And more and more, this video—and the way we normally talk about the atonement—doesn’t match up with the merciful, loving God I am coming to know in my life.

The atonement of Jesus Christ is clearly at the center of what we believe as Christians and Latter-day Saints. Elder Tad R. Callister called it “the most supernal, mind-expanding, passionate doctrine this world or universe will ever know.” Elder Neal A. Maxwell said it is “astonishing,” “marvelous,” and “remarkable.” President Russell M. Nelson called the atonement of Jesus Christ “the greatest single act of love of all recorded history.”

In general, I think that as Latter-day Saints, most of us would say we understand the atonement reasonably well. Jesus suffered in Gethsemane and died on the cross, and lived again so that we can, too. He paid the price for our sins, in a way that only a God could. These are things we first learn in primary, and that continue to gain meaning for us as we get older.

But there is more than one way to see and understand the atonement of Jesus Christ. There are a variety of theories of the atonement, that change how we view both this sacred act and the character of God. I won’t take the time or space here to detail out the most popular atonement theories; that kind of summary exists elsewhere (I find this one to be concise and helpful). But I’d like to highlight what other atonement theories have added to my understanding of its significance and the character of God.

Latter-day Saints generally favor “penal substitution” theory

First, let’s go back to “The Mediator.” I can still hear Elder Boyd K. Packer’s gravelly voice telling the story in that video. It starts with a young man who took on a big debt, certain he would be able to pay it back later.

But when the debt comes due, he can’t afford to pay it back. He asks for mercy, but the creditor points out that that wouldn’t be fair—forgiving the debt would leave the creditor unpaid. He is interested in justice. Fortunately, a third person steps in (a savior, if you will). He pays the debt in full, and asks the debtor to be in debt to him instead, with more compassionate terms.

The story is based on the discussion in Alma 42 about mercy and justice. You’re probably familiar; the idea is that mercy cannot rob justice, and that both must be carried out to their fullest extent. The only way for both mercy and justice to be done is for a third party to step in. Thanks to Jesus Christ, this is how the creditor (in our case, God) sees justice through, while the debtor (which is us) is treated mercifully and doesn’t receive the punishment that would be just.

This is the root of penal substitution theory—it’s about someone (a “substitute”) taking on someone else’s punishment (“penal” is from the same root as “penalty”). Its beauty is in its logical completeness. Every i gets dotted and every t gets crossed. This is the happy ending in “The Mediator”:

And so it was that the creditor was paid in full.

He had been justly dealt with.

No contract had been broken.

The debtor in turn had been extended mercy.

Both laws stood fulfilled.

There’s just one problem, though. And that is that I don’t recognize the God in this story.

This theory does not describe the God I’ve come to know

I’ve been raised on this particular way of understanding the atonement all my life. It has been immensely valuable to me. But as I get older, and my connection to divinity becomes more relational and less transactional, I’m not sure it describes the God I see. It doesn’t mean the perspective is wrong, but it may be incomplete.

For penal substitution theory to hold, two things must be true: 1) God must find value in doling out punishments, and 2) sin must always require punishment. I’m not sure about either of these.

Does God find value in doling out punishment?

In October 2001, President James E. Faust told a story in General Conference1 about a hungry little boy who got caught stealing another boy’s lunch at school. The class had decided that anyone caught breaking the rules would be beaten across the back ten times with their coat off.

When Little Jim, the boy who had been caught, took off his coat, the class saw his “bony little crippled body” and that he had no shirt. The teacher hesitated, but then when he was about to start the punishment, Big Tom—the boy whose lunch had been stolen—stepped in and volunteered to take the beating instead.

The end of the story is dramatic:

After five strokes across Tom’s back, the rod broke. The class was sobbing. ‘Little Jim had reached up and caught Tom with both arms around his neck. “Tom, I’m sorry that I stole your lunch, but I was awful hungry. Tom, I will love you till I die for taking my licking for me! Yes, I will love you forever!”’

It’s another analogy for the atonement, of course. Big Tom—the very one who was wronged—can take the licking because he’s strong, and Jesus Christ can take our pain and punishment because he’s strong. Little Jim ends up feeling greatly indebted to Tom, whose grace he did not deserve.

But the question lingers, for me: When Tom stepped in and forgave the thief of his lunch, couldn’t the teacher have just decided not to hit anybody? What did the teacher gain by whipping Big Tom?

We talk freely in the Church about our Heavenly Parents as a kind, loving Mother and Father. We talk about repentance and forgiveness, and about our sins being washed away through baptism and the atonement of Jesus Christ. If these characterizations hold true, I would expect a God that forgives. Instead, we hold to this idea of a God insisting on giving out punishment for every mistake that has been made.

I understand the argument. If God is perfect, then God embodies all virtuous attributes. Justice is one of those attributes, so it can’t be short-changed; and in the end it’s not God’s choice to punish us, it’s our choice to sin and bring a need for just retribution into the world. This is an anchor in Alma 42: if “the works of justice would be destroyed, [then] God would cease to be God.”

But as my faith journey has taken unexpected twists and turns (as well as challenges in being a parent, challenges with mental health, etc.), my personal experience is not with an austere God who sits in unrelenting, unbending judgment. I don’t feel like that’s who my prayers go to. My experience is with a God who has wrapped me up in arms of love time after time, when I didn’t have any other way to make sense of things. It’s a God that I see every morning when I go for a walk, in the sun coming up over the mountains, the geese that land in a farmer’s field, and in every child of God that I pass on that trail.

I don’t know, personally, a God of punishment. I know a God that is a much more tender parent than that.

Does sin always require punishment?

The second half of this is that for penal substitution theory to hold, sin must always require punishment. Alma is fairly clear on this point—“there [is] a punishment affixed”—and I think the mapping of sin → punishment is one many Latter-day Saints would affirm. It’s certainly what I learned growing up in the Church.

But just as my view of the nature of God has changed, my perspective of sin has shifted a lot in recent years. Maybe it’s the experience that I’ve gained as a parent of teenagers, or maybe it’s the greater sense of my own inadequacies.

I don’t see mistakes as transactions. You’ve done x wrong, so you need to receive y punishment. I don’t see the judgment, after this life, as being a Good Place-style counting up of your good actions and bad actions and seeing which side of the ledger wins. Instead, more and more I see mistakes as inevitable parts of growth, as we learn to become like our Heavenly Parents.2

Analogies for this are so familiar that they’re almost not worth mentioning. When a child is learning to walk, you don’t punish them for falling; you help them get back up. Sinning while we learn to be holy is like falling while we learn to walk; I think our Heavenly Parents are less interested in punishing us than they are in helping us up so we can try again.

As Latter-day Saints we’re especially equipped to see things this way. If we believe in eternal progression—the idea that we continue to learn and grow and increase after this life—then we certainly believe that progression starts right here, right now. In that case, death isn’t a time when it’s determined where you’ll live for eternity; rather, it’s a checkpoint in an eternal journey that we don’t fully understand in this life.

If this is the case, and if sins are opportunities to learn rather than bad grades on our report card, then there may be natural consequences to our actions, that feel like punishments—substance abuse can lead to addiction, infidelity can lead to broken marriages, and breaking the law can lead to literal imprisonment. But these are less about God delivering cosmic justice and more about natural things that occur because of our actions.

You might disagree with me on this. You might disagree with me deeply. And I’m okay with that. We have the scriptures, and we have words of living prophets, but we’re talking about a topic that I’m not sure we’re capable of understanding fully, in this life. If we hang our hat on the discussion of justice and mercy in Alma 42, for example, are we assuming that Alma the Younger (its author) knew everything about the atonement? Do we assume that he knew more or less than we do now? Can we know anything of these things?

But the scriptures say…

Alma 42 is full of hard-line, legalistic language; it talks without wavering about laws, punishments, and strict obedience. While Alma talks about mercy, he talks about it in a deeply transactional way, and leans much more heavily into justice—and how mercy can’t stop the freight train that is eternal justice. Why is that? Why would Alma use this kind of language?

Well, if you’re looking for an explanation for legalistic language, don’t forget that he had been the chief judge. He was also talking in this chapter to his son, Corianton—the one who had “[gone] after the harlot Isabel” and done damage to their missionary effort. It shouldn’t be any surprise that a former judge, trying to keep his rebellious son in line, described the gospel in stark terms and highlighted obedience and punishment. When you take a step back, that’s very much in character for Alma.

We have to accept that Alma 42 is situational, and heavily impacted by its context—just like everything else ever said or written about the atonement of Jesus Christ. Just like what you’re reading right now, which is rife with my own cultural biases and context. Eugene England reminds us that no matter how pure a gospel truth seems, it is filtered through our human understanding first; it is “merely the closest approximation that in­spired but limited mortals can receive.” It’s simply not possible to discuss the gospel—or any topic—absent of our own biases, and that’s as true of scriptural authors as it is of us.

So, how do we know who’s right? How do we know which version of the atonement is correct?

Atonement theories aren’t in competition with each other

The natural instinct is to try to land on which one is right. We love all the One True Things. Is Alma’s legalistic, no-BS version correct? What about a version that emphasizes God’s unconditional love and mercy? Is the concept of debt one that we should hang onto, or should we think more about the atonement’s transformational power?

The good news is that we don’t have to pick one. I’m not sure the atonement of Jesus Christ, the greatest act of love ever done, can be wrapped up in a few sentences. When we try to describe something infinite, we make it finite. Our human understanding just can’t get there. As St. Augustine said, “If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.” (Sermon 117.5)

We tend to describe the atonement one way, as Latter-day Saints, and that’s largely as a payment of debt. But there’s also the idea, called moral influence theory, that the dramatic expression of love in the atonement changes us—not our ledger with God. Or there’s another, called Christus Victor, which suggests that Jesus Christ defeated death and sin, rather than paying a price for them. These both speak to me a bit, because they lean into my personal belief in a loving God (instead of a judicial God). My understanding of the atonement has grown more by exploring additional perspectives than by doubling down on the one I grew up with.

Which is, of course, the one in “The Mediator.”

That video was important to me at one point, and it helped me develop an understanding of the atonement of Jesus Christ when I was a young missionary and didn’t understand much of the gospel at all (or, at least, a lot less than I thought I did). There’s nothing wrong with it—it gives one perspective on the atonement. It’s just not the one that’s feeding me right now, as my faith evolves.

A while back I sat in a Sunday School lesson where someone commented, “I’m eternally grateful that we have the full picture.” I’m not sure we have the full picture. We probably won’t understand the depth and implications of the atonement in this life, and I’m pretty sure we actually can’t. But we can lean into the things we do know.

For me, that’s knowing that there’s a God who wraps me up in Their arms, and reminds me that things are going to be okay.

“We LOVE the women in the church!” “[Women] just don’t fully understand the meaning of the words in the temple.” “Men have the priesthood, but women have motherhood!” “You are making something out of nothing. I have never felt second place in the church.” “Women are more spiritual than men.” “Women, we need you!”

In 2015, Fiona Givens gave a beautiful speech at the Affirmations Annual Conference. She spoke about Jesus Christ and how he invited us to pick up our crosses and follow him. Givens pointed out that these crosses can be heavy burdens that we carry and when one stumbles beneath the weight of their cross, the only way to truly help them is to reach out and touch their cross as you help them lift it. She taught that offering simple words of comfort does not help. “Platitudes fail. It is only when we touch the pain that we are in a position to enter that second covenant: to mourn with that person. It is only then when we can truly comfort.”

Not only did this speech inspire me to start wearing a cross, as a reminder to reach out and help my siblings who struggle with the crosses that they bear, but it also brought my attention to the harmful use of platitudes. Platitudes are statements that are often trite or meaningless that are used to comfort or quell uneasiness in place of actions that will actually comfort and initiate change. When platitudes are consistently vocalized and repeatedly used, they tend to lose any power or importance that they may have once held.

Platitudes are a form of spiritual gaslighting. They treat symptoms but not causes. They put the burden of resolution on the woman. They signal to women that those who make decisions don’t really want to change anything. They attempt to silence women and reward those who don’t speak up about their discomfort. And they increase our feelings of loneliness in a church that preaches belonging. And I’ve been hearing them for years.

