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If you were to learn about Latter-day Saint garments only from mainstream media coverage, you might assume that women experience them primarily as a burden: physically uncomfortable, medically suspect, sexually inhibiting, or symbolically oppressive. Some women do experience them that way, and their stories should not be dismissed. But the current conversation is incomplete. In recent years, journalists have both given garments increased media attention while giving heavy deference to those who don’t like them. The media has been far less interested in women who experience garments as sacred, comforting, protective, inconvenient but worthwhile, and simply woven into an ordinary life of faith. The result is not exactly a false picture, but an unbalanced one.

To understand the distorted public conversation, it helps to begin with a few basic facts.

The garment, or, more properly, The Garment of the Holy Priesthood, is the two-piece underclothing that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have been through a covenantal temple ceremony called the endowment wear (hence its colloquial name, the temple garment). Many receive the endowment before a mission or temple marriage, though others do so for personal spiritual reasons. 

The garment represents the coat of skins given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and serves as a reminder of the promises made in the temple. It provides spiritual protection to its wearer. And it also reminds the wearer of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which symbolically covers our sins and weaknesses and wraps us in mercy. 

The garment design, like other components of the temple, has been updated many times since it was first introduced by Joseph Smith. Originally a long-john one piece, the style and material options have expanded over the years, most recently with a sleeveless top option released for both sexes in 2025.

Endowed Latter-day Saints are expected to wear the garment “day and night throughout [their] life.” At the same time, there is variation in practice around exercise, medical issues, postpartum recovery, and other personal matters, and these questions are not dictated in detailed church policy. The church handbook also states that “it is a matter of personal preference” whether a member wears other undergarments over or under the garment.

Historically, the Church has been cautious about publicly discussing the temple garment, but in recent years, it has released several press releases and an informational video about the garment for a non-member audience. In 2014, one such press release indicated that popular pejorative terms such as “magic underwear” were “inaccurate” and “offensive,” and requested that media give Latter-day Saints “the same degree of respect and sensitivity that would be afforded to any other faith by people of goodwill.” In response, The Atlantic published a respectful piece, but headlined it “Mormon Underwear, Revealed.” Indeed, mainstream media coverage of the garment very rarely avoids a wink at the sexual—on the same day of the aforementioned Atlantic headline, The Washington Post published an article titled, “Mormon Church peels back mystery of sacred undergarments.”

The problem, unfortunately, goes beyond headlines. Hanna Grover, 27, a content creator who posts humorous videos about Latter-day Saint life, was interviewed for a 2025 New York Magazine piece entitled “Mormon Women Are Going Sleeveless.” She told me that her interaction with the writer was very respectful, and that the writer took the time to “understand my background and how garments were a part of my life even before I was endowed.” But Grover said she was surprised upon publication to find that she provided the only positive garment commentary included in the final article (the majority of the interviewees identified as ex-Mormon).

Part of what makes the fixation so frustrating is that religious clothing is not actually unusual. Many faiths use clothing, coverings, or other embodied practices to express devotion, modesty, consecration, or separation from the world. Garments are perhaps unique in that they also serve as underwear, but they are also comparatively less restrictive than many other religious vestments.

Amanda Volk, 42, a lifelong member of the Church in Kansas City, Mo., told me that as a girl in central Kansas, she often noticed Mennonite women in long dresses and bonnets and asked her mother why they dressed that way everywhere they went. Her mother used those moments to explain that many religious communities use dress to express devotion, modesty, and religious dedication to God—and that Latter-day Saint garments belonged to that broader pattern. Seen through that lens, garments did not strike her as something extremely foreign. 

Any casual observer can easily note that public discourse around garments tends to center around women. Perhaps women’s garments receive disproportionate attention because women’s bodies already receive disproportionate public scrutiny. 

Still, if public coverage often foregrounds women’s dissatisfaction, my own interviews suggested that women who experience garments positively are rarely as simplistic as outsiders assume. Their experiences differ widely. Some adjusted quickly and easily. Others experienced real frustration, trial and error, or wardrobe overhaul while still coming to see garments as meaningful.

Kenzie Spafford, 22, lived in Las Vegas when she was endowed. Shortly after, she moved to Tokyo, Japan, notorious for its hot and humid summers. Then she received a mission call to Gilbert, Ariz. “I’ve experienced a lot of heat since being endowed,” she told me. She worried that it would be uncomfortable wearing the extra layer of clothing in the heat, but she found “it doesn’t really bother me at all. I hardly notice how hot it is with a super thin extra layer, it feels like nothing.”

Arantza Condie, 35, a convert and mother of three, was endowed three years ago. She told me that preparing to wear garments was nerve-wracking and that she had to replace most of her wardrobe. Initially, she was disheartened in trying to find clothing that worked. It was a lot of trial and error. But over time, she said, she came to enjoy the new style that was emerging. Unexpectedly, she found herself criticizing her body less and feeling more comfortable in her skin. The most profound change in her, she said, did not occur because the garments “forced” her to dress modestly, but because she was confronted with the reminder of Christ, and His love and sacrifice for her, every morning she put them on.

Other women I talked to described a similar transformation of perspective—when they began to see the garment as enabling them to have a greater closeness to and understanding of the Savior, those feelings of restriction began to melt away.

Alli Stoddard, 21, is a returned missionary and student at BYU. She explained, “While garments do help us to stay modest, that is not why we wear them … When my perception of garments (was) that they were for modesty, I had very little desire to wear them, but when I understood that they represent Jesus Christ covering us, my love for my garments grew exponentially, and the struggle of wearing them disappeared.”

How individual members discuss garments varies greatly from family to family. Because Latter-day Saints promise in the temple to not reveal some aspects of the temple ceremony, some members are cautious in general about discussing any aspect of the temple outside its walls. In my experience discussing garments with women for this and previous articles, many said that an overly cautious home culture around the topic led newly endowed women to feel confused and discouraged. By contrast, women who grew up in homes where garments were discussed openly and frankly—and where parents intentionally prepared their children for garment wearing—felt more comfortable and better prepared for the transition when they were endowed.

Several of the women I interviewed reinforced that point. Volk told me that she grew up in a home where her parents were committed to wearing their garments daily, and that her mother was wise in helping her children dress in clothes even at a young age that would help prepare them to wear garments someday. Ellie Lewis, a 21-year-old California native and BYU student, chose to be endowed just after high school graduation. She said that with her mother’s advice, she was quickly able to find materials and fits she liked, and that because she already dressed conservatively, she did not need to make a significant adjustment in clothing style. After only a few days, she said, the additional layer felt normal; within a week, she “no longer felt fully put together without them on.”

I asked Becky Squire, 42, a popular influencer who shares devotional and lifestyle content along with garment-friendly fashion, about the tension between discussing the garment in a way that acknowledges both its sacredness and its impact on the mundane daily life of the wearer. “Every single time I post about them, I always include the purpose and tie them back to Jesus Christ,” she said. “I see so many online posts about them and it’s all about fashion. Period. And it’s okay to share them like that, but (it’s important to acknowledge) the power that comes from wearing them.” In speaking with her own daughter about garments, she told me “my main goal was to teach and prepare her before she went through the temple. It was never about what you could or couldn’t wear. It was about becoming someone who wants to make and keep covenants and live in God’s presence.”

Outsider commentary often frames women’s garments as evidence of oppression, while showing little curiosity about women’s own moral or spiritual interpretations. All of the women I spoke to emphasized that the narrative of oppression was inconsistent with their own sense of agency.

“The world has become so big on living your truth and encouraging us to find our voice, but only if our voice and our truth agrees with everyone else’s,” Spafford explained. “I’m comfortable in my skin and my body, I don’t need everyone else to be comfortable with it too … It feels ridiculous to always have to defend my freedom when I’m choosing it everyday, nobody is forcing me or going to make me feel bad if one day I stop wearing them. I would be the only one affected.”

