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Imagine you are a first-century Jew at the time of Jesus. You saw the famed Rabbi of Galilee perform miracles. He multiplied food and raised the dead, miracles echoing Elijah and Elisha. You heard him teach doctrines that built upon the law of Moses, but he drew out principles that made the law much more challenging. You saw him ride into Jerusalem on a colt, cleanse the temple, and teach that he was not only the Messiah, but Deity himself. 

And then he was betrayed by his friend and follower, Judas (known in Hebrew as Judah), the namesake of his own people. And rather than take his place on the political throne of Israel, you witnessed this Son of David condemned by Jew and Gentile alike, then tormented, crucified, and placed in a tomb. 

What would you expect next if your only source of reference was the Hebrew Bible? Would you have recognized Jesus of Nazareth in the scriptures you studied? Could you have anticipated from scripture that this self-proclaimed Messiah would miraculously come back to life—forever?

As Easter approaches, perhaps we can feel more charity and empathy for the disciples’ confusion following Christ’s death. Their source of scripture was the Hebrew Bible, which we call the Old Testament. While the Nephites and potentially some ancient Israelites had explicit teachings about the Atonement and Resurrection, the Jews in Jesus’ day faced an open question. 

Despite being longer than the rest of the Latter-day Saint canon combined, the Old Testament has fewer explicit references to “the fundamental principles of our religion”.

Yet while the Old Testament speaks less explicitly of Christ, shadows of His Atonement and Resurrection can be found in its pages. Some teachings of Christ may have been intentionally veiled in rituals and prophetic language. But just as the temple veil was rent at Jesus’s death, making clear that the way back to God was through Christ, the Spirit can lift the veil from our understanding, helping us see that the Easter message is implicit in the Old Testament’s pages. 

Why Isn’t the Resurrection Clearly Taught in the Old Testament?

Restoration scripture makes clear what the Old Testament does not: ancient prophets like Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Isaiah, and others knew of Christ’s mission to some degree. This makes the relative absence of discussion about Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection in the Old Testament puzzling. As I see it, scripture (particularly the Book of Mormon) provides three potential explanations. 

The first is that revelation occurs gradually: “line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little.” It may be that knowledge of Christ’s atonement, death, and resurrection was originally sparse, leading to less emphasis in earlier scripture. But our teachings about ancient prophets, if taken literally, are too clear about prophets’ knowledge of Christ’s atonement and resurrection for these doctrines to be considered only seedlings. This must be supplemented by other explanations.

The second possibility is that teachings of a suffering “Anointed One” were rejected, lost, or censored by those who compiled the texts. For example, the Book of Mormon cites Israelite prophets like Zenos, Zenock, and Neum—who aren’t in our canon elsewhere—that taught of Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, and burial. These prophets were stoned and cast out, and perhaps their teachings were likewise discarded.

Nephi also states that the Bible was altered before its international distribution: “they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious.” The editing and authorship history of the Old Testament is complex, and some books could have been crafted by an editor who did not know of or believe in Christ, despite prophets having taught of Him. 

A third possibility is that Old Testament teachings of Christ were veiled to the people by God’s prophets, or even veiled to prophets by God Himself, because of ancient Israel’s spiritual unpreparedness, or for some other divine purpose. Paul spoke of a “veil” that obscures understanding “in the reading of the old testament,” but that this “veil is done away in Christ.” The veiled message Paul speaks of likely came by giving Israel rituals that would resemble Christ’s sacrifice, as well as giving them sacred texts that veiled the mission of Christ or that could point to Him as a secondary, or higher, meaning. The true nature of Christ’s mission could only be gleaned by revelation.

Taken together, these explanations allow us to admit that explicit Old Testament references to Christ are sparse, but that Christ’s mission can still be found through the Spirit’s tutelage. Jesus taught that “the scriptures” of his day—meaning the Old Testament—“are they which testify of me” and commanded his audience to “search” them. With that imperative, I turn now to veiled Easter teachings of Christ found in the Old Testament for those with “eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

Ancient Israelite Prophecy of Christ’s Sacrifice

Abinadi, teaching about the Messiah’s divinity, condescension, atonement, and resurrection, claimed that “all the prophets who have prophesied ever since the world began [have] spoken more or less concerning these things.” Perhaps some of this teaching was censored, but much of it may have been inspired thematic and narrative parallels in scripture that constituted “more or less” a prophecy. As Nephi said, “all things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of him,” including parallels in sacred history, poetry, and even prophecies with other primary meanings. Jacob added a second witness that the Israelite scriptures “truly testify of Christ” and “that none of the prophets have written, nor prophesied, save they have spoken concerning this Christ.”

Christ’s atoning sacrifice in Gethsemane and on the cross at Calvary is mirrored in some Old Testament narratives. In the Akedah, God commands Abraham to bind and then offer a burnt sacrifice of “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.” This excruciating story, rife with philosophical complexity, does not thoroughly explain itself, but Jacob saw it as typifying Heavenly Father’s offering of His Only Begotten Son for our sins. In further parallels to Christ, Isaac rode a donkey to Mount Moriah, just as Christ rode a donkey for his triumphal entry to Jerusalem, and Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice to its site, just as Christ carried a wooden cross to Golgotha. When Isaac asked his father where the offering was, Abraham replied, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” Isaac was miraculously delivered, and a ram in the thicket was provided as a substitute, symbolizing how the Lamb of God would ultimately sacrifice in our place. 

In another example reminiscent of the crucifixion and resurrection, Moses is commanded to raise up a brass “serpent and set it upon a pole” for the Israelites to look upon for healing from fatal snake bites. As with the story of the Akedah, the Christian significance of the story is never explained in the Old Testament, but Christ Himself and Book of Mormon prophets interpret it as a veiled symbol of Jesus raised upon a cross to save us by having the faith to look to Him. 

Beyond narrative mirroring, Christ’s mission seems to be directly or indirectly described in isolated phrases and references. New Testament authors like Matthew felt comfortable declaring that Old Testament passages were “fulfilled” when they provided an inspired parallel, even if the context of the passage doesn’t indicate at all that it is messianic prophecy. I argue that we can generally feel comfortable accepting these parallels as well if we acknowledge that there might be a different primary meaning. 

Language echoing Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion is also scattered across the Psalms and connects Christ to his royal ancestor David. The Psalmist(s) describes betrayal by a “familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread”; being despised, mocked, and taunted about how “He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him”; being surrounded by “the wicked,” after which “they pierced my hands and my feet”; being given “vinegar to drink”; crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; having his clothing divided among a crowd; and being “poured out like water.” The context of some of these psalms suggests that the entire psalms were not necessarily messianic prophecy, yet Gospel authors understood them as being strongly implicated, and Psalm 22 in particular bears stunningly similar parallels.

Finally, there were prophets whose writings could be fairly classified as more direct prophecies of Christ’s sacrifice, most notably Isaiah. In particular, two of Isaiah’s four “Servant Songs” testify strongly of Christ, even if they applied to multiple people (the unnamed servant has variously been understood to be Jesus, Israel, Isaiah, Cyrus, and others). One of the Songs speaks of an unnamed servant who listened to God without rebelling, who gave his “back to the smiters,” and who did not hide his face “from shame and spitting.”

Isaiah’s fourth Servant Song, even though contested in interpretation, is by far the most reminiscent passage in the Old Testament of Christ’s atonement. It describes a lowly “servant” of God with “marred” appearance who has “no form nor comeliness [and] no beauty that we should desire him,” and who is “despised and rejected of man; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Although many prophets have been unpopular, the affliction this servant bears is for our griefs, our sorrows, our transgressions, and “the iniquity of us all.” The servant is given as an atoning “offering for sin” by which he will “justify many” and make “intercession for the transgressors.” In so doing he was “cut off out of the land of the living,” “made his grave with the wicked,” and “poured out his soul unto death.” And despite his death, he will be “exalted and extolled, and be very high,” will “prolong his days,” will “see his seed,” and will be divided “a portion with the great [and] spoil with the strong.” Even if there were other applications of this prophecy, it testifies beautifully of Christ’s mission and is perhaps the rarest gem of prophecy of Christ in the Old Testament.

Sacrifice 

In addition to prophecies,  the Old Testament practice of sacrifice foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice for us all. 

The Old Testament speaks openly of a victorious, reigning Messiah, but says little of a Messiah who suffers for sins. But that changes if we learn to see ancient animal sacrifice as a shadow of “that great and last sacrifice” that would satisfy the demands of justice for our sins. 

Though animal sacrifice is as old as Adam, the books of Moses codified its intricacies. With five distinct offerings—burnt offerings, peace (well-being) offerings, sin offerings, trespass offerings, and meat (grain) offerings—the Mosaic rules for sacrifice were complex. The sacrifices had mixed and overlapping purposes: atonement or expiation of sin, removal of ritual impurity, gratitude, memorial, obedience, or petition for deliverance. Animals of both genders and even non-animals were used for many offerings, but all offerings were food items, often with symbolically pleasing smells. Sometimes the offeror ate the sacrifice, other times the priests ate it, and burnt offerings were simply burnt for God.

Some special sacrifices were associated with holy days, such as the Day of Atonement or Passover, and some were performed on behalf of all of God’s people. The Passover sacrifice, in particular, involved the slaughter of a male lamb, whose blood saved the firstborn sons of Israel. And whatever other sacrifices were given, all firstborn animals were to be given to the Lord. 

We can see how these many purposes of sacrifice map onto Christ’s atonement and our own personal sacrifices. We see similarities to Christ describing himself as food and drink that must be ritually consumed by others. We especially connect the image of a male lamb of Passover to the Christian message because scripture calls Jesus the Lamb of God. In general, though, the Christian meaning of these sacrifices was hidden at the time. It is not clear from Leviticus that the Israelites were anticipating a final sacrifice. Leviticus merely taught the underlying principle that blood represents the sacredness of life, and “it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” 

As we take the sacrament this Easter season, we symbolically consume Christ’s body—just as Israelites did with animal sacrifice—and are divinely fed. We also promise to give up our sins. As the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught, “Real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting it be consumed.” We can also follow Christ’s example and the other purposes of sacrifice in sacrificing our own time and wills, obeying God, expressing gratitude, asking God for what we need, and being “an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, wellpleasing to God.” 

The Law of Moses

In addition to its sacrifice requirements, the Law of Moses foreshadowed Christ, who later declared not only that he fulfilled the law but that “I am the law.” As the Book of Hebrews teaches, “the law [of Moses] ha[s] a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things.” The law seemed to require revelation to see Christ shadowed in it. Abinadi and Benjamin both taught that the Israelites “did not all understand the law,” not because of low intellect, but because they “hardened their hearts.” This was certainly true of Sherem, who claimed Jacob was wrongly “converting” the law of Moses into worship of Christ. 

