Many things are moving in the right direction. Since the birth of classical liberalism, global poverty has plummeted from near 80% to under 9%, life expectancy has more than doubled, and violent crime is at historic lows. Religious liberty protections in the United States are stronger than virtually anywhere in human history.

But other things are breaking. Teen depression and anxiety rates have doubled since 2010. Marriage rates have fallen nearly 60% since 1970. Birth rates have cratered below replacement levels. Community bonds are dissolving. Loneliness has become epidemic. Political polarization has intensified to levels not seen since the Civil War era.

The family, the fundamental unit of society, struggles to survive in a culture that treats it as optional at best and oppressive at worst. Meaning structures that sustained civilization for millennia are weakening or disappearing entirely.

Secular liberalism promised neutral public spaces where diverse communities could coexist peacefully, but in practice those “neutral” spaces often became vehicles for harmful ideologies hostile to traditional religion and the virtue that flows from it. Public schools teach gender theory as settled science. Corporate HR departments enforce progressive orthodoxy. Administrative agencies regulate religious institutions. The state did not remain neutral. It just changed which comprehensive vision it enforces.

So the question religious conservatives are asking is reasonable: If secular institutions have failed to form virtue and preserve what matters most, shouldn’t we use government to restore what is being lost?

I understand this impulse. I share the alarm.

But as a Latter-day Saint, I believe we should take a different path. Coercion can never produce true goodness; it can only compel outward behavior. If we want to build a better society and protect our way of life in the long term, a more liberty-centric approach to cultural change is the best path forward.

Liberty as a Familiar Alternative

This does not mean abandoning virtue, family, or community. It means getting government out of domains where it has failed and trusting voluntary institutions to do the work that actually transforms lives. This approach has two complementary commitments:

First, protect liberty fiercely in the public sphere. Limit what government controls. Prevent majorities from using state power to enforce their vision on minorities. Ensure that families, churches, communities, and voluntary associations have the freedom to operate according to their values without government either forcing them to compromise those values or forcing others to adopt them.

Second, fight the battle for virtue in the private sphere. Build families so strong that people want to emulate them. Create churches so compelling that people choose to join them. Demonstrate through your life that virtue produces joy, meaning, and flourishing. Compete and win in a marketplace of free thought and association. We should not use state power to mandate virtue. We should prove through voluntary excellence that our way of life produces human flourishing and invite others to join us freely.

For Latter-day Saints specifically, this should feel natural. We are a tiny religious minority that thrives when government protects our liberty to worship, organize, build institutions, and live according to our values. We suffer when majorities use state power to enforce their vision of righteousness.

The liberty we preserve for others to make decisions we disagree with is the same liberty that protects our ability to live our peculiar religion. Liberty is not just morally right. It is the most durable protection we can give to our way of life. It is also where our theology points.  

Liberty in God’s Plan

The most fundamental question in Latter-day Saint theology is also the most politically relevant: What is the purpose of existence?

We believe humans can become divine beings. If the purpose of existence is transformation into beings with infinite potential, then moral agency is not optional—it is the necessary mechanism by which transformation happens.

The War in Heaven expands our understanding of this. In the premortal council, Lucifer promised to save everyone by eliminating agency entirely. God rejected this plan—not because it would not produce behavioral compliance, but because it would destroy what He is trying to create: beings capable of independent righteousness. God chose agency knowing some would fail because the alternative would destroy the very purpose of existence. 

That answer is not emotionally satisfying. Liberty is costly. But if God chose agency despite its risks, we cannot justify using coercion to produce virtue.

Our scripture shows us how the righteous should tolerate error. Alma 30:7-11 describes Nephite prophets facing false teachers willfully corrupting souls. God’s command? They are explicitly forbidden from using law to control religious belief: “there was no law against a man’s belief.” Here God refused to let even His prophet use state power to create forced virtue.

Doctrine and Covenants 121 makes this structural: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” Notice: “can or ought.” Not just “should not”—cannot. Coercion breaks divine authority. This is not a temporary accommodation for mortality. It reveals something eternal about righteous power.

Living prophets affirm this often. In his October 2025 General Conference address, Elder David A. Bednar taught about the “eternal importance of moral agency” which he defined as “the divinely designed power of independent action that empowers us as God’s children to become agents to act and not simply objects to be acted upon.” 

And in prior times of cultural turmoil, prophets have made it clear this extends to the political. President Ezra Taft Benson warned: “one of Lucifer’s primary strategies has been to restrict our agency through the power of earthly governments.” He did not isolate left-wing tyranny, but any use of state power to coerce private virtue.

Our history teaches the same lesson. For our entire history, we have been a religious minority headquartered in a Christian majority nation. When Christian majorities wielded state power to enforce their vision of virtue, we were often the targets. Missouri’s governor ordered our “extermination.” Joseph and Hyrum were murdered by a mob that believed they were defending Christian civilization. This was state power wielded by Christians convinced their religious vision justified coercion. When we are tempted to use government to restore virtue, we should remember we know exactly what that looks like from the other side.

The Risks of Reaching for State Power

Reaching for state power instead carries serious risks. First, you hand those with views opposed to yours the blueprint. Every tool you build, every precedent you establish, every expansion of government power you create to enforce your values becomes available to your opponents when they win elections. And they will win elections.

You might establish laws promoting traditional marriage. They will use the same state machinery to enforce gender ideology in schools. You might require religious education in public schools. They will mandate intersectional social justice curriculum. The power does not stay in your hands. It transfers. And when it does, you will face the very machinery you have built to advance their values.

Second, you teach the next generation that politics determines virtue. Once you establish that state power is the proper tool for cultural formation, the only question becomes: who has more votes? 

Third, you signal that voluntary persuasion is not sufficient. If Christianity truly produces human flourishing, why do you need state enforcement?

The gospel succeeds through attraction, not compulsion. People become Christians because they encounter Christ and recognize Him as the source of life abundant. They join churches because they see communities living with joy, purpose, and love that they want for themselves.

When you reach for state power to enforce religious values, you are announcing that attraction is not working. You are saying your faith cannot compete on its merits in a free marketplace of ideas. That is spiritually devastating. If we really believed that truth freely chosen would prevail, we would not need state coercion.

All of this is to render unto Caesar what is God’s.

The Path Forward

We are facing real and serious problems. The concerns driving religious conservatives toward government solutions are legitimate and urgent. 

But Latter-day Saints have unique resources to see why that response is both theologically wrong and strategically unwise.

Our theology teaches that transformation requires freely chosen action, not coerced compliance. Our scripture commands tolerance even of false teachers. Our prophets warn against restricting agency through government. Our history shows what happens when Christian majorities wield state power to enforce virtue.

Let’s build the Kingdom of God through persuasion, not coercion. Let the state protect rights while God transforms lives through voluntary institutions. Compete in the marketplace of ideas with confidence that truth, freely chosen, will prevail.

God chose liberty over guaranteed outcomes in the War in Heaven because agency matters more than safety and freedom matters more than forced righteousness. As Latter-day Saints, we should understand why that choice was right and why we must make it in our politics today.

Let’s start rendering unto God what is God’s.

The post Caesar’s Dues appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In today’s fraught political landscape, it’s hard not to feel like both sides are dominated by extremes. And people are noticing. Registered independents have hit an all-time high and continue to increase. While academic research shows that most independent voters still hold ideological leanings, more people than ever are hesitant to officially align themselves with either political party.

This is problematic. Political parties have served as important organizing institutions in American politics for over two hundred years. Their primary goal is to elect candidates to office. Parties accomplish this by attracting voters and building broad coalitions. With America’s two-party system, as soon as one party knocks the other out of the arena, there is an incentive to broaden political appeal to win back voters. 

The past three presidential elections have been decided on thin margins, and Congress has had the narrowest majorities over the past three cycles than at any point in nearly a century. If large, diverse coalitions are no longer necessary to win elections and mobilized ideologues can instead emerge victorious, then the founding idea of a democratic republic reliant on a pluralistic society is bankrupt. 

The solution? Join a party. The medicine might seem counterintuitive to the diagnosis. How can increased partisanship help a polarized America? Because civic engagement, including partisan activity, allows citizens to steer the course of the political parties and, by extension, the nation.

Too often, people relegate political engagement to Election Day, unaware that half the battle was already fought months earlier in caucus nights and committee meetings. It’s powerful to cast a ballot, but even more powerful to shape the ballot itself. In politically homogeneous states, which are becoming more common, congressional elections are often decided at the primary level, or even earlier through party maneuvering (see both Democrat and Republican examples) that determines who appears on the ballot. Registered independent voters are often left out of these decisions, limiting their ability to select candidates and party platforms they most support.

When a closed primary system is used, independents lose political influence, especially in homogenous states, because they cannot determine who is selected as the party’s candidate. Take Utah as an example. Only registered Republicans are allowed to vote in the Republican primary, and GOP candidates are almost always elected for federal and statewide office. While we can bemoan party operations, I am personally irked when someone claims, almost righteously, that they registered as an independent voter. To me, it means they have willfully given up political influence. 

Surprised at the significant support I garnered for running on a different agenda than the national fervor at the time, I again offered my vision of a different direction for the party. I called for a broader coalition of support and identified the shortcomings of relying upon divisive figures. After a second round of voting, and with one person shifting support, I was elected as my precinct’s state delegate.

My experience did not teach me to have a holier-than-thou attitude toward people with a differing vision of politics than myself. Instead, it taught me that one vote in a caucus can matter, and that involvement with parties can be effective in changing their direction. 

I urge readers to become more involved in their local parties. We should seek to be more engaged within our communities, especially through civic and partisan means. A political party may not accurately represent all your views; indeed, it probably will not and should not. Dallin H. Oaks, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said as much in 2021, emphasizing that “no party, platform, or individual candidate can satisfy all personal preferences.”

While I do not place the Republican or Democratic parties on the same pedestal as the American democratic project, I do believe MacIntyre’s point offers a helpful model for the partisan. Being an avid supporter of a political party still allows for healthy disagreement with the party’s platform or structure. 

I leave with this: joining a mainstream political party opens up avenues for political power that are closed to many independent voters, and joining does not mean you agree with every aspect of the party. If anything, the greatest impact you can have is changing the institution itself and moving the party forward in its quest to serve the people. 

In the past, Republicans and Democrats were not so polarized, and I believe more partisan involvement would actually increase mutual understanding and respect if done thoughtfully. So why wait? Join the party.

The post Join the Party appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In the wake of a polarizing hyper-partisan election, where caustic accusations have been heedlessly hurled in the hopes of securing one more vote, an old and ugly anger threatens to breach the protected and protective space of home and family. The unmerciful activism of cancel culture is a social cancer, and now we’re being told to take it home—a cancel culture home brew that can strain and break our closest relationships, leading to decades-long rifts.

Following the election, some pundits and journalists (here, here, here) are suggesting that for their own emotional health, family members may need to leave their chairs at family gatherings conspicuously empty. Others seem to advocate it as a form of familial activism, silently exclaiming by their absence their aggravation and irritation toward family members whose political views and choices are seen as contemptible, wrong, and hurtful. Some go so far as to configure it as an imperative moral issue. Ultimately, toxic contempt and contention are being promoted.

Whether posited as self-care, messaging, or retribution, heeding such supposedly “therapeutic” advice tempts us to only extend the political conflagration and turn family too into a scorched earth wasteland. Looking for somewhere to vent and someone to take the lash of one’s frustrations, family is, tragically, a convenient target, and the holidays are the immediately available venue. 

As a therapist, I predict a poor outcome, but common sense will lead you to the same conclusion. Let’s be clear about this, we are being tempted to concoct a cancel culture home brew. How is that going to turn out? In the moment, we may say to ourselves, “I really don’t care,” but that may be rash and can lead to regret. The Family Proclamation warns against “the disintegration of the family” and calamities upon individuals, communities, and nations that follow. Relationship rejection and repudiation, shunning, and ostracizing, like many other human impulses, may be personally palliative in the short run but is no prescription for the long-term well-being of anyone. The actions pundits are suggesting will only severely complicate a family’s future. Burning bridges is never more unwise than in the relationships we rely on the most. 

The pundits and media platforms on both sides of the political divide all thrive on “othering” and bogeyman narratives. Families, our most cherished, enduring, and essential attachment relationships, are torn apart by “othering.” Someday we realize that family is all we’ve got, and we emphatically say no to family “othering.” Cancel culture home brew is pure poison. 