Larisa Banks, 40, a Utah mother of five, made a similar point: “No one is forcing me to wear my garments … It’s not about control, but covenant.” To her, outsiders may understandably see oppression, but inside the practice she experiences garments as something chosen as part of her relationship with God. “Receiving my endowment healed my soul. I was struggling with a deeply personal trial and the experience I had in the temple taught me that this life is just a blip of eternity. Just a blip. And wearing the garments is the least I can do to show my devotion and appreciation for Jesus Christ. He saved me when he didn’t need to and my garments remind me of that daily.”

Ultimately, garment conversations are so difficult because the garment often serves as a proxy for a woman’s larger experience in the Church. It is hard to separate one’s feelings about garments from one’s feelings about covenants, authority, womanhood, marriage, community, and belonging. Women who feel spiritually fed by the Church and at peace within its moral world are often more likely to experience the garment as meaningful rather than burdensome. Women who feel estranged from the Church or wounded within it may be more likely to experience the garment as a concrete manifestation of that pain. This does not make either experience unreal. It simply means that the garment is rarely just about the garment.

When women struggle with garments, Banks said, the first question should not be whether they simply need more faith. “First, I would ask someone struggling to wear their garments what is making it hard right now? … Are they struggling emotionally or feel like they lost some sense of identity? Are they feeling less feminine or less attractive? Are they dealing with a changing postpartum body or sensory issues? Are they struggling to understand the purpose of the garment? I would tell them garments aren’t meant to erase identity. They’re meant to anchor it. I would tell them, it’s ok that it feels different and that the Lord isn’t surprised by them feeling anything they are feeling.”

Likewise, Spafford said she would advise someone who does not have a good relationship with their garments, “Give it time. Garments are an adjustment, but if you go in with an open mind, an open heart, and a desire to follow God, you’ll figure it out a lot faster than if you fight it.”

That, perhaps, is what much of the current garment conversation lacks: not more exposure or more voyeurism, but more open mindedness. A woman who experiences garments as painful or burdensome should be taken seriously. So should a woman who experiences them as sacred, anchoring, protective, or joyful. And any fair attempt to understand Latter-day Saint women and their garments ought to make room for both.

The post The Trouble with Garment Talk appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

One of those things is not like the others.

Religion is, of course, not exempt from corruption or crime. But this combination can also create a temptation to read every religious controversy as though it were a mob file waiting to be cracked open.

That seems to be part of what happened in the Sun-Times’ two recent pieces on Wade Christofferson, the brother of President D. Todd Christofferson. This case is horrifying and newsworthy. The Justice Department says Wade Christofferson was federally charged in late 2025 with attempting to sexually exploit a minor and with coercion and enticement. Prosecutors allege repeated hands-on abuse of an Ohio child, plus separate exploitation and hands-on abuse involving a second child in Utah. The Sun-Times also reported that the alleged abuse underlying the current criminal case did not occur on church property and was not directly tied to church activities. That does not make the case less awful. But it does matter when deciding what kind of story this is.

The outline of the Church’s response, as reported by the Sun-Times itself, is not the outline of an established institutional cover-up. According to the Church’s statement, Wade Christofferson was excommunicated in the mid-1990s over abuse allegations, readmitted in 1997, and D. Todd Christofferson did not learn the specific nature of his brother’s abuse history until around 2020, through family disclosure. The Church also told the Sun-Times that when those older allegations were discussed, the adult victims did not want law enforcement involved, and that when President Christofferson later learned of a recent allegation involving a minor, he immediately reported it to legal authorities. Those facts may still leave room for criticism and painful moral questions. But they do not suggest corruption, cover-up, or scandal. The framing and analogies used by Herguth do the suggesting that the facts do not.

Herguth’s coverage did not mention the research suggesting that The Church of Jesus Christ’s policies, or the research showing their low sexual abuse rates compared to other youth organizations. But he did find time to mention LGBT+ issues and Joseph Smith’s polygamy.

In other words, his coverage treats The Church of Jesus Christ not as a major religious body that helps facilitate faith for millions around the world, but treats it like a mob that should be taken down no matter how relevant or supported the accusations.

But what else would you expect when you assign your organized crime journalist to your religion stories?

Latter-day Saints should not ask to be shielded from scrutiny when children are harmed. This case deserved coverage just as other crime beat stories do. But it also deserves journalistic discipline. The Sun-Times missed the boat here in a way that was predictable and avoidable if they had just assigned the correct reporter.

The post Media Framing in the Wade Christofferson Case appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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It is often easier to speak about the parts of life that unfold as we hoped. I could talk all day, every day about the many good things that have come to my life since my wife and I were married. But it can be difficult and awkward to talk about the things that go wrong. Although I love talking about my marriage, it is much more difficult for me to talk about another major life event—when I returned home early from my missionary service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after seven months. Speaking about my early return and everything associated with it just does not come easily. That difficulty comes largely from within: at some point, I came to see returning home early as a personal failure—something that should not have happened—and that belief made the subject unusually difficult to discuss.

But what if we took a different perspective? We often talk about all the wonderful personal growth that full-term returned missionaries had while serving, but why should growth that early-returned missionaries go through after they return be any different? Of course, not all outcomes are going to be positive. Coming home early from a mission is a very challenging experience that can set a soul on a catapulting track toward self-discovery and growth. As an early returner, and now as a Ph.D. student in psychology, I was able to get funding to do a study on what causes early returned missionaries to get on that track of growth. 

My Early Return and How It Led Me to This Study

Before turning to the study itself, some personal context may be helpful. These “positive outcomes” may not show up immediately, nor do I think it’s fair to expect oneself or a loved one to cope with such a dramatic life event so easily. In one of my favorite articles, “Bereavement: An Incomplete Rite of Passage,” the author explains that someone may never entirely “get over” the loss of a loved one — they may learn to generally deal with the loss, but their perception of the experience continually shifts and evolves. I feel the same way about my early mission return. When I came back, I was almost numb. A month later, I was feigning happiness. Two months later, I was questioning my faith. Three months later, I began searching for any identity other than “early-returned missionary” that I could affix to myself, yet each “identity” I attempted to develop was more fragile than the last. My grades at Brigham Young University also suffered.

There was only one other existing academic study on early-returned missionaries. I decided to follow its lead in interviewing each person in depth rather than using survey data. Although this process limited the number of people I could involve in the study, other studies on the use of interviews for niche topics find that researchers tend to reach a sufficient sample level at about 12 interviews. The prior study I mentioned included 12 early-returned male missionaries and had questions on mission experiences, early returns, and post-mission adjustment. I wanted to expand upon this research by including women and spending more time speaking about the identity development participants had gone through since their early return and their perceptions of their future. I also remained open to other salient themes that emerged from interviews. So, I recruited 20 early-returned missionaries to participate in this in-depth study — 9 men and 11 women. I would like to stress that this was a highly emotional experience for most people, and I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to interview such wonderful people about their experiences.

Identity transformation

First, every person mentioned feeling an identity transformation in some way. One participant shared:

Honestly, I think coming home from my mission is a really big thing. It really defined who I am as a person and my understanding of church member[s], because before I thought a church member had to be someone [who] grew up in the Church, that served a mission … things like that. Then I [understood] that a church member is someone that just tries their best to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. And so that really [helped] me shape and understand the members of the Church in a broader sense and not just the typical Utah stereotypes. So, I think coming home from my mission definitely helped with that.

This sentiment resonated strongly with my own experience. Even as a missionary, I had felt that coming home early would be a condemnation for the rest of my life, rendering me always some degree of broken in church settings. Only after going through this process did I realize that it truly is impossible for anyone other than Christ to live a fully “perfect” life, and that joy comes in embracing my imperfections and Christ’s role in my redemption.

Hope for the future

Another finding was that 19 of the 20 participants mentioned an optimistic view of how their futures would develop, given their experiences as early-returned missionaries. Another participant shared:

It’s interesting because I feel less … fearful for the future because I’m like, I already have had something that has literally broken me down to lower than I thought I could be at, and I came out of it. So, it kind of gives me more confidence that whatever comes, I know I’ve been through the process before of only having God to rely on.