Spiritual gaslighting

I try to show up honestly and authentically at church. In my spiritual and religious life, that is a value I have put at the forefront of my engagement with the church. I remember a particular Relief Society lesson where I attempted to be vulnerable and share a personal experience. As part of my comment, I shared my very personal feelings that I had felt undervalued and underutilized as a woman in the church. I shared about my struggle to reconcile what I believed to be an equal collaboration between my Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, standing side by side and equally powerful, with what I see in the church as an unequal and imbalanced positioning of men and women. A woman immediately shot her hand up and said that she had never felt second in the church and she doesn’t think that women are held back at all. This probably was a very uplifting and proud moment for her, but not for me. Her words cut into me and made me doubt my own lived experience. Her apparent intent was to tell me that I was wrong or somehow less than because I didn’t live up to what she believed about the situation. This and similar messages build up over time and pressure women to distrust their own spiritual authority and instincts. It subtly teaches her to not have a personal connection with her Savior and the Spirit and to only trust in the male leaders who have stewardship over her.

Treat symptoms, not causes

We have all heard the admonition to “pray more” or “attend the temple more often” when we are struggling. There is no doubt that those things CAN bring peace, but just doing those things does nothing to solve the actual problem. They do not address any of the institutional or structural issues that women face. Especially when a “fix” like attending the temple is placing a woman squarely in a location where she may feel acute pain. For me, and many others, the temple highlights some of the glaring issues of inequality and silencing that many women face in the church. So repeatedly encouraging attendance as a solution to a woman’s pain is like putting a band aid on an infected wound. The injury is not healed, and possibly the infection will go deeper and cause more long-term problems.

There is something to be said about a woman turning to her Heavenly Parents for peace when things are hard, but if decision makers are not working toward any actual solutions, she will continually return to or be reminded of the pain that she initially felt. It doesn’t just go away.

The burden of resolution

Recently, a female former church leader was being interviewed about changed wording in the temple ordinance (a very important change!). She talked about how she and other female leaders were part of a group that informed the male leaders on certain words or phrases that were possibly challenging to women. She said that some changes were made, but that the doctrine did not change. She said that the problems with the old wording, “was a total misunderstanding.” The problem is, we knew what the words meant. We did not misunderstand their meaning, nor the structural implications of those words. But we had the burden of responsibility placed on us to deal with the paradox that arose when those harmful words were used. And even though the wording changed, the doctrine (which can also be challenging, especially in the way that it is interpreted and practiced) remains the same. Women are constantly told that if they were more spiritual, understood better, or prayed more, like mentioned before, then we wouldn’t have any of these concerns. But the system stays the same. As lay sisters in the church, we have no ability to make structural changes without a man agreeing to those changes. And yet, the burden is placed on us to come up with a resolution to the problem. And actually, if we look at it a little more deeply, we are responsible for figuring out how we deal with the issue or get past the issue without actually addressing or resolving the issue.

Do decision makers actually want change?

Women are all too familiar with this scenario, but most men don’t see it as a problem. Picture with me, you walk into the chapel, ready to be spiritually fed. As you sit in the pew, you look up on the stand and see three or four young men sitting at the Sacrament table. Your eyes scan to the stand. The three bishopric members are ready and in their seats. Often one or more of the Stake Presidency will be joining them. Your eyes scan a little more and there is a young man waiting for his time to speak. An adult man sits next to him and is chatting with the high councilman who is assigned to speak in your ward that day. Often a woman will be playing the organ and another preparing to lead the congregational hymns, but it is not unheard of to have these positions filled by men. A sea of dark colored suits sits austerely before you. The meeting runs smoothly and you hear messages about business interactions, sports metaphors, and outdoors adventures, hopefully sprinkled in around mentions of Jesus. Can you be fed by the Spirit in these meetings? Of course. Is your soul actually fed? Not so much. It’s hard to relate to.

These types of meetings are not uncommon. Some wards have them more frequently than others. After I sat through one a few years ago, I connected with a bishopric member to encourage including women as much as possible. He brushed off my concern and said, “We prayed about who should speak,” essentially shutting down the conversation because we know prayer and revelation surpass everything. What he didn’t realize his message conveyed to me was that including women in the speaking schedule each week was not a priority for him. No extra effort would be made. To him, my concern was meaningless.

President Spencer W. Kimball told his son that while the temple and priesthood ban was in place, church leaders were actively asking for and seeking revelation. He said, “I believe most revelations would come when a man is on his tip toes, reaching as high as he can for something which he knows he needs, and then there bursts upon him the answer to his problems.” President Russell M. Nelson said, “Good inspiration is based upon good information.” To me, it seems like the key in both of these comments is that there is a question or concern and the person is actively working on it, whether by praying specifically about it or engaging in conversations with others where a person could influence their decision. And this is where I have to ask, are the Brethren seeking revelation in regards to women? Are they actively taking the disparities and inequalities that women face structurally and doctrinally in the church to the Lord? They may be. I have no way of knowing. It would be nice to know that they are working on it, if they are.

Silence the concerns and reward the loyal

I have already shared a few ways that I have felt silenced by other probably well intentioned members. This might be one of the trickiest instances with platitudes. The person saying the thing often thinks they are offering comfort or providing a plausible answer/solution to the problem. But what they don’t realize is that they are conveying the message that feathers have been ruffled, the boat has been shaken, and they need to end the conversation to restore “peace.” Women are conditioned in and out of the church to be agreeable, patient, and long-suffering, so when one decides to *finally* speak up, it really can shake the boat for everyone! For most of church history (and American history) women who advocate for themselves and others are seen as unruly, loud, abrasive, and troublemakers. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that platitudes are used to silence “these” women.

A number of years ago, I sat in a multi-stake women’s conference where we heard from a General Relief Society leader. As she began to address some of the difficult issues women face in the church, my heart sank with the disapproving overtones in her words. Then she said something to the effect of, “Any woman who struggles in the church or wants more as a woman in the church is being deceived by Satan.” My heart was crushed. Any woman sitting in that room who had even an inkling of uneasiness about their role or position in the church was effectively told that Satan had hold of their lives. In my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

On the other side of the coin, women who do NOT have concerns, aren’t aware of any issues, or at the very least, don’t voice any concerns are rewarded with callings and opportunities to sit at the table. They are seen as good and faithful women who are doing it “right.”

When staying quiet is seen as faithfulness or righteousness, you can see why many women who see very real disparities struggle to find their place in the church.

Loneliness and belonging

One of the most beautiful things about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the community that comes with membership. We are a service-oriented people. We help each other move, provide meals, foster friendships, and look after one another. We have a shared goal of Zion; a place or state, according to Elder Todd D. Christofferson, we will achieve after we, “(1) become unified in one heart and one mind; (2) become holy people; and (3) care for the poor and needy.” I truly believe this is a goal that many Latter-day Saints share. Everyone wants to belong somewhere in a community that will care for them physically, spiritually, and emotionally.

For many women, it is especially hard to feel this kind of care within the church. So often we are dismissed and/or silenced. When a woman, like myself, brings her true self, her authentic understanding and connection with Heavenly Parents, coupled with her frustration and pain from the systems within the institution of the church, she is looked down on. It feels very isolating, as if everyone is working to build Zion, but some people aren’t allowed in because of their perspectives. Can we truly create Zion if we are actively, even if unintentionally, pushing people away?

It is increasingly difficult to show up each week and be surrounded by people who refuse to see, acknowledge or address the pain and very real disparities I am experiencing. I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel valued.

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So, what do we do?

As lay members of the church, what do we do? We can’t make sweeping changes. Of course I hope the leaders of the church are truly listening, seeking, pleading, and working toward change. But in the meantime, what happens? As a woman, all I can do is to continue to speak up and advocate for myself and my fellow sisters.

Men in the church, whether you are in a leadership position in your local congregation or not, you can listen to and believe women. Don’t require her to prove her pain. If she has trusted you enough to share her pain, you can rest assured that it is real.

You can also work to educate yourself on women’s concerns and perspectives in the church. There are incredible books, podcasts and social media accounts to learn from. The truth is, you will never understand what it is like to be a woman in the church. Listening to women who are living through the pain and struggle will be vital. Even President Nelson, after hearing honest feedback from female church leaders about a talk he was preparing to give said, “I don’t understand what you’re telling me. I don’t feel that little sensitivity at all, but I trust you.” And then he made the suggested changes. Trust the women who are voicing their concerns. You may not be able to make structural changes in your ward or area, but through collaboration and partnership with women, you will be able to make improvements to help women know that they are heard and valued.

As Fiona Givens said in her 2015 speech, “As we enter the waters of baptism, we covenant to bear each other’s burdens. [Upon seeing someone stumble under their cross] you bend down to help that person with the burden, of necessity you must touch that cross. It is only then that you understand the nature and the depth of the pain that person is carrying.” You have to get close. Move in. Listen. Learn. Believe. Stand up for women even (or especially) when we aren’t in the room. It may be uncomfortable for you, but that’s okay. Sit with your discomfort. Learn from it. And then follow through over time. Check in, not with the mindset of “fixing” her, but rather to truly minister to and collaborate with her.

Women are leaving the church in very high numbers. It isn’t because we are weak, losing our faith, or because we don’t have a deep connection with our Savior. It is because we have been told for decades that we matter, we have value, and we are needed, and yet very little has changed for women in the church to show us that is true. We have been absorbing platitudes and feigned kindness for years. The platitudes keep failing us. We deserve to be heard and believed. We deserve to have the men around us, in our families or in leadership, choose us instead of prioritizing the institution or providing a quick notion of insincere comfort.

That’s not too much to ask. It’s actually the very least that love requires.

For most General Authorities, we see them twice a year at General Conference. The main impact they have on us individually is the talks they give. It’s easy to think that this is their main job; traveling around, giving talks.

But in reality, they have two jobs—they’re called to be spiritual leaders, but also to run the huge, global organization that is the Church. And that complicates things.

The Church has tens of thousands of employees around the world, doing all sorts of things; in addition to direct Church administration, there are things like LDS Philanthropies, Family Services, Missionary Training Centers, Family Search, Seminaries and Institutes… the list goes on and on, even including all three BYU campuses. These things all need leadership. And at the top of each thing is a General Authority, called to oversee that business or department.

That’s the rub. General Authorities are called to be spiritual leaders, for millions of Latter-day Saints around the world. And at the same time, they’re essentially called to be vice presidents in a huge corporation.

It’s possible that the Lord calls General Authorities for their ability to run the Church organization as much as their ability to inspire. Especially as the Church has grown over the last century or two, I assume the profile of General Authorities has shifted toward strong administrators and business leaders. It’s not to say they aren’t effective prophets and priests—they can be both.

It sounds weird to say that maybe the General Authorities don’t impact us as much as we might think. But much of that administrative work in the Church is abstract to us, as rank-and-file members. They’re attending meetings, managing budgets, and making organizational decisions. This is what apostles and General Authority seventies are doing every day. Doing that kind of work, I’m not sure that Elder Cook affected me today. Elder Soares didn’t impact the way I went about my Thursday.

Your experience might be the same, or it might be the opposite. I’m aware that my privilege—as a straight white male—inoculates me against harmful policies that marginalized groups in the Church have experienced. These can impact the Church and its culture for generations. And certainly, a man called into the highest leadership positions will be on track to potentially become the President of the Church someday, which could have even further-reaching effects. The things that don’t impact me individually can impact my fellow children of God deeply.

At the ward and stake level, there is a certain pragmatism that goes into deciding who callings should be extended to. From my experience, the bishopric is looking at who’s available, who’s been in a different calling for a long time and is “due” to be released, who they know might be a good fit for the calling, whose job or family situation might allow for the calling… and inspiration on who it should be. Inspiration is part of the puzzle, but it’s not the only factor.

I have to assume that some level of that same pragmatism plays into calling people into senior leadership positions in the Church, including the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. When talking about choosing his counselors in the first presidency, President Russell M. Nelson said that “good inspiration is based upon good information.” Sometimes that “good information” has a lot to do with who is already connected to Church leaders in meaningful ways.

