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The failed execution of Christa Pike, the ongoing prosecution in the case of Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the impending military execution of Nidal Hasan—along with the short-lived plan to publicly broadcast it—have fueled debate over the death penalty. 

Given the national interest in the topic, I want to add something to the Latter-day Saint discussion. I hope to encourage fellow opponents of capital punishment to engage in the discussion with greater charity and intellectual honesty, while also explaining why I oppose capital punishment as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Pro-Death Penalty Argument

Murder cries out for justice; that is undeniable. As the Lord said to Cain, “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” I’ll never forget how horrified I was when I saw the sickening video of Charlie Kirk’s murder and knew that there was no way he could have survived. The crimes of Christa Pike and Nidal Hasan were similarly gruesome beyond description. 

The book of Genesis bluntly prescribes a punishment for such acts: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” This is arguably the foundational argument for the death penalty in the West, and it has been accepted by widely varying thinkers as a way of upholding the value of human life, punishing the evil of destroying the image of God in another person, protecting the community, and deterring future violence. 

In our own history, Joseph Smith, who ran for president on a platform of extensive prison reform, still believed that crimes like murder and treason could warrant death. The Constitution, which we believe is inspired, similarly contemplates the lawful use of the death penalty in several provisions, even as it prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. George Washington also authorized public executions as commander of the Continental Army. John Locke, whose writings heavily influenced the Declaration of Independence’s beautiful promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” nevertheless saw no inherent conflict between the death penalty and his ennobling natural rights philosophy.

These are arguments that anti-death penalty advocates should take seriously, and in the current debate I frankly admit that they often do not. Instead, it is common to hear arguments that portray death penalty supporters as defenders of barbaric relics of the past, that downplay or medicalize the evil actions of murderers, or that even generate public sympathy for murderers in the name of preventing execution. 

Others have unjustly criticized pro-life supporters of the death penalty as inconsistent, suggesting moral equivalence between the homicide of the tiniest and most innocent humans and the execution of the worst criminals. Moreover, the actions of the most radicalized opponents of the death penalty sometimes contribute to modern difficulties in carrying out the death penalty, including the failure of more humane methods (as in Christa Pike’s case) and the rising costs of carrying out executions. For example, these groups often lobby against pharmaceutical companies to discourage them from selling drugs needed for lethal injection. Anti-death penalty activists also contribute to seemingly endless legal lobbying and appeals, even in cases of clearly established guilt. This makes carrying out the death penalty immensely costly. The delays it causes also damage the death penalty’s deterrent value. These same opponents then cite the problems they have contributed to creating as evidence that the death penalty doesn’t work and should be abolished. 

In the case of Christa Pike, her guilt was established beyond a reasonable doubt. She had even attempted to murder another inmate and escape from prison. Yet some sought to excuse or downplay her actions as merely a result of her childhood trauma. I believe that trauma is real and tragic, but it also doesn’t negate her moral responsibility. Others challenged execution protocols that were part of established Tennessee law and sought multiple stays of execution. Her case underwent multiple rounds of appeal and review over the course of three decades prior to her failed execution. Activists supported these efforts through amicus briefs, petitions, and messaging campaigns. These activists are sincere, but their behavior shows some lack of reflection. They mistake permissiveness and a diminished sense of justice for enlightenment and mercy. 

Why I Oppose

Yet despite all of these arguments and concerns, I remain opposed to the death penalty. I ask myself: Why would a perfect Father, who weeps over the violence His children inflict on one another, not expect those who govern to exercise justice with forbearance, avoiding violence or using only the minimum necessary force when force cannot be avoided? Modern prisons have made it possible to protect society without executing those convicted of murder. A death penalty advocate may reasonably point to Christa Pike’s attempts at murder and escape as evidence of the need for swift execution, but her attempts failed. And these incidents are relatively rare. Concerns about pardons and sentence commutations can likewise be addressed by limiting those powers, where legally possible, or by implementing appropriate safeguards. 

Some Latter-day Saints read Doctrine and Covenants 42:18–19, which says that “he that killeth shall die,” as a modern reaffirmation of the death penalty. I think this misses important context. In verse 18, the Lord states clearly, “I speak unto the Church.” These verses are also surrounded by verses describing immoral actions and their spiritual and ecclesiastical consequences, not civil punishments for committing them. Only later in the section is the law addressed. The Lord commands that murderers be “delivered up and dealt with according to the laws of the land,” but prescribes no specific punishment. These verses seem to me to be teaching that a person who commits murder is killing their own soul, and that full restitution for their act is not possible here on earth—not that divine justice will not be satisfied unless they are executed, or that forgiveness is always impossible for someone who has committed murder. We believe in a Savior who performed an infinite Atonement.

Many who support the death penalty in principle were rightly aghast at the prospect of broadcasting Nidal Hasan’s execution. Many of their objections have merit. They also raise this question: If the death penalty is inherently just, rather than justified only when other means are unavailable or unlikely to prevent further harm to others, why should its public broadcast be something shameful? Wouldn’t the “spectacle” of publicly executing an unrepentant mass murderer and traitor to his country just reinforce deterrence and demonstrate a commitment to seeing justice done? If broadcasting an execution is acknowledged to undermine the death penalty’s legitimacy or desensitize viewers, perhaps that should be taken as evidence against its inherent justness. At an 1858 anti-capital-punishment meeting chaired by the unrelenting advocate of human dignity Frederick Douglass, a resolution argued that “instead of repressing and preventing the horrid crime of murder, [the death penalty] really serves, by shocking and blunting the finer and better feelings of human nature, to undermine respect for human life.” 

Another concern Douglass understood better than most, given the racial climate he lived in, was the risk of human error or partiality in imposing the death penalty. Data on wrongful convictions is heavily debated, and I generally approach it cautiously. Nevertheless, according to the Innocence Project, 21 people who spent time on death row have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, when forensic analysis gained traction. They are a subset of the 130 people during that period who were convicted of murder and eventually exonerated on the basis of DNA.

Usable DNA evidence becomes available in only a fraction of homicide cases, meaning that if you include findings of innocence based on other evidence, DNA-based exonerations offer only a partial estimate of innocent people who may have been convicted. And when you add in convictions that were invalidated because of prosecutorial misconduct, the number of innocent people who were wrongly convicted may be even higher. The point is that even our modern system is vulnerable to errors that risk executing innocent people, and there’s no guarantee we will correct every wrongful conviction. That should at least give us pause. Additionally, if the state executes an innocent person, the finality of that action means the likelihood that the actual perpetrator will be brought to justice is severely reduced.

Regardless of what one makes of these statistics, the death penalty has indisputably been wielded at times throughout history as a tool of dehumanization in the name of justice. It grants the government a power that is ultimate, final, and susceptible to misuse and abuse. Joseph Smith himself would have been a victim of this awful reality in Missouri if not for the courage of General Alexander Doniphan. Why would we want to give the state such power unless it were absolutely necessary? 

Even someone who has committed the vilest sins is still a child of God. Jesus Christ suffered and died for that person, too, regardless of whether that person would accept Him. If we can honor that person’s humanity while protecting other lives, without substantially increasing the risk of shedding innocent blood, why would we not do so? It’s true that leaders of the Church haven’t taken a specific position on the issue, but their neutrality doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to grapple with the moral consequences of this question. What if “the least of these” includes even those who have committed the worst crimes? I believe we can uphold the image of God in even these individuals and still meet the moral baseline established in Genesis. The death penalty should be opposed.

The post Justice Without Execution appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Yet the Church’s opposition to expanded access to elective abortion has provoked significant backlash, even among its members. What’s going on here?

Idaho

Let’s look at Idaho. Current Idaho law is highly protective of unborn life. Its Defense of Life Act generally prohibits abortion after fertilization, with exceptions in the first trimester for reported rape or incest and for abortions that a physician determines are medically necessary to prevent the woman’s death. Idaho’s fetal heartbeat law separately prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected (around six weeks), with exceptions for medical emergencies involving risk of the mother’s death or a substantial risk of irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. However, the narrower exception under the Defense of Life Act takes precedence. 

Proposition 1 would significantly alter Idaho’s law by establishing a right to abortion before fetal viability and allowing it after viability in cases of medical emergency. Yet many support the measure, despite its expansion of elective abortion, typically citing concern for women’s access to medical care.

We must take seriously our responsibility to protect mothers’ lives and health. As scholars from the Ethics & Public Policy Center have written: 

Just as justice requires us to protect all unborn children, so too does it require us to protect access to life-affirming medical treatment for pregnant women facing grave medical complications. This is part of the pro-life ideal, not an exception to it. Ensuring access to such treatments is morally right and consistent with giving both mothers and unborn children the same protections accorded to others.

But you don’t fix potentially problematic law with worse law. Instead of ensuring the death of more unborn children by expanding abortion rights, Idaho residents should work to better tailor existing legislation to increase protection for the health of women and their babies. Significantly expanding elective abortion access is not the answer to ensuring medical professionals can act competently in cases when the mother’s health is at risk.

As you might expect, Doe’s extremely broad definition of health allows almost any concern to be invoked to justify abortion that is not strictly medically necessary—hence the ubiquitous slogan “abortion is healthcare.” Many critics believe this definition is far too broad and has contributed to a permissive legal framework under which an estimated 65 million abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973. 

In Idaho, a coalition of abortion providers, emergency room physicians, and maternal-fetal medicine specialists are supporting Proposition 1 in order to expand the state’s medical exceptions for abortion. Some emergency room physicians—who often provide initial care for pregnancy health crises—and some maternal-fetal medicine specialists—who provide care for both mother and unborn child, especially in high-risk pregnancies—believe that legislation restricting abortions will inevitably be interpreted in ways that will prevent them from providing the care they believe is best for their patients. They also fear the current law will result in doctors being prosecuted for exercising their best medical judgment in cases involving “serious but non-fatal harm, such as significant organ damage or an infection that has not yet become life-threatening.” 

These are important considerations. The law needs sufficient flexibility for physicians to provide care in cases where the distinction between a significant health concern and a life-threatening condition is unclear. It’s important to note that ordinary treatments for pregnancy complications are already legal in Idaho and are not classified as abortions. These include treatments for ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, and completed miscarriages. And the law already covers life-saving treatments when the mother’s life is obviously at risk. So the controversy lies in the gap when a woman faces serious bodily injury, but death is not necessarily an imminent certainty.

Nevertheless, physicians in Idaho have transferred patients to out-of-state hospitals rather than risk becoming a test case that could jeopardize their practices or expose them to costly litigation. 

Idaho would likely benefit from amending its existing laws to emphasize that physicians can address serious threats to mothers’ health before their conditions become life-threatening. A proposition that does just that would be reasonable. But Idaho does not need to overhaul its entire legal scheme to provide elective abortions up to viability—a change that goes far beyond tailoring the law to improve care in emergency medical contexts. 

The Secular Case for Restricting Abortion

Beyond improving medical care, some simply want to expand abortion through viability for any reason, which both the Idaho and Nevada initiatives would do. Here’s why this is problematic.

For one, enshrining abortion as an individual woman’s right devalues human life itself, as well as society’s respect for mothers and children. Recognizing the unborn as having important social and moral status also recognizes pregnancy and maternity as important, meaningful, and charitable acts. As Erika Bachiochi has written, “To belittle the moral status of the unborn child is to belittle the state of pregnancy, and so the pregnant woman. Indeed, the sacrifices that pregnant women endure during their pregnancies would be more honored (and perhaps more rewarded) were we as a culture honest about the dignity of the human beings who have been entrusted to their care.” Our Creator endowed us with the unalienable right to life—the minimal prerequisite to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Women are trustees of unborn life and therefore stand in a position of trust relative to their vulnerable unborn children. 

Framing abortion solely as a woman’s private right also devalues fathers and families more generally. It impairs family relationships by elevating parental relationship problems, economic fears, and educational goals over the welfare of unborn children, and thus over human life itself. Being a husband and a father encourages men to develop emotional maturity, patience, and empathy, and fosters deeper personal growth. Currently, fathers have no parental rights relative to their unborn children, but they retain the duty of support. Many fathers of aborted children feel disenfranchised and experience grief over the abortion of their children, and many mothers are also negatively affected by abortion.

Ending the lives of the unborn cannot solve the problems women and their children face.  It appears that most abortions are performed on the poor or working poor, nearly two-thirds of whom are in their 20s. There are pro-life answers to pro-choice questions, and we must provide women better choices than abortion. 

In no other human relationship do we recognize a general right to unilaterally terminate another person’s life. As Lynn D. Wardle queried in “World & I,” “How can any activity that involves the consent of one individual, requires the assistance of a second, and results in the destruction of a third be called a matter of privacy?” In fact, giving a parent the right to end the life of their child, as Mary Parthun has pointed out in the book “Abortion’s Aftermath,” is socially regressive. Some ancient societies exposed unwanted newborns to the elements to end their lives; we’ve legalized ending the lives of unborn children in utero via chemicals or medical procedures and call ourselves morally superior. 

The Case for the Church’s Intervention

These secular arguments are not the only grounds for opposing initiatives that expand abortion rights. Latter-day Saint teachings also provide Church members with spiritual and temporal grounds for restricting elective abortions.

Against the backdrop of abortion ballot measures in Idaho, Nevada, Virginia, and Missouri, the letters from Church leadership discussed earlier provide wise and welcome counsel. New members may be unfamiliar with the Church’s long-held view that human life—including the unborn—is a sacred gift from God, central to His plan for the spiritual progression of His children. And some longtime members, despite knowing the Church’s policy on elective abortion, are nonetheless wary of supporting restrictions on a woman’s agency to choose abortion. 

