The idea of violent Islam fits into a persistent criticism of religion in general, which is that religious people and groups are unusually violent. Charles Kimball writes, “It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.” For example, recent Netflix series depicts Brigham Young, an early president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a “villainous, violent fanatic,” despite evidence that Latter-day Saints were less violent than other groups at the time.

All Muslims? 

As a threshold matter, it’s hard to know what it would mean to say that Islam is inherently violent. If this is true, does that mean that every Muslim will unavoidably engage in violence? Or perhaps not everyone, but only 50%? 20%? 10%? 1%? Or perhaps something more ambiguous, such as that “wherever” we see Islam, we see political violence? 

Further, when we speak of Islam, what are we referring to? It is critical to understand that there is no single understanding of Islam. There are myriad sects and movements within Islam, each with its own particular ideas and teachings. Here is a chart showing the basic divisions of Islam:

As with other major religions, these different branches within Islam do not always agree with each other on many core teachings and practices. Even within a particular branch, there can be many differing opinions from different leaders on specific concepts. Whenever extremist groups claim to be speaking for “Islam,” they clearly do not represent the views of millions of other Muslims. 

The Reality of Violent Islam

Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that a great deal of violence has been perpetrated by self-identified Muslims and that such violence is often justified in religious terms. The most recent well-known event was the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel which killed 1,139 Israelis and others and injured thousands. Many Americans have vivid memories of the September 11, 2001, Twin Towers attacks, which killed 2,977 people. As of 2015, four Islamic extremist groups (ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of all deaths from terrorism. From 2011 – 2019, there were between 13,000 and 33,000 deaths per year from terrorist attacks. Most of these attacks and deaths have been in Muslim-majority countries. One study claims that over 167,000 people have been killed by Islamist attacks over 40 years; 90% of those victims were other Muslims. 

It is also true that Islamic extremist groups often justify their attacks using their religion, specifically their interpretations of Islamic texts such as the Quran, the hadith, and Sharia law. Their reasoning includes armed jihad as retribution for perceived injustices against Muslims by non-believers; the belief that certain self-identified Muslims have violated Islamic principles and are therefore considered disbelievers (takfir); the perceived obligation to restore Islam’s dominance by implementing sharia law and reestablishing the Caliphate as a unified Islamic state (e.g., ISIS); the pursuit of heavenly rewards through martyrdom; and the conviction that Islam is superior to all other religions.

It is difficult to find accurate estimates of how many Islamic terrorists there are in the world due to the clandestine nature of these groups and the different definitions of terrorism. However, estimates have been made. In 2014, ISIS was thought to have at most 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, plus another 30,000 from other countries. There are about 10,000 fighters detained in Syria as of 2024. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban potentially have tens of thousands each. When all the terrorist groups are put together, most sources seem to estimate there could be around 100,000 individuals. The highest number I found was from a report in 2018 that estimated there were up to 230,000 Salafi-jihadist and allied fighters worldwide. In comparison, the global Muslim population is 1.9 billion. Thus, the highest estimates of Islamic terrorism posit that .005% to .012% of all Muslims are terrorists. In other words, 99.99% of Muslims in the world are explicitly not terrorists.

Violent Verses in the Quran

Despite looking at these numbers, some may still say that the actual Al-Quran preaches violence. Specific Quranic verses certainly seem to condone violence, such as the “Sword Verse”: 

“… kill the polytheists who violated their treaties wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them on every way” (Surah At-Tawbah 9:5).

Critics claim that such verses are evidence of Islam’s endorsement of violence. There are three reasons why pointing to violent verses in the Quran as evidence for Islam’s fundamental violent nature is not a particularly convincing argument.

First, like many religious texts, I suspect that these verses are often taken out of context by both critics of Islam and violent Muslims themselves, trying to religiously justify their actions. There are many people who perpetuate evil in religious and non-religious contexts. People with evil intentions will find justifications for their actions if they look for them. The Al-Quran is certainly not the only holy text used as justification for horrendous acts. 

Second, if one is going to accept the Al-Quran as an authoritative voice when it comes to violence, then one must accept the whole Al-Quran. There are other verses that preach peace rather than violence:

“… Whoever takes a life … it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity” (Surah Al-Ma-idah 5:32).

“Good and evil cannot be equal. Respond to evil with what is best, then the one you are in a feud with will be like a close friend” (Surah Fussilat 41:34).

“The true servants of the Most Compassionate are those who walk on the earth humbly, and when the foolish address them improperly, they only respond with peace” (Surah Al-Furqan 25:63).

The meaning of particular verses is situated by the overall meaning of the text. While I may not be an expert on the Al-Quran, Christians and other believers (and non-believers) should be able to understand that certain passages can be selectively employed in a way that goes against the overarching message of the text.

The Concept of Jihad

Beyond specific Quranic verses, the concept of jihad offers a clear example of how Islamic doctrine can be subject to widely varying interpretations. Critics and Islamic extremists often claim that jihad primarily means “holy war” and use it to justify violence against non-believers by presenting it as a divine mandate for conquest. However, many Islamic scholars and practitioners interpret jihad differently by viewing it primarily as a personal, spiritual struggle to live a righteous life and resist evil—much like the Christian exhortation to “put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:10-11). 

Armed jihad is still considered a significant concept in mainstream Islamic teaching, but it is thought of as secondary and limited to defensive contexts. Thus, as with many religious teachings, the meaning of jihad depends on interpretation and context. The existence of peaceful, alternative interpretations within Islam demonstrates that the Quran, like any religious text, offers a range of possible readings. That flexibility itself suggests that Islam cannot be reduced to a singular, violent doctrine.

It is also worth pointing out that most victims of extremist violence are Muslims. In other words, the violence mostly comes from some Islamic sects against other Islamic sects, highlighting that the violent sects do not necessarily represent Islam itself, nor do they primarily target non-Islamic populations. Extremist groups often represent fringe interpretations that are condemned by most other Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims simply don’t belong to terrorist sects of Islam. 

Potential Origins of the Call to Violence

While extremist groups and their actions are often cited as evidence of Islam’s supposed inherent violence, a closer look reveals that their motivations and justifications are often far more political than theological. In fact, many of these groups and the regimes they represent leverage religion as a tool to consolidate power, often distorting Islamic teachings to suit their ambitions.

While there are Islamic terrorist groups in many places around the world, the majority of them are concentrated in a few countries of the Middle East. Often these groups aren’t just operating within a country’s borders, they are running the country. The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has housed various Islamic terrorist groups, and ISIS stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. These governments are run by people who have shown they will leverage religious authority and their people’s faith for their own violent ends.

Personal and Observational Evidence

The most compelling evidence for me as to why I don’t think Islam is fundamentally violent comes from personal experience. It’s not official, it’s not professional, it’s not scientific, but I do think it is relevant. 

I served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Indonesia, which is the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. For two years, I lived alongside 235 million Muslims, at least 87% of the nation’s total population. I talked with, walked with, ate with, and lived with Muslims every single day for two years in Indonesia. Not one of them tried to kill me. None of them assaulted me. None of them even gave me a little push or yelled at me to get out of their country. In fact, the only people who kicked me out of their house for teaching about Jesus Christ were other Christians. 

During my time there, Indonesian Muslims would frequently and emphatically disavow terrorist groups, insisting “they are not really Muslim.” These weren’t casual statements made in passing—they were heartfelt declarations from people who were deeply troubled by how their faith was being misrepresented by extremists. Despite being a visible religious minority as a Christian missionary in a Muslim-majority country, I never once felt physically threatened or in danger.

Looking Forward

I have yet to be convinced that Islam is an inherently violent religion. The bigger question for me is, how do we live with our Muslim neighbors? How do we, as a country, a society, a world, and a people live with others who have a radically different worldview than us? Well, that’s always been the question. How do people with irreconcilable differences get along? I have no idea, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think the differences are as big and daunting as they might seem. Every religion and worldview has some sharp edges that need to be smoothed down, edges that come more from culture and history rather than doctrine and teachings.

One thing is certain: insisting that your Muslim neighbor’s faith requires violence is not a good foundation for friendly relations. Claiming all Muslims are disposed to violence because of their religion is a gross and misleading generalization. As the Muslim and Western worlds increasingly come into contact with each other, we have choices about how we will interact. Refraining from tarring all Muslims as violent is a crucial first step toward building better relationships with our Muslim neighbors.

The post Beyond the Sword: Challenging the Myth of Islam’s “Inherent” Violence appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Feeling validated about one’s self or having one’s choices affirmed is not inherently a bad thing. Certainly, we can all resonate with wanting to have our feelings and points of view confirmed by others. For example, perhaps an extreme one, women who have experienced physical abuse often seek and need validation from others that what they are experiencing is actually abuse. I (Brianna) once had a client who came to a session after her husband had physically assaulted her, and she had called the police. She was worried that she had done the wrong thing, had maybe overreacted, or was actually the one at fault. In this case, however, it was important to validate that her physical safety was important and that she had done the right thing.

