This question is swirling around the internet in light of recent actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in Minnesota. Among the most troubling of those actions is the killing of two U.S. citizens by ICE agents in recent weeks, which has sparked protests across the country. Many are deeply concerned about the humanity of ICE’s tactics—and some are questioning the agency’s very existence.

Amid the deaths and pervasive fear and upheaval in Minnesota, many are asking where the Church’s response is. The Church has significant membership in Minnesota and even a temple near St. Paul. Are the Minnesotan Saints forgotten?

But still, why nothing from Headquarters?

A Global Church

As the Church becomes increasingly global, it appears to be pursuing a kind of institutional federalism, in which announcements are made locally on matters pertaining to those regions. We saw this recently when an area presidency member announced to a congregation of members of the Portland Maine Stake that a new temple would be built near them. President Oaks later stated that he received a strong impression after he assumed leadership of the Church that temples should be announced where they will be built.

The pattern of local announcement recently followed in Canada, when leaders of the Canada Area issued a statement on a proposed Canadian bill that would have jeopardized religious freedom.

And in Minnesota, the pattern followed suit: area leadership communicated messages to the local congregations pertaining to the situation there.

In many ways, this emerging local approach makes much more sense for a global church. As Elder Gong pointed out in the most recent General Conference, “Every Sabbath, members and friends from 195 birth countries and territories gather in 31,916 Church congregations.” Expecting Church Headquarters to comment on every issue facing congregants with ties to 195 countries is simply unrealistic. But the lack of a formal statement does not mean that the leaders do not deeply care. Their care tends to be shown, however, through ministry and ecclesiastical teaching, rather than PR.

The local approach also helps to avoid a form of parochialism, where American Latter-day Saints see their most pressing issues addressed by Church Headquarters, but members from other countries do not. It is true that, in the past, the Church has spoken more frequently on domestic issues, including a statement on immigration as recent as last year. This has made us think of the Church as an American institution, and we expect it to speak to our American issues. While it may seem strange, even wrong, not to have a statement on Minnesota, you could say the same for any number of situations in other countries. For example, should the Church have made a statement about the Iranian protests? About the Sudanese Civil War? About the ongoing oppression of minorities in China? 

Many Latter-day Saints live in countries with rampant government corruption and state-perpetrated injustices. If Headquarters comments on American issues, but says nothing about the pressing issues in other countries, what message does it send to non-American Saints? Are their challenges not as important? While American issues are real and significant, we must not assume that they command more attention or concern than the issues of our brothers and sisters in other countries simply because Church Headquarters are in the U.S. As we shift our understanding of the Church as an American institution to a global one, we will likely face the reality, however uncomfortable, that fewer American issues are addressed by Church Headquarters. 

On Speaking Out Generally

We often want the Church to be an espouser of moral clarity in our troubled political climate. We want the Church to do it all—save us from this life, and from the next.

Was his silence complicity? Or was His mission altogether something else?

To say that Jesus did not speak out is not to say that He was passive. Nor is it to say that He did not care about injustice. Indeed, He gave His life to redeem the injustices of this life in the next. And where justice and law would condemn us, He gave his life to give us another chance.

Jesus cared deeply for those affected by the Roman rule. He cared deeply for the poor. He ministered individually to those that the oppressive systems had neglected—or shunned. He taught the worth of every person to God, restoring to them their dignity. His teachings empowered everyone to make this world better, no matter their station.  

But His Kingdom was “not of this world.”

If this is His Church, should we expect an approach that does more or less than this?

The world would have the Church to be a more powerful arbiter of social justice. And there is no doubt that religious institutional power is real. For example, the role of Black churches in advancing the civil rights movement was monumental. And many other religious groups have played a powerful role—both good and bad—in shaping the political challenges of the day.

But the Church of Jesus Christ is trying to accomplish something different. The Church is not trying to save the world, however much we want it to, but rather the people of it. Its mission is building disciples who have the discernment to engage in the matters of the day with Christlike principles and resolve.

The Church could thrust its institutional power in many directions, and it may achieve some desirable results. But it stays focused on its mission to prepare the people of this world—living and deceased—for eternal life through Christ. That mission calls for different priorities.

The Church’s political neutrality approach is admittedly dissatisfying to some. With so much wrong in this world, an institution with power has a moral responsibility to do everything it can to change this world, right?

And yet the Church is changing this world for better—through one moral person at a time. But instead of seeking a radical change in systems, it seeks a radical change of heart in individuals. 

Sharon Eubank said it best:

I will never discount the one thing this Church does that lifts entire communities in rapid development. It invites men and women of all social classes and backgrounds to enter sacred buildings and make the most binding and important promises of their mortal lives. In those buildings, they promise not to steal or lie, they promise to be faithful to their spouse and children. They vow they will seek the interest of their neighbors and be peacemakers and become devoted to the idea that we are all one family—all valued and alike unto God. If those promises made in holy temples are kept, it transforms society faster than any aid or development project ever could. The greatest charitable development on the planet is for people to bind themselves to their God and mean it. 

To the chagrin of some, the Church’s approach to the world’s problems isn’t a top-down, system-dismantling operation. Instead, it seeks to form the character of individuals who can then speak out with moral clarity—who can pursue just causes because they, in their hearts, love what is true and good. 

We must recognize that the Church faces a number of challenges any time it contemplates speaking out. In rapidly developing situations, collecting the facts is essential. Rushing to hasty judgments can lead to mischaracterizations of situations. The Church must be careful not to damage its credibility by commenting too soon.

It is also very easy for a statement about injustice to be conflated with entire movements or unlawful protest methods that the Church does not wish to endorse. The Church is also careful not to paint targets on the backs of its members, particularly those who live in politically tense areas. And the more the Church is seen like an activist organization instead of a religious one, the more wary other countries are of opening their doors to it. These realities mean that, even when the Church may feel it is necessary to speak up, it has to be extra measured in its response. Responses crafted under these parameters often come out simple and principle-focused, sometimes causing more frustration by members that the response was not more direct or pointed.

Church Activism

Like any institution, the Church also occasionally speaks up on issues that might implicate its mission or operations. For instance, it has sometimes spoken up on issues pertaining to religious freedom, human dignity, or core religious doctrine. 

Some fault the Church for doing this, as if institutions should not speak up about the core things for which they stand. The Church’s political neutrality statement explicitly states that “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.” These statements should not come as a surprise, nor is the Church somehow immoral for making these statements and not others. Rather, it merely reflects a mission-aligned organization.   

The Church’s political neutrality statement acknowledges that “the application of these principles of political neutrality and participation in an ever-changing and complex world.” It reserves the right of the First Presidency to “seek prophetic wisdom and revelation on these matters.” While the current approach remains, there is always the possibility it could change.

But for now, the task remains for us to become the moral people that the Gospel of Jesus Christ inspires us to become. We must seek to apply the principles Church leaders have taught to the complex real-life situations we face, including in Minnesota. This means more than virtue signaling on social media; it means actually becoming virtuous. In reality, the best response the Church can give is when its members, whose hearts have been changed to love what is just, good, and true, choose to apply those teachings in pursuit of a better world.  

The post Church Communications in Times of Crisis appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

MotherWise Denver

 Just over the Front Range to the east is a unique program under the label of MotherWise that serves mostly low-income pregnant women and new mothers in the Denver area. MotherWise is the flagship program of Thriving Families and the on-ramp for a set of other valued services for these lower-income moms. A class in English or Spanish begins almost every week, so moms can start the program right away. Teen moms have their own separate classes, using a different curriculum, Love Notes (which is also used in Healthy Relationships Utah). The curriculum is designed for individuals rather than couples, although many of these moms are in romantic relationships, married, and all have children. MotherWise is a 6-week, 12-hour educational program focused on gaining knowledge and skills for healthy relationships using the well-researched Within My Reach curriculum. It also includes information on mothers caring for and connecting with their babies. Many of the participants have experienced trauma in their lives growing up and/or within their romantic relationships. For some, the class alerts them to the reality that they are in a dangerous relationship which can help them make decisions and plans for exiting the relationship safely, if they choose. The Within My Reach curriculum used in the program was designed with sensitivity to how trauma can impede learning and change. In-person classes resumed summer of 2022 (after the pandemic disruption), but program administrators learned a lot about online delivery of their classes and continue to offer that popular delivery option as well. The opportunity for online classes provides fewer logistical challenges for moms and is more economical for MotherWise. 

I had the opportunity to observe an in-person class last October. The class was held in Thriving Families’ downtown Denver office in a nondescript office building next to the state courthouse. The building also houses offices for the local Family Justice Center that serves survivors of domestic violence. Moms arrived with babies, older kids (free childcare provided), strollers, and diaper bags in tow. Many took advantage of free Uber rides to classes that Thriving Families pays for. This was deemed an important expense for the program because transportation issues are a big challenge for moms to attend weekly classes. What seemed like a large classroom quickly becomes tight with about 8 moms, 5 babies in carriers, and all the accompanying baby gear. One mom is missing (she gave birth two days ago), and breastfeeding war stories are the informal topic of conversations as participants get settled before class begins.

I was also impressed with how Collette fielded comments and questions and sometimes skillfully steered conversations back to the lesson. Despite the large amount of group participation, she was able to cover the scheduled curriculum for the class that day. She taught without notes, keeping constant eye contact with the moms, and even occasionally bouncing a participant’s baby on her hip. There was clearly a positive group dynamic among the participants, something many relationship education experts believe is crucial to good outcomes of these kinds of classes. The class ends with a list of infant care resources in the Denver area from which moms could benefit. The participants enjoyed being with each other and listening to other women’s stories and comments. One participant offered a ride home to another one at the end of class instead of her calling an Uber. 

MotherWise is just the gateway to other valuable supports. Thriving Families, the non-profit that runs MotherWise, also offers individual, couple, and family therapy for the moms who go through MotherWise. These voluntary therapeutic opportunities allow these women to work on problems that can go beyond what a group class can help with. Trauma-informed therapists offer 30-40 sessions a week on-site and virtually for participants. Additionally, Thriving Families offers postpartum depression prevention groups because these low-income moms are at especially high risk for postpartum depression. Some participants want more help with parenting, so there are regular parenting classes as well. Once a month, there is also a group session with a certified doula to answer questions about pregnancy and childbirth. About a third of MotherWise moms will participate in these additional support services. Overall, MotherWise enrolls 400-500 moms a year. 

Of course, navigating this array of internal services can be a challenge for overwhelmed moms. Therefore, the classroom instructors can do double duty as their “family support coordinators” by working one-on-one with participants outside of class to connect them with additional internal and community resources as needed and wanted. This may be one of the key ingredients of the program’s success that other programs might want to follow. Another key ingredient may be the drive for continuous improvement of existing services to meet the needs of their clients. However, the ‘secret sauce’ in all this, according to multiple MotherWise program administrators, is their ability to hire deeply caring and professional staff with low turnover rates. Dr. Galena Rhoades, an internationally known scholar of relationship education and a research professor at the University of Denver, provides overall leadership. She writes the grants to fund these programs and gives strategic vision to the operation and, additionally, is one of the most impressive practitioner-scholars I’ve ever known. While her role is essential, she relies on the Director of Programs and Community Outreach, Jessica Purcel, as the COO of Thriving Families, and other dedicated staff, to make the program dream an operational reality. Purcel came to MotherWise with a client services background in business, not the typical social services career history.

Sometimes, when I observe these kinds of classes, I find myself wondering whether they really have sufficient ‘oomph’ to lift participants’ relationships and family lives above their challenging circumstances. In this case, however, I could sense how this kind of class—along with the additional services—would be a powerful support system for moms going through stressful times and provide a real lifeline for some. Program administrators told me that for some of the moms, MotherWise was really their only support system. As more research evaluating this program emerges over the next few years, I expect it to prove its merits and cost-effectiveness. 

Family Expectations and True Dads—Oklahoma City

Further east is a program in Oklahoma City. On an unusually balmy December 2022 evening, I sat in on Family Expectations and True Dads classes in Oklahoma City. This program is offered through Public Strategies Inc. (PSI), a private human services company that delivers relationship education, fatherhood and co-parenting education, and workforce development services to lower-income individuals and couples in Oklahoma City. PSI is one of the premier providers of these kinds of educational services in the country. Kathy Edin, Princeton University professor and one of the most important social policy scholars in the country, believes that PSI’s work is one of the most important local social policy laboratories in the country right now. She argues that what they do is a beacon for other social policy efforts nationwide to improve the lives of disadvantaged families. Given their programming experience, skill, and innovation, the federal government’s Office of Family Assistance also contracts with PSI to consult with other similar federally funded programs.