The Church proclaimed the dignity and value of every human soul more than 30 years ago in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” In order to protect and promote the eternal progression of those souls, the Church counseled that sexual relations should be only between a lawfully wedded man and woman who care for each other, welcome the birth of children, and cooperate as equals in providing for and rearing their children. Those teachings affirm the intrinsic worth of human life and the profound importance of committed, healthy family relationships—both of which elective abortion degrades.

The Church supports individuals’ efforts to establish and maintain strong families through far-reaching educational and humanitarian programs, including self-reliance courses, health initiatives, and mental health services.

The stakes are high—for society and for individual souls. As we continue to address abortion and efforts to restrict or expand it, we should “accept the reality that we are fellow citizens who need each other” and heed President Oaks’ counsel to interact respectfully—a much-needed call for civil discourse in our age of sound-bite rage campaigns, both online and in person. 

Surely we can love our neighbors as ourselves, including women with challenging pregnancies, their irreplaceable unborn children, and the fathers of those children. We must love them enough to find ways to help them establish and maintain healthy family relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even into eternity.

The post Mothers Deserve Better Than This appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

When we use the phrase “mental heuristics,” we are talking about something like a set of software programs in our minds. These programs cause us to process information rapidly in certain ways, usually automatically and without our awareness. For example, sports fans sometimes become excessively caught up in intense rivalries, and when two fans of opposing teams in a rivalry see each other in public, they might go out of their way to avoid each other after their mental heuristics lead them to anticipate an ugly public confrontation.

And their mental heuristics may be completely wrong. It may be true that both of them are very kind and respectful toward opposing fans and would be great friends if they got to know each other.

Mental heuristics can be accurate or inaccurate, but they are extremely useful. We cannot constantly investigate our surroundings, interrogate the people around us, and study every issue in depth at every moment. The human mind relies on heuristic shortcuts to keep us safe and help us avoid sensory and information overload.

Indoctrination into belief systems creates mental heuristics. Expressive individualism is the worldview at the heart of movies like “Footloose” and “Frozen,” and a person with an expressive individualist heuristic automatically views all attempts to create community norms and standards as preventing the expression of a person’s “authentic self.” Postmodernism is a worldview that many people adopt in graduate school, and it creates a heuristic that views all human activity and discourse as attempts to structure power. Marxism and Marxist-influenced approaches create mental heuristics in which we divide the world into oppressors and oppressed and see society as “systems of oppression” that maintain various forms of “supremacy.”

I should reiterate that heuristics are not inherently good or bad. As Latter-day Saints, we actively strive to develop good heuristics of charity that lead us to a default processing of the world with love of God and neighbor.

Our political heuristics in particular are powerfully reinforced by brain chemistry. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox recently wrote an excellent book, “Off Ramp,” in which he explained:

When we feel connected to others, our brains give us a ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling that is caused by the hormone oxytocin. This is a bonding hormone that increases feelings of trust, empathy, and closeness to partners, friends, and family and communities … It also pushes us to defend our in-groups against threats from others. In a 2015 study, participants given oxytocin were more likely to “adopt the erroneous judgments of their in-group members than subjects who did not receive the hormone.” Oxytocin increases in-group favoritism, lying for one’s team, conformity to in-group preferences, and aggressive protection against threatening outsiders. It’s fun to consider when you’re watching the TV show Survivor, but alarming when it suddenly invades every aspect of our lives. That loyalty doesn’t disappear once a person steps outside of the ballot box. It seems to follow us everywhere.

This echoes the observation in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book “The Righteous Mind” that the brain chemical dopamine is also directly involved in our political thinking. He described a study in which researcher Drew Westen gave his research participants political messaging they found difficult and then gave them counter-information that “released” them from the mental stress of that initial information:

Once Westen released them from the threat, the ventral striatum started humming—that’s one of the brain’s major reward centers. All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this dopamine response … Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their candidate) got a little hit of that dopamine.

Given the role of these two chemicals in our responses to political information, we benefit from asking: What is really going on in our personal experiences of politics?

Most of us believe our political and other views are correct; otherwise, we would hold different views. But in a TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz asked a question later echoed by Jonathan Haidt: “How does it feel to be wrong?” The answer is the same way it feels to be right. The reassuring, reinforcing sensations of oxytocin and dopamine are experienced by people who are right and also by people who are dangerously wrong.

As specific examples, I think of President Donald Trump and Jon Stewart as the kings of political dopamine on the right and left, respectively. Trump built his political career and Stewart built his career as a commentator in the same way: publicly humiliating people to entertain audiences. Both of them have always offered their audiences some amount of truth, paired with enormous heuristic shortcuts that avoid real truth in opposing views. By sneering and insulting their opponents, they leave their audiences awash in surges of dopamine that reinforce their sense of intellectual and moral superiority.

We sometimes discuss peacemaking in terms of civility, but in reality, civility only reduces conflict, which we might call “détente-making.” This is valuable, to be sure, but peacemaking—the attainment of genuine mutual understanding and respect—requires work that is deeper and more difficult than détente-making. It requires work that breaks us free from the dopamine- and oxytocin-reinforcement loops that keep decent people suspicious and even hateful toward each other.

Brookings Institution fellow Jonathan Rauch has recently caused a stir by pointing to the “civic theology” of Latter-day Saints, articulated most strongly by President Dallin H. Oaks. I suggest this notion of our civic theology is essential to understanding President Oaks’ prophetic project. And I suggest the heart of our Latter-day Saint civic theology can be seen in a simple personal exercise: Imagine the political figure you most despise. For American Latter-day Saints on the political left, that figure is likely Donald Trump. For American Latter-day Saints on the political right, that figure might be Kamala Harris or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Understand that this person, who fills your heart with fear and loathing, may well end up in the presence of God for eternity, in what we call the celestial kingdom. And the celestial kingdom is a place where everyone will be fully at peace with one another, without any personal hostility or grievances. Knowing the likelihood that many of your current political adversaries will be there, is the celestial kingdom still a place where you yearn to be?

So many of our discussions of peacemaking focus on the tactical, on things we should or should not do. But as this exercise illustrates, a real theological question in which we name names is a much better exercise for helping Latter-day Saints to understand the stakes involved in peacemaking. If we are mired in political oxytocin that leaves us feeling love and belonging toward our in-group and fear and loathing toward everyone outside our in-group, we would do well to break free of that chemical feedback loop. The work of breaking free is to honestly explore the validity of opposing political views. This involves setting aside heuristics that we formerly relied upon to rapidly make sense of political information. In the process of sincerely looking for validity in opposing political views, we may or may not change our minds. But we will likely lose relationships that depend on the constant chemical reinforcement of political oxytocin. In this, we take up our cross.

In politics and everywhere else, the quest for truth cannot long coexist with other cravings like belonging, comfort, or validation. All of the most important questions of our time are so serious that they sift out people who are willing to patiently see beyond their heuristics and wrestle deeply over what is true, from those who use political and moral discussions merely as a means to oxytocin- and dopamine-driven rewards.

Returning to where we started: In her article on abortion, Meagan Kohler could have done the predictable thing. She could have written a typical article intended to push her readers’ partisan mental buttons and give them another hit of dopamine. Instead, she wrote a serious piece exploring how the assumptions about gestation that we find in the pro-choice movement are regressive for civilization. That is a position that deserves deep reflection, not shallow heuristic dismissal.

But for people who have spent years or even decades cultivating heuristics of intellectual entropy, expressions of moral order and clarity are received as oppressive or even pathological. Social media is a place where intellectually entropic people gather to reassure each other in a hot tub of oxytocin after feeling the sharp discomfort of clarity. On subjects like abortion, there are many voices of entropy both in and out of the Church, so a frenzied response is almost to be expected. But there also may be a few people—perhaps even just one—at a crossroads in their thinking, willing to give their hearts to a real consideration of a thoughtful treatment of the issue.

To reach that small subset of readership is the goal of every converted Latter-day Saint commentator. We should likewise each carry a personal goal of modeling something other than heuristic-driven responses toward people we regard as political or religious opponents. In many cases, even when we disagree, there are things we can learn from them in that disagreement.

The post Could You Share Heaven With Them? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I feel these changes almost every day of my life. As the daughter of two Hungarian-born Holocaust survivors, I have long been aware of the evils of antisemitism. Yet the reality of that time of horror seemed like a nightmare from a world which, thankfully, no longer existed. Many thoughtful people believed that the deadly poison of Jew hatred had at long last been expunged from society following the Holocaust—that the sheer magnitude of the evil perpetrated against the Jewish people during World War II had somehow purged this cursed toxin from our body politic.

Furthermore, as my mother often reminded me in my youth, after 2,000 years of persecution in the diaspora, there was once again a Jewish home in the ancient land of Israel. She would say with sorrow, “If only Israel had existed during the Second World War, there would have been no Holocaust because there would have been a safe haven that those of us threatened by the Nazi death machine could have fled to.” It was a comforting thought that such vicious hatred could never again be unleashed on the Jewish people, but, in retrospect, it was naïve and simply wrong. October 7 exposed just how naïve and wrong such thinking was.

If you had told me the day after the attack that the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust would unleash an unprecedented tidal wave of global antisemitism, I would have dismissed it as absurd. Yet that is precisely what happened, and it continues as I write these words three years later.

The Warning Signs Were Already There

Looking back, the signs of danger were all around. Let me explain with a bit of history. In 1947, the United Nations adopted a partition plan for the territory of the former British Mandate for Palestine in the Middle East. It called for two independent states: one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as part of a special international zone that would have been administered by the U.N.

Israel accepted the partition plan, while all the Arab nations rejected it. Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq launched a war against the newborn nation of Israel. The secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, declared that this would be “a war of extermination” and promised “a momentous massacre.” He advised a British official that “It does not matter how many Jews there are. We will sweep them into the sea.” He was not alone in announcing the Arab armies’ genocidal intentions vis-à-vis the Jewish state.

Thankfully, they failed in their efforts to “drive the Jews into the sea,” and in 1949 Israel became the 59th member of the U.N. by a vote of 37 to 12 with 9 abstentions.

A more recent example of the U.N.’s moral corruption as it relates to the Jewish homeland is one that hits close to home. The U.N. held a World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 25 years ago, which was originally meant to combat global discrimination and slavery. Instead, it devolved into a festival of hate that demonized Israel and engaged in sickening antisemitism. My father, Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, led the congressional component of the American delegation to this shameful conference. As participants distributed blatant Nazi-style caricatures of hook-nosed Jews and thousands marched in the streets with signs reading “Hitler should have finished the job,” individual Jewish participants faced nonstop harassment and intimidation. At the direction of Secretary of State Colin Powell, my father spearheaded the walkout of the entire U.S. delegation and subsequently denounced the conference as “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” that he had witnessed since the Nazi era.

Just as with the October 7 attacks, a rational person would expect that this “Durban debacle” would have led to profound regret and introspection on the part of the global diplomatic and human rights communities, along with a sincere attempt to right a ship that had so clearly foundered on the rocks of moral confusion and hatred. That did not happen. On the contrary, many historians mark this terrible episode as the start of a dark new era in which the language of human rights was laundered and hijacked to denigrate, slander, and isolate the Jewish homeland.

Criticism and Antisemitism

Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident and current chairman of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, has suggested a simple framework to help any fair-minded, nonracist person spot the difference between legitimate and hateful censure. Sometimes called the “Three Ds” test, it is an effective tool that, like the sword spoken of in Hebrews 4:12, is “quick, and powerful … a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The three questions posed by the test are as follows:

1. Is the intent of the criticism to demonize?
2. Is the intent of the criticism to delegitimize?
3. Does the criticism apply a double standard to the actions of the state of Israel that no other nation is subjected to?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then disagreement has devolved into something darker, and it has lost its legitimacy.

What Antisemitism Looks Like Now

I wrote at the beginning of this article that, as a person of proud Jewish heritage, I live every day in this new world of pervasive antisemitism. This takes many forms, from people looking at me askance or making comments under their breath when they see my Star of David necklace, to the fear and worry I feel when I see a young Jewish boy wearing a kippah in public and wonder if and when he might be attacked, to watching the fear of so many Jewish students who face a climate of suspicion and exclusion on college campuses while so many university administrators remain indifferent to this reality. It also takes the form of my 95-year-old mother pleading with me not to publish this article because she fears that in this new climate of Jew hatred, it could bring me to harm.

Still, I am fortunate to continue to live in relative peace and safety. The same, sadly, cannot be said for many Jewish individuals and communities throughout the world. Antisemitism may begin as muttered comments and stereotypes, shifting to slurs and chants, but it always moves with alarming speed to violence. The examples are manifold and heartbreaking: An angry mob storming a Russian airport in search of Jewish passengers; two young Israeli embassy employees gunned down on the streets of Washington, DC, after attending an event focused on interfaith bridge-building; a fatal attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, with another suspected plot only recently foiled by the British police; an elderly Jewish woman killed by a violent flamethrower attack in Boulder, Colorado, during a peaceful march in support of the October 7 hostages; an armed driver plowing into a Michigan synagogue that also housed a preschool for more than 100 Jewish children; a modern-day pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam targeting supporters of an Israeli football club; and, most devastatingly, a Jewish community joyfully celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach gunned down in broad daylight.

Choosing Light

Despite all these tragedies, and others too numerous to list, the darkness of this present moment cannot compare to the shadows that covered the earth during my parents’ childhood. Yet even then, when “evils were most free,” as the Jewish-Hungarian writer George Gabori put it, the light found a way to shine in the darkness and not be overcome by it.

I think of Denmark. My family lived there for three years while my husband served as the American ambassador to that country. We never tired of hearing or retelling the story of how the Danes rescued virtually their entire Jewish population from deportation, literally under the noses of their Nazi occupiers. For this national act of courage, Denmark has been uniquely recognized at Yad Vashem for its valor and humanity, with a special tree dedicated in its honor in the Avenue of the Righteous.