Personally, I feel the same way — I know that I can do all things through Christ because I have already been at my lowest, and He has lifted me up again.

Peacemaking and reconciliation

A third commonality, shown in 19 of 20 interviews, was that of peacemaking or some form of reconciliation. One early-returned missionary wrote the following in her journal while on the plane home from her mission, “My Heavenly Father is so wise in giving me an experience like this. It forces me to actually fully trust in Him, which I do. This is one of the first experiences in my life that I can’t fully plan out first.”

This was one of my favorite responses. Having a framework of trusting in God built from strongly needing to do so earlier in life can be so beneficial to one’s future. I’m aware that challenges lie in the future, both for me and this early-returned missionary, but trusting in God first above all else has provided a foundation for all of my decisions that will always yield the best outcome — even if I can’t always see it right then.

Empathy

Despite increased empathy for others not being directly referenced on the list of interview questions, the topic came up in 16 of the 20 interviews. One person said, “Had I not seen myself [at] such a low point in my life, then I wouldn’t be able to reach out to others in a similar state.”

This finding in particular is something I would love to explore deeper in future research. How amazing is it that our imperfections and difficult experiences can actually lead us to become more like Christ? Before my early return, I was of the mindset that early-returned missionaries could generally have stayed out if they had just tried harder. Only after returning early despite having given every ounce of dedication and effort to the Lord did I realize that I’d had it all wrong: I feel for people who are in similarly devastating circumstances. I wish I’d had that quality beforehand, but the empathy I developed is one of my most prized possessions, and I thank God for giving it to me.

Faith

A majority (14 out of 20) specifically mentioned having stronger faith in God or religion as a result of their early return during their interviews, while 4 specifically mentioned having weaker faith as a result of their early return. This strong majority of increased faith is encouraging. One person referring to their early return said:

Because of that, the steps I took afterward, it made me read the scriptures harder than I’ve ever read in my life, and it’s made me love just light, seeing people’s light, and the light of Christ in them. I feel like I’m able to see it so easily and I appreciate it so much because I’ve seen the darkness.

Faith is a lifelong journey, and mine has grown as I’ve appreciated the outcomes of my difficulties more and more. It really is amazing to see others appreciate the goodness of Christ even more after having some experience with darkness.

Perceptual change over time

A final theme referenced by the majority of interviewees (12 of 20) was that of perceptual change. One interviewee said, “I guess with more time that passes, I see it in a different way… So, I think it’ll always be in the back of my mind, or it’ll always be something I reference, just because it was very, very starkly different from any other experience I have in my life.”

It is hard to run away from such a formative experience, and I don’t believe it’s best to act like it didn’t happen. As with all difficulties in life, we tend to see our challenges differently with time, as we learn more about God’s love for us as individuals.

What Many Early-Returned Missionaries Still Need

There were more themes that came from these interviews, some of which included negative experiences, but those tended to be highly individual. What did seem to be uniform throughout the interviews was that these people wanted someone to talk to about their experience, but often didn’t feel that they could. One interviewee said that he didn’t have a single person to talk about his early return with — no member of his family would entertain the topic, and he didn’t feel like he could bring it up to his friends. The sense of loneliness this young man exuded was palpable.

Those close to early-returned missionaries can offer an invaluable gift: patient love and a willingness to listen without judgment. Early returners are changing and actively growing, just like you are. We have come a long way as a church community in normalizing the idea that those who might deviate from the normative experience are fully worthy of love and support, but I believe we can be even better, and in attempting to do so, can more fully serve as Christ would.

The post When a Mission Ends Early appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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David Archuleta’s new book, Devout, begins as a moving and candid account of overcoming family trauma, toxic relationship dynamics, suicidal ideation, and an overbearing father determined to live vicariously through his talented son.

Which is why its ultimate conclusion is so tragic.

Because his understanding of God was that of a bludgeon instead of a balm, David decided that leaving the safety of the restored gospel was the best route for him and could be for others.

There’s no way for any of us to know what choice we would make in his shoes, so this isn’t about judging his heart. Thankfully, that’s God’s job. But it is about making righteous judgments about the morality of his choices and the impact his advocacy will have on others. As Latter-day Saints, how do we currently respond to stories like David’s, and how could we shift that response toward something more theologically sound and compassionate?

Patterns of Responding

There’s a predictable pattern that emerges whenever a prominent Latter-day Saint comes out as gay. This pattern typically plays out on both extremes of the political divide. One side uses the announcement as an excuse to ignore, belittle, or theologically dunk on anyone battling with LGBT+ concerns and questions. While that’s going on, the other side recognizes the individual’s sincere expression of pain and uses it to discourage faith-affirming, truth-filled ministering. 

As a sexual minority myself, I alternate between being engrossed with watching it unfold one day and being completely jaded by the drama the next. While our stories diverge in many ways, I do understand the feeling of watching a Church-wide debate that addresses deeply personal aspects of myself. It can be engaging, but it can also be frustrating. 

Both approaches come with a variety of intentions and goals—both good and bad—but both approaches also get us further from reconciliation, community, and truth. Let’s explore these patterns, examine how they fall short of discipleship, and uncover some possible alternatives.

Pattern 1: Apathy and Dismissal

One pattern of responding comes from a subset of Latter-day Saints who are deeply committed to their faith but struggle to embrace any attempts to address morally complex issues, especially LGBT+ issues. Either they take hard conversations about these topics as an attack on faith that requires an aggressive response, or they worry about saying the wrong thing and do not engage at all.

I have great sympathy for both of these worries. After seeing so many examples of church members using LGBT+ issues as a way to shoehorn progressive politics into the gospel, I find myself starting from a place of skepticism whenever I encounter the topic in a faith context. But seeing so many poor examples of addressing a topic doesn’t automatically justify avoiding the topic altogether.

When we encounter approaches like the one in David’s book, it can sometimes feel easy to justify taking a dismissive approach to his story or the story of others like him. Although David’s book begins as a respectful, candid exploration of his trauma and adversity, as it continues, it takes a rather sharp turn toward caricaturizing our beliefs and disparaging church leaders. This might make some inclined to stop considering David’s perspective altogether.

For example, when describing a conversation with Elder M. Russell Ballard where David was asking questions about homosexuality, Elder Ballard admits that we don’t have many revealed answers (a sentiment that other leaders have expressed): “Well, David, to be honest, I don’t know much about any of this. We don’t really have the answers on what to do about LGBT people. We’ve gone as brethren…and prayed about this, but we’ve never received any answers.” David’s conclusion to that answer was that Elder Ballard was admitting they were being dishonest about their role as prophets, seers, and revelators: “I was surprised by what Elder Ballard seemed to be admitting to me—that they didn’t actually know what God wanted or not. They were making guesses. But they were going to tell everyone the message was from God so they would just follow along without questioning them.”

The apathetic, dismissive approach falls short of discipleship by leaving a void. The more aggressive approach falls short of discipleship by pushing others away. Christ did neither. He purposefully sought out those who were rejected or engaging in behavior that was considered sinful or outside the norm. He approached the woman at the well, a social taboo given her Samaritan background, to minister to her. Even though he acknowledged she was living with a man who wasn’t her husband, he didn’t condemn her. Instead, he taught truth lovingly. He didn’t show apathy toward her choices, but he didn’t berate her either.

Being a disciple means engaging in these conversations with both courtesy and conviction. It means listening to the experiences of others with an open mind and a receptive heart. And it also means keeping truth tied to our efforts to minister.