Existing in echo chambers can steadily move us away from reality and confine us in a space that is not actually healthy or helpful. We lose the ability to challenge our own beliefs and consider different points of view when we are unequivocally validated in the beliefs we hold. Particularly when our choices are destructive to others or ourselves, what we need may not be validation but rather challenge and correction. If we only ever hear our own thoughts and ideas repeated back to us in an affirming way, we can quickly lose touch with reality. An echo chamber allows us to inhabit a world entirely of our own making, a world created in our own image and reflecting back to us only ourselves. As such, the danger of an echo chamber lies in the way it encourages us to be like Narcissus, a figure of ancient Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water.   

To understand better how echo chamber therapy can impede our happiness and growth, we need to take a look at how modern therapeutic practice developed and how it fails to provide what we need to reach our highest potential. We will see that our Heavenly Father wants us to grow and develop and that, often, this growth requires us to change, repent, and improve. True love and concern for people do not affirm them in whatever they happen to be doing but instead challenge us to become who we truly can be—the sort of person our Heavenly Father intended us to become all along. 

Echo Chambers & Person-Centered Therapy

Carl Rogers is considered a “father” of modern psychotherapy with his theory of “person-centered therapy.” His ideas and therapeutic approach have played—and continue to play—a particularly influential role in how therapists are trained today. Indeed, he is one of the top 12 most cited psychologists of all time. Although you may never have read or heard about Carl Rogers specifically, there’s a very good chance that you have heard the phrase “unconditional positive regard” or “unconditional love” somewhere, perhaps in an introduction to psychology course or even in casual conversation with friends.

Carl Rogers […] argued that to facilitate genuine psychological and emotional healing therapists must establish a particular kind of empathic relationship with their clients, one based on the therapist’s unconditional acceptance of the client, regardless of what the client says or does or feels. 

Most American psychotherapy training programs tend to emphasize person-centered therapeutic modalities as a basic building block in counseling education. Everything beneficial in the therapeutic relationship, it is often said, is rooted in and built up from the therapist’s use of unconditional positive regard in approaching the client.

Rogers himself argued that in order for the individual to be fully free to be themselves in therapy, the therapist must create an environment of unconditional acceptance and radical tolerance or, to use a more recently popularized term, a safe space. 

On a surface level, the creation of safe spaces does not seem like a bad idea. And, as Gantt and Thayne also note: 

… helping an individual to feel safe in expressing his or her hidden thoughts and feelings is a valuable and important endeavor, especially in a therapeutic setting where genuine empathy and openness are vital. 

These professionals further articulate that to criticize Rogers is not to criticize empathy, understanding, and openness as a whole. While Rogers has been particularly influential in defining what empathy means for psychologists, his way of facilitating openness and authenticity is not the only one. Nor would we argue that it is the best way as a therapist. 

What Rogers misses (and what many of his followers miss) is the difference between the ability to exercise judgment or discernment about events or behaviors in a client’s life and judging a person’s value or intent. There is simply no avoiding this issue, though. Helpful interpersonal feedback requires judgment and discernment about whether the client is living a good, functional, or healthy life. 

Skeptical? Try this quick thought experiment: 

Imagine that the ‘worst’ person that you know is getting therapy. The therapist provides validation for every thought, feeling, and action that person has ever had or done—including those that have hurt you or other people. 

Certainly, this is not a very comfortable thought. Validating sins and misdeeds does not help the person in the wrong want to change, and it is cheapened when it is applied by default to everything another feels or does.

Rebukes, chastenings, reprimands, commandments, instructions, parental advice, attempts at persuasion are all fundamentally and inescapably at odds with the notion of a “safe space.” 

But “safe spaces” may not actually be what is best for us. In order to understand the truth about love, healing, and happiness, we should first look to those who do it perfectly—Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ—and understand the meaning and purpose of our lives. 

The Plan of Happiness & Our Divine Purpose

The Plan of Salvation is, indeed, a plan of happiness. But to understand what this really means, we must understand happiness. It is common in our modern, secular world to define happiness ecumenically as an agreeable psychological state. According to this understanding, people are happy as long as they enjoy what they are doing and are achieving what they desire. But this approach has obvious problems, ones that have been noted at least since the beginnings of the Western intellectual tradition—for example, by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and many others. If we enjoy doing evil, does this make us happy or merely more miserable because we do not appreciate the significance of our actions? As the philosopher and psychologist William James observed: “If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” People and society often flaunt the commandments of God and experience ‘happiness,’ but Alma is correct when he states, “wickedness never was happiness.”

If we leave the word “happiness” as the world would define it, then we may miss the purpose of our lives. Life is not about preventing the vindictive judgment of a vengeful God, rather, it is about who we become. As Elder Christofferson has said, “God’s purpose is that we, His children, may be able to experience ultimate joy, to be with Him eternally, and to become even as He is.”

However, if we ‘think celestial,’ as President Nelson has counseled us to do, we can see that we must follow the commandments of God, make covenants in the temple, and live our lives trying to be more like Christ if we want to become people who will want to stand in the presence of God. Through these commandments, covenants, and efforts, Heavenly Father shows us the manner of heaven through our experience by becoming as He is. This goes beyond “check-list” religious practices. The very act of becoming is the ultimate joy, happiness, and purpose of life. 

How Does God Love Us? 

So as we think about God, His plan, and how He loves us, let us consider a different thought experiment. In another article written here at Public Square Magazine, Kylie Burdge and I (Brianna) comment: 

Imagine a parent looking at their 8-year-old child saying, “I love you totally and completely, so please do not feel any need to grow and change.” While it is true that we love our children as they are, does that love for them mean that we never want them to change or grow or progress? From a Christian view, those desires would not really be loving because they inherently limit the experiences and ultimate happiness that we want for children […] Their perspective would be forever limited. In fact, there is an aspect in which we intuitively recognize that there is something wrong with a parent who wants their child to stay as they are forever. 

Good parents know that their children need to grow and change. Sometimes this tutelage includes reprimands, instructions, advice, and chastenings—though always motivated by and grounded in selfless love. After all, the scriptures say: “For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,” and “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.” Lest we forget, these guidelines for love are almost the exact opposite of how we would define a contemporary “safe space.”

So how does the Lord provide chastisement? 

Doctrine and Covenants sheds some light on His purposes: “Whom I love I also chasten that their sins may be forgiven, for with the chastisement I prepare a way for their deliverance in all things out of temptation, and I have loved you” [emphasis added]. Elder Christofferson further adds, “The fruit of God’s chastisement is repentance leading to righteousness.” 

God’s intent with chastisement, or correction, is to help us become as He is. We agreed to His plan from the beginning and clearly had the desire to live as He does. Indeed, in this respect, He is a bit older and wiser in the ways of life and truth. Within this context, repentance is simply a reflection of how we change and how we grow into new people over time through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Chastisement and correction from a Godly perspective is loving because it helps us realize who we are and who we can become.

Love and Therapy

How does this apply to therapy and echo chambers? First, we should be clear that therapists are neither parents to their clients nor gods. They are just people. However, by exploring and embracing the love Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for us, we can expand our vision of what healing and growth look like.

However, the reality is that therapists are imperfect, and they may not always make the best observations or challenges in the right way. You don’t have to take everything your therapist says at face value and apply it exactly in your life. Rather, a therapist can provide opportunities for growth by having productive dialogue around the context of your life and possible areas of improvement. You want to find the right therapist for you, not the perfect therapist. 

Ultimately, though, you have a better opportunity to grow and progress if you find an environment where you can feel lovingly and fairly challenged. In these constructive confrontations, you have an increased opportunity to learn the truth about your experiences and the people in your life. As Jesus taught, “the truth shall make you free” and you will never learn the truth in an echo chamber.

The post When Safe Spaces Aren’t Safe: How Unconditional Acceptance Can Stifle Growth appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We love hearing from our readers and feel a sense of responsibility to serve each of you well. If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at contact@PublicSquareMag.org. It’s the easiest, most direct way to speak to our editors.

We are Growing a Community

In 2024 Public Square has begun to blossom beyond our articles. We launched our book club and have featured books from some preeminent Latter-day Saint voices. This book club has given our readers the opportunity to better dialogue and to grow our mission of elevating Latter-day Saint voices. Those voices are no longer just found on our editorial pages but in the social media conversations around them.

As our community has grown we’ve had an increased need for approaching moderation. And we’ve received some criticism from those who suggest that we’ve moderated too lightly, allowing content that is critical and factually inaccurate to remain on our pages. For example, after helping to break a major story that the origins of the CES letter, an influential anti-Mormon document, had been substantially misrepresented by its author, some commented on our stories that we were motivated to break this story because the accusations in the letter had never been answered. Though this claim is inaccurate—the substance of the CES letter has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked—we allowed these claims to stand on our pages. We believe that as our communities have grown, we benefit from the opportunity to recognize and confront these kinds of claims rather than simply moderate them away.

We hope that as we continue to grow, we will be better able to maintain this kind of self-sustaining conversation, which doesn’t require the degree of moderation that is sometimes necessary to prevent smaller communities from being co-opted by outside bad actors.

Ecumenicalism

For the second year in a row we participated with a broad coalition of faiths to celebrate Fidelity Month. Fidelity Month is the vision of Robert George, an occasional contributor to Public Square Magazine.

We also sought inspiration from the larger evangelical movement in comparing our own tradition’s approach trajectory to projects they’ve previously embarked on, such as the seeker-sensitive movement or the no-hell movement.