A variety of analyses over the years1 suggest that certain factors correlate with calls to the Twelve.

The strongest is undoubtedly family connections. It makes sense early in this dispensation, when there just weren’t that many members of the church; Joseph Smith extended callings to many of his own family members to be leaders in the Church, including his brother William as one of the first twelve apostles. While it’s less common now, President Henry B. Eyring is the nephew of President Spencer W. Kimball, and both Elders Gerrit W. Gong and Dale G. Renlund had father-in-laws that were General Authority Seventies.

Another is through the Church Educational System. President Oaks and the late Elder Jeffrey R. Holland were both president of BYU. President Eyring was the president of Ricks College and the CES Commissioner—and new Elder Clark G. Gilbert was both of those things, too, with Ricks College having become BYU-Idaho. Elder Gong also worked as an assistant to the president of BYU.

It’s also not exactly a secret that General Authorities tend to be incredibly accomplished in white-collar careers. President Oaks and Elders Christofferson and Cook have backgrounds in law. We’ve just mentioned those who were in academia. Elders Cook, Rasband, Stevenson, and Gilbert have held President, CEO, or COO titles in corporations.

There are other connections, too. Elders Quentin L. Cook and Jeffrey R. Holland were mission companions. Elder Ronald A. Rasband had President James E. Faust as his stake president for 14 years. And geography matters; Presidents Oaks and Eyring, and Elders Christofferson, Renlund, Rasband, and Cook are from Utah or grew up there.

None of this is to say that callings aren’t inspired, or that God’s hand isn’t involved.

In recent decades, it’s been popular to say that a certain prophet was called at a certain time so they could apply expertise from their career, prior to becoming a full-time General Authority. We said this about President Gordon B. Hinckley, who had a background in public relations and led the Church during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. We said this about President Russell M. Nelson, who had a background as a physician and led us through the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s even being said about President Dallin H. Oaks, who is a constitutional scholar in a time when the United States Constitution is at risk.

This sheds a positive light on pragmatism in Church leadership callings. In many faith traditions, entering church leadership means studying to become a priest/rabbi/pastor/imam and having that be your full-time vocation for most of your life. While General Authorities have served for decades before getting called to the Church’s highest posts, it’s generally in addition to their day job. They bring other experience to the position. Overall, that feels positive to me.

Sometimes a General Authority will get called where we disagree with them politically, don’t appreciate their personality, or question what they’ve done in the past. I’ve felt that. It’s not great. Maybe there are spiritual reasons the person was called, maybe there are pragmatic reasons—I’ve never been in a position to say.

In a couple of weeks we’ll have the opportunity to raise our hands—or not, as the case may be—to sustain President Oaks in his new role, and Elders Caussé and Gilbert as Apostles. For some Latter-day Saints, that will be easy, as these men fit into a long lineage of prophets and apostles we’ve become familiar with. For others, it won’t be so easy.

Whether or not someone sustains or supports a given General Authority isn’t a reflection of their faith. Whether or not you raise your hand isn’t a test. We’re sustaining them as spiritual leaders, but maybe even more so as administrators of the Church’s organization. Maybe you’re sustaining the position, and trusting that they’ll grow into the mantle and exhibit Christ-like love for those in the margins. Maybe you’re just hoping to not get hurt.

I’ve always raised my hand, before. It might not be as simple and automatic as it used to be. But right now it means that I’m willing to stay in the room and see what happens next.

We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

This statement makes a concession for the Bible and its long translation history, acknowledging that humans have been involved all along and that errors might have been introduced along the way. This feels prescient for a statement written in 1842; the King James Version was by far the dominant English Bible at the time, and serious challenges to the KJV’s text wouldn’t come until later in the 19th century.1 Joseph Smith had some idea at the time that the KJV’s translation wouldn’t hold up.

The Article of Faith doesn’t make that concession for the Book of Mormon. But there were human beings involved throughout its formation as well, and we should be prepared to extend the same grace to the Book of Mormon as we do to the Bible.

The past 50 years have been a heyday for Bible scholarship and new translations, with the NASB, NIV, and NRSV all released in the 1970s-1980s. New historical sources (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the 1940s-1950s) added to the idea that the King James Version may not always be, as we say, translated correctly.

There are those in Christianity (especially western, evangelical Christianity) who believe that the Bible is inerrant, which generally means they believe it to be free of any error, although interpretations of that concept vary. The prevailing idea is that 1) the Bible contains God’s complete word, so that nothing is needed beyond the Bible, and that 2) every word written in its pages, or at least every idea, is inspired.

Some variation of a belief in biblical inerrancy shows up in the creedal documents or official statements of many major Christian denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church in America, each describing the Bible in its own way as “infallible truth and divine authority”.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explicitly does not subscribe to the concept of biblical inerrancy, stating that Latter-day Saints “do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error.” But sometimes we push this a little far, and take some pride in this stance. If this ever verges on feelings of superiority, we should recognize that many Latter-day Saints’ approach to the Book of Mormon aligns closely with ideas of biblical inerrancy.2

First, some background. Biblical inerrancy comes in a couple of flavors; these are Christian theological categories that we will apply to an LDS context:

• Dictation theory asserts that God verbally dictated every word of the Bible to its authors. Taken to its extreme, this would mean that the personalities, biases, and even writing styles of the scribes don’t show up in the text; instead, it is literally written by God Himself, with the book’s authors serving only as hands, writing down the words exactly as given.

• Verbal plenary inspiration grew out of dictation theory, and makes a little more space. The rough idea here is that God inspired the authors of scripture in such a way that the resulting words were what God intended to be written. The outcome is more or less the same, but the process is different, and it allows for the personalities of the authors.3

Do we think either of these are true for the Book of Mormon? If you polled Latter-day Saints, I think you’d find an overwhelming, yes. But it’s more complicated than just that.

The Book of Mormon’s provenance is a major factor when we’re talking about dictation theories. Like the Bible, the Book of Mormon has a variety of authors (Nephi, Alma, Mormon, etc.), who may have been inspired in different ways to write their records. It’s possible that they wrote words that were dictated by God (dictation theory), or that they wrote their own thoughts and were inspired as they did (verbal plenary inspiration)—the latter is the more common idea in LDS circles. It’s also possible they wrote things that were meaningful to them but not inspired by God.

Then there’s the abridgment step, by Mormon. Some records, including the small plates of Nephi (comprising 1 Nephi through Omni) were included in the gold plates as-is without abridgment or commentary. But the most significant chunk of text, from Mosiah up to Mormon, was abridged by Mormon. If the original authors—King Benjamin, Alma the Younger, and others—were inspired, was Mormon also inspired when he abridged their words?

But there’s also the translation step, and Book of Mormon translation is wholly different from Bible translation. While the most popular Bible translations have had teams of scholars on the project (the NIV had over 100), the Book of Mormon was translated entirely by Joseph Smith, word for word and linearly from start to finish.

Further, Joseph Smith used a seer stone, meaning that he wasn’t always even looking at the plates as he translated them. Scholars Gerrit J. Dirkmaat and Michael Hubbard MacKay, in a BYU Religious Studies Center paper, confirm that “…the translation usually occurred while the plates lay covered on the table (although some accounts suggest that the plates were sometimes kept in a nearby box under the bed or even hidden in the Whitmers’ barn during translation).”

Which raises the point—if Joseph Smith wasn’t even looking at what was etched on the plates, does that mean that Latter-day Saints subscribe to dictation theory when it comes to the Book of Mormon? The idea that Joseph translated without looking at the plates gives unexpected credibility to a dictation theory-style inerrancy in the Book of Mormon text.

Did God give every word to Joseph Smith, word-for-word? Some will make the argument that He did. But what did He dictate? Is it an accurate translation of what Mormon and other authors wrote on the plates? Is it a revision of their words? Is it something else entirely? Consider the Joseph Smith Translation, which isn’t a re-translation in the truest sense; Joseph Smith added additional revelatory material beyond what’s in the KJV text (we see some of this in the Pearl of Great Price, in the books of Moses and Joseph Smith-Matthew). Is this what happened with the Book of Mormon text, too?

If dictation theory holds true, then it would imply that the Book of Mormon is free of error. Except even then not really in its fullest sense, because we also know the Book of Mormon has been edited since its original translation, and corrections have been made a few times. In the 2013 edition—the newest—there were 38 verses with changes in the Book of Mormon text itself (not including chapter headings, etc.).4 It’s an interesting dichotomy if the Lord dictates a perfect record, only to allow errors to be made in the publishing process.

There are clearly questions here that we can’t answer. And they point to a similar conclusion for the Book of Mormon that the eighth Article of Faith comes to for the Bible: We believe it is the word of God, to the extent that us humans haven’t messed it up somehow.

Sometimes we get a little hung up on the concept of the Book of Mormon being “true,” without defining our terms. By being “true”, do we mean that every word is factual history? This is a difficult claim to make; even modern professional historians struggle to remove their own personal bias when recording history. Allowing authors to have their own personalities introduces their biases into the text, which can be at odds with objective historical accuracy.

But if, by saying the Book of Mormon is “true”, we mean that it teaches true principles, that’s a different claim entirely. In that case, it’s entirely acceptable to have the authors show their personalities and proclivities. It’s not a big deal if there are edits to the text. The records can change hands as many times as needed, and go through as many abridgments and translations as needed, and still teach the truths that we need to grow closer to God. And that, I believe, is the purpose of scripture.

This is how I understand Joseph Smith’s statement that “the Book of Mormon [is] the most correct of any book on earth”; it doesn’t mean that the Book of Mormon is a more accurate history than any other, or that the printing process introduced fewer errors than in other books. In fact, the back half of that quote spells out exactly what I think Joseph Smith meant: “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth… and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” If the correctness is the book’s ability to bring people nearer to God, then generations of Latter-day Saints will attest to its “correctness.”

As a Church we assert that “we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly,” and the grace that we give to human errors in the Bible is rightly extended to the Book of Mormon as well. Because in reality, a text doesn’t need to be inerrant to be scripture. It doesn’t need to be a perfect history or a direct transcription from God’s lips to the printed page.

There are Christians who believe the Bible is without error. There are Latter-day Saints who believe the Book of Mormon is without error. I’m not in either camp. I think both books demonstrate the human-ness and fallibility of their authors. And that’s reassuring to me.

“As far as it is translated correctly” doesn’t mean it’s not scripture if humans have touched it. It means we acknowledge the humanity found in its pages.

This is, of course, true. In 1986, President Ezra Taft Benson spoke to the youth of the Church, and said, and I quote, “Don’t see R-rated movies.”

So, isn’t that all we need? Doesn’t that close the book on that topic? Don’t we believe that when the prophet speaks, the debate is over?

Before we get too far, I want to establish that I believe two things can be true at the same time: 1) Prophets are called of God and lead His church through divine direction, and 2) prophets are human beings who make mistakes in things they say and do.1 It can be hard to reconcile the two, and I’m sure plenty of people have left the Church over similar concerns. But for me, knowing that prophets aren’t perfect is a faith-affirming concept; because when I see the inevitable imperfections, I can attribute them to man instead of to divinity.

But still, there are plenty of questions. We’ll tackle these:

• When the prophet says something, does that mean it came from God?

• Will God allow a prophet to lead us astray?

• If not everything the prophet says is from God, how do we know what is?

Let’s start with the first question.

When the prophet says something, does that mean it came from God?

When President Benson spoke to the youth about R-rated movies almost 40 years ago, he used a direct statement: “Don’t see R-rated movies.” It’s hard to get any more clear than that. Linguistically, this is called an imperative, a statement that expresses a direct command or request.

When a prophet speaks in imperative statements it’s easy to listen and understand. Do this, don’t do that. They sound like commandments; “Don’t see R-rated movies” sounds a lot like “Thou shalt not see R-rated movies.” I understand anyone who sees this simple statement and says, okay, that ends that discussion.