PSI’s founder and president, Mary Myrick, has been leading this work for 25 years now. She is a home-grown resident who speaks in a slow Oklahoma drawl that belies a keen mind that is equally adept at managing the minute details of providing high-quality services to lower income families and executing the rigors of social policy evaluation studies. Additionally, she more than holds her own in esoteric ruminations about how to build a better social welfare system. PSI’s work in this field started in the late 1990s as a unique state policy initiative to strengthen marriage and reduce divorce rates. During this time, Oklahoma’s divorce rate was outranked only by Nevada, and then-Governor Frank Keating wanted to do something about it. Myrick’s public relations firm was tasked by the governor to build a statewide infrastructure for providing marriage education services to Oklahomans. She built an impressive operation in the early 2000s before the Great Recession, and big budget cuts forced her to focus resources on a more limited area. From that point, federal grants supported continuing services in Oklahoma City. During the Obama administration, program providers were also urged to offer employment services to program participants, and Myrick embraced this opportunity to help couples financially as well as relationally. Both fathers and mothers have the opportunity to improve their employability and find work. Employment challenges and financial stresses are a big factor in why lower income families may struggle to stay together. With another grant, PSI eventually added a fatherhood and coparenting program to their portfolio, enabling them to serve low-income families better regardless of the status of the parents’ relationship. Each of these services—couple, father/co-parenting, and employment—is integrated with the others, and program participants often use multiple services. PSI is a valued partner with the Oklahoma Department of Human Services in an effective private-public partnership to serve disadvantaged families in Oklahoma City. 

At the end of one Research Advisory Group meeting, I stayed an extra evening to observe the Family Expectations and True Dads classes being taught in their renovated facility on the edge of the trendy redeveloped Bricktown downtown area of Oklahoma City. Couples slowly gathered in their respective classrooms, bringing in a modest meal of pasta and salad, which was provided to the couples due to the late start time of 6 pm. Onsite childcare is provided as well when needed, so couples don’t have that added expense and can concentrate on the curriculum and activities. Eventually, about 5 couples settled into the Family Expectations classroom’s comfortable chairs, each well representing the racial and ethnic diversity of Oklahoma City.

After a PowerPoint lesson on building babies’ brains, I follow the men upstairs to another room for “baby boot camp,” where they practice on life-like infant dolls. Marlon dials down his strong voice to a softer, earnest mode to help the men understand that they need to be out ahead of their female partners in childcare. “Before you come home from work, you call her and ask if you need to pick up anything for the baby or dinner on your way home,” he commands more than suggests. “And those dishes in the sink when you get home are your responsibility. Later, when she is nursing the baby, you are there rubbing her feet or talking to her. She is not alone in this; she has a full partner. This is father-of-the-year stuff, men,” he preaches. Then, he patiently teaches them how to swaddle and hold an infant, practicing it with them three times. He doesn’t leave out the high-pitched baby talk so essential to infant linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development. His father-in-waiting trainees are fully engaged now. I can’t help but smile at the scene of five wide-eyed young men—probably equal parts excitement and terror as they anticipate their coming baby—gooing and smiling at their infant dolls as they carefully wrap and tuck them in their upside-down triangle baby blankets and gently slip their hand under the doll’s neck and head to lift and cradle them.

After enjoying this optimistic scene, I slip out of this classroom and into the room next door, where a session of True Dads is going on. Again, a tall African-American man with a large fedora hat is facilitating, regularly calling on the men and their partners by name as he circumnavigates the room, asking them to respond to a question or say what’s on their mind. They are talking about “Amy” and “Flo,” animated characters in a video they just watched that represent the different parts of the brain that are involved in emotion regulation and our “fight or flight or freeze” response. I recognize this material from the PREP relationship-strengthening curriculum out of the University of Denver, from which the True Dads program draws a healthy sample of its content. The 5 or 6 couples and a few “stag” men in the room are trying to learn how to harness their emotions and avoid destructive communication patterns that break apart coparenting relationships and make it hard for men to stay engaged in their children’s lives. A second facilitator, a grandmotherly African-American woman with a constant smile and encouraging demeanor, leads a discussion on depression and getting past the stigma of asking for professional help. I get a sense that these True Dads participants are not quite as engaged and upbeat as the expectant couples in the Family Expectations class downstairs. Probably most of them are no longer in romantic relationships but are trying to hold together a workable relationship as co-parents of a shared treasure.

 Where other programs artfully dodge the close-up lens of evaluation research, PSI has enlisted in three federally funded, rigorous evaluation studies. Family Expectations was evaluated twice, once focusing on unmarried couples and a second one looking at married couples. In the first study with unmarried couples, Oklahoma City was one of eight couple-relationship-strengthening programs evaluated across the United States. This multi-year study, labeled Building Strong Families, was the first to assess the effectiveness of these new programs serving disadvantaged couples. It studied them right at the beginning while the program administrators were still on a steep learning curve. In most sites, many participants who signed up for the program never showed up, and only a small percentage had a substantial dosage of the intervention, but this was not the case in Oklahoma City. Building on several years of experience, Myrick and her team had already figured out how to recruit and retain these stressed couples. Most of their recruited couples received a strong dosage of the intervention. Maybe this is why the Oklahoma City site was the only one to see some positive results at the end of the study, finding a statistically significant difference in the percentage of Family Expectations couples who were still together three years after beginning the program (49%) compared to control-group couples who did not receive the intervention (41%). However, no programs in the study found a difference in the percentage of couples who decided to marry during the course of the study.

A second rigorous study of Family Expectations concentrated on the married-couple participants. Again, Oklahoma City was one of eight program sites across the country testing the effectiveness of these marriage-strengthening programs. This time, most sites, including Oklahoma City, found a reliable pattern of positive but relatively small effects on couple relationships. However, there was no difference between the treatment and control groups in the percentage of married couples who were still together at the end of the 30-month study.

I think it is worthwhile to note that the Family Expectations program has survived two rigorous tests now showing positive effects. This is especially impressive because the ‘norm’ of these kinds of social policy evaluation studies is finding “no effects,” particularly when they are done at the early stages of program development like these studies were. From these results, a confident PSI launched another rigorous study to test the effectiveness of its new fatherhood/co-parenting program. Serious evaluation of these kinds of fatherhood programs was lagging behind the couple programs. For a third time, a PSI program demonstrated its skill with results that noted a decrease in fathers’ psychological distress, improvement within their coparenting relationships and parenting practices, and, perhaps most impressively, improving children’s psychological well-being. Showing the positive effects of these adult education programs on children’s well-being has been the holy grail of this work because their ultimate purpose is to improve disadvantaged children’s lives.

My University of Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin, has gone beyond the numbers and conducted in-depth interviews with these program participants. They talk about their hopes for and experience with the programs in more personal terms. “Tiana knows life will spill many more ‘glasses of milk,’” Halpern-Meekin writes in her book, Social Poverty, “and so [Tiana is] banking on Family Expectations to provide them with some tools so such mishaps are not ‘catastrophic.’ And it’s essential to her that [her partner] Stefan is by her side through all this.” Additionally, Halpern-Meekin further explains the primary motivation she found for why parents enroll in these classes: 

“Parents often explained that one of the life experiences they most wanted to give their children was that of growing up with both their parents in a loving and healthy household —they saw this as a social resource. An investment in their own relationship, therefore, was a guard against their children’s social poverty.” 

Or as one mother put it, “I still want my son now to see that it’s us, and we’ve got a strong bond, and we can communicate . . . so that they have some kind of grasp of, you know what, people can make relationships work. That not every relationship fails.” 

Backed by scientific inquiry as well as through these personal testimonials, the programs I have highlighted here possess the ability to change the landscape of interpersonal relationships for some low-income families. From either a conservative or progressive perspective, there is much to be gained from public investment in these types of programs.

The post Breaking Cycles: How Education Lifts Families appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

However, the basics of human flourishing and development go beyond supplying the necessities of life. Indeed, we would posit that the lack of these essentials reflects a deeper problem within our contemporary times. If we want to treat social development at its core, we must go beyond treating the symptom-like manifestations of a deeper problem. This idea is reflected in what Elder D. Todd Christofferson said in a recent conference address, “The concept of sustainable development is an interesting and important one. Even more urgent, however, is the broader question of sustainable societies.” The Family: A Proclamation to the World gives further insight into sustainable societies through the promotion of the family. It reads:

 We warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. …We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society. 

The Doha International Family Institute, DIFI, supports these statements in its own declaration, “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” From prophetic revelation, in addition to the pro-family stances of various other organizations, it is possible to trace some of the degradation and poverty in society to the disintegration of the basic and fundamental unit of society—the family.

With this general understanding in mind on a worldwide scale, The United Nations established “The International Year of the Family” in 1989 to help in creating sustainable societies, with their first conference in 1994. The UN designated May 15th as the annual day to celebrate the family, and every 10 years on this date a larger memoration takes place, usually in the form of a conference. As part of the purpose of this celebration, they note, “The family constitutes the basic unit of society and therefore warrants special attention.” The Doha International Family Institute, DIFI, hosted the global conference in 2014 and is again hosting in 2024. In DIFI’s declaration they affirm their mission by stating: “Strengthening the family presents a unique opportunity to address societal problems in a holistic manner.” Here at Public Square Magazine, we want to join in the celebration of the International Year of the Family by creating a series completely dedicated to the family.

The post Redefining Wealth for the 21st-Century Family appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Perhaps the most urgent examples for us to consider are discussions around church policy and teachings regarding sexual minorities and trans-identifying individuals. If we were to visualize the nature of church members’ stances on these questions, we might use a chart with axes of knowledge and empathy:

Looking at this chart, consider two hypothetical examples:

1. Mike is a parent whose young son, Eric, confided in him that he is attracted to other boys. Mike has never spent any time seriously investigating the nature of same-sex attraction, but he loves his son and suddenly feels a deep sense of compassion for other kids experiencing things similar to what Eric is experiencing.

2. Gary is a parent whose young son, John, confided in him that he is attracted to other boys. In response, Gary has been consuming hundreds of hours of podcast content, books, and social media posts where people discuss their experience of being a gay Latter-day Saint.

Our initial assessment would likely place both Mike and Gary into the high empathy quadrants, where Mike would be considered low knowledge, and due to Gary’s intensive consumption of information, Gary would be considered high knowledge.

However, this would be an erroneous understanding of Gary’s situation.

It is important to clarify that information is a narrative we create to explain certain selected data, and narratives are not the same thing as knowledge. In some of our presentations, we have discussed the process of moving from data to information to knowledge to wisdom and how that process involves patient effort.

This model is often used in defense and intelligence contexts; a good example of how it works is found in Israel’s experience of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and, more recently, in the October 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel. In both situations, Israel’s citizens and intelligence agencies had turned data (observations) into information (narratives) that did not reflect reality. Surprised by attacks from hostile neighbors in both instances, Israel has expended effort to understand where there was an intelligence failure, which is a breakdown that occurs somewhere in a defense organization’s process of moving from data to knowledge, which can then be developed into wisdom for making good choices. More broadly speaking, anytime we are surprised and feel blindsided by the actions of individuals or organizations, it means that we have been operating with a discrepancy between their adherence to this process versus ours.

To minimize the likelihood of an intelligence failure, intelligence analysts actively seek out disconfirming information—information that reflects a different narrative of data. When done sincerely, this helps to test the validity of narratives and jettison narratives that reflect poor assumptions.

Understanding Information, Narratives, and Knowledge

Returning to our hypothetical examples, Gary’s information-gathering will probably lead him to believe that he is knowledgeable about same-sex attraction and the experience of sexual minorities in the Church. After all, he has been hearing from countless people who are directly living that experience. He has likely internalized the dominant cultural narratives, such as that sexual minorities are only ever “born that way”; that same-sex attraction can never broaden into opposite-sex attraction; that not to immediately affirm an identity is to inflict lasting emotional and psychological trauma; that there is not a place for them in God’s plan of salvation; that their only two options are to accept exile from their faith or endure the inevitable misery and loneliness of celibacy; that so-called mixed-orientation marriages are inauthentic and doomed to failure, and more.

What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.

A good example of Peck’s notion of map revision is found in the story of Michelle Alleva, a formerly trans-identifying woman who detransitioned and turned to speaking out publicly about the effect of trans ideology on girls who are having normal adolescent experiences of social awkwardness. In a substack post describing her shift in narrative (or “map revision”), she depicted her trans-identifying narrative in the following way:

As time went on, Michelle developed new and more accurate understandings of her own psyche and found the courage to revise her narrative of her experiences in a map that reflects much more maturity and openness:

The great psychologist Carl Jung promoted this process of developing consciousness, of coming to understand the deeper things that are going on in our hearts and minds that shape our narratives and behaviors. He called it “individuation,” and to indicate how personally painful it can be, he used the metaphor of “crucifixion of the ego.”

As Peck noted, often new information is dismissed as “false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil.” And to be clear, sometimes it really is all of those things. But Michelle’s new narrative was of her own self-understanding, and she documented the fact that in many online communities, just this simple act of publicly questioning any element of one’s narrative of trans identity results in severe consequences of harassment, shaming, and emotional extortion. In an instant, what was once a supportive online community shows that they are somehow all out of empathy.

In popular podcasts that share the stories of sexual minorities and trans-identifying individuals in the Church, there are emotionally appealing personal narratives that are shared without any attempt to question their validity in any way. It is assumed that to interrogate a person’s personal narrative of their experience in the Church is to inflict “harm” and, even worse, to be a sign that one has a crippling character defect of lacking Christ-like empathy. This narrative reflects a preference for emotional validation over the development of knowledge and is a consequence of the cultural erosion of valuing objective truth as an important principle. Again in the words of M. Scott Peck, “Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful.” Nowadays, culturally protected classes have an effective veto on what narratives can be interrogated and which ones become sacred beyond questioning. And just like Israel’s intelligence failures, this creates a dangerous mismatch in knowledge that enemies can exploit.