We have also begun a series celebrating the principles taught in The Family Proclamation in preparation for its thirtieth anniversary. These principles continue to serve as a beacon to those across faiths looking for simple articulations of important truths, and we’ve found enthusiasm among our many religious friends for this series.

Politics and Unity

This year was Public Square Magazine’s second presidential election year. We attempted to build on our work in 2020 while applying the lessons we learned then.

We largely tried to hit this goal by publishing editorials that focused on principles to consider leading up to the election rather than candidates. We strived to promote principles such as temperance, respect for democratic norms, and respect for women and families, among others. Our only article about candidates was a reported piece on how different Latter-day Saints are voting and why, not an editorial urging any direction.

We did receive some criticism for our late decision not to publish any editorials for or against candidates, but we ultimately felt that modeling the kind of unity we would need to find quickly in our wards and Sunday School classes was a better path forward.

Major Controversies

Among the largest stories we covered this year was the film Heretic, a film about a madman torturing two sister missionaries by making them listen to his lectures about atheism, in addition to the psychological and physical abuse they endured at his hands. 

We are particularly proud of our reporting on the story. We secured the script more than five months before its release and had our reporters at the premiere to observe the finished film and gauge reactions to it. 

Our comprehensive coverage of the film and its controversies were among our most widely read articles of the year. 

We also followed a slowly breaking story about the Associated Press’ failure to cover The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints according to their journalistic standards. These failures first appeared in 2023 when usually reliable reporter Michael Rezendes began including sloppy, slapdash conclusions in his articles about the Church. But these failures really revealed themselves in an April article about the subjects church leaders didn’t discuss in the recent General Conference.

They followed this up with an error-ridden article about new temples the Church is working to build in Las Vegas and the Dallas metro area. Despite these mistakes being plain, factual, and repeatedly brought to the attention of AP editors, the article still remains uncorrected.

We expect that this story will continue to develop in 2025.

Perhaps our most controversial story of this year concerned religious garments. The social media reaction to this story was broad and cut in many different directions. We are proud of our authors who helped articulate their faith and decisions, and we are glad that we are able to provide them with an alternative platform since they have been cut out of other coverage on this issue. We are also pleased with how our new moderation approaches have allowed those conversations to flourish on our social media.

Looking Forward

As Public Square Magazine looks forward to its sixth year, we remain committed to fostering a vibrant, respectful, and engaging community for our readers. Our focus will add collaborative projects that amplify meaningful dialogue, strengthen shared values, and build bridges of understanding. We are especially excited to expand our efforts in accessibility, ensuring that our content reaches broader audiences while maintaining the depth and integrity our readers value. From further refining our book club and community initiatives to deepening our partnerships with other contributors, we aim to make our platform even more impactful.

Faithful civil discourse remains at the heart of our mission. In a time of polarization and division, we will continue to strive to model and encourage conversations rooted in mutual respect, curiosity, and a commitment to truth. Inspired by prophetic counsel and guided by enduring principles, we hope to continue creating a space where the complexity of modern issues can be met with compassion and clarity. Thank you for being part of our journey. Here’s to another year of growth and meaningful engagement!

The post Our Year in Review: When Moderation Sparks the Loudest Debate appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Growing up as a gay Latter-day Saint in the early 2000s presented unique challenges—but not the ones you might expect. Unlike many stories that you might hear in the media, I did not experience religious trauma or blame God for my circumstances. Instead, I struggled with a lack of resources that could give me alternatives to misguided worldly influences and hold fast to my Savior.

This raises a few important questions:
• How can we empathize with the experiences of sexual minority Latter-day Saints without enabling them to drift away from the gospel?
• How can we unapologetically hold to our beliefs while respecting the agency of those who choose a different path?
• How can we tactfully and effectively challenge faith-destroying narratives?

As I learned how to navigate these questions in my own life through personal experience, I have been richly blessed. I have a strong testimony of the restored gospel, a life-giving temple marriage, and three beautiful children—one of whom tends the gardens of our heavenly mansion while we navigate mortality. Early in my marriage, I discovered a vibrant network of same-sex attracted Latter-day Saints thriving within the Church. Some are in mixed-orientation marriages like mine, while others live celibate lives.

Their examples inspired me to reflect critically on the principles and practices that have helped me cultivate a thriving life within the gospel when many in the world would say that it’s impossible to do so. I also considered the misconceptions I once held—misconceptions that many still grapple with—which make it harder to hold onto faith as a sexual minority. And like others, I’ve seen firsthand how certain beliefs and attitudes often lead individuals away from the Church.

In many ways, this book is a letter to a younger version of myself growing up in today’s politically charged climate. It is my testimony of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and the power it has to enrich our lives. It’s also a heartfelt guide for Latter-day Saints navigating the complex terrain of LGBT+ issues—helping them love and support others without enabling a crisis of faith.

Because I have been so blessed to find and sustain a successful marriage, I feel a deep responsibility to speak out. I feel an obligation to share my experiences and challenge harmful approaches to LGBT+ issues that lead people away from the covenant path.

My goal has been to provide encouragement and support to sexual minorities who are striving to stay committed to the gospel. I also aim to steer the conversation within the Church toward a framework that respects diverse experiences while remaining firmly anchored in gospel truths.

This book is my effort to do just that.

The post When Compassion Misleads: How Faith and Identity Can Coexist appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Like racehorses frenzied in anticipation for the starting horn to sound, each team’s starting five took to the floor, anxious for the opening tip-off to let them loose. The atmosphere buzzed as the crowd fixed their gaze on the court. The muted shrieks of sneakers on the playing surface composed the rhythmic symphony of competition.

The ball was tipped, and the trail-bound Cougars removed the bounds holding the game clock. With 40 minutes of basketball underway, the countdown had begun. Who could have expected this basketball game would not be remembered for its result but for the hateful and bigoted jeers of the student section?

It wasn’t long before a ball flew out of play near the Providence student section. A moment of dead air was suddenly invaded by a coordinated chant.

“F— the Mormons! F— the Mormons!” 

The message was clear and poignant: the visitors were not welcome in Providence due to religious intolerance. In no uncertain terms, the home crowd joined as one to spread hatred.

Neither happened. The collective roar from a sea of fans loyal to a school nicknamed “Friars” was active in disparaging another sect of Christianity. Bigotry is blind, I suppose.

To make matters worse, BYU would suffer an embarrassing 19-point defeat to the host team, returning home with no response to the inexcusable act of intolerance directed toward them in the early minutes of the game. Salt meets wound.

If this were an isolated incident, time could wash this polluted occasion into triviality. As Brigham Young University and its sponsor religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have experienced, this instance is indicative of a greater pattern that has been directed at “Mormons” for years.

While it is not often this publicized, private instances of this level of hatred towards the Church and its membership are hardly infrequent. 

Jake Retzlaff, BYU football’s Jewish quarterback, shared his unique perspective on this phenomenon with McKay Coppins of the Atlantic. The head of the Cougars’ football team wears his religious beliefs as a badge of honor, especially at an institution with an overwhelmingly LDS student body.

“The blatant disrespect for their faith—it’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and they were saying that in the stands?” Retzlaff questioned, appalled. “Imagine if that hit the papers. That would be a big deal.”

“There’s a lot of people who just don’t like Mormon people for no reason,” he insisted. “That’s what happened to the Jews all throughout history.”

The man who fans affectionately dubbed “BYJew” has experienced more anti-Mormonism during his time at BYU than anti-Semitism, but the lack of outrage from bystanders is especially noteworthy.

At football games at Oregon University’s Autzen Stadium, “— the Mormons” chants showered the field, much to the disgust of an LDS recruit in attendance as he was considering a commitment with the Ducks. Identical jeers from the University of Southern California arrived when BYU competed in the Colosseum. Ironically, the Trojans’ starting quarterback was likewise a member of the very church they were disparaging. That player’s exit from USC in the following offseason didn’t come as a surprise to many.

Anti-LDS rhetoric seems to be more socially acceptable than other religious bigotry, and I have a theory as to why that could be—it all stems from the victim’s response (or lack thereof).

The New Testament’s instructions on responding to opposition are clear: “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” The Savior’s Church, and its latter-day leaders, share this sentiment and insist that followers of Christ resist any impulses that would rupture any remaining civility in hostile interactions.

Simply stated, members of the Church are encouraged not to fight back. In some ways, this makes “Mormons” an easy target. Conversely, this perspective allows for more constructive rhetoric in our interactions. Rather than biting back when a stranger’s hostility shakes your composure, re-routing conversations to be uplifting and positive can build a stronger resolve to stand for good. Returning hatred for hatred is a horrible way to live.

President of the Church, Russell M. Nelson, declared in his April 2023 discourse, Peacemakers Wanted, “The Savior’s message is clear: His true disciples build, lift, encourage, persuade, and inspire—no matter how difficult the situation. True disciples of Jesus Christ are peacemakers.”

Your response to opposing forces will mold both who you are today and who you can become tomorrow. Opposition is inevitable, but a strong resolve can shape our character. The anecdote from the opening was not the first instance of religious bigotry aimed toward the Church or its members, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Take faith in knowing that persecution comes and goes, but your reaction can greatly affect your circumstances—for good or bad. Turning the other cheek isn’t a sign of physical weakness; rather, it’s a strong indication of moral resolve.

