments or any physical manifestations of a deepening relationship. While more expected, this pattern repeats itself in the other films. “Love Hurts” has one relationship that grows very close but never realizes itself with a kiss. The other relationship storms through both. 

The exception that proves the rule in this case is “Kinda Pregnant.” In this film, Amy Schumer’s character pretends to be pregnant and then meets the man of her dreams and has to navigate her lie. The physicality of her relationship is a major theme because she is trying to wear a fake baby bump. So while she kisses him on the first date and doesn’t sleep with him until the second, the film presents this as atypical to highlight the plot elements. 

This trend may be a result of relying on the will they/won’t they question to dominate the narrative. But most of these films had many more questions to explore. Well over half of “The Gorge” comes after we’ve answered that question. “La Dolce Villa” has an entire secondary plot about who will own the house after our romantic leads consummate their relationship. The only film that leaves the answer to the question until the end is “You’re Cordially Invited.” This means that there’s no compelling plot reason to rush things. If anything, they’re abandoning lots of dramatic potential that could help enhance the final acts of these films. 

This approach contrasts with older films such as “Titanic,” “Notting Hill,” or “Crazy Stupid Love,” which promote contemporary sexual ethics but still use a spectrum of physicality to communicate the state of a relationship to an audience. 

Deprioritized Romantic Relationships

One of the interesting phenomena of these films is what a relatively small role the romantic elements even play. Despite being romance films set for Valentine’s Day releases, they spend a lot of their time on broad comedy, shoot-em-up action, or thriller mysteries.

In both “La Dolce Villa” and “You’re Cordially Invited,” the romance is treated as a replacement comparable to the relationships the main characters have with their children, and as they let their close relationship with their children go, they find a romantic relationship to fill the space. A romantic relationship is not treated as primary but interchangeable. Other times the romance is accidental. In “The Gorge,” our characters meet each other in a total fluke. While “Kinda Pregnant” shows our only character who wants a relationship, she only finds one once she stops trying. “Love Hurts” shows our only character who has made a long-term attempt to woo his partner, and of the five films, he is the one who has the least success by the film’s end.

But in “Love Hurts,” when Marvin tries to build his life, he first gets a job, then a home, then success, and only once he has the regional real estate salesman of the year award does he pursue romance. 

In “You’re Cordially Invited,” two couples get married. One of them has been out of college for a year. Both have good jobs, live together, and are going to move across the country. But after they get married, they get the marriage annulled, deciding that it is too big of a step. They stay together, but they decide to get married later when they’re ready. 

“Kinda Pregnant” starts with our main character believing that her boyfriend will propose because they’ve been dating for four years, and she’s now turned forty. He doesn’t and instead asks to have a threesome. While our main character is upset, we catch back up with him later to show that his path was a good path for him, and he’s happy. 

What’s interesting is that these movies often talk warmly about marriages that must have occurred at young ages and produced happy families, but those are only ever our characters’ backstories. Marriage and relationships are consistently treated like a cherry on top of an already-completed life rather than a component part of a completed life. 

The State of Love at the Movies

Taken together, these trends paint a picture of contemporary romance in film that is both familiar and subtly evolving. The structural patterns of attraction—finding commonality, embracing quirks, engaging in transgressive acts, and ultimately proving devotion—remain firmly in place. However, modern romantic films increasingly frame relationships as secondary, treating them as a means of fulfilling emotional needs rather than a key pillar of personal or shared purpose.

Perhaps the most telling trend is the deprioritization of romance as a narrative focus. While these films are marketed as love stories, they often treat relationships as secondary to personal growth, comedic chaos, or external conflict. The protagonists find love almost incidentally, as though romance is something that happens when all other elements of life have been resolved. This is particularly where romance emerges as a substitute for shifting familial relationships rather than as a goal in itself.

The underlying message of these films is clear: romance is not a necessity but a pleasant addition to an already complete life. While this reflects a cultural shift toward personal fulfillment and self-sufficiency, it also raises questions about whether love, as traditionally understood in storytelling, is losing its central place in cinematic narratives. As modern films continue to reshape the romance genre, it remains to be seen whether future stories will continue to treat love as an afterthought or find new ways to reestablish its significance in shaping meaningful lives. And dare we hope they might return to portraying the kind of love God invites us to? In the meantime, we can use this holiday—every day—to celebrate the real thing.