Toward High Empathy, High Knowledge

Recalling our hypothetical church members Mike and Gary—if they are stuck in the zone of high empathy and low knowledge, what does it look like to fit into the other quadrants?

A low-empathy, high-knowledge individual might be very current in his understanding of all the latest research into human sexuality and the psychology of gender but also view these questions only in the abstract, like a science project. This individual may lack the ability to see beyond the theoretical and perceive real people with real stories and real day-to-day challenges. He will be a poor minister to those whose suffering is profound and real. This person probably is doing active harm in whatever domain his knowledge exceeds his empathy.

A low-empathy, low-knowledge individual couples a disdain or indifference toward other people with a lack of curiosity and an unwillingness to learn anything new. A good example of this quadrant is found in the narratives of people who dismiss sexual minorities as all having developed attractions as a result of sexual abuse or that all trans-identified individuals are just men with sexual fetishes. Choices in this zone are oriented toward the avoidance of intellectual and emotional work.

Finally, the quadrant of high empathy, high knowledge is occupied by the Church’s First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke of the thoroughness of their efforts to gain knowledge for church governance:

Not often, but over the years, some sources have suggested that the Brethren are out of touch in their declarations, that they don’t know the issues, that some of their policies and practices are out-of-date, not relevant to our times.

As the least of those who have been sustained by you to witness the guidance of this Church firsthand, I say with all the fervor of my soul that never in my personal or professional life have I ever associated with any group who are so in touch, who know so profoundly the issues facing us, who look so deeply into the old, stay so open to the new, and weigh so carefully, thoughtfully, and prayerfully everything in between. I testify that the grasp this body of men and women have of moral and societal issues exceeds that of any think tank or brain trust of comparable endeavor of which I know anywhere on the earth.

These phrases looking so deeply into the old, and staying so open to the new, convey serious and mature engagement with disconfirming information that allows for movement from information (narratives) to knowledge (confirmed facts). Elder Holland would later say of their knowledge-seeking in questions surrounding sexual minorities, “I and many of my Brethren have spent more time and shed more tears on this subject than we could ever adequately convey to you this morning, or any morning.”

Their knowledge of these issues is coupled with profound empathy, as President Nelson expressed in a talk at BYU and, as Jeff described so powerfully, speaking from personal experience. Jeff can also confirm from personal experience that despite criticisms from both sides of the cultural divide on church policy and past statements from church leaders (some of which may be legitimately unfortunate), those high councils of the Church, including the Quorums of the Seventy, are indeed both highly informed and highly empathetic. This does not mean that the church organization always gets everything right or implements guidance correctly (especially at the local level), but it does mean that the level of knowledge and genuine concern for the individuals affected is greater than any other individual or organization of which we are aware. As the Psalmist says of the Lord, “mercy and truth are met together” (Ps 85:10), so His authorized servants seek earnestly to emulate this quality in their public pronouncements and policies as well as their personal ministry.

It’s important to understand that people whose commitments put them outside of the quadrant of high empathy and high knowledge will always have a hard time understanding the actions of the prophets and apostles who guide the Church. Some of them, lacking even a basic commitment to reality, will dismiss even the most obvious and easily verifiable information confirming the Church’s teachings on gender, sexuality, and family. They will label higher-knowledge skeptics of queer theory, gender theory, and other ideologies as “bigots” and “-phobes,” labels that reflect low knowledge (and usually epistemic closure) on the part of the labeler. At times, they will go so far as to engage in apologetics for depravity and neurosis while voicing an expectation that someday, high-knowledge church leaders will somehow “come around” to narratives that disregard knowledge in service to misplaced empathy.

In therapy, these pitfalls are known as client-therapist fusion and a lack of differentiation. When a therapist is fused with her client, her client’s suffering has fused with her own discomfort at that suffering. Now both must be eliminated at any cost, and she takes that suffering home with her. Pity and incapacitating affirmation replace acceptance and empowering resilience in therapy. This fusion reduces her capacity for handling painful emotions, which then likely gets imparted onto her clients. Both the therapist and the client are rendered less healthy in the course of this untherapeutic “therapy.” As psychotherapist Russ Harris writes, “Having the thought ‘I shouldn’t make my clients feel uncomfortable’ may lead [the therapist to avoid] the anxiety that comes with confronting problematic behavior in clients.” 

You are the best therapist, he continues, “when you defuse from your own unhelpful thoughts, make room for [your and your client’s] discomfort, act in line with your values, and engage fully with the client.” The undifferentiated, fused therapist is a rescuer with all the frantic heedlessness and co-dependence that implies, whereas a differentiated, compassionately detached therapist is a healer who knows when and how much a dose of painful reality should be applied. She is compassionate without enabling dysfunction. She is able to do this because she has done this work within herself and exemplifies to her clients a courageous, continuing willingness to incorporate more and more reality and truth into her life. 

Any of us can fall into the same fusion-undifferentiation trap, and that brings us to a point of reflection: where are we on this chart, and why? Are there data we are unwilling to see? Are we mistaking narratives for knowledge? Has our empathy closed us off to knowledge, or vice versa? And what about the people around us? How do we differ in our applications of these processes? How do those differences affect our ability to hold meaningful and productive conversations with each other?

A year ago, when we created our series on sexual minorities in the Church and our series on the Family Proclamation, we did so with the intention of helping more church members join church leaders in the quadrant of high empathy, high knowledge. But that is a difficult place to be; it is a place that sees differences between narratives and knowledge. It is a place where people wrestle with ambiguity and sometimes struggle to navigate real dilemmas that stretch the soul. It is a place that is sometimes a target of attack, derision, and condemnation. But it is the only zone of experience where the decisions of our prophets and apostles become comprehensible. Best of all, it is the only hope the rest of us have of arriving at life-giving, life-saving truth, no matter how flawed and incomplete that will be for us mortals who “see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13:12). As Jesus promised to those with such courage, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

The post Empathy or Echo Chambers? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

His remarks remain both poignant and relevant today. 

Perhaps the most quotable words from his remarks were simple, “Of course, Black lives matter! That is an eternal truth.” His remarks came on the heels of a summer marked by protests over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. The organization Black Lives Matter, which was founded in 2013, rose to national prominence, with its name becoming a rallying cry for racial justice. By echoing those same lines, he connected the political moment to theological teachings.

Many prophetic statements only have their complete meaning fully understood with the passage of time. More than three years later, the political conflicts that backgrounded Oaks’ original remarks no longer provide the same context. This separation may allow us to start the process of understanding the fuller theological ramifications of his remarks. 

Oaks is a former lawyer and judge and has a reputation as a very careful speaker. So, our analysis takes for granted that his word choice was quite intentional. And we intend to focus on his remarks about the phrase “Black lives matter.”

Perhaps an understated element of his remarks was the legitimization of a thing that could be described as a “Black life.” 

By saying that “Black lives matter,” Oaks establishes as a first principle that Black lives exist. These lives are marked by challenges specific to their set of circumstances. Oaks quoted Russell M. Nelson, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ, as saying, “I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism.” Just three weeks prior, in the faith’s General Conference, Oaks had said, “We must do better to help root out racism.” His formulation here seems to suggest that the necessary a priori understanding is that Black lives exist and experience the racism that is to be rooted out.

Once Oaks has identified Black lives as a matter worthy of consideration, he states that these lives “matter.” Matter, in this context, is fairly amorphous. That something “matters” is ultimately a pretty low bar and demands very little of the acknowledger. So, Oaks is sure to expand on this in his remarks. 

He explains that we should not believe that different races qualify as “first-class” or “second-class.” He concludes, “We condemn racism by any group toward any other group worldwide.” While his remarks were clearly influenced by the political circumstances in the United States, where Oaks and other senior leaders of the Church are headquartered, their ramifications expand to multiple similar conflicts in many nations across the globe.

For Oaks, “Black lives matter” appears to mean that the quality of being Black does not affect importance in the eyes of God, nor should it in the eyes of others.

Oaks also positions his remarks within the larger tradition of racial equality within the Church of Jesus Christ. He does not address the Church’s race-based priesthood ban directly. However, his statement that “Any … official practices of racism involve one group whom God created exercising authority or advantage over another group God created” demonstrates a separation from those policies. He describes official policies that create first and second-class races as “outlawed” by the Lord in D&C 101. Rather than focus on that history, Oaks seeks to connect with the progressive racial policies of the faith’s founder Joseph Smith, who strongly advocated against slavery and did ordain Black men to the priesthood.

Latter-day Saints believe in an ongoing process of revelation from prophets and apostles who guide the Church in the here and now. Declaring that these statements against racism are authoritative, Oaks communicated to his Latter-day Saint listeners that they should be treated with the same respect and deference as scripture.

Each of these remarks was given in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Oaks’ remarks clearly indicate his belief that our faith should impact how we behave as political actors. As a new election season begins, their teachings ought to become foundational to our own process in choosing the leaders who will create the kind of society where people of all races are free from racism.

The post How Latter-day Saint Doctrine Confronts America’s Racial Divide appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

 Such stifling injustices are a manifestation of the worst kind of climate change—a global warming of hostility and hatred that is laying waste to the hearts of humankind. Society’s twin pillars of civility and charity are crumbling. Love of neighbor is being replaced by disregard for neighbor. The rancor of our political discourse reflects a deep-seated contempt for the perspectives of others that spreads through social media channels with an almost combustible virulency. And taken together, the eradication of racism and the elimination of poverty constitute an urgent, pressing work that remains far from complete. The difficulties experienced by and evils perpetuated against innocent and repressed people cry out, as did Martin Luther King Jr., for justice that rolls “down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

It seems society has adopted the contemptuous attitude of Latimer, the narcissistic narrator in George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859), who, in his dying days, described the scorn and disdain with which humankind treat one another: 

While the heart beats, bruise it—it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. 

The severity of our social and spiritual condition should awaken each of us to take more determined and deliberate steps to create a just and civil society. But that task, worthy in its aim, seems increasingly formidable, even impossible, in its execution. Ironically, our magnified view of the world’s injustices seems to diminish our belief that we can do anything to help solve them. Difficulties, whether close or far, loom so large that we often feel powerless to shoulder them. We delegate their solutions to governments or charitable organizations, hoping some wisdom will prevail in the hearts of those who lead them. We then turn our hearts inward, trying to untangle our own problems and seek solace for our own hurts, forgetting or ignoring the needs of those around us. 

And what are those necessities? After food, said John Stuart Mill, our security is “the most vital of all interests” and “the most indispensable of all necessaries.” It is something “no human being can possibly do without; on it, we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good.” That security, says Mills, arises from the claim we have “on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence.” 

Indeed, we are bound together in making one another secure; we are in the same boat and of the same body. All of this is well and good. Yet even when motivated by our most noble and principled hopes and our staunchest determination, we come to realize our efforts will prove inadequate when measured against the staggering sum of the needs of humanity this moment in history presents us. 

Perhaps it was such a realization that prompted Gilbert Kilpack’s 1946 reflection on the emptiness of the peace that ensued after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then a secretary in the Stony Brook Friends Meeting in Baltimore, Kilpack believed that after enduring “so long and bitter a conflict, it became necessary to see ourselves clothed in righteousness, but it was self-righteousness—which frequently conquers, but never makes, peace.” There is, Kilpack continued, 

something of God in every man, let us affirm it more certainly than ever, but surrounded as we are by millions of new-made graves and with the voices of the hungry and the dispossessed in our ears, let us not easily accept the impious hope that the natural goodness of ourselves is sufficient stuff out of which to fashion a better world.

Dismissing what he saw as the “dominant hope” lingering “in millions of minds” that “man is sufficient unto himself and has but to strive to bring the good new kingdom in,” he gives this glaring warning: 

Hear me, I cry it with all my strength, and my voice rises out of the suffering and the bitter crucible of our times: man is not by nature good. We are all born with a freedom to turn to the good, but the Source of good is Beyond, and the power of human transformation is a given power. We may labor, study, and weep for it, which we must do, but in the end, it is given.

Now, more than seventy-five years later, Killpack’s exhortation speaks with a prescient thunder, for he was right: healing the pains of hunger and the wounds of war and inequality, bridging the chasms spanning society’s most deeply divided issues and resolving our differences—especially differences that polarize and paralyze us and evoke conflict and contention—will never be accomplished unless we turn to powers higher than those we possess.

Realizing our need to turn to such powers, this is a season to remember how God has turned to us. He sent His Son, who “left worlds of light” to become “the meek and lowly One.” Christ descended into our world to know our pain. It was, said Matthew Henry, “a great step downward, considering the glories of the world he came from and the calamities of the world he came to.”