Nephite prophets saw Mosaic Law as creating a typological framework for an ultimate self-sacrifice to atone for all sins. Nephi taught that “for this end hath the law of Moses been given”: “proving unto my people the truth of the coming of Christ.” Abinadi taught that it was “a shadow of those things which are to come.” Amulek testified that “the whole meaning of the law, every whit” was to point to “that great and last sacrifice” of “the Son of God, yea, infinite and eternal.” We, too, can acknowledge the complexity of the Law of Moses while affirming that it served as a type and shadow of Christ’s atonement to ancient Israelites.

The Old Testament and Resurrection

As for its teachings about the resurrection specifically, the Old Testament shows a plurality of views about the afterlife. Resurrection isn’t clearly taught in many of its books, especially the earlier ones. Jews in the days of Jesus were divided on whether it occurred. Pharisees, who accepted the later prophetic texts, believed in resurrection; Sadducees, who held only to the older books of Moses, did not. Zoramites like Zeezrom and Antionah, who demonstrate knowledge of the early Hebrew Bible books, are also puzzled by references to the resurrection. 

The Book of Daniel declares that “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” But that book falls relatively late in the Old Testament, and the clarity of the doctrine is obscured as we move back in time—perhaps another veiled or censored teaching. Though there is some uncertainty about what he meant, Isaiah prophesied that our God “will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces;” and “O Lord. . . Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body [or “together their bodies”] shall they arise.”

Other than these passages, there are a few resurrection passages that are debated but possibly veiled or which might have a secondary meaning. Ezekiel prophesied that a valley of dry bones will come to life as normal people, primarily as a metaphor for the restoration of Israel, but perhaps also suggesting the possibility of resurrection. The Hebrew grammar is jumbled, but Job seems to say, with words not in Hebrew italicized, “though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet [from] my flesh shall I see God.” 

With these powerful images of resurrection available to him, Jesus, surprisingly, does not cite Daniel, Ezekiel, or Job when prophesying of his own resurrection. Instead, Jesus sees the most relevance in the story of Jonah (or Jonas in Greek): “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”  We don’t instinctively think of Jonah being swallowed by a “great fish” as death, but Jonah’s prayer from inside the fish uses the language of death: “out of the belly of hell [Sheol] cried I, and thou heardest my voice.” He stayed there for three days before his deliverance.

Perhaps more importantly, God is the one who breathes life into humanity, and he saves Israel from death and bondage repeatedly. The Exodus is just one beautiful example of God delivering his people from bondage—a frequent metaphor for death in scripture. And God shows himself in the Old Testament to be a God of miracles. The same omnipotence that would allow God to part the Red Sea, stop the sun in the sky, shake the earth, obliterate cities, turn back armies, bring springs to life, and deliver his people is the same power required to perform the most stunning of all miracles: to raise from the dead.  

Christ is the Meaning

Finding Christ in the Old Testament happens the same way we develop a testimony of Christ in the first place. Nephi tells us that a key to understanding Isaiah, for example, is the “spirit of prophecy”—that is, the “testimony of Jesus” obtained by revelation. If we encounter Christ’s character in the course of our study, we have found him in the text. Peter, who recognized Christ as the promised Messiah, told Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” not because it was a logical imperative in scripture, but because our “Father which is in heaven” had “revealed it unto [him].” The Lord’s counsel for studying the Apocrypha also applies to the Old Testament: “whoso is enlightened by the Spirit shall obtain benefit therefrom; And whoso receiveth not by the Spirit, cannot be benefited.” 

Christ is indeed “in all things, and is through all things, and is round about all things.” Like the first-century Jews who needed the Spirit to understand Christ in their scripture, we, too, can seek the Spirit’s help in unveiling Christ in every part of our lives, however hidden He may seem. As we search the scriptures and apply “our hearts to understanding,” we can come to see what Jesus taught His apostles: that the Old Testament scriptures “are they which testify of me.”

As Christ “yielded up the ghost” on Calvary, “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom,” a symbol of overcoming the barriers to God’s presence under the old covenant. As the Book of Hebrews teaches, we can now “enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus . . . through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.” Just as the veil in the temple symbolized Christ’s broken body, the veil of the Old Testament is also rent by Christ Himself through revelation. 

Perhaps we can now better understand, with the scarcity of explicit references to Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, how confused Christ’s disciples must have been immediately after his death. For those on the road to Emmaus, this confusion was dispelled when Jesus, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets . . . expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” and why he “ought . . . to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory.” He was the veiled meaning all along.

The post Unveiling Christ this Easter appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

I understand this impulse. I share the alarm.

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

Liberty as a Familiar Alternative

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

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

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

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

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

Liberty in God’s Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Risks of Reaching for State Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Path Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Attack dog. Enforcer. Culture warrior. These labels and more have been used to describe Elder Clark G. Gilbert, newly called apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has also been described as a “high-profile defender of doctrinal orthodoxy” and a proponent of “retrenchment.”

What’s all the fuss about? As Commissioner of Church Education, Elder Gilbert is accused of instituting a variety of measures to ensure that professors at BYU support the doctrine of the Church that pays their salaries—specifically on issues related to marriage, family, and gender. According to some, these measures have ushered in a culture of fear among faculty who have reservations about Church doctrine or policy. Other concerns have been mentioned, but this seems to be the heart of the issue.

Before I say a few words in defense of Elder Gilbert, I want to take a moment and recognize the difficult space that many Latter-day Saint scholars inhabit. The Church’s views on family, sexuality, and gender are (to put it gently) not popular in academia. Despite stated aspirations to diversity and inclusivity, there isn’t much room in academia for researchers who vocally promote the Church’s positions on family life. I have seen this first-hand in my nearly two decades in academic life. Those who support marriage as the union of a man and a woman and claim that sexual relations should only happen in such marriages are castigated as out of touch, prudish, ignorant, hateful, and bigoted. It’s hard to get along in your profession when your colleagues view you as little better than a racist.

There are intellectual resources to defend the Church’s positions on these matters (more on this below), but the opposition to such arguments is so loud, so confident, and so strident that often it’s easier to just keep quiet. Latter-day Saint scholars are generally trained in the same graduate programs, go to the same academic conferences, and are under the same pressure to publish in top journals as scholars who don’t belong to the Church. It’s hard to not imbibe the norms, expectations, assumptions, and conclusions of the culture, including revisionist views about gender, sexuality, and family. The implicit and explicit pressure to fall in line with the prevailing orthodoxy can be suffocating. Even Latter-day Saint scholars who want to resist the prevailing academic culture on these issues can feel bewildered about how to do so. 

In an environment where so much of your professional success is influenced or determined by people who are hostile to the Church’s views, I can see why many people would feel concerned about Elder Gilbert’s efforts to align the faculty with the doctrine of the Church.

At the same time, I, like many other faculty and students, choose to study at BYU precisely because of its doctrine. I want to be at a university where I can “seek learning, by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). As Elder Gilbert has emphasized many times, institutional drift in academia is real, and many universities that start with religious aspirations end up abandoning them later. It’s tempting to say that this is the standard arc for religious universities in the United States. Believing that BYU’s distinctive religious heritage can be maintained without intentional efforts to preserve it is naive.

But perhaps it is not possible to run a quality university that is committed to religious beliefs? Indeed, many of the criticisms of Elder Gilbert presuppose that it is inherently wrong to try to get professors to align with Church teachings. The critique takes two forms: first, that any attempt to align (or more darkly, “impose”) views about any topic at a university is wrong; and second, that it is wrong for BYU to expect faculty to support the Church’s doctrine on marriage, family, and gender.

The first view is widespread but breaks down upon inspection. As I have explained in detail, it is neither possible nor desirable for a university to be completely devoid of commitments. Without well-known and agreed-upon standards, university life would descend into a cacophony of competing claims, none of which could be evaluated as better than any of the others. The scholarly practice of peer review presupposes that practitioners in the discipline know what counts as “legitimate” scholarship and can reject submissions that do not meet disciplinary standards. (A more blatant example of institutional gatekeeping would be difficult to imagine.) As I wrote in the previously mentioned article,

The point of academic study is to produce knowledge. This search is a winnowing process, as academic ‘disciplines’ (note the word) seek to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of unsupported opinion and bias. Good scholars are committed to getting it right, which presupposes that truth is real and knowledge is possible, which in turn is premised on a host of philosophical and other presuppositions. Academic freedom cannot mean the freedom to be supported in whatever one believes; rather, it is the freedom to seek truth, which means being accountable to reality.

It may come as a surprise to some readers, but some people actually want to go to a university that includes religious beliefs among its commitments (see Elder Gilbert’s recent article on this in The Chronicle of Higher Education). A recent essay by prominent Catholic sociologist Christian Smith explains that he chose to teach and research at Notre Dame because he wanted more direct engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition. But after 20 years at Notre Dame, Smith decided to leave because (in his view) the university was not living up to its potential. He writes: “When I came to Notre Dame, I believed the university was serious about its Catholic mission. I tried to make my contribution, I think with some success. But I also saw much of the institution absorbed by other interests that, in my view, were often irrelevant to or at odds with the Catholic mission.” I don’t have enough information to know if he is right about Notre Dame, but many people want something other than the standard secular university experience. In general, the world is enriched, not diminished, by religious universities that pursue truth in a distinctive way.

To be clear, as Commissioner of Church Education, Elder Gilbert wasn’t some rogue actor trying to sneak something past Church headquarters. The family proclamation may be controversial in some quarters, but it is firmly established as Church doctrine. It would be hard to make this point more emphatically than President Dallin H. Oaks recently did: “Those who do not fully understand the Father’s loving plan for His children may consider this family proclamation no more than a changeable statement of policy. In contrast, we affirm that the family proclamation, founded on irrevocable doctrine, defines the mortal family relationship where the most important part of our eternal development can occur.”

Some critics might be concerned that Elder Gilbert’s efforts to align the faculty with the Church’s teachings diminish academic freedom. In my view, this gets it exactly wrong. There are hundreds of universities in the United States where revisionist scholarship about marriage, family, and gender is welcome and rewarded. The orthodoxy on these issues is clear and intolerant. There is a much smaller number of universities where one can pursue scholarship that is aligned with the family proclamation. If BYU became just like other universities, there would be less academic freedom than there currently is. (Attentive readers will realize that I’m using “academic freedom” in two senses here, individual and institutional, both of which are explained in detail in BYU’s Academic Freedom Policy.)

Though debates over marriage, sexuality, and gender are often framed as conflicts between “rigid defenders of orthodoxy” and proponents of love and authenticity, the reality is not so simple. At the heart of these conflicts are deep disagreements over personal identity, sexual morality, the meaning of human life, and the common good. There are many resources available to Latter-day Saints and others to think through these issues carefully. In my view, these are not issues on which one has to “blindly accept” Church teachings; the assumptions that lead to revisionist conclusions about marriage, gender, and sexuality are highly contestable.