The post Religious Intolerance As Sport: Turning the Other Cheek appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

That was my first introduction to Ballerina Farm and the Neeleman family, though my sister could remember neither name at the time. Hannah Neeleman is the poised and beautiful face of their social media, which presents in idyllic, almost nostalgic colors, the homespun adventures of her life with her husband Daniel, and their eight children living on a 328-acre farm just outside of Kamas, Utah. Though the details of their life on the farm should, like the cow on the camping trip, present no threat to anyone with a different life and different choices, her 10 million follower count on Instagram means that their life, as it plays out on the social media stage, garners the attention and criticism of many. A July article in The Times on the family went viral after it made some strong and fairly offensive inferences about their marital dynamic, which were based on the author spending a single day with them and likely coming in with an angle presupposed.

That particular aspect of the author’s analysis struck a personal chord with me. I went on my first date with my future husband the week before I moved to New York to pursue acting professionally and even as I landed in this bustling city dragging my luggage through Harlem looking for my new address, I could already feel that I might one day love that man more than this place. I flew back and forth from New York to the UK for a Master’s degree in writing and dreamed about various kinds of success. Now, I have three little children, live in a home far from any iconic metropolis and my big, beautiful writing desk is often blocked by giant hot wheel tracks and unfolded laundry, and sometimes I’m the one that puts them there. Hannah Neeleman’s would-be ballet studio becoming a school room for their homeschooled children sounds like an indication of practicality not patriarchy.

Agnew described Hannah Neeleman as a woman who “milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants” and asked an interesting either/or question, though I think was unwilling to give both apparent answers equal possibility, “Is this an empowering new model of womanhood—or a hammer blow for feminism?”

The quiet query that follows such a question is what is feminism? It is only a hammer blow if it flies in the face of what feminism actually is. I naively thought feminism was a movement that fights for the rights of women to freely pursue any life they want, including raising a large family, cooking sourdough from scratch, and drinking milk straight from the cow. From the rhetoric surrounding the most recent election, however, it would seem feminism only includes a woman’s right not to have a child, even if it is the natural consequence of choices she has made. Those same people fiercely fighting for that apparent right do not rally quite as vocally around a different woman’s right to raise a large family.

“But Agnew (and the online chorus of Hannah’s detractors),” author Sarah Baird points out, “never meaningfully addresses why the Neelemans’ life might be inspiring; she doesn’t really seem curious about that.”

This author, and many other voices online, do not even leave room for the possibility that Hannah may love and value her country life and her meadows of bright-eyed, wild, and capable children as much as she claims to online. And that, at least some significant portion of her 10 million followers, are there to watch because they too see the appeal.

I am exactly Hannah’s age and though it is common for anyone to long for their childhood as a simpler time, those of us who came of age as technology advanced in unprecedented ways at the turn of the 21st century literally grew up in a simpler time. Now we have young children growing up in a frighteningly complex one while we attempt to navigate it with noisy, crowded, and conflicting technology as both our instruction and destruction. At times, I feel towards smart phones not unlike J.R.R. Tolkien felt towards the invention of the combustion engine:

It is full Maytime by the trees and grass now. But the heavens are full of roar and riot. You cannot even hold a shouting conversation in the garden now, save about 1 a.m. and 7 p.m.—unless the day is too foul to be out. How I wish the ‘infernal combustion’ engine had never been invented.

The world of social media is noisy and the overstimulation of motherhood is made worse by screens that constantly notify us of equal parts calamity and opportunities for overconsumption. We struggle to healthily navigate it ourselves and don’t know how to begin to teach our children to do better than we can. Enter a little glimpse into a simpler world. Ballerina Farm may be performance art, but the reason we’re still talking about it is because it’s so well done. The wholesomeness at the center of its aesthetic is something many of us are deeply craving. Maybe somewhere off in the rolling rural hills, a world still exists where kids have dirt under their fingernails and run through pastures and make lemonade out of a fistful of dandelions and rhubarb they found in the yard instead of fighting over iPads. Maybe I can’t have the farm, but it’s possible I could turn off the TV and let my 3-year-old help me feed our very first sourdough starter.

 Perhaps some women just look at “former professional ballerina” now “mother of eight” on paper and can’t help but write the story of a life that took a left turn. But their perception of what fulfilled womanhood looks like doesn’t matter. It’s Hannah who gets to decide if she’s happy. “When I first started dancing … I felt like dance was a part of me, a part of who I was meant to be,” Neeleman said in a clip from nearly a decade ago, while pregnant with her second child, “and later on, as I’ve become a mother, I felt that same connection to this calling—that it’s a part of me, that it’s who I was meant to be. I really feel like I was meant to be a mother.”

 There is a place for vulnerable, relatable mom-content that makes you feel less alone as you sit in a bathrobe at 4 p.m. in a wrecked house with the TV as your only salvation. There’s also a place for content that distills the magic of what motherhood could be and sometimes really is.

 I saw a brief clip of her teaching the candidates at the latest Mrs. American pageant some interview skills before the event where she would hand over her crown to one of them. She is in full glam make-up, high heels and has her baby carrier strapped to the front of her. She seems completely unencumbered by the presence of her baby and later wears her Mrs. American sash right over the top of the baby for photos. She made no attempt to downplay or hide the baby’s presence nor did she seem to be flaunting it. It was just a beautiful little fact of her current stage that she brought along for the ride. 

 That normalization of having a baby with you in public or even a professional setting is in stark contrast to the growing number of social media posts that say “babies shouldn’t be allowed on planes” or “people, stop bringing your kids to restaurants” and the growing popularity of the “child-free wedding”.

The alarming extension of the societal inclination represented in that article from The Times that says no woman could be freely choosing to have so many children, is a growing public disdain for children in general. What’s so strange about that growing impression is that we were all children ourselves. It’s not some annoying hyper-niche hobby that a tiny portion of the population disruptively dabbles in, it is an essential stage that every single human on this planet goes through. And every one of our childhoods involved an exhausted adult somewhere in the background rooting for us and raising us at great personal expense.

 It was, in fact, that same baby’s attendance at the original Mrs. American pageant, with her mother competing 12 days post-partum, that skyrocketed Hannah Neeleman into public conversation. Though perhaps it was the combination of a baby and a ballgown that kept people talking and brought on Megan Agnew’s original question about whether this was a new model of womanhood or a hammer-blow to feminism.

 My frank answer to that question is why does it have to be either? I attended the most recent Mrs. American pageant in Las Vegas, where Neeleman was passing the torch, to support a close family member who was competing. It felt very clearly like something I would never be interested in participating in. But I also sat in the lobby afterwards with that family member hearing about all the ways the experience had inspired and empowered her and felt so happy that she got that opportunity. That is feminism. Women supporting women in pursuing excellence and actualization in every sphere and not always rushing to say one form of excellence threatens another by its very existence.

 I can see that someone else was breastfeeding in a ball gown 12 days postpartum and be happy for her and also be happy that 12 days postpartum found me in my own bed snuggling my baby in a bathrobe. I can be overwhelmed with my three children and see someone else enjoying eight and not assume that must mean she’s under someone’s thumb and can’t possibly be choosing that life freely. It’s her right to love the feeling of hands covered in flour and lots of faces to wipe.

 But somehow, the more loudly society purports to fight for women’s rights, the less likely they are to include ‘raising a large family and finding joy in homemaking’ as being among them.

The post The Longing and the Loathing Inspired by Ballerina Farm appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We should defend the importance of the family as a stabilizing force in society—a spiritual and emotional respite. However, paradoxically, there is another argument for why we should be grateful for the influence of the family: there is no respite from your own big brother, and there is little stability in your relationship with your moody little sister.

Think back to your childhood. You hopefully have fond memories of laughter and play. I hope that those memories are the most vivid for you. However, for the sake of my argument, try to remember the reality of daily life with your family. Maybe your big brother ignored you, your sister was hyper-sensitive, or your dad was hard to please. But the reality of familial discord does not negate the good times. In fact, I argue that it makes them all the more miraculous.

But why would we want to defend families if this is the case? As we learn in Romans 5 and hear so often over the pulpit, suffering breeds character. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

Chesterton emphasizes the conflict implicit in family life not as a discouragement against family but as an enticement to those of us who genuinely want self-improvement, “The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind (to test his goodness) would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And this is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.” 

Why Familial Loyalty is Crumbling

Modern thinkers often reject the family because of the conflict and clashing personalities that are so often found there. They say it thwarts happiness and dampens freedom. Many feel we should be able to choose our associations rather than have to deal with unfavorable family relations. This is why we see more people breaking away from family. Indeed, one in four adults now say they are estranged from a family member. A recent article in the New Yorker discusses the reasons why an increasing number of people are having “no contact” with their parents. This is due in large part to shifting political or religious ideals or the inability to get along. Rather than condemning this trend, the author seemed to conclude that there is no way out for many families. One secular estranged daughter said of her religious parents, “Reconciliation, for me, would mean them doing a bunch of work, and I don’t think they’re going to, so I just need to move forward like it’s not going to happen.” And so, the estranged move into like-minded communities, read their favorite political pundits, and become comfortable with their chosen clan. 