Never was there a poorer man than Christ; He was the prince of poverty. . . . He who scattered the harvest o’er the broad acres of the world, had not sometimes wherewithal to stay the pangs of hunger? He who digged the springs of the ocean, sat upon a well and said to a Samaritan woman, “Give me to drink!” He rode in no chariot, He walked his weary way, footsore, o’er the flints of Galilee! . . . . [H]e said, “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but I, the Son of man, have not where to lay my head.” He who had once been waited on by angels becomes the servant of servants, takes a towel, girds himself, and washes his disciples’ feet! He who was once honored with the hallelujahs of ages is now spit upon and despised! . . . . Oh, for words to picture the humiliation of Christ! What leagues of distance between Him that sat upon the throne, and Him that died upon the cross! . . . . Trace him, Christian, He has left thee His manger to show thee how God came down to man. He hath bequeathed thee His cross to show thee how man can ascend to God. . . . Oh, Son of Man, I know not which to admire most, thine height of glory, or thy depths of misery! 

Matthew Henry suggests we should ask “with wonder,” “What moved Him to such an expedition?” 

Jesus answered simply: “I am come a light into the world,” He taught, “to seek and to save that which was lost.”

As His followers, seeking and saving now become our mission as well. Christ commands us to “condescend to men of low estate,” to “lift up the hands which hand down,” and to “heal the brokenhearted.” He asks us labor with Him to love and comfort those whose losses have drained the reservoirs of their hope, to feed those whose hunger can only be satisfied by the Bread of Life. He asks us to live the principles of His gospel, which radically contradict the world’s intemperate and revenge-filled ways. In a time of war, Jesus calls us to be peacemakers. He counsels us to agree with our adversaries quickly. He pleads with us to be meek and merciful. He invites us to treat others as we would want to be treated.

Then, among all these commandments comes “the admonition that challenges each of us,” said President Russell M. Nelson: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” When we do these things, we can “literally change the world—one person and one interaction at a time.” 

Of course, the full measure of the salvation Christ extends to us awaits His next coming, when He will reign supreme and when every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess He is the King come again to reign eternally. Then all the dead, billions upon billions, shall rise in resurrection, and all “they who have believed in the Holy One of Israel, they who have endured the crosses of the world, and despised the shame of it, they shall inherit the kingdom of God, which was prepared for them from the foundation of the world, and their joy shall be full forever.”

Yes, our world is becoming increasingly “unhinged.” But we need not, we cannot become hopeless. The words spoken by Martin Luther King Jr. nearly sixty years ago as he received the Nobel Peace Prize remind us that change is possible, even inevitable: 

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. . . . I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.

King’s powerful conviction invites us to deal with our personal and global challenges using a more active love born of faith in Christ’s redemption and fueled by a covenant of commitment to join with Him in the remaking of the world. Motivated by such love, we can be assured that the wrong will fail and the right prevail. And we can have peace, knowing that in Christ, all things will become new. 

Like Jesus did throughout His life, let’s determine to spend more time this year with the poor and those low in spirit, with the homeless and lonely, with the sick and the hungry. Let’s love our enemies. To these and to all, we must minister with His mercy and join Him in the cause of justice. 

How shall we begin? 

“Someone, “ said King, “must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

The post Hot War, Cold Hearts: Living in an “Unhinged” World appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Later, I learned that my biological grandmother had been a drug addict who couldn’t cope with motherhood. Even sadder but still a fairly simple story. 

 Only recently have I learned that the life of this grandmother-I-never-knew is also a story of the violence and abuse produced by racism and sexism—a reminder that our individual histories can’t be understood separate from the cruel, oppressive forces that shape society.

 But this fuller picture of my family, which I have pieced together from my prison cell, also has reminded me that beautiful things can be born through something broken.

 Let’s go back to that simple story.

My mother, Rebekah Patrice Davis, was raised by her adoptive mother, Geraldine Davis, who was a loving and kind Black woman. (Mom’s adoptive father died when she was very young.) My mom always yearned for a relationship with the family she was born into but was plagued by the thought that maybe her biological mother really didn’t want her. This fear of rejection, along with difficulty finding information about her birth family, discouraged her from trying to identify and contact her mother.

 But it didn’t end there. The case worker gave her four telephone numbers that possibly belonged to relatives. No one picked up at the first two numbers, but the third call was answered by a man named Ronnie. My mother hesitantly explained who she was, and her half-sibling abruptly interjected, “I’m your brother and Mom never wanted to give you away!”

 That was the beginning of the end of the simple story.

 Seven years later, I sat on the edge of my steel bunk, staring at the old photo of my biological grandmother that my mother had sent me. My grandmother’s long ember-colored hair flowed over her shoulders and rested on her back as she sat on the sidewalk, holding a 4-year-old who I would learn was my Uncle Marcus, another of my mother’s four half-siblings whom I had known nothing about. I had been incarcerated for nearly 15 years, and this was my first encounter with these relatives, through a photo that came in a large manila envelope to my prison cell.

 To sum up the simple story, my mother always knew she had been adopted at birth and believed that it was because her mother was too young to provide for her child. After talking with her half-siblings, she assumed that her mother’s drug problem was also a factor. But when I started talking with my newfound aunt and uncle, that story of how racism and sexism fueled the abuse and violence that shaped my grandmother’s life emerged. Should I have been surprised? These forces run deep in American history, of course, but we don’t always realize how powerful are the corrosive effects on individuals in our lives.

 I ran my fingers lightly across the photo, fascinated by the striking resemblance between my mother and grandmother. The brim of their noses, almond-shaped eyes, rosy cheeks, and thin lips made them look nearly identical. The only exception was that my grandmother was White, and my mother was Black. 

 I set the picture of my grandmother on the gray steel table next to the prison phone and dialed my Aunt Rhonda’s number. My mother had given me contact information for Rhonda and Ronnie, who could help me learn more about our family history. As the phone rang, I took a deep breath to relieve my nervousness. I didn’t know what to expect from this initial conversation. After my aunt accepted the collect call, we spent a few minutes in small talk before I jumped right into inquiring about the life of Donna Phillips, the woman in the photo whose blood runs through my veins

 I wanted to be respectful and began by asking what my grandmother was like—what things she loved to do. The awkwardness that can exist between two strangers was broken when my aunt, in her boisterous voice, said that my grandmother loved Keith Sweat, an R&B singer who released his breakout album in the late 1980s. The two of us began singing “Make It Last Forever,” drawing out the “ever” part melodramatically.

Rhonda told me that her mother/my grandmother really enjoyed music, fashion, and artwork. But above all, Donna felt most alive being outdoors, by the lake, surrounded by trees. My aunt talked about how my grandmother dreamed of living in a house where she could see the mountains from the backyard and wake up to the scent of crisp air and the feel of morning dew on green grass. “These were the things that made her happy,” Rhonda said. “These were the things that put a smile on her face.”

 When Rhonda talked about how much my grandmother loved and valued her children, I couldn’t help but wonder: “If her children meant so much to her, why did she give my mother away?” Rhonda began unpacking the traumatic circumstances surrounding my mother’s conception, details that Ronnie also would discuss with me. The information shattered my preconceptions about who my grandmother was, leaving my heart aching over what she was forced to endure as a child.

My great-grandmother apparently agreed with James’ views and didn’t challenge the emotional abandonment, frequent beatings, and sexual abuse that crushed Donna’s childhood spirit in ways hard to imagine.

 I could feel the lump form in my throat as I listened to my uncle talk to me in a separate conversation about the numerous times my grandmother was locked in a basement for hours. Apparently, this was her mother and stepfather’s way of disciplining her, either for misbehavior or whenever she became an inconvenience. It wasn’t long before her two stepbrothers began emulating the same abusive behavior. Both boys were physically aggressive toward Donna, and one forced her into a closet and raped her when she was 9 years old.

 The more I listened to my aunt and uncle describe my grandmother’s upbringing, the more I realized that I had too easily accepted the idea that my grandmother had been a selfish, irresponsible drug addict. I had failed, out of ignorance, to consider the traumatizing events that she’d experienced before her introduction to drugs. Sadly, this is too often what society trains us to do—define and categorize a person by what we hear and what we see, rarely considering the circumstances that may have shaped them as children.

 By the time my grandmother turned 15, she was having sex with multiple men, including Murray Givre, a 22-year-old Jewish man who had Nigerian, Sierra Leonean, and Somali heritage. My grandmother told her family that she had met him in high school, and apparently, no one had been concerned about his age or questioned the story about how they had met. According to my uncle, my grandmother’s stepfather had taken a liking to Murray in spite of James’ atheistic and White-supremacist views. My grandmother’s parents considered him Black and his Jewish heritage didn’t change that. In their eyes, there were no important distinctions between Blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics, and Jews. If you weren’t White, you were Black, plain and simple.

 Despite those prejudices, James often invited Murray over to play poker and go fishing on their days off work. Though Murray was a regular visitor to my grandmother’s home, no one suspected that he and my grandmother were sexually involved, even when my grandmother unexpectedly became pregnant.

 According to Ronnie, my grandmother’s high school teachers noticed her pregnancy first. My great-grandmother was furious, though her indignation apparently had nothing to do with a 15-year-old getting pregnant but rather that the child might be Black. For my great-grandmother, a Black child being raised in a White home was unacceptable. In the 1960s, these dividing lines between color were societal norms for many White families, not just in the South but also in northern states such as Washington. These prejudices led my great-grandmother to put my grandmother into a home that prepared White girls to give up their babies at birth, typically through adoption. On November 22, 1968, my grandmother gave birth to my mother and returned home without her child, a devastating loss that would dramatically alter her life.

 Rhonda emphasized that my grandmother never wanted to give up her baby and that having her daughter pried from her arms left a tremendous hole in her heart, exacerbating my grandmother’s childhood trauma. Donna Phillips teetered on the edge of hopelessness.

My uncle explained that through the chaos, Murray Givre continued to play poker with James Neely and work odd jobs around the house. The Neelys were bent on believing that my grandmother was pregnant by Ronnie Larry, a Black man who later fathered Rhonda and Ronnie. Murray continued his secret sex life with my grandmother, apparently unaware that he was the father of the child my grandmother was forced to give up.

 Within two years, my grandmother gave birth to Uncle Ronnie. But by this time, the trauma my grandmother had endured over the years had undermined her ability to mother. As these adverse experiences weighed on her teenage shoulders, she began escaping into drugs, promiscuity, and a criminal lifestyle. Going to jail became a part of her normal routine, which eventually led her to doing time in the penitentiary.

 After Ronnie was born, my grandmother gave birth to Rhonda, Markus, and Marketta. Although she eventually lost custody of all her kids because of her lifestyle, Ronnie, Rhonda, and Markus had opportunities to visit their mother. Marketta, on the other hand, was taken at 10 months, never to see her mother again except for once when she was 18. And there was other sadness in their lives. According to Rhonda, her and Ronnie’s father was murdered in Seattle in the 1980s, and they grew up without him, while the father of Markus and Marketta was rarely around to help raise his children.

 When I asked my aunt about her childhood memories of time with her mother, she responded by saying, “Some days were rough!” She said that my grandmother’s home was a “shooting gallery” where other drug addicts would come and shoot dope. Ronnie, who had been exposed to drugs as a child, eventually began using with my grandmother, developing the same habit and lifestyle.

 But Rhonda said that among the nightmarish moments, there also were plenty of positive memories. She recalled how excited she would be to sit by the lake and feed the ducks with her mom. She described a moment when her mother was sick and didn’t have the strength to step outside and watch the fireworks on the 4th of July. So, my aunt fired a few small ones out the window so my grandmother could see them. These were the moments when she and her brothers would feel the love they yearned for. Those experiences of family time brought an occasional semblance of stability into their chaotic world.

 My grandmother tried to be a better parent, but my great-grandmother, Mary-Ann, never really supported her. She had practically exiled my grandmother, not only because of her drug problem but because her children were Black. According to Ronnie, the Neelys made it clear that none of my grandmother’s children were welcome in their home, and that’s the way it stayed for much of their lives.

 Things began to change for my grandmother when her health deteriorated, and she was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. She began to reflect on her choices, reevaluating what was important to her. My aunt said that around this time, my grandmother began expressing interest in God, making frequent comments about Christ and His ability to forgive her for all her transgressions. Ronnie said that in the last three months of her life, she periodically would apologize for the lifestyle she had exposed him to, speaking of her deep regret for the way she had raised her children. She also spoke about my mother, trying to imagine what life would have been like had they not been separated. When my uncle told me about his response to my grandmother’s apologies, I felt his compassion and the ring of truth in his words: “Mom, you did the best you could with what you had.”

 Those words resonated deeply with me. Too often, people who are down in life are told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they have no boots. Now when I think about my grandmother, I account for all the trauma—the loss of her father and brother, being abused and raped as a child, routine mistreatment and abandonment, and then having her daughter pried from her hands because of racist parents. How could she have been better when better was never modeled for her? How could she love properly when she had never been properly loved? We all are, in some ways, limited in what we can do by what we have had done to us.

 Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I was sentenced to 63 years in prison as an accomplice to first-degree murder and on multiple counts of attempted murder in the second degree. Although I accept accountability for my actions, I cannot ignore the adverse experiences that molded my childhood and adolescent mind. Unfortunately, much of American society ignores these dynamics, choosing only to see incarcerated individuals through the lens of what they have done rather than the social forces that shape the communities they come from.