Pattern 2: Discouraging True Ministry 

Another pattern of response comes from a broad group of Latter-day Saints who graft the modern approach to LGBT+ activism into their ministry. Some are politically involved and actively campaign for doctrine to change, while others take a more pacifist, you-do-you approach. When encountering stories like David’s, they rightly sympathize with the expressed pain, but their actions move beyond sympathy. Instead of anchoring their support in gospel truths, they remove many core components of the gospel from their attempts to connect and comfort. Instead of merely affirming the pain and lending an ear, they join in on disparaging our beliefs, prophets, or modern revelation. In the name of ministering, they share and leave supportive comments on social media posts that undermine doctrine. They discourage gospel discussion on topics like the eternal family and reject parts of the family proclamation.

David’s story commands compassion. His dad pushed him to participate in singing competitions, including American Idol, which he was ultimately grateful for, but which weren’t without their scars; he dealt with toxic family dynamics that split his family into factions; his parents divorced after years of turmoil; and, worst of all, he dealt with feelings of despair so deep that he considered taking his life. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for someone who has gone through as much as David.

But what makes situations like this even more tragic is when the conclusion of that pain is to feel ostracized from or to reject the very thing that will help them heal best: namely, Jesus Christ and the understanding of His atonement found in His restored church.

The most challenging dynamic is when church members feel pressured to participate in this type of support because of language or behavior that mirrors manipulation more than advocacy. For example, a common theme in Devout is David’s mention of the effect our beliefs about marriage and family had on him. In referencing a group of people that walked out of his Christmas concert in Delta, UT (where I lived for a couple of years), after he used it as an opportunity for political advocacy, he said, “If that made them uncomfortable, then fine. I want them to think about why it made them uncomfortable. Maybe because sharing their beliefs led someone like me to consider ending my life, and they just wanted me to pretend to be a happy straight Mormon whom they loved watching on Idol?” Hurt by their lack of enthusiasm for his advocacy, he used our beliefs as a bludgeon. He furthered the idea that if we continue to believe and express our beliefs, we’re going to push people to the brink of desperation. A claim that, thankfully, is contradicted by the data. 

This same dynamic plays out in David’s account of suicidal ideation. I have no doubt that David’s suicidal ideation was genuine. He explains it in detail, and while I’ve never experienced that myself, I could nearly feel the despair as I listened to the audiobook. What a horrible reality to experience. I’ve seen it firsthand in a close friend who tried multiple times to end his life, thankfully to no avail. 

Instead of lacing our support with modern symbols and ideas, we can anchor it in the teachings of Jesus Christ. And not just the parts of His message that, in isolation, could seem to fit in with LGBT+ activism. But the totality of His message—including the sacrifice, responsibility, and love that’s moored to God’s law.

A Christlike Pattern for Responding 

Growing up a sexual minority Latter-day Saint was confusing enough for me. I can’t imagine adding to it the type of mixed messaging and morally confused advocacy that’s so common in the way that members of the Church often respond to experiences of same-sex attraction today. I came out of adolescence with plenty of fears and insecurities, but just enough faith to move forward toward the life I wanted. For me, that led to a life in the Church, an amazing wife, and children of our own. I don’t know that I would’ve been so lucky if I grew up in the environment that exists today.

As disciples of Christ and members of His restored church, we have the duty to love David and people like him without reservation. We also have the duty to love those who will be negatively affected by the message he’s promulgating. Are we loving them by cheering David’s choice to leave the path? Are we loving them by insinuating or explicitly stating that the covenant path is oppressive or harmful? Or that modern prophets are standing in the way of God’s true will for gay people? 

We can’t let emotion decide what’s true. Suffering and hardship—like the kind he experienced—don’t automatically discredit a path. On the reverse, relief or elation—like what he’s described after removing gospel standards from his life—doesn’t automatically vindicate one. 

I doubt David will ever see this. But if he does, I hope he also considers why his advocacy might not be received well by all, not out of hatred for him, but out of concern for our children and loved ones.

More than any other social debate, LGBT+ issues have challenged the idea that we can love those who share a different perspective. And it’s no wonder, with how high the stakes are viewed on both sides. But I reject the idea that in order to love someone, we must either adopt or cheer on their choices. As the late and missed President Holland put it, “As near as I can tell, Christ never once withheld His love from anyone, but He also never once said to anyone, ‘Because I love you, you are exempt from keeping my commandments.’ We are tasked with trying to strike that same sensitive, demanding balance in our lives.”

My aim is to strike that balance. I hope you’ll join me in that goal. 

The post A Devout Sexual Minority’s Response to Archuleta’s “Devout” appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Elder Clark G. Gilbert was announced Thursday, February 12, 2026, as the newest member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His call fills the vacancy that followed the passing of President Jeffrey R. Holland, who died December 27 at age 85. 

Years before today’s announcement, Elder Gilbert sat in a devotional hall in Lima, Peru, surrounded by first‑generation university students enrolled through BYU–Pathway Worldwide. A visiting General Authority, Elder Carlos A. Godoy, looked over the room and urged those students to “involve the Lord in this process” of lifting their lives through education and discipleship. In a general conference address, Elder Gilbert later used that scene—and his now‑familiar “parable of the slope”—to teach that in the Lord’s calculus, our eternal trajectory matters more than our starting point: “In the Lord’s timing, it is not where we start but where we are headed that matters most.” That anecdote captures his blend of faith, data‑driven pragmatism and pastoral concern that has marked his ministry. 

Born in Oakland, California, in 1970 and raised in Arizona, Clark G. Gilbert served a mission in the Japan Kobe Mission before graduating in international relations from Brigham Young University. He earned a master’s in East Asian studies from Stanford University and a doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School, where he later joined the faculty in entrepreneurial management. He and his wife, Christine C. Gilbert (née Calder), are the parents of eight children. 

After returning to Church education in the mid‑2000s, Gilbert became associate academic vice president at BYU–Idaho, working on online learning and what would become the Pathway program. In 2009 he was appointed to lead Deseret Digital Media and soon after the Deseret News, where he orchestrated a widely watched digital transformation that separated fast‑growing digital operations from legacy print, refocused editorial priorities, and drew national notice from media analysts. 

The Church’s Board of Trustees named him the 16th president of BYU–Idaho in 2015. Two years later, in February 2017, the First Presidency announced BYU–Pathway Worldwide, a new global higher‑education organization for the Church; Gilbert was appointed its first president. In April 2021 he was sustained as a General Authority Seventy and that August began service as Commissioner of the Church Educational System (CES). 

Under Gilbert’s leadership, BYU–Pathway matured from a promising pilot into a large‑scale, global gateway for degree seekers who often balance study with work and family. In 2024, nearly 75,000 students in 180+ countries were served through BYU–Pathway; a Church announcement described the initiative’s subsequent rollout of three‑year, outcome‑based online bachelor’s degrees—offered by BYU–Idaho and Ensign College with NWCCU approval—as a way to reduce time and cost while preserving required learning outcomes. 

His scholarship and executive experience have also shaped his public profile beyond the Church. Gilbert co‑authored Dual Transformation (Harvard Business Review Press), a playbook for leading legacy institutions through disruption while simultaneously building new growth engines—an approach visible in his work at the Deseret News and later in CES reforms. 

In his recent ministry, Gilbert has emphasized a number of important themes. 

Divine potential and covenant identity. Elder Gilbert’s October 2021 general conference message, “Becoming More in Christ: The Parable of the Slope,” distilled a recurring theme: that conversion to Jesus Christ changes our “slope”—our trajectory—through grace, repentance and covenant discipleship, regardless of starting point. He illustrated that theology with stories from inner‑city youth in Boston and first‑generation learners in Peru, connecting pastoral care to measurable change. 

Education as religious responsibility. As CES commissioner, Elder Gilbert has argued that learning in the Church is inseparable from discipleship. In a June 2025 broadcast to tens of thousands of seminary, institute and Church‑sponsored higher‑education teachers, he reiterated CES’s mission to “prepare young people … to grow spiritually and become lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ,” signaling a continued push to align curriculum, hiring and student support with revealed priorities. 