I think of the noble defiance of Moroccan Sultan Mohammed V, who refused the demands of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy government to turn over a census of Jewish Moroccans, instead reportedly stating, “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”

I think of Albania, the only occupied European nation where the Jewish population was larger at the end of World War II than at the beginning. Following its noble code of “Besa,” which means “to keep the promise,” it extended protection to nearly 2,000 fleeing Jews, often at the peril of its citizens’ lives.

These heroic examples of light shining in the darkness give me more than hope; they give me courage to face the evils of my day. I was recently reminded in an article by Daniella Greenbaum Davis about God’s very first act, as recounted in the book of Genesis. She writes, “The first thing God does in the Torah—before light, before land, before people—is draw a line. He separates light from darkness … day from night. Creation itself begins as an act of distinction … Right from wrong. Truth from fiction. Order from chaos.”

I sometimes despair that there are far too few people today who are willing to choose light over darkness. Then I think of Ahmed Al Ahmed, a Muslim father of two, who bravely charged the attackers at Bondi Beach and likely saved dozens of Jewish lives by doing so. When confronted by evil, he did not hesitate, and he put his life on the line to stop it. Most will not be called upon to show such courage in defense of their Jewish brothers and sisters, but I hope more will see his example and have the decency to at least speak out against the tidal wave of antisemitism that was unleashed on October 7.

As I reflect on that fateful day, three years on, I am grateful for those in history and today who have chosen light over darkness. I pray, and I must believe, that this will always be the choice that ultimately prevails in our world.

The post Choosing Light After October 7 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Almost two years ago, I stood before a judge who administered an oath requiring me to “support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

As a newly admitted lawyer, this felt like a sacred honor. My burning interest in constitutional law drove me to law school. Now I had sworn to be one of its defenders. I now had a formal role to play in upholding its principles.

There’s something important about taking an oath. It establishes an obligation to a principle, even when honoring that obligation is hard. I take my constitutional oath very seriously.

But we have too often assumed that the duty to uphold and defend the Constitution rests only with public servants and attorneys. Friends who are not lawyers often ask me how they can protect the Constitution. Too often, they’ve been told there’s not much they can do unless they go to law school.

I profoundly disagree. Yesterday, President Dallin H. Oaks spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., about the relationship between becoming a peacemaker and upholding the Constitution.

His address got me thinking: What might a citizens’ oath to uphold the Constitution look like?

Inspired by President Oaks’ address, I believe it would center on becoming a peacemaker: someone who listens to and loves our fellow citizens (especially those most different from us), is willing to compromise to achieve mutually beneficial policy objectives, and upholds the Constitution’s principles. This is an oath we can all take, and one that our Constitution desperately needs.

An Oath to “We the People”

When we think of the Constitution, what images come to mind? Parchment? Pocket pamphlets? Perhaps the U.S. Capitol, the White House, or the Supreme Court, or the people who work in them? 

I urge us to think differently. Start with who you live with. Then think of your next-door neighbors. Then think of your broader community—the people among whom you work, shop, recreate, and worship. 

Instead of parchment, pamphlets, or policymakers, I want you to think of these people. The friends and enemies of your community. The people you love, the people you fear, the people you know nothing about.

Think of people because the Constitution belongs to “We the People,” the opening words of its preamble. It doesn’t just belong to the Supreme Court or the lawyers or the National Archives. Through its organizing principle of popular sovereignty, the Constitution belongs to all of us. We are the source of its power and legitimacy. But the “we” is collective. Not just you and your favorite political commentators or me and mine. 

The principle of popular sovereignty strengthens as we learn to become peacemakers. If we see the Constitution as belonging to all of our fellow citizens, we will realize that our protection of it cannot be only self-serving. We cannot, as President Oaks taught, “seek total dominance for all of our own positions.” Instead, he taught, “We should make every effort to understand the experiences and concerns of others, especially when they differ from our own.” 

If we are to have, as Lincoln said, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” we have to believe this really means all of us. 

An Oath To Love and Need Each Other

Knowing that we cannot neglect our fellow citizens’ interests in our civic engagement, we have to face an even more demanding truth. Not only do our fellow citizens share the source of the Constitution’s power with us, but we need them in our civic life, and we need to love them.

President Oaks taught yesterday that “All of us should accept the reality that we are fellow citizens who need each other.” He later noted that “the Lord has taught me that it is possible to obey and seek to improve our nation’s laws, and also to love our adversaries.”

Loving our adversaries is part of the hard peacemaking work our Constitution needs.

Of course, many are cynical about that kind of project in our politically polarized nation. Hostile social media arguments and political violence make the risks feel high.

But the reality is that we really do need each other. As Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote from Birmingham Jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” We cannot shun certain groups of our brothers and sisters and believe that we are serving our nation.

An Oath to Compromise

A peacemaking oath to support the Constitution isn’t limited to interpersonal peacemaking. It also includes—not uncontroversially—peacemaking in policy. 

Forged in compromise, the Constitution also requires compromise for the creation of laws. Its early proponents anticipated, not unwisely, that all kinds of “factions” would animate our governance, as James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers. “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” he wrote in No. 10. The Constitution’s remedy was structuring government as a democratic republic, where representatives would have to persuade one another and moderate their positions to create law. Or, as President Oaks put it, the Constitution “compels a divided people to build coalitions that allow them to act together for the common good.”

This ought to give us hope for our polarized times. Divisive differences were anticipated from the start. We just have to be willing to work them out. 

President Oaks has taught that “on contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify.” These are words I couldn’t get out of my head as I interned in Washington, D.C., in the years after his talk. I encountered people on both the right and left who wished the Church would take a different path in its approach to religious liberty. Those on the left were frustrated that the Church’s reason for supporting compromise legislation was to protect religious liberty. Those on the right were frustrated that the Church would agree to compromises that seemed to go against its own teachings. One side wanted the Church to compromise its core commitment to protecting its doctrine; the other wanted the Church to remain unyielding in protecting it. 

But what President Oaks teaches is “a better way forward—a way to resolve differences without compromising core values.” This approach is what he has called “fairness for all.” “When there is genuine conflict on the effect of constitutional rights,” he taught, “contesting positions need to be balanced legally and negotiated politically in a way that upholds all essential rights to the greatest extent possible.” In other words, you may get your rights, but you also have to respect theirs.

This approach undergirds the 2015 Utah Compromise, the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), and the unpassed federal Fairness for All bill. Each of these measures committed to legislation the core value of religious liberty, which allows the Church to carry on in accordance with its doctrines. Yet each one also provides other protections—LGBT nondiscrimination in the Utah Compromise, and same-sex marriage recognition in the RFMA. These measures represent efforts to accomplish peacemaking in the policy context.

For many members of the Church, the Church’s support for these measures may have initially felt surprising or even hard to reconcile. (More on that here.) Some may have felt the compromise was far more significant than the moment required. But I learned during my time in Washington that the Church really means it when it says “moderate and unify.” As President Oaks taught, this requires “all of us to obey some laws we dislike and to live peacefully with some persons whose values differ from our own.”  

It may be that this call to be so willing to compromise is a prophetic call specific to our time. Perhaps it is. But it is a prophetic call nonetheless. 

The peacemaking approach of “fairness for all” is sometimes unpopular, even among members of the Church. In seeking to follow this call, I have had to moderate some of my own positions, even when my original position felt more philosophically consistent or morally pure. But if politics is the art of the possible, then we will almost certainly need to moderate our expectations for what constitutional policymaking can achieve. 

The thing nobody likes about peacemaking in a policy context is that the lines are hard to draw. How much of a principle can I forgo before I have compromised my own core beliefs? Are my beliefs compromised by allowing something I do not believe in? (The Church’s example has taught us: not necessarily.) What is truly essential to protect, and what is not?

These are challenging issues to resolve. If they’re causing us to think hard about them, discuss them with others, and question our own positions, this might be good evidence that we are doing the exact work we need to do. 

An Oath to Principles

Finally, any oath to the Constitution must include an oath to the Constitution’s principles. This is, admittedly, where lawyers often come in. When constitutional principles are violated, we expect litigation, if not law review articles, to alert us to what’s wrong.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was known for pulling out another nation’s constitution at his law lectures. He would read its extensive Bill of Rights, which guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of protests, and many other rights, far exceeding those of the United States. He then asked his audiences which country the constitution was from. 

He would shock them when he told them it was the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union—not exactly the poster country for constitutional liberty. He went on to say that “every tyrant” and “every banana republic” “in the world has a bill of rights.” “Unless the real constitution of a country prevents the centralization of power, all the rest is words on paper.”

Our Constitution’s structural division of power is a vital safeguard for our individual liberties. It is also a safeguard for the rule of law. 

If there is anything peacemakers should be inflexible on, it is the rule of law. We must expect government actors to follow the law, especially the supreme law of the land, the Constitution.

Our branches of government should check each other. But even these checks and balances are not foolproof. Those in power must also sometimes exercise self-restraint, hence the Latter-day Saint admonition that “honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.” 

An important way we can defend the division of power is by understanding what each branch is allowed to do, then voting with those limits in mind. We should carefully investigate candidates’ intended actions and whether they seek to undertake duties that are duly committed to another branch. Individuals who show a reckless disregard for rules or the law may carry those same tendencies into public office. 

When we see violations—prospective or committed—we should contact our members of Congress, who were intended to have the greatest power in the government, not the least, and urge them to act. We can write op-eds to raise awareness for our fellow citizens. We can support state leaders who refuse to surrender states’ rights to the federal government. And most importantly, we can encourage good and honorable people to run for office, and then vote for them. 

Will You Take the Oath?

So, on our Constitution’s birthday, will you take a citizens’ oath to defend it? You don’t have to memorize the preamble (though it’s inspiring) or own three copies of the Federalist Papers (though why not?) or read constitutional law cases (though I promise it’s super fun).

These are not the things that protect the Constitution. Instead, the Constitution is protected by sustained efforts to know, listen to, and love your neighbor. To focus on supporting legislation of compromises—fairness for all—that deters needless litigation and that actively promotes pluralism. To vote for candidates who do not merely articulate fondness for constitutional principles but who show that they are committed to them, even when those principles limit their own power or constrain their policy agenda.

These are the things anyone can do. And our nation needs you to do them. 

On this Constitution Day, I hope you will join me in taking a citizens’ oath to defend the Constitution by being a civic peacemaker. It is what our Constitution needs.

The post The Republic Relies on Restraint appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In a recent letter to The Salt Lake Tribune, Latter-day Saint writer David Ostler argues that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supports religious liberty only halfheartedly. According to Ostler, the Church supports its own priorities and those of other Christians but is “far less willing to defend the religious rights of people outside the LDS faith when those rights conflict with church policies or values.” 

We strongly agree with Ostler “that religious freedom is strongest when it protects people of every faith—including those with no faith at all.” But we disagree with his assessment of the Church’s record on religious liberty. 

Setting the Record Straight

To begin, Ostler makes misleading statements about the Church’s efforts to protect religious liberty. He says that the Church did not “intervene” in the case of Damon Landor, a Rastafarian whose case recently came before the Supreme Court. But while the Church could not legally intervene as a party, it did become involved. It filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Landor, clearly and publicly supporting Mr. Landor’s case through the only legal avenue it had.

Ostler also argues that the Church should have “filed opposition” to the Texas abortion ban to protect its members’ religious freedom. But this conflates an allowance with an obligation. Just because the Church allows abortion in exceptional cases does not mean members have a religious obligation to obtain abortions, nor that getting an abortion is an exercise of religious belief. 

The case involving Hoosier Jews for Choice, in which several plaintiffs in Indiana claim a right to abortion under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) law, is more complex. However, it’s also not as simple as “you supported religious liberty in other cases, so you have to support it here.” RFRA laws have several standards that must be met, and there are good reasons to believe that those standards have not been met in this case. 

Promoting Religious Freedom Through Legal Action

Beyond these cases, Ostler raises an important question that he never really answers: What does it mean to consistently support religious liberty as a universal principle? If, as he seems to suggest, it means supporting religious groups and beliefs other than one’s own, the Church clearly does. 

There are many, many cases in which the Church has filed briefs in support of religious communities and individuals with significantly different beliefs. Most religious freedom cases to reach the Supreme Court in recent decades have involved Christian litigants. However, the Church has also supported non-Christian groups and individuals. In recent years, it has filed in support of the Rastafarian prisoner previously mentioned; Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic parents; Catholic entities; Lutheran churches; nondenominational Christians; and an evangelical Christian, among several others. 

What’s more, the Church frequently joins religiously diverse coalitions to file these amicus briefs. This practice indicates its interest in securing religious freedom for all, not only for itself. 

The Church also has a longstanding relationship with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The Becket Fund is the leading national law firm that defends the religious freedom of people of all faiths, not just Christians. It has represented Sikhs, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and members of other minority faiths.

And while religious liberty is a fundamental right, it’s not an unlimited right. The state can restrict religious liberty for legitimate reasons, and the Church understands this. For instance, the state’s interest in promoting health and safety led to restrictions on houses of worship during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the proportionality of these restrictions compared to those imposed on other institutions has been debated, the Church willingly complied to promote health and safety, despite the way these restrictions limited religious exercise. Further, President Oaks has said that religious government officials cannot use religious liberty as a justification to avoid fulfilling their duties under the law, such as providing marriage licenses to same-sex couples when the law recognizes these marriages. 

Promoting Religious Freedom Through Dialogue

We also think it’s important to look at global religious liberty. After all, the focus of the Church’s recent fast for religious liberty was specifically to promote this freedom worldwide.

The Church has also financially supported the annual International Religious Freedom Summit, which brings together key religious freedom organizations to champion religious freedom worldwide. Summit participants come from diverse faith backgrounds and from around the world to work together to improve religious freedom for all people everywhere, especially for the world’s most persecuted groups.