Make Family Our Starting-Point Solution

Instead, families are our starting-point solution, the place where respectful pluralism begins and is practiced and polished. Family relationships can become our fixed star to navigate by, reminding us that relationships are primary. The choices we learn to make in our families can chart a course to a transformative public pluralism and peacemaking. Family can be our starting point from which we generalize relationship commitment and pluralistic practices. Family can be where we come to see pathways forward, guiding us in revitalizing society. We must resist the pundits who suggest we traffic cancel culture politics into the home, however common the trope may be.

Family Intervention

Let Thanksgiving for our family relationships and Christmas for the Prince of Peace help us get our bearings and refresh our relationship commitment to each other, even in the face of differences. Instead of becoming another front line in the battle, families can be our resort in times of trouble, our reminder of relationship priority and preeminence, and the relationship base from which we take our bearings and build outward and upward.

Families are our first introduction to pluralism. No family is a cookie-cutter replication. Each person is a unique encapsulation of humanity, personality, and experience, and the challenge and opportunity of pluralism only grows as the family grows. Adult children, the persons they marry, and the grandchildren that follow bring ever-expanding diversity and opportunity to put relationships first.

Instead of being the final casualty of our toxic politics, family relationships should be our reminder to lay politics aside at numerous critical junctures—such as home, church, and neighborhood—and refresh and renew ourselves in the joy of relationships that are so core and fundamental in our lives. 

On the heels of our political calendar, a time-out moment can be helpful, yet (as pundits’ words tainted with grievance clearly show) time-outs all too easily morph into a cold-shoulder retribution and punishment, hoping to hurt. Therapeutic time-out is a relationship-affirming pause as one prepares to return and repair, not withdraw. “I love you. Our relationship is everything. I’ll see you soon (definitely for the holidays), just give me a moment to decompress”—should be the affirming message and transparent motivation behind time-out.

Part of building and renewing relationships is curiosity, expressed through attentive listening. The experiences that have shaped each person can be a rewarding point of engagement, a wonderful human story worth diving into. The world’s most awe-inspiring destination is the landscape of the human heart, the unfolding panorama of the eternal soul, the breathtaking beauty of love—these are life’s can’t-miss experiences. Thanksgiving can be about sharing our stories, remembering the joys, the humor, the love, and being there for each other.

In time, even our perplexity over our differences can become a point of interest, exploration, and growth. In the process, we find that our priority values are constantly distilled, defined, and refined. We realize that our enduring attachment bonds mean the most and we begin more regularly to make choices that avoid amplification of differences into the realm of discord or contention. As family members develop relationships of respect, love, and mutual appreciation, a higher path of political rapprochement opens up. Surprisingly, as we keep relationships first, opportunities and the ability to occasionally talk politics and to listen to each other with genuine interest increases.

Families are there for us. We love them. We get upset with them. But we should never disown them over politics. Any party, politician, pundit—or anyone else—that tries to come between me and my family, that tries to drive a political wedge, that suggests I should disassociate or disown them, that puts politics above family, is … wrong.

Let’s not yield the home front to toxic politics but rather make our relationship education and experience on the home front a springboard to a more civil society. Aspiring to a happy Thanksgiving and Christmas, consider these resources for peacemaking (here, here) and for further down the road (this, this, this). President Russell M. Nelson observes: “Contention is a choice. Peacemaking is a choice. … Anger never persuades. Hostility builds no one.” Elsewhere he invites: we can “interact with others in a higher, holier way, … [we can] choose to be a peacemaker, now and always.” If there is ever to be peace on earth—and there will be—it will begin and be learned in love at home—through relationships created and sustained not by an easy compatibility but by unbreakable bonds of love.

The post Cancel Culture Home Brew: Political Self-Care or Dangerous Games? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

For the Christian, freedom has a dimension that is much more deep and consequential. There is a hint of this fact in the words of Jesus: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” Much of our discourse around freedom is centered on bodily freedoms, and comparatively little of our discourse addresses freedom of the soul. Edmund Burke famously spoke to the interrelatedness of these dimensions of freedom:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

The intemperate mind referred to by Burke is only a reflection of the state of our soul, the degree of our alignment with God’s understanding of reality. When Christ brought this understanding to humanity in person, His message was one of profound freedom, of a kind that most people never fully know. Like most societies throughout history, Judeans in the time of Christ were concerned with physical freedom from oppressive political enemies. The violent oppression of Rome in that time was very real, and Judeans’ hopes for physical deliverance are very understandable.

Years ago, amid the mockery and slander of the Book of Mormon musical, theatergoers opened their playbills to find an ad placed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which read, “You’ve seen the musical; now read the book.” This ad was a declaration of inner freedom: we, as a church, are free to choose our response to mockery and slander. When you attempt to provoke our outrage, we are free to not become consumed with outrage.

Inner freedom is the hardest kind to obtain and, I confess, it is not my usual state. I only sometimes experience it. I am as prone as anyone to reactive states of mind, to wrapping myself tightly in the unfreedom of grievance narratives. I believe that in the West, inner freedom can be difficult to accept because our approach to spirituality is often achievement-oriented. We tend to think of the gospel in terms of getting, obtaining, and achieving. Inner freedom requires subtraction spirituality, with different terms like letting go, surrender, and allowing. These approaches to spirituality are not mutually exclusive; they are both vitally important. In achievement spirituality, we demonstrate to God what we desire, and in subtraction spirituality, we demonstrate to God whom we trust.

The Anna Option

A core question in both spirituality and mental health is the locus of control: where do we perceive our well-being to be located? Do we believe that we are empowered to develop wellness, or do we believe that our ability to be well exists outside of ourselves, depending upon the actions of “powerful others?” Numerous studies in psychology have shown that an internal locus of control results in more life satisfaction and well-being, while an external locus of control creates in people the opposite: turmoil, conflict, and despair.

In the Gospel of Luke, the story of Anna is a lesson in the power of internal locus of control. We are told that Anna was a “prophetess” and was one of two people who received revelation when the infant Jesus was brought to the temple. Anna was a widow who “departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” We know of no formal explanation in Jewish law for the prophetic role that Anna developed. We only know of her extensive fasting (a core discipline in subtraction spirituality) and service in the temple, with the result that she had developed prophetic gifts. Her sense of empowerment to do these things was an outgrowth of her internal locus of control.

Recently, Amanda Freebairn published an article interestingly titled “Living my faith more, instead of just thinking about it more.” She told her story of faith development:

As I began questioning my faith, as so many young adults do, I thought answers could be better found in the work of scholars than from my ward members bearing their personal testimonies of God…

I haven’t “figured it all out.” But I love going to church. I love my ward and I no longer feel different or isolated in my church community. I look forward to general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ and try to listen to a talk every day. They are no longer a source of frustration or angst for me.

I also love President Russell M. Nelson, and I fully sustain him as a prophet of God, not just a nice older man.

What changed? The major turning point was when I had the impression that I needed to ease up on the “research” and instead give something else a chance: really living my faith.

This is the Anna option, the internal locus of control. There is no narrative of “as soon as other people and institutions do x, y, and z, I can thrive.”

By contrast, an activist posture toward the Church insists otherwise. It promotes an external locus of control, the notion that our experience of God in the Church depends upon people or institutions changing in some way. Refuting this falsehood, the story of Anna the prophetess is echoed by her spiritual descendants, including Mary Whitmer, Eliza R. Snow, Emmeline B. Wells, and other great women of the restoration into the present day.

Victor Frankl taught that “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” This freedom is sometimes easier to imagine in theory than to embrace in practice, as we are pulled into any number of difficult situations on any given day. Inner freedom requires inner resources. To maintain inner freedom to not be angry, for example, requires emotional resources that we are more likely to have if we are getting adequate sleep and physical exercise.

Similarly, there are some inner resources that can only come with a healthy spirituality. President James E. Faust taught that

Each of us, regardless of our nationality, needs to reach down into the innermost recesses of our souls to find the divinity that is deep within us and to earnestly petition the Lord for an endowment of special wisdom and inspiration. Only when we so profoundly reach the depths of our beings can we discover our true identity, our self-worth, and our purpose in life…

Teaching the spirituality of subtraction, President Faust continued:

Only as we seek to be purged of selfishness and of concern for recognition and wealth can we find some sweet relief from the anxieties, hurts, pains, miseries, and concerns of this world…

This is really the recovery of the sacred within us. We have the authority in our beings to respond to challenges of life any way we choose. Thus, we gain mastery in any circumstance.

Here, President Faust taught a concept that is beautiful, but is it true?

Any circumstance?

Can I be well if my career aspirations don’t come to fruition and I end up needing to forge a new path? Can I be well if my children make choices that reduce their own wellness and joy? Can I be well if my political candidate does not win an election? Can I be well if I am released from a church calling I love? Can I be well if there are people around me at church who see the world in different ways than I do or who sometimes act offensively? Can I be well in an experience of tragedy? Can I be well if I am misunderstood or falsely accused?

Do I have the inner freedom to respond to each of these scenarios with poise instead of falling to pieces and becoming bitter? Do I have the inner freedom to not be angry, or the inner freedom to forgive, or to patiently trust? Do I have the inner freedom to not take offense?

According to President Faust, the resources for this kind of inner freedom are already within us. But if my own experience is a guide, it is only the work of subtraction spirituality that enables us to perceive those inner spiritual resources.

The Liberating Power of Adversity

For many, experiences of subtraction spirituality are found in situations of deprivation. This is why, for many Latter-day Saints, the mission experience catalyzes a profound spiritual awakening. In a recent devotional talk on the True Millennial YouTube Channel, Lexi Walbeck told of her mission,

I tried with considerable effort and divine assistance to see beyond my own pain, loneliness, and frustration. Immediately, something magical began to happen. I started to fall in love with the Filipino people. Their success, progression, and fulfillment became more important than my own… Fast forward to the end of my mission when home was just weeks away, I wore the same torn and ragged clothes I had hand scrubbed since I started, complimented by my rubber muddy Crocs. A balding bun held what was left of my hair and my rice diet had settled plumply in my cheeks and belly.

I was riding home in a tricycle, holding our groceries for the week on my lap. Raw fish dripped blood and other liquid down my legs, and I physically looked and smelled probably the worst I ever had in my life. But as I was bouncing home, I looked up and caught a glimpse of myself in the cab mirror. I couldn’t look away. I was glowing. My countenance shone so bright it actually shocked me. The light was so radiant and brilliant that, for the first time in my entire life, I said to myself, “I am so beautiful. I am so beautiful.” In that moment I saw my true identity. Christ’s power, light, and intelligence was in my reflection, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, the most beautiful me.

Walbeck’s account reflects similar stories told by numerous great souls throughout history, of how irony and illness and tragedy often lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of God and of ourselves. The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote of his spiritual awakening amid the deprivation of being unjustly imprisoned under Stalin:

In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

…All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation:

“Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

Adversity can be a great teacher of subtraction spirituality if we will allow it to.

In a world without subtraction spirituality, inner unfreedom is the norm and it manifests in areas like politics and culture. Our daily emotional temperature becomes determined by the actions of political and social media commentators. In popular culture, people manifest inward unfreedom as they participate in events like pride parades, which really only parade the unfree human psyche ruled by cravings for sensation and for society’s affirmation. In political discussions, freedom is usually understood in these terms as the absence of prohibiting forces. But presently, much of American politics is a contest between people who are inwardly unfree. We are an electorate controlled by impulses and resentments and fears, and from a national security perspective, this makes us vulnerable to our adversaries’ strategies of divide and conquer.

Freedom to be Different

Following a recent football game against Kansas State University, BYU fans surprised the sports world by donating to help a cancer-stricken friend of the opposing team’s quarterback. A colleague of mine at work is a fan of another Big 12 school, and after hearing of this, he told me he cannot wait to go to a game in Provo, even if his team loses. He said that he knows how differently visitors are treated there in Provo.

Presently our Latter-day Saint capacity for subtraction spirituality and our love of the resulting inner freedom are being tested. For some of us, renovations to our beloved temples have become a severe test in this area. For others of us, our ability to subtract is tested in our career ambitions or our willingness to live within our means. Among some Latter-day Saint influencers and commentators, there is a fixation on grievances of the past that leads to demands for institutional apologies. These individuals spread the inner unfreedom of an external locus of control to their followers, who then forsake the Christian covenant path for a new covenant path of grievance-oriented activism.