Here’s the thing, though. In that talk, President Benson made ninety-four imperative statements.2 “Don’t see R-rated movies” was slotted in among many, many other instructions he gave when speaking to the Young Women, including:

• "Learn some favorite hymns"

• “Attend dances where the music and the lighting and the dance movements are conducive to the Spirit”

• “Earn the Young Womanhood Recognition Award” (and "proudly wear the gold medallion")

• "Let the young men of your acquaintance know that you expect them to assume their missionary responsibilities"

• "Avoid steady dating with a young man prior to the time of his mission call"

• "Do not take the chance of dating nonmembers, or members who are untrained and faithless"

Is every imperative statement in this talk a commandment? They all came from a prophet. They’re all worded in similar ways. But I simply can’t understand this to mean that, at the time, not earning the Young Womanhood Recognition Award was a sin against God.3

The reality is that President Benson expressed a lot of thoughts in this, and culturally many Latter-day Saints elevated the R-rated movies reference to near-commandment status while being more lenient with others. The logical conclusion here is that not everything he said in this talk is from God, and certainly not that everything he ever said while serving as prophet or Apostle is God’s direct commandment to us. Even Joseph Smith insisted that “a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such.”4

So, to answer the question, does everything the prophet says come from God? I don’t think we can say this is true. The prophet can speak for God, but isn’t always doing so.

Will God allow a prophet to lead us astray?

You know the scripture reference on this one, from Wilford Woodruff in Official Declaration 1:

The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place…

At face value, the quotation supports some level of prophetic infallibility. It suggests that God would not allow a prophet to make a mistake, presumably by taking away their agency to do so.

In reality, the context of this quote is important. It’s at the end of remarks given by President Woodruff in General Conference in 1890, shortly after the release of the Manifesto which ended the practice of plural marriage in the Church. In the talk, he talks very openly about how the practice was discontinued because of the laws of the United States at the time, and alludes to how there was threat that the government would seize the Church’s three operating temples.

Historian and scholar Janiece Johnson reframes the quote in that context, suggesting that it’s not actually an assertion of prophetic infallibility:

Now, some use this to infer that a prophet can’t do wrong, that prophets are infallible. But I think this context here is essential. He is saying… “Maybe… maintaining the temples and the places where we perform these sealings is the more important thing.”

It seems likely that President Woodruff was talking specifically about the life-altering announcement he’d just made, about discontinuing plural marriage—and not making a claim that no prophet would ever make a mistake.5

If not everything the prophet says is from God, how do we know what is?

This is the golden question, isn’t it? This is the question I get asked, more than any other, when the topic of prophetic fallibility comes up.

Have you heard the phrase, “when the prophet speaks, the debate is over”? This originated with Sister Elaine Cannon, who said it in a women’s meeting in 1978, while serving as the Young Women General President. This kind of idea gets repeated frequently in the Church. There are good reasons for following the prophet with alacrity—we can find safety in following what the prophet says, we can be unified with our fellow Latter-day Saints, and we demonstrate humility with our obedience.

And at the same time, following the prophet exactly suggests that our personal revelation doesn’t play any role in our decision to do so (or not).

President Spencer W. Kimball was the President of the Church when Sister Cannon said this, and this was his response, as recorded in Sister Cannon’s biography:

President Kimball called Elaine regarding the controversial statement. He commended her for her example and abilities, but gently asked her not to use the phrase “when the prophet speaks, the debate is over” again. He felt it conveyed a message that was too easily misunderstood. He wanted to be sure that members of the Church would feel free to decide for themselves, prayerfully and faithfully, about the statements of a prophet.6

Compared to how insistently we talk and sing about following the prophet, it’s refreshing to hear President Kimball temper that a little bit. Brigham Young similarly emphasized the role of personal revelation in following church leaders, when he himself was President of the Church:

I am… afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are lead by Him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence… Let every man and woman know by the whispering of the spirit of God to themselves whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates or not.7

But that’s also more complicated than it seems. If the prophet speaks, what do we do if the Spirit tells us individually something different? Do we just… not follow the prophet?

A modern example is when COVID-19 was at its peak, and President Russell M. Nelson urged members of the Church to wear masks and get vaccinated. His words, representing himself, President Oaks, and President Eyring as members of the First Presidency in an official statement, were “we urge the use of face masks” and “we urge individuals to be vaccinated.” They could hardly have been more clear.

In this case, I felt confirmation of what the prophet was saying, and felt confident in following President Nelson’s counsel. But many of my fellow Latter-day Saints did not, and despite the prophet’s words chose to not wear masks or get vaccinated. Who was right? Was this a case we should follow the prophet? Is this different from President Benson instructing us to not watch R-rated movies, or is it the same?

There’s not a clean answer to the question of, “How do I know which of the prophet’s words are from God?” It’s messy, because revelation is messy. None of us is totally clear on when something is inspiration, vs. when it’s our own idea. It may even be that the prophet himself isn’t entirely clear when something comes from the Lord vs. from his own mind—because if he was, I think he’d tell us when something is for sure from God.8

So, clearly our own access to inspiration from the Holy Ghost plays a role here. If you wish it were always clear what came from God and what came from man, you’re in good company. J. Reuben Clark, even while in the First Presidency, tackled this topic in some depth. He cites, as a starting point, Doctrine & Covenants 68:4, which introduces the problem:

And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.

How do we know, though, when a prophet or Apostle is “moved upon by the Holy Ghost”? How do we know when that’s happening, and when it’s not? President Clark’s conclusion on this is elegant and clear:

The question is, how shall we know when the things they have spoken were said as they were “moved upon by the Holy Ghost?”

I have given some thought to this question, and the answer thereto so far as I can determine, is: We can tell when the speakers are “moved upon by the Holy Ghost” only when we, ourselves, are “moved upon by the Holy Ghost.”9

On one hand, it can’t get much simpler than that—it’s when the Spirit confirms to us that something is true.

On the other hand, this is still a messy business; what if your neighbor in the pew has come to different spiritual conclusions than you? That’s just how this works. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth, and trying to control personal revelation at the institutional level simply isn’t possible. You and I are entitled to personal revelation to understand if even a prophet—called of God—is speaking God’s words, or his own.

Wrapping up

We have a lot of words from modern prophets. The President of the Church speaks in essentially every General Conference, sometimes 2-3 times per conference—all the while not claiming every single thing they say is inspired. I took President Benson’s counsel about R-rated movies seriously for a lot of years, and I don’t regret that. Eventually I turned it over to my God-given personal revelation and discernment, and I approach it through that lens now.

Maybe a recent prophet has said something, or instituted a Church policy, that doesn’t sit right with you. That’s okay. It doesn’t brand you as an apostate, or unfaithful. The nature of personal revelation is that it’s personal; nobody gets to tell you what you do or don’t feel. Personal revelation is how God speaks to human beings—and this church, at every level, is full of them.

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back

But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass…

The movie, KPop Demon Hunters, peaked in popularity a while back and I assume it doesn’t need introduction. My wife Anne and I went to the Halloween costume parade at our son’s elementary school a few months back, and I swear at least 20% of the girls were in KPop Demon Hunters costumes (and one of our boys dressed as one of the Saja Boys, so we were right in the thick of it).

This movie has a powerful, deeply personal theme that seems to have been accelerating in popular culture for some time (spoilers coming). Rumi has a secret, something she sees as shameful and a flaw; she’s hiding that she is half-demon. But in the end, that becomes her biggest strength. Only when she stops hiding that part of herself and embraces both the darkness and the light inside her, is she powerful enough to defeat the demon king and save the world. This is foreshadowed at the beginning of the movie, when a young Rumi recites that the hunters can “Fix the world and make it right / When darkness finally meets the light.”

…

This pattern would just be a children’s story if I didn’t see it coming to life in so many Latter-day Saints. Maybe these stories resonate because they feel like our own spiritual journeys. How many of us are bringing a sanitized version of our faith to church with us, and leaving our full selves at home?

This is the beginning of a piece I wrote for my good friends at Patheos; go read the rest of it here!

Read the rest of this essay on Patheos

…Also, a podcast!

If you haven’t tuned in yet, my wife Anne and I have been doing a podcast called “And Yet, We Believe.” We’re a married couple having honest conversations about the beautiful messy middle of Latter-day Saint life. If you like the stuff I write on here, you’ll like the podcast too… the episodes are usually about 30 minutes, so they’re easy to get through. You probably already know Anne from her Instagram (mine is here).

We’ve done 44 episodes so far, addressing a variety of nuanced LDS topics; our timely episode on Bible translations has been really popular, as well as one titled “Dealing With People Who Can’t Handle Your Nuance.”

Here’s our most recent episode, in a variety of formats for your listening/viewing pleasure:

That’s it for now! We’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming in my next post.

I love this imagery. Iron Rod Latter-day Saints know exactly where their next step is going to be. Their focus is close at hand, and they know that if they keep their grip solidly on the rod, they’ll get where they’re going. Liahona Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, know where they’re trying to get to; they know what direction they’re headed, even if the path isn’t clear to get there. Neither of the two is wrong, they’re just taking very different journeys to get to the same place.

The body of Christ needs both types of Latter-day Saints—the unflinching certainty of Iron Rod church members who bring stability and consistency to our worship, and the exploratory faith of Liahona members who help us deal with complexity.

Out of the two, I’m a Liahona. There are lots of us. Sometimes we’re called “nuanced” Latter-day Saints, or even “progressive” members of the Church (which isn’t a political term in this case). Every person is different, but Liahona Latter-day Saints are generally those who have questions, maybe even doubts, and are choosing to stay. Sometimes we don’t feel like we fit in, because our faith looks different from others. We don’t always relate when people say “I know” things are true; we believe, we hope, and we choose these things, when we don’t know.

You might think of this brand of Latter-day Saints as having one foot out the door, or having the left the Church entirely. That’s true of some people, but not all. Many of us are showing up every Sunday, magnifying our callings, and trying to make everything work.

This type of Latter-day Saint can also have a strained relationship with leadership. Sometimes a well-meaning bishop, Relief Society president, or stake president—probably of the Iron Rod variety—just doesn’t understand this other perspective. For a Latter-day Saint who’s already seeing their faith evolve and expand, having a Church leader who just doesn’t get them can make things worse.

So, maybe this will help. I’m talking to you, bishops, Relief Society presidents, and stake presidents. I polled ~70 of us Liahona-type Latter-day Saints about what they want you, as local leaders, to know about us.1 Here’s how we want to be treated.

I am not a project.

You might feel a stewardship, as part of your calling, to “rescue” anyone whose faith looks different. It may feel like leaving the ninety-nine to save the one who is lost.

But the thing is, we’re not lost. We don’t need to be “checked on” or “saved.” Most of us have sat in a ward council at one time or another, and we know how those conversations go. Save your “focus families” to be those who need help paying their rent, or just got a devastating medical diagnosis. Those who could use your help.

If we need you, we’ll come find you, I promise. But making us a project is insulting.

I am not dangerous.

I can hold a calling, and I can serve in the Church. I can teach a class. Living the gospel differently from you does not make me a leper. I’m not contagious.

Joseph Smith’s journey started with having questions, and the scriptures are full of people who had questions as part of their faith journey.2 And, dare I say, every ward is full to the brim of people who have doubts sometimes, or whose relationship with the Church shifts from time to time. Having questions doesn’t mean someone is elbow-deep in anti-LDS websites or trying to burn it all to the ground.

I still have faith.

Please know this. Please feel this deep in your bones. Many of us whose faith looks a little different have a deeper, richer faith than we used to. We’ve done more reading and more studying than we used to, to make sense of things. In many cases, recognizing what parts of our faith practice are simply cultural—and discarding those that don’t provide value—has allowed us to develop deeper personal relationships with God.

Joseph Smith taught that “the best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask it from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 191). Many of us are trying to do just that, and looking to God for divine teaching. We’re taking very seriously Alma’s call to “arouse [our] faculties, even to an experiment upon [His] words.” For many of us Liahona members, our spirituality and relationship with God has never been stronger.

A “faith crisis” does not mean leaving your faith.