The Church’s flagship legal institution, BYU Law School, also hosts an annual International Law and Religion Symposium that convenes people of different faith backgrounds (or none) to discuss challenges to religious freedom and learn about best-practice solutions. And BYU Law School also boasts some of the world’s leading scholars of law and religion, who travel the globe teaching the principle of religious freedom for everyone, everywhere.

None of this captures the Church’s extensive humanitarian efforts, many of which help people persecuted for their beliefs. Consider, for example, the Church’s assistance to the Yazidis, a religious minority in Iraq who faced genocide at the hands of ISIS, or the Church’s efforts to help refugees, including many who are fleeing religious persecution. Countless other examples exist.

It’s true that the Church does not get involved in every single case or with every bill with religious liberty implications. The Church has consistently emphasized that certain core spheres of religious freedom are most important to protect, and it prioritizes them. As critics of the Church would agree, not every purported exercise of religious belief can or should be accommodated. But within appropriate limits, religious belief deserves special recognition and support. The Church has long supported religious liberty as a broad principle, one that applies to religious believers and nonbelievers alike. 

The post Whose Religious Freedom? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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See amid these rocky mountains,
Zion’s standard wide unfurled,
Far above Missouri’s fountain,
Lo! it waves for all the world.

Freedom, peace, and full salvation,
Are the blessings guaranteed;
Liberty to every nation,
Every tongue and every creed.

“The Mountain Standard,” by P.P. Pratt

On July 24, 1849, two years after the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah settlers gathered to celebrate Utah’s first formal Pioneer Day. 

Among the speakers was Thomas Bullock, a pioneer himself. After a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, Bullock read Parley P. Pratt’s poem.

The stanzas present Deseret as a place of religious liberty and extend that promise beyond the Saints. In Deseret, sect would not divide, for all were united with “shackles burst asunder.” There would be no “foreigner” in Deseret—only “a friend, a brother.”

Pratt’s invitation also served an immediate practical purpose. Emigration was central to the future of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the West. The journey from bondage to liberty was as physical as it was spiritual. Zion needed Saints; the Saints needed Zion.

Two short months later, Pratt’s invitation took institutional form. On October 6, 1849, The Church of Jesus Christ organized the Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company. Bullock served as the company’s clerk, meticulously arranging passage for thousands of Latter-day Saints from around the world. Many soon followed in his footsteps and found freedom in the valleys of Deseret. The fund continued to finance this sacred migration for nearly forty years, until its forced disincorporation by the federal government in 1887.

That history offers Latter-day Saints a useful lens for considering the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. The two programs are not the same. But they address related questions, and they call on similar spiritual instincts. How can a community help people fleeing persecution begin again? 

Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company 

The Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company (PEF) was a loan program through which the Church paid in advance for Latter-day Saints’ travel to Utah. During the mid-1800s, The Church of Jesus Christ maintained a religious mandate that members migrate to Utah. The PEF provided the material means.

The General Assembly of the State of Deseret formally incorporated the PEF in September 1850. The legislation stated that “the general business of the Company” was to be “devoted…to promote, facilitate, and accomplish the Emigration of the Poor.” Stated motivations were both economic and religious. The state of Deseret needed laborers; Latter-day Saints needed liberty. The PEF offered both. 

The Church was keenly aware that many of these good and worthy people were fleeing very real persecution. The day before the ordinance was adopted, Elder George A. Smith of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles spoke “in behalf of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund” and recalled this experience: 

We were surrounded by mobs and our 150 houses lighting the heavens with their lurid flames, at midnight, and when rapine, robbery, and violence ruled supreme in Illinois. At that time this people were defenceless; every liberty was taken from them.

Elder Smith said Latter-day Saints then resolved to leave Illinois. They covenanted to use their property and influence until every Latter-day Saint who wished to leave had reached safety.

The fund successfully accomplished both its economic and spiritual aims. From 1854 until the fund’s forcible federal dissolution in 1887, around 30 percent of all Latter-day Saint emigrants used PEF loans. That amounted to approximately 30,000 people.

Congress dissolved the PEF with the passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. Congress hoped to end The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by undermining its source of growth and prosperity. 

Today’s Perpetual Emigration Fund: The Refugee Program

Nearly a century after the federal government dismantled the PEF, Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 with bipartisan support. The law established the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, through which people facing persecution abroad—including many facing religious persecution—may seek resettlement in the United States. 

The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is distinct from the U.S. asylum process, though both were established via the Refugee Act and serve individuals fleeing persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Asylum seekers request safety at or within the U.S. border; refugees request safety while outside the United States through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supports both refugees and asylum seekers who enter the United States through employment, education, and other partner programs.

The modern refugee program no doubt differs structurally from its nineteenth-century predecessor. The historical PEF was a distinctly religious endeavor, organized by church leadership to gather a religiously homogeneous group to a small but growing community. The modern refugee program, by contrast, is secular and federally administered. It welcomes individuals of every background and belief across the country.

Yet while they belong to different eras and operate under different authorities, these two programs share profound moral and functional parallels. 

Economic Similarities

The refugee program is literally a perpetual emigration fund and functions similarly to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund. 

Many refugees finance their travel to the United States through a travel loan serviced by the International Organization for Migration. Refugees begin repaying these loans after they become financially self-sufficient. Their repayments help finance future refugee travel, making the program—like the PEF—a fund by and for refugees. On the eve of their journeys, refugees today sign a promissory note similar to the note signed by early Latter-day Saint pioneers. 

The Refugee Program is also economically self-sustaining. Research conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2024 found that refugees and asylees contribute more to the American economy than they cost to resettle. Over a 15-year period, net fiscal benefits—primarily contributed through income and taxes—were estimated at over $123 billion. 

Utah’s 14,400 refugees generate over $572 million in household income and hold over $425 million in spending power, according to the American Immigration Council. They also pay over $50 million in state and local taxes. As births decline and Utah’s existing population ages, migration will only increase in importance—becoming a significant driver of Utah’s population growth. Just as the PEF was intended to bring “a great army of laborers” to “help here, on the farm and in the Shop, building and on the public works,” the refugee program is a critical contributor to Utah’s economic future. 

Religious & Spiritual Similarities

But the similarities between the PEF and the refugee program are not simply economic; they are also spiritual. By law, all refugees have fled persecution of some kind; many have fled religious persecution. The Lautenberg Program is reserved for people fleeing religious persecution. It has resettled tens of thousands of religious refugees. Christians made up at least half of the refugees resettled in the United States over the past ten years. Many refugees of other faiths have also been resettled.

Life-threatening, religiously motivated persecution is no longer a reality for most Latter-day Saints. However, it remains a reality for our brothers and sisters in faith throughout the world. In 1853, President Brigham Young encouraged Latter-day Saints to allow their past to guide their future: 

We might ask you to reflect upon the days that you have spent in yonder distant land, where you could seldom walk the streets or enter a shop, like another citizen, without the finger of scorn being pointed at you, without suffering the malignant taunts and sneers of the ungodly, for the sake of your ‘religion.’ 

President Young’s urgent call could just as easily describe the persecution faced by refugees of faith today. According to tracking data compiled by Global Christian Relief, 4,849 Christians were killed for their faith during its latest reporting period. Over that same time frame, 67,843 Christians were physically or mentally abused worldwide for faith-related reasons. Religious minorities around the world face a rising tide of persecution. They include members of underground churches in North Korea and people fleeing hostile regimes in Iran or Afghanistan. Tragically, just as their need for sanctuary has grown, America’s doors are closing.

The persecution of modern-day refugees reinforces the purpose of Pioneer Day: to remember the struggle of our pioneer ancestors, remain grateful for the grace—material and spiritual—that enabled our contemporary religious and economic prosperity, and retain compassion for those currently enduring similar plights. While Latter-day Saints today can no longer contribute to the PEF, they can support the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

The Refugee Program Is At Risk

Unfortunately, the similarities between the modern U.S. refugee admissions program and the PEF also extend to their detractors. Just as the federal government forcibly disbanded the PEF to prevent the continued immigration of Latter-day Saints, the federal government is now attempting to halt the resettlement of refugees fleeing persecution through the refugee program.  

The forced dissolution of the PEF was the culmination of a decades-long federal campaign. In 1885, two years before the dissolution of the PEF, President Grover Cleveland made an extraordinary request to Congress. He asked for a law to “prevent the importation of Mormons into the country.” His words echoed a hostile 1879 State Department circular issued by Secretary William M. Evarts. The circular directed U.S. diplomatic and consular officers in Europe to enlist foreign governments in halting the emigration of Latter-day Saint converts. In addition to dissolving the PEF, the Edmunds-Tucker Act barred the territorial legislature from passing any law intended to bring people into the territory.

Just as the federal government disbanded the PEF, the current federal government is attempting to dismantle the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. In January 2025, it suspended refugee admissions, freezing funding for essential infrastructure and services. Admissions resumed in October 2025, but the federal government set a historically low refugee admissions goal for fiscal year 2026 and adopted unprecedentedly narrow admissions priorities. As of May 31, 2026, only 6,668 refugees have been admitted to the U.S. this fiscal year. Of those, 6,665 were from South Africa; only three were from Afghanistan, a country with well-substantiated refugee claims. Before 2016, the United States admitted an average of 95,000 refugees per year. 

As a result, the refugee program’s infrastructure is shrinking. Historically low funding has accompanied historically low admissions; many local resettlement agencies have been forced to close their doors due to financial uncertainty. Financial and operational volatility forced two of America’s longest-standing resettlement agencies, those run by the Catholic and Episcopal churches, to withdraw from the refugee program in the spring of 2025. 

In 1889, federal judge Thomas J. Anderson used a similar tactic to halt Latter-day Saint migration, famously refusing to naturalize Latter-day Saint immigrants.

While Utah’s support for refugees largely continues, the state has not escaped the negative impacts of federal disinvestment. Utah regularly welcomes over 1,000 refugees per year. This year, Utah has only welcomed 70—all South Afrikaners. Catholic Community Services of Utah, one of the state’s four refugee resettlement agencies, initially announced that its resettlement program would end. After an outpouring of private donations, the agency reversed course and temporarily continued services for resettled refugees. But many of Utah’s refugee families remain in limbo, unable to receive green cards and at risk of the federal government rescinding their refugee status.

Our state’s ability to continue its pioneer tradition of offering refuge to those fleeing religious and other forms of persecution is at risk. 

A Perpetual Refugee Program: Building Bipartisan Support For A Refugee Bottom Line

Latter-day Saints’ history does not settle every question of public policy related to refugees. But that history can inspire Latter-day Saints to honor their pioneer heritage by ensuring the United States remains a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution. As proposed by Governor Herbert in celebration of Pioneer Day, a statutory admissions floor is one proposal worth serious consideration. Such a floor would help communities sustain their economies with a more predictable flow of refugees. 

Latter-day Saints can help by writing to their city council members, mayors, state legislators, and governor, to encourage them to call for a robust refugee admissions floor. 

Immigration debates are polarizing; supporting the refugee program doesn’t have to be. Refugee programming cannot survive without predictability. The PEF arose in a similarly polarizing environment within the Church, yet church leaders considered it a “a subject worthy of consideration and encouragement, fraught, as it is, with the best interest of society.” 

This Pioneer Day could be an ideal opportunity to carry forward Pratt’s promise. 

As Brigham Young urged Latter-day Saints, it is their obligation to remember the pioneers of their faith and their path to freedom and ensure this path remains available in perpetuity. 

The author wishes to thank Sophie Huttner for her editorial assistance with this article.

The post A Refuge for Modern Pioneers appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In 2008, my parents lived in the California North Hollywood Stake, an ecclesiastical unit of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While attending church services that summer, the bishop read an important letter from the First Presidency of the Church. It noted that Californians would vote on a proposed amendment to the California state constitution in November that, if passed, would specify “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” 

The letter explained that the Church would participate in a coalition of other churches and organizations and urged church members to “do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment.”

My parents understood the difficulties that the First Presidency’s request could impose on Church members. Their stake was in the heart of the U.S. film and entertainment industry. Many within the Hollywood community strongly advocated for same-sex marriage. Yet my parents, along with many other Latter-day Saints, began knocking on doors and making calls at phone banks to urge fellow Californians to vote yes. 

Despite challenges, the combined contributions of Church members were impressive. While Roman Catholic archbishops and lay organizations contributed an estimated $3 million to the cause, Latter-day Saints are estimated to have contributed over $20 million and provided an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the volunteers who conducted door-to-door canvassing. These efforts made a big difference. Despite polls showing that Proposition 8 would be defeated handily, it passed by nearly 600,000 votes, retaining the traditional definition of marriage, at least temporarily. 

For their participation the Church and its members faced immediate backlash. The Church faced demonstrations outside its temples and meetinghouses, with demonstrators chanting epithets and slurs. The names of donors to Proposition 8 were published, leading to harassment, intimidation, and the loss of work. My parents, like many other Church members, felt this was a defining moment.

Then, fourteen years later, in November 2022, the Church surprised many observers by announcing its support for the federal Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA). The Act would codify same-sex marriage under federal law while upholding important religious freedom protections for religious people and organizations. 

Same-sex marriage was already considered a constitutional right under the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. But same-sex marriage supporters had become nervous about Obergefell’s viability after Justice Clarence Thomas indicated interest in reconsidering it. Meanwhile, religious organizations wanted statutory religious freedom protections to uphold their doctrine about marriage. This new law attempted to meet both needs. 

In this third installment of a three-part series, I will explore how the Church continues to vigorously defend traditional marriage as divine doctrine while simultaneously teaching the importance of “fairness for all” as part of its deep commitment to religious freedom. 

When Civil and Divine Laws are in Tension

The Church’s approach to religious freedom fosters societal harmony by honoring moral agency, while holding firm to its own doctrine. 