And again, politics is presently an area that is testing many church members’ love of inner freedom, particularly in the United States. This political season, I have personally found value in a specific decision around politics: I decided that however my fellow church members decide to vote, I will fully respect their decisions without looking down upon anyone for whatever they decide and however they arrive at their views. Having subtracted from my own heart and mind an imaginary responsibility to judge the people around me, I now have inner freedom from feelings of contempt and disappointment that usually attend those outward judgments. I relish the freedom that I feel as a result of this decision.

I wonder if, in the coming days, our capacity for subtraction spirituality will be tested in more pronounced ways. I wonder if inner freedom and an internal locus of control will increasingly define us as a people, not just in our treatment of guests at sporting events but in other contentious areas like politics. Maybe we will recalibrate the intensity of our political and other debates in light of Brigham Young’s insight that “There is no freedom anywhere outside the Gospel of salvation.”

I sincerely hope for this to be the case.

The post Beyond the Ballot Box: Our True Christian Freedom appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Before the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913, it was the legislatures from each state that chose who would represent the state on the federal stage. This method was designed to strengthen the federalist ideals of those attending the Constitutional Convention. However, because of this amendment, it will be you voting for your senator on November 5. 

The argument for this change was to increase the power of the voter by allowing them to directly affect who would be the federal spokesperson for their state. Paradoxically, the unforeseen consequences of this action have led to a loss of freedom for individuals in any particular state. The focus and incentives for a senator shifted from protecting the state’s autonomy to focusing on the next election cycle. 

This resulted in what is referred to today as dual federalism. Instead of the federal and state governments operating in two different spheres, they are now combined in fundamental ways. Instead of fighting to keep the federal government out of their turf, senators are now fighting to allow the government to enact laws in their states called “federal mandates” so they can receive more funding from the federal government. 

This compromising relationship between the state and federal governments has seemingly led to the squandering of the rights of the average citizen so the state can make a quick buck—all done under the guise of increasing democracy.

The Senate is not the only office affected by America’s shift from a constitutional republic to the vicious wolves of a pure democracy. Even the high office of the president is being influenced by this cultural shift.

What is the purpose of the President of the United States? I don’t believe either candidate would have the correct response to that question. Donald Trump would probably start talking about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs, while Harris might monologue about being raised in a middle-class family in Canada. Both candidates would probably answer as they have before, explaining their different policies. 

But that’s not the role of the president. Perhaps someone with a strong understanding of the Constitution will point to Article II broadly and say, “Here, this is the role of the president.” Even so, I think we need to be more specific than that. Although Article II enumerates the executive powers of the president, one line explains the role of the current president: the Oath of Office. 

As the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1 states, it is the president’s duty to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” to the best of their ability. And as George Washington so beautifully put it, “So help [them] God” if they don’t. 

If that’s the role of the president, then shouldn’t that be the standard by which we elect them? Maybe when voting for the POTUS, we shouldn’t be asking ourselves what their views are on taxes, transgender athletes in women’s sports, climate change, or IVF. Instead, we should ask ourselves who would do the best job of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution as it is written. 

That’s not to say that these issues aren’t important. They are. Both sides of these debates need to be discussed and considered at the federal level. However, that is the role of the House of Representatives—to discuss and promote what you, the person they represent, feel about any one of these issues. For this reason, the Electoral College was conceived. Its goal was to prevent the office of president from being one of pure populism. 

The checks and balances of the legislative process were carefully considered by wise men. The goal of the Constitution in this aspect was to involve the consent of every involved party before anything could become law. First, a bill must be proposed by either the House or the Senate and approved by the other. The passing of a bill in the House will signify the will of the majority of current citizens of the United States. The Senate will then convey the concurrence of the majority of states on the same matter before the bill can be moved from Capitol Hill to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Then the president will read through the bill. Before signing it into law, it is their duty to determine if it aligns with the wisdom of the ages as portrayed in the Constitution. No matter how important, prudent, or popular a bill may be, it is the sacred obligation of a president to veto that bill if it does not align with the Constitution. If that bill is truly important and widely accepted enough, then there should be a national consensus to support an amendment that would allow for such a bill.

This election, I would encourage you to try to adopt this perspective. Don’t treat your senator like a representative. Vote for a senator who will stand up for the rights of your state. Conversely, when voting for the president, ask yourselves: Who do I trust to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America?

The post Are We Asking the Wrong Question When Electing a President? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Since the 2016 election cycle, curiosity about what motivates Latter-day Saint voters has spiked. Their votes have been more up for grabs than in recent generations, and they play key roles in swing states such as Nevada and Arizona.

What follows is an analysis of the different types of US-based Latter-day Saint voters based on my experience in talking to these different groups. 

Group #1 Morality-Crisis Fighters—Trump Voters

These voters are concerned about society turning on them and their values. They see support in major institutions such as academia or news media for acts they find deeply immoral, such as abortion or chemical sterilization of children, as a crisis.

Morality-crisis fighters are very sensitive to double standards in media coverage and tend to feel alienated from contemporary life. 

These voters see Donald Trump as an important figure in standing up to these forces. They find virtue in his willingness to violate norms to attack those they believe are deeply problematic. The widespread opposition against Trump seems to solidify their perspective on how important he is. 

Many in this group see Trump as someone who has been provided by God for this moment.

Latter-day Saints in these groups often believe the United States is in a similar state as the Nephite nation was in the Book of Helaman. They are concerned about “secret combinations.” These voters tend to see Trump as a fighter for their values in a similar vein to Captain Moroni.

The defining image for this group is Trump’s defiant fist in the air after the assassination attempt.

Group #2 Character-first Centrists—Harris Voters

These voters see this election as another referendum on Donald Trump. They tend to view Kamala Harris as representative of the norm but view Trump as a uniquely immoral character.

They understand the recent instruction from the Church’s First Presidency that “members should seek candidates who best embody [gospel] principles” primarily in terms of character rather than policy positions. These voters seem to compare Trump to a King Noah-type figure. Additionally, because of the acceptance of Trump’s immoral behavior, they also tend to see the country as facing a deep moral crisis.

The character-first centrist group is more conservative on social issues, but they either have little history in party politics or are independents. 

For these voters, the defining moment in determining their vote is the release of the Access Hollywood tape, where Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. 

Group #3 Loyal Republicans—Trump Voters

These voters are conflicted about Donald Trump but will vote for him. From this perspective, they seem to believe that all politicians have low moral character, and Trump is simply lumped in with them. 

However, what they do know is that the Republican party has long represented their values while the Democratic party has long opposed their political goals.

Loyal Republicans are not deeply involved with political news or strategy. They vote for representatives, so they don’t have to pay attention to all of “that.” You might hear them dismiss political questions with a “render unto Caesar” type of response.  

This group also tends to view the first Trump term as a positive time for the US and conservative success while dismissing critiques to the contrary as apparent media bias.

Additionally, they tend to value loyalty, unity, and community and believe that the senior leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ are largely Republican; therefore, that position feels like a safe bet. 

Group #4 Agency-focused Progressives—Harris Voters

These voters include the few long-time democratic loyalists among Latter-day Saints who new voters have now joined.

They are enthusiastic members of the Democratic party. 

They worry about state abortion bans that don’t include exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, because that would prevent people from getting abortions that the Church’s position allows.

In terms of religion, these voters are focused on agency. They see the Democratic party values as more aligned with Latter-day Saint beliefs on issues like caring for the needy or immigration. They also tend to see the Republican party as having moved to the far right under Trump. 

Latter-day Saints who reject the Church’s teachings on LGBT+ issues find common cause with this group.  

One of the most striking images for this group is the report on caged immigrant children that was first made public during the Trump administration.

This position is common for Latter-day Saints in careers such as academia, where conservatism is untenable. And it tends to be overrepresented among the Latter-day Saint talking class.

Group #5 Pragmatic Institutional Conservatives—Trump Voters

These voters tend to be politically savvy. This group avoided Donald Trump in primary elections, but they’ve come to recognize his political potency. Some respect it, some resent it, but they all accept it as long as it helps their primary goal of pushing the federal government toward the Republican party.

Pragmatic institutional conservatives see a presidential election as less about the top of the ticket and more about the tens of thousands of individuals who will shape federal agencies. This group includes those who want to ensure that the Supreme Court remains in conservative hands.

People in this group tend to be very concerned with social issues. They believe the Republican party is much more closely aligned with the Church of Jesus Christ on abortion, religious freedom, gender transitions, and same-sex marriage. When they apply their faith to the election, they think about issues like these. 

These voters see Kamala Harris as dangerously left-wing on social issues and believe a Republican administration is the only way to stop that, regardless of who the president is. 

Group #6 Reluctant Social Conservatives—Harris Voters

These voters care deeply about social conservatism but also have equally deep concerns about another Trump presidency.

These voters have rationalized voting for Harris in this election because they believe the conservative majority on the Supreme Court can prevent any egregious progressive excesses.

These are the voters most likely to talk about “holding their nose” to vote or voting for the “lesser of two evils.”

People in this category use a variety of rationales for voting for Harris. Some are happy that the Biden administration has led one of the best COVID economic recoveries in the world. Others are concerned about Trump’s character or policy issues. What unites them, however, is their strong social conservatism and rationalization to vote for Harris because of the Supreme Court’s strong conservative bent. 

Reluctant social conservatives tend to view their religious obligations in pragmatic terms, trying to figure out how to create the most good with their one vote. 

Group #7 Disenfranchised Populists—Trump Voters

Among Latter-day Saints, these voters tend to be rural but can include union workers as well. They may not love Trump’s morality or demeanor, but they’ll vote for him because they view him favorably compared to politicians overall. Because Trump is seen within this group as “authentic,” they can imagine spending time with him and admire his business success. 

Disenfranchised populists don’t feel besieged so much as they feel forgotten. For them, this election is a referendum not on Trump or Harris but on the Democratic party’s alliance with out-of-touch urban academia. These are the voters you will hear complain most often about “wokism.” Some of these voters were even previously inclined to vote for Democratic candidates.

However, their biggest issue is simply the economy. For them, the defining image for this election is the Joe Biden “I did that” sticker placed at gas pumps, and they react negatively to assertions that the economy is doing fine. 

Voters in this group consider the intersection of their faith and politics the least of any group. But when they do, they see Trump as honest and caring for less fortunate folks like them. 

These voters tend to focus the most on tying Harris to the Biden administration. 

Some in this group are more sincerely aligned with the pragmatic institutional conservative group, but they recognize the political potency of this argument and focus on it in their public advocacy. 

Group #8 Democracy Absolutists—Harris Voters

This group of voters is largely the descendants of the “Never-Trumpers.” They also view the election as primarily a referendum on Trump, not so much about his character or his policies as about his orientation toward democracy itself.

Democracy absolutists don’t feel they can rationalize Trump’s shortcomings for policy goals because they believe he could unravel the American experiment itself.

This group of voters feel vindicated in their assessment of Trump by his behavior concerning the certification of the 2020 election. January 6th is the defining issue for them. While some of this group are long-time democrats who prioritize this issue over others, most are conservatives who find the threat to the rule of law deeply unconservative.

This group believes that remarks by President Dallin H. Oaks of the first presidency were targeted at Donald Trump. He said, “We obey the current law and use peaceful means to change it. It also means that we peacefully accept the results of elections. We will not participate in the violence threatened by those disappointed with the outcome.”

Voters in this group can see Trump as a figure like Amalakiah, who sought to overturn the Nephite election of a chief judge and reinstate a king. They say things like, “I would vote for a rock over Trump.”

Group #9 Jesus 2024—Write in Voters

These voters hold their vote as a sacred privilege. For these voters, a candidate must reach a certain threshold of acceptability before they are willing to vote for them. In their assessment, none of the candidates in this cycle have met that threshold. 

These voters tend to share the concerns about Trump’s immorality and authoritarianism, so they will not vote for him. But they will not be complicit in allowing Harris’ social positions to advance. 

For people in this group, their vote is an endorsement. They take the religious aspect of their vote very seriously, and they cannot endorse someone they believe will hurt people. They look down on the “lesser of two evils” argument with the rejoinder that they won’t vote for evil of any kind.

Voters in this group are often very focused on abortion issues, and some of them see Trump’s pivot to the center on abortion as part of what disqualifies him.

These voters see the United States at a similar stage to the period in 3 Nephi when wickedness and destruction abounded, and the people were waiting for the arrival of Jesus Christ. Thus, you can hear some of them advocate for “Jesus 2024.” But sincerely, these voters either plan to sit out or write in a protest candidate.