Which brings us back to the idea of Elder Gilbert as a “culture warrior” or an “attack dog.” It’s strange that people on only one side of these controversies get called names like this—even when the university in question is clearly owned and operated by the Church. As my former teacher Robert P. George writes in a related context, “There is a culture war, alright, but supporters of the sanctity of human life and the conjugal conception of marriage are not the aggressors in it. It was people on the other side–those who reject sanctity of life principles and the idea of marriage as a conjugal union–who wanted to change longstanding legal and cultural norms.” In my view, Elder Gilbert took reasonable steps to ensure that BYU students get the education that is advertised in the BYU mission and aims, and I’m grateful for his efforts.

In a recent interview, Elder Gilbert recounts an important conversation he had with President Holland. Both the mandate from President Holland and his ultimate hope for BYU seem like a good way to conclude: 

I remember I was talking to President Holland, and he was bemoaning that he could feel this drift happening to the university. And he’s like, ‘What have they done with our school that we love so much?’ And I felt awkward. I wasn’t even the commissioner yet. And I felt like I needed to defend them. And I said, ‘Well, President Holland, you know, we have the honor code, we have devotionals, we have religion classes, we have the academic freedom policy.’ And I said, ‘They’re like bumper lanes protecting us from bowling into the gutter.’ And he didn’t even let me finish. And he said, ‘That’s very different than bowling for a strike.’ And he said, ‘We need to bowl for a strike at BYU.’

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Years ago, as I was running errands with my minivan full of little children, I checked my rearview mirror. I saw the traffic behind me, but I also saw the sweet little faces of my kids. For some reason, that quick glance—which was such a simple thing on an ordinary day—resulted in an overwhelming sensation coming over me. It was so distinct that I still remember the exact location where it occurred. It’s difficult to describe, but the best I can say is that it was a rush of gratitude. I felt gratitude for the law of chastity—reserving sexual relations for marriage—and for those who had taught it to me. Also, gratitude for my younger self who had trusted in it so I could experience the good fruits it bore as I married and had children.

Louise Perry

In an earlier article, I wrote about society’s need for righteous fathers, and I relied heavily on the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which is a lesson from Louise Perry. Perry argues that women and children have paid a disproportionate price in the fallout of crumbling marriage norms over the last several decades. While working at a rape crisis center in her twenties, she began questioning the modern secular norms she had previously absorbed. Eventually, she became convinced that Christian sexual ethics work, although she was not persuaded by Christianity’s supernatural claims. 

I found Perry’s writing compelling and have continued to follow her online. Over the last several months, I’ve noticed, as have others, that there’s been a transformation in Perry’s relationship to Christianity. It’s moved beyond a sociological appreciation. In an interview earlier this year, she said:

“I kind of think of myself as an agnostic Christian. I go to church. Some weeks I believe and some weeks I don’t but one of the things that my husband and I have committed to do—he’s in the same boat as me—is, we are so convinced that it’s sociologically true and we would so like it to be supernaturally true, that we want to give our children the best chance possible of believing both truths and the way to do that, I think, is to expose them to Christians.”

And then, in a more recent interview, she said: 

“And … since writing the book, I have become Christian and have become much … more willing to make these arguments in theological terms. One of the reasons that I ended up becoming Christian is because I realized if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true. And observing quite how sociologically true it is was very persuasive to me.”

From Hesitation to Witness

It’s interesting to note that Perry married her husband in 2017 and published her book in 2022 between the births of her two sons in 2021 and 2024. She credits her time at the crisis center for initially opening her up to Christian sexual ethics, but the process of becoming a Christian coincided with her early years of motherhood. Perry said she wanted to give her children “the best chance.” Her children were a motivation for her—a common human experience that many of us have as we take on the responsibility of precious souls.

I’ve thought a great deal about Perry’s experience of being drawn to Christian sexual ethics as a young secular thinker, and it has caused me introspection. How many times have I remained quiet about gospel teachings about marriage and sexuality because I assumed they were the least popular aspects of my faith? How often have I jumped to hasty conclusions about who may or may not be receptive to the Latter-day Saint doctrine of the family? 

We live in a confusing world, and many norms that we once took for granted are being challenged. In Quebec, three men recently adopted a three-year-old girl in a case that is described as a first in Canada. In May 2025, a journal article put out by the American Sociological Association argued that childhood sexual innocence is a “colonial fiction” and that “childhood pleasure is indispensable for an inclusive sociology.” Marriage and birth rates are falling throughout the world. These are just a few of the indicators that point to an obscuring of the divine vision of the family—and Latter-day Saints aren’t the only ones noticing. Many people are feeling the divine tug of truth about the family unit and are participating in conversations about how to safeguard it. 

There will continue to be opposition, and likely even attempts to silence defenders of the family. Still, as Latter-day Saints, we can—and should—join in efforts that foster the flourishing of families. And in the process, we will be strengthened by others, like Louise Perry. They offer fresh outlooks that can inspire us to be more enthusiastic about the eternal truths about family structure that we may have taken for granted. 

The post The Secular Feminist Who Tested Christian Ethics—and Stayed appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Fathers and mothers do not provide exactly the same type of parenting; they have complementary strengths and responsibilities. Sometimes children need experiences best provided by a father, such as adventure or disciplined intervention. Sometimes they need experiences best provided by a mother, such as sustained, careful nurturing. Latter-day Saints believe we have Heavenly Parents—Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother—and that many mortal patterns also hold true in heaven. Why not parental gender roles?

Brigham Young taught, “As far as we can compare eternal things with earthly things that lie within the scope of our understanding, so far we can understand them.” In that spirit, I propose a parallel: mortality as a ‘dad mode’ adventure, where the Father naturally has a more salient role. Additionally, we can understand Heavenly Mother by considering life before and after an adventure with Dad. 

So what is “dad mode?”

In our family, the normal potty training routine involves loving explanation and nurturing guidance, primarily from mom. For one of our kids, this persistently failed. Switching to ‘dad mode’ solved the problem—Dad physically restrained the child on the potty until the task was completed in the proper location. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth during the process, but the child learned by experience that the assigned task was possible and was praised for completing it. From then on, potty training was largely successful — the child quickly forgot the ordeal, but retained the skill. 

The brief ‘dad mode’ intervention looked and sounded painful. Mom would not normally pursue this kind of approach, but she was aware of it, agreed it was necessary, and did not bail the kid out. Appealing to mom during this process would not have been productive. Dad was running the show, and Mom supported his approach. Mom handled most of the teaching before and after this intervention, though not during it.

Taking kids backpacking offers another “dad mode” example. The itinerary is set by Dad; the kids aren’t really competent to judge such things. Sometimes they get to keep hiking, even on sore feet. Dad distributes the pack weight and typically does not reassign it; doing so would set a poor precedent and weaken the kids. So the kids struggle. They get stronger. They learn something about themselves. And then mom welcomes everyone back with a feast, having stayed home, cared for the baby, and done a thousand other things. Afterward, even the kid who cried for a mile talks unprompted about what a great experience the trip was. 

This also has gospel parallels. Heavenly Father is obviously prepared to send people off on literal wilderness adventures: consider Adam, Abraham, Moses, the brother of Jared, Lehi, Nephi, Ammon, Elijah, and Christ, as well as later community treks such as Zion’s Camp and the pioneer migrations. Children in the Church sing that we can all be pioneers, and youth go on pioneer trek reenactments. And Eve deserves praise for starting all of the adventures. Embarking on adventures is in our spiritual DNA. 

As Paul writes, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” 

The “dad mode” wilderness adventure analogy can go further. Consider: what level of guidance and communication is appropriate for a young man on a wilderness adventure? He needs the tools and information to succeed, yet he learns most in the context of a legitimate challenge, which might not be best served by easy or excessive communication. 

Taken together, these patterns suggest that Heavenly Father presides over a high-stakes, sometimes grueling ‘dad-mode’ adventure. We agreed to go to the camp, and we’re in for it now! Heavenly Mother approves, yet seems to leave the management of this enterprise primarily in the Father’s hands. Then what is She doing? Presumably, everything else: managing and enjoying the whole domestic enterprise of heaven, and helping children in every other phase of their development. 

A common caricature reduces motherhood to giving birth, and perhaps keeping children alive until they can be placed in the care of a business and/or government. Maybe there’s a Mother’s Day card involved, once a year, until social media convinces the kid that mom is “toxic.” Did I mention the pain and exhaustion?

If you combine this diminished view of motherhood with the obvious fact that Heavenly Mother is not front-and-center here on Adventure Camp Earth, you might imagine that eternal motherhood is a frustratingly limited role, primarily centered on giving birth. But mortality is only a tiny fraction of our existence, and this caricature of motherhood is only a tiny fraction of what it should be. True motherhood engages with every aspect of life, and continues through the child’s whole life—and to heaven.

I suspect heavenly motherhood is more like being a grandmother than a mother of a newborn. It will presumably involve interacting with offspring at a wide variety of developmental stages (including premortal and postmortal), and taking joy in their milestones. We will have plenty of time—just as God has time to hear every prayer and count every sparrow—and money will be no object. It sounds similar to an ideal retirement, with no aging and a perfected body.

And all of this happens in a place—a home. The hymn says, “Home can be a heaven on earth,” and I say heaven is centered on perfected homes. Domesticity is hard to capture—it isn’t just the cookies in the oven, or the smile when you come in, or the familiar beauty of the decorations. It isn’t just catching up, or playing a game, or conspiring against the world. It’s not just the feeling of loving welcome, the feeling of the Holy Spirit, the feeling of coming home to a perfect refuge. But there’s some mixture of all these things, and more, that makes a home heavenly, or makes a heavenly home. And the best homes have a mother at their core.

Joseph Smith taught that “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us [in heaven], only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” So we should expect that our grandmother’s house will be a heavenly institution—arguably the heavenly institution. 

And while blissful domesticity reigns above, here we are on a “dad mode” adventure. It isn’t quite a representative picture of what came before or what comes after; it involves less mom and more hard knocks. But it’s temporary, and it’s good for us. And soon enough, our Mother will lovingly welcome us home.

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In English, idioms appear only occasionally as colorful expressions, but in biblical Hebrew, idioms are constant, shaping the way meaning is conveyed. 

Think of the phrase “kick the bucket.” To an English speaker, it is perfectly clear that no one is literally striking a pail with their foot. To someone learning English, however, the image is more than confusing. They would have to be told that it is an idiom, a soft turn of phrase that carries a meaning larger than the literal words.

The Hebrew Bible is filled with phrases like this: to “harden the heart,” to “lift up the face,” to “walk in the way,” to “know” someone, to “cover the feet,” to “gird up the loins,” to “set the face,” or to “eat bread.” These are simple examples, yet in a conceptual language, most phrases carry layers of idiom that remain difficult for us to perceive. 