President Dallin H. Oaks has taught an important framework that the Church has followed since its earliest days for instances when civil law and divine law seem to be in conflict. First, religious believers must try to harmonize civil and divine law or seek to change the offending civil law. When change becomes impossible, then, in almost all cases, believers must submit to the law even though they disagree. Believers should do all they can to show respect and civility toward those with whom they disagree and work with them on the best ways to harmonize their fundamental beliefs. 

The Church’s support for Proposition 8 was consistent with this approach to religious freedom. The Church encouraged its members to seek changes to California’s laws to conform to its understanding of the divine law of marriage. It supported that same definition when the question went before the U.S. Supreme Court. When that effort failed at the highest court in the land, the Church supported the Respect for Marriage Act with its religious freedom protections as the best way to harmonize its views with the offending law, all while striving for civility and respect for others. 

Religious Freedom Includes Fairness for All

Religious freedom is not just about asserting our rights. It also imposes a responsibility to protect others in theirs. As President Oaks stated, “At a time when most of our public discourse concerns rights, it may seem strange to speak of responsibilities. But a democratic republic needs patriotic citizens who are fulfilling their responsibilities as well as claiming their rights.” 

The Church’s conduct following Proposition 8 illustrates this principle. In November 2009, after Proposition 8 passed, the Church supported Salt Lake City ordinances protecting LGBT+ individuals in housing and employment discrimination. At that time Church spokesman Michael Otterson said, “I represent a church that believes in human dignity, in treating others with respect even when we disagree—in fact, especially when we disagree.” 

In January 2015, months before the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell legalized same-sex marriage, the Church held a rare news conference to express public support for legislation protecting LGBT+ rights. Sister Neill Marriott, a counselor in the Young Women General Presidency, framed the issue as one of coexistence, “This nation is engaged in a great debate about marriage, family, individual conscience and collective rights and the place of religious freedom in our society. The eventual outcome of this debate will influence to a large extent whether millions of people with diverse backgrounds and different views and values will live together in relative harmony in the foreseeable future.”  

National experts were called in to meet with legislators, many of whom were not naturally disposed to support LGBT+ rights. Church representatives and community stakeholders participated in “intense negotiations” designed to help everyone involved better understand and trust each other. Legislators needed to understand that, in addition to protecting essential LGBT+ rights, the bill also provided numerous essential religious freedom protections to both religious individuals and organizations. 

The Utah bill was signed into law in March 2015 and was widely hailed as a model of cooperation. While the law is often called the “Utah Compromise,” it did not compromise any of the Church’s beliefs or doctrines. It was a win for both sides of a contested debate. Elder Ronald A. Rasband, now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, explained, “We believe in creating a space for everyone to live their conscience without infringing on the rights and safety of others. When the rights of one group collide against the rights of another, we must follow the principle of being as fair and sensitive to as many people as possible. The Church believes in and teaches ‘fairness for all.’”

Applying Fairness for All After Obergefell

Three months after the “Utah Compromise,” the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex marriage was a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. 

While many conservative Christians denounced the Court’s decision, the Church of Jesus Christ took a different tack. Even though the Church, with others, filed an amicus brief arguing against same-sex marriage, it acknowledged the legal finality of the Court’s decision, while continuing to teach its doctrinal beliefs about the purpose of marriage. 

A few months later, President Oaks delivered an important speech at the Court/Clergy Conference in Sacramento, California. Instead of criticizing the Supreme Court’s holding, President Oaks praised the majority opinion for not grounding its decision on claims of animus by supporters of traditional marriage laws, and for acknowledging the reasonableness of religious and philosophical arguments for marriage between a man and woman. He continued by arguing that there are two systems of law: divine and civil. Jesus taught us to respect both: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” President Oaks added, “we must, to the extent possible, obey both systems of law. When there are apparent conflicts, we must seek to harmonize them.”

He counseled believers to not invoke religious freedom to override every law they dislike, and to “acknowledge the validity of constitutional laws.” Ultimately, he argued, there comes a point when, for the sake of our pluralistic democracy and the rule of law, the political and legal battles must come to an end.

This framework explains how the Church could both vigorously advocate for traditional marriage, while later supporting legislation that acknowledged the legal reality of same-sex marriage and the need to protect churches and believers’ vital interests. 

This framework also explains why President Oaks criticized the efforts of a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, just as he criticized California government officials who refused to enforce Proposition 8. In both instances, he asserted that personal convictions, religious or otherwise, cannot be used to avoid the rule of law, and that people with conscientious convictions on either side should instead recuse themselves. 

President Oaks has continued to lead by teaching the principle of fairness for all. At the University of Virginia in 2021, President Oaks delivered what he called “the most difficult address I have ever undertaken.” He acknowledged the continuing conflicts between religious freedom and protections against LGBT+ discrimination but hoped to provide a “feasible path forward.” He called on individuals not to seek “total dominance” for their own position, but instead “accept the reality that we are fellow citizens who need each other.”  We should resolve differences through “mutual respect, shared understanding, and good faith negotiations.” Doing so, he added, “does not require any compromise of core principles.”

That sentiment, in short, explains how the Church could support the federal Respect for Marriage Act, while still holding to its doctrinal belief in traditional marriage. 

Support for The Respect for Marriage Act

The Respect for Marriage Act did not arise in the same legal world as Proposition 8. In 2008, the legal definition of marriage remained unsettled. By 2022, Obergefell was the law of the land. And while President Oaks acknowledged that the Act “did restate” same-sex marriage as the law, this restatement “added little,” he said, beyond the rights granted in Obergefell. The Church’s focus was on religious freedom protections. 

While this position is entirely consistent with the Church’s longstanding approach to divine and civil laws in tension, it nevertheless received significant backlash both from the right and, for different reasons, from the left.  

But others, perhaps initially skeptical of the Church’s position, have come to defend its approach. After studying President Oaks’s teachings, Joshua Topham dismissed as uninformed the argument that the Church’s “civic theology” toward the LGBT+ community compromises Christian moral values. He wrote: 

I suspect that some readers will view the LDS Church’s emphasis on civic charity and mutual accommodation as a sort of betrayal. But to dismiss Oaks’s civic theology as a surrender to secularism is to misunderstand it. He is not urging the dilution of Christian teaching on matters of moral importance but the application of Christian charity to political life. His civic theology is rooted in the conviction that building a harmonious pluralistic society will entail the hard work—and the Christian virtues—of persuasion, compassion, and love unfeigned. Perhaps rather than revealing a weakness of resolve, this civic theology of peacemaking offers precisely what is needed to restore our rupturing social fabric.

Similarly, Jonathan Rauch, an openly gay, married Jew, lauded the Church’s efforts to emphasize the responsibilities of religious freedom in his article “How Latter-day Saints Can Save American Democracy.” Rauch concluded:

Why might the church support the Utah compromise and the Respect for Marriage Act? Because those measures protect the church’s ability to teach and practice its doctrines about marriage and sexuality within its own institutions, while also protecting, in the larger society, people’s ability to make their own choices about marriage and sexuality. Thus can ‘patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation’ advance religious freedom and personal freedom in tandem.

Promoting Religious Freedom and Fairness for All

What can we do as individuals to promote an understanding of religious freedom that includes fairness for all? 

Recently, Amy Andrus, an associate director at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU, provided numerous additional suggestions of ways we can promote and protect religious freedom. 

To these excellent suggestions, I would emphasize three principles.

Be examples of disciples of Jesus Christ. The Lord taught, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” If others do not see religious people as happy, kind contributors to their communities, why would they value the religion they espouse? As President Oaks once noted, “If one does not value religion, one usually does not put a high value on religious freedom.”

Teach your children (or grandchildren) the principles of religious freedom and fairness for all. Each semester I ask my religious freedom students at BYU to share what they learned in their elementary and high schools about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the founding of our country. Their responses suggest that schools teach less about these subjects than in prior generations. As Camille Smith recently noted, it is up to parents, rather than schools, to teach the rising generation about constitutional principles. 

Get involved. Whether it is participating in the PTA, volunteering at your local school, or attending political caucus meetings, your involvement makes a difference. As you get involved, remember that religious freedom allows you to advocate your opinions freely, even if grounded in religious belief. While dropping off our children, my wife began to notice the lack of adherence to the school dress code. Motivated in part by religious beliefs, she reached out to the high school principal and made presentations to the school board. In the end, they reaffirmed the dress policy to the students and parents. Religious voices do make a difference. 

Strengthening religious liberty begins with us. As discussed in this three-part series, we should understand the rights and blessings of religious freedom, its history and laws, and our responsibility to protect the moral choices of others while we advocate for our own. Then we should teach these principles to the rising generation so they, too, may continue to enjoy the blessings of religious liberty. 

Read the first article in this series, “The Doctrine of Religious Freedom,” here.

Read the second article in this series, “The Legal Framework of Religious Liberty,” here. 

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Damon Landor, a Rastafarian and former prisoner, would likely agree.

In 2020, Landor was finishing a prison sentence in Louisiana custody when two prison guards approached him, intent on shaving off his knee-length dreadlocks to align with the prison’s grooming policy. About two decades earlier, Landor had made a Nazarite vow to never cut his hair.

Prepared for the confrontation, Landor tried to show the guards a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that said prisons were generally barred from cutting male Rastafarians’ hair.

Despite Landor’s pleas that they respect his rights, the guards threw the court opinion into the trash and handcuffed him to a chair. They then shaved off his dreadlocks and put him into lockdown until the end of his sentence. While receiving a long-overdue haircut is a welcome experience for most people, Landor compared the forced breaking of his vow to being raped.

Most people probably agree that Landor and other religious prisoners like him should receive a remedy for the abuses they suffer at the hands of state officials, especially when they suffer irreparable harm. However, despite several justices recognizing the egregious nature of what happened to Landor, the Supreme Court ruled against him in his attempt to recover monetary damages from the offending prison guards for violating his rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).

Why? Understanding this ruling requires understanding the interaction between RLUIPA and the Constitution’s Spending Clause.

RLUIPA was passed in the wake of a battle over religious freedom protection between the Supreme Court and Congress. In the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision Employment Division v. Smith, the Court broke away from decades of precedent that had provided strong religious freedom protection under the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause. Instead, it held that the free exercise of religion can be restricted or burdened if government laws or regulations are “neutral” and “generally applicable” (meaning that the laws do not target a specific religion’s practice and that they apply across the board).

In response to Smith, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to restore the pre-Smith standard of review for claims involving religious exercise at both the state and federal level. After the Supreme Court limited RFRA to the federal government, Congress passed RLUIPA in an attempt to restore the pre-Smith standard of review to additional state and local contexts, including the treatment of institutionalized persons. Under RLUIPA, when a state prison receiving federal funds places a “substantial burden” on an inmate’s religious rights, it must show that it is using the “least restrictive means” to accomplish a compelling governmental interest. In other words, the prison bears the burden of showing there was no other way to accommodate the prisoner’s religious exercise and still achieve the law’s purpose.

In this case, the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC) received federal funding and agreed to answer certain suits, as a prison system, for violations of RLUIPA. Using RLUIPA, Landor sued LDOC and the offending prison guards in their official and individual capacities for monetary damages under RLUIPA’s provision that permits those who experience violations of their religious rights to obtain “appropriate relief” from the offending government (here, the prison). By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, only the damages claims against the prison guards in their individual capacities remained because lower courts had found that the monetary suit against LDOC and the guards in their official capacity was barred by the Eleventh Amendment’s sovereign immunity doctrine.

But why did the Supreme Court prevent Landor from being awarded damages from the prison guards in their individual capacities? Louisiana argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that Congress lacked power under the Constitution’s Spending Clause to impose personal liability on state employees who had not consented to liability. RLUIPA conditions the spending of federal funds on prison systems’ compliance with the stricter standard of respecting inmates’ religious rights, not on individual prison employees’ adherence. Only the prison system itself had accepted the conditions and consented to liability.

In the Court’s eyes, prison guards are not privy to the prison’s acceptance of liability because they do not knowingly consent to it when hired and thus do not face individual liability for violating the religious rights protected by RLUIPA.

Even though the Court’s decision in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety was ultimately decided by the Court’s Spending Clause analysis, it highlights a glaring flaw in current religious liberty law: inmates like Landor who suffer harm from prison officials related to their religious practices in prison currently have no practical remedy available to them under RLUIPA.

This enduring vulnerability in religious practice for people of all religious traditions is highly concerning, especially in our increasingly diverse and secular society. Religion supports human flourishing and is an integral part of individual identity for many prisoners and everyday people alike. It is also an essential part of many prisoners’ rehabilitation.

Because of the Supreme Court’s decision, we should ensure that prisoners have a remedy when they endure abuses at the hands of prison officials and that guards have an incentive to respect the religious exercise of prisoners. This might include conditioning federal funding to prisons on guards accepting suits for monetary damages, or states implementing parallel protections to RLUIPA that allow these suits.

Whatever the solution, it will likely require that more Americans do the work necessary to understand the importance of protecting the free exercise rights of minority religious groups like the Rastafarians and then influence political officials to take the necessary steps.

Relative to other faith traditions in the United States, Rastafarians are a small fraction of the religious population. Their beliefs and practices—like Landor’s knee-length dreadlocks— might seem obscure or even strange to many.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we may not agree with many of Landor’s beliefs. But therein lies the beauty of true religious freedom and the right to conscience: the ability to believe and act in accordance with one’s beliefs should not depend on anyone else’s approval, and especially not upon majority approbation. 

As Latter-day Saints, we are perceived by many to be a peculiar people with odd customs and unprecedented doctrine. In advocating for other faith traditions that face obstacles to true religious liberty, we also help protect the ability to share the message of the Restoration. As Joseph Smith said, “The same principle which would trample upon the rights of the Latter-day Saints would trample upon the rights of the Roman Catholics, or of any other denomination who may be unpopular.”