Hopefully, this analysis will help politicos better understand and speak to the different types of Latter-day Saint voters and help Latter-day Saints better understand the others in their congregations.

The post The 9 Groups of Latter-day Saint Voters appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In a low moment, both Ryan and Jeff explode in an online social media exchange that includes phrases like, “I honestly cannot fathom how any decent person could vote for ________.” Their relationship is deeply damaged. To make matters worse, each seeks counsel from members of his own (fiery) political tribe. Both tribes further demonize the former friend and “other,” who is canceled and socially damned.

It is now 2024. Ryan and Jeff have not spoken in nearly a decade. Both are painfully poorer for the loss of a deep friendship where, once, on occasions as poignant as family deaths, each had lifted and served the other like a brother. All this was lost over disparately checked boxes and a failure to remember that reasonable people can disagree.  

The names are changed but this story is true.  Perhaps you have seen the same “friend to ‘un-friend’ tragedy” in your own circle and have names of your own to throw on the waste pile containing the decaying remnants of Ryan and Jeff’s broken bond of brotherhood.

 America:  The Dream, the Vision, the “Great Idea”

As brothers and sisters in the American family living in a land unlike any other, we must individually and collectively be more civil, more wise, and more honorable than we have been in recent elections. There is a better way.

America is not only a land—it is a dream, a vision, a sacred yearning. Paul Hewson (better known as Bono), a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize nominee and winner of the 2008 Nobel Man of Peace Award, has frequently written and sung about this vision. As a youth, Bono saw his native Ireland torn by Catholic-Protestant intolerance that escalated to violence and resulted in bombing-related deaths among some of his closest friends and literal neighbors. These travesties presented a poignantly painful and perplexing puzzle for Bono as a child of a Catholic-Protestant interfaith marriage. Surely, he hoped, humankind could do better than hatred, violence, and blood-soaked ground. Bono recently wrote of both his native Irish home and the American dream:

Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country but it’s not an idea. America is an idea. A great idea. … America is a song yet to be finished. … Perhaps America is the greatest song the world has not yet heard. … (Surrender, pp. 463-464).

For Bono and many around the globe, America has offered and can yet offer light and hope via the religious and political tolerance, civility, and pluralism promised in the American motto E pluribus unum—from many, one. This dual-fueled flame of unity and plurality—of the right to hold sacred personal conviction coupled with authentic tolerance of others to believe differently—requires unwavering and acute diligence and effort.

Selling Hate Versus Honoring Different Roots

E pluribus unum is not a promised land, nor is it a birthright. It is the apex of a mountain that must be collectively ascended. Without intentional upward effort, the heavy gravity of political, religious, racial, and ideological differences drag us downward to disintegration and entropy. Indeed, the Neo-Nazi leader Lincoln Rockwell once said to Alex Haley, “The easiest thing in this world to sell is hate.”

Gratefully, Alex Haley refused to take the “easy” path of hate. Perhaps no American artistic product has wielded more impact and unifying force than Alex Haley’s subsequent effort, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (and landmark TV mini-series) Roots. Through Roots, America, the “great idea” was challenged, and “America the People” was confronted with the horrors of African slavery and invited to step onto the painful ground of African Americans in deepened empathy and respect. Many accepted that invitation, and, in some ways, America became a better version of herself. We still have rivers to cross, however.

It is relatively easy to have warmth, affection, and sympathy for a person or group with whom we share religious, racial-ethnic, or political ties. However, we find nowhere in the writings of world religions a statement that reads, “Blessed is the one who only loves the easily lovable.”

By contrast, various expressions of the Golden Rule—exhorting us to respectfully treat others as we would be treated—are prevalent across religious traditions. While it is frighteningly easy and destructive to hate, it is deeply honorable and constructive to develop friendships and relationships of trust with those whose experiences, beliefs, and views differ from our own. Love of one another—including those we are tempted to see as “the other”—is an ascension worth the required personal and collective effort.

Striving to Surmount the Empathy Wall of Political Differences

The philosopher Terry Warner echoed, “To the immature, other people are not real.” Similarly, one obstacle to achieving the aim of E pluribus unum is a concept the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called “the empathy wall”—a barrier that keeps us from truly seeing others as “real.”

While holding a strong progressive orientation herself, Hochschild made the concerted effort to live among, share meals with, and interview passionate (circa 2015) Tea Party supporters in Southern states with petroleum-based economies. In her book-length study, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Hochschild actively avoided the tendency of many social researchers to repeatedly steal the microphone from her participants, like a “diva soloist.”

Instead, Hochschild listened to the voices of others. She listened not only for hours but for months. She probed, prodded, dug, and came to better understand those persons who allowed her onto their porches and into their homes. Hochschild did not change her own political views, but she did pay the steep price to climb over “the empathy wall.” Her example resonates with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s statement:

[A]ny self-knowledge worth the name tells you that others are as real as you are, and that your life is not just about you, it is about accepting the fact that you share a world with others, and about taking action directed at the good of others.

Given the divisive and hostile climate that too often prevails in contemporary America, it has never been more important to intentionally surmount the empathy wall that can prevent us from “sharing a world” with others while also blinding us from viewing others as entirely “real” as we are.

Arlie Hochschild’s personal investment in the kind of expensive pluralism required to surmount the empathy wall is remarkable and motivational. Based on 25 years of interviews with religiously, racially, and ethnically diverse families in their homes, our team developed a visual representation of ascending over Hochschild’s “empathy wall” called the empathy ladder (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Empathy Ladder

 An Overview of the Empathy Ladder

The journey offered by the empathy ladder leads us from the bottom rung of myopic ignorance to the second rung of tentative tolerance. From tentative tolerance, we can step up to indirect learning. Indirect learning can rise to healthy appreciation, and one step above healthy appreciation is relational learning. The descent to the personal, sacred ground of another person (on the other side of the empathy wall) includes stepping from relational learning to deep respect. From deep respect, we finally step onto the sacred ground of holy envy. Each additional step on the empathy ladder deepens our ability to appreciate another person or group. The more often we navigate the empathy ladder, the greater the enrichment we receive to our minds, hearts, and relationships.

Stephen Covey posited that the most important principle in human communication may be: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” One person making this gracious effort can have ripple effects. Indeed, we have reported from our interviews with hundreds of strong married couples from diverse races and religious traditions that one of the foundational lessons these exemplary families illustrate is “the principle of lived invitation.” Namely:

“Our behavior is permission to others to behave similarly … but it is more than that. It is an invitation to do so.”

Our research team has further noted that “[L]ike individual persons, each religious tradition has its own quirks, blind spots, and foibles. … [T]aking potshots at these perceived weaknesses is a cruel game that can rapidly turn into a blood sport.” Indeed, these are games where no one wins. Instead of amplifying prevalent weaknesses we observe in other denominations or persons, we posit that it requires intention and strength to focus on the strengths of others. The effort to develop the kind of deep respect that is rarer than love can lead us to the final step of developing holy envy.

We believe that a full-souled expression of holy envy results from deeply honoring the best of one’s own religious tradition and people, coupled with a broadminded and large-hearted desire to also acknowledge, honor, and be elevated by the best of other religious traditions and people as well.

Our team has observed and documented that religion wields what de Tocqueville called a “peculiar power”—a power that can destroy or construct, harm or heal. Like religion, political passion also wields peculiar power. Can the political empathy wall be surmounted so that contentious division can be replaced by “deep respect”?

A Political Vision of Surmounting the Empathy Wall

We began this report with the tragic reality of Jeff and Ryan’s terminated brotherhood— former friends who opted to lob verbal grenades onto the other side of the empathy wall instead of making the effort to surmount the wall and see the person on the other side as “real.” We now turn to an alternative model for the 2024 election cycle.

Pam Monroe spent her early career in Progressive politics with an especial passion for policy designed to help and lift those in poverty. Pam’s career eventually shifted to academia where she would hold an endowed professorship at LSU. Pam was widely and highly esteemed by colleagues (liberal, moderate, and conservative) and, in 2004, was elected President of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) while still in her 40s. Throughout her career, Professor Monroe’s focus never shifted from her concern for those in poverty. But caring for the poor was not Pam’s only love. “Everything I am,” she has repeatedly said, “is because of the love of Jim Garand.”

Jim Garand, like his wife Pam, has held an endowed professorship at LSU for decades. Like Pam, Jim was elected President of a large academic organization (The Southern Political Science Association) at a relatively young age. Unlike Pam, however, Jim is a committed Conservative—one who has frequently had to look beyond his party’s primary nominees in recent elections.

Both Pam and Jim are powerhouses. Both are articulate, enigmatic, passionate and have no difficulty expressing themselves and speaking their keen minds. Given these realities, it may seem that the stage was set for an epic battle and a very brief marriage—one likely featuring pyrotechnics. However, the years have yielded something quite different. You see, both Pam and Jim know how to listen to each other with deep respect. In connection with queries about this, Pam responded,

I fear you give us too much credit—rather, that you give ME far too much credit. Jim is the peacemaker. I’m just not an idiot.

Further, from Pam’s perspective, “We haven’t bridged a gulf quite so wide as the essay references.” Perhaps Pam is right. She usually is. However, she and Jim are the closest thing that this author has ever seen to embodying the elusive American ideal, so we will continue. Jim responded,

Pam likes to say that marriage is the best hard work that one ever does, and dealing with personal political division in today’s polarized United States is not easy and reflects that “hard work” theme. Sometimes it involves one of us listening without comment to the other rant over something that one of us finds outrageous. Sometimes, it involves not bringing up a touchy topic when emotions might be raw. It also involves not trying to score cheap political points or use “zingers” on the other. In intense political discussions, it can be difficult to show this kind of restraint.

To recap:  From Pam and Jim, we have references to peacemaking, bridging gulfs, shared “hard work,” and often “listening without comment” with mutual “restraint.” It sounds a bit like Durant’s “river of fire” wisely banked at a thousand turns. Notably, a profound respect for each other and their relationship is evident and woven into both partner’s comments.   

Pam and Jim’s marriage has subsequently inspired deep respect and holy envy in many who have observed their blessed union over their more than 40 years of marriage. Pam and Jim offer a hope-filled reality to an America plagued by political division. Pam and Jim both play fair and acknowledge many conspicuous flaws in both major parties … including certain candidates their preferred party has nominated. Pam and Jim’s political values are different, but both of these remarkable persons have surmounted the empathy wall so frequently for each other that they also share a great deal of sacred ground. Whatever political winds have blown over the past four decades, they have refused to surrender the rock of their respect-filled relationship.

The Purpose and a Plea

It is uncertain which parties and candidates will prevail in various elections in 2024 or during the next contention-filled election cycle. Whatever the poll results this month or in the future, Pam and Jim will continue to “seek first to understand,” they will continue to warrant and offer deep respect, and they will continue to love one another. If they can do so for four decades, maybe the rest of us can do likewise with the politically opposing loved ones that we have not yet foolishly canceled.

In the contention-riddled face of the cannibalistic political “now,” my purpose here is a plea that we each honor the timeless, sacred, and inherent worth of relationships between persons. May we be wise enough to “do politics,” civility, and respect in a way that embodies the American ideal. A question for each one of us remains:

“Am I willing to climb the empathy ladder for someone else?”

A passage from the Jewish Zohar reads:

A wise man knows for himself as much as is required, but the [person] of [true] discernment apprehends the whole, knowing both his own point of view and that of others. … He apprehends the lower world and the upper world, his own being, and the being of others.

May we all more wisely and respectfully discern and “apprehend” the faith, the political beliefs, and the being of others. May we make the effort to surmount the empathy wall rather than lobbing verbal grenades over it. May we move closer to the “great idea” of America.

The post The Great Idea of America: Lessons from a Mixed-Politics Marriage appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The difference in America’s divisive episodes is not demonstrated by disagreeing more vehemently or that our populace has stronger, more politically polarizing positions. The difference actually lies in how we now vilify, hate, and demonize the other. In modern, contemporary times, it seems that we now think that people on the other side cannot be truly good or rational; they are more than merely misled—they are mendacious and malicious. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that we are living through a time that is somehow unprecedented in the history of our nation, with potential existential implications for the American experiment in liberal democracy.

As we, therefore, undergo once again “the times that try men’s souls,” how can members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reflect their commitment to Christian values and gospel ideals while still demonstrating that degree of toleration, taste, and tact in politics that is becoming of those who profess to be disciples of the King of Love and giver of the two great commandments? What should Latter-day Saints do differently in periods of extreme political polarization? Should we become more or less partisan?