BYU’s distinctive mission—“gospel methodology.” In August 2025, addressing the BYU University Conference, he urged faculty and staff to be “deliberate” in building a university that engages the world “without being defined by it,” emphasizing prophetic governance, mission‑fit hiring and the charge to employ “gospel methodology” in research and teaching. He highlighted the call—traced from President Spencer W. Kimball to modern apostles—to teach “truth with love” while preparing students for the Savior’s return. 

Home, family and the Savior. In September 2025, Elder and Sister Christine Gilbert taught BYU–Idaho students how to find Christ in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” underscoring a Christ‑centered view of family relationships and identity. That devotional, and similar messages across CES, reflect his conviction that doctrine, belonging and spiritual habits must be taught together. 

To journalists and Latter‑day Saint observers, Elder Gilbert’s selection reads as both pastoral and programmatic. His ministry has consistently fused access (lowering barriers to education across continents), alignment (anchoring institutions to revealed mission) and accountability (measuring outcomes without losing sight of grace). BYU–Pathway’s scale—tens of thousands of learners worldwide—and innovations like the three‑year degree show a willingness to rethink form while protecting substance. In media, peers noted the boldness of his digital “dual transformation,” separating the old and the new to let both flourish. Those same instincts—build the future while strengthening the present—have characterized his counsel to teachers and students: teach truth, elevate slopes, and center every effort on Jesus Christ. 

Colleagues describe Elder Gilbert as an exacting but pastoral leader—comfortable with spreadsheets and scripture alike. He met Christine at BYU; together they have raised eight children through moves that traced a calling‑heavy life from California to Massachusetts to Idaho and back to Utah. The biography pages maintained by the Church and BYU‑Pathway emphasize both his scholarship and his family‑first discipleship, a through‑line visible in his local service as a bishop, counselor in a stake presidency and Area Seventy before his 2021 call as a General Authority. 

Within the Church’s governing structure, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are “special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world.” When an apostle passes away, the President of the Church calls a replacement. His background in global education and institutional renewal suggests he will bring a data‑literate, prophetically aligned voice to a quorum that travels, teaches and administers worldwide.

The post Who is Clark Gilbert, Our New Apostle? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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New York Magazine’s The Cut published a long reported feature yesterday on Latter-day Saints, Utah, influencer culture, and the national appetite for “Mormon aesthetics.” Buried inside it is a serious thesis: Latter-day Saints helped shape key parts of modern online life—tech, genealogy, affiliate marketing, brand deals—and now a particular Utah-flavored influencer ecosystem has gone mainstream.

That subject deserves real cultural journalism. But the feature doesn’t treat Latter-day Saints seriously. It treats a living religious community as a cultural prop: a reliable source of weirdness, a costume rack of eccentric doctrines, and an acceptable target for winking contempt—then layers that tone over doctrinal errors and an over-reliance on critics with little balancing context.

Latter-day Saints do not need the approval of a lifestyle magazine to live out our faith, but there is something wrong when editorial culture still thinks it is acceptable, or even smart, to understand a religion through nothing but memes.

Criticism isn’t the Problem. Contempt Is.

The Church is not above scrutiny. If you want to examine PR strategy, media posture, investments, or Utah’s insular status dynamics, fine—do the work: show receipts and speak with informed believers, scholars, and, where relevant, critics. Latter-day Saints are so accustomed to sneers from legacy outlets that even serious critical coverage can feel like a relief. But this feature does not read like an investigation guided by intellectual curiosity. It reads like something else: a story that wants to be both reported analysis and group roast.

A Publication That Wants Credibility Can’t Cover Faith Like It’s a Freak Show

The clearest tell is the piece’s reliance on outsidery shorthand: familiar “Mormon jokes,” recycled late-night tropes, and online folklore presented as representative. That method is at best lazy, at worst socially corrosive. When a major publication treats the sacred life of its neighbors as a punchline, it is not merely “edgy.” It’s the normalization of contempt for a minority faith.

And to be blunt: there is a reason this kind of tone still shows up with Latter-day Saints more easily than it would with many other religious groups. The feature claims Latter-day Saints now carry real cultural cachet, yet writes as if anti-Mormon mockery is still culturally acceptable. That’s a sign that anti-Mormon mockery is still socially permitted in a way it wouldn’t be for many other minority faiths.

What the Piece Does Well

To be fair, the feature does some real reporting: It paints a vivid picture of a Utah influencer ecosystem; it traces how early Mormon mommy bloggers helped professionalize affiliate marketing and online commerce; it captures how “noncontroversial” family content became brand gold during the pandemic; it correctly notices that Utah’s particular blend of community networks, aspirational domesticity, and entrepreneurial hustle can be an accelerant for online business.

If you want to analyze a community that you believe has exported a powerful cultural product—“Mormon mom” influencer culture—then you also owe that community the baseline respect of accuracy and the basic fairness of being represented by more than its loudest detractors and its most sensational reality TV exports. 

Three Failures that Warrant Post-Publication Changes

The problems in the feature fall into three categories:

1. Factual inaccuracies
2. Statements included for the purpose of mocking Latter-day Saint belief
3. Unchallenged criticisms presented as if they are settled truth

These are not nitpicks. They go to the heart of whether the piece is journalism or polemic.

1) Factual inaccuracies: the kind that shouldn’t survive a competent edit

Some errors are interpretive. These are not. These are statements about what Latter-day Saints believe, teach, or do—asserted in the narrator’s voice—that are wrong, distorted, or presented with such sloppiness that readers are misled.

Here is a catalogue of the most obvious problems:

Doctrinal claims that are misstated or sensationalized

• The piece claims there is a doctrine of spending 1,000 years in “spirit prison.”
• It claims spirit prison is for the “least worthy,” implying a ranked afterlife prison system.
• It calls spirit prison a “temporary hell,” borrowing a loaded popular image that distorts how Latter-day Saints understand the spirit world.
• It states inaccurately that women cannot prophesy in the Church—erasing a long Latter-day Saint teaching about women’s spiritual authority and gifts.

“Worthiness” and church practice presented as caricature

• The piece asserts that for Latter-day Saint women, “worthiness” depends first and foremost on marriage and motherhood. That is an editorial line that reads powerful and condemnatory—and it is misleading. Latter-day Saint worthiness has formal, published standards and interviews; you can critique those standards without inventing new ones.
• It describes bishops’ interviews for youth and lists topics that are not included in the youth interview questions.

Internet folklore treated like representative practice

• The piece presents “soaking” as a way young Mormons can have sex without breaking chastity covenants, treating it like a real, meaningful “loophole” in lived religion. At best, it’s gossip; at worst, it’s a joke inserted because it’s humiliating.

Errors of basic terminology

• The feature confuses temple clothing worn in the temple with temple garments that are first received in the temple and then worn as an everyday religious commitment. That confusion is exactly the kind of thing that happens when a writer is covering a community from the outside and does not slow down to learn the vocabulary.

Sloppy claims about history and demographics

• The piece asserts that Black men could not hold leadership positions before 1978, when what it appears to mean (and should have precisely stated) is that Black men could not be ordained to the priesthood prior to 1978.
• It gives a Utah Latter-day Saint self-identification figure with no clear sourcing, and different from the most widely reported Pew Research figure.
• It reports an incorrect count of temples announced in 2025—again, a checkable detail that signals a lack of verification.
  

[Editor’s Note: New York Magazine has since corrected the final two errors, but declined to fix the other factual mistakes in the piece.]

These are not obscure theological disputes. An understanding reader might handwave these away as honest mistakes or minor points. But these are precisely the kinds of facts that journalists care about (or at least should). The errors suggest an editorial posture of stereotype-driven credulity: if a claim sounds weird enough, it is assumed true, and therefore not worth checking.

Religious reporting is challenging and detail-heavy, which is exactly why careful outlets verify doctrine and terminology with knowledgeable members of the faith and scholars—so the people being described can recognize themselves in the description.