 After my last conversation with Rhonda, I paced the floors in my cell before picking up the photo of my grandmother again. Growing up, my five siblings and I knew nothing about the circumstances surrounding our mother’s conception. We were clueless about the life of our grandmother, including the childhood trauma she experienced.

 Herein is a testimony that no matter what life looks like, there is hope that beautiful things can still be born through something broken.

The post Racist Roots: A Prison Cell Journey Into My Mother’s Past appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I’ve seen many variations of these complaints. Some call for mass firings. Some call for a cessation of all donations. Some call for boycotts! Here are just two examples I’ve seen recently:

“[BYU is] spiritually dangerous to many unsuspecting church member youths and their parents who think all is well at BYU.”

“Remind me not to provide any financial support to grandchildren who express an interest in attending BYU.”

To my fellow brothers and sisters who are frustrated, I make the following appeal: Our loyalty to a beloved institution must go deeper than our current culture war. It is a cheap loyalty that throws a beloved institution under the bus on the basis of rumors or even on the basis of valid concerns. 

Some humility is in order. In psychology, we learn that we are exceptionally bad at evaluating relative risk. If you ask the average person if they are safer walking the streets today than 40 years ago, most will say no—despite the fact that rates of violent crime have plummeted. For one example, close to home: Headlines linking modesty culture to rape never mention that—even accounting for underreporting—BYU’s incidence of sexual assault is substantially lower than at other universities. 

In other words, we have a built-in tendency to fixate on and generalize from lurid stories. And in this case, we largely ignore the myriads of less sensational examples of faculty delivering on the university’s mission. Those stories don’t make it into the gossip. So I’ll admit to pulling my hair out a bit when I hear people say, in response to an anecdote about some perceived failing, “I now encourage other parents to consider sending their children elsewhere.” 

Where else? There isn’t another institution in this nation—except its sister institutions in Idaho and Hawaii—where students can learn secular subjects from instructors who are passionate about divine truth and who reinforce moral standards. Why throw all that away?

For all the scaremongering about BYU going “woke,” it’s still the most politically balanced university in the nation—and given the trends of all academic institutions to lean even more leftward, this also means it is still one of the most politically conservative universities in the nation! Fourth most, by some estimates, with only Liberty University, Cedarville University, and BYU-Idaho listed as more conservative. I do not think that doctrinal orthodoxy should be measured in political terms, but I think this should give politically conservative members of the Church some pause before disparaging the institution.

Institutional trust is easier to destroy than create. Like individual trust, institutional trust is difficult to build and very easy to lose. It is like an oak that takes decades to grow but can be chopped down in an afternoon. This is why it’s so damaging when trusted cultural institutions abuse that trust. To mix metaphors, the seeds of distrust, once planted, can grow perennially for years to come. This is perhaps one of many reasons I hope we all—anyone connected to BYU—will take these stories seriously and work to address these concerns.

But none of us can accomplish alone what can be accomplished through an institution like BYU. The institution cannot fulfill its prophetic purpose if institutional trust has been destroyed, and when we click “share” on every story, rumor, or piece of gossip, we might as well be taking hatchets of our own to that tree. Fomenting online outrage does not do any actual good. Not because those stories aren’t important—the right people should hear them—but your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are not the right people. 

Let’s not make our trust in church universities the latest victim of the culture war. I invite Latter-day Saint journalists and podcasters who concentrate and amplify stories about faculty or student misbehavior at BYU to consider a more productive approach. Broadcasting them in public venues doesn’t actually help the institution—it merely puts embattled administrators on the defensive and spreads seeds of mistrust that will continue to grow long after any perceived issues have been addressed.

Those of us concerned about institutional drift at BYU need to convey those concerns in a different way than those who disparage the institution for upholding Church teachings. When we pursue activist strategies and engage in pressure tactics, we are using secular, worldly approaches to seek to advance the spiritual mission of the institution. We turn the affairs of a Church-sponsored institution into a battleground of public perception.

Institutional change requires patience and commitment. Many think of tending an institution like weeding a garden. However (to reuse a metaphor), tending a university with a divine mission is far more like caring for an orchard than a garden. Every tree in the orchard represents years of investment and care. Actions taken today can have effects that won’t manifest for years to come. Changing the direction of an orchard is a decades-long process (compared to the weekend project of a garden).

We’ve witnessed tectonic cultural and legal shifts over the last ten years in the United States, particularly around sexuality and gender. The very soil has changed, so to speak. It would be unreasonable to expect that nobody at our beloved church schools would be influenced by those shifts. It’s understandable to be caught off-guard when we see evidence of these shifting worldviews within our own ranks. But adapting institutional norms to these new cultural winds is neither a simple nor quick affair.

Elder Holland’s address to faculty in the fall of 2021 communicated a clear message to those who have been concerned (paraphrased): “We hear you.” Elder Gilbert’s subsequent devotional address at BYU communicated another clear message: the prophet sits at the head of the board of trustees, and we can rest assured that the Lord has a plan for church schools. 

BYU employs nearly 2,000 faculty and instructs tens of thousands of students. With an institution that large, in good weather or bad, we should expect to see outliers and issues crop up along the way—and it shouldn’t surprise us to hear gossip of lurid stories. However, those striving to make the university’s divine mission a living reality will continue to do so the way disciples usually do: without fanfare and often under-the-radar. So inevitably, these reparative efforts will be much less visible than the incidents that prompted them. I’d like to relay what Elder Clark C. Gilbert assured BYU faculty and students in his devotional address: “The good guys do win in the end, but sometimes it takes a little patience and even some faith.” That victory comes not by fixating our attention on our current cultural turmoils but on our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Celebrating BYU’s unfolding mission. In 1976, Elder Maxwell invited Latter-day Saint social scientists to “become more of a link and bridge between revealed truth and the world of scholarship.” In response to Elder Maxwell’s invitation (and other inspired directives from Church leadership), a number of faculty in BYU’s psychology department and across the university centered their research and theorizing on ways to advance a distinctively Latter-day Saint approach to the study of human behavior. They made it their professional mission to train a generation of Latter-day Saint students who take the Restored Gospel seriously in their research and practice—to be rigorous scholars, careful thinkers, and absolutely loyal to church doctrine and prophetic teachings.

Many of my mentors at BYU were committed to examining their discipline through the lens of the gospel. They took seriously the call to be disciple-scholars who interact sincerely with the consensus of their field but who are not ashamed to remain different and distinct from that consensus. Because of their tireless efforts, a seed planted by Elder Maxwell’s remarks 45 years ago has borne fruit in my life and given me a professional purpose and mission. At BYU, I learned to explore the worldviews and assumptions that inform the social sciences and to compare and contrast them with alternatives informed by revealed truth. I was introduced to thinkers like Terry Warner and others who advanced a vision of psychology grounded in the assumption that we are moral agents acting in moral contexts.

This is why BYU is so dear to me. There, I was equipped with tools to help students maintain conviction. I love that institution with all my heart. May all of us who share that love take care to channel concerns in ways that build the institution rather than undermine and erode public trust.

The post On Confidence in BYU’s Mission and Potential appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

This final chapter of Radiant Mormonism briefly seeks to integrate the various gospel principles that should guide us as Latter-day Saints in living the “abundant life.” It does so by summarizing prophetic teachings about how to live lives of dignity by serving the living globally, beginning with close friends and neighbors, but then spreading far beyond our nice little comfort zone with an expansive view. We can either hunker down and play it safe, focusing on our nuclear family and local neighborhood. Or we can feel the spirit of Zion that changes our perspective, reaching out to bless dozens of others, followed by hundreds, and perhaps thousands. It’s totally up to us.

 I begin with the stirring words of President Gordon B. Hinckley, who said, “If we are to build that Zion of which the prophets have spoken and of which the Lord has given mighty promise, we must set aside our consuming selfishness. We must rise above our love for comfort and ease, and in the very process of effort and struggle, even in our extremity, we shall become better acquainted with our God” (Hinckley, 1991, p. 59).

 A century earlier, the church’s radical and fiery leader John Taylor cried out against the greed and selfishness of the Utah pioneers, calling on them, even demanding that they provide economic support to create jobs for the many saints who were unemployed and hungry. “Talk about financiering! Financier for the poor, for the working man, who requires labor and is willing to do it, and act in the interest of the community for the welfare of Zion, and the building up of the kingdom of God upon the earth. This is your calling; it is not to build up yourselves, but to build up the Church and kingdom of God…. Do not let us have anybody crying for bread, or suffering, for want of employment. Let us furnish employment for all” (Taylor, 1878, p. 308).

 Twentieth century LDS apostles and prophets have consistently admonished church members to move above and beyond their conspicuous consumption and materialism by actually seeking to practice principles of stewardship, consecration, and United Order values today. As President Lorenzo Snow articulated the matter, we are to dwell essentially as equals, “for the purpose of uniting the Latter-Day Saints, the people of God, and preparing them for exaltation in the celestial kingdom, and also for the purpose of preparing them here on this earth to live together as brethren…so that there shall be no poor found in the midst of the Latter-Day Saints, and no monied aristocracy in the midst of the people of God” (Snow, 1878, p. 342).

As President Ezra Taft Benson put it, United Order values are critical to worthy LDS living: “We must not lose sight of the fact that all we are doing now is but a prelude to the establishment of the United Order, and living the law of consecration. The individual saints must understand this” (Benson, 1988, p. 123). Are we following his admonition?

Joseph Smith taught that we have the opportunity and responsibility “to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to provide for the widow, to dry up the tear of the orphan, to comfort the afflicted, whether in this church or any other, or in no church at all, wherever he finds them” (1842, p. 732). One of Joseph’s earliest apostles, John Taylor (1879), preached the doctrine of full employment for God’s children, declaring “that you require among yourselves; and also find employment for every man and woman and child within this Stake that wants to labor. That is what you should do” (p. 165).

 Today in 2023, our challenges are every bit as great as in earlier years of church history, because we must unite God’s children, not merely spiritually or psychologically, but economically as well. Let us remember the counsel from President Joseph F. Smith (1905). He pointed out that the Prophet Joseph believed that “a religion which has not the power to save people temporally and make them prosperous and happy here, cannot be depended upon to save them spiritually, to exalt them in the life to come” (p. 242).

 In raising and teaching our large family the full meaning of the gospel, my wife, Kaye, and I have sought to educate and—more importantly—practice the fullness of a “Zion lifestyle,” giving as much money as possible to the church and to the many good organizations seeking to assist those who suffer. We’ve been blessed with sufficient resources to manage on roughly half of our income so that we could donate the other half to those needing temporal support.

 In doing this, we’ve drawn on several magnificent scriptural sources to guide our lifestyles. One is from Nephi’s record in the Book of Mormon after Jesus’s atoning sacrifice and resurrection when he appeared to the surviving, yet vanquished, Nephites. Readers will recall reading that he admonished the people to unite as a genuine Christian community. They did so, and it led to the transformational fact that they soon “had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi, vs. 3). Over the next roughly 200 years there was equality and the prevalence of love, such that “surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God” (4 Nephi, vs. 16).

 Many excerpts from the Book of Mormon warn us about the problems of pride related to our obsession with material things. Today, in 2023, I worry not only about many Americans’ obsessions with fancy cars, their ever-ending acquisition of electronic toys, and their insatiable “need” to dine at the most expensive restaurants and travel to exotic resorts. I also worry about their fixation on designer brands of jewelry and clothing. “And it came to pass…that the people of the church began to wax proud, because of their exceeding riches, and their fine silks, and their fine-twined linen…and in all these things were they lifted up in the pride of their eyes, for they began to wear very costly apparel” (Alma 4:6).

 A valuable religious story about living simply and observing the values of a more-righteous economics that has always guided decisions of righteous people comes from the scriptures detailing the works and words of the ancient prophet Enoch in the Pearl of Great Price. I’ve especially appreciated the insights about the City of Enoch from one of our most literate and scholarly apostles, Elder Neal Maxwell. He wrote a small, 64-page volume entitled Of One Heart: The Glory of the City of Enoch. In it, Apostle Maxwell writes of how that particular utopian society grew out of the righteous, Zion practices of God’s people over hundreds of years. But how were they able to practice consecration and stewardship during those turbulent times? Elder Maxwell (1979, pp. 37–39) points out that they had “learned not to withhold affection and esteem from each other” and this practice eventually led to their “no longer holding back” their goods. “Enoch tells us that it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.” Maxwell also articulates important gospel principles and cultural values of the followers of Enoch, including the fact that they achieved greater efficiency by laboring in love; they highly valued the work ethic; and they used cooperation rather than competition as their motivation. The ultimate result? “The Lord called his people ZION” (Moses 7:18).

 How to achieve this is, of course, a major question. Apostle George Q. Cannon, counselor in the First Presidency of Brigham Young, is one of many leaders besides Jesus Himself to call on us to reduce human suffering. But even he admitted this is a complex issue. As he once pointed out, we must be up to the task because the Lord of Heaven himself had “chosen his people, the Latter-day Saints, to solve these knotty problems that have troubled the brains and afflicted the children of men for so many centuries” (Cannon, 1869, p. 99).