Part of the problem is that some people seem to think it goes without saying which political party Jesus ‘would have belonged to’ and to which party we, therefore, ought to belong. The funny thing is that both sides tend to think along these lines, including members of the Church. We should remind ourselves of Abraham Lincoln’s words from his Second Inaugural Address at that time in our nation’s history in which divisiveness led to much violence and war: 

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.

For a church that lives and dies with continuing revelation, I think the answer is simple: we do as the living prophets are currently teaching us to do. At different times in dispensational history, the solution to such problems as we face may have been different. For example, the Saints of God have repeatedly been commanded to “flee out of the midst of Babylon” and probably shall again. Most currently, our charge is rather to be reconciled unto Babylon herself. President Dallin H. Oaks recently taught: “On contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify” [emphasis added].  

In other words, we are still called to be peacemakers. We are not called to be the victors at all costs, not adamantly uncompromising in the name of righteous consistency, but moderators and unifiers and peacemakers. He did not even say to convince or persuade, a key aspect of the democratic marketplace of ideas! I believe this is implicitly a call to be anti-radicals or radical moderates; we cannot escape the implication of being moderate in President Oaks’ admonition that we moderate and unify. Could anyone other than a sincere moderate effectively moderate?

No matter what the issue nor how high the stakes, Jesus speaks unequivocally:

He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.

We must humbly refuse to join in on the contention of our times. Even when it comes to matters impinging on fundamental religious tenets, it does not seem that the ends (true laws) justify the means (prideful contention). In April 1989, then-Elder Russell M. Nelson wrote, in words as unequivocal as those of the Savior before:

Certainly, no faithful follower of God would promote any cause even remotely related to religion if rooted in controversy, because contention is not of the Lord.

This illustrates how the gospel of Jesus Christ does indeed demand something radical of us, something unthinkable, the sort of thing that would cause many of His disciples to “[walk] no more with Him.” We are radically required to refrain from political radicalization, or from radical behavior against our fellow man in political society. Jesus said, “It is better to offer the other [cheek] than to revile again. … For it is better that thou suffer thine enemy to take these things than to contend with him.”

This does not mean that we agree with all that is done with the force of law. It means that we obey the current law and use peaceful means to change it. … In a democratic society, we always have the opportunity and the duty to persist peacefully until the next election [emphasis added].

The prophets, seers, and revelators who constitute the First Presidency are clearly calling us to be moderate—or to exhibit the virtue of moderation, which is well-attested in modern revelation—in both our attitude and our methods while pursuing political change.

More demanding still, I believe we are invited to be moderate not only in our political attitudes and political behavior but also in our political beliefs. We must exhibit sufficient humility, recognizing that we approach objective truth only imperfectly and subjectively, to “consider it possible, in the bowels of Christ, that we may be mistaken.” If not mistaken about value-outcomes (such as the correctness of abortion), then at least about value-hierarchies (such as whether or not to make that issue the deciding issue of one’s vote or party identification). 

President Oaks teaches that the Church will at times “exercise its right to endorse or oppose specific legislative proposals” but that “each citizen [must] decide which issues are most important to him or her at any particular time. Then members should seek inspiration on how to exercise their [political] influence according to their individual priorities.” We are specifically called to become issue-voters rather than party-voters, which “will not be easy [and which] may require changing party support or candidate choices, even from election to election.” This is itself a form of moderation, and specifically a moderation of belief about the holistic goodness of one party and depravity of the other, including their political adherents. 

To put it simply, we cannot afford to believe that the other side is evil. Certainly, we should beware of secret combinations, but in a world chock-full of conspiracy theories, this is not where President Oaks has chosen to put any emphasis.

One other reason why we should be moderate in our beliefs is that the truth so often exists in the midst of apparent paradox and contradiction—better understood as balance. This is, I think, an interpretation of “opposition in all things” that is equally as necessary as that traditional interpretation, which focuses primarily on temptation and trial. This is the opposition of classic tragedy, of good against good, of truth against truth, of impossible choices and balancing acts. It is the opposition of opposites, but also of compliments—just as God embodies all contradictions: Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, eyes aflame and a voice as rushing waters, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world and the firstfruits of the resurrection, and male and female. Indeed, Joseph Smith remarked that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest,” and Brigham Young similarly said that “all facts are proved and made manifest by their opposite.”

Moderation in belief may be the surest road to true belief because the truth exists in the tension and contradiction between opposing sides. Thus, neither side is always entirely true. This is a conception of our increasingly accurate approximation of truth as a narrowing sinusoid rather than a rational function monotonically approaching its limit. This is the “dialectic of enlightenment.” However, this is probably only true for us fallible humans, because there is no ideological moderation or equivocation in omniscience; rather, God exhibits the balance of simultaneous superlatives (Anselm’s definition)—the ultimate contradiction.

If one cannot abide the ideas that have been conveyed and still insists that we should be radical with a righteous zeal in our political beliefs, integralistically declining to distinguish between religious and political truth or between ontological and practical reality—even then, I think the teachings of the Church are unambiguous in one final respect: that we should not be partisan.

Beginning at least with Brigham Young, the Church has taught that members of the Church in good will and good standing can belong to any/either of the major political parties:

Are we a political people? Yes, very political indeed. But what party do you belong to or would you vote for? I will tell you whom we will vote for: we will vote for the man who will sustain the principles of civil and religious liberty, the man who knows the most and who has the best heart and brain for a statesman; and we do not care a farthing whether he is a whig, a democrat, … a republican, … or anything else. These are our politics.

President Oaks similarly insisted:

We should never assert that a faithful Latter-day Saint cannot belong to a particular party or vote for a particular candidate. We teach correct principles and leave our members to choose how to prioritize and apply those principles on the issues presented from time to time. We also insist, and we ask our local leaders to insist, that political choices and affiliations not be the subject of teachings or advocacy in any of our Church meetings.

Can it be any mistake that we had a doctor during the pandemic, and we could potentially have a juror during the coming constitutional crisis? Recall that President Kimball instructed President Gordon B. Hinckley to “[c]all Nelson and Oaks to the Quorum of the Twelve, in that order.”

In President Oaks’ call for Latter-day Saints “to moderate and unify” is the fact that to sincerely and effectively moderate, we must be moderate—in attitude, behavior, and belief. Our role in doing so may very well prove indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, the very passage of which President George Washington attributed to the Founders’ willingness to compromise with each other—even on fundamental moral issues like slavery—for the sake of union:

The Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.

I do not think that a willingness to compromise politically requires compromising our convictions nor equivocating about absolute truth, but that is a topic deserving of an essay of its own. For now, suffice it to say that I think more of us should consider emulating Eugene England and becoming “radical middle-of-the-roader[s].”

The post The Radical Center: Why Latter-day Saints Should Embrace Political Moderation appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Some of the most influential organizations working today saw their birth during these time periods, such as the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Many of these organizations came about to help rectify historic injustices faced by members of their community. But this is far from the only purpose of civil rights organizations.

The mechanisms of legal change are often benefited by civil rights organizations. By having organizations dedicated to these issues, they can raise awareness of certain trends that affect the people their organization represents, they can raise funds to pursue legal cases important to their cause, they can engage in lobbying for laws that will disproportionately affect their community, or litigate laws that do. In many real ways, identity groups without their own civil rights organization are at a disadvantage in the United States’ political and cultural arena. 

One of the earliest groups with this kind of focus is the National Grange. While it started more as a fraternal organization, it soon recognized it could play an important role in advocating for the needs, interests and rights of farmers and rural communities—a group that required distinct advocacy but that had not experienced historic discrimination.

Today, there are many civil rights organizations. Some represent the needs of historically disadvantaged groups, such as the NAACP or the ADL. But many represent other groups, such as the NRA, AARP, or the Home School Legal Defense Association.

After Protestants and Catholics, Latter-day Saints represent the third largest religious identification in the United States, with a very similar population to American Jews.

There are many civil rights organizations that focus on the Jewish population or issues of importance to them. These include the Anti-Defamation League, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and what is widely believed to be the earliest civil rights organization for a religious group, the American Jewish Committee.

There is no comparable organization among Latter-day Saints.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself has often acted as the primary focus for efforts to advocate for Latter-day Saints. But it’s a religious, not a civil rights organization. And its public affairs arm is by its nature suited for response, not advocacy.

There are a few other groups that seek to advance Latter-day Saint interests such as FAIR Latter-day Saints, The Widtsoe Foundation, Faith Matters, and the Elizabeth McCune Institute, but they do so through educational, devotional, and apologetic work rather than legal advocacy or media relations. A gap remains in dedicated Latter-day Saint civil rights advocacy.

On the political side, the most notable movement has been Mormon Women for Ethical Government, an organization of left-wing Latter-day Saint women that arose to oppose Donald Trump and the politicians who supported him. But their focus was on a specific political issue, not on representing the needs of Latter-day Saint women. Similarly, Brigham Young University has an International Center for Law and Religious Society that does important advocacy work on a topic of importance to Latter-day Saints, international religious freedom, but has not paid any sustained specific attention to Latter-day Saints beyond their own identification with the faith. 

There are a handful of individual voices that note civil rights issues related to Latter-day Saints, who have drawn notable if moderate followings on social media, but even these individuals tend to be more focused on devotional and cultural issues. And their efforts lack the kind of structure and planning that a single organization can provide.

The lack of a Latter-day Saint civil rights organization has had a negative effect in many arenas of public life.

Even those who are dismissive of complaints about the mistreatment of Latter-day Saints as being not that important can recognize that many groups who are substantially successful in the United States still benefit from legal organizations that are dedicated to supporting their civil rights. In fact, the lack of such an organization could play a notable role in allowing the mistreatment of certain groups to fester or remain. Effective advocacy can build cultural cachet—the kind Latter-day Saints continue to lack.

Given this environment, we believe it is time for a civil rights organization to be founded specifically to advocate for the rights of Latter-day Saints in political, legal, and cultural spaces.

The post It’s Time for Latter-day Saints to Have a Civil Rights Organization appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Latter-day Saint observers of recent political trends in the United States, in particular, can see these alarming processes underway. The ideological left and right in the United States have been rapidly hardening into cult-like movements, described well in Terryl and Nathaniel Givens’ evergreen article This is How It Begins to End.

The word “cult” has fallen into academic disfavor in recent years because, like many terms, it has been applied to an ever-increasing set of groups and behaviors in a process called semantic inflation. This is when a term becomes so overused that people can no longer reliably agree on what the term actually means. Attempts have been made to create a more rigorous framework for defining the term cult, most notably Steven Hassan’s BITE model, with its focus on control over people’s behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. But as I demonstrated in my recent presentation on the use of the term “cult” in reference to Latter-day Saints, the BITE model can be used convincingly to apply the cult label to military service, academia, activism, start-up companies, and a number of other human experiences. For this reason, the BITE model is often dismissed as unhelpful.

As I argued in my presentation, movements that are experienced as “culty” by one person may be experienced the opposite way by another. Critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sometimes characterize our faith as a “high-demand belief system,” which is true. But it is also true that every human being is born into a high-demand belief system. And critics of religion have a hard time admitting this, but on a societal level, there is no higher-demand belief system than nihilism, the belief that life has no inherent meaning or purpose. Its miserable premise has birthed a variety of high-demand coping strategies, chief among them hedonism and activism. In my personal experience growing up as a Latter-day Saint youth in hedonistic Southern California, I witnessed peers turning constantly to hedonistic numbing behaviors of drugs and sexual promiscuity, with punitive exclusionary and shunning behaviors toward people who questioned the dominant hedonistic social narrative.

The soundtrack for my teenage years was a Rush song called Subdivisions, with lyrics that spoke to the frustrations of living as a religious minority in my area:

In the high school halls,
In the shopping malls,
Conform or be cast out!

It might be surprising for some observers of our faith to learn that for many of us who grew up in hedonistic secular contexts, the intensive and highly controlled experience of missionary service actually felt in many ways like a relief. And people who find the idea of a university behavioral code “oppressive” might be further surprised to know that many students enroll at Brigham Young University specifically for the benefits of living with the school’s honor code. For myself and many of my peers there, BYU felt like freedom from the pressure cooker of hedonistic nihilism that surrounded us in our younger years.