Some people like the term “faith crisis”; others don’t. Many of us see it more as a faith evolution, or even a faith expansion. It doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is happening!

It can be scary, though. Suddenly seeing wiggle room in your testimony is like having the earth shift beneath your feet. What if everything falls apart? What if you lose everything?

Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught us that “our testimony will be tested and tried. Faith is not faith if never tested. Faith is not strong if never opposed.” He reminds us, in his reassuring way, that trials of faith and unanswered questions are normal parts of a growing faith. But losing the childlike faith that you had before is like a death, and it requires some mourning. I can tell you, it’s tough. But the death of a simple faith also makes room for a more durable, more abundant faith. More and more I think this is what Alma describes as a “mighty change of heart”—it’s entirely worth it, but it’s scary and painful to get there.

Our feelings are already tender. We’re probably going through more than you expect.

All we’re looking for is love and support.

Someone told me a story about their friend, who met with their bishop and told him they were stepping away from the Church. His response was something like, “I don’t have all the answers, but I know the Lord loves you. We love you too, and you’re always welcome here.”

It changed the experience for this person. It doesn’t mean they stayed, but they felt loved where they were and had a positive perception of the Church.

Love and support.

Which can be tough! Most bishops and Relief Society presidents aren’t trained in pastoral care, and you didn’t ask to be put in a position where you’re dealing with people’s difficult questions and faith crises or faith expansions. That’s not a slam, it’s just the reality that your background might be in real estate or accounting or something else, and all of a sudden you have a calling that asks you to do something else entirely.

It can be uncomfortable to come talk to a leader that we don’t already have a close, trusting relationship with. We’ve all heard stories of someone who went to their bishop because they were having doubts and concerns, and the bishop took away their temple recommend. We’re wary of going to an Iron Rod believer to talk about our faith.

Some things that you love are hurtful to me.

Many of us nuanced Latter-day Saints, especially those with family and friends in the LGBTQ+ community, have a hard time with the Family Proclamation. We know you love it. We know where it came from. But it is so often turned into a weapon that any mention of it can be painful—for how its been used to ostracize LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints, and also to reinforce dated gender roles.

By the same token, even the temple can be challenging (and it doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s ability to go in). Some women see the worst of gender inequality coming through in the temple; from unequal language in the endowment ceremony, to the ghost of eternal polygamy living in sealing policies (where a man can still be sealed to more than woman, but a woman can’t be sealed to more than one man), and even in the idea that a man gets to decide whether they qualify for a temple recommend or not. I know it might be hard to imagine someone not loving the temple, but just ask next time. Not everyone’s temple experiences are the same.

Finally, many of us are looking for reasons to stay…

…So don’t give us reasons to leave.

There’s a cultural thing in the Church where sometimes people think you need to be either all the way in, or all the way out. The term “cafeteria Mormons” gets thrown around as a condescending term for anybody who doesn’t fit the mold and maybe isn’t all the way in right now. But we’re all cafeteria Latter-day Saints in our own way; we all decide how we’re going to keep the Sabbath Day holy, how much family history we’re going to do, and if R-rated movies bother us. If all someone can do right now is come for sacrament meeting and sit in the back, don’t you want them to do that? Why would you want them to not feel welcome?

If we wanted to leave, we’d leave. If we’re here now, it’s because we’re trying to stay.

And you know what’s the best thing you can do? Listen.

Listen and try to understand. Our experience is different than yours, so don’t assume that the tools that work for you will work for us. Just listen with empathy, and resist the urge to jump in and fix everything. Because we’re not broken. And we have more to offer than you imagine.

Every ward needs both Iron Rod and Liahona members, and your ward definitely has both (even if it doesn’t seem like it!). Maybe this is part of what Paul meant when he compared the Church to a body; some people are the eyes, others are the feet, etc. He’s very clear that God has set it up this way, on purpose: “But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.” We’re all here to play a role; none of us is an infected appendix that needs to be removed.

Listen. Love. Give us your support. That’s all we need.

As a kid, I did all my homework, I attended all my youth activities, I went to seminary. I took girls on dates as a teenager but didn’t have a girlfriend until after my mission. I didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs—I didn’t even drink caffeine. And as previously discussed, I did not watch R-rated movies.

I did these things because I was a Good Kid. That was my identity; it’s who I was. My perceived value came from being Good. If I wasn’t Good, then I wasn’t anything at all. And that meant I was always in pursuit of being Better, so that I could continue to be worth something. If there was a way to earn love and approval, whether my parents’ or God’s, I was going to find a way to do it.

Maybe this was you growing up, and maybe this is you right now. Maybe you’re reading this, and you’re just so tired. Maybe you’ve been trying so hard. I see you, and I feel you, because I have been, too.

I remember one time, when I was five years old and in kindergarten, I had to “change my color” at school. Does this sort of thing still exist? You started every day with a green piece of construction paper in your paper slot on the wall. If you misbehaved in some way, the green paper would be taken out and you’d be down to the next color, yellow.1

The day I got bumped to yellow is still fresh in my mind, decades later. Not because of what I did, but because of the shame I felt associated with it. On the bus ride home that day, I crumpled the piece of yellow paper and discreetly tossed it under the plasticky brown bus seat. I did not take it home. I could not bear showing it to my parents.

The fact that I still carry this shame so long later, when it has long since stopped mattering, gives a sense of the merit-based way I viewed the world. I didn’t understand that my parents wouldn’t stop loving me because I’d been something other than perfect. I didn’t understand that parents really can and do love their children unconditionally.2

Now, as a parent, my children have made mistakes. I can tell you for sure that I loved them before the mistake, during the mistake, and after the mistake. So why is it so hard to understand that our Heavenly Parents love us before, during, and after every imperfect moment of our lives?

Clinical psychology and therapy have brought the language of attachment styles into our vernacular in recent years. I learned, one way or another, to have an anxious attachment with all the authority figures in my life. This is the attachment style embodied by insecurity about relationships, a need for reassurance, people-pleasing, and as a result of these things, low self-esteem. And while I don’t have any data to back this up, I think this is how many Latter-day Saints of my millenial generation grew up in relation to the Church.

Anxious attachment to God and the Church means you get to feel good on days where you read your scriptures, did your ministering, and lovingly cared for your kids. But it also means you have to feel bad on days you skipped the scriptures and ministering and yelled at your kids. And given how often we as mortals do the latter, we’d need to feel bad about ourselves a lot more than we feel good about ourselves.

You have to decide for yourself that you believe that God’s love is truly unconditional. If you go looking for scriptures and quotes that describe God’s love as conditional, you’ll find them3. But if you look for God’s love in your life, especially at the times you feel the least worthy of it, you’ll find that too. I think this is less a question of theology and more a question of what your relationship is with God.

Paul, in the New Testament, clearly believed in this unconditional love:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I’ll make plenty of space for Latter-day Saints who don’t see the Eternal this way. I didn’t, for a long time. The first question asked—always—is, well, if I am a recipient of God’s love and grace unconditionally, then does that mean I can do whatever I want? Does that mean I can just go sin?

The difference now is that I see this the opposite way. You could say that when we do what God asks, then He loves us. But I think, instead, that when we understand God’s love, we want to do what He asks. Take a moment and read those sentences again if you didn’t pick up the difference; it’s small, but meaningful. It’s “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” not “I’ll only love you if you keep my commandments.”

As Latter-day Saints, we’ve attached merit to every part of our worship. If you want to go to the temple, you have to meet certain criteria, like paying tithing. Joining the Church itself requires accomplishment; you have to have stopped smoking, etc. if you are to pass the missionaries’ baptismal interview and “qualify” to join the Lord’s church. And even when we talk about the atonement of Jesus Christ—the infinite sacrifice of an eternal being, that defeated sin and reconciled all of us in the eyes of God—we turn it into something that you have to do something to receive, something you have to “access” or “activate” in your life.

But that’s not what unconditional means.

Unconditional love finds me when I’ve climbed back into the safety of my bed, my face red from crying. Unconditional love finds me when I’ve messed things up, when it’s all my fault and I don’t know how to put it all back together. Unconditional love finds me on my worst days, the days when I don’t even love myself.

In the Church we sometimes talk about the difference between “worth” and “worthiness.” The idea is that everybody has inherent worth, but not everybody will be esteemed “worthy” to participate in temple ordinances, etc. I’ll just add one thing to that. The knowledge that we all have worth comes from an eternal concept; we were loved unconditionally in the pre-mortal life, we’re loved here in mortality, and we’ll continue to be loved after this life. Temple recommend interviews, as important as they are in today’s institutional Church, are not eternal. The Church concept of “worthiness” has a specific meaning, one that matters for a time and then will ultimately stop mattering. What matters on the eternal horizon is our individual worth, and that has never changed.

As Sister Tamara W. Runia said:

Obedience brings blessings; that is true. But worth isn’t one of them. Your worth is always ‘great in the sight of God,’ no matter where your decisions have taken you.

You can’t earn God’s love because you already have it. That’s the good news of the gospel. This infinite, eternal, and unconditional love surrounds you whether you see it or not. There is simply nothing you can do to earn more love, because there’s also nothing you can do to earn less.

You don’t have to believe it all the way for it to be true. You have Heavenly Parents who are watching you through everything you’re struggling with, rooting for you, and loving you through it.

Maybe, just for a moment today, you’ll be able to feel it.

That’s the church culture I grew up in, anyway. Maybe you had the same experience. There was always more I should be doing. I was never reading the scriptures as much as I could. I was never doing enough service, or doing enough home-teaching-turned-ministering.

The Parable of the Talents is not super helpful in this. Read in the standard way, it embraces a “more is more” message: regardless of how many talents you have, you should be out there getting more. Twice as many, ideally. Sticking with what you’ve got is unwise, and unrighteous. You need more. More, more, more.

But there’s another reason the Parable of the Talents has never felt quite right to me, and it’s because the interpretation has always felt a little too on the nose. The master gives each servant “talents,” which they should multiply. The deep, rich meaning behind this metaphor? We have all been given talents, which we should multiply. I never would have come up with that.

Jesus used parables as a pedagogical technique; we’re probably familiar by now that parables can be understood at multiple levels. When the disciples press Him to explain one of His parables, He tells them that they’re designed specifically so that certain people will understand at depth, while others won’t:

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:

That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand…

Which is why I feel like I’ve never gotten much from the Parable of the Talents. Using “talents” as a metaphor for “talents” is not exactly God-level storytelling,1 and the idea that we should develop our skills feels shallow compared to other parables that illuminate the nature and character of God2—not to mention how toxic the “more is more” mindset can be.

So, what if this parable isn’t about doing more, but about understanding who God really is?

You know the story: A master gives talents—an amount of money, perhaps a large amount—to three servants, in amounts of 5, 2, and 1. Then he leaves. The first two servants engage in some sort of trading and double their money; the master rewards their faithfulness. The third servant buries his money, and when the master comes back, he takes away this servant’s one talent and gives it to the one who now has ten.

I think every time I’ve been taught this lesson—in talks, in lessons, or wherever—the lesson has been that God gave us each literal talents, meaning skills. If we magnify them, we’ll be given more; if we hide them under a bushel, then what we have will be taken away. So, if it’s not about developing talents, what is it about?

To me, the Parable of the Talents isn’t a parable about doing more to win God’s favor. It’s about trusting who God is.

Let’s jump in.

14 ¶ For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.

The “man” in this parable (or “lord” later, or “master” in other translations) is assuredly the Lord.3 The man’s absence throughout the body of the parable can represent our mortal tenure, where we are separated from God. We are the servants, and this parable tells the story of our being with, being separated from, and then being reunited with God.

The Lord undoubtedly gave us gifts—“His goods”—when we came to this world. Beyond “talents” meaning skills and abilities, our Heavenly Parents gave us goodness. They gave us grace.

15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.

The fact that the man gives to each “according to his several ability” is very important; it doesn’t and can’t mean that the Lord gives more love or more grace to people who have more ability. Grace, by definition, is unearned and unmerited. The Greek word for “ability” here is δύναμις, which is most commonly translated in the New Testament as “power.” Instead of this meaning that certain people are given more because they are more deserving, perhaps it’s that we’re each given what we will have the opportunity and capacity—or “power”—to use.