Family reconciliation demands work—work that is continual and difficult for all involved. Many don’t seem willing to make that sacrifice anymore. The Christian values of forgiveness and humility seem outdated and we would rather just have a life of ease. But a life that is surrounded only by people who make us comfortable is a small world indeed. As Chesterton says, “We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor … That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty toward humanity, but one’s duty to one’s neighbor.” 

“Progress” is one of our favorite words, but we just don’t hear much about “becoming a good person.” Yet, if we want progress, surely the only path toward it is for individuals to improve themselves and become virtuous. Throughout human history, the quest for “goodness” has been the driver of great minds as well as common men and women. Great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle spent their lives seeking to define and comprehend virtue and to teach us how to live a “good” life. Their intellectual descendants in philosophy, theology, and literature have long tried to work out the way to virtue. Guiding children onto the path of goodness was once the backbone of education. Plato even defined education this way, “Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

Our children are now being schooled without the benefit of McGuffey Readers. Many of their lessons would seem judgmental or overly prescriptive to our modern relativist viewpoint. School curricula rarely mention “virtue” or overcoming adversity but instead focus on achievement and happiness. The traditions and morals of our ancestors crumble, and children are left with endless choices and no clear expectations of life. Children unschooled in virtue may decide that the struggles of family life impede their achievement or happiness. Therefore, we should not be surprised by free-falling marriage and birth rates.

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened, and maintained.” Winston Churchhill

As Christians, however, we seek after virtue, accept suffering as part of mortality, and desire much greater ambitions than a mortal life of comfort. We want a life that demands things of us, that stretches us—we want an adventure. Chesterton explains, 

Adventure is, by nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family, we step into a fairytale.

If we take control over our lives, free ourselves of pesky relatives, and create a society for ourselves, we will block ourselves from any humbling relationships that aid our virtuous progression. As Chesterton says, we may create a society “for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.” 

The “Thrownness” of the Family

German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes our birth into this world as being “thrown” into our lives. We didn’t choose the place or circumstances of our birth nor our relatives and culture. Although there are some theories that premortal souls may have had some choice in their ultimate destination, there is no clear doctrine on this topic. Therefore, we will assume that the ‘throwing’ was done by our Heavenly Father. Seeing that we are often thrown into situations that are difficult and with people with whom we don’t naturally get along, comfort doesn’t seem to be His goal for our lives. Instead, God wants us to become good, to prove we can take the life we are thrown into and turn it into a hero’s epic. 

The home is where most of our heroism must occur. There is a special kind of annoyance that happens in the home, a more potent offense and a more stinging rebuke than found anywhere else in the world. We could travel around the world among diverse cultures and never encounter anyone as incomprehensible as our own sister. We can seek and attain honor and glory on Wall Street but find no one whose opinion matters more to us than our own fastidious father. We may debate opposing ideologies throughout the nation but will find no one’s politics more upsetting than our own Uncle Bob.  

“The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergences and varieties. It is like a little kingdom and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps we listen to sweet and idyllic descriptions of the family and think our own family is unique in its chaos and conflict—it isn’t. But that’s okay.

Taking Heidegger’s concept, who has been ‘thrown’ at us that we must learn to deal with? Who were we ‘thrown’ at? More than likely, we were thrown some curve balls. Considering the shared genetics, environment, and culture, it is miraculous how different members of a family can be from one another. Perhaps this diversity was purposely orchestrated by a loving Heavenly Father who knows what we need to progress. 

It’s a sad irony that we would never have been as neglectful of our high-school teacher’s instructions as we were of our beloved mother’s. Our brother would never have treated his friend’s little sister the way he did his own. But, because we deeply loved our mother and, despite his denials, our big brother cherished his little sister—there was, and is, a persistent power present in the family sufficient to enable a deep and lasting change to our character. 

I remember well as a child that my best friend was my sister, who was two years older than me. She was also my worst enemy. She was sweet, quiet, and sensitive. I was overconfident, pushy, and insensitive. This led to some hardship. I remember feeling like she always thought the worst of me. She remembers my rudeness. Years into our adulthood, we would still get into arguments. But I have changed, and so has she. I am less brash and sarcastic than I used to be, and my sister is more resilient than she used to be. It seems reasonable to assume these changes came from varied life experiences, travels, or extensive reading of scripture, psychology, and philosophy. 

But honestly, I think the change came because of our relationship and the slow chipping away of each other’s rough edges. I began to choose not to say things because I didn’t want her to take it the wrong way. She chose to let things go. I believe I am a better person because I had to go through the difficulty of adapting to my sister. We got through our trying and wonderful childhood and are still best friends, but we are no longer worst enemies. 

If we believe this life is a grand adventure—a place to prove ourselves, develop ourselves, and prepare ourselves for even greater tests in life—what better place to become “good” than those places that God “throws” us? In the relationship we did not choose, we will find inconvenient people who help us stretch experiences and grow. The family may be the harshest and most demanding of all tests. 

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, written 2000 years ago, is full of a Roman emperor’s philosophical rumination on how to be a good man and how to deal stoically with our fellow humans. It’s almost humorous to read how the ruler of a huge empire, whose daily life was filled with conquering armies, political strife, and exotic adventures, has to repeatedly reassure himself he is capable of dealing with everyday interactions with family and associates. He writes, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. … And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower.”

Goodness is Built at Home

Of all the quests we may take, there is none more primed to lead us on the path of goodness than those inside the walls of our own homes. It is in our home that we become true heroes. It is in our unchosen environments that we test our virtues. If we want to prove ourselves as disciples of Christ, emissaries of love and forgiveness, we must succeed on the battlefield of our own home.

As a mother of five, it is easy for me to be profoundly grateful for my beautiful children and my life full of loving moments. The greatest joys in life come through my family as well as the greatest miseries and strife.  If I can, through the lack of peace and pleasantness, find reconciliation, patience, and love, perhaps I have found the path toward goodness and adventure.

If we ponder the many things we have to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, perhaps we could consider the hardships found in our own homes. Let’s pray for peace and work towards harmony. But let’s also teach our son that if he could just learn to get along with his little sister, ruling Rome would be easy.

Link to the essay for Heretics by G.K. Chesterton, which is quoted at length.

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To be clear, there is no reason to believe that the organizers of this display “believe” in Dionysus as an actual deity with power. Rather, Dionysus is an archetype for festivals, revelry, and intoxication. Understood as an archetype, the myth of Dionysus can provide insights into important impulses or tendencies in human life. It can also help us see the truth more clearly.

Community, tolerance, non-violence: to put it mildly, this is an idiosyncratic reading of Dionysus. To the organizers’ credit, it must be acknowledged that Dionysus offers a version of community. In a festival atmosphere, where music and alcohol lower inhibitions, there is a kind of blurring of boundaries and a jovial spirit that lubricates social connection. There can be no hierarchy—no social classes—at the Dionysian festival. As the wine flows freely and the drums beat ever louder, all the petty divisions that separate human beings fade away into insignificance. The contemporary fashion of wanting to “dismantle” or “deconstruct” social norms is right at home with the Dionysian spirit. 

But there is a crucial difference between the Dionysus of the Olympics and the Dionysus of the Greeks. The Olympic version is advanced as a benign character—a silly blue man singing about how we should all go naked all of the time, not a threat to anyone or anything. It is a vision of comic transgressivity, harmless extravagance, and festive naughtiness that no one has any reason to fear or criticize. Indeed, an AP report of the opening ceremonies led with this line, written as a compliment: “Paris: the Olympic gold medalist of naughtiness.” 

But the Greeks were not nearly so naïve about the character of Dionysus. They recognized that when social conventions are dismantled, there are vicious as well as merry impulses waiting to be let loose. Nietzsche notes that Dionysian festivals included an “extravagant lack of sexual discipline” and not just the fun kind of sex: “The most savage beasts of nature were unleashed . . . [including a] repellant nature of lust and cruelty.” Without common restraints on behavior, humans might imagine themselves to be gods, but they can also devolve into beasts. 

It gets worse. What of those people who are unwilling to join the frenzied retinue of Dionysus? In Greek myths, they do not fare well. Euripides’ The Bacchae tells the story of King Pentheus of Thebes, who was not honoring Dionysus. By the end of the story, the followers of Dionysus (including Pentheus’ own mother, Agave) literally tear him to pieces while in a state of Dionysian frenzy. The same thing happened to the musician Orpheus—he did not honor Dionysus, and the female followers of Dionysus tore him apart when he would not have sex with them (this might go without saying, but Dionysus doesn’t seem to be too concerned with consent). This tearing apart of humans or animals is such an important theme in Dionysian myths that it has its own name: sparagmos.

So when the official Olympics X account states that “Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings,” the statement can only come across as ironic. Dionysus is no pacifist, and his followers are not harmless. Further, like all gods, Dionysus is a jealous god. He demands recognition and honor, and those who will not give him his due face his wrath. The idea that Dionysus’s party is a harmless display of community, tolerance, and non-violence is not even a myth—it is a fairytale.

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There remain some ideologically professional organizations that have not yet adopted the new consensus, including powerful ones such as the American Medical Association. But the overall trend is clear.

Some states, such as Tennessee, have passed laws banning these kinds of medical care. Yesterday, June 25, 2024, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging the Tennessee Law.