In response to a request for comment about the article’s editorial process, Lauren Starke, head of communications for New York Magazine, replied, “Our writer consulted a wide range of sources with varying perspectives, and the story was carefully reported, edited, and fact-checked.” If so, these varying perspectives and careful reporting did not appear in the final draft of the article. It does not even appear that an in-house religion reporter was consulted. 

2) Mocking statements: the paper trail of contempt

Even if every factual claim were perfect, the piece would still have a problem: it repeatedly deploys editorial asides and framing choices that read as intended to belittle.

A story can have a voice without being cruel. This one is cruel in small, deliberate ways—the kind that accumulates until the reader understands the assignment: these people are weird; feel free to laugh.

Here is a catalogue of the clearest tone cues:

• Opening with a sexual pun as the entry point into “Mormon” Utah: a signal that this community will be handled with a wink, not with care.
• Describing Latter-day Saint beliefs as “zany” in the narrator’s voice—an adjective that invites ridicule rather than understanding.
• Referring to Mormons as “freaks” (even as part of a broader cultural arc). If you want to understand how a community went mainstream, you do not need to label them freakish. That’s not analysis; it’s sneering.
• Casually conflating Latter-day Saints with polygamous shows like “Big Love” or “Sister Wives.”
• Throwing out tangential doctrinal ideas with no purpose beyond making it appear silly, and in a way an average member would not recognize as “what we believe.”
• Bringing up “soaking” as a narrative beat—not because it’s crucial to the thesis, but because it’s humiliating and clickable.
• Referring to church reserves/investments as a “war chest” rather than using neutral language like “savings” or language Latter-day Saints would use themselves such as “rainy day fund.”
• Referring to the most serious source on the church as “a Happy Valley mom who posts educational content about the faith.” While Latter-day Saint women often view their roles as mothers as the most significant, the phrasing here is clearly meant to downplay her professional accomplishments and portray her as a frivolous home vlogger. 

None of this advances the core journalistic purpose. All of it advances a social purpose: to reassure the reader that they are part of the in-group that knows how to roll their eyes at the out-group.

A publication can choose that posture. But it shows they should not be considered a serious, fair-minded journalistic institution.

3) Unchallenged criticisms: letting the loudest critics define the subject

Professional journalists abide by The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Or at least they are supposed to. 

One of these codes is to diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing. The article fails on this front. According to internal sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the subject, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not brought in on the article until late in the process. New York Magazine did not diligently seek out other Latter-day Saint organizations who could respond to the criticisms in the article either. 

Reality television is not ethnography. It selects for spectacle, conflict, and extremity; it is not designed to be representative. Most readers understand that instinctively. But when the subject is Latter-day Saints, that genre literacy seems to vanish: the most sensational export becomes the interpretive key for the whole community.

The feature repeatedly gives critics a runway and does not bother to add context, corrections, or faithful perspectives—especially when describing sacred worship. In over 6,000 words, the article manages to include only a few active Latter-day Saints. Jasmin Rappleye, an experienced content creator with serious doctrinal literacy, was woefully underused as a source—she is given a brief quote about “publicity,” and responds to one allegation that influencers are paid directly by the Church (they’re not). Meanwhile The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and frequent church critic Heather Gay is featured in a quarter of the article. 

This is where the piece crosses from “critical” into “polemic”: it grants authority to the sharpest negative descriptions without doing the basic work of hearing from people who actually practice the faith. 

Examples from the article include:

• It repeats “magic underwear” without noting that Latter-day Saints find that label offensive and have asked others to stop using it—something a respectful publication would at least mention if not honor, even if it still determined that underclothing or a religious minority was a proper subject of journalism.
• It presents “community surveillance” as a defining cultural norm without giving ordinary faithful members a chance to explain how they experience community, accountability, and belonging, and push back on the narrative.
• It gives a critic’s description of temple worship designed to make sacred practice sound ridiculous without any counterweight from a believing voice who can explain what temple worship is intended to be and why it matters.
• It allows the Church to be inaccurately labeled “a theocracy”—a term that describes governments, not churches.

The only moment where balance appears is when the writer needed a denial for legal reasons (the clarification about the church paying influencers). Everything else—the theology, the worship, the moral life of millions of people—gets flattened into outsider narration and the commentary of critics.

That isn’t how you cover a religion. It’s how you prosecute one.

The Biggest Omission: Jesus Christ

One might not expect a cultural publication to take our faith in Jesus Christ seriously (though it did identify us correctly as Christians). But if you are writing a cultural article on why Latter-day Saints do what they do, and you do not talk about how we love Jesus Christ and try to follow His example, then you are not telling the full story.

The story turns a Christ-centered faith into an aesthetic, a machine, a brand strategy, and a collection of quirky doctrines for outsiders to gawk at. Readers come away thinking Latter-day Saint life is mainly about branding, surveillance, and monetization. You cannot tell the truth about Latter-day Saints while ignoring its core animating fact. That omission doesn’t just offend believers. It robs readers of the most important explanatory key to the lives of Latter-day Saints.

Why This Matters Beyond “Hurt Feelings”

Some editors respond to criticism like this with a shrug. They determine it is not their job to be the Church’s PR, or they believe that upsetting people means that their hard-hitting coverage landed. 

I am sorry to disappoint you. But it is also not your job to be the PR for Heather Gay, and an article about how a Hulu reality show made people buy sodas with syrup in them is not hard-hitting coverage.

The reason Latter-day Saints don’t like this kind of coverage is because it’s bad. 

And Latter-day Saints have a long history of being treated as something less than fully American—something exotic, suspect, culty, ridiculous, or dangerous. The article tries to say that is over, while making it very clear it is not. 

The story even gestures at historic persecution early on, then proceeds to participate in a softer modern form of the same impulse: they’re weird, so it’s fine to talk about them in a way you would never talk about others.

A fair feature can be sharp and unsparing and still meet standards of fairness and accuracy. If a publication wants to cover religions—especially minority religions it believes are culturally influential—it should meet the minimum bar:

• Get doctrine right or do not summarize doctrine.
• Avoid lazy stereotypes and derogatory tropes.
• Do not turn sacred practice into spectacle for clicks.
• Include the voices of sincere practitioners, not only critics and reality TV proxies.
• When you make an error, correct it publicly.

We invite New York Magazine, The Cut, and the author and editors of this article to make a public apology to Latter-day Saints, and if they don’t remove the article, to at least correct the inaccurate statements and remove the mockery. 

Moving forward, this can be an opportunity for reflection and improvement. 

One of the most frustrating parts of being part of a community that pop culture periodically discovers is the sense that you are never being spoken to—only spoken about. That your real life is invisible behind the versions of you that sell: the cartoon missionary, the “zany belief,” the “magic underwear,” the reality show scandal, the internet rumor, the aesthetic mood board.

Latter-day Saints are not asking to be shielded from critique. We are asking to be treated as fully human and honestly represented.

New York Magazine can do better. But “better” is not a vague aspiration. It starts with the basics: accuracy, fairness, and the humility to admit when a story uses a minority faith as a punchline.

The post The Ethics of Contempt appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Almost immediately, everyone did what everyone always does when “the files” drop: they hunted names, screenshotted fragments, stitched narratives together, and treated the internet like a jury box. But even major outlets covering the release have warned that the dump is chaotic, heavily redacted, and incomplete in ways that make confident conclusions difficult—while victims and advocates have criticized the process for exposing survivors while leaving many alleged enablers opaque.

And yet, even with all that noise, something clear has emerged for Latter-day Saints: this release was a stress test for decades of anti-Mormon conspiracy storytelling—and the conspiracy didn’t show up.

The test conspiracy-peddlers didn’t expect to fail

For a long time, a certain genre of anti-Mormon commentary has insisted on two overlapping claims:

1. That there is a uniquely large, uniquely hidden sexual abuse problem inside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, driven or protected from the top; and
2. That senior leaders are “globalists” quietly entangled in elite power networks—exactly the kind of networks epitomized by Epstein.

To be plain: there have been horrific abuse cases involving members of the Church, and those cases deserve honest reporting—not dismissal.