Sometimes we read a scripture like this and attribute it to the Lord’s “fairness”—He gives more to those who earn it. But we should remind ourselves that God is wildly unfair. He gives us way more than we could ever earn. Fairness is not the point.

16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.

17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.

18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.

The first two servants multiply what they’ve been given by interacting with other people. They give the talents, and receive more in return. This is not something you can do on your own; you have to engage with others.

I desperately want salvation to be an individual pursuit, but the more my faith develops and matures the more I realize we are all interconnected. Our common humanity as citizens of the world and children of God ties us together in ways we can’t imagine. Each of us is the main character in the story of an eternal journey. We all have worth in the sight of God, even when we try so hard to diminish each others’ worth in this life.

The first two servants took the grace and love they received as gifts from God and shared them around. Maybe they gave grace to others by assuming someone had good intentions, instead of assuming they worst about them. Maybe they did this by making space for others who didn’t feel like they belonged. God has given us abundant grace in His willingness to forgive us; maybe these servants paid that forward, and forgave others.

When they gave grace in these ways, even more came back to them. This is the beautiful reality of that common humanity. Everything we’ve received was given to us by God. And when we give that to others, we get even more.

I worry that we’re all going to catch a glimpse of this beautiful reality, and in the next moment go back to our worlds of cable news and social media outrage, and all of it will be lost. I’m not sure that any of us are capable of getting more than glimpses of the kind of love our Heavenly Parents have for each of us. But the way we catch those glimpses is by trying to have that same love for others.

19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.

20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.

21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.

23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

When we generously share that which we’ve been given—unconditional, unmerited, and undeserved grace—then that’s when we might have this moment, when God says to us, “enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

This takes me immediately to 2 Nephi 31, where we hear something similar. Nephi has just talked about how everything we think we’ve accomplished has come through relying wholly on Jesus Christ. And if we continue to do that, then we’ll hear the Father say to us, “Ye shall have eternal life.”

I can only imagine what that must feel like.

The first two servants understood that their master was rooting for them all along. He’d given them something precious, and they knew that he simply wanted them to succeed. He wanted nothing more than to have them enter into his joy.

The amounts they were given, and the amounts they received back, didn’t matter. The Lord said the same thing to each of them, for making the most of the grace they’d been given.

24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:

25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.

26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:

27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.

29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But the third servant didn’t understand his master. He had a different image of God in his mind. Instead of seeing God as loving, merciful, and parental, he sees his lord as “hard,” cold, and unforgiving. And with that understanding of God, his inclination is to protect what he’s been given. Not only does he not share the grace he’s received, he makes sure to shut everyone else out.

The problem here is not that God is harsh and unyielding. The problem is that the third servant can’t see him any other way.

This last servant believed his own reality, either that he’d been taught or that he’d created. He actively prevented grace from multiplying in his life. While the story suggests that the master took away the servant’s one talent at the end, it may be that the servant never truly received that grace in the first place. Those who recognize they have grace will receive more; those who can’t see it don’t even have the chance to experience it. The outer darkness is not a place where the servant is sent, it’s where he already lives—a place where he can’t understand or accept God’s abundant grace.

There’s a moment from when I was a teenager that has stuck with me—one of those seemingly-random moments that ended up forming a core memory. I’d slept in, and I was running late for school. Being late to school was something I could deal with, though. What was worse was that the moment I went downstairs, I’d have to answer to my mom and dad. Why was I late? How could I be so irresponsible? Like the third servant, I believed my parents would be harsh and unforgiving. A scolding and even punishment were stair steps away.

But that’s not how my story ends. When I came down, my mom immediately saw that I was late, and leaped into action. She gathered a few things together for me to take as a lunch, and helped me hurry out the door. She wasn’t interested in scolding me. She wasn’t there to discipline me or make me pay for my error. She wanted me to succeed. If I was late to school, she wanted to help me get there as soon as I could.

The mercy and grace that my mom provided was far more than I could have expected.

The scriptures are full of these stories, stories of people who have gone so far down a given road, only to find that it ends in overwhelming, confusing grace. Paul stood by while Stephen was stoned, before the very Savior he was persecuting made him the New Testament’s great missionary. Alma the Younger went out to destroy the church of God, only to run headlong into that same grace. The woman taken in adultery braced for the impact of the scribes’ and Pharisees’ stones, before the Lord extended His hand of mercy to stop them.

I believe in a God that wants all of us back. Our Heavenly Parents have given us abundant, life-giving grace in hopes that we will give it to others—by seeing them as whole human beings, by forgiving them, and loving them, whether we see them as neighbors or enemies. When we do that, the grace we get back can be almost more than we can handle.

When we understand this parable through this beautiful lens, it changes dramatically. It’s no longer about how many things we’re checking off the to-do list, and stops being about whether we’re outperforming, outrighteousing everybody else we see on Sunday. It’s not about doing enough, because I don’t believe in a God that keeps track of how many minutes we’ve read the scriptures or takes attendance in Church meetings.

I believe in Heavenly Parents who love us unconditionally—me and you both. And who wants nothing more than to welcome us back into Their joy.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the movie—it’s the epic story of a man who saved thousands of Jewish people from certain death during the Holocaust. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1994 and is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

It is also rated R. Which is why when my class watched Schindler’s List, I didn’t have my parents sign the permission slip. I sat in the school library and did an alternate assignment. I was a good Mormon boy in the 1990s,1 and that meant I didn’t watch R-rated movies. I simply did not think twice—it didn’t matter what the movie was about, why it had the rating, or whether it had historic significance. I just didn’t watch R-rated movies. Including this one.

It was common at the time for Latter-day Saint families to have a rule against watching R-rated movies. It wasn’t a rule in every home, but even if your family allowed R-rated movies you knew another Latter-day Saint family who didn’t. Growing up, I was taught over and over again—in Young Men for sure, but probably as early as Primary too—that I shouldn’t watch R-rated movies.2

But this is one of those surprising things where something that seemed like an absolutely pervasive rule—“no R-rated movies”—was less pervasive than I thought. R-rated movies did come up in General Conference a few times, but it’s been almost 25 years since they have. And R-rated movies were never mentioned in the Church Handbook of Instructions or in the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.

Really, go check. I could have sworn it was in the version of For the Strength of Youth we used when I was a youth. I checked, and it really wasn’t there.

But now this guideline is less useful than it used to be. There are Latter-day Saints all over the world, and other countries don’t use the U.S.-based MPAA rating system for movies. Movies on TV and on planes can be edited, but aren’t always. And of course, lots of TV shows that are rated TV-MA have as much or more adult content as R-rated movies, but have never had the same stigma within the Church. You can’t just boil it down to “don’t watch R-rated movies” anymore.

And the ratings should have never been the point.

I definitely believed, as a youth, that watching an R-rated movie was a sin. That I’d be docked for it at the final judgment; that it would accrue some Bad points that might someday slot me into a lower kingdom of glory. But when I view the gospel through the lens of the two great commandments, loving God and loving our neighbor, I see it differently.

Having this black-and-white rule—“R-rated movies are bad”—outsources our morality. It’s letting a Hollywood trade association decide what will and won’t be spiritually harmful to us. It’s us not trusting ourselves to make real decisions about what media content enhances our relationship with God and those around us.

We all do this, and we do it in lots of different ways in the Church. Instead of understanding what makes a Sabbath day holy, we outsource it to a list of things to do and not do. We frantically google to find out if “chai” is something we can have.

Where I live, stake leaders have started to talk about ministering a little bit differently. While the original thrust of ministering was moving away from the once-a-month visit model of home and visiting teaching, lately they’ve been saying, “Maybe it’s a once-a-month visit after all.” Trusting members of the Church to follow personal revelation is tough, because as Hugh Nibley said, “You can’t trust revelation because you can’t control it.”

We all do this, as parents and leaders. Instead of teaching our youth what modesty means, we tell them it has to do with types of swimsuits and whether your skirt reaches your fingertips. Instead of teaching them how to understand and appreciate the miracle that is their God-given bodies, for decades we regurgitated that having two pairs of earrings is Bad.

You have to start somewhere, I get that, and clear rules are good for that. That’s why we teach children this way: don’t run into the street, don’t talk to strangers, don’t watch R-rated movies. We have these rules with our own kids. Movie ratings matter here.

But in the Church we don’t have a good way to grow out of this and into something that centers your relationship with God. I think that having this black-and-white rule as an adult—“R-rated movies are bad”—actually hindered me from being able to tell for myself what content was compatible and enriching to my spiritual life. It told me to look at ratings instead of understanding how it impacted my ability to love God and love my neighbor.

With movies, there are ages and maturity levels where some things become appropriate that weren’t appropriate before. That maturity brings understanding. It’s possible that we also grow into spiritual maturity that helps us see some of these “rules” differently. We start to replace the rules with higher-order principles.

That doesn’t mean we throw everything away. Commandments don’t go away just because we see their weakness when they’re not backed with something greater. You should still keep the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity. But there are plenty of other things in our Latter-day Saint culture that aren’t commandments. We can just do them, or we can plumb their depths to see what they have to offer us spiritually.

My oldest is sixteen, and as his parents, we’ve tried to make it clear that we don’t hold an expectation for him to go on a mission. We hope he does, because my wife and I both served missions and they were incredibly meaningful and impactful to us. But we hope he does it because he wants to share the gospel with others, not because that’s just what good Latter-day Saint boys do.

Can you do both? Meaning, can you rely on rules and routines while also deriving spiritual benefit? Sure. I think many Latter-day Saints (and Christians in general) do. It’s when the rule becomes the point, that’s the problem; it’s when the behavior (the act of going on a mission, in this case) becomes more important than the love it was designed to foster.

But we have to understand the why. We don’t have to try everything to get there. I don’t need to try alcohol to understand the effect it can have on my life. I didn’t need to try premarital sex to see that it wasn’t right for me and my spiritual life. But if this life was simply a test of obedience, we’d be given a clear list of rules and a scorecard for keeping them. Instead, we have a world full of gray areas and ambiguity, a world where we have to decide what we ourselves believe.

President Nelson said, “I urge you to stretch beyond your current spiritual ability to receive personal revelation.” I think he meant this. I think he meant that we shouldn’t outsource our morality, but that we should understand what we do, why we do it, and how it affects our relationship with God and others.

I watched Schindler’s List this past week. Only ~27 years after I chose not to watch it in high school. I’m in my 40’s, and I think it’s the first R-rated movie that I’ve ever watched unedited.

It’s an amazing film, of course. It’s rated R for a number of reasons; officially “language, some sexuality and actuality violence,” per the MPAA. If my sixteen-year-old’s high school class were to watch it, and he felt like it was something he could handle—well, I’d want to have a conversation with him about it first. But I think I’d sign the permission slip.

In 1820, Lucy Mack Smith and three of Joseph’s siblings had joined a Presbyterian church. Joseph’s father was an avowed Universalist, but might not have belonged to any church at the time.

And while young Joseph was inclined toward the Methodists for a bit, he wasn’t committed. He didn’t dutifully show up every Sunday, and he didn’t trust everything that was said just because a pastor said it. If Joseph Smith was 15 years old today, and a member of our church, I can hear what we would say about him:

• “He needs to doubt his doubts.”

• “He probably got offended.”

• “He’s not reading the scriptures and praying enough.”

• “We need to get that boy on a mission.”

• “Think of what he’s doing to his family.”

• “He’s taking the easy way out.”

• “He was led astray.”

As Latter-day Saints, we often look down on those who leave the Church (this shouldn’t be true, but it is). But those brave souls, whether you agree with their path or not, are following in Brother Joseph’s footsteps. Joseph Smith had questions, sought his own answers, and challenged everything. So why do we fear when Latter-day Saints do that now?

The term “deconstructing” comes up when people do what Joseph did. I really like this definition:

Faith deconstruction is the systematic taking apart of one’s belief system for examination.