My experience of faith has definitely been high-demand, and also extremely high-reward. But it has not been as high demand as many alternatives I have seen. Over the past century, religious groups that have relaxed their demands in doctrine and praxis have mostly declined and disappeared. Headlines about the rise of the “unchurched” have emerged at the same time as headlines of nihilistic despair among young people, alongside headlines of skyrocketing rates of mental illness and deaths of despair. In reality, these are all the same story, the story of the extremely high-demand belief system called nihilism.

The most effective antidote to nihilism in Western civilization has been the scriptural witness of a loving God revealed by prophets. Through the ages, prophets have been followed: sometimes in the form of simple adherence to their guidance, but other times in people’s willingness to literally pack up and move to walk behind Moses or join the entourage of Isaiah or John the Baptist.

The phrase “Follow the prophet,” sung by our primary children, is sometimes regarded as “culty” by people who have never seriously investigated its meaning. When we encourage each other to follow the prophet, we are talking about our scriptural exhortation to “give heed” to a group of people who we believe to hold a prophetic office described in the words of Jesus as “Moses’ seat.” To “give heed” means to treat their guidance as having divine inspiration or authority, and it is a significant component of what we call a commitment to sustain our church leadership.

The commitment to sustain poses challenges to believers in situations where prophetic guidance goes against our own instincts or perceptions. The tension between internal versus external authority is a constant in our life of faith, as it has always been for believers. An excess of deference to external authority becomes idolatry, or what we call “borrowed light,” and at the other end of the spectrum, sole reliance on our internal authority is self-worship. I suggest there is a healthy “integrated” center place; in my own view, it means that upon receiving prophetic guidance, I make the best possible case for the validity of that guidance before I entertain a stance of disagreement. That can sometimes be a long and prayerful process of study and consultation; it requires zero surrender of my own autonomy or my critical thinking skills. By contrast, I observe that critics of prophets through the ages have tended to operate like “herds of individuals,” refusing to examine their own worldviews and behaving in very predictable ways, almost as if following a script.

Of course, it is important to here acknowledge the merit in some criticisms. In many contexts, the commitment to follow a religious leader can indeed be a part of an unhealthy approach to religion that is rightly described as “culty.” But it is abundantly clear that this is not the only way to experience this principle. In contrast with cult groups, which tend toward insularity and isolation, prophet-following Latter-day Saints live all over the world and study and work with constant exposure to different ideas. Non-Latter-day Saint sources of information are frequently quoted and promoted in official messaging at the highest levels of church leadership. People who sometimes think of the Church in “culty” terms are faced with cognitive dissonance over the reality that mentally healthy, well-adjusted adult Latter-day Saints who live with a bedrock spiritual commitment to follow the prophet are found not in a walled compound somewhere but fully participating at all levels of secular society in most institutions.

In a recent presentation at BYU-Idaho, Latter-day Saint scholar Melissa Inouye offered a warning voice about political trends, using Chinese political history as an example. An interesting element of her presentation was her description of China’s cultural revolution, with its violent mobs and the cult of personality surrounding Chairman Mao. Her warnings seemed to have general applicability, speaking to tendencies that can be observed at both the political extremes in the United States. Here and in some other areas, the ideological left and right have morphed into cult-like movements, and I apply that term in light of their attempts to control information; their obsession with ingroup and outgroup; their insistence upon absolute ideological conformity, and more of their manifestations of components of the BITE framework. Our political movements often behave like two conspiracy cults that derive oppositional life force from one another. And strangely enough, whatever their differences, their extreme elements seem to be able to unite around a hatred of Jews.

In a recent article in The Free Press, Jewish filmmaker Ilan Benjamin describes a sort of awakening he experienced following the October 2023 Hamas terror attacks in Israel. Ilan describes his past thinking as a progressive Jew in the United States: 

I proudly supported Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA+, and feminist causes. I called myself a progressive Jew. But over the years, I noticed a disturbing trend: With all the atrocities in the world, why did my social justice warrior friends hate Israel so disproportionately? Why did it feel like intersectionality excluded Jews? Why did the left—who supposedly stood up for human rights—put child-murdering Hamas terrorists on a pedestal? 

Benjamin continues his reminiscence, discussing his futile attempts to help his progressive friends see the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with some degree of nuance: 

At first, I thought it must be miseducation.

“Ah, they think Palestinians are the indigenous people. I’ll show that Jewish history, and the archaeology to prove it, dates back millennia.” 

“Ah, they think we’re white colonizers. I’ll show how many Jews are people of color, including those who are Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ethiopian.” 

“Ah, they’ll get it once I show them that there are fifty Muslim countries, and only one Jewish state.” 

But my friends weren’t interested in correcting their misunderstandings.

The refusal among his friends to make even the slightest adjustments to their perspectives is called cognitive closure, a concept I discussed in a recent article on fundamentalism. This cognitive closure is why so many former progressives characterize their departure from progressive politics as leaving a cult. Ilan Benjamin spent years in denial, but his account of his recent awakening to the problems in his progressive ideology reads like a narrative of cult deprogramming. The person he had been, who tolerated the antisemitism rampant in the messaging of the left, is not someone he can honestly continue to be.

Numerous political figures and commentators who were considered firmly on the ideological left or right now consider themselves politically homeless and find their former parties and ideological allies to be unrecognizable, which is language used by people whose loved ones have joined a cult. I would suggest it is not at all an accident that the most independent-thinking, opposite-of-culty political act in recent memory was Mitt Romney’s lone vote of conscience in the February 2021 impeachment vote. Romney’s singular act came from his own moral compass, his intellectual autonomy, and the same prodigious critical thinking skills that served him so well in his business career. If Romney’s religion were a cult, then this was certainly not evident in his remarks to the Senate, where he cited his religion as a core source of his willingness to think and act independently in the face of partisan pressure that was overwhelming and threatening. Romney’s religious commitments gave him intellectual and ideological freedom.

Later that year, in remarks at the University of Virginia, President Dallin H. Oaks offered a message that served to remind the world how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will continue to engage with the world. Rejecting the totalizing narratives that animate the culty ideological extremes, President Oaks stated,

Another basic imperative is that we should not seek total dominance for our own position; we should seek fairness for all. Specifically, people of faith should not contest every nondiscrimination law or policy that could possibly impinge, however insignificantly, on institutional or individual religious freedom. Likewise, proponents of nondiscrimination need not contest every religious freedom exemption from nondiscrimination laws. The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding, and good-faith negotiations. And both must accept and respect the rule of law.

In light of these prophetic ideals, following the prophet means leaving whatever cult offers you an absolutist political redemption story.

But conspiracy cults frame every dispute as if it is exactly that situation, dividing the world into the evil people over there versus the good people (us). To negotiate or compromise in any way is to become a participant in the evil conspiracy. If you befriend them, you are one of them.

In the last century, history has shown that in the absence of a prophetically-revealed understanding of the redemption of the world, modern societies do, in fact, tend to gravitate toward one or another demonic redemption story, and we are reminded of the Book of Mormon’s references to ancient “plans” around the acquisition of power. In the 20th century and to some extent in the present, Marxism and fascism have functioned like a pair of predictable, scripted trajectories for societies that accept Satan’s offer of the kingdoms of the world.

The response of Christ to Satan’s three temptations was a declaration of freedom, but the price of Christ’s freedom was an extremely high-demand commitment, one that He extends to His followers. And we can fully acknowledge that the language of taking up one’s cross, of severing one’s hand, of not looking back, certainly can be misapplied in ways that manipulate people. But even when properly understood and charitably communicated, real Christian commitment will only ever be high-demand.

In the abandonment of Christianity in the West, we see that to give the opposite responses to the three temptations—to say that cravings are needs; to say that recognition and validation are essential; to say that power and control are necessary—all of this is to reject real freedom in favor of addiction, psychic torment, emotional fragility, and absolute political loyalty. And to view the three temptations as rights, which increasingly more Westerners are doing, is to invite totalitarianism. This is the culty new reality of many post-Christian Westerners who unironically boast of their “freedom” from organized religion.

The phrase “religious freedom” is sometimes viewed in legal terms as a set of rights, but we can understand that phrase in another sense: it is the freedom to follow the prophets in seeing clearly and responding well to a number of trends in society that are suffocatingly oppressive and yes, “culty.” Freedom to follow prophetic guidance is the freedom to avoid these downward spirals in the surrounding culture and develop into a thriving, well-adjusted adult who contributes positively to the world around us.

The post Follow the Prophet Out of Your Cult appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I begin with a story. When our youngest son Jared was about nine years old, he was in the back seat with his brothers while Julie and I drove down the road from Oak Hills in Provo that goes along the north side of the Provo temple. The view of the valley is quite commanding there. As we looked out of the expanse of Utah County and of Utah Lake and the mountains to the West, the sky was very dramatic, with great contrasts of light and darkness and displaying various shades of red and purple. Jared was clearly impressed. He sat upright to have a better look and exclaimed: “Holy cow! Don’t tell me it’s the Second Coming!” He then added, with hardly a pause, out of concern for our neighbors to whom he delivered daily newspapers: “I feel bad for those people who paid ahead on their subscriptions!”

For us Latter-day Saints, our view of politics and of public affairs more broadly may depend significantly on how we situate ourselves eschatologically, that is, in relation to the “Last Things” prophesied in scripture. Especially when politics is increasingly divisive, confusing, and unpleasant, it is comforting to remember that the world is ultimately in God’s hands and that it is not up to us to decide the final outcome.

For behold, it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward.

“Verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness;

“For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves. And inasmuch as men do good they shall in nowise lose their reward.

“But he that doeth not anything until he is commanded, and receiveth a commandment with doubtful heart and keepeth it with slothfulness, the same is damned” (D&C 58:26-29).

Until we are told we can stop living providently and exercising foresight—or stop paying our newspaper subscription a month in advance—we remain agents responsible for making the best future we can for ourselves and our communities. Keeping in mind both our ultimate dependence on Higher Powers for what matters most and our moral responsibility to do what good and to prevent what evil we can, let us consider these two religious statements concerning politics:

The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience (2009; excerpt)

… freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions. … we affirm 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society … We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. …

LDS Statement on Neutrality (excerpt)

The work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints includes sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, strengthening individuals and families, and caring for those in need. The Church does not seek to elect government officials, support or oppose political parties, or, generally, take sides in global conflicts. The Church is neutral in matters of politics within or between the world’s many nations, lands, and peoples. However, as an institution, it reserves the right to address issues it believes have significant moral consequences or that directly affect the mission, teachings, or operations of the Church.

The Manhattan Declaration is a straightforward argument for the importance of religious truth in political life. The Latter-day Saint statement on neutrality expresses a desire to keep the church out of politics as much as possible. The question, of course, is just how far such a neutral stance is indeed possible. The exception to the posture of neutrality enters in immediately as soon as “significant moral consequences” are at stake. We are led to ask, then, whether moral questions can, for the most part, be kept separate from political questions.

Political theorist Scott Yenor has insightfully articulated the current state of social norms on sexual morality: 

Every country has a sexual constitution: a set of laws and opinions, which use shame and honor to shape and guide sexuality…. We currently live under the Queer Constitution, which claims to—and in fact does—reject the Straight Constitution. …It moved from gay rights in the 1970s to proclaiming “Gay Pride” a virtue in the 1990s, … to constitutionalizing same-sex marriage in the 2010s, to protecting gender identity under the civil rights laws in the 2020s, to practically banning intellectual and legal opposition to the Queer Constitution on speech platforms. …The live-and-let-live attitude, hoped for by conservatives and promised by revolutionaries, cannot, in principle, hold. Indeed, the move from legal tolerance to public celebration is perfectly logical.  

It’s hard to disagree with Yenor’s diagnosis. When society is arrayed in such plain and overt opposition to the teachings of the Church, the question of neutrality takes on a new significance. To what extent should we or can we be neutral?  

“Fairness,” “Tolerance,” and the Common Good

We hope to avoid bitter public conflict over such sensitive moral issues by organizing political life in terms of an idea of “fairness” rather than with reference to a substantive moral agreement. “Fairness” is a pragmatic substitute for moral agreement. But can “fairness” be defined apart from some broadly shared understanding of the common good, of our common purposes? And can our understanding of the common good be severed entirely from the philosophical and religious questions of human nature and the human good? Can we define “human rights” apart from some substantive understanding of human decency and human flourishing?

 “There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates.”