Now, you can imagine how this creates a problem for our modern understanding. For those of us who speak in hard languages like English, that creates a particular challenge. Hard languages train us to expect precision, one-to-one meanings, and fixed categories. Our minds are shaped by that rigidity, so the polysemy of this biblical Hebrew can feel foreign or even flattened when we encounter it. Ancient hearers lived in the flow of those multiple meanings and felt at home in them. We, as hard-language speakers, have to work against our instincts to even begin to comprehend the depth that biblical Hebrew carried so naturally.

Soft vs. Hard Language

Soft languages like Hebrew are capacious. A single word can hold multiple meanings at once. Take the word shema. In English translations, it appears as the command “hear,” as in Shema Yisrael—“Hear, O Israel.” To the ancient ear, shema held so much more depth than the flattened translation we hear today. It carried the sense of listening with understanding and responding in obedience. The Israelites, when specifically using the word shema, could not separate hearing from doing, so when they heard the call to shema, they understood it as a summons to act.

English and other modern hard languages perform well when clarity and efficiency matter. But they struggle with conveying layers of meaning that soft languages carry naturally. God speaks to us according to our understanding. Isn’t it interesting that even today, He draws on the conceptual depth in these soft languages when communicating with us? Could it be that modern English is too rigid to hold the mysteries in the language of God? Perhaps God is still speaking in soft, polysemic, and conceptual terms. If so, we would want to invest effort to learn the conceptual depth by which God has always communicated. As Joseph Smith, the first prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wrote to an early church editor W. W. Phelps on November 27, 1832, he offered a heartfelt plea to God: “Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison, almost as it were, of paper, pen, and ink, and of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language.” That prayer is more true for us today than it was for them then.

The Puzzle of Kenegdo

The story of Adam and Eve has been told and retold for centuries. But what many of us receive today is a story shaped by layers of tradition. Generations of interpreters passed it down through debate, dogma, and politics. Artists gave it form in iconography, each picture coloring how Eve was seen. Over time, the narrative hardened into a familiar version in which Eve was created as subordinate to Adam and both were commanded to avoid the fruit.

Linguistics tells another story. When the Hebrew text is examined diachronically, tracing the earliest layers and the way meanings shifted over time, a very different picture appears. The text itself only records Adam being directly commanded concerning the fruit (see also Moses 3:16, which is even clearer on this point). This sets the stage for a problem. Adam alone could not fulfill the divine command. The ancient oral tradition left a clue in the ṭipḥa (¶)—a cantillation mark that signals a pause in the verse. Readers in antiquity would have recognized this as a deliberate stopping point. This is the moment where Adam stands in stasis. Something more was required to move the story forward.

The very next verse introduces that solution: “It is not good that man should be alone.” The Hebrew word ṭov, usually rendered “good,” can also mean “sufficient.” In other words, Adam by himself lacked sufficiency. Ancient oral tradition and semantic studies show that ṭov often implied functionality or adequacy rather than strictly moral value.

Into this insufficiency steps the figure we too quickly name Eve. The text first introduces her as ezer. Most translations reduce this word to “help,” but that translation obscures the deeper meaning. Hebrew has other words for ordinary “help.” Ezer is different. It appears only 21 times in the Hebrew Bible, and in nearly every case, it is bound to salvation or deliverance (Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33:7; Psalm 33:20). Eve enters the story as ezer, the one who brings salvation to the problem Adam could not solve.

Her title is extended with the word kenegdo. Translations often render it as “meet” or “fit,” as in “an help meet for him.” This choice at least hints at equality, which was remarkable in the world of the translators at the time. But it still falls short of what the Hebrew conveys. Kenegdo literally means “standing opposite of” or “face-to-face with.” It’s an idiom that, taken at face value, describes one who stands across from another as an equal counterpart. Yet, as with all idioms, its real meaning lies in the depth of the concept it conveys.

Each time God entrusts a servant, the language is “face to face.” Jacob names the place Peniel because he saw God “face to face” and his life was preserved. Moses speaks with the Lord “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” at the moment of his prophetic calling. The Levites stand before the Lord face to face to minister, signifying presence and commission. In each of these earliest instances and many more, the idiom marks the moment of authorization. Understanding the nature of soft language, to stand face to face is to receive priesthood.

Adam was not authorized to move forward in the story. Eve enters as the one who bears authorization. She stands face to face, fulfilling the very definition of priesthood. This idiom is difficult for hard-language speakers to grasp, yet in the Hebrew Bible it is unmistakably tied to authority.

Standing Face to Face in Nauvoo

The idiom of priesthood begins in Eden, but it does not end there. Eve as ezer kenegdo, standing face to face and embodying salvation and priesthood, is reborn in that same language when Joseph Smith restored the Relief Society, a women’s group of Latter-day Saints, in Nauvoo, Illinois. The archetype did not just disappear. Joseph Smith reestablished the Eden pattern when he invited women into the temple ritual.

In the Kirtland Temple, the first temple of the Church of Jesus Christ, women had no organized ritual role. They witnessed, sang, and rejoiced at visions, but the temple order remained incomplete. By the time the Latter-day Saints had moved to Nauvoo, three years after the Kirtland Temple, questions about women’s authority had come to the forefront of Joseph Smith’s mind. In March 1842, he organized women into the Relief Society. Emma Smith was sustained as president, fulfilling the earlier revelation that she was to be an “Elect Lady.” To the women gathered, Joseph Smith declared, “I now turn the key to you in the name of God.”

Week after week, Joseph Smith expanded their charge. He taught that women could heal, prophesy, and bless with divine sanction. He even described their role as “to save,” echoing the ancient role of ezer in Eden. Eliza R. Snow recorded that Joseph Smith promised the sisters they would form “a kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day.” The culmination of this vision came in the Nauvoo Temple, where women participated alongside men in the ordinance they called “the endowment.” They clothed themselves in the same garments, entered the same covenants, and received the same blessings. 

This was the difference between Kirtland and Nauvoo. In Kirtland, women stood as witnesses. In Nauvoo, they stood face to face with men in ritual, equal counterparts in the order of the priesthood, clothed in the same robes, speaking the same covenants. That balance echoes all the way back to Eden. Eve was the one who moved creation forward, standing as salvation, ezer kenegdo, face to face with Adam when he could go no further. In Nauvoo, women once again stood in that role. They moved salvation forward, clothed in priesthood, equal in covenant, bearing authority in the same idiom restored. The archetype of Eve was never a symbol frozen in the past. It was restored as living practice, carried into the temple, where women and men stood together as counterparts in the image of God.

If the garden was the beginning, and Nauvoo was a renewal, then the future still holds further unveiling. The temple is the vessel of that unveiling, carrying us deeper into the truths that were spoken from the beginning. We can trust that revelation will not stop. It will grow, it will deepen, and it will carry us into the fullness of what it means to stand face to face with God, as Adam and Eve once did.

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The policy paradox can be summarized this way: what is right for the one may not be right for the many, and what is right for the many often is not right for the one. Parents face it at the dinner table, leaders face it in government and the Church, and we all face it when our personal convictions seem to clash with collective expectations.

Human nature compels us to force a resolution of paradox with human hands (Daniel 2:45), but this often leads to misdirected frustration. However, with a new perspective we can receive a ‘greater portion of the word,’ as Alma taught, coming to ‘know the mysteries of God’ more fully (Alma 12:9–11). We will gain spiritual contentment and peace, despite worldly dissonance trying to force resolution masked as justice.

Let’s explore why the one-many tension persists, how to approach it through a faithful perspective, analyze a specific case study, and conclude with practices for peacemakers. 

Why the One-Many Tension Persists

Some tend to favor what is right for the one, while others have a natural preference to prioritize what is right for the many. This tension will continue to persist amid our surrounding global and personal challenges. The following illustration shows this tug and pull with a question mark in the middle.

Understanding why this tension persists helps us see that it is not a problem to solve, but a condition to understand. The next step, then, is to explore how faith helps us hold that tension without losing peace.

A Faithful Way to Hold Policy Tension

The policy paradox can be understood through intellectual, emotional, and experiential approaches. We use both mind and heart to seek knowledge, righteous judgment, and wisdom. In the visual below, notice how our individual approach to understanding develops into a more experiential level when we are surrounded by family and a covenant community.

Experiential understanding helps open our minds to behold the face of God and connect with our sisters and brothers who were “prepared to come forth in the due time of the Lord to labor in his vineyard” (D&C 67:10; 138:56). Through meekness and peace, we resist the impulse to resolve tension without an eternal perspective.

As we enter the presence of the Savior, full of charity, we recognize how it is possible for the “many and the one” to receive light and patience. Which lens or lenses of knowledge do we bring to the policy-making table as we analyze decisions from Church leaders, past, present, and future (John 7:24)? How can an individual with unique needs and desires that seem to conflict with the needs and desires of the broader community gain peace as the controversy within the paradox seems never to end?

As we truly behold the Savior and His trust in us, we can navigate global variables with a refined calibration of perspective through the still small voice of the Holy Ghost. The policy paradox through calibration of justice and mercy has been beautifully described by BYU law professor Shima Baughman. Shima gives examples of sentencing from criminal court judges who change their approach when considering individual cases compared to judges who approach sentencing through the lens of viewing the masses. When I listened to her powerful witness, her words brought to my mind Ammon’s approach to Lamoni’s father, imbued with charity and eternal perspective, seeking to individually calibrate justice and mercy for the “one”, while simultaneously considering the needs of the “many” (Alma 20). Shima clearly describes a vision of justice and mercy that is virtuous, praiseworthy, and of good report.

Further, we could debate the motives of Alma the Elder and Mosiah in their inspired non-linear “policy” journey in seeking to establish eternal principles of justice and mercy in Mosiah 26. Alma was troubled and went to Mosiah to apply the policy, but Mosiah “said unto Alma: Behold, I judge them not; therefore I deliver them into your hands to be judged.” Alma again had to go back to pouring out his whole soul to God to understand what was right for the one and what was right for the many, putting Alma in an “impossible” situation. And yet, with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26). 

This soul-driven reality is the essence of the policy paradox folks often can not see until they personally experience and willingly participate and refract light, patience, and capital “T”ruth through a crystal prism of pure intelligence, a piercing angle of humility. Humility brings peace, which is a vital prevention as we sometimes calibrate the definition of law, doctrine, policy, or principle incorrectly, and at times continue to be distracted from a higher and holier understanding. For example, in Alma 1, notice how the term “law” is defined. It seems to be understood differently at different times according to the “many,” established laws acknowledged by the people, as well as the “one,” where Gideon had to deal with Nehor’s false interpretation of the policy paradox. 