In the Summer of 2023, I joined a series of articles positing that the West was seeing the rise of a new religion. Since that time, I’ve come to refer to this as “the religion of the self.” The religion of the self centers on each person’s own understanding of their psychological core. The greatest good in this religion is actualizing that psychological core into reality. While this religion does not have the formal structure of religion that we are accustomed to, it does follow many of the familiar patterns of the early development of religious systems of belief throughout world history.

The transgender movement is one expression of this religious movement. It relies on dramatic metaphysical claims such as that a biological man is, in fact, a woman. By defining truth as our understanding of our own psyche, the religion of the self provides the philosophical grounding necessary for these claims. The new name and social transition rituals that derive from this philosophy find counterparts in many religious traditions.

So what happens when medical science says that hormone and surgical transitions for teenagers are harmful, but a religion has arisen that believes the transition of the outer self into the vision of the inner self is the greatest good?

Free Exercise of Religion

Let’s start by making it clear that when it comes to adults, the free exercise of religion pretty well guarantees the right to perform hormonal or surgical transitions. 

Body modifications, such as tattoos or piercings, are part of religious rituals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Wicca. Case law has even guaranteed tattoo parlors the right to operate. 

Surgical transition is, of course, much more invasive, but even on this front, there is some precedence. The Synanon, a new religious movement active from the 1950s to 1970s, mandated some followers to engage in vasectomies. 

But most importantly, surgical sterilization is legal for adults in the United States. Having a procedure be legal for non-religious reasons but illegal for the rationale of the religion of the self would violate our most basic tenets of religious fairness.

Adults who choose to undergo gender transition procedures in order to align their outer self with their vision of their psychological core as dictated by their religious beliefs are constitutionally protected.

Religion and Kids

However, the new research is focused much more specifically on children. The constitutional landscape for children and the free exercise of religion is much more nuanced. Let’s look at the landscape around medical interventions for children, particularly when they intersect with religious freedom laws.

On one end, you have male circumcision. Male circumcision does have long-term negative effects, such as reduced sexual sensation. But these effects are generally mild, the procedure involves very little risk, and some doctors believe there may be an upside to hygiene.

Still, there have been attempts to make the procedure illegal. The most notable attempt was in San Francisco in 2011. Ultimately, however, the male circumcision ban was stopped for unrelated legal reasons. California soon passed a law preventing local governments from passing bans against male circumcision, citing parental rights to make religious decisions for their children. So, on one end of the spectrum, you have procedures with mild side effects that are protected for religious reasons. 

On the other end of this spectrum, you have female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM is universally condemned in the medical community. The negative effects on women are much greater and long-lasting than the effects of circumcision on men. FGM is illegal across the United States and most of Europe, regardless of whether the girl or her parents consented to the procedure. There is no exception for religious reasons.

In one case, lawyers were planning on challenging the bans on freedom of religion grounds but ultimately did not. Erwin Chemerinsky, a leading constitutional Law Scholar, told the Detroit Free Press about the freedom of religion argument, “It is hard for me to imagine any court accepting the religious freedom defense given the harm that’s being dealt in this case. It is a losing argument. You don’t have the right to impose harm on others in practicing your religion.” 

Between these two poles, you have a variety of cases, and judges tend to consider a number of factors:

1. What is the opinion of the child, and is that child mature enough to make the decision?
2. How severe is the harm done, and is that harm reversible?
3. How effective would the procedure be?

Let’s look at a few example cases and how judges balanced those factors.

The first is the case of E.G. She was a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who decided not to get a blood transfusion to treat her leukemia.

The judge in the case considered that E.G. was considered mature for her age—psychologists said she had the maturity of an 18-21-year-old. E.G. also understood her religious beliefs well. Of course, her decision to not take treatment would not be reversible, but because the judge also considered that even if E.G. did take the treatment, the survival rate was only 20%. In weighing these factors, the court found E.G. had the right to refuse the blood transfusion.

The second is the case of Daniel Hauser. Hauser was only 13 years old. He practiced a Native American religious belief called Nemenhah. Hauser was not able to articulate his beliefs well, and his reading capabilities were put below a fifth-grade level. In addition, doctors said he had a negligible chance of survival for five years without the treatment but an 80% plus chance of survival with the treatment. In this case, the court found that Hauser (and his parents) did not have the right to turn down the treatment.  

The third case involves Shannon Nixon. Shannon died at 16 years old because her diabetic ketoacidosis was not treated. Her parents believed the treatment was in opposition to their religious views as members of the Faith Tabernacle Church. In this case, the parents were tried for child endangerment, and they made the claim they were acting in accordance with their child’s religious wishes. In this case, the judge found that because the consequences of not taking action—death—were so severe, it was not something that minors could consent to.

Children in the Religion of the Self

Children who have been raised in the religion of the self may seek to obtain medical procedures that the latest medical consensus concludes are harmful, much like FGM.

Let’s look at the same factors these judges have considered.

Maturity of the Child. This would largely need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. However, there is significant research to suggest that those who have gender dysmorphia have developmental disorders such as ASD at a higher rate than the population at large.

Severity of the Harm. One of the most important findings of the Cass report is that medical transitioning does not protect children from suicide. This procedure does not alleviate another risk. Those who describe teenage medical transitioning as “life-saving care” are misinformed about the research. However, surgical transitioning does similar but much more severe harm than FGM, and hormonal transitioning can cause permanent harm, such as sterilizing the child.

Effectiveness of the Procedure. Various studies suggest that gender dysphoria stops without medical intervention in 60-90% of cases. Between this and the conclusion on suicide, it appears that medical transition in the teenage years has little medical purpose. Rather, the purpose is a religious one of aligning the outer presentation of the self with the inner conception of the self.

Based on these factors, it appears that transgender transitioning is further outside the acceptable parameters than even FGM. Altogether, it seems likely that challenges to potential laws against medical transitioning for children would survive any objection to the religious rights of those who practice the religion of the self. 

While the religion of the self is a new religious movement that is still forming, it is a legitimate philosophical worldview that deserves the same deference and respect in our law as any other religious worldview. But it is not a superior worldview that deserves additional deference. In the same way, the courts have limited the religious freedom of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Native Americans when those practices could harm children, it is reasonable, based on the developing consensus, for states to ban medical transitioning for children as well.

Of course, the litigation now headed to the Supreme Court is not attempting to protect the religious freedom of transgender teens and their parents. They are basing their claim on the idea that gender identity is an attribute protected by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. And because it would so clearly not survive under religious protection guarantees, the US government, in this case, is implicitly arguing that gender identity is an attribute more worthy of constitutional deference than religious belief. I wouldn’t expect the Supreme Court to agree.

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Though argument does not create conviction, lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

These words have provided a foundation for the way in which we want to approach a Latter-day Saint understanding of gender identity and, ultimately, eternal identity. We feel a keen desire to provide ‘reasonable evidence’ for our perspective because, too often in contemporary society, gospel-informed views are dismissed as mystical, unscientific, and insensitive simply because they are also founded in religious teachings.

1. When we engage in conversations about human experiences, we’re not merely listing objective observations; we’re also offering interpretations based on our implicit or unstated understanding of reality. Put simply, every observation of human life is intertwined with our beliefs about the nature of reality. 

2. Second, with this being the case, there are many ways in which one could explain various human experiences. Each explanation would be grounded in its own understanding of the nature of the universe and personhood. 

3. Third, because there are many different perspectives, they cannot all be true because many are antithetical to one another. For example, it cannot be true that people are both agentic and devoid of free will. Additionally, many of the esteemed and touted ideas of our society face overwhelming criticism based on scientific, historical, philosophical, phenomenological, and spiritual evidence. However, all people are susceptible to false ideas masquerading as truth, even ‘scientific’ ones. 

4. Fourth, all explanations carry assumptions that shape our understanding of personhood, with potential unintended consequences in how people see themselves and structure their lives. This is particularly worrisome for members of the Church of Jesus Christ, as divergent beliefs may steer them away from the teachings of the Restored Gospel. However, these negative outcomes are not always immediately evident, and seemingly innocuous ideas can subtly influence our identities, behaviors, and testimonies. implications for how other aspects of personhood are to be understood. 

5. Fifth, because of the worrisome possibility that divergent beliefs about personhood may steer people away from the gospel, particularly those masquerading as truth, it is of utmost importance that members of the Church can discern clearly between the philosophies of men and the doctrines found in scripture and those revealed through living prophets. That way, as Elder Bednar stated, they can learn to “press on [and] hold fast” to the doctrines of the Restored Gospel and “heed not” the philosophies of men.  

The topic of human identity, and by extension, gender identity, is no exception to these propositions. Many members of the Church struggle to understand their identity. Additionally, in trying to understand, question, or explore this identity, some have had negative experiences themselves or know those who have had negative experiences due to the insensitivity and misunderstandings of others within the Church. The personal wrestle to know of one’s individual place in God’s plan in the context of the very real, lived experience of gender dysphoria can be a challenging journey. The difficulty and heartache of this wrestle are not ones we wish to make light of. Our intention is not to dismiss the reality of individual experience with gender dysphoria and the pain a person can experience in trying to navigate and understand themselves. Leaders of the Church have often addressed these experiences as being real and in need of compassionate understanding; we echo those statements most ardently.