If we want religious liberty to endure, we cannot defend it only when our own beliefs are at stake. Indeed, caring about and defending the religious rights of the most vulnerable is a powerful way to shore up religious freedom for all, including ourselves. It should not matter whether a cross or dreadlocks symbolize deeply held beliefs. 

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Latter-day Saints should look beyond the festivities and reflect upon the deeper meaning of the freedoms we enjoy. From the blessings promised to this land to the founding of America and the Restoration of the Gospel, Heavenly Father’s guiding hand has quietly moved through the centuries, preparing the way for the founding of a land of liberty where He could restore His gospel. Though the history of the United States has, at times, been filled with injustices and failures to live up to its own principles of liberty and justice for all, its founding principles created an inspired framework through which liberty, religious freedom, and human dignity could be expanded.

As we revel in parades and picnics, our nation is threatened by a growing disregard for God and the blessings of freedom He has bestowed. To honor this anniversary properly, we should recall America’s inspired founding and draw from that remembrance the strength to defend the divinely inspired Constitution in a polarized age where God‑given liberties are increasingly misunderstood or ignored.

A Land of Prophecy

Book of Mormon prophecy reveals God as guiding when and how nations would come to the American continent. The prophet Lehi taught that “there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord.” The prophet Moroni taught that “this is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ.”

The American continent has long been home to many peoples with diverse languages, governments, economies, and religions, including those described in the Book of Mormon as being led to the Americas. The Book of Mormon describes how the people of the American continent were, for a time, kept “from the knowledge of other nations,” including the nations across the Atlantic whose later arrival would drastically reshape history. 

Europeans did not arrive in the American continent until after the nations of feudal Europe experienced the Renaissance and Reformation and established themselves as independent kingdoms. The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi described the Europeans’ first encounter with America, starting with Christopher Columbus, as inspired:

And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.

Given the devastation European conquest brought to many Indigenous peoples, it can be difficult to see how inspiration was at play. While Columbus is a morally complex figure with a challenging history, we also learn from his journals and letters that he was particularly  interested in the biblical passages that referred to the gathering of Israel, he employed persecuted Jews and conversos in Spain, and felt guided by the Holy Ghost in his revolutionary voyage to the New World. 

Nephi also saw that, after Europeans learned of the New World, many would seek to escape the persecution and tyranny of the Old World and flee to America to obtain religious freedom (1 Nephi 13:13-16). Building upon the Renaissance and Reformation, the Pilgrims and their Mayflower Compact established early settlements “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith,”  a covenant land with a biblical foundation. The concept of practicing religion according to the dictates of one’s own conscience, revolutionary before the founding of America—and often taken for granted today—became one of the quintessentially American ideals that has spread through much of the world.

A Providential Revolution

In that same vision, 2,300 years before the American Revolution, Nephi saw that American colonists would prevail in their war for independence with God’s help (1 Nephi 13:16-19).

President Ezra Taft Benson taught, “Our Father in Heaven planned the coming forth of the Founding Fathers and their form of government as the necessary great prologue leading to the Restoration of the Gospel.” 

And many paid the price they pledged. Roughly a dozen signers of the Declaration suffered serious losses to homes, estates, or property—through looting, occupation, destruction, or burning—often at the hands of British or Loyalist forces. Five others were taken as prisoners of war—and in the particularly horrible case of Richard Stockton, starved and kept in freezing, brutal prison conditions for months. One signer lost his son in the Revolutionary War, and another had two sons who were captured. Nine died from a variety of causes during the war and did not see the Constitution established.

Many of the founders have since had proxy temple work performed on their behalf. In August 1877, Elder Wilford Woodruff, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and president of the St. George Temple, received a visitation by the spirits of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They asked Elder Woodruff why the saving priesthood ordinances of the temple had not been performed for them.

Elder Woodruff recorded this visitation in his journal. “Before I left St. George, the spirits of the dead gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them. Said they, ‘You have had the use of the Endowment House for a number of years, and yet nothing has ever been done for us. We laid the foundation of the government you now enjoy, and we never apostatized from it, but we remained true to it and were faithful to God.’”

After the temple work was completed for the Founding Fathers, Elder Woodruff wrote in his journal, “I felt thankful that we had the privilege and the power to administer for the worthy dead, especially for the signers of the Declaration of Independence, that inasmuch as they had laid the foundation of our Government, that we could do as much for them as they had done for us.”

As president of the Church, President Woodruff later declared in the April 1898 general conference that “those men who laid the foundation of this American government were the best spirits the God of heaven could find on the face of the earth. They were choice spirits … [and] were inspired of the Lord.” Indeed, the Founders were exceptional in their faith, education, wisdom, vision, and leadership ability.

An Inspired System of Government

The founders helped to lay an inspired system of government. In 2 Nephi 10:10-14, the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob foretold that in the latter days the Gentiles would colonize America and would establish it as a land of liberty where no kings would rule. Through Jacob, the Lord declared that He would protect the inhabitants of the land and that anyone who tried to establish a kingdom would perish.

In rejecting even the suggestion of kingly power, George Washington showed the kind of humility and restraint that many scriptural civilizations lacked, recognizing that monarchy always carries the risk of tyranny and pride.

Instead of creating a kingdom, the liberated colonists chose a radical exception to the global status quo by establishing a constitutional republic, something Abraham Lincoln would later summarize as “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Thus, Washington’s humility and desire to serve as president rather than rule as an autocrat is one shining example of what has come to be known has “American exceptionalism.”  

A Divinely Guided Constitution

Having designated America a land of liberty, God raised up a group of inspired and intelligent leaders who could draft a constitution and establish the first truly free society in modern times. The Lord revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith that He inspired the Constitution for the specific purpose of eliminating slavery and protecting the God-given rights belonging to all people. He declared:

According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;

That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.

Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.

And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose” (D&C 101:77-80, emphasis added).

Thus, the Lord inspired the Constitution as a means to eventually abolish slavery and protect the sacred agency that Heavenly Father had given us as a critical part of our eternal progression.

Of course, it took significant work and nearly a century to end the despicable practice of slavery in the United States.

Although the abolition of slavery was not immediately achieved at the founding of our republic in 1776, some states immediately began to strip away at slavery’s foundation. For example, during the Revolutionary War, Vermont used its state constitution to abolish slavery in 1777, becoming the first state in the Western Hemisphere to do so. New Hampshire followed in 1779.

Pennsylvania began gradual emancipation in 1780. Massachusetts came next with a state supreme court decision in 1783, and Rhode Island began gradual emancipation in 1784, shortly after the war. Later that year, Connecticut initiated a gradual plan to emancipate its slaves.

Thus, within eight years of our founding in 1776, six of the original Thirteen Colonies had abolished slavery or begun gradual emancipation. Many in the founding generation drew on the principles of the Revolution to challenge slavery and to establish a constitutional framework that, while imperfectly applied, contained principles capable of more fully securing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

So why did many of the Founders, who denounced slavery, nevertheless own slaves themselves? The answer is complex, as they operated within the socioeconomic system inherited from British colonial rule. Both Washington and Jefferson helped articulate the age’s ideals of liberty while remaining entangled in slavery. Washington came to oppose the institution privately and freed the people he personally owned in his will, while Jefferson opposed slavery in principle but freed very few of the hundreds he enslaved. He vociferously condemned slavery as a “cruel war against human nature” in his original draft Declaration, but Virginia passed various pro-slavery laws during his lifetime that made manumission difficult. In spite of their complex history with slavery, the Founders’ lives demonstrate how God can work through imperfect people to accomplish His purposes and lay a foundation for later generations to fulfill.

Defending the Constitution

Heavenly Father has given a sacred responsibility to His covenant people to befriend and defend the Constitution. As recorded in Section 98, the Savior told Joseph Smith, “Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land” (D&C 98:6). Because He created all mankind to be free, Jesus asks us to do our part to ensure that the rights and privileges of all mankind are protected. 

He also warned against laws that encroach upon the God-given rights and privileges of personal liberty, and of our obligation to elect honest and wise leaders (D&C 101:77-80 and 98:5-10).

The Lord further revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith that the Constitution and the United States would one day be imperiled. Several contemporaries of the Prophet Joseph Smith reported that he prophesied that the Constitution would seemingly hang by a thread, and Latter-day Saints would step forth to save it from threatened destruction. 

Our modern prophet, President Dallin H. Oaks, has described an apostolic responsibility for studying the meaning of the divinely inspired United States Constitution in the work of the restored Church. For example, he has identified how the First Amendment’s antiestablishment and religious exercise guarantees were the fertilizer in the soil from which the Restoration took root.

It is no wonder then that the Prophet Joseph Smith called the Constitution “a glorious standard… a heavenly banner.” The dedicatory prayer for the Kirtland Temple, as dictated by Jesus Christ to the Prophet Joseph Smith and found in Section 109, contains these words: “May those principles, which were so honorably and nobly defended, namely, the Constitution of our land, by our fathers, be established forever” (D&C 109:54).

A Sacred Responsibility

As we celebrate Independence Day on America’s 250th birthday, we must remember that we are free because of divine providence from our Father in Heaven. We are free to exercise our moral agency to choose good over evil. He asks us to love Him and each other, and to keep all His other commandments. May we use our agency to be peacemakers, especially in our politically divided society.

As American citizens and as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we are among the most blessed of all of Heavenly Father’s children. With those blessings, we have a sacred responsibility to be a light to the world. We are called not only to share the restored gospel as part of the gathering of Israel, but to be the “salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). In other words, “to be the seasoning, savoring, preserving influence in the world, the influence which would bring peace and blessings to all others.”

President Oaks declares that our belief in the divine inspiration behind America’s founding gives us a special responsibility to uphold constitutional principles, trust in the Lord, and remain optimistic about our nation’s future. We should pray for our nation and peacefully and lawfully engage in civic life. Upholding the Constitution, he counsels, also means learning its inspired principles, supporting wise leaders who defend them, and being informed citizens.

Heavenly Father inspired the founding of our republic as a land of liberty. This was an important step so that Jesus Christ could restore His gospel upon the earth. Therefore, when influences—whether political or cultural—seek to undermine our nation’s inspired founding principles, we should protect the heritage with which God has blessed us. 

The significance of America’s 250th birthday invites us to do more than celebrate; it calls on us to remember, recommit, and reclaim the sacred purpose of our nation. Let us resolve today, as Old Glory flutters triumphantly in the background of our Independence Day celebrations, that we, as Latter-day Saints, will righteously honor our responsibility—as prophesied by the Prophet Joseph Smith—to rise up and defend our divinely inspired Constitution. Then, with God’s continued grace, the United States of America will have many more milestone birthdays to come—birthdays on which our children and grandchildren can rejoice in a nation still anchored to the principles with which He made us free.

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On July 5, 2026, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States will join in a unified fast of gratitude for religious freedom and pray that religious freedom will spread throughout the world. In anticipation, our team at Public Square is highlighting one international religious freedom crisis for readers to remember as they fast and pray. 

We spoke with with Nury Turkel, a Uyghur American lawyer, author, and human rights advocate opposing China’s genocide of the Uyghur people. Born in a communist-run re-education camp in China, Mr. Turkel came to the United States, where he became an attorney and a religious freedom advocate, even as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued to persecute his family and other Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. As the first Uyghur American to serve on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Mr. Turkel has been profiled by Foreign Policy and other major outlets. Our interview focuses on the stark realities of the repression of religious freedom in China, the role of U.S. leadership in advocating for international religious freedom, and what Latter-day Saints can do to remember and stand up for the Uyghurs.

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

Remembering the Individual Victims of Genocide

Anna Bryner: Let’s start with China’s genocide of the Uyghurs. In your 2022 book, “No Escape,” you describe the system of surveillance, forced sterilization, sexual violence, detention, re-education, forced labor, family separation, and cultural erasure. You explain the genocide through stories of individuals in your book. What was it like for you to write this book about your people? How can we always remember the individuals affected by genocide? 

Nury Turkel: Thank you very much, Anna. It’s so nice to speak with you again and to share some thoughts.

Writing this book was a therapeutic process for me. It made me feel as if I finally had an opportunity to unload much of the pain and suffering that I experienced, both in China and later in the United States.

I never thought that I would end up talking about the way that my mother brought me into this world in such a horrific way. But I decided to use my story, starting with the title “No Escape,” to illustrate that people like myself—who are disfavored and disliked by a ruling regime—have been suffering, whether under the thumb of the Communist Party or as free Americans. Even as a senior member of the U.S. government, I was still affected by the regime.

So I was trying to use my story to tell the stories of those who are similarly situated and those who have not had the type of privilege I have—being a lawyer in the United States’ capital, having extensive professional and personal support—who are eager to have their voices heard.

Individuals in “No Escape” are not just data points. They are flesh-and-blood human beings who had dreams, families, careers, faith, and desires as simple as meeting their future wives and husbands to get married and build families.

When I think about the challenge of keeping individuals at the center, after interviewing all of the camp survivors, I’m reminded of a sentiment often attributed to this horrific individual, Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.”

When you hear the media and the advocates saying upwards of 1 million, that’s a lot of people. That’s more than the population of the District of Columbia. But those people, as I noted, have had lives, aspirations, and desires. They’re real people with names, with families, careers, and aspirations. 

The Chinese government has weaponized our psychological tendencies to reduce people to statistics, essentially saying, “Once I lock you up, you disappear. No one cares.” So I focus heavily on the Uyghur women to make the case that this is not only a mass atrocity, but there’s orchestrated, systematic sexual violence being committed against the most vulnerable women. I have some graphic accounts in my book, including their names. 