Oftentimes, the many can overwhelm the needs of the “one,” and sometimes the needs of the one can misdirect the needs of the “many,” thus the paradox of policy. Parents try to respect a child’s needs while balancing the needs of the entire family. The burden of leadership is on the parent (Numbers 11:17; Isaiah 48:17; Abraham 1:18). I believe being a parent is an experiential education in the policy paradox, where children may be too easily distracted from principles as they narrowly focus on the “policy” decisions through an incessant lens of assumed unfairness from a parent. This aligns with Elder Kim B. Clark’s teachings on the purpose of deep learning: to experience joy, and, I would add, gratitude by faith. The longer I am a parent, the more I gain a deeper intellectual, emotional, and experiential understanding, peace, and gratitude, ameliorating past perceived unfairness from my parents when I was a young adolescent. 

The Case Study 2015-2019 and the D.E.E.P. Path

As an example, let’s analyze the policy from November 2015 specific to baptism for children of same-sex couples. What was right for the many? What was right for the one? Later, in April 2019, how did the policy change—and what remained the same? This leads us to recognize the journey of what I call D.E.E.P. learning within the policy paradox for individuals, one by one.

D–Discouragement (disorientation, depression, doubt, despair)

E–Engagement (wrestling, acting, pondering, proving)

E–Enablement (hope, faith)

P–Power (joy, gratitude by faith and by experience)

When the policy was announced and broadly disseminated in 2015, my circle of loved ones struggled deeply. I felt their pain. Although I couldn’t fully understand everything they were experiencing, I felt peace that the Savior knew and understood the timing and the D.E.E.P. learning journey of each person from each orbit, one by one, directly or indirectly affected by the policy.

Obviously, President Nelson had taught about becoming peacemakers for several decades before this message. Time is only measured unto man (Alma 40:8). For me, it was a quiet reminder that the Lord guides His Church through His servants and each of His children—line upon line, precept upon precept, perspective upon perspective.

For some, this “fresh view” of eternal principles (what stays the same), policies (dynamic), practices (endless refractions of interpretations), and paradox may be seen as giving an excuse. Yet, as I’ve tried to listen to all sides of “middle of the road” to extreme perspectives towards the “reversal” of this policy, I keep feeling peace, light, and even greater charity towards those who drafted, reviewed, and wrote the policy originally, those who performed the research to understand patterns of exceptions by the First Presidency between 2015 and 2019, those who drafted, reviewed, and wrote the updated policy, and those who felt their hearts break during 2015 and 2019 with a “fresh sting,” mixed with love for their brothers and sisters directly affected by the policy. 

This has been a D.E.E.P. learning experience for me that has carried me into intellectual, emotional, and experiential highs and lows. I felt the sting of discouragement and disorientation in 2015. Like in the movie Inside Out, where joy and sadness coexist, I engaged and wrestled with the policy, prayed and pondered deeply over several years, trying to keep an open heart to those hurting and the constant companionship of the Spirit of the Lord. I felt enabled by the Lord to rise to higher mountains of perspective that I couldn’t have received without His power and peace. 

The original bright-line rules offered clarity, but all rules are inherently both overinclusive and underinclusive. The Savior, as Lawgiver, gives grace and power within and between the continuum of over- and under-inclusiveness.

In each policy decision, we are offered refractions of perspectives that can keep us humble and “equal evidence” for and against our preferred policy approaches, while we are “perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension.” Humility and meekness toward the paradox of policy provides a “ridiculously inefficient” approach to divinity, but it is nonetheless effective and imbued with eternal strength.

This case study shows how policies can be both inspired and imperfect, painful and refining. So how do we, as disciples, live within such paradoxes day to day?

Practices for Peacemakers

Where will you go next? For your personal intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and experiential education, you can start by analyzing the journals of those who went before us, both our ancestors and those from ancient scripture. The policy paradox influences us to seek those transformed perspectives, to see how something that feels wrong for the individual might serve the larger community, or how something that blesses the community might need adjustment for the one. Thank heavens the paradox is not resolved by human hands and human minds, for it would frustrate our learning journey to become more like our Heavenly Parents. In my personal orbit, I have learned an effective way to learn the policy paradox experientially is by becoming a parent, to gain a fresh view of how our Heavenly Parents navigate this tension with each of us.

The paradox is not an obstacle to faith—it’s a training ground for intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and experiential discipleship. When we accept and learn from tension, we begin to see the Lord’s hand not just in the outcome of policies but also in the process of wrestling over them.

And so my invitation is simple: be humble. List the ancient, modern, and personal policies that shape your life. Then, prayerfully, apply the paradox lens. Seek to understand your neighbor and your neighborhood and how the Lord continues to guide both. The process will not always be quick. But if you walk it with the Savior, the past, present, and future will become one in peace (John 14:27). The paradox will move from an idea in your mind to a truth in your soul. And in that transformation, you will see not only the one and the many, you will see Him.

The post When Faith Meets Policy: Finding Harmony in Holy Tension appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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I served as the Primary music leader for many years, and over time, I watched as the children clearly indicated with their smiles and enthusiasm which Primary songs were among their favorites. It is no surprise that the kids cherish Janice Kapp Perry’s A Child’s Prayer.

Adult members love this Primary song too, perhaps because the lyrics express the fragility of our faith.  As the devout Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor points out, in our secular world, religious faith is continually “cross-pressured;” that is, non-believing scientific materialists frequently call the veracity of our religious beliefs into question.

A Child’s Prayer begins with two sobering rhetorical questions:  

Heavenly Father, are you really there?
And do you hear and answer every child’s prayer?

The first stanza concludes with a hopeful tone:

Some say that heaven is far away,
But I feel it close around me as I pray.

As with the Primary children, in reaching toward heaven in this way, all our prayers, at least in some measure, constitute an attempt to confirm that God is really there.

Let’s review the concept of prayer and the central role that prayer plays in the life of a Latter-day Saint. Let’s consider what kinds of prayer there are. What do the scriptures teach us about how to pray?  And perhaps most importantly, what does it mean for a prayer to be answered?

Although we often think of prayer generically, prayer takes many forms. Prayers of thanksgiving, such as the blessings we say over our food, constitute the more quotidian types of prayer. Liturgical prayers, the most formal category, are recited in rote form as part of our worship services.  Liturgical prayers project a mystical quality, reminding us of the miracles we are contemplating. That we recount rote prayers at baptisms, the temple endowment, and the blessing of the sacrament reinforces our belief that God is mindful of these ordinances, having set forth specific language for us to hear in connection with them, that “they may always have His spirit to be with them” (Doctrine and Covenants 20:76-79).

All these varieties of prayer are familiar to us, but it is petitionary prayer, perhaps, that is our most common conception of prayer. These are prayers in which we petition Heavenly Father for specific blessings, hoping that He will grant us the righteous desire of our hearts. Pleading for a loved one to be healed of a serious illness, asking for success with a new job application, or imploring for a successful pregnancy—all these are examples of petitionary prayers.

Many of our petitionary prayers are not answered in the way we would hope. Consider the countless millions of prayers offered up in times of deep human despair that appear to go unanswered. Prayers from Auschwitz, Poland, during World War II, and from the New Orleans slave auction in the Antebellum South are chilling examples. Our beliefs assure us that God hears such prayers, but He often seems to answer them in ways we do not expect and cannot understand. This is why it is important to consider what it means for a prayer to be answered.

The scriptures clearly outline the methods, contours, and boundary conditions of prayer. Alma taught us to “counsel with the Lord in all thy doings” (Alma 37:39); his colleague Amulek reminded us that Alma’s admonition extends to prayer over temporal things: “Cry unto him when ye are in your fields, yea, over all your flocks …” and “… Cry unto him over the crops of your fields, that ye may prosper in them” (Alma 34:20 & 24). We learn from Enos that sometimes it is necessary to spar spiritually with our Father in Heaven. Enos recorded, “I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before God” (Enos 1).

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul helps us understand that sometimes in our extremity, we are bruised and battered, finding ourselves speechless at the hour of prayer. In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains that in such times of despair: “… we know not what we should pray for … but the Spirit maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). Sometimes we commune with God by opening our hearts to Him without saying a word, with “groanings that cannot be uttered.”

The Epistle of James succinctly summarizes what the scriptures teach about prayer: The “fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much” (James 5:16).

Examples from the scriptures of first prayers are especially instructive. Joseph Smith’s initial foray into praying out loud was truly remarkable. From the “boy’s first uttered prayer,” we learn that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that a restoration of the gospel was at hand. Joseph Smith’s first prayer was surely among the most important prayers ever formed by the tongue of man. Following the boy prophet’s example, we should take to heart the admonition that “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God” (James 1:5).

The inaugural prayer of King Lamoni’s Father, recorded in the Book of Mormon, is another poignant example of a first prayer. Upon introduction to the gospel by Aaron, one of the missionary sons of Mosiah, the powerful and worldly king articulates his very first prayer. In truly striking humility, he prays that “if there is a God,” as Aaron had assured him, “I will give away all my sins to know thee” (Alma 22:18). In this fascinating pronouncement, the ancient American king summarizes the ultimate purpose of prayer: to know God and thereby give away all our sins. How ironic to have a heathen, Lamanite king teach us so eloquently on this point of doctrine. Sometimes burgeoning faith is faith in its purest form.  

A unique feature of personal prayer relates to the intrinsic honesty that inevitably accompanies this private dialogue with God. When we kneel in secret prayer before the all-seeing eye of God, no pretense or deception is possible. We are completely exposed in the naked reality of our imperfections. Knowing this, our private prayers take on a no-nonsense quality that is perhaps unparalleled in other arenas of human discourse.

The 19th-century American author and literary critic Mark Twain famously emphasized this truism about prayer in his iconic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At a key juncture in the story, Huck considers promising God that, going forward, he will change his wicked ways and do the right thing. But being honest with himself, he ultimately concludes that his commitment is not earnest and that he cannot deceive God in any case.  

“I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing,” Huck says, “… but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out” (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).

The context of this scene is complex; Huckleberry was already doing “the right thing.” But he made the essential point nonetheless. That we cannot pray a lie means that our dialogue with God can cut to the chase and be brutally honest and sometimes painfully authentic.

This humble quest to live a holy life, as reflected in the aspirations of The Lord’s Prayer, stands in stark contrast to the puffed-up confidence in the arm of flesh we see in our secular world. The militant atheists of our day point a scornful, derisive finger at those who pray, asserting that prayer is a silly, superstitious act, likening prayer to black magic or a sorcerer’s spell. In these criticisms, these sanctimonious nay-sayers of prayer unwittingly reveal a key element at the foundation of true prayer.  The spells of black magic in literature and legend typically involve a deal with the devil, in which the petitioner agrees to sell his soul in exchange for fortune, power, or fame.  