I’ve seen it elsewhere defined as “the process of taking apart and examining an idea, tradition, practice, or belief to determine its truthfulness, usefulness, and impact.” For Latter-day Saints, this often means starting to split apart doctrine and culture. It means taking a specific belief—maybe a belief in the truth of the Book of Mormon, for example, or that prophets are called by God—and exploring whether it’s something you believe for yourself, or if it’s something where you’ve relied on the testimony of others. Or it might mean taking a specific practice—paying tithing, maybe, or worshipping in the temple—and deciding if it brings you closer to God.

In his various histories, Joseph Smith wrote about some of the things that troubled him as he deconstructed his youthful faith, in his search for truth—and now, two hundred years later, we’re still struggling with the same things. It’s almost uncanny to see the same questions he had echoed in those deconstructing their faith today. Here are a few:

“I don’t know what is true.”

That’s the whole First Vision story, right? Young Joseph Smith didn’t know what was true, and he wanted to find out. I think many of us, whether active in the Church or not, are joining Brother Joseph in asking, “Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?”

It’s easy to assume that Joseph struggled to find truth because the Church hadn’t been restored yet. But more and more, I think the struggle to find truth is just part of being human in the first place.

“I don’t see Christ-like behavior in churches, or their leaders.”

Joseph Smith read the Bible, and didn’t see churches and their leaders doing the things that Christ taught. This is from his history, written circa 1832, writing about the time before the First Vision:

“Applying myself to [the scriptures], and my intimate acquaintance with those of different denominations, led me to marvel exceedingly. For I discovered that ​they did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation, agreeable to what I found contained in that sacred depository.” (edited for clarity)

It was true then and it is true now, no matter what church you’re talking about, because every church has human beings in it (including ours). Sometimes the pure teachings of Christ—to love our neighbor, to care for the marginalized—are lost amongst the administrative aspects of a global church organization.

“The world is just terrible.”

Is it surprising at all that Joseph Smith thought things were in pretty bad shape in the early 1800s? Isn’t that the quaint, pastoral lifestyle people want to go back to? This is what he said about it, also from his 1832 history:

“I pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind: the contentions and divisions, the wickedness and abominations, and the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind.” (edited for clarity)

Now, the shabby shape of the world may not be a reason to leave religion—it may actually spur people toward religion. But many people become disillusioned with the way their institutional church reacts (or doesn’t) to world events. Jesus Christ’s gospel is to lift the hands that hang down; this kind of one-to-one ministration isn’t always the hallmark of large organizations, churches or not. And as terrible as things are now—politically, socially, economically, whatever—they were bad in Joseph Smith’s time, too.

Deconstructing, asking questions, having doubts—Joseph Smith did all of these. And to us as Latter-day Saints, they were maybe the greatest things he could have done at the time. We celebrate that he asked questions, and for whatever reason, we panic when we have questions the same way he did.

But even when someone leaves the Church, they’re following the model that Joseph Smith set for us. Their faith journey is covered in the fingerprints of a gospel that encourages us to seek our own personal revelation. Asking questions is exactly what Joseph Smith did. Having doubts is exactly what he did, too.

It’s easy to say that Joseph Smith’s questions were rewarded with the First Vision, and our questions often get rewarded by nothing at all. I hear that, and I relate to it deeply. But while everyone’s experience with answers will be different, the process matters as much as the outcome. There is power in the asking.

The scripture verse that catalyzed the entire Restoration, James 1:5, is an invitation to recognize those deconstructing questions and take them to God. The assurance is that God is not judging us based on our questions; to me, this has a “there are no stupid questions” vibe. It’s clear that asking questions is not only okay, it’s recommended:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.1

And, staying on the theme of verses that missionaries have memorized, Moroni’s promise says essentially the same thing. It says that if you want to know something, you should ask—don’t resist the question, don’t distrust yourself for having the question, but instead, just ask:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

The problem with pulling out individual scripture verses to support this idea—that questions are key to a growing personal faith—isn’t that there are too few, it’s that there are too many. And beyond just verses, the scriptures are full of lengthy stories and narratives that deliver this same message over and over again. Here’s a few:

• Alma’s treatise on faith in Alma 32 details exactly what we’re describing here. If you want to know if something is good or true, plant the seed by asking the question. In Alma’s parlance, maybe it will grow, maybe it won’t.

• Gideon, in Judges 6, needed evidence from the Lord multiple times before he would believe. He just kept asking. I especially like in verse 39 where he says, “Let not thine anger be hot against me”—assuming that he’s pushing the limits of the Lord’s patience. The Lord answers anyway.

• You could add in Nicodemus’s innocent questions for the Savior, Enos’s wrestle with God, the brother of Jared asking how to light the barges, etc. etc. All these people asked questions. So if we have questions, we’re in pretty good company.

Questions and doubts can be scary, in ourselves or others.2 Sometimes these questions are the outward manifestation of an inward existential grapple with our faith. Sometimes there is tremendous pain and loss behind these questions; that’s what happens when your whole identity, everything you’ve held close in your life, is suddenly in question.

I used to think that people who had questions and doubts were lacking faith. But now I realize that these are the people with the most faith—those who are making sense of the world in the face of everything falling apart. Having questions doesn’t mean losing faith. Doubting things that you were certain about before doesn’t mean losing faith. And even if your faith in the institution is on trial, you can still have a robust relationship with God.

Questions aren’t a sign of weak faith, they’re a sign of growing faith.

Elder Boyd K. Packer knew that the path forward isn’t always clear:

Somewhere in your quest for spiritual knowledge, there is that “leap of faith,” as the philosophers call it. It is the moment when you have gone to the edge of the light and stepped into the darkness to discover that the way is lighted ahead for just a footstep or two.

That’s the thing. Often, moving your faith forward means having to go right to the edge. You can’t hang back and expect the light to show you the way. We often assume that we can know everything in the gospel without paying the price to get there. The price we pay is going to the edge of what we know, putting our foot out, and seeing if there’s a place to step.

We see this in our culture, when we focus on how scripture stories end, rather than how they must feel in the middle. We skip over Jonah’s decision to not do what God asked and go to Ninevah, and instead just celebrate when he eventually does. We celebrate how none of Helaman’s stripling warriors died in battle, but we don’t think about the night before, when Helaman must have been sick with worry about what would happen to these young boys in a war of men. Similarly, we think all questions and doubts should just fast-forward to the happy ending, because of course there will be a happy ending.

Deconstruction can be hard on everyone involved. The person going through it is staring down a monumental shift in their life, one where they lose their once-beloved community. Their family is wondering if this is going to leave a metaphorical empty chair in the Celestial Kingdom. And the ward knows they’re supposed to be doing something, but they don’t know what.

In the Church, we lack the vocabulary and muscle memory to know how to be there for people whose faith is developing and evolving. We’re not good at it, the way we are at supporting someone who’s just had a baby or needs lunch organized for a funeral. You don’t really take a casserole to someone who is taking charge of their faith, someone who is working through the deconstruction, trying desperately to find the peace and harmony on the other side.

Right now, when we have questions, we feel like the only direction we can go is out of the Church. If everybody else’s faith appears to be rock-solid, while yours is crumbling, it’s natural to assume you don’t belong. Instead, we can talk openly about the questions we have, be vulnerable instead of putting up façades, and make space for every flavor and color of faith. If we normalized having questions, then others might recognize that staying-with-questions is an option too.

That’s what our church is about—or it should be. We believe deeply in personal revelation. We believe that when we ask, we can receive. We value, maybe more than anything else, our ability to have our own testimony and not have to take anyone’s word for it. The fact that we can know for ourselves, through honest questions, is at the heart of everything. Culturally, we can be scared of having questions. Whether it’s for ourselves or others, we wish we could just know, without going through the hard part.

But in a Church founded on a young boy’s questions, we should give people room to have questions.

And I might dismiss it, except that I keep hearing it from intelligent, self-aware, generally spiritually-tuned-in people. It’s a question I would never think to ask, but since it keeps coming up, here we are.

The question is, when are we loving people too much?

The general premise is that if we love people too much, especially those that live in certain ways, at some point we cross over into tolerating and enabling their sinful behavior. There has to be somewhere that we draw the line. You might hear this as “love the sinner, hate the sin.” The idea says that at some point we must wield the sword of righteousness, that we must reprove betimes with sharpness, and that since we’ve been warned, we must warn our neighbor—even if the wicked take the truth to be hard.

I’ve even heard this described as being one of the two great commandments. The first is to love God, of course, and the second is to love our neighbor. Some people believe that the first is a counterpoint to the second, that loving God puts a cap on how much we can love our neighbor. If we love God, then we’ll defend His gospel by speaking out against sin. We’ll love our neighbor right up to the point that it encroaches on loving God. That’s the checks and balances on loving our neighbor.

But that’s not how I see the world.

In my personal discipleship, I’ve decided that I can’t entertain a theological concept of loving too much, or giving too much grace or mercy. I believe that God gives love, grace, and mercy to me in abundance, and that I have both the responsibility and the privilege as a Christian to dispense in the same abundance to others. There’s just not a scenario where I think human beings are capable of loving more than Jesus Christ commanded us to.

Jesus never said to “love the sinner, hate the sin.” He never even said to “love the sinner.” But he did just say to “love.”

In fact, Jesus’s teachings appear to specifically refute this idea that we should limit the love we have for others. He taught us to love even our enemies, to not judge, and to forgive everyone, setting examples where He ate with sinners, touched lepers, and forgave even those who crucified Him. When Jesus said love everyone, He appeared to mean it, without limit.

At most, He said to “go, and sin no more,” but He said that to the woman immediately after shutting down those who wanted to stone her. If we apply that scripture story, we’re both the woman—sinful, sure, but not condemned by God—and the hypocrites, the people wanting to exact our own crooked understanding of the gospel on those we see as more sinful than ourselves.

It strikes me that when we’re asked to keep the commandments, this is an individual directive to each of us: I’ve been asked to keep the commandments, and so have you. This is a personal thing we can each do. But we haven’t been asked to ensure that everybody else is keeping the commandments. That’s just not what we’ve been asked to do. Our job is to love our neighbor, not police our neighbor.

So, where’s the value here? What’s the benefit? What do we get out of drawing a line for where our kindness and forgiveness will end?

We see this at its most exaggerated with the LGBTQ+ community; some people feel a need to wear on their sleeve that they will be intolerant and unsafe to children of God who identify in these ways. This concept of telling people, “I don’t approve of your lifestyle,” as a way to elevate ourselves over others, to draw lines between who we see on the side of righteousness and who we don’t, is distinctly antithetical to what Jesus taught.

In addition to not being Christ-like, this can be exactly this kind of outward disapproval that contributes to higher rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in the LGBTQ+ community.1 We tend to think of bullying as something that happens with kids, at school; this is adult bullying.

We don’t do this with other things. We don’t say, “Karen, I need you to know that I don’t approve of your gossiping lifestyle.” “If you’re going to live under this roof, there won’t be any of that not-paying-tithing going on.” “You know those coffee drinkers, they’re always trying to force their lifestyle down your throat.”2 These examples are, of course, ridiculous.

In some cases, such as with the LGBTQ+ community, the mindset seems to line up with political ideologies. Much of politics in the United States right now seems to be focused on telling people what they can and can’t do, and who deserves to have rights and who doesn’t. There are cases where politicians lean in to cruelty, and assert that God is behind it. Many people are more worried about whether ideas are right or left than if they’re right or wrong.

You never have to like the ways that people sin, or the choices they make. I don’t like the ways that I sin, or all the choices I make, let alone those of others. But judging others for their choices, especially vocally, is simply not what Jesus did, and it’s not part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The love that Jesus Himself demonstrated was complete, and full, all the way down to Him giving His life for you, and for me. Flawed and sinful as we all are.

Elder Holland powerfully taught it like this:

We are supposed to be Christ-like, we are supposed to be charitable, we are supposed to demonstrate love; but he is saying that were it not for real charity, capital C, the one time in all the world that real charity was demonstrated, i.e., the pure love of Christ — if it were not for that, “we could not inherit that place which thou has prepared in the mansions of thy Father.”