But the claim at issue here isn’t “abuse exists” (it does, tragically, in every sizable institution). The claim is that the Church’s top leadership is part of a shadowy sexual corruption on one side, global influence schemes on the other.

If that were true, this was the moment it should have detonated.

Instead, it didn’t.

A worldwide net—and nothing where critics promised a catch

The whole point of an Epstein document dump, in the public imagination, is that it catches people from “all kinds of quarters.” And it has: major coverage has focused on public figures, political operators, and celebrity relationships; the whole world is sifting and speculating.

So what about the Church? Where are the receipts that a certain corner of the internet has promised for years?

In the Utah-adjacent reporting that’s surfaced from the latest release, the most concrete “Mormon-world” items being discussed are mundane and geographically local—things like travel notes involving Park City, and paying a likely victim’s tuition for Brigham Young University–Idaho, and someone writing to Epstein mentioned Elder Dale G. Renlund was presenting at a health conference.

If you tell the world for decades that senior Church leaders are entangled in the very elite sexual machinery the Epstein story represents, then the largest public release of Epstein-related material should show it. Instead, it shows, at most, the kind of peripheral, often banal “Utah shows up in a massive dataset” traces you’d expect when you dump millions of pages spanning years and continents.

The “most damning” line—and why it still doesn’t land

Critics have understandably tried to elevate a single muddled excerpt—circulating online from an email labeled “EFTA02437604”—as the long-awaited smoking gun. In that excerpt, Epstein appears to write (in a typo-riddled sentence) about “wayne owens … from utah,” references “pons and cold fusion,” and includes the phrase “had [to/ot] meet with the head of the mormon church.”

Epstein suggested in 2009 that in 1989, when he argued against funding cold fusion research, he met with the “head of the mormon church,” presumably because such funding would have gone to Utah.  

No name for who he meant. The memory is twenty years old. Not even a claim that the meeting was desired by church leaders. And the topic was mundane decades before Epstein’s sexual abuse networks were known. 

I imagine some will attempt to squeeze continued criticism out of the line. But what we have been promised by the anti-Mormon conspiracists for years clearly did not exist. In fact, the Church and its leaders have remained so clear of Epstein and its associates that it should broadly be seen as a positive for their moral character. 

Why this should change the conversation—on both sides

If you’re a critic, this moment is an invitation to intellectual honesty. The Epstein files—massive, messy, and full of all kinds of names—were supposed to be the hammer blow. Instead, they have not delivered what the most confident anti-Mormon allegations promised.

And if you’re a believer, this moment is not an excuse for a victory lap. There are real victims who must remain the focus of care and attention. And remember, the data remains partial and contested. We shouldn’t claim this means more than it does. 

The Epstein files—whatever else one thinks about this sprawling, troubled, often infuriating release—have provided a rare public opportunity to compare conspiracy claims against a truly enormous body of material. And when it comes to the most sensational anti-Mormon accusations about senior Church leaders—secret globalist schemes, Epstein ties, sexual impropriety—the result is not “finally, we got them.” 

The result is: nothing. At the end of the day, behind all the sturm and drang was just normal people. 

That doesn’t make the Church above scrutiny. We all have much work to do in continuing to help victims in every corner. But perhaps we can now do it based on the truth. It should make everyone—members and critics alike—more reluctant to trade in insinuation when the moral stakes are this high.

The post The Conspiracy That Wasn’t appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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.

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National Religious Freedom Day stings a little this year.

The past few months have brought some painful experiences to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In September, a shooter and arsonist took the lives of four members of the Church and wounded several more in Michigan. Just hours before, the Church’s senior leader, President Russell M. Nelson, had passed away. In our mourning, many online expressed great sympathy and kindness. But sadly, some saw fit to focus on hurtful arguments that Latter-day Saints aren’t Christian—and in some cases, argued that we’re simply demonic.

Around the country this fall, explicit chants about “Mormons” echoed through several college football stadiums where BYU played, including at a game where survivors of the Michigan attack were in attendance. Although apologies followed, they claimed that the actions did not represent the university, and no actions were taken to help remedy the students’ animus. (I do note that some schools took intentional steps to prevent these hateful chants, which I gratefully applaud.)

All this in a time where Pew Research Center has reported a great irony: while Latter-day Saints are unique for feeling positive—and in most cases, very positive—toward all faith groups (and even atheists), they are, in return, disliked by nearly all those groups. (A shout-out to our Catholic friends, the only surveyed group to feel positively.)

The way that Latter-day Saints face religious hostility in America is unique. Commentator Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch said it well after the Michigan shooting: “I think extreme anti-Mormonism may be the most reactionary form of hatred in America” because it is “hating people solely for what they believe.” The hatred “is overwhelmingly theological and abstract” and does not appear to be inspired by “anything that Mormons”—or as we’d kindly suggest, Latter-day Saints—“actually, or even allegedly, do.” 

This peculiar theological hate often leads to a strange cultural tolerance for degrading Latter-day Saints in the public square in ways that would not be deemed permissible for other faiths. For all the talk in recent years of shedding hate and cultivating tolerance, love, and respect, it hasn’t seemed to apply in a widespread way to members of The Church of Jesus Christ. As Simran Jeet Singh of Religion News Service reported, “Hating Mormons remains socially permissible in modern America, just as it was nearly 200 years ago when they were forcibly displaced and almost exterminated.”

Yet despite the peculiar flavor of religious animus prevalent toward Latter-day Saints in America, I don’t think most of these cultural slights weigh too heavily on Latter-day Saints. Most of us have (perhaps sadly) grown accustomed to routine maligning by the media and the entertainment industry. We know we are countercultural—or in scriptural parlance, a “peculiar people.” The scriptures teach us to expect persecution and pay no heed to the world’s judgment. We focus on living our faith and finding joy in Christ, and we don’t spend much time fretting about this mistreatment.

But the violent attack—that was different. That pain pierced our historical consciousness, searing into our remembrance the violent persecution the early Saints in Missouri faced nearly two centuries ago. A much different context, yes. But the common thread? Hate-fueled violence toward Latter-day Saints.

I have followed religious freedom conditions around the world for nearly six years. My interest in advocating for the persecuted drove me to law school and inspires me to volunteer my free time to the cause. I frequently read horrific reports of mass atrocities, including war crimes and genocide. My heart grieves every time. Sometimes I become so consumed that the suffering persecuted are all I can think about.

And yet the Michigan attack shook me differently. Perhaps because Latter-day Saint meetings and chapels are so universal, and because I have spent nearly every Sunday of my life in them, I felt that I could visualize every moment of the attack as if I had been there. I could see the lay bishopric member at the stand when the truck drove into the building, the unassuming carpet on which the members would have run as they scattered, the hallways with gospel art where each member would have frantically searched for a safe way out. 

I wept for days after this attack. And I felt intense guilt that I do not weep every time I read of one. It is my firm conviction that every human life holds equal inherent worth and dignity. This belief is what drives me to advocate for the religious freedom of all people. And yet I suppose we are all most emotionally affected by what we are most intimately connected to. 

But now I no longer view my emotional response to my own faith’s suffering with shame. Instead, I see it as an impetus for me to better bear the burdens and “mourn with those that mourn” outside of my faith community in the wake of religious violence. Having briefly tasted, if only from a distance, the sting of religious violence aimed at my own faith community, I can more empathetically engage with others who have endured it too.

And sadly, many have. Just a month before the Michigan attack, an attacker opened fire on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, killing two children. In June, a heavily armed man opened fire on CrossPointe Community Church in Michigan and was fatally shot. In May, a Jewish couple who worked for the Israeli embassy was shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Similar attacks have happened to various people of faith and houses of worship across the country in recent years.

And for minority faith groups in America, religious persecution in the form of hate crimes, even if not violent, is too often a real and pervasive part of their experience. Of the 3,096 hate crimes motivated solely by religious bias in 2024, the three most affected groups were minority faith groups: about 69 percent of the religious hate crimes were targeted at Jews, 9.3 percent were targeted at Muslims, and 4.9 percent were targeted at Sikhs.