I also have a chapter called “Cultural Erasure” that specifically talks about the systematic and deliberate attempts to debase the Uyghur religion and just completely wipe it out. We have seen it already in society. For example, when my dad passed away, people who expressed condolences over the phone could not say, “Rest in peace. May Allah preserve a place in heaven for your father.” I mean, that kind of Quranic language is not even permitted.

Some of the things that I’ve seen done are erasing the names from the headstones, removing family photographs from homes, and banning the Uyghur language in schools. Because when you erase the people’s names, you erase the people. This was in the ugly chapters of the Nazi playbook.

My approach during the time that I wrote this book, and also afterward, was just to keep naming individual names. Just keep reminding them that those names need to be read and mentioned.

I had the fortune of meeting the incredible diplomat Ambassador Nick Burns during the confirmation process, and he said something that still sticks with me. When he was working for then-Secretary George Shultz, every time they met with the Soviet leadership, they brought in names, and they said the names, repeated the names, regardless of whether they listened or not.

Ambassador Burns did exactly that, going to the meetings with the Chinese and mentioning my parents’ names, my mom’s name. I think we have seen some really good, happy endings in that endeavor. So my approach is to keep naming the names.

And also, in the book, I wrote about scholars, musicians, and ordinary farmers whose children don’t know where their parents are. Based on the credible investigative journalists’ work, 800,000 to 1 million Uyghur kids have been locked up in children’s detention facilities. You don’t have to be a parent; you don’t have to be a sister; you don’t have to be a brother to be able to appreciate what that would do to you if somebody took your children away. That’s not only breaking the spirit. It’s breaking the family, the roots, the connection. That will have a generational effect.

So, to conclude the question, this is to the general public, this is to the advocates, this is, of course, to the diplomats who have access to the jailers of the prisoners of conscience and prisoners of religious freedom: Just say the name. Learn the name, say the name, repeat the name in every meeting that you have. I’ve done it. It annoys the counterparts. But in the end, that’s what they do, and that’s what they will continue to do: imprison and keep repeating the line that no one cares about the prisoners—unless you repeat their names.

Patterns of Repression

AB: What have you learned about patterns of repression from writing this book? 

NT: The CCP does not allow people to have dignified final days, funerals, or burials. The Uyghur people are not only not allowed to practice their religion, but the CCP is also changing the religious text. 

This is also happening to the Christian community. They have specifically targeted the Uyghur Muslims and the Catholics. There are a large number of Chinese Catholics. They went underground. During my time at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), I specifically advocated for their rights when I was engaging with the Vatican because what the CCP is doing is horrific.

The CCP changed the text, both in the Quran and the Bible, to make it in line with its policy of Sinicization. That’s a state project. This project was articulated in Xi Jinping’s speech from 2013 in an infamous document called the Number 9 Document, which is available on Wikipedia. This once-secret document was leaked and essentially argued that the Chinese government must do everything possible to prevent the spread of what it called the “thought viruses” of religious belief that are metastasizing the whole human soul and human body. I’m paraphrasing it, but that’s the essence of it, the doctrine that they strictly believe and continue to follow. They see these faith groups as carriers of the Western ideology or the Abrahamic faith, which they believe are antithetical to the communist ideology.

This is their state program and policy to Sinicize the faith groups, specifically those who follow the Abrahamic tradition. So when our government officials—those of us in the space of advocacy, foreign policy, and national security—mention that the CCP leadership has a plan to reshape the world, that’s not hyperbolic. It’s based on the Chinese leadership’s own speeches and policy documents.

And whenever the Chinese leadership delivers a speech, it becomes a blueprint for policy pronouncements and implementation. So, once Xi Jinping said, the year after he became the leader of China, that Western ideology is a threat to the existence of the Communist Party, people did not take it seriously. But now we’re seeing all of it—you know, it’s even in the broader national security space, specifically in technology.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about technology, particularly its misuse. That’s how it started. They used technology to surveil places of worship and the devices that exchange religious texts. And then they also look at who’s purchasing what, using all the online purchase history. They also look at using technology to see who they’re talking to, what ideological leanings or spiritual teachings they’re leaning towards or more receptive to, or what countries they want to visit. These are all AI-powered tools of repression targeting ethno-religious groups in China.

U.S. Legislative Responses to the Uyghur Genocide

AB: Can you talk about what it was like to lobby for the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021?

NT: It was a privilege to be involved in this legislative advocacy work. We call it lobbying. In the United States, it is perfectly legitimate, constitutional, and legal. Some people make a living as lobbyists in Washington. But what is remarkable about this whole process is that it was done without a single penny spent on professional lobbyists. No professional lobbying effort, no massive advertisement campaign, or expensive fundraising, or that sort of stuff was ever part of this process.

It is so satisfying that good people in the U.S. Congress, specifically on a staff level, recognized early on that this is something that had to be done.

I got involved, starting from my very first congressional testimony in 2018 that paved the way for the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (UHRP Act). And this was also publicly documented. In October 2019, I testified before then-Senator Marco Rubio specifically on forced labor. That one hearing, based on what I heard from the staffers who put it together and advised congressional leadership, was the catalyst for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).

So it was a humbling and instructive experience in my career. I’ve done legislative advocacy for my corporate clients, but this was the most meaningful because we are a country of laws, and it’s a capitalist market economy. And it’s perfectly okay and legitimate that companies make money. But what we were advocating was providing guidelines and guardrails on how to engage in ethical business, specifically for those with a business presence or business dealings in China.

In the UHRP Act, the most important aspect is to utilize the tools in our toolbox, for example, the Global Magnitsky Act. That is one of the most powerful legal tools we have for going after entities and individuals responsible for human rights abuses. That hadn’t been utilized against those who are responsible for mass atrocities and egregious human rights abuses in China.

So we wanted to have a legislative mandate for that to be utilized. As a result, for the first time, sitting Chinese officials were sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, in the spirit of, under the mandate of, the UHRP Act.

As for the UFLPA, this is arguably one of the most important legislative mandates that the United States Congress put in place to address modern-day slavery or lingering trade issues in our country’s dealings with China on economic and trade fronts.

For years, the U.S. government had urged governments around the world–including China–to end the use of forced labor and stop enslaving fellow human beings. I mean, anti-slavery is deeply embedded in our national values as Americans. We have a history of our own. And with such a large consumer base, we have a responsibility as a country and as a society to say no to forced-labor products.

And most importantly, this was something that could be a potent weapon to stop, or respond to stop, or interrupt, or disrupt the ongoing genocide. The Uyghur genocide, religious persecution, mass atrocities, and collective punishment—all of these go hand in hand with the enslavement of the Uyghurs.

So the brilliance of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senator Marco Rubio, the congressional leaders who spearheaded this process, recognized that this menace, this cancer of forced labor, needs to be eradicated from the global supply chain by way of helping the Uyghur people.

And I have to underscore this. I mentioned that we didn’t hire professional lobbying firms to help, but we had tremendous support from the faith community. The Catholic community, the Latter-day Saint community, and the Southern Baptist community were advocating and using their influence to lobby.

This whole effort to draft, advance, and pass the UFLPA started in early 2020. This was the time that the country was suffering and losing thousands of lives during the pandemic. And this pandemic, the shortage of supply chain supplies, critical supplies, ventilators, PPEs, and medicine, all were connected to the Uyghur forced labor.

So it was a historical movement, a moment, that brought in a lot of people from all walks of life, all faith communities, to address something that is in line with our national interest and also a part of American values.

It was not a hard sell, to say the least. That experience taught me the power of persistence and persuasion. It also demonstrated that a compelling moral argument can ultimately prevail. That’s one important thing to keep in mind: what we were doing was against the entire global supply chain. And we’re talking about more than 80 global brands that are affected. I don’t want to name the names because some of them stopped that practice. But virtually every major brand we know—as consumers of the things we eat, wear, drive, and use–was touched in some way by Uyghur forced labor.

So it was very satisfying to pass this legislation. It could be used as a case study for other communities to successfully build bipartisan support and get something done meaningfully in Congress.

Founding Ideals and Preventing Modern Slavery

AB: You’ve talked before about how the world’s response to the Uyghur genocide has been morally inadequate. As we’re approaching America’s 250th anniversary and thinking about our founding ideals, what would a morally responsible response look like from Americans and also from the world?

NT: This is an important moment for me to reflect. I live in Washington, D.C. I think the whole city is getting ready for this 250th anniversary. You’re seeing some new monuments and exhibits going up, many reflecting on different chapters of American history, including the Civil War. That makes this conversation especially meaningful and timely.

When America was founded and in its early decades, economic interests—particularly slavery and the cotton economy—made it politically convenient to look away from profound injustice. Today, the economic incentives are different, but the moral dilemma is strictly similar. Critical minerals, manufactured goods, and global supply chains have created powerful incentives to ignore forced labor. The United States is now investigating forced labor in dozens of countries, and the Office of the United States Trade Representative has initiated a Section 301 investigation. Yet it can still be politically and economically convenient to look away from what’s happening in Xinjiang. 

In other words, economic stakes are enormous. If you look at our government’s tone, publicly calling out those abusers has been almost nonexistent today because economic interest is still at the top of the priorities. And history will not be kind to us if we follow the same path.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the early 2000s, when China joined the WTO, American companies moved to China because there were incentives—tax incentives, cheap labor and all the rest—and a mindset that doing business in China, helping to build the Chinese economy, would eventually encourage political liberation and bring China closer to the international rules-based order. It didn’t happen.

So there’s a lesson to learn. And I don’t want to get too deeply into my other work on international trade, export controls, and global compliance. China has identified and exploited strategic choke points in critical minerals, some of which, according to documented evidence, are linked to forced labor. That presents a serious strategic challenge, and I believe the U.S. government should be doing more to address it. 

So a morally responsible response has several components that we need to keep talking about, even though this is not a very popular topic these days.

First, it requires that we actually enforce the laws that we have passed. We have so many good laws. I’m a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) lawyer by training, and I’ve worked extensively on global regulatory compliance. The FCPA matters because corruption and human rights abuses often go hand in hand. Companies that ignore corruption risks frequently ignore forced labor, repression, and other human rights abuses as well. The same commitment to corporate accountability underlies the UFLPA, which, like the FCPA, is landmark legislation. But enforcement requires resources, political will, and a willingness to confront powerful corporate interests.

Second, it requires diplomatic courage. I mentioned a 301 investigation.  I know it’s too much trade talk here, but it has significant diplomatic implications as well. Forced labor and genocide should be treated merely as bilateral trade disputes. They should be treated as moral and diplomatic red lines that shape every aspect of our engagement with the Chinese government. That principle should guide U.S. diplomacy at every level. It’s so important.

And third, it requires a supporting accountability mechanism, documentation of crimes. The State Department used to have a global war crimes office and had done some documentation of crimes. I don’t know if that is still the case under the current leadership. And also, the U.S. government should be pushing for accountability. Without accountability, perpetrators will continue committing these atrocities with impunity. 

So as America approaches its 250th anniversary, we should ask a simple question: Do we still believe in the universal ideals on which this country was founded? 

Another question we need to ask ourselves: What did the founders mean when they wrote about liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are we living up to those ideals?

So if you believe in all that, then we cannot be silent when the government is systematically destroying a vulnerable population, their faith, their language, their families, their lives. The measure of American leadership is not what we say about ourselves. It’s about what we do. Actions speak louder than words.

American Leadership in Promoting International Religious Freedom

AB: Related to that, what is the role of American leadership in promoting international religious freedom, and how would you assess our current efforts?

NT: It’s sad to see that our leadership in the international religious freedom space has not been as visible as during my time in the U.S. government. During the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, international religious freedom was an important aspect of our foreign policy and diplomatic engagements. Today, it has been pushed to the sidelines, and that leadership is no longer as visible.

But when Congress put in place IRFA, the International Religious Freedom Act, in 1998, it had a very simple but powerful intention, which was to make sure that we don’t forget about who we are. Religious freedom is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It’s an older concept than human rights. The UN Declaration of Human Rights drew heavily from principles reflected in our constitutional tradition, including religious freedom.

So this is not about the United States going out and telling people how they should be free of political repression and religious persecution, but this is a way of magnifying and presenting ourselves based on the foundational concept of the United States, based on the ideal.

So this was the most effective message that I deployed during my time in the U.S. government: 

We’re not here to impose our values on you. We’re simply saying that your country will be stronger if people are free to practice their faith without fear. If there are no prisoners of conscience or prisoners imprisoned because of their religion, your society will be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more stable. You won’t need thousands of police officers or pervasive surveillance systems to control your own people. The more freedom people enjoy, the less resentment and resistance governments create. So this is less constant monitoring and relatively easy for you to do. 

That was the kind of message that I delivered and sent as a USCIRF representative.

So it resonated. We were able to secure the release of some political prisoners. We were also able to engage with some governments to modify some of their laws and regulations. But in the end, what we do, what we did, and what USCIRF does, what IRFA does or intends to do, is good for humanity, good for the country.

By advocating for international religious freedom, we also advance U.S. national security interests. Societies that protect religious freedom are generally more stable and less susceptible to violent extremism. Radicalization has a lot to do with religious persecution.

So there are multiple benefits to recommitting ourselves to the vision Congress established in IRFA and supporting USCIRF’s mission. And disturbingly, USCIRF has to fight for adequate funding almost every year. Given America’s economic strength and the scale of federal spending, USCIRF should not be worrying about whether it has sufficient resources to carry out its mission. Those are the things that really concern me.

We need more people showing up, especially in Congress, speaking about the importance, or talking about the importance of religious freedom, both at home and abroad. The political will is so important. We have the legislative mandate. We have the culture. We have the willingness to help those who have been suppressed and repressed because of their faith. We can do a lot better.