 As one of the perhaps-radical early pioneers, Elder Cannon (1878) also voiced his concern that the LDS people would become too proud and greedy—which apparently has come true, when we observe Utah’s many wealthy mansions and expensive automobiles while the masses have no access to low cost-housing and must use public transportation for their often-menial jobs. We witness far too many poor families, children without medical care, and rejection of migrants fleeing crime and poverty south of the U.S. border. Likewise,  Lorenzo Snow preached, “Now let things go on in our midst in our Gentile fashion, and you would see an aristocracy growing amongst us, whose language to the poor would be, ‘We do not require your company; we are going to have things very fine; we are quite busy now, please call some other time.’ You would have classes established here, some very poor and some very rich. Now, the Lord is not going to have anything of that kind. There has to be an equality; and we have to observe these principles that are designed to give everyone the privilege of gathering around him the comforts and conveniences of life” (Snow, 1878, p. 349).

 Elder Cannon (1878) also decreed that a “man who has got the blessings of God around him, should be willing to sacrifice a portion of his surplus means to establish some industry, that this poor man can work and obtain a good remuneration for his labor, that he can see comfort and convenience before him, by persevering as he has done who has been thus blessed. This is the spirit and aim of the United Order, and that we should endeavor to establish. We should employ our surplus means in a manner that the poor can have employment and see before them a competence and the conveniences of life, so that they may not be dependent upon their neighbors” (p. 349).

 We learn by carefully focusing on this principle stated in the revelations received in the church’s early days. For example: “If any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment.” (Doctrine and Covenants 104:18). I’ve often inquired of some of my LDS friends and close neighbors about this verse. The occasional replies include such responses as these: “Well, I don’t read it exactly that way.” Or, “This is referring to the future when the millennium is on earth.” Or even “When the president of the church orders me to share what I have with the poor, I’ll do so. But not now.”

 If our responsibility in becoming a “beloved community,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., called for, or in building a Zion community, as LDS scriptures mandate, the question of our willingness to live simply so as to give our extra money and things to help the poor is quite problematic. At least this seems to be true, according to Brigham Young. Said he, when stressing the principle of consecration during a great 1855 sermon in the Salt Lake Tabernacle: “The brethren wished me to go among the churches, and find out what surplus property the people had…. Before I started, I asked Brother Joseph, ‘Who shall be the judge of what is surplus property?’ Said he, ‘Let them be the judges themselves…. I never [found] a man yet who had a dollar of surplus property. No matter how much one might have, he wanted all he had for himself, for his children, his grandchildren, and so forth…. Occasionally, some were disposed to do right with their surplus property; and once in a while you would find a man who had a cow which he considered surplus, but generally she was of a class that would kick a person’s hat off, or eyes out, or the wolves had eaten off her teats. You would once in a while find a man who had a horse that he considered surplus, but at the same time he had the ringbone, was broken-winded, spavined in both legs, and had the pole evil at one end of the neck and a fistula at the other, and both knees sprung” (Young, 1855, p. 307). Apparently, after the pioneers began emigrating to territorial Utah, in what was then called the early Great Basin Kingdom, they had the same love of material things and reluctance to hold onto every single possession as do many Latter-day Saints living comfortably today.

 A dear friend of mine, Joe Christensen, raised this point in one General Conference. He had been the director of the Institute of Religion at the University of Utah when I was an undergraduate student there, and I had taken his inspiring class. Later he was named head of the Church Education System and was my supervisor when I founded the institute program in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. After serving as president of Brigham Young University–Idaho, he was appointed a General Authority Seventy. In General Conference he once offered good insights about the extent of our giving to disenfranchised, struggling families, including citing C. S. Lewis’s 1952 little volume Mere Christianity. Joe’s suggestion? “In addition to paying an honest tithing, we should be generous in assisting the poor. How much should we give? I appreciate the thought of C. S. Lewis on this subject. He said: ‘I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare…. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us…they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them’” (Christensen, 1999, p.4).

 President Spencer W. Kimball (1977) saw the folly of our latter-day possessiveness and greed that apparently block the powers of heaven from radiating down on us. He reminded us that “Pres. Joseph F. Smith said: ‘You must continue to bear in mind that the temporal and the spiritual are blended. They are not separate. One cannot be carried on without the other, so long as we are here in mortality.’ The highest achievement of spirituality comes as we conquer the flesh. We build character as we encourage people to care for their own needs. As givers gain control of their desires and properly see others needs in light of their own wants, then the powers of the gospel are released in their lives. They learn that by living the great law of consecration, they ensure temporal salvation and spiritual sanctification. Isn’t the plan beautiful? Don’t you thrill to this part of the gospel that causes Zion to put on her beautiful garments? When viewed in this light, [this is] the essence of the gospel. It is the gospel in action. It is the crowning principle of a Christian life” (1977, pp. 76–79).

 President Kimball’s counsel is akin to the prophetic words of the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob, who clearly informs us regarding how riches can be acquired and the things for which they should be used: “But before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God. And after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them…for the intent to do good—to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted” (Jacob 2:18–19). I don’t read into these words anything about building my personal empire, or acquiring an expensive new car every year—not even a Tesla for a discounted cost of “only” $92,000. I have many friends who spend much of their time seeking new jobs, better compensation, and new career adventures in large corporations. They acquire multi-million-dollar homes every 12 to 18 months, owning one, two, or three simultaneously. An acquaintance of mine in Salt Lake City finally decided to sell his $47 million home because his two daughters were going off to college and he said he didn’t need such a “large” house anymore.

As one of my mentors, the great LDS humanitarian Lowell Bennion, told me about such things: “I’m not judging. But I do question some people’s point of view” (Bennion, 1982). I learned much from him since I was a young University of Utah college student, enjoying our wonderful conversations. Over the years, Lowell wrote a slew of official church manuals, integrating the LDS faith with writings of the world’s great philosophers and some of their theories. He advised top LDS Church leaders through the decades. He helped develop the Church Education System (CES), including being greatly honored by President Gordon B. Hinckley, the main speaker at Lowell’s funeral. I have tried to follow his motto since we were both Institute of Religion directors who collaborated with LDS students in teaching the gospel for many years. In fact, the Brethren called him to establish the very first University of Utah Institute program. After he finally left that position on campus, he became a professor, as I did also. But on doing so, and forever after, he would say: “I used to teach religion; now I practice it.”

As I remember “Brother B,” as he was affectionately called by many students at the University of Utah, including some who became General Authorities, even apostles, one of his published insights comes to mind. In a small, simple 1996 volume, he raised the specter of what ancient prophets from Old Testament times might decree today in challenging our modern LDS comfortableness with practicing our religion on special days with designated ordinances, yet overlooking the very essence of true religion. “Much of the Old Testament ritual rejected by the prophets, such as burnt offerings, has little meaning for us today. To sense the full impact of these prophetic teachings, we need to use present rituals. Wouldn’t we be shocked if a prophet today speaking for God should say to the Saints: ‘I hate your baptisms and sacrament service. I will not hear your prayers and songs any more. Amen to your priesthood. Be honest in your dealings, be merciful to the poor and afflicted, be understanding to the needs of others. Then my spirit will be with you and you will be with me’” (Bennion, 1996, p. 32). “Brother B’s” philosophy centered on charity and compassion—not status, authority, and ritual. To me this suggests that we are to find our deepest religious experiences in feeding the hungry and aiding impoverished widows. Such a view parallels my own. He worried about our materialism as LDS members, including our emphasis on luxury, which he explains “by its very definition means going beyond need. I also see a strong motivation of self-indulgence and vanity” (Bennion, 1988, p. 44).

 I truly hope that my friends and co-laborers who seek to build a better world have enjoyed and will profit from a few ideas and experiences detailed in Radiant Mormonism by those of us who have launched new social ventures to reduce human suffering and empower the poor. Some years ago, I was asked to write a brief testimony about my faith on an LDS website, “Mormon Scholars Testify,” a project that several members of the LDS religion faculty at Brigham Young University established for FAIR Mormon, a research organization. I add it today in bearing witness to the church and the entire world:

 “The highest level of Mormonism is that of Stewardship and Consecration, meaning we are called to practice what we preach. While some Mormons feel that such practices are reserved for some future date when the Church announces we should begin building consecrated lives, many of us understand on deeper levels that the time to do so is here and now. The bulk of my adult and family life has centered on offering all I have to God and His children. Related principles are equality, simplicity, sacrifice, pure motives, cooperation, and other United Order values which inspire us to serve the poor and needy. As saints of the latter days we are told to give of our time, money, and skills to building Zion, a condition in which there is no poverty, no tears, no sorrow…. My testimony is a matter of practice, a way of living. My life is my witness. Service to others is my testimony. In conclusion, let me affirm my commitment to the practices of the LDS Church. It is an article of my faith that I believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all. I believe all things, I hope all things, I have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, I seek after these things” (Woodworth, 2010).

 I have looked upon the community of the Latter-day Saints in vision and beheld them organized as one great family of heaven, each person performing his several duties in his line of industry, working for the good of the whole more than for individual aggrandizement; and in this I have beheld the most beautiful order that the mind of man can contemplate, and the grandest results for the building up of the kingdom of God and the spread of righteousness upon the earth. Will this people ever come to this order of things? Are they now prepared to live according to that patriarchal order that will be organized among the true and faithful before God receives His own? We all concede the point that when this mortality falls off; and with it its cares, anxieties, love of self, love of wealth, and love of power, and all the conflicting interests which pertain to this flesh, that then, when our spirits have returned to God who gave them, we will be subject to every requirement that he may make of us, that we shall then live together as one great family; our interest will be a general, a common interest. Why can we not so live in this world?

References

 Alma 4:6.

Bennion, L. L. (1982). Personal conversation with the author.

 Bennion, L. L. (1988). Do Justly and Love Mercy: Moral Issues for Mormons. Cannon Press.

Bennion, L. L. (1996). How Can I Help: Final Selections by the Legendary Writer, Teacher, and Humanitarian. Aspen Books.

 Benson, E. T. (1988). Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson. Bookcraft.

 Cannon, G. Q. (1869). Journal of Discourses, vol. 13.

 Cannon, G. Q. (1878). Journal of Discourses, vol. 19.

 Christensen, J. J. (1999). “Greed, Selfishness, and Overindulgence.” General Conference, April.  

Doctrine and Covenants 104:18.

 Hinckley, G. B. (1991). “Our Mission of Saving.” Ensign, November.

 Jacob 2:18–19.

 Kimball, S. W. (1977). Ensign, November.

 Maxwell, N. A. (1979). Of One Heart: The Glory of the City of Enoch. Deseret Book. (See pp. 20, 37–39, 49.)

 Moses 7:18. The Pearl of Great Price.

 4 Nephi: 3 and 16.

 Smith, J. (1842). Times and Seasons, March 15.

 Smith, J. (1977). Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Joseph Fielding Smith (ed.). Deseret Book.

 Smith, J. F. (1905). “The Truth About Mormonism,” Out West, vol. 23.

 Snow, L. (1878). Journal of Discourses, vol. 19. https://jod.mrm.org/19/341.

Taylor, J. (1878). Journal of Discourses. vol. 19, Discourse 43. Also published in the Latter-day Saint Millennial Star. April 8.

 Taylor, J. (1875). Journal of Discourses, vol. 20.

 Widtsoe, J. A. (1943). Evidences and Reconciliations. Bookcraft. Also in Improvement Era, vol. 43.

 Woodworth, W. (2010). Mormon Scholars Testify. FAIR Mormon website.  

Young, B. (1855). Journal of Discourses, vol. 2.

 Young, B. (1868). Journal of Discourses, vol. 12.

The post Practicing Personal Consecration Globally appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Systemic or Soul Change,” and to “Renounce or Redeem.“

Every day, American media is filled with tit-for-tat warfare over woke. On one side, articles lament the intrusion of “woke” politics into elementary schools, children’s books, library reading hours, and churches. On the other side, articles bemoan the resistance to social justice progress as reflecting intransigent racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Do we really have to go to war over social justice?

Jacob spent the last few articles marching through competing visions of fundamental problems, core solutions, and what to do with those not on board with the popular answer to both. We wouldn’t blame anyone who came away thinking he was gearing up to encourage readers to join the wider culture war being fought in America over these same disagreements.

Interfaith Effort as a Model

Christopher recently added his exploration of how this new faith in social justice fits into the tapestry of world religions. The hope in identifying this belief system as religious, rather than religion and wokism as opposites, is not to heighten tension or prevent us from being able to work together—in fact, the hope is that it will produce the opposite result.

As a society, we already have systems and structures in place for understanding and navigating inevitable tensions between those of differing religious systems.

By framing this new movement as a religious faith, we are able to answer many of the questions that create social conflict today. Should the government be able to use its power to shut down institutions where this faith is practiced, such as has recently occurred in Florida? Should the symbols of this religion be displayed in public schools? Must other religions agree to the tenets of this faith in order to continue to function?

Each of these questions has prompted deep and sustained debate over human history. But once any belief system is framed as a religion, the good news is we already have fair and consistent answers to these challenging questions.