The post Love at the Movies: Why Romance is Dead, but Hollywood Pretends Otherwise appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

To be clear, there is no reason to believe that the organizers of this display “believe” in Dionysus as an actual deity with power. Rather, Dionysus is an archetype for festivals, revelry, and intoxication. Understood as an archetype, the myth of Dionysus can provide insights into important impulses or tendencies in human life. It can also help us see the truth more clearly.

Community, tolerance, non-violence: to put it mildly, this is an idiosyncratic reading of Dionysus. To the organizers’ credit, it must be acknowledged that Dionysus offers a version of community. In a festival atmosphere, where music and alcohol lower inhibitions, there is a kind of blurring of boundaries and a jovial spirit that lubricates social connection. There can be no hierarchy—no social classes—at the Dionysian festival. As the wine flows freely and the drums beat ever louder, all the petty divisions that separate human beings fade away into insignificance. The contemporary fashion of wanting to “dismantle” or “deconstruct” social norms is right at home with the Dionysian spirit. 

But there is a crucial difference between the Dionysus of the Olympics and the Dionysus of the Greeks. The Olympic version is advanced as a benign character—a silly blue man singing about how we should all go naked all of the time, not a threat to anyone or anything. It is a vision of comic transgressivity, harmless extravagance, and festive naughtiness that no one has any reason to fear or criticize. Indeed, an AP report of the opening ceremonies led with this line, written as a compliment: “Paris: the Olympic gold medalist of naughtiness.” 

But the Greeks were not nearly so naïve about the character of Dionysus. They recognized that when social conventions are dismantled, there are vicious as well as merry impulses waiting to be let loose. Nietzsche notes that Dionysian festivals included an “extravagant lack of sexual discipline” and not just the fun kind of sex: “The most savage beasts of nature were unleashed . . . [including a] repellant nature of lust and cruelty.” Without common restraints on behavior, humans might imagine themselves to be gods, but they can also devolve into beasts. 

It gets worse. What of those people who are unwilling to join the frenzied retinue of Dionysus? In Greek myths, they do not fare well. Euripides’ The Bacchae tells the story of King Pentheus of Thebes, who was not honoring Dionysus. By the end of the story, the followers of Dionysus (including Pentheus’ own mother, Agave) literally tear him to pieces while in a state of Dionysian frenzy. The same thing happened to the musician Orpheus—he did not honor Dionysus, and the female followers of Dionysus tore him apart when he would not have sex with them (this might go without saying, but Dionysus doesn’t seem to be too concerned with consent). This tearing apart of humans or animals is such an important theme in Dionysian myths that it has its own name: sparagmos.

So when the official Olympics X account states that “Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings,” the statement can only come across as ironic. Dionysus is no pacifist, and his followers are not harmless. Further, like all gods, Dionysus is a jealous god. He demands recognition and honor, and those who will not give him his due face his wrath. The idea that Dionysus’s party is a harmless display of community, tolerance, and non-violence is not even a myth—it is a fairytale.

The post Dionysus and the Olympics: The Dark Side of Tolerance appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Of those shows, two of them had a main cast character who was depicted as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or 0.1%. This is in contrast to the 1.7% of the US population that are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Latter-day Saints are underrepresented as main characters on US scripted TV shows by 1700%.

This lack of representation contributes to attitudes that Latter-day Saints are foreign, cloistered, and unusual. 

One other effect of this lack of representation is that an undue burden is placed on the few Latter-day Saint characters in popular culture to represent the whole.

Perhaps the religious group most impacted by their media representation over the last thirty years has been the Muslim community.

Muslims are rarely seen as the main characters in TV shows. They are almost always the other that our main character is operating against. These characters too often fall into three main stereotypes: the rich sheik, the exotic belly dancer, and the terrorist. 

The existence of these stock characters carries some negative effects. They paint public perceptions and limit the imagination of what a Muslim can be. 

However, the representation of Muslims on television in recent years also shows some hope. There has begun to be an increase in Muslim representation on television. Muslims make up about 1.1% of the US population and now make up about 1% of the characters on TV shows. As this representation has increased, the variety of characters they play has been able to increase. Peacock’s “We Are Lady Parts” is about the creation of a girl band; the members are all Muslim. Disney Plus’ “Ms. Marvel” has a Muslim protagonist whose participation in her religious faith is a part of the overall painting of her character. Cartoon Network’s “Young Justice” features another Muslim superhero. Netflix’s horror “Midnight Mass” features a Muslim police chief navigating his complex identity. And Hulu’s “Ramy” does a particularly noteworthy job of showing a Muslim character of faith.