True prayer, in stark contrast, necessarily requires a promise on the part of the petitioner to live a holier life, one that is more full of love and honor, compassion and sacrifice. Rather than selling one’s soul as in black magic, true prayer is an effort to perfect it. In this sense, prayer is indeed magical. Perhaps this is the main reason that the Book of Mormon reminds us that the “evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray” (2 Nephi 32:8). The adversary seeks to prevent the soul-perfecting magic of prayer from happening.

So what does it mean for a prayer to be answered? There are, of course, many responses to this thought-provoking question. There is no doubt that many petitionary prayers are answered as we hope.  The God we worship is a loving God. We sometimes receive, as the Psalmist refers to them, “tender mercies” (Psalms 25:6), and as did the Old Testament’s Gideon, “dry fleeces” on the dew-soaked ground (Judges 6:39).

Our God “is a God of miracles” (2 Nephi 27:23). He will sometimes do great works among us, as He did when he delivered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego from Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace (Daniel 3).  But many times the hoped-for blessings do not materialize, and the fiery furnace burns on—when the loved one’s illness is not cured, the hoped-for job offer does not come, the longed-for pregnancy is not realized. These are the times when answering the question “What does it mean for a prayer to be answered?” takes on special significance. Among the many answers that one could offer, perhaps chief among them is that a prayer is answered when a soul is transformed through prayer.

The prayers we say over our food simply illustrate this assertion. When we say a blessing before our meals, we don’t think that something miraculous happens to the food. The miracle is taking place in our hearts. Through a brief prayer over “our daily bread,” we acknowledge the bounty of the earth, this life as a gift, that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). When said earnestly, such a prayer changes us a little for the better, reminding us that “man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4).

Let’s return now to the Primary children and their beloved song, A Child’s Prayer:

Heavenly Father, I remember now

Something that Jesus told disciples long ago:

“Suffer the children to come to me.”

Father, in prayer I’m coming now to thee.

Pray, he is there;

Speak, he is list’ning.

You are his child;

His love now surrounds you.

He hears your prayer;

He loves the children.

Of such is the kingdom, the kingdom of heav’n.

God’s ways are often inscrutable to His creatures, but we can be reassured that He hears our prayers and answers them in ways that always bless us over the long haul. Earnest prayer transforms us. Speak, He is listening.

The post Heavenly Father, Are You Really There? On What It Means for a Prayer to Be Answered appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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As mental health therapy becomes an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary life, it becomes more important to stop seeing the practice as a monolith and recognize it as a bundle of distinct practices, philosophies, and goals. Sometimes these different approaches even directly contradict one another. 

Latter-day Saints understand the importance of caring for our mental health and often utilize mental health practitioners. But that doesn’t mean every approach is worth trying or comports with Christian principles.

Differentiation therapy, however, conflicts with the principles of Christianity broadly and the Restored Gospel specifically. In addition, despite the modality’s current popularity, there is little evidence that this approach works.  

What is Differentiation Therapy?

Differentiation therapy is a psychotherapeutic model advanced by David Schnarch. It is also sometimes called “crucible therapy.”

Schnarch posits that the purpose of our relationships is individual growth, and that the way to heal relationships is by focusing on our own needs, identity, and preferences separate from our partner. 

Schnarch first published his theories in the early 1990s. He built on the ideas of one of the early practitioners of family therapy, Murray Bowen. Bowen pioneered systemic therapy, a therapeutic approach that recognizes how our struggles are often found within the complex system of relationships in a family. Bowen articulated “self-differentiation,” the ability to recognize and define yourself as an individual within that system, as one of the items in tension in the family system. 

Schnarch focused and emphasized self-differentiation, recontextualizing this idea within the affective domain of marital intimacy, asserting that the path to greater eroticism, emotional fulfillment, and personal development lies not in interdependent vulnerability but in cultivating emotional autonomy and self-definition. He contends that genuine intimacy emerges when each spouse remains firmly rooted in a differentiated self, experiencing anxiety within the relationship that spurs individual growth, and resisting the urge to seek validation from the other. Schnarch’s framework is built on the maxim that relational maturity is contingent on one’s ability to “hold onto oneself,” particularly in the face of emotional intensity.

As Paul teaches in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Differentiation therapy doesn’t hold up to those standards.

For Christian or Latter-day Saint engagement, any therapeutic model must be assessed through two interdependent criteria: its empirical reliability and its theological coherence. Specifically, a model must conform to a theology that affirms the covenantal, sacramental, and grace-dependent character of human relationships. 

On both empirical and theological grounds, this model raises serious concerns. 

Similarities to the Gospel

Before diving into why differentiation marriage therapy doesn’t adhere to Christian theology, let’s first grant that there is much about the ideology that can appeal to those in our tradition. 

Crucible Therapy is so named because the idea is for us to improve ourselves like metal does in a crucible. This metaphor is familiar to Latter-day Saints, who have heard it consistently in General Conference addresses for decades.

We want to grow, which sometimes requires us to do (or endure) difficult things. Joseph Smith even described his time in Liberty Jail as a “crucible.”

Personal growth is a key component of the Latter-day Saint conception of life and the eternities, as we rely on the grace of Jesus Christ to become more like Him.  

And we view marriage as a key pathway to achieving that personal growth. Elder Richard G. Scott described the overarching theme of the “eternal blessings of marriage” as “trying to be like Jesus.”

Even the concept of self-differentiation itself is not opposed to the gospel. After all, in President Russell M. Nelson’s 2008 formulation, salvation is “an individual matter.” In each Latter-day Saint ordinance and covenant made from the first at baptism to the temple endowment, individuals participate independently.

The problem with differentiation therapy is not the ingredients, but rather the emphasis, proportions, and timing.

The Sacramental View of Marriage

Scripture and tradition present a vision of marriage not as a mere partnership but as a covenantal and ontological union. Genesis 2:24 and Mark 10:8 declare, “the two shall become one flesh,” articulating a unity that transcends sentiment or legal arrangement. This union is sacramental, reflecting the mystery of divine communion and typifying the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church. 

Within Latter-day Saint theology, this union also echoes the oneness of the Godhead and extends to eternal dimensions. Eternal marriage is not a symbolic ideal but a sacred ordinance that enables joint participation in the divine nature. In this view, marital unity is achieved through consecrated covenant keeping and divine grace.

President Gordon B. Hinckley famously warned that “selfishness is the great destroyer of happy family life.” Christian ethics consistently portray the self not as autonomous but relationally constituted, and pride as the origin of spiritual alienation. Love entails the displacement of self-centeredness. Schnarch’s valorization of emotional self-sufficiency is in tension with Christ’s self-emptying love.

Schnarch does attempt to articulate an ideal of oneness near the end of his second book. He writes, “Holding onto yourself and becoming more differentiated actually leads to the loss of the self you’ve been holding onto.” In this, he articulates a goal shared by Christians. But Schnarch gets the order precisely backward. In teaching the Twelve Apostles, Jesus said, “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

The Rev. Lauren R.E. Larkin, an Episcopalian, notes that Schnarch’s model implies what I might describe as a form of psychological soteriology in which transformation is self-engineered and internally sourced. In contrast, Christian soteriology comes from the sacrifice of the self in our relationship with Christ, and that happy marriage comes from applying the same principle. 

Specific Theological and Pastoral Concerns

Schnarch’s philosophy is hardly the only one to be at odds with the principles of Christianity. But it warrants attention both because of its growth among those providing therapy for Latter-day Saints and the specific negative behavioral outcomes it can produce. 

Reframing of Selfishness as Growth

In Schnarch’s paradigm, behaviors that prioritize the self over marital unity are reframed as developmental milestones. This conceptual move risks legitimizing patterns of emotional disengagement or moral abdication that Scripture identifies as destructive.

Devaluation of Mutual Dependence

Christian marriage presupposes mutual reliance and covenantal solidarity. Emotional interdependence is not pathological but redemptive. By pathologizing need and elevating stoicism, Crucible Therapy undermines the logic and purpose of marriage within the Christian life.

Therapeutic Destabilization of the Vulnerable

The deliberate intensification of anxiety may compound harm in couples already contending with trauma or asymmetry. Without a framework of mercy, discernment, and accountability, this method risks exacerbating wounds rather than fostering healing.

Psychological Work as Identity Formation

Crucible Therapy reflects and clinically adopts a broader cultural trend: the belief that personal identity is best discovered through solitary psychological excavation. For Christians, our truest identity is revealed not in looking inward but in looking upward—to God—and outward—to others.

Undermining the Redemptive Power of Weakness

Differentiation therapy often frames strength in a relationship as the ability to withstand emotional storms alone. But Latter-day Saint theology teaches that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, and our spouses as a “help-meet” for those challenges. Schnarch ignores the redemptive capacity of dependence. 

Flattening the Eternal Narrative of Marriage

Perhaps most fundamentally, differentiation therapy assumes marriage is primarily a context for individual growth and erotic renewal. But for Latter-day Saints, marriage is the divine setting for exaltation. While it shares the desire for marriage to be a conduit for individual growth, the Latter-day Saint conception of marriage has a project much more lofty and eternal in mind. 

Secular therapies can’t be expected to fully integrate all gospel understanding. Still, we can avoid the ones whose explicit goals and practices set us toward different goals than those we are pursuing.

Toward a Christological Integration of Differentiation and Unity

The question of how to balance differentiation and unity—how to maintain personal identity while becoming “one” with another—is not merely a psychological puzzle but a theological one. For Christians, the life of Jesus Christ provides the supreme model for how distinctiveness and relational communion are held in perfect harmony. He is not only the exemplar of love but the embodiment of divine identity lived in full self-giving.

Throughout the New Testament, Christ’s actions and teachings demonstrate a perfect union of individual authority and relational surrender. In John 5:30, He declares, “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge … because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.” Here we see a Savior who is fully self-aware and fully self-sacrificing. His divine agency is never wielded for isolation but always for communion—first with His Father, and then with those He came to redeem.

The pre-mortal Christ likewise demonstrates an integrated identity in His dealings with Israel. In Exodus 3, He reveals Himself as “I AM,” an assertion of sovereign selfhood. Yet He repeatedly binds Himself in covenant to His people, dwelling with them, feeding them, and pleading for their return. His identity is never diluted, but His divine selfhood is always offered for relationship.

In 3 Nephi, the resurrected Lord descends among the Nephites. What does He do? He weeps. He heals. He prays for their unity, invoking the language of divine indwelling: “that they may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee” (3 Nephi 19:23). Here again, the goal is not emotional distance but sanctified closeness. Christ does not ask us to become strong by ourselves. He invites us to be made whole in Him. At no point is differentiation set against unity. Rather, disciples are expected to retain their agency and consecrate it—to grow, yes, but to grow together.

From this Christological lens, differentiation is not a prerequisite for unity, nor is unity a threat to identity. Instead, selfhood and love are co-eternal truths, fulfilled in covenant. The Savior does not command us to “hold onto ourselves” but to take up our cross. He does not sever our personhood; He sanctifies it in communion.

In Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, we see the perfect integration of individuality and unity. 

Recommendations for Moving Forward

For Latter-day Saints looking at what kinds of marriage therapy are appropriate for them and their circumstances, I have a few pieces of advice. 

Not all therapists and therapeutic practices are created equal. As mental health resources are often in short supply, it can be tempting to visit the first person with a license and an opening. But it is worth being discerning, especially in a venue where we are opening up our hearts and minds to someone. 

While “Latter-day Saint therapists” can be helpful (if unnecessary) in that journey, be careful to understand whether your therapist merely understands the vocabulary of Latter-day Saints or is committed to helping you maintain your worldview.

Preserve your moral and spiritual lexicon. Grace is not a synonym for internal resilience. Sin is not a developmental stage we grow out of. 

Based on my experience, observations, and analysis, my advice is for Latter-day Saints to exercise considerable caution before engagin in differentiation therapy or working with clinicians who practice it. There are approaches that better align with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and which the evidence shows work better.

David Schnarch’s Crucible/Differentiation Marriage Therapy presents a psychologically articulate, but ultimately inadequate framework for relational transformation. Its emphasis on self-validation, emotional independence, and internal differentiation diverges from the best practices evidence shows work and the covenantal, grace-saturated vision of Christian marriage.

The post When Therapy Undermines Marriage: How Differentiation Fails the Christian Model appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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There are questions that create profound divisions among Christians. Some of these divisions become so deep that two Christians in the same congregation can be said to be living a completely different religion. For example, among Latter-day Saints, the question of whether or not to sustain the leadership of the church—and as President Henry B. Eyring taught, how strongly to define the word “sustain”—is one of those basic foundational questions that creates fundamentally different experiences of religion among people who sit in the same pews. And for the broader Christian world, one of the greatest divides is found in how believers respond to the gospel of John chapter 6. There, Christ provides a clear contrast between His mission and the world’s approaches to alleviating pain and poverty.

Christianity is experienced by believers internally, who then impact the world externally. The internal impacts of Christian faith are described in terms of repentance, inner rebirth, and transformation of our desires in the direction of goodness and holiness. With inner transformation, the Christian is then equipped to bless the external world with judgment, a scriptural concept that basically means to make the world right. Inner conversion leading to change in the world around us is the Christian order to follow for the transformation of society, and there are no shortcuts to the ideal society (“Zion”) that it produces.

They go on to associate Jesus with Moses, under whose leadership the children of Israel were given a constant supply of manna in the wilderness: “Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” And there follows a demand: “Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.”

We read that the people saw Jesus as “the prophet who should come into the world” as a result of this similarity with Moses (v.14), and immediately they sought to “take Him by force, and make Him a king” (v.15). Jesus responded in ways that must have gone against the people’s mental conditioning: He refused to be a king, and He refused to perpetually feed them. With these choices, Jesus was only repeating His responses to the temptations in the wilderness, where Satan offered Him political power— “the kingdoms of the world”— and also recognition, “He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up…”.

And as with the temptations in the wilderness, Jesus’ choices in John chapter 6 should give us pause. Every reader would benefit from pondering what we would do in Jesus’ situation. With the power to eliminate all hunger forever by distributing an endless supply of food, would we do it? Or would we see, as Jesus did, reasons to refrain from doing so? With the ability to eliminate oppression by becoming a politically all-powerful king or queen, would we do it? Or would we see, as Jesus did, reasons to refrain from doing so? These questions that arise in John 6 are at the heart of much of modern political conflict.

In the wonderful series “The Chosen,” this conflict has been represented in the story of Judas. Viewers are given a portrait of Judas as a man who is extremely earnest, who feels deeply the pain of the world and sees in Jesus the possibility of immediate resolution for all of that pain.

In this dramatization of Judas, the creators of The Chosen are tapping into a deep current in the psyche, the current of our expectations toward God. When we feel some sympathy toward Judas in The Chosen and we relate to his desire to see the world made right as quickly as possible, we can understand people’s expectations of God and how those shape so much of the world around us.

Consider the views of German academic Bruno Bauer, one of the formative influences on the mind of Karl Marx. Similar to The Chosen’s portrayal of Judas, Bauer said of Jesus,

On earth, [Jesus] would be a thousand times more necessary and useful to man than in heaven, if what we say about him in good Jewish fashion is true, that God will give him the kingdoms of the world and through him restore peace to the whole earth. What reasonable reason can Christians give as to why God did not keep his word to the Lord Jesus? Why did he take him to heaven if he is to be a Lord on earth and to judge the dead and the living in the way we imagine? Why must the devil, whom he is supposed to have overcome, still rule the whole world more than 1700 years after his overcoming and leave the conqueror behind? Why did he (the Lord Jesus) not take the kingdom immediately after his resurrection, as his Father had promised him? What was the reason that he had to ascend to heaven and in the meantime let everything on earth go topsy-turvy?

Marxism and its twin ideology of fascism on the right emerged in societies that knew the Bible. In biblical texts like the book of Isaiah, we read of an ideal future world free of the kinds of conflict and pain that we now experience:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

Like The Chosen’s Judas, Bruno Bauer viewed Jesus as a failure: holding all the power to inaugurate this ideal world envisioned by Isaiah, Jesus frustratingly declined to do so. It is interesting to note that in his summer 1839 university studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Karl Marx took only one course, and it was a course on Isaiah taught by Bruno Bauer.

But are these horrors exclusive to the ideological left? Consider this statement:

If positive Christianity means love of one’s neighbour, i.e., the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of _____ has accomplished a prodigious work …

Not knowing the source of the quote, we might assume it to come from a Marxist luminary like Antonio Gramsci, who famously said that “socialism is precisely the religion that must kill Christianity.” But in reality, if we fill in the blank in the above quote, it is referring to “the people of National Socialist Germany.” The speaker claiming that German national socialism was superior to commonly lived Christianity was, in fact, Adolf Hitler, speaking in February 1939.

In a recent discussion on the Doctrine and Governance program, we observed how at the extremes of left and right, people work toward delusional visions of an ideal world; on the left, there is the vision of a classless society articulated by Marx, and on the right, the current vision is Christian nationalism, which imagines a king-figure imposing Christian righteousness upon the nation. Both of these delusions emerge in the swamps of social theory that form as people reject the Christ of John chapter 6.

By stark contrast, consider a recent devotional address given by Sharon Eubank at BYU-Idaho. There she repeated and answered an “accusation-question” that is commonly aimed toward the church:

I am occasionally asked, “Why doesn’t the Church spend more money on humanitarian work? Why doesn’t it stop building expensive temples and focus its resources on relieving the poor?” This is a legitimate question for the Church of Jesus Christ. But is it money that solves society’s ills? The world has poured two trillion dollars into addressing chronic issues in Africa. Why isn’t the situation better? Because money isn’t really the issue. Lasting progress comes through trusted relationships, infrastructure, reducing corruption, and the ability of people to work together. Money doesn’t necessarily create those things. They must be developed alongside the resources, and frankly, it is much harder work.

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. So, thank goodness the Church builds 335 temples and counting. It is the greatest poverty alleviation system in the world.

The quality of our viewpoint depends on what we are willing to see, and in Sharon Eubank’s role leading humanitarian efforts for the church, she has seen which assistance strategies actually help people, and which ones fail. She has seen how root causes are ignored when endless loaves and fishes are demanded of God or governments.

In confronting the root causes of humanity’s struggles, the Christ of John chapter 6 invites our conversion, the writing of God’s law upon our hearts. And the results of that process are exactly what Sharon Eubank described. As I noted in a recent article, it is no accident that Utah, the most templed region of the United States, consistently ranks at or near the top in annual surveys of upward mobility and income equality. The Zion society we yearn for is indeed available to us, but only on God’s terms, in God’s timing, through processes revealed by God’s ordained servants.

In her devotional, Sharon Eubank spoke to young, impressionable students who will eventually be exposed to utopian ideologies in the world, ideologies that always promise heaven yet end up creating hell. In the midst of all the voices pulling these students toward delusional extremes, Sharon Eubank modeled the example of the Christ of John chapter 6. She stood before her audience and, rather than promise them a life of endless free loaves and fishes, she loved them enough to ground them in God’s truth.

The post When God Refuses to Fix the World: The Politics of John 6 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Joseph Smith often spoke of miraculous things the way others might speak of the weather. Details that would have sent people reeling were, for him, offered in passing. He described visions, angelic visitors, and heavenly councils with the ease of someone reporting familiar events. When asked about sacred mysteries, he didn’t pause to dramatize. He simply answered. In 1832, in the early spring dust of frontier Ohio, Joseph sat with a few companions and dictated a short theological text. It slipped in quietly, without an announcement. The document, later called A Sample of Pure Language, read more like a spiritual note passed across the room than a formal revelation. Because it wasn’t a revelation.

The topic began with a single question: “What is the name of God in the pure language?”  Joseph’s reply was immediate: “Awman. The Being which made all things in all its parts.” There was no preface, no citation. Just a name, resting between Joseph’s memory and revelation. The spelling later settled as Ahman, and that name began to ripple into hymns, into revelations, into sacred places. A second question followed: “What is the name of the Son of God?” Joseph responded: “The Son Awman, the greatest of all the parts of Awman, except Awman.” The document is compact and unfinished. It offers no grammatical rules, no dictionary, no syntax. But it leaves a pattern. Ahman. Son Ahman. Sons Ahman.

William W. Phelps recognized this. He referred to the document as a specimen of the pure language and copied it into a letter to his wife. Soon, he began to write hymns invoking the name Ahman and included it in editorial work on church publications (Church History Catalog, MS 8532). When preparing the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants (D&C 78:20), Joseph inserted the phrase “saith Son Ahman.” It wasn’t in the original manuscript, but reflected his evolving vocabulary of Edenic language. For those familiar with the earlier version, the meaning was clear. The language of Eden had been quietly woven into formal scripture. (See Jensen, pp. 385-386.)

In 1838, Joseph declared a valley in Missouri to be Adam-ondi-Ahman, revealed to him by God. The name implied that Adam once stood there with Ahman. The structure mirrored Semitic naming traditions. The revelation gave no explicit definition, but the sense was immediately understood. Adam once stood in the presence of God in that very place. W. W. Phelps had already invoked the name in hymns. Orson Pratt, years later, affirmed what he had learned from the Prophet and the early brethren: that Ahman was a name by which God had been known to Adam. The valley became sacred for what had occurred there, but even more so for what was promised to come. It was understood as the place where the first covenant between heaven and earth had been made, and where that covenant would someday be fulfilled.