For instance, in a US context, the First Amendment’s free-exercise and establishment clauses function to provide both the protections and limits for any system of strong religious commitments.

And in the United States, we also have robust ecumenical and interfaith efforts. Yet today, because of the cultural power of this new religion, those who are not part of it are often wary of engaging in any joint work. Increasingly, it appears as if larger walls are established (on both sides of the conversation) in order to help protect identities and organizations.

By comparison, interfaith efforts don’t face these same challenges because religions come together as ideological equals, and there is much less risk of being subsumed. This framework frees adherents of different faiths, much like it may social justice advocates, to work together where there is a common cause.

Latter-day Saints certainly have plenty of common cause with those in this new faith. And this framework should hopefully allow us to better work together on those common goals.

Social Justice Implicit in Christianity?  

What’s most increased our confidence that this is possible has been meeting many people deeply committed to social justice and witnessing the vibrancy of their faith in Christ and their love for His Church. And we’ve also been reminded by many of these same people about how often an emphasis on justice—even social justice—shows up in scripture. As McArthur Krishna summarizes:

In the Bible, we see God saying over and over again, “I love justice.” Throughout the Bible, God denounces greed and calls for the right use of power. God speaks out, cares for, and protects those whose life, labor, and dignity are abused. And God continuously calls for the right treatment of the widow, immigrant, and orphan.

Given the interplay of religion and social justice, all of this raises an important question: what is the distinction between a form of social justice that fortifies and enhances faith in Christ as opposed to one that corrodes and diminishes it?

What does stronger faith look like? 

Before we even get to that question, it’s important to be clear about what is meant by “strengthened faith.” People, generally speaking, are not in agreement about this, including those among our own faith. This arises from the many different perspectives across American culture about what God wants, what is true, and what a healthy spiritual development looks like in terms of religion and social justice.

For our purposes, then, we’d like to operationalize something we would propose as consistent with prophetic teaching when it comes to the difference between a corroded faith and a vibrant one—reflected in this simple, 7-question survey:

1. When you sit in any worship meeting, do you get more preoccupied with the race or gender of speakers—so much so that you struggle to focus on what they are actually saying?

2. Do you more often than not feel uncomfortable joining in worship with the body of believers—be that in your local ward or in general conference as a whole?

3. Do you find yourself disregarding counsel from priesthood leaders—generally or locally—due to their race or gender?

4. Do you find yourself so frustrated about certain issues of inequity that it leaves you in a frustrated place about the institutional church?

5. Do you find yourself questioning whether the covenants and ordinances of the Church matter at all due to these other questions about inequity?

6. Have you started to entertain the possibility that a focus on repentance is, in fact, problematically shaming and guilt-provoking?

7. Do you ever wonder “if I can be a part of this church” as long as they teach X, or practice y, in relation to a specific minority issue?

If your answers to these seven questions are mostly or almost all “yes,” then by our definition, the strength of your faith has been hollowed out to some degree by a secular conception of social justice. No matter how much others might insist that you are, in fact, in a higher spiritual place—and with more enlightened views of God, divine love, and Zion building on earth—we’re among those who would humbly disagree.

And so would we imagine the prophets. You might disagree with all of us. But that’s why we’re trying to be clear by proposing the above criteria as a kind of metric for whether or not someone’s faith has been strengthened (or not)—and whether it has arrived at a corroded, hollowed out place (or not).

Imagining a faith-friendly social justice

Given that as a backdrop, here’s our best attempt to outline a set of social justice criteria that holds the potential to unite believers and bind hearts to sacred covenants rather than the reverse:

1. The priority of sin. Problematic inequities would be understood and presented as subsidiary and emblematic of sin rather than replacing or taking the place of sin. This hierarchy would need to be clean and clear. Caring about inequity, then, doesn’t need to mean we stop caring about sin … it simply means we are attentive to one particular kind of sin.

2. Roles aren’t a bad thing. Thoughtful space for purposive distinctions between roles and peoples would need to be allowed—rather than pretending that any and all differences are wrong-headed and evil. In this way, for instance, innate and eternal differences in gender roles would still be appreciated and valued.

3. The priority of repentance. Attention to systemic and institutional improvements would not eclipse the central attention to personal repentance. But neither would the individual improvements distract from larger collective changes needed either. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we can care about both of these too.

4. War no more. Contrasts or tensions between these various points of view would be explored with charity and generosity—putting aside the kinds of tensions with tradition that have characterized even religiously-themed liberationist strains. A faith-friendly social justice would not participate in the harsh and condemning rhetoric of the larger secular conversation at all.

5. Letting God lead the way. While acknowledging steps we can all take—individually and collectively—to move towards greater collective justice, this vision of social justice would emphasize the centrality of God and divine power in receiving the reconciliation and healing we ultimately seek. This foundation in divine faith would invite humility and encourage patience as we reach for a “more perfect union” among us.

Do you agree or disagree with these five criteria of religion and social justice? We would love to hear your additional thoughts.

By the way, similarities between these ideas and other proposals on the table are not accidental; for instance, notice the generosity and charity of Chloé Valdary’s antiracism program, the faith-infused Catholic-inspired “Dignity, Equality, and Solidarity,” and Brigham Young University’s own belonging initiatives aiming to foster “a community of belonging composed of students, faculty, and staff whose hearts are knit together in love.” It’s no coincidence that each of these comes from an explicitly faithful and Christian attempt to take social justice concerns seriously.

By considering these new ideologies as a robust and unique religious movement with distinct philosophical foundations—we might then examine its different approaches to some of the most important questions we face. By recognizing it for what it is, then, we don’t have to be so afraid of it. Latter-day Saints have a long history of inter-faith efforts. Perhaps this will be one new horizon in that work.

Let’s keep talking about this. And let’s keep exploring together what more we can do to articulate and chart a faithful, peace-oriented social justice effort that can draw hearts together and unite us all with the Prince of Peace, who promises to bring justice to the whole earth.

The post How Reimagining Social Justice Could Ease the Culture War appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Once upon a time, it was fashionable to be “religious” in order to fit into the world around us. That word even had a nice ring to it in broader society—carrying with it a status that was valuable. 

The opposite is true in much of the developed world today. In American modernity, it’s stepping away from faith that has increasingly become a mark of cultural cachet—seen by many as a reflection of integrity and courage on the road to full authenticity. Anyone ready to follow their “own truth” away from the orthodoxy of a faith tradition can expect to be met with a social media shower of hearts and emojis to prove just how special that decision truly is.  

It’s often taken for granted in such a choice that people are leaving religious passion and commitment behind. But as more and more have pointed out in recent years, ceasing to trust or love the Divine is not to cease to trust or love anything at all. Instead of a dissolution of trust and love, these internal devotions almost always end up getting transferred to something else. 

In her accompanying BBC documentary, “The Church of Social Justice,” Lewis, who happens to be an atheist, proposes that “religious impulses don’t die out—they just transmute themselves into something else,” before inquiring further, “Have we really become less religious? Or has our hunger for truth and meaning simply transferred itself to social justice politics?” 

The many adorations of modernity. Politics is certainly not the only place our wandering adoration goes. I’ve written previously about some of the disparate ways modern hearts and minds end up spending their love and trust in a secularizing society. These include: 

• Drugs and alcohol as common pathways of ecstasy and escape, sought after both for their temporary relief from pain and for their shaky promise of being “a path toward transcendence, a way of accessing an extra-human world of rapture.”
• Sports becoming a “form of religion” for those who draw strength from the regular performances to “see their lives as meaningful” and “overcome isolation and connect with others” as the common fervor among fans “unite[s] all those who share them into a single social community.”
• All-consuming work lives are repurposed for some as “a primary way to find meaning in the world and a crucial part of our identity.”
• The single-minded quest for beauty has also become a quasi-religious phenomenon—complete with resisting the temptation to betray diets outlined in various “sacred texts” which detail extensive rules about what to eat or not eat. Through self-objectification, people can ultimately relate to the beauty of their own bodies with a fervid fixation (see Instagram as Exhibit A!). All this more broadly reflects a “cult of physical improvement.”
• Romance has likewise become a singular source of transcendence for many. Several hundred years after the courtly love of France, the philosopher Rousseau first asserted that “a single human being” could be “experienced as embodying the greatest good and be worthy of the sort of love that was formerly reserved for God”—reflecting an “all-powerful solution to the problem of finding meaning, security, and happiness in life.” This was the kind of uplift and self-fulfillment, historian Stephanie Coontz argues, “that the previous generation had sought in religious revivals.” 
• Sex itself has come to constitute the ultimate transcendence for many. As Marxist scholar Cornel West writes, “The body may be a poor vessel for transcendence, yet it now is the last such vessel for many … [For many young people] transcendence itself is incarnate in the lived experience of sexual stimulation.”

Many other experiences have been described in equally rapturous terms—from rock concerts and political rallies to culinary delights and exotic vacations. And don’t get me wrong, with some exceptions, many of these other outlets of passion and fulfillment can be healthy parts of life when used in sensible, balanced ways. Yet every one of them, without exception, can also become domineering and controlling influences that we become fixated on in a way that takes us away from other precious aims. In this way, we might fill entire days with Netflix, video games, food binging—and lots of other things too.  

An alternative to faith in God. Much of this makes sense. In a secularizing world where people are turning away from anything connected with the divine, people naturally turn to something else for transcendence and relief. In Shadi Hamid’s “America Without God,” he quotes theologian Abraham Kuyper who argued that “no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty.” Hamid also notes what Samuel Goldman calls “the law of the conservation of religion,” which is that “in any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed.”

The steep drop in religious attendance over the past two decades, along with the rapid growth in “nones,” has been much discussed of late—with a frequent insistence that the evaporation of religious passion was on the horizon. Yet, as Isabel Fattal writes, “It’s strange, because all the data we have suggests that in both Britain and the U.S., organized religion is declining. Church attendance is declining.” But she then admits that religious fervor is not going away and highlights the possibility that “politics,” among other things, “has raced in to fill both the good and bad bits of religion.”

Reflecting on the same dwindling of collective commitment to Judeo-Christian faith, Helen Lewis adds, “We might expect that religious concepts—repentance, hellfire, heresy, apostasy—would have become less salient as a result. But that’s not the case. For some activists, politics has usurped the role that religion used to play as a source of meaning and purpose in our lives, and a way to find a community.”

Senior Brookings fellow Shadi Hamid agrees: “If secularists hoped that declining religiosity would make for more rational politics, drained of faith’s inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed. As Christianity’s hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.”

The other religion. A social and political religion taking the place of Christian faith? That’s exactly what my friends Dan Ellsworth (Has Politics Become Your New Religion?) and Tom Stringham (The Other Religion) have been writing eloquently on the pages of this magazine. Stringham highlights another religion booming around us right now:

Increasingly, I get the feeling that educated friends, relatives, peers, and acquaintances leaving the Church aren’t leaving the Church so much as they are joining—what exactly? Something else. They’re not becoming Catholics or Presbyterians or Muslims or going through any deliberate conversion process. It’s something a little different. If you ask them about it, they’ll probably be confused—denying they are joining anything at all. 

Dating the appearance of this new force to about 2013, he goes on to underscore its influence on educated white members in North America drifting into dissent and disaffection, saying, “At least among educated white members in North America, the story of recent widespread disaffection is mostly one of widespread conversion to an alternative religion.” 

Stringham elaborates:  

There have always been seductive influences on the fringes of our faith, but, at least among educated white North American members, there is only one competing religion that has left the fringes and begun exerting its influence on almost everyone. It’s the official religion of our social class, the one with influence in practically every institution, and the one that does not regard itself as a religion because it does not have to.  

As you can see, Stringham’s clearly not the first to point in this direction or even to make this observation outright. 

Early cautions. In 2018, John McWhorter, a writer and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, observed at the inaugural Heterodox Academy conference I was attending that in the previous few years, “social justice warrior ideology” among his students had started to look more like religion. 

“And I must make it clear that when I use the word religion, I don’t mean it as a battering ram,” he said, “I don’t mean it to be funny. I mean that there actually is something that has settled in, in our campus discussions now, that an anthropologist from Mars would recognize as no different from, for example, strong Christian fundamentalism.” 

Stringham agrees, “I mean it literally when I say it is a religion. It’s a comprehensive worldview with taboos, authority, myths, sacred objects, a moral framework, and unfalsifiable beliefs.”

Since that time, McWhorter went on to elaborate on his concerns in a 2021 book called, “Woke Racism.” When asked in the wake of that book whether he’s been merely metaphorical, McWhorter insists otherwise, “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in this comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion”—again adding, “An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

But couldn’t any ideology be similarly conceived of as a quasi-religion? McWhorter responds, “Why I am disinclined to call this just another ideology is because of a certain fervency in how this ideology is conducted. Where, for example, body language comes into it, that is modeled on what we call a religion rather than ideology. People put their hands up into the air, people put their bodies on the ground, in the name of this particular religion.”

Journalist Helen Lewis (who was raised a Catholic before stepping away from faith) similarly notes religious language cropping up in popular culture, such as angry activists who urged a Dave Chappelle supporter to “repent” and students demanding the University College London change course in their work with an LGBT+ charity, with a sign that read “REJOIN STONEWALL OR GO TO HELL.” 