This isn’t to say Muslim characters that are lacking don’t exist. They continue to be portrayed in stereotypical ways at disproportional rates. Sometimes shows will attempt “representation,” such as Netflix’s “Why Are You Like This,” which shows Muslim characters mainly betraying their Islamic identity. But while those stories may not be ideal for Muslim representation, they are part of a tapestry of portrayal that is finally starting to include some more honest and complex representations as well. These more honest portrayals are possible as the overall rate of representation has increased.

Latter-day Saint characters also tend to fall into familiar stock patterns, though naturally, they are different kinds of patterns. For Latter-day Saints, the most common characters are either:

1) Naive, repressed, and often family-focused
2) Rebellious against their strict upbringing
3) Secretive and violent

These patterns are common in depictions such as “The Book of Mormon Musical,” where the characters are displayed as naive. The secretive and violent stereotype was the most common early on, appearing even in Sherlock Holmes, and persists without any additional insight or nuance in Hulu’s recent “Under the Banner of Heaven.”

We were able to read a copy of the shooting script of an upcoming film starring two sister missionaries. We strongly advise you to avoid the film. One of the sisters fits the naive stereotype, while the other shows she’s rebelling by discussing her pornography usage in the film’s opening scene. (The final film will likely be different from the shooting script).

Apple+’s “Physical” has the prominent character John Breem, who fits into the repressed pattern. “Quantico” is an ABC procedural that had a Latter-day Saint in one episode. He was repressing the affair he had while a missionary (they also made sure to film his garments for good measure).

Netflix’s “Stranger Things” has probably given the most positive depiction of Latter-day Saints on television in the last ten years. But while it is positive, the depiction slots right into the family stereotype. 

Even the best, most nuanced depictions of Latter-day Saints, such as Cole, a doctor who appeared in seven episodes in the fourth season of “House” sixteen years ago, fall into these patterns. While he tries to follow his convictions on alcohol, he eventually gives in and drinks. 

The problem isn’t that these depictions are always negative, many of these stereotypes are good, just as a depiction of a rich sheik isn’t necessarily negative. It’s that when that’s all there is, the complex, honest reality of the Latter-day Saint experience goes missing. 

But similar to the experience of American Muslims, the answer is likely not to nitpick and fight against every stereotypical or negative depiction but rather to work toward an overall increase in representation, which will then give space for honest, in-depth representations to finally appear. This is especially true of Latter-day Saint women, who are even less represented.

It’s not that we are calling on creators to never write Latter-day Saint characters who fall into those stereotypes but to write more honest Latter-day Saint characters overall. If we had seventeen times more Latter-day Saint characters on television appropriate to our overall representation, it wouldn’t matter if we had a few who were naive or rebellious since those types certainly exist among the diversity of our community.

One organization that perhaps has been the most effective in modeling this kind of advocacy is GLAAD. GLAAD is an LGBT+ advocacy organization. They began by advocating that newspapers use the term “gay” to refer to their community rather than “homosexual,” which they no longer preferred.

Over time, they began to consult with TV and film studios on representation efforts. In 2013, they released their first Studio Responsibility Index. They looked at the movies released by the major Hollywood studios and found that 14 of the 101 films released had LGBT+ characters. At the time of that report, 3.5% of Americans identified as LGBT+ or about twice as many as Latter-day Saints. By 2023, 100 of the 350 films released included LGBT+ characters. Based on their success, it’s not unreasonable to think that Latter-day Saints could reasonably appear in many more major film releases. 

If there were 50 films a year depicting Latter-day Saints, having one with ugly stereotypes about missionaries would hardly be a cause for major concern. The problem is that this upcoming film is not one of fifty; in fact, it will probably be the only major motion picture depicting Latter-day Saints this year.

So, while we are likely to hear people (rightfully) decry the inaccurate and vulgar depiction of these missionaries, what we need isn’t a couple of bland, inoffensive depictions. We need a rich diversity of depictions so that bad ones like this merely fade into the background.

The post When Representation Fails: Latter-day Saints and The Cost of Invisibility appeared first on Public Square Magazine.