Antisemitism in the United States is surging. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported the highest total number of antisemitic incidents since it began tracking data in 1979. 77 percent of Jews have reported feeling less safe in the U.S. since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, according to a report by the American Jewish Committee. And the same report indicated that more than half of U.S. Jews avoided a behavior in 2024 due to fears of antisemitism. 

Islamophobia is also increasing significantly. 70 percent of Muslims have reported facing increased discrimination in American society since the Hamas–Israel War began. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents in 2024 since the group began compiling data in 1996. 

These trends are not limited to the United States. Just days after the Michigan attack on The Church of Jesus Christ, a Manchester synagogue was attacked during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The Manchester attack had startling similarities to the one in Michigan: the attacker drove a vehicle toward the sacred space (though this time, not into it), then exited in an attempt to violently attack the worshippers. 

As Latter-day Saints engage in dialogue about religious persecution—which I fully encourage—we must make sure we understand the broader context of religious persecution and hostility in the U.S. and abroad. As we join the conversation, we must neither understate or overstate our own case. Yes, we are often treated in highly unusual ways, particularly culturally, that should be adamantly condemned. But in so many ways, we fare much better than others in our acceptance, freedom, and safety in society. We are not persecuted the way we were in the early days of the Church. We are not victims of atrocities like ethnic cleansing or genocide because of our faith ties. Many of our fellow human beings are not so lucky.

If we plan to advocate for ourselves, we should first become better aware of the other faith groups experiencing religious hostility and persecution. We should realize that we do not carry the same fear that many Sikhs or Muslims or Jews carry when they leave their homes dressed in religious apparel. We do not know what it is like to have an ethnic-religious identity, with both aspects triggering acts of discrimination against us. We should try to better understand the experiences of our brothers and sisters for whom these forms of persecution are daily realities. And we should understand hostility toward or persecution of Latter-day Saints in this broader context. 

If we wish to advocate for ourselves, there is always the question of whether to turn the other cheek or to defend a righteous cause. In my own view, while we must seek to turn the other cheek and achieve personal reconciliation, and we must forgive those who have persecuted us, scripture teaches it can be righteous to advocate for ourselves as a group when we are persecuted as a faith community (so long as we did not provoke the offense). Restoration teaching adds that this advocacy should be peaceful.

In fact, I think it is important for members to peacefully and respectfully advocate for our faith community when we experience persecution: first, because it is just, and second, because it signals the standard of how we believe all human beings and their religious beliefs should be treated. If we don’t speak up about cultural desecration of the Book of Mormon in a musical, are we implying it’s okay to desecrate the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), the Qu’ran, or the Bible? If we imply that hate speech against us is okay, do we think it’s okay against Buddhists, Sikhs, or evangelical Christians? Would we stand for explicit chants against them at sporting events or vile tweets against them on X in the wake of religious violence aimed at their communities? 

Even if you don’t want to deal with the question of whether self-advocacy is righteous, one thing is surely just: advocating for the religious freedom of others. In so doing, we honor the human dignity—the inherent, unchangeable, equal worth—of every person. We recognize that to be human is to have a conscience, and that from this follows the corollary human right to follow it. We emphasize that all human beings deserve to be treated with kindness, respect, and love—no matter what aspects contribute to their identities.

The Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable was the unlikely advocate and rescuer for the injured Jewish man. Jews viewed Samaritans as religiously impure and heretical. Samaritans saw Jews as arrogant and wrong. And yet, the Samaritan man was the one who both noticed the wounded Jewish man and addressed his needs. Laying aside the tension between their communities and perhaps their inabilities to fully understand each other, the Samaritan had compassion for the Jewish man. However different from himself, the Samaritan saw the humanity in the other, “shewed mercy,” and helped the broken Jewish man heal from what he had so cruelly been a victim of. The Jewish man was not the Samaritan man’s enemy, but his neighbor and his brother.

This is our example. We must set aside our differences to advocate for the religious freedom of other faith groups. We may not fully understand them, and they may not understand us. Sometimes, there may even be significant theological rifts or cultural tensions between us, including harsh words uttered. But we can choose to see the humanity in one another and to stand for it.

So, on this National Religious Freedom Day, when persecution strikes my faith group, I commit to peacefully but firmly condemn it. And when it strikes others, I will condemn it too—perhaps even more vigorously. 

The post Latter-day Saints Must Stand With the Religiously Persecuted appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Few Church leaders have been as well-liked as President Holland, who recently passed away at age 85. He had a talent for connecting with nearly everyone: old and young, rich and poor, academic and practical, believers and skeptics, people within the Church and people outside of the Church, and just about everyone else.

This is why I think his 2021 talk, “The Second Half of the Second Century at Brigham Young University,” is particularly noteworthy. In this talk, President Holland defended the unique mission of Brigham Young University (BYU) and said the University should be willing to forgo some “professional affiliations and certifications” rather than renege on its core commitments. The talk attracted particular ire for discussing LGBTQ issues and suggesting that BYU professors provide “musket fire” in favor of the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality.

I have discussed President Holland’s talk in more detail elsewhere, but what I want to focus on here is what the talk says about his character. President Holland likely knew that his talk would be unpopular. He knew that many people would (falsely) accuse him of hatred and insensitivity. He knew that his standing as the apostle that everyone liked, as a leader that everyone could relate to, would be seriously threatened.

It’s also noteworthy that President Holland gave this talk at the peak of Progressive confidence about issues related to gender and sexuality. The Church’s views were castigated as false and harmful; members of the Church were constantly told that they were on the “wrong side of history” for holding to the views expressed in The Family: A Proclamation to the World. At a moment when the forces of political, social, and academic respectability were all blowing in the opposite direction, President Holland was willing to stand up and be counted as someone who was committed to the Church’s teachings.

Of course, Church leaders (as well as the rest of us) are not supposed to care about what the world thinks of us. We are repeatedly warned in scriptures about loving the praise of men more than the praise of God. Popularity can become an idol, distracting and deflecting us from commitment to God. But Church leaders are human, and humans like to be liked. President Holland knew that this talk would put his reputation and public standing in jeopardy. He gave the talk anyway.

Jesus taught: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). He also taught: “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26). Though a message of peace, the gospel is also “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence” (1 Peter 2:8) to those who do not believe. Perhaps by design, the gospel can never be made completely respectable by worldly standards.

To me, President Holland’s 2021 talk demonstrated his ultimate allegiance. He was willing to give up his worldly popularity and respectability to stay true to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I believe he gave the talk with great eloquence and sensitivity, but that is not how many people received it. He was criticized by people within and without the Church; even some national publications took notice of the talk and criticized it. But this was a price he was willing to pay. Perhaps there is not better way to end than with President Holland’s own words about courageously defending the gospel:

“Be strong. Live the gospel faithfully even if others around you don’t live it at all. Defend your beliefs with courtesy and with compassion, but defend them . . . In courageously pursuing such a course, you will forge unshakable faith, you will find safety against ill winds that blow, even shafts in the whirlwind, and you will feel the rock-like strength of our Redeemer, upon whom if you build your unflagging discipleship, you cannot fall.”

The post Popularity Is a Terrible God—and Jeffrey R. Holland Knew It appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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

Lessons From Other Institutions’ Hard Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Clear Pathways to Civil Authorities and Outside Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Mandatory, Role‑Specific Training and Renewal

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

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

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

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

4) Centralized Records and Portability of Warnings

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

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

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

5)Survivor Support and Redress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are We Actually Doing Poorly?

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

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

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

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

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Seeing Critics of the Church with a Pure Love

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

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

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

#SurvivingMormonism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Bigotries, New Veneers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put bluntly: the villain economy found a familiar mask. 

Ministering to Deep and Unmet Needs

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from Our “Enemies”

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

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

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

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

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

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