“If you spend any time online looking at social-justice movements,” Lewis writes, “you start to see very heightened language, which often has shades of fire and brimstone—the idea of people being evil, going to hell, needing to repent and atone for their sins.” That’s what led her to explore “the religious overtones of the ‘culture wars.’” On both left and right, she finds “unquestionable doctrines, charismatic preachers, blasphemy and heresy—and the promise of salvation.” 

Shadi Hamid likewise writes about the trend to “take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and ex-communication and repurpose them for secular ends.” 

In a follow-up interview with Isabel Fattal, entitled “Is Politics Filling the Void of Religion?” Lewis went on to note that being on the left is often considered to mean “you’re skeptical and rational—driven by reason, not these old superstitions.” She continued, “What initially intrigued me was the idea that people who would self-describe as rationalists were nonetheless acting in these very faith-based ways.” (As people of faith know, of course, reasonableness, rationality, and science are not antithetical to vibrant faith.)  

Lewis speaks directly about political leaders and activists tapping into a hunger for the spiritual, quoting Elizabeth Oldfield, who leads the Sacred Podcast, as describing a “very deep, human urge for moments where we ‘un-self’” which manifests among many in “tarot cards, new age spirituality, meshing with social justice movements.” In that ferment, another leader notes, “Populist leaders assume the charismatic status of many religious revivalist leaders.”

An expanding ideology. Across those speaking of this social justice-as-religion phenomenon, here’s a back-of-napkin timeline:  

• 2013 — This other religion’s cultural emergence, according to Tom Stringham
• 2014 — Its particular effects show up on college campuses, according to Jonathan Haidt
• 2015 — It begins really flourishing, according to John McWhorter 

McWhorter adds, “Some will go as far as to own up to it being a religion, and wonder why we can’t just accept it as our new national creed”—adding that many have been “supposing that this new religion is so incontestably good, so gorgeously surpassing millennia of brilliant philosophers’ attempts to identify the ultimate morality, that we can only bow down in humble acquiescence.” 

But he continues, “It’s time it became ordinary to call it for what it is and stop cowering before,” reiterating, “a new religion is preached across America”—one “in the guise of world progress.” 

Professor Ralph Hancock calls this “the religion of compassionate liberation.” 

Not an insult. By the way, none of this is an attempt to offend religious people—who are used to being parodied and mocked. Rather, this is more directly an attempt to clearly and accurately describe reality. 

In characterizing the public feedback to her essay, Helen Lewis remarks that “one of the most common negative responses was to assume that I was being pejorative in making the comparison between social-justice politics and religion.” But she insisted, “Religion is a force for good in many people’s lives, including those of my parents.”

Tom Stringham notes the obvious—that “most people, inside or out, don’t recognize it as a religion”—further acknowledging this “practical difficulty” in this new insight, namely that believers in this worldview, “unlike adherents to most religions, usually don’t consider their worldview to be a religious worldview or even a worldview at all.” 

Consequently, even if this designation is intended respectfully, it will alienate many of its adherents who prefer to see their beliefs as obvious. Framing it as religion shows how this belief is merely one of many—that, like all others, it is a “contestable worldview.”

Among other things, Stringham points out that such recognition could be helpful to parents trying to explain the culture war to their children. When the rituals, symbols, and catechisms of this faith are repeated in public, rather than taking them for granted as a new reality that we are forced to reckon with, we may instead simply point out that (a) not everyone shares our faith, (b) we believe in some different things but respect their right to their beliefs, and (c) speak appreciatively about how they are trying to tell people to be nice to everyone, and we can agree with that part.

Other new political religions. This article series focuses on the new religion of “compassionate liberation,” which is often, but not exclusively, found on the political left. As noted earlier, there are many other places where religious fervor is funneled. “There is an equal amount of dunderheaded censorship and religious behavior coming from the right,” McWhorter notes. And with QAnon and Trumpism, more generally, also evincing some of the same hallmarks of a new religious faith, they are certainly worth studying on their own merits. 

But there are important differences. For one, the power differential is considerable—with right-leaning political religion having nowhere near the same degree of cultural influence in entertainment, business, bureaucratic, or educational institutions.

In many ways, this right-leaning political religion may be a reaction to the dramatic insurgence of social justice fervor. (It was only in 2015, after “compassionate liberation” had taken significant hold, that a rightward reaction began to emerge).

Additionally, Helen Lewis suggests, “On the right, there is a much more obvious synthesis: overt displays of religion into which politics gets woven. It’s not a substitute so much as it is a complement.” She goes on to cite one QAnon follower as saying, “I feel God led me to Q.” Due to this synthesis, this right-leaning political fervor seems not to have the same power to draw people away from their religious affiliations as much as change them (which entails new challenges). 

Looking ahead. It’s not just in language and passion that we are witnessing religious fervor in American politics. It’s also in the commitment to fundamental narratives of what is going wrong in society and how to remedy it—as well as how to treat those who disagree with our preferred solutions. 

Ultimately, religion describes what we believe, what we value, and how we see the world. And these competing visions of problems, solutions, heretics, and ultimately the ideal society we aspire to are both profoundly interesting and hugely consequential for real-life choices.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be taking up these questions in greater depth. But I close for now by asking: can you really blame people for chasing after some of these sources of secular transcendence? That’s all many people are even familiar with. Remember this when you see friends chasing relief and deliverance in alcohol, rock concerts, or romance. What opportunities have they had to learn any other, better way to find salvation and transcendence?   

The post Invisible Religion: The Most Popular Religion in America Doesn’t Know It’s One appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

There is no way to get around this problem entirely, and sooner or later, kids will have to learn to deal with the complexity themselves. But while the content of culture war disputes is often complex, the nature of the conflict itself is quite simple, to the point that kids can understand it. It can be summed up as, “We have our religion, and other people have theirs. We don’t agree about everything, and that’s OK.” I’ve come to believe that correctly framing the conflict goes a long way toward finding our way peacefully through it for both kids and adults.

I’ve argued previously that we should frame widespread disaffection from the Church somewhat less in terms of “leaving the Church” and more in terms of “joining” another one. At least among educated white members in North America, the story of recent widespread disaffection is mostly one of widespread conversion to an alternative religion, which we can call contemporary American expressivism. Similarly, the story of the contemporary “culture war” is, in significant part, the story of the emergence of this new religion and the conflicts that have arisen between it and traditional religions.

If you accept this framing, a couple of things become clear.

For one, as I and others have written about before, a person can’t be all-in on both the Church and wokeism (or any other comprehensive worldview). You can find the truth that exists in other religions, but you can only honestly adhere to one religion at a time.

For another, if wokeism is a religion, then it should have the same social status as ours. Specifically, you don’t have to convert to it, the same way other people don’t have to join our church. You can respect the religion, see what is good about it, and still decline to participate in its customs or adopt its worldview.

This is important to remember when helping kids navigate new situations. For instance, think about what you would say if your young child asked you what the big rainbow flag at the grocery store meant. At the same time, consider a less familiar (but real) scenario. Many people in your neighborhood are observant Muslims who have recently immigrated from other countries. When tensions flare up in Palestine, many of them march peacefully along the street with flags and banners to support the Palestinian cause. Often their chants include a slogan that local supporters of Israel consider offensive. What do you tell your kids if they ask what the symbols and chants mean?

In both scenarios, it’s simple and true to say that while we have our church and our religious beliefs, not everyone is part of our church. And other people have their own religious beliefs. We agree with some of the things they believe and other things we don’t, but we try to respect their beliefs, and we hope they respect ours too.

We might also add: The people who fly the rainbow flag are part of an American religion that is becoming very popular. There isn’t really a name for the religion yet, but they sometimes call themselves woke. We don’t agree with everything they say about moms and dads, but they are trying to tell people to be nice to everyone.

Likewise, the people marching and chanting were Muslims, which means they believe in a religion called Islam. They were talking about a war far away and who they support in that war. Not everybody agrees with them, but they are trying to help other members of their religion.

It seems to me that the important thing to communicate to young kids in these situations is less the substance of the worldview attached to these symbols and more the social context. Kids at this age are probably asking, “why are those people doing a thing that we don’t do?”—which is a social question, more than a curiosity about beliefs and values.

Answering this question is important because, up to this point, most of the new symbols kids have encountered are either universal (like, say, road signs) or symbols of our own religion (say, the sacrament) and will be integrated naturally into their own developing worldview. (It’s bad to run through a stop sign, and we should take the sacrament to remember Jesus each Sunday.)

Living in a sectarian world, where we encounter symbols and messages that are foreign to us, is more complicated than living in Zion, but it’s not impossible. Kids seem to be able to understand that there are different religions, that not everybody believes the same thing as we do, and that that’s OK. With this understanding, they are in a better position to evaluate messages they encounter without being either uncritical on the one hand or adversarial on the other.

This understanding is also useful for adults. Many of us have been asked at some point why we don’t use a symbol or term when it “just means” equality, kindness, or respect. We may find it difficult to answer. But Latter-day Saints could just as well ask others why they don’t wear, say, CTR rings, which after all “just mean” that we should choose the right. But we know why: other people don’t wear CTR rings because they are not part of our religion. They may not object to the nominal meaning of a CTR ring, but that doesn’t mean they need to wear one. Neither should church members feel obligated to participate in the customs of religions we aren’t a part of, let alone customs that may cause tension with our own religious beliefs.

I am suggesting that we openly—and correctly—frame contemporary American wokism as religion. There is a practical difficulty with this approach, which is that believers in contemporary American wokism, unlike adherents to most religions, usually don’t consider their worldview to be a religious worldview or even a worldview at all. Referring to their beliefs this way, even respectfully, will rub many of them the wrong way or at least cause confusion. But introducing the additional level of abstraction—pointing out that each person speaks according to a contestable worldview—is essential if we want to have productive conversations on culture war topics.

Without this correct framing, the conversation will, by default, take place “inside the box” (where the “box” is the worldview of the other person). In such a conversation, the deck is stacked. At best, the other person will merely come to (mistakenly) believe our religion to be consistent with theirs. At worst, the Christian believer converts himself to the other religion by unwittingly participating in it.

If insisting on this framing feels aggressive, notice the wording of the 11th Article of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ: “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” We regard people of other religions as peers who have the “same privilege” as us, not as our superiors or inferiors. Granting that others may worship how they wish does not imply agreeing to treat their religious worldview as uniquely neutral and universal or to take their beliefs for granted for the purposes of conversation.

Which is to say, the unique teachings of contemporary American wokism should not be simply accepted. For example, the religion holds that maleness and femaleness, qua the social categories we are all familiar with, are, in fact, categories of gender identity, a gnostic sense of one’s identity that is perfectly knowable by the individual but not verifiable or falsifiable by others, even in principle. This is a strong, arguably supernatural teaching which should not be simply accepted unless it is part of a conscious, deliberate conversion to the woke religion.

Wokeists also teach that racism, qua the social phenomenon almost universally agreed to be very bad, is a structural form of oppression inherent in the relationships between white people and others. Some leaders in the movement teach that racial disparities are ipso facto racist. One implication of these teachings is that a white person’s intent does not matter at all for evaluating whether something they do is racist (and thus wrong) and that asking for evidence of racist intent is itself racist.

These are strong claims. Similar ethical claims by other religions would be contested by Latter-day Saints and not treated as the new, universal rules of the game. But because this other popular religion has not been framed as a religion, it may not even occur to us to contest the claims. In May-June 2020, many people found it hard to articulate exactly why they felt uncomfortable adopting the symbols of the BLM movement, despite agreeing that black people’s lives mattered and that patterns of racist conduct should be stopped. For most of them, the reason (whether they realized it or not) was that using the symbols signaled adherence to a whole religious worldview—one that teaches dubious dogmas like “intent doesn’t matter.”

—

The culture war makes life harder, but the fact that the other religion is a religion should give us some hope of cooling it down. Two warring parties that recognize each other’s interests as valid can often come to a peace agreement. Religions that contextualize themselves and other religions as religions can coexist, despite not being aligned on theological questions.

More importantly, the personal understanding of culture war issues as reflecting a plurality of religious views guards us, and our kids, in two different ways. On one level, it reminds us that believers in the other religion deserve respect, the way Muslims or Catholics or Hindus do. It also permits us to identify the truths that exist within the religion. And on another level, it helps us avoid accidental conversion. The barrage of sectarian messages our kids will hear online and at school can, in this framing, be correctly contextualized as teachings of a competing religion that may or may not be true rather than as obvious or neutral messages that ought to be absorbed and integrated into their worldviews as Latter-day Saints.

Much of the culture war-related tension we experience as Latter-day Saints boils down to a conflict between two religious worldviews, and much of the trickiness comes from the fact that we are trying to do the impossible: affirm them both at the same time. When we realize that many contemporary “secular” notions about sex, family, race, and other social questions are fundamentally religious in nature, conflicts become much easier to manage—and easier to explain to kids.

The post Talking to Kids (and Adults) About the Culture War appeared first on Public Square Magazine.