What started as a brief Q&A in an Ohio notebook grew into a network of names, rooted in the identity of God, spreading through doctrine, scripture, and song. And yet, the deeper structure of it all remained unspoken. Joseph never laid out the grammar of the pure language. What is left is a set of terms, offered plainly, but arranged with care. By the early 1840s, Joseph Smith entered a new season of instruction. In Nauvoo, he spoke more freely about the nature of God, the structure of eternity, and the roles of divine beings. Revelation came in stages. Some teachings were delivered from the pulpit, while others took shape in more intimate settings. One such setting was the Nauvoo Lyceum, a circle of trusted Saints who explored theology in dialogue with Joseph’s reflections. Joseph often used these moments to teach the process by which he himself received revelation. From these accumulated moments, Joseph began to articulate a divine hierarchy and establish structures that reflected it. Priesthood quorums, the Relief Society, and the vision of an earthly Zion all emerged from this process. They were designed to mirror the divine order of the Elohim as described in the councils of heaven. (See Psalm 82:1; “Nauvoo Lyceum Minutes”; Bushman, pp. 419-430; Flake, ch. 3.)

According to William P. McIntire, who recorded the moment in his journal, Joseph told the group: “The Great God has a name by which He will be called, which is Ahman.” And then he explained that when someone sought divine instruction, when one prayed, there was power in understanding God with a name as a being like Adam. God made mankind in His own image, Joseph said, and that knowledge could become a key to unlocking divine communication. It was a frame of reference. Ahman was the God who looked like Adam, and who still bore that familial connection in His title. Ahman is then a title reflecting the theological pattern Joseph Smith often taught in which the name of God shares a familial relationship with humanity.

Lorenzo Snow later expressed this pattern in a now-famous couplet: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” Joseph confirmed this principle in his King Follett Discourse, teaching that God was once a mortal being and that mortals, through progression, could become like Him. The name Ahman thus aligns with Joseph’s understanding of revelation as relational. It echoed the belief that humans are not distant from the divine but are deeply connected to it across time, form, and potential.

The Hebrew Bible follows a similar pattern. Names like Daniel, Ezekiel, Elijah, and Adonijah embed divine titles, El, Yah, Adonai, within personal missions. Joseph Smith had no formal training in ancient onomastics, yet he intuited what many philologists later confirmed: sacred names carry layered, relational meaning (Alter, and Noegel). Some Latter-day Saint writers later linked Ahman with “Man of Holiness,” a divine title from the Book of Moses (McConkie, p. 22, and Stapley). The Son was then called “Son of Man,” meaning Son of the Man of Holiness, a theology of relationship encoded in language. For Joseph, the name simply belonged. He offered it without preface or explanation, as if it had always been there. And in a way, it had. This brief note, later titled A Sample of Pure Language, was not a revelation in the formal sense. But it became a spark. Ben Spackman describes revelation as a layered reality, glimpsed in visions, refined through translation, and shaped by years of reflection. That is what this was. A moment of clarity inside a much larger process. 

The name Ahman reflects how Joseph’s revelations often began. Rarely given in a grand vision, but with a question or phrase that opened space for inquiry. It was about being drawn into the pattern. For Joseph and the Saints, this small note became a theological key. It spurred conversations, inspired edits, clarified doctrines, and formed part of the sacred lexicon of Restoration scripture. The name itself is less a solution than an invitation to think relationally, to seek divine patterns, to follow meaning as it accumulates. Revelation, for Joseph, was not something dropped from heaven. It was something shaped by effort. The Restoration came word by word, name by name.

The post The Valley Where Adam Stood with God appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Here is the latest article in our Peacemaking Series. To read the last article: Disagreements Bring Balance: When Silence Isn’t Peace

Few moments are more defining than those shaped by deep personal betrayal. When recalling these moments, the body often reacts before the mind—muscles tighten, the stomach turns, and the memory returns with clarity. The pain may be lasting, the consequences irreversible. In such moments, two responses emerge side by side: anger and forgiveness—two gifts, one in each hand, and while both feel justified, only one can be given.

This is the essential tension at the heart of forgiveness: not a passive emotion, but an active, deliberate, sacred decision. Forgiveness is often couched in dramatic moments of intense pain and wrongdoing, but it also needs to find its way into everyday moments, like when a loved one or stranger says a careless word or performs a negligent action. These small moments of hurt, if unforgiven, can lead to a lifetime’s accumulation of tension and resentment. There is great power for both the offender and the offended in the words, I forgive you. While it is often assumed that forgiveness must be earned, Christian theology and research present a different view. Forgiveness is a gift extended not only to the offender, but also to release and heal the one who forgives.

What Forgiveness Is and Isn’t

Forgiveness is often misunderstood in its meaning and execution, carrying a wide range of meanings across individuals and cultures. Some may conclude it is unattainable before ever fully understanding what it entails. This word deserves a thoughtful unpacking before being dismissed. Clarifications of what forgiveness is and is not can be helpful. 

Forgiveness is not:

• Trusting the person who caused the wrong.
• Earned by the person who caused hurt.
• Forgetting what happened.
• Pretending the offense didn’t hurt.
• Letting the offender perpetuate the harm.
• Reconciliation, or prolonging a relationship.

Forgiveness is:

• A choice to act compassionately. 
• Beginning to feel compassion as you act compassionately.
• Given whether or not the other person shows remorse or change. 
• Something you do for you.
• A perpetual choice and not a single event.

Psychologist Everett Worthington––a leading expert on forgiveness whose research has informed much of the thinking in this article––identifies two forms of forgiveness: decisional and emotional. 

Decisional forgiveness is consciously choosing to forgive—often for our own well-being rather than for the benefit of the offender. 

Emotional forgiveness, by contrast, is when feelings of anger begin to soften into empathy and compassion.

While it is often believed emotions drive actions, research and experience suggest the opposite: choices and behaviors gradually shape feelings. Suggesting that often it may be required to act compassionately, before we feel compassion. Anger’s grip is hard and often shapes our journey with forgiveness. Anger can serve as an emotional strategy to overcome feelings of helplessness. However, as President Nelson taught, “anger never persuades,” and the sensation of control is really an illusion: change is up to the offender just as much as our decision to forgive is up to us.

Forgive For Your Own Sake

Worthington’s research shows forgiveness improves mental and physical health, lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, and even boosts the immune system. Forgiveness may not change the offender—but it will change the forgiver.

When we decide to release resentment, we begin to, as one Church leader put it, “rise to a higher level of self-esteem and well-being” characterized by emotional clarity and peace. Choosing to forgive doesn’t deny the pain—it simply refuses to let that pain define our path forward.

Examples of Forgiveness

At one point in early Church history, tensions ran high among members. People were hurting each other, holding grudges, and struggling to move forward. In that setting, the Lord gave a clear, striking command: His followers “ought to forgive one another.” Then He added something sobering. While God alone could decide “whom to forgive,” His disciples were not given that same privilege of discretion. They were “required” to forgive “all.”

It isn’t a suggestion. It isn’t conditional. This is a divine directive for healing and unity. The Lord didn’t ask them to ignore justice—He asked them to make room for His mercy by letting go of their desire to carry the offense any further.

Why would the Lord ask something so hard? Perhaps it is because the Lord knows that holding onto hate keeps our minds dwelling on the past and the offender. Focusing on the offense leaves no room for contemplating and engaging with His healing grace and hope in the present.

Jesus, hanging on the cross, uttered the words while looking at His torturers, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” In that moment, Christ modeled the highest form of forgiveness: extending compassion without having received any apology, show of remorse, or change. He recognized His abusers’ ignorance toward the depths of His pain and the extent of their own sin. Often, offenses are committed in such a state.

Even when buried by regret—when the weight of wrong choices seems too great, or the damage too deep—there is still hope. Healing doesn’t require perfection, only a willingness to turn toward the Savior. His grace reaches to infinite depths. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland tenderly reminds us, “It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines.” The same is true for those who have caused wrong. They, too, remain within the reach of divine love, and those who forgive become more like Christ when hoping for their healing. 

The REACH Method

So what is to be done when someone wants to forgive, but doesn’t know how or where to begin?

Start here. The Skyline Research Institute has published a series of short and playful videos focusing on tools and tactics for Peacemaking. These videos expound principles taught in President Nelson’s address “Peacemakers Needed” by complementing them with academic theories in psychology and conflict management. This current article is one in a series of articles published through Public Square, exploring the theories taught in each video more thoroughly.

The following video teaches principles of forgiveness from the perspective of a cat learning to forgive the dog who hurt them.

As shown in the video, these steps give a simple starting place for applying the divine and well-researched principles of forgiveness:

1. Name the Hurt.
Think of the person who hurt you. Let yourself feel the pain. Ask, “What specifically hurts me about this?” Is it betrayal? Injustice? Abandonment?

2. Imagine Speaking to Them.
What would you say if they were sitting before you? Get it all out—no filters. Write it in a letter (even if you never send it).

3. Switch Seats.
Now imagine being them. What might they say? What wounds might they carry? This doesn’t excuse them—it humanizes them.

4. Picture the Two Gifts.
In front of you are two gifts: your forgiveness and your anger. Which will you give them?

This process may need to be repeated many times—that’s okay. Forgiveness is rarely a one-time event. Like any habit, the choice to act with compassion must be practiced, especially in the face of discomfort. It may feel unnatural or insincere at first, but each time we choose kindness, the action becomes a little more familiar, a little more automatic. In any given situation, forgiveness is a muscle that strengthens with use. It’s a neural pathway that, with repetition, begins to favor hope, action, and healing over the depressing and well-worn track of rumination.

If the choice to act compassionately towards an aggressor feels out of reach, recognizing the need to forgive and its benefits is a good place to start. Even aiming for forgiveness softens your heart. Desire to want to forgive.

Based on his research, Worthington developed the REACH method:

• R – Recall the hurt.
• E – Empathize with the offender.
• A – Altruistic gift of forgiveness.
• C – Commit to forgive.
• H – Hold onto forgiveness when emotions rise again.

As the video showed, REACH is enacted step by step by recalling the hurt, imagining the offender’s pain, and choosing to give the “gift” of forgiveness. 

The Choice Is Ours

The reality of pain is undeniable, and its depth is often known only to the individual and God. Life frequently confronts people with shocking and disproportionate suffering, much of it undeserved. Such experiences are not uncommon, though they remain deeply personal and often isolating.

Forgiveness does not erase the past—but it reclaims the future. It is not about denying hurt, but about refusing to let that hurt decide who we become. In a world full of real wounds and imperfect people, forgiveness offers something radical: not control over others, but healing within ourselves. Though anger may offer the illusion of power, only forgiveness frees us from the grip of the past and opens the way to peace. 

As both research and revelation affirm, forgiveness is not just a moral ideal—it is a practiced, powerful, and divine pathway toward emotional, physical, and spiritual renewal. 

The invitation remains: choose the gift of forgiveness. Give it again and again.

The post You Don’t Need to Feel Forgiving to Forgive appeared first on Public Square Magazine.