1. Contemporary gender identity (CGI): Gender identity is found within us; its reality is based upon our sense or feelings about ourselves and is not necessarily related to our physical body/presentation or our biological sex. This way of understanding human sexuality is far newer in the history of ideas.

2. Divine gender identity (DGI): Human sexuality goes beyond the modern conceptualization of ‘gender identity’ and presumes that moral sexual embodiment, in which gender and sex are unified, has a divine intent and purpose bound within eternal families and exaltation.

To accomplish our aim, we wish to provide a simple yet clear descriptive comparative analysis between these two understandings of gender identity in order to clarify their differences and alleviate some of the confusion people experience when trying to understand their experiences with gender. While many of the topics we discuss can apply to a broad application of human sexuality, this article seeks only to address gender identity. We explore the ideas behind gender identity by (1) naming the assumptions about personhood undergirding those ideas that are taken as fundamental realities, (2) linking some of the main claims of each understanding of gender identity to each assumption articulated, and (3) summarizing the assumptions of the two views to show their differences, and concluding with some remarks. 

Contemporary Gender Identity

Regarding sexuality and personhood, the contemporary approach to gender identity asserts at least three key claims wherein its fundamental assumptions are clearly established and through which a clear contrast between CGI and DGI can be demonstrated. Additionally, we feel it important to note that our understanding of CGI has been greatly influenced by the various works of Carl Trueman on the subject, who has provided an extensive analysis of the history of the ideas underlying CGI, pointing to the various philosophers and psychologists we will mention here.

Assumption #1: Cartesian Dualism

To begin to understand the basic concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘self,’ we must explore Cartesian dualism. To put it simply, Cartesian dualism is a philosophical position that maintains that the world, and more particularly, human nature, is fundamentally composed of two separate, distinct realities: an internal subjective reality and an external objective reality. 

Accordingly, persons are described as ‘subjective selves,’ whose essential characteristics are internal to them (i.e., their personality or identity) and, thus, distinct and separate from the external world of objects. In this framework, all thoughts, desires, and claims regarding what kind of person one is, or self-understandings, are necessary products of a person’s subjective reality. Thus, their “real self” is the inner self. A person’s body, on the other hand, is taken to be an object of the external world that is separate from (but can be manipulated by) a person’s subjective, inner mind. In other words, in Cartesian dualism, persons’ bodies are likened to a puppet (i.e., an external object) that is manipulated by a puppeteer (i.e., the inner, subjective, “real” person) exerting the force of its will upon the body.

In short, CGI, based on Cartesian dualism, asserts that gender identity and associated behaviors stem from the unique inner feelings and desires of individual persons. In other words, gender identity is a subjective reality and, therefore, the truth about who each person is will be found in reference to that inner reality, which is taken as being completely different than the external reality, not in reference to the physical body that houses that subjective reality (e.g., “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “I feel like a woman”). Additionally, the concept of ‘authenticity’ comes from outwardly living one’s internal reality, or more simply, ‘being true to how we feel on the inside.’ We find the root claims of these statements and ideas not in the 21st century but in Cartesian dualism, an idea that came about hundreds of years ago in the philosophies of Rene Descartes.

Assumption #2: Radical Subjectivism

Understanding the concept of radical subjectivism, particularly illustrated in the ideas of Sigmund Freud, is crucial in understanding CGI. Essentially, radical subjectivism is the idea that the truth about the self is entirely constituted and determined by one’s individual, inner emotional experience, “feelings,” and thus can only truly be known to the individual themselves. As discussed in the previous point, because of the assumption of Cartesian dualism, CGI presumes that gender identity is inside each human being and is distinct from the body. When this is combined with the assumption of radical subjectivism wherein one’s internal emotional experience is the sole arbiter of truth, then there is no apparent or easily distinguishable external characteristic by which individuals or those around them can determine their gender. Accordingly, external genitalia or chromosomes are considered unimportant in determining gender identity because gender, like all other aspects of human identity, is ultimately manifested internally in one’s subjective feelings. Such feelings are taken to be the highest authority on an individual’s gender identity such that no one else is allowed to comment on the person’s lived experience. “My feelings are fact” is the heart of radical subjectivism. Therefore, within CGI, “my feelings about my gender are the facts about my gender” is the sentiment.

Feelings are taken to be the highest authority on an individual’s gender identity.[/perfectpullquote]Radical subjectivism, then, is the very reason why ardent proponents of contemporary notions of gender and sexuality encourage, even insist, that people be allowed to listen to and explore any and every gender-related feeling or activity until it “resonates” with them. The feelings that “resonate” are interpreted as being in line with the person’s inner gender identity. The emphasis on subjective feelings as indicators of identity is a critical point of difference between how CGI and DGI state persons should understand their gender identity; CGI assumes the superiority of subjective feelings in determining gender, while DGI does not. Many of us have been exposed to the radical subjectivism of CGI as we’ve encountered advertisements like the following that clearly presume that one’s sexuality isn’t obvious.

Assumption #3: Sexual Moral Relativism

Building upon the idea of radical subjectivism, moral relativism is the notion that moral claims can only be determined true or false depending on an individual’s viewpoint or preference. In other words, moral relativism claims that morality ultimately depends on the perspective of the individual. Given the claim that gender is a fundamentally subjective and internal reality, known only to the individual person through their individual feelings, CGI makes a third moral claim about gender identity: there is no right or wrong way to identify, so all persons should pursue any desires, labels, and expressions as they personally see fit to do so in accordance with their subjective sense of their sexuality. In fact, to do so is the ultimately moral thing to do, the highest form of human living. This is what is typically referred to as “living authentically,” as mentioned previously.

Summary of CGI

In summary, CGI asserts a conception of personhood in which gender is taken to be subjective and separate from the body (i.e., Cartesian dualism). The truth about gender identity is known only to individuals through their inner subjective emotional experiences (i.e., radical subjectivism), and individuals are morally accountable only to themselves such that they are and must be free to pursue whatever gender identity they wish (i.e., sexual moral relativism). CGI is not some idea that is without consequence—It is founded upon philosophical principles that were thought of long before our time and implicate a great many things, things that we might not want to believe, about who we are as human beings. 

Divine Gender Identity

President Nelson articulated that there are three identities that we should put before all other identities: (1) children of God, (2) children of the covenant, and (3) disciples of Christ. All the principles of divine gender identity (DGI) ultimately point to and support these essential identities. We will discuss at least three key claims wherein DGI supports a gospel understanding of who we are as human beings and what our ultimate purpose is here on Earth. 

Assumption #1: Moral Gendered Embodiment

 DGI starts from the simple and fundamental claim made in the Family Proclamation that gender identity is considered an eternal and essential part of a person’s identity. Leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ further clarify that gender refers to a person’s biological sex and biological sex is patterned relationally (i.e., male bodies in complement to female bodies). In other words, according to DGI, gender is (1) inseparable from how a person’s body is sexed (i.e., gender is embodied; sex and gender cannot be fully separated), a claim that is a clear contrast to the Cartesian dualism of DGI, and (2), with very rare and notable exceptions (which the Church has provided counsel on) bodies are sexed in two complementary ways. Therefore, moral gendered embodiment is the assumption that the truth about a person’s gender is, in part, to be found in reference to a person’s sexed body and how its complementarity relates to the opposite sex. That is, the truth about one’s gender is inseparable from one’s sex, and that fact is evidenced in that (1) male bodies differ from female bodies and (2) both are essential in order to bring to pass the unity of husbands and wives required for God’s eternal purposes for the family—”Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.” While it may be beyond the scope of this article, we wanted to provide another resource that discusses eternal identity in the context of human sexuality beyond the discussion of gender (you can find it here).

Revelation is a long-established order by which the Lord helps us to know and understand both temporal and eternal truths. As such, this is the method for obtaining knowledge assumed by DGI. In other words, revelation is the way by which we ought to seek to know and understand our divine identity and purpose, especially in terms of our moral sexual embodiment. For DGI, then, the words of prophets, seers, and revelators, both ancient and modern, teach individuals the divine truths about their identity. Through divine revelation, we have been taught that we are eternally sexed (gendered) as men and women, that sexuality is meant to be expressed in marriage between a man and a woman, and that flourishing eternal gender identity is fully realized in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage found only in temples. 

DGI further acknowledges that we will often have experiences that seem to pull us in directions that oppose divine revelation. There are all kinds of ideas and feelings related to moral gender embodiment, many of which are confusing and difficult to understand in light of revealed doctrines about sexuality. For example, the idea of discouraging affirmative care seems cruel if we assume a contemporary understanding of identity. Some may argue that the gospel teaches us to be kind, not cruel, so it would seem the gospel would support the idea of affirmative care/practices. However, we would identify these ideas as mingling scripture and incompatible philosophies. We must exercise caution and be sure that we are starting on the proper premises taught by the gospel in order to find genuine, consistent, and sensical answers. Additionally, given the way that DGI understands gender identity, we must have Christ-like patience, long-suffering, and compassion for those navigating such an experience. However, love and compassion do not necessitate assuming a CGI perspective wherein feelings alone are taken as the authority on one’s identity and destiny, especially when they have clear ties to worldly philosophies that have become mingled with scripture. We are meant to overcome the world through Christ, not capitulate to it. As President Nelson conveyed to us in a recent conference address, 

What does it mean to overcome the world? It means overcoming the temptation to care more about the things of this world than the things of God. It means trusting the doctrine of Christ more than the philosophies of men. 