AB: Can you talk more about how, when you were at USCIRF, you had opportunities to not only advocate for the Uyghurs but also for people of many other faiths? I know you personally adopted a prisoner of conscience, Shamila Kakimov, a Jehovah’s Witness. Can you talk about what it was like to stand for people of other faiths when your own group had been suffering so much? And why does religious freedom mean religious freedom for everyone? Why should we stand for each other?

NT: For me, this question gets to the very heart of religious freedom.

When I had that platform, I knew there were many others whose voices also deserve to be heard. So at the time, when my people were suffering on a scale that is hard to comprehend—we talked about millions, when the mosques were demolished, when the children were separated from parents—it would be natural, perhaps, even expected that I would focus exclusively on the Uyghur suffering.

But I believed, and still do, that it is both a moral and a strategic mistake to focus only on one group. Because the bad actors use the same method. They vilify not only one religion, but all religions. So the people who have problems with religion and faith are generally about more or less the same people with the same idea and the same playbook.

So I decided to use my time and platform to advocate for those who have not had enough voice in this arena.

I picked up a few cases, specifically those from Central Asia. They have a cultural, historical, and linguistic connection that is convenient. So that’s why I advocated the rights of the Latter-day Saint community, Jehovah’s Witness community, Catholic community, and Jewish communities living in predominantly Muslim societies.

I did that because when my people were desperate to be heard, those same communities stood with the Uyghurs. They spoke up for us when it mattered most. 

Supporting them wasn’t only an expression of gratitude–it was also a reflection of my belief that religious freedom is universal. And if we defend it only for people who share our own faith, then we aren’t really defending religious freedom at all. 

The Personal Toll of Advocacy

AB: And you’ve paid a personal price for your advocacy. In 2024, you were reunited with your mother after 20 years of separation. How do you carry the grief of this work without losing hope? And how do you measure success when so much remains outside of your control?

NT: Anna, as you know, I was born in a re-education camp. That was my beginning, and I’ve been dealing with this as long as I’ve been breathing.

A long time ago, my mother was pregnant with me during her third trimester. And she sustained physical injuries because of the physical abuse in the camp. She ended up giving birth to me while her body was in casts, chest down. So that fact—that brutal way that I was brought into this world—shaped everything about how I understand persecution, everything about why I do this work.

For more than 20 years, my mother was separated from me. She was not allowed to leave town. She was under both domestic and international travel bans. She was not even allowed to go to Beijing to meet with our ambassador. She lived under watchful eyes every day. So it’s no different from being locked up.

And this was the time when I was building a life and career in America, and I could have just said, “Okay, I have a life here. Don’t worry about it. Forget it. They’re not going to change. They’re not going to do anything humanly possible. I’d be better off just being a lawyer in Washington and enjoying my life.”

I decided to take the other way. I started writing, testifying, speaking, educating, and advocating. In some instances, I found myself involved in some of the controversial political and geopolitical issues.

When I reunited with my mother, cinematically, miraculously, at an Air Force base in Texas on Thanksgiving in 2024, it was one of the most joyful and heartbreaking moments of my life. She was alive. As soon as she got off the plane, she said, “I’m glad I won’t be dying alone.”

That was so moving. It was the first hug in 20 years that we had on the tarmac. But those years of suffering taught me a lot of things in life that otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to learn by reading or from real professional experience. Pain and suffering sometimes make you value and appreciate life more. That’s how I feel.

And also, I believe in fairness. I believe that being persistent and staying hopeful in this kind of advocacy work—being factual, not hyperbolic—and just people will respond. I cannot say—I cannot thank those people in cross-administrations enough. We’re talking about the U.S. presidential administration, starting from George Bush, Obama, first Trump, Biden, now Trump.

So from the previous four administrations, I’ve made so many friends and contacts, and I have nothing to give them. But I earned their respect, earned their support, secured their support. In the end, they become an advocate for me.

So those wonderful people made Trump hand in my parents’ names on his first trip in November 2017, and then that same work continued in the Biden administration. President Biden himself asked Xi Jinping twice, in person, to allow my mom be able to travel to the United States to be with her American children and grandchildren.

So it was the endurance, the perseverance, staying hopeful. I was looking at some of my email communications with the officials that I communicated with over the years, letters I’ve written, and I sent essentially the same message: “I am a free American. I testified. I spoke out against human rights abuses. I served in the U.S. government. I volunteered my time. And my government should not tolerate another government punishing my parents, my family, for what I do in America as a free person. We should not have a foreign government reaching out to me through a long arm and making me feel that I cannot escape from their persecution.”

So it was a happy ending, but the reunion is not the same. It’s not the same as restoration. You may have seen my public messages. My family and I lost a time that can never be brought back to us. So this regime essentially stole 20 years of my life and family time from me.

So, how do I carry this? Honestly, I’m not sure if I can carry it as much as I have learned to walk alongside it. And I don’t try to put it down or put it away. I let it remind me that this work is not abstract. The person who benefits from this, from the next piece of legislation or the next diplomatic intervention, is real.

I wrote about this in my latest piece for Fox News. Like me, they have a mother, they have family, they have faith. It took almost 20 years for my mom’s name to be said to the person who was holding her. And there are many others who are waiting for their names to be said to their jailers.

So that’s the type of thing that I always mention when I meet with people who are in power.

But as for measuring my success in that one-family advocacy, I have to radically define what it looks like.

I cannot feel free from all of the people who are still there. And the current political environment is not ideal for that. And I cannot undo the years of suffering. What I can do is to make the next violation more costly, amplify the next survivor’s testimony, help one person to feel less alone in their suffering.

Some days, that is enough. Some days it’s not. In the latter days, I return to the faces of the people that I’m fighting for, that I profiled in the book, and that I interviewed. And I remember that to stop would be abandoning them.

I know that when you look around today in the political environment, it sounds impossible. I’ve been there. I’ve been in impossible situations and rather hopeless situations as well. But hope is not something I wait to feel. It’s a discipline. Hope is a discipline.

And late Senator John McCain once said—and this is very applicable to a community that faces repression: “Hope is the best weapon against oppression.” So that’s the kind of thing that keeps me going every day.

Picturing the Individuals Persecuted When We Fast for Religious Freedom

AB: As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints participate on July 5th in fasting and prayer for worldwide religious freedom, what would you want them to picture when they’re thinking about the Uyghurs and others who are persecuted for their beliefs?

NT: First of all, I want to begin by acknowledging something very important. I find The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints deeply meaningful. It has profoundly moved and touched me with the level of support I received from it, including the opportunity to meet with the Church leadership during a lunch in Salt Lake City a few years ago.

So the Latter-day Saint community knows something about what it means for the government to turn against your faith. I think that commonality, the common experience, is where something built a really strong bond between my way of seeing the world, seeing religious repression, and the Latter-day Saint community.

The Missouri extermination order comes to mind, the forced migration. I was a tour guide in San Francisco before I moved here. I took tour groups to Temple Square countless times. I’ve been to Latter-day Saint communities in Idaho, in Nevada, in Arizona, and, of course, in southern Utah, countless times. Fascinating history: a long history of being told that your beliefs made you dangerous or unacceptable. That memory is not merely historical. It’s part of the Latter-day Saint community’s memory identity.

So when you close your eyes and fast and pray on July 5th, I want you, as the Latter-day Saint community, to draw on that memory, and then I want you to imagine this:

Imagine a grandmother in Kashgar, my place of birth, who can no longer teach her grandchildren to pray. Not because she has lost her faith, but because the government has taken her grandchildren to boarding school, where they will be raised to forget who they are. She knows their faces, but she does not know if they still know hers.

Imagine a father who has been in a detention camp for three years or more. His only “crime” was having too many contacts in a foreign country, or going to the place of worship too often, or owning a copy of the Quran. He does not know if his wife is still waiting for him. He does not know if his children still say his name.

Imagine a young woman who was taught to be proud of her language, her music, and her faith, and who now lives in a world where all three have effectively been erased from public life.

When you pray for the Uyghurs, pray for those individuals. Not the abstract statistic of a million, but the grandmother, the father, and the young woman. And pray, knowing that your prayers are not empty. They sustain the ones who are fighting. They signal to governments that people of conscience are watching. And they testify that in God’s eyes, these lives matter, and they’re not forgotten.

And July 5 is significant. In 2009, in the streets of Urumqi, the Uyghur capital, Chinese security forces violently suppressed peaceful demonstrations, resulting in the death of many Uyghurs. So July 5 holds profound historical significance for the Uyghur community.

What Can the Average American Do? 

AB: Finally, what are some concrete steps that individuals can take? How do supply chains fit in?

NT: As a corporate lawyer who advises companies, I know business leaders care about consumer concerns. So we don’t have to be in a position of power to make a difference. We have tremendous influence as consumers.

So one of the most direct actions people can take is to look at the labels on their clothing and other consumer goods. Many everyday products — from groceries and tires to sporting goods and school supplies—have been linked to forced-labor risks.

So check the label. For cotton products, roughly 85% of China’s cotton is sourced from the Uyghur homeland. Many of the garments hanging in closets across America and around the world were made with cotton picked by people who had no choice or no right to say no. And those cotton products are made by vulnerable modern-day slaves. So the cotton is the thread connecting your wardrobe to the camp system. Don’t forget about that. That’s really important.

And also, contact your representatives and urge them to continue funding the enforcement of the seminal Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Support Uyghur advocacy groups. They’re easy to find online.

And then when you go to the church, just share what you heard, what you read about the Uyghurs. Again, there’s so much relevance and connection between the Latter-day Saint community and the Uyghur community’s historical suffering or facing religious persecution. The fact that you’re interviewing me today speaks to that fact. We met several years ago. You still remember. You read my book. And that speaks volumes about your caring about these issues.

And then the other thing is to stay hopeful. This pendulum will swing back. When we look around today, it may seem as though people no longer care about human rights or religious liberty. I don’t believe that’s permanent. I don’t know exactly how things will change, but I do believe we cannot remain a healthy society if we stop caring about these fundamental values. 

So my message is simple: stay hopeful. Pray, and act. And do both together. 

And the Uyghur people—I know this might be a little bit provocative—but I often say the Uyghurs ask for partnership and support, not pity.

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1. We can pray for religious prisoners of conscience.
   Like Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail, many today are imprisoned for their faith. Others are tortured, disappeared, or sentenced under unjust laws. In China, Seylihan Rozi, a Uyghur Muslim mother, was sentenced to 17 years for teaching the Qur’an to her children and a neighbor. In Iran, Joseph Shahbazian, a Christian pastor, was convicted of praying with others and celebrating Christmas. In Russia, Ivan Neverov, a Jehovah’s Witness, received seven years for holding religious meetings. And in Nigeria, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, a Sufi Muslim musician, has spent more than six years in prison facing the possibility of the death penalty for sharing song lyrics deemed blasphemous.

We can pray for these prisoners and their families—and even for their captors—that hearts may soften, prisoners may be treated with dignity, and unjust laws may change. 

2. We can also pray for religious communities facing genocide and mass violence. Our own history of extermination orders and forced exile should make Latter-day Saints especially tender toward those whose faith has made them targets of violence. Uyghur Muslims in China have endured mass detention, forced labor, and the systematic destruction of families and mosques. Christians in Nigeria continue to be murdered, kidnapped, and driven from their villages. Armenian Christians have been forced from their ancestral lands. And Rohingya Muslims have been driven from Myanmar into desperate refugee camps.

We can pray for the displaced to find safety and compassion, for the violent to be restrained, and for those who are suffering to be strengthened. 

3. We can pray as well for democratic countries where religious liberty is weakening. In Japan, courts dissolved the Unification Church and seized its assets. In France, strict secularism has forced Muslim girls to choose between receiving an education and keeping their religious commitment to cover their hair. In Canada, recent legislation removed the longstanding religious speech defense, raising concerns that good faith religious expression could now be prosecuted as hate speech. And here in the United States, where religious liberty is core to our national identity, the picture is sobering: by my calculations from Pew Research Center’s data, the U.S. ranks 90th out of 198 for freedom from government restrictions on religion—and 91st for social hostilities. The threats range from legal pressure to lethal violence: pandemic-era limits on worship, conscience conflicts for religious professionals and institutions, and deadly attacks on Jewish, Muslim, and other faith communities—including Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc.

We can pray that free nations—especially our own—will have the humility to recognize our shortcomings, and will have the courage to live up to our ideals and strengthen religious liberty. 

4. The darkness is real, but so are the people shining a light. We can pray for the defenders of religious freedom. Through the First Freedom Foundation, I have the privilege of working with young leaders like Hewan Omer of the Free Yezidi Foundation, who serves genocide survivors in Iraq; Twesigye Leonard, a secular humanist in Uganda, who trains lawyers to defend religious liberty where non-Christians are often persecuted; and Mohammad Rahaman in Nepal, who is working to guide his country’s powerful youth movement toward principled advocacy rather than division. Others cannot be named for their safety. Like America’s founders, they are often young, under-resourced, and facing overwhelming opposition—yet they continue to defend religious freedom for all, even as they receive bombs at their doors. 

Pray that they will be strengthened, protected, and sustained in hope. 

5. Finally, we can pray for courage in ourselves. Religious freedom is not only a right to defend; it is a duty to extend. It is easy to support the rights of those we agree with. It takes far more courage to stand for the conscience of our adversaries. President Dallin H. Oaks has taught that the freedom and protection we seek must not be “for ourselves alone.” 

We must pray for the strength to defend religious freedom for friend and foe alike. 

As we fast, let us remember those whose poverty, hunger, and displacement are the direct result of religious persecution—refugees driven from their homes, families denied work or education, and believers forced to choose between conscience and survival. 

May our hearts be softened toward the persecuted, our courage be strengthened to defend religious liberty for all of God’s children, and our offerings of prayer, sacrifice, and action be accepted by the Lord.

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