If Tocqueville is right (and I think he is), then the concept of “fairness” will not save us from hard questions about how we understand the common good—about our nation’s “sexual constitution” and its moral constitution more generally. Elder D. Todd Christofferson has explained very clearly why morality is not a purely private or purely religious (as distinct from more widely social) concern:

The societies in which many of us live have for more than a generation failed to foster moral discipline. They have taught that truth is relative and that everyone decides for himself or herself what is right. Concepts such as sin and wrong have been condemned as “value judgments.” As the Lord describes it, “Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god” (D&C 1:16). As a consequence, self-discipline has eroded, and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments.  

“Tolerance,” like “fairness,” may seem to offer an easier, less burdensome alternative to our public responsibility for a wholesome understanding of human nature and human purposes. But, as PresidentDallin H. Oaks has explained, citing President Boyd K. Packer, “The word tolerance does not stand alone.  It requires an object and a response to qualify it as a virtue . . . Tolerance is often demanded but seldom returned.  Beware of the word tolerance.  It is a very unstable virtue.”  

Tolerance is unstable and often, in fact, duplicitous, I would say, because our view of the scope of tolerance—the range of behaviors and policies deserving of acceptance—always depends upon some more substantive moral convictions. “Tolerance” is often wielded as a weapon against more traditional moral viewpoints, but the morality—and the view of humanity—behind the deployment of “tolerance” is never itself question. All too often, tolerance is meant to apply to my opinions and practices but not to yours.

“Neutrality”: Context and Limits

How, then, are we to understand the Church’s emphasis on political neutrality, fairness, and tolerance, and apparent disinclination in the present political and social context to take a strong public stand on matters of substantive morality such as is expressed in the Manhattan Declaration?  

To begin to explore this question, it is important to see that while these teachings are in part explicitly grounded in the fundamental Christian virtue of charity or love, it is also reasonable to postulate that they are intended to address current political and social circumstances of the Church in North America in a practical way. It is natural and right that the Church should attend first and foremost to its own interests—that is, to its divine mission of saving souls—of showing the way to Eternal Life to the living and of binding together the generations and redeeming the dead through temple ordinances. In a time of the weakening of shared moral and social norms and of increasing ideological extremism, the Church’s first political priority must be to secure its right to pursue its religious purposes. Implicit in the background of such practical political judgments is, of course, the question raised by my son’s apocalyptic response to a dramatic skyscape:  just what time frame are we working with here? Are longer-term political considerations (our concern for a sound shared morality adequate to support a self-governing society) to be devalued in view of the imperatives of the last days?  

However much weight we give to such millennialist considerations, we can understand why Latter-day Saint involvement in public debates, such as the lost battle against the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual couples, has, at least for now, apparently, been sacrificed to a rhetoric of morally “neutral” fairness and tolerance with a view to securing in exchange a general recognition of rights of religious free exercise. Rather than hoping to contribute to the common good of society by participating in public debates over issues of fundamental social morality, we hope, at least for a time, for example, to be allowed to continue employment practices in Church education which many now would hope to abolish as “discriminatory,” not to mention to continue to uphold norms in our temple ceremonies that increasingly violate the deepest moral or ideological sensibilities of a powerful block of public opinion, especially elite opinion. While there will always be costs as well as benefits to such rhetorical and political choices, it is not difficult to imagine a reading of our current political and social circumstances that would explain and justify the now dominant posture of “neutrality” or “fairness for all.”

Whose Neutrality? The Church and its Members 

That said, it is important to recognize that the Church’s stated and official policy applies to the Church as an institution and is not being advanced as the one true political stance to be adopted by the general membership.   It is not clear, moreover, that the public-relations posture that dominates church communications is the best stance for all of its members to take in their public engagements.   And, speaking of the membership, another important motive in the Church’s messaging regarding politics seems to be a determination to lower the temperature of politically related debate in our own congregations. It is possible to acknowledge the importance of responsible engagement by Latter-day Saints in the difficult issues that roil our public life while seeing that it is a high priority to preserve peace and brotherhood among ourselves. This is certainly an important purpose in President Russell M. Nelson’s very forthright call, echoed by other Church leaders, for us all to be “peacemakers”:

You have your agency to choose contention or reconciliation. I urge you to choose to be peacemakers, now and always.

Anger never persuades. Hostility builds no one. Contention never leads to inspired solutions. Regrettably, we sometimes see contentious behavior even within our own ranks.

Now, I am not talking about “peace at any price.” I am talking about treating others in ways that are consistent with keeping the covenant you make when you partake of the sacrament. You covenant to always remember the Savior. In situations that are highly charged and filled with contention, I invite you to remember Jesus Christ. Pray to have the courage and wisdom to say or do what He would. As we follow the Prince of Peace, we will become His peacemakers.

President Nelson then interjected, as many will recall, the genial observation that “At this point, you may be thinking that this message would really help someone you know.”  And, of course, the tendency to weaponize even the idea of peace-making is a very real problem. As President Packer once said of tolerance, “peace-making” can perhaps also be an “unstable virtue.”  Everyone wants peace on his or her own terms, especially when he is not even aware that he is setting terms. Thus President Nelson’s apparently casual aside is, in fact, very significant: “I am not talking about ‘peace at any price.’”

The Big Exception 

Having outlined a number of ways to explain and validate the Church’s posture of political neutrality, it is time to notice the massive exception that accompanies the neutrality statement, an exception that might well prove to be more important than the rule:  The Church “reserves the right to address issues it believes have significant moral consequences or that directly affect the mission, teachings or operations of the Church.”  Of course, what counts as “significant moral consequences” or as directly affecting religious mission is a question open to interpretation, to say the least. As Elder Oaks has himself argued with some force, all legal questions—and I would add, at some level, all political questions—are finally moral questions. Despite the too common nostrum against “legislating morality,” we, in fact, never legislate anything else—or how can we claim that it is morally right to obey and morally wrong to disobey the law?

Much would seem to depend, then, on the Church’s interpretation of “significant moral consequences,” which obviously would require a highly contextualized judgment. Just to cite the most obvious and troublesome example: is public policy regarding abortion morally “significant”? It certainly would seem so. But can the Church, in its official capacity, make a significant, constructive difference in determining such policy? And if so, how? And it certainly can be argued that there are circumstances in which it may actually be more advantageous, in terms of the Church’s essential mission, for it to remain “neutral,” or perhaps simply silent, even where matters of fundamental moral importance are at stake. The moral issue may be simple for us Latter-day Saints, but the surrounding political questions, including a realistic assessment of actual risks, opportunities, and constraints, are more complex.

Our Pragmatic Situation

Having recognized that the Church’s political stance must depend on the specific political circumstances in which it chooses to intervene, let us consider briefly what are the most fundamental constraints that the Church and its members now confront as we face outward toward the political world in the United States. A simple way of characterizing our political situation as a religion today might be simply to acknowledge (1) that there once was a culture war that defined much of political debate in the United States, (2) that the Church not long ago made certain efforts to intervene in that “war” (contributions to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s; the Family Proclamation itself, 1995; mobilization in favor of Proposition 8 in California to prevent the radical redefinition of marriage. 2008), but (3) that now the moment of the culture war is over, not because the cause was not important or that our efforts were not legitimate, but simply because we have lost.  

Is this characterization of our situation adequate? There is no question our circumstances are fundamentally different than just a decade ago, and there is no point intervening as if the year were 1995 or 2008.   On the other hand, we delude ourselves if we imagine that, just because we have lost a certain fundamental battle, the war is, therefore, over. Because the plain fact is we can keep losing—at least if Yenor (see above) is in any way right about the ascendant “sexual constitution” that now governs us. The attack on moral Truth, or simply basic truths about human nature, male and female, is never done. Tolerance or “respect for differences” is a very unstable virtue indeed, and the demand for “equality” (or, now, “equity”) is an inherently bottomless demand.

Here is what Pierre Manent, the French political philosopher, wrote in response to the radical redefinition of marriage in his own country: 

The demand for the right to marriage on behalf of … [homosexual] couples must be considered a metaphysical demand, that is, a demand that bears on the meaning and the whole of human life … Insofar as marriage was the crucial institution of a human world organized according to natural law, the law of which we are speaking aims to overturn or abolish this very order.  Henceforth societies living under this law are involved in an experiment that is equally crucial and whose consequences yet to come, public as well as private, will no doubt be commensurate with the audacity or imprudence of what has been done.

This legislation … owes [its] ascendancy to the ambition I have called metaphysical, the claim to inscribe into positive law the thesis according to which the just or legitimate human order excludes all reference to a natural norm or purpose.  

The attack on natural norms or purposes cannot be sated, and so there is little ground for hoping that the enemies of truth will be content to enjoy their past victories and adopt a “live and let live” posture towards individuals, families, or churches and other communities that wish to maintain the more traditional norms and practices that are now increasingly seen as “alternative lifestyles.”

Elder Robert D. Hales stated in the October General Conference, 2013, “The world is moving away from the Lord faster and farther than ever before. The adversary has been loosed upon the earth.”  Many of the brethren have echoed this assessment of our practical situation. If we accept this assessment, then it is hard to see how we might expect a posture of neutrality or hope of reciprocal “fairness” to offer a long-term solution, or a viable long-term approach, to our political and cultural circumstances as a Church. It is more likely that we will need more of the harder virtue of courage praised by Elder Russell M. Nelson in the April 2014 General Conference (quoting President Thomas S. Monson, 1986): “Of course, we will face fear, experience ridicule, and meet opposition. Let us have the courage to defy the consensus, the courage to stand for principle. Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God’s approval” (my emphasis).

President Oaks offered an even more bracing assessment of our practical (political and cultural) situation in an address to the BYU-Idaho community in 2015. “The denial of God or the downplaying of His role in human affairs that began in the Renaissance has become pervasive today,” he said.  While observing that “the glorifying of human reasoning has had good and bad effects,” President Oaks went on to explain, “prophecies of the last days foretell great opposition to inspired truth and action. Some of these prophecies concern the anti-Christ, and others speak of the great and abominable church.”  President Oaks thus associated the core teaching of nothing less than this “great and abominable church,” which “must be something far more pervasive and widespread than a single “church,” as we understand that term today” with Korihor’s teaching of “moral relativism” in the Book of Mormon: “Break free of the old rules. Do what feels good to you. There is no accountability beyond what man’s laws or public disapproval impose on those who are caught.”  This is, to say the least, a sobering perspective on our practical circumstances as members in interface with the larger culture and with political and legal powers and principalities. 

The Perils of Pragmatism

To the considerable degree that the doctrine of “the anti-Christ” or the “great and abominable Church” increasingly pervades our society, it seems unlikely that anything resembling “neutrality” will be a viable posture for the long term for Latter-day Saints. To be sure, there may be many times when the Church judges it prudent to keep its head down in view of its most important and urgent religious priorities. But it is important that we as members guard against interpreting this prudent or pragmatic posture as a compromise regarding basic principles and eternal truths. It is natural, almost irresistible, as we enter into necessary political compromises that we begin to adapt our understanding of truth and morality to the terms of that compromise.

To be sure, “patience, negotiation, and compromise” may be seen not only as means to [political and social] ends but “as social and spiritual ends unto themselves,” as public intellectual Jonathan Rauch recently argued, in praise of what he takes to be Latter-day Saint political theology.   There is no doubt that there is something to be learned and real virtues to be refined by earnest and temperate engagement in the great moral debates that now shape American politics. Rauch is certainly right that believers benefit from learning how to check the impulse to “impose my will politically to limit your agency.”  At the same time, however—and this is a simple truth Rauch seems to ignore—politics is not a debating society in which the conversation never ends and consequential decisions can be deferred indefinitely. A long-time advocate of same-sex marriage himself, Rauch would appear not to be eager to re-open that debate. Law and policy will be determined one way or another, and individual agency will have to bend to this determination. (For Rauch, the ultimate authority is a purely secular and quasi-scientific “constitution of knowledge” that excludes all religiously tainted convictions.) In any case, moral agency makes no sense without a moral framework, and civil legislation will always partake of and contribute to a shared moral vision. As President Oaks has taught, all law involves the “legislation of morality”—one morality or another. Marriage as we know it has, for public and legal purposes, been radically redefined and essentially compromised in a way that has real consequences for the well-being of Americans. 

We may therefore find comfort in the assurance that “Congress has now reaffirmed that our beliefs ‘are due proper respect,’” but it is easy to get swept up in the worldview according to which all views deserve respect—but only because they are equally groundless, that is, because there are no rules and no truths about human, political power. It is one thing prudently to recognize the Church’s limited scope of action in the present political environment. It is quite another to define that environment in the relativistic or liberationist terms of our enemies. It is one thing to honor the commandment to love our enemies. It is quite another to imagine we do not have enemies.  