Revealed doctrines, scriptures, covenants, and the ongoing revelation of prophets, seers, and revelators are the source of knowledge for who we are, including our gender identity. This goes beyond the radical subjectivism of CGI. Perhaps this is why church leaders continually point people to the Family Proclamation and why President Nelson encouraged members to put their identity as children of God, disciples of Christ, and children of the covenant before all other identities. 

 Assumption #3: Covenant Purpose & Divine Destiny

Furthermore, in DGI, moral gender embodiment is taken as a gift from God, a gift given for a divine purpose. Accordingly, gender plays a critical and eternal part in that divine purpose. DGI asserts that sexual powers are complimentary sexed (gendered), given for the purpose of creating families and unifying men and women as husbands and wives in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. Accordingly, the law of chastity is the higher moral standard which represents that divine purpose. In other words, God has revealed clear moral standards concerning moral-gendered embodiment.

Marvel not that all mankind, yea, men and women, all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, must be born again; yea, born of God, changed from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming his sons and daughters. And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this, they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God. [emphasis added]

This is not to say, however, that every mortal experience with gender identity, or even every feeling associated with moral gendered embodiment, can and should be categorized as a temptation or as being depraved. We do not wish readers to come away from this using other persons’ emotional experiences related to gender as weapons against them. That being said, neither is every experience and feeling associated with moral gendered embodiment an unequivocally pure indicator that one’s gender is in opposition to one’s divine destiny to be sealed in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. It is because it takes time to understand such a divine destiny that we are repeatedly invited to pray, study scripture, and participate in ordinances that remind us of our covenants on a regular basis that remind us that men and women are meant to be sealed together for time and eternity. 

Ty Mansfield, a well-known scholar who has done a lot of work on the intersection of faith and LGBT+ issues, has said this concerning how such a process takes time in order to realize the truth about gender and sexuality: 

… this journey demands greater patience, time, and a readiness to place our trust in God and the expansive cosmic design—requirements that often exceed the patience of prevailing cultural narratives about gender and sexuality.

As we attempt to make sense of the idea of gender as faithful latter-day saints, we ought to exercise our embodied gender in accordance with God’s divine purposes. Indeed, we will be held morally accountable for how we teach and live these divine laws. Ultimately, DGI asserts a conception of personhood in which all persons are relationally gendered, can know that truth through faith and revelation, and whose sexual behavior and identity are morally dependent upon God and others as taught and ensured in divine covenants.

Conclusion

Put side by side, we can see a clear difference between the assumptions of a contemporary understanding of gender identity and a divine understanding of gender identity. It is important that we are not deceived by the compelling narratives solely based on the feelings of the individual. Just as our religious ideas are grounded in a specific worldview, so too are those secular perspectives. Simply put, the assumptions of Cartesian dualism, radical subjectivism, and sexual moral relativism are not the same as the assumptions underlying the doctrines of the gospel. Therefore, we must be careful not to adopt these worldly perspectives on ‘identity’ because they contain falsities about who we are, why we are here, and how we should live our lives.

The voices of CGI convey that the gospel is too hard, too unloving, and too intolerant to remain committed to the gospel. Covenants, from this perspective, are a burden that makes life harder. However, as President Nelson has conveyed, “making and keeping covenants actually makes life easier!” While life may be easier on the covenant path, that does not mean that life will be easy.

President Nelson promises us that “As we strive to live the higher laws of Jesus Christ, our hearts and our very natures begin to change. The Savior lifts us above the pull of this fallen world by blessing us with greater charity, humility, generosity, kindness, self-discipline, peace, and rest.” Life is going to be hard, none of us are exempt from that reality. But, life on the covenant path, consistent with our moral gendered embodiment, is better and entails more blessings and peace than we can imagine.

The post The Givenness of Divine Gender Identity appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The recently published Cass Review in the United Kingdom highlights the tumultuous debate surrounding gender-related distress and how to best provide professional support, particularly with young people. A little more than a year ago, Utah prohibited pharmaceutical and surgical transition for minors, following the lead of several other states and countries that have banned or severely curtailed these treatments for minors. At the same time, other states and countries have moved in the opposite direction, expanding access to these treatments and disciplining those who publicly oppose them. What is to be done? And what about the vulnerable young people and their families caught in the middle?

We agree with Dr. Hilary Cass when she urges clinicians and others on all sides to stop vilifying each other and instead engage in open, respectful debate about how to best conceptualize and treat gender distress. She describes the difficulty clients and families face in finding timely therapeutic support, and the need for clinicians to provide sensitive and cautious care to developing youth.

Yet research in this area is controversial and often generates seemingly contradictory conclusions. Sincere and caring providers come down on different sides of this issue and disagree, sometimes bitterly. While we respect the skills and devotion of medical providers, we believe, based on our own values and our understanding of the scientific research, that psychological and family therapy — without the inclusion of medical and social transition options — is the best treatment approach, especially among young people.

A deeper analysis by an independent researcher showed a more nuanced finding: roughly one-third of patients got worse, one-third stayed the same and one-third improved in their psychological function — accompanied by all the medical risks entailed in prolonged use of puberty blockers, including reduced bone density, height, infertility and stunted brain development. As a result, England has seriously curtailed these treatments for young people.

For years, the loudest voices have assured distraught parents that social transition, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are safe and easily reversible and provide such dramatic mental health benefits as to be “life-saving.” While some research suggests that these social and medical efforts sometimes improve client well-being, other research indicates that little to no benefit is derived from these interventions. Additionally, puberty blockers are often the first step in a more invasive and permanent transition process that includes cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Despite these side effects and questions over benefits, parents who do not believe medicalization is the best treatment route for their child sometimes feel pressured to travel down the medicalized pathway against their intuition. We believe psychological and family-centered treatments have much to offer gender-distressed clients and their families, and that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel — we just need to use it with this population. Regular, family-centered therapy can be used to promote strong relationships, body acceptance and authentic living.

As independent family therapists, we came together during the debate and passage of Utah’s HB40 law restricting medicalization and surgery for minors. We supported the law, but also understood that families would need more support than ever. The distress and anguish these young people and their families feel is real, and their need for support and effective treatment is great.

We recently founded the Gender Harmony Institute to implement best practices of regular, time-tested therapy in treating this population and pairing it with solid research that monitors the well-being of our clients even after they terminate treatment with us; follow-up is all too lacking in this area where there are still so many unknowns. We recognize that not all clients and families will want or will respond to treatment that is limited to psychological and family therapy. In these cases, we will flexibly adjust treatment interventions according to client responsiveness and well-being. If clients desire support for legal, social and/or medical transition, we will refer them to professionals to help them in these areas, while continuing to support their overall well-being.

Additionally, our nonprofit model allows us to receive grants and donations to provide subsidized care to a growing population that sometimes lacks economic means. For maximal impact, Gender Harmony Institute also plans to disseminate what we are learning through training and certification programs directed at other clinicians, parents and schools. We’re gathering caring providers in Utah and around the country to apply well-established and empirically validated psychological and family treatments for gender-related distress.

There are a variety of professional options to support families facing this complex experience.[/perfectpullquote]Three examples of clients we have treated demonstrate the power of this approach:

1. A teenage girl told her parents that she “really is a boy.” At first, she thought the only way to deal with her gender-related distress was to socially transition. She was highly anxious and vacillated between shutting down and becoming angry when talking to her parents about her experience.. We supported the family in strengthening their connection, accepting her experience of same-sex attraction, and navigating the challenges of female puberty. Now, she has far less anxiety about her relationship with her parents, her body and her sexuality, and happily identifies as a gender-nonconforming girl.

2. A young adult woman came in because her parents suggested that therapy would be helpful as she makes steps toward medicalization. Through therapy, she realized where some of her anxieties were coming from — difficulties fitting in with others in the past, neglect as a child, a strained relationship with her parents and difficulty maintaining employment. While she still feels unable to fully accept her body, she is more confident, has better relationships with her friends and parents, and is able to tolerate work she does not fully enjoy. She also has a better understanding of the risks and the reasons why she is choosing a medical pathway.

3. A teenage boy came to therapy at the insistence of his parents after he announced that he “is a girl.” He is autistic and had been struggling with his mental health and peer relationships. Through therapy, he noticed that he started thinking he was transgender when he was experiencing a depressive episode. We supported him in learning to better communicate with friends, regulate his emotions and engage in self-care — getting enough sleep, having a healthy relationship with tech, spending enough time outside and staying active. Now, he says he doesn’t think about gender very much, and focuses most of his energy on building healthy relationships and taking good care of himself.

These examples demonstrate the value of taking a comprehensive, family-focused approach to gender-related distress. There are a variety of professional options to support families facing this complex experience, and there is always opportunity for families to strengthen their relationships — even when strong disagreement persists. We invite clinicians, gender-related distress patients, families and community leaders to partner with us to support families and clients by helping them strengthen their relationships, accept their bodies and live authentically.

The post An Alternative to Gender Transition appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LDS Statement on Neutrality (excerpt)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Neutrality”: Context and Limits

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

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

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

Whose Neutrality? The Church and its Members 

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Exception 

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

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

Our Pragmatic Situation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perils of Pragmatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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