In his most recent General Conference address, Elder Christofferson expounded on the importance of the gathering of Israel and the sealing power of the priesthood. The highest purpose of the sealing power is to bind families together forever. One purpose of the gathering is to make the blessings of this sealing available to the saints; another is to protect the faithful from the wrath that must be poured out on mankind as a natural consequence of disobedience to God’s laws and commandments. “Without the sealings that create eternal families and link generations here and hereafter,” Elder Christofferson taught, “we would be left in eternity with neither root nor branches, neither ancestry nor posterity.”  He then described the two types of disobedience that merit God’s wrath: 

It is this free-floating, disconnected state of individuals, on the one hand, or connections that defy the marriage and family relations God has ordained, on the other hand, that would frustrate the very purpose of the earth’s creation. Were that to become the norm, it would be tantamount to the earth being smitten with a curse or utterly wasted at the Lord’s coming.  

Extreme, relativistic individualism and the perversion of the true idea of marriage and family are ideas and lifestyles that portend nothing less than the devastation of the earth. Whatever practical compromises we find it necessary to make in the political realm, we must not delude ourselves that what is at stake in our understanding of the family and of the purpose and limits of sexual expression is a mere matter of individual taste or inclination, a topic upon which reasonable people can reasonably disagree without some being right and others being profoundly, disastrously mistaken. Nothing less is at stake than the very purpose of creation.   

Of course, the outcome of our political efforts is finally in the Lord’s hands. President Russell M. Nelson has prophesied: “In coming days, we will see the greatest manifestations of the Savior’s power that the world has ever seen. Between now and the time He returns . . .  He will bestow countless privileges, blessings, and miracles upon the faithful.” This promise must give us great comfort and assurance as we navigate the storms of contemporary society. But our responsibilities to our families, communities, and fellow citizens remain: whatever the scope and limits of our moral agency in the present moral and political world, we must exercise that agency in light of our best understanding of God’s ultimate purposes for his creation. 

Pragmatism in politics, including when necessary, a public posture of “neutrality,” can no doubt be a necessary and thus a legitimate virtue. But we must not forget that the virtue of pragmatism can be very unstable.

The post Pragmatic Political Priorities: Faith Within a Culture Clash appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

“Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?”

And with a quick breath and a nod of his head, “Yes,” the legend was gone. 

Charles Shepard sat in the 1980s newsroom of the Charlotte Observer when his phone rang. He covered a number of beats, including that of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, among the most influential televangelists in the country.

“My name is Jessica Hahn,” the voice said, “Jim Bakker paid me off after raping me.”

James Frey invented a story about being a hero in the third world. Ravi Zacharias, an influential pastor, was involved in a massive sexual misconduct scandal. Brian Williams, Mark Driscoll, John Rigas, Mike Daisey, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Peter Popoff all presented one image to the world that was shattered when it was discovered they were cheats—not at all who they presented themselves to be. 

Tim Ballard—the influential leader in the anti-child-sex-trafficking arena—may have now joined their ranks. As a hero to many Latter-day Saints, a faith he shares, Ballard has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, fabrications of his work, misappropriation of funds, and falsely claiming official church support. 

An Ongoing Story

To be clear, the story is still being written about Tim Ballard. Details will continue to come out. Ballard has denied the allegations entirely. There are certainly cases where politically useful public accusations turn out to be baseless, such as Richard Jewell and the Atlanta Olympic bombing, the Dreyfus Affair, or the Duke Lacrosse Team. 

The evidence facing Ballard includes records from a police investigation (though they have not yet been released in full), a resignation, video evidence, and accusations from seven women. And while Vice as an outlet is certainly guilty of overstating the evidence in pursuit of its agenda at times, the evidence in support of this reporting is robust, reasonably high-quality evidence.

In addition, the decision of a major institution, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to conclude that Ballard was involved in “activity regarded as morally unacceptable” holds significant weight. (Some have questioned whether the Church, in fact, released the statement quoted by Vice. I have independently verified the statement, as have multiple other trustworthy sources.) For everyday Latter-day Saints like me, the fact that the Church publicly weighed in on these accusations lends them a significant amount of credibility even while some details are still to emerge.

For a still-developing story, withholding judgment can be appropriate. This is true both for Ballard and for those judging the Church for the propriety of its statement without knowing what information the Church is privy to. As the evidence continues to stack up, it can be valuable to begin processing the information that does exist and considering a way forward.

A Real Price

It’s tempting to dismiss the fall of a hero as inconsequential, to say, “Grow up, no one is perfect.” But the reality is far more complex. Heroes, especially those with significant influence, don’t just inspire; they shape perceptions, mold values, and set standards. When they fall, the ripple effects are profound, often causing pain, disillusionment, and a reevaluation of deeply held beliefs.

Bill Cosby, once affectionately dubbed “America’s Dad,” was more than just a comedian; he was a cultural icon. His influence on American television and his pioneering role as a Black comedian made his conviction on sexual assault charges all the more devastating—posing challenging questions for those who identified with and looked up to him. 

This has led to a complicated response from fellow black male comedians. Jerod Carmichael said, “It’s a place of categorizing that you have to take your mind to in order to not erase any good memory, but also being aware of the responsibility you have to be a moral person. … There are real, serious accusations. … The mind is torn. But I think both can coexist, even within our own heart.” 

Dave Chapelle, meanwhile, crafted a comedy routine about an ugly superhero who must sexually assault women to get his superpowers. While discussing the moral quandary involved, Chapelle compares the hero to Bill Cosby. 

These fallen heroes have real-world impacts. 

Samuel Hislop wrote for Public Square Magazine about “The steep price of hypocrisy in Christian witness” regarding the sexual abuse allegations of Ravi Zachariah and the harm it did to the faith of those around him.

Latter-day Saints even have a scriptural example showing the effects of Corianton’s sexual misconduct on the people he served as a missionary. “O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct, they would not believe.” 

For those who admire Ballard, such accusations can deeply shake their sense of trust and their sense of place in the world. 

A History of Chastisement

The phenomenon of influential figures falling from grace is not new to Latter-day Saints. Historically, the pattern of calling out by name is deeply tied to Latter-day Saint history and practice. The Doctrine & Covenants, revelations from the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ, chastises Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., Ezra Thayre, Frederick G. Williams, and Newell K. Whitney. Though each of these figures was also a powerful influence for good, the Lord also saw fit to publicly chastise them. “As many as I love,” the Lord explained, “I rebuke and chasten.”

Historical instances like John C. Bennett’s scandal in Nauvoo remind us that falling public figures aren’t a modern phenomenon. However, the social media age, and the blooming of unvetted religious influencers, have amplified this effect giving rise to figures such as Sterling Van Wagenen, Denver Snuffer, Natasha Helfer, and most recently, Ruby Franke. 

Tim Ballard is only the latest in this trend, though because of his political poignancy and the recent popular film fictionalizing his claims about his life, his scandal is larger and more notable than most of these.

Still, some wonder why the Church would call out Ballard and not these other figures. Others wonder about the prudence of using Ballard’s name. In our influencer age, names are an institution complete with brand, persona, and ideology. Ballard’s approach to personal branding certainly fits into this mold. As the Latter-day Saint blog “Wheat and Tares” recently pointed out, this kind of public distancing is not only found in church history but in the recent past. 

It occurred when Ammon Bundy claimed his seizure of federal property was based on scriptural principles. And when Ayla Stewart publicly claimed that the Church’s statement condemning racism supported her white-supremacist views, the Church issued an amendment that “Church members who promote or pursue a ‘white culture’ or white supremacy agenda are not in harmony with the teachings of the Church.”

The unifying feature of these public statements is they respond to individuals who claim authority or support from the Church, which they do not, in fact, have. As a result, these kinds of rebukes have more often occurred to those on the political right since they are speaking to an audience that is attracted to authority. When left-wing figures similarly speak in opposition to church teachings, they often do so as anti-institutionalists, so the parallel issues can be dealt with privately through membership councils since there are no public claims of support the institutional Church needs to contend with in these cases. 

This is particularly sensitive when it involves issues of financial enrichment, as Ballard is accused of. The Doctrine and Covenants sections chastising Frederick G. Williams and Newell K. Whitney both refer to financial matters. More recently, in 2015, an internet store was set up by a family member of a general church officer to profit off of his general conference remarks. By the next day, the financial venture was stopped, and the general officer issued a public apology. 

The Book of Mormon contains many enjoinders against what it calls priestcraft and defines it as those who preach “that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.” Priestcraft is a concern for all church-adjacent influencers and organizations and something each person should carefully consider in choosing their influencers.

Perceptions, Politics, and Peace

If our perceptions are skewed toward one political bubble, when incidents occur, we immediately put the participants into the hyper-stylized roles of our echo chambers. This makes the heroes seem more heroic and the villains more villainous, and when anything happens that contradicts that view, we adopt a mechanism to reconcile it.

Take, for example, the case of a teenager wearing a MAGA hat who had a standoff with a Native American elder. The initial video clip went viral, with many quick to condemn the teenager’s perceived disrespect. However, as more footage emerged, the narrative became more complex. One political bubble had moved on and largely dismissed new developments, while the other used the new developments to craft a new story about media villainy.

Such incidents highlight the role of identity politics and tribalism in shaping our reactions. Rather than evaluating events on their merits, we often view them through the lens of our affiliations. How would the responses to this matter change if the political affiliations were flipped?

The media, with its need for clicks and views, plays a role in magnifying these divisions by confirming the biases of one camp, and outraging the other camp, generating crucial click-through and ad views from both. 

Latter-day Saints who were all-in on Ballard are now faced with a difficult conflict to navigate. One approach is to deny it entirely. This is the approach that Ballard has taken, not only denying the allegations but denying that the Church even issued the statement—it has. Similarly, some seek to undermine the legitimacy of enough of the relevant information that their worldview is back in equilibrium.

Others choose to ignore the allegations because of the biased system that produced them. Comedian Eddie Griffin chose this approach to the Bill Cosby scandal, saying, “There is a systematic effort to destroy every black male entertainer’s image. They want us all to have an asterisk by our name,” before listing the controversies of several popular black entertainers and athletes.

Still others use the scandal as evidence that the tragic figure must be making a difference or the “powers that be” wouldn’t want to bring them down. In this case, public misbehavior can, unfortunately, increase someone’s public influence. 

Meanwhile, those on the other side politically use these examples of human failing as little more than points to score in a cultural war battle. 

We must avoid each of these types of reactions. For Latter-day Saints struggling to understand why an individual whose work they love and the Church they love may appear at odds, the answer is not these kinds of mechanisms that serve to only dig in. And we should never succumb to celebrating sin. Rather the answer may be found among the lyrics of a Latter-day Saint hymn, “Where can I turn for peace? … Where, when my aching grows? Where in my need to know, where can I run?” The hymn answers simply that we can turn to Jesus Christ. 

We are All Fallen

Business leader Tara Mohr wrote about dealing with fallen heroes. She wrote that when we discover our public heroes have fallen short, “it can leave us disillusioned not just about the hero but also about the ideals that he or she seemed to stand for. … we confuse admiring the work with admiring the person.”

She goes on to suggest that the part of people who stand for true principles and the part that violates those same principles come from different parts of them and suggests that sometimes it’s those who are most in need of learning those principles who become public figures supporting them. She adds, “Don’t think you have to find a way to love all their personal decisions because you love their work.”

We are all fallible human beings. And we will all fall short and disappoint those around us. We are all sinful regardless of our politics, religion, culture, wealth, or any other feature or identity.

As the narrative around Tim Ballard unfolds, it serves as a poignant reminder of the fragile nature of human integrity. Institutions, including churches, have a responsibility to their members and the public and, at times, must take stances to maintain institutional integrity and provide moral clarity, drawing from a deeper well of understanding and discernment.

Yet, as individuals, especially as Christians, we must resist the allure of trial by media and instead approach such situations with a heart that seeks both justice and mercy. People will always fail us at some point. The only sure foundation is Jesus Christ and the redemption found in Him. By placing our faith in Him, we need not rush to judgment nor feel compelled to defend the indefensible. Instead, we can navigate these tumultuous waters with grace, compassion, and a steadfast commitment to truth, love, and righteousness.

The post In the Wake of Scandal: Tim Ballard and the Latter-day Saints appeared first on Public Square Magazine.