This is the charity that saves. This is the charity that faileth not. Ours does not always save and it does sometimes fail. As much as we try, we fall short. But one time, by one Person, the pure love of Christ was demonstrated. Real charity was given to this world. Christ loved us perfectly and it lasts forever. That’s why we can say that real charity, never faileth. He never fails us.

Can we love people too much?

Did Christ love us too much? Does Jesus Christ’s unending mercy mean that He’s too tolerant of the things we do? Is the Savior of all mankind enabling our sinful behavior by forgiving us?3

God has given us commandments and asked us to follow them; this is something only God can do. In Their infinite wisdom, our Heavenly Parents have perfectly blended justice and mercy—but They did not ask us to be just. They only asked us to be merciful. They asked us to love Them, and each other.

I don’t know what this looks like in real life. We all need to “go, and sin no more.” And somewhere along the line, we need to shed the need—and the sin—of judging others.

When I’m surrounded by so many people, my default mode is to flatten people into stereotypes and caricatures. I think we all do this. There’s a man in a turban. A young woman in a fancy dress (at 9am on a Monday, inexplicably). A business woman in a pants suit. A family on vacation. Cops, sanitation workers, food cart owners. I automatically reduce every person to one thing, because I have to. There’s just so many people.

But I can also acknowledge that flattening people like this is hazardous. From my perspective, these are all just people that are in the way of me getting to a bagel with scallion cream cheese. But to them, I’m just in their way. No matter how cool and handsome I think I am, I’m just another guy, another flattened stereotype (probably “clean-cut white guy, must be a Mormon”).

And I’m struck by the reality that every person I see is a main character. Every single person around me (and around you) is in a story where they’re the hero. They have a complex background, deep feelings, and goals and dreams. Each one of them was born because of two people, each of whom had their own incredible depth and background and amazing lives. On the street they’re just people, they’re just stereotypes. But every person out there is changing the world as much as you or I ever will.

And more importantly? Each one of those people is a beloved child of heavenly parents. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”1

There are no ordinary people in the kingdom of God. God doesn’t make NPCs.

“NPC,” if you’re unfamiliar, is a term that comes from video games; it stands for “non-playable character.” NPCs are faceless, generic characters that are there to populate the game and fill the space. You can sometimes interact with them a little bit, and they’ll respond with pre-programmed phrases; but they’re not major players. They’re just on the side.

I’m talking about the villagers in Minecraft, who mostly say “Hmmm.” It’s the nurse who heals your injured Pokémon. It’s the old man in Zelda who says, “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this.” If you’re more of a gamer, it’s the town guards in Skyrim who repeatedly say, “I used to be an adventurer like you…”. Or, if you know the movie “Free Guy,” starring Ryan Reynolds, it’s about an NPC who breaks out of his shallow NPC mold and becomes a main character.

Human beings are never that simple. You simply can’t say anything about “all Black people” or “all LGBTQ+ people” or “all Latter-day Saints” and have it be true, because no person is just one thing. I used to not be able to see this. Hopefully you’ve been able to see this depth in all your life’s side characters for a long time. But this is new to me, and every time I catch a glimpse of the depth of another person it feels sacred. It feels like I have encountered something holy.

Jesus loved the background characters. The woman with the issue of blood is often portrayed this way: sitting in a lonely corner, all by herself, invisible to all the people walking by. But she made herself a main character—she reached out. And while He could have continued walking past, Jesus stopped. He saw her. We don’t get much of her story in the New Testament, but we know that she’d been incurably ill for twelve years. And even amongst all the hurriedness and the crowdedness of all the people around Him, He stopped. He stopped and He saw not just a woman on the street, but a complete and whole human being and a daughter of God.

Later, Jesus died for her. And for you and me, of course. But also for every person you see on the street or on the subway or at your kid’s band concert.

This sensation has a name, sort of. John Koenig coined the term “sonder” to mean (noun or verb) the awareness that everyone has a story. He references that outside ourselves, and outside our immediate circle of friends and family, there are the “extras,” like extras in a movie. And to sonder, then, is to realize that every person has that same rich history, texture, and depth of feeling.

As Valarie Kaur said, in her tremendous book See No Stranger:

When we choose to wonder about people we don't know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.2

People come to life when I realize that each one of them woke up somewhere this morning. The clothes they’re wearing, that I can see, are the result of choices they made today. They picked out that shirt, those pants, those shoes. They picked those clothes out of a closet, or maybe out of a suitcase like I did, or maybe they were thrown over a chair. And, maybe next, they ate breakfast. Just the simple act of thinking about what someone might have eaten for breakfast, and imagining them doing it, turns people into real, three-dimensional human beings for me. All of a sudden, they have a story.

Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them.3

Each person we cross paths with—whether literally on the street, or in any other context—is a beautiful home being built. Wood floors are going in, vaulted ceilings, and beautiful balconies are going in piece by piece. It means each of us is always under construction, and always a little dusty. But it also means we’re always in the process of becoming something greater, until eventually we become mansions in the eternal presence of our Heavenly Parents.

I have to think the world would be a kinder, more peaceful place if we could see people this way. When someone drives erratically on the freeway, we can assume they’re a terrible driver or we can be curious about what’s going on. When someone we don’t know snaps at us in line at a fast food restaurant, we can assume they’re an a-hole or we can wonder what pain they’re feeling today.

Being Christ-like means seeing a stranger and sensing their sacred story.

God doesn’t make NPCs. There are no ordinary people. Nobody is just one thing. And if we can just glimpse that, we can see through the eyes of divinity.

And that’s okay. I assume we don’t have those details because it doesn’t really matter what the celestial kingdom looks like.1 I’m not even clear it’s a place, in the normal sense. There are much more important parts of our theology than, you know, heaven’s decor.

But it matters deeply what each of us thinks heaven will be like, in a metaphorical sense. That affects how we understand the gospel, and how we live our lives.

Paul Tillich, an influential theologian and philosopher, developed the concept of the “ultimate concern.”2 Your ultimate concern is the thing that matters most to you. It’s the thing your heart is most interested in, the object of your devotion and worship. Your ultimate concern is what you will give up everything else to get.

For some people, that might be something that doesn’t seem religious in nature, like money, power, acceptance, etc. But Tillich would argue that if your ultimate concern is one of those things, then that is your religion. That makes it impossible to not be religious; even if you’re an atheist, there is something that means more to you than anything else. That’s your religion.

And that guides your actions. If your ultimate concern is money, then you’ll do whatever it takes to acquire more of it. It might mean working crazy hours to launch a startup, to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It might mean entering shady real estate deals or Ponzi schemes. Or it could mean theft, straight up. The point is that whatever your ultimate concern is, you’ll do what it takes to achieve it.

A simpler way to think about this is this scripture: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Why it matters

That’s what I mean when I say it matters what you think heaven looks like. If heaven is something specific to you, that’s what you’re going to work toward in this life. For example…

Do you think heaven is small, with only a handful of people there? If so, all your effort has to go into being one of those people. Your job is to outrun, outlast, and outrighteous the people sitting next to you on the pews. It’s a zero-sum game. There are limited tickets to get in. Someone reads the scriptures fifteen minutes a day? You’ll read for thirty. Someone pays a generous fast offering? You’ll double it. You’ll go to the temple every day. It may be that the only way to get to heaven is by stepping on others along the way, and if that’s the heaven you aspire to, you’ll do it.

Do you think heaven is right here, with the earth having received its paradasiacal glory and becoming the celestial kingdom (as in Doctrine and Covenants 88:17–20 and 130:9)? Then it might be important to you to take care of this earth. Maybe the Earth isn’t just a pool of resources to be strip-mined and depleted, maybe it’s not just a holding tank for our waste and pollution. If we believe that the earth will be with us in the next life, then we’ll treat it as something that will make it into the next life with us.

Do you think heaven is a place where we’re in a constant attitude of worshipping God? Maybe it is. And if so, you’d better figure out what worshipping really is. Maybe you look into self-abnegation and self-flagellation and other ways to prostrate yourself before God. If that’s what heaven is, then you need the practice. Other people become somewhat unnecessary in this view of heaven.

What do I think? I think heaven is big. I think we’ll be there with loving Heavenly Parents, and the company of all our spiritual brothers and sisters, the whole of the human family. I think our Heavenly Parents love all of us—their children—so deeply that Their plan makes it possible for us all to get back to them.

Popular depictions show St. Peter at the pearly gates, deciding who will get in, whose testimony is tall enough to enter. I don’t think heaven has gates. I think God is trying to bring us in, not keep us out.

That’s what heaven looks like, to me. Maybe it looks different to you.

Which is why I think it matters a great deal how we treat other people now. Are we in a race against the people around us, or are we on a journey with them? In this life, we share a common humanity that binds us all together. But we also share a divine parentage. Being children of God, every one of us, ties us together in ways deeper than living on the same street or having our children go to the same school.

That’s why I talk and write about love—because I’m trying to become that person who can love everyone, no matter how dumb or bad at driving they are. And that’s not because I think I can score more Afterlife points by loving my neighbor, it’s because the points don’t matter and loving each other is how we become more like God.

Seeing heaven differently is why we sometimes seem to be on a different page than others around us, even at Church. If I see heaven as having room for all of us, and the person one pew over sees heaven as exclusive and small, then we’re going to see the world differently. I might put more weight on kindness to others, and they may put more weight on exact obedience. Is one of us wrong? I guess we’ll find out when we get there. But importantly, we’ve both aligned our beliefs and actions to our ultimate concern. And we can understand each other better when we know that.

This also affects the way we understand the gospel itself. It affects what scriptures we like best—they’re the ones that reinforce our ultimate concern. It affects what we hear and take away from general conference.

What that looks like

There’s been chatter lately about the Parable of the Ten Virgins.3 I used to always view the story from the standpoint of believing heaven to be full of people who have earned the right to be there; people who have met rigorous behavioral qualifications to enter. The five wise virgins were prepared to pay the price of entry into the bridegroom’s presence; they had oil in their lamps. I understood that to be symbolic of having a sufficient quantity of testimony, or perhaps of obedience, to be admitted into the celestial kingdom.

But other interpretations are floating around, and they better fit my view of heaven now. Instead of the five left-out virgins being foolish because they didn’t have any oil, they were foolish because they thought the bridegroom cared how much oil they had. Or to put it better, here’s Nadia Bolz-Weber:

They were foolish because they listened when voices other than God’s tried to tell them who they were. They listened to those whispering voices telling them that they can only approach the groom if they have already met all their own needs first…

The foolish bridesmaids weren’t foolish because they didn’t bring back-up oil, they were foolish because instead of trusting that the light of Christ was enough to shine the way, they wasted all that time and energy and money trying to get their own because someone shamed them into thinking they could never approach the Lord with their lack.

This reading of the parable makes the bridegroom, representing Jesus Christ, into a much different character—and one much more in line with the Jesus of the New Testament (and the Book of Mormon). Rob Bell adds this:

Could God say to someone truly humbled, broken, and desperate for reconciliation, “Sorry, too late”? Many have refused to accept the scenario in which somebody is pounding on the door, apologizing, repenting, and asking God to be let in, only to hear God say through the keyhole: “Door’s locked. Sorry. If you had been here earlier, I could have done something. But now, it’s too late.”4

Do you see how different this looks through the different lens? The gospel becomes an entirely different pursuit, a different journey, when the Savior’s invitation to us holds strong regardless of how much oil we have. I don’t think God is going to lock the door on us. I don’t believe heaven has gates.5

For a lot of us, the ultimate concern we had growing up isn’t something we chose. It was taught, explicitly or implicitly, by those who raised us. We learned it in Primary and youth classes. Maybe we saw a loving God modeled by parents who loved us unconditionally, or maybe we imagined a harsh, disciplinarian God because that’s what our parents modeled for us. Maybe heaven sounded like a joyous place where we could be with our families forever; maybe heaven sounded like an unwelcoming place where we would be forced to be with our families forever.

But later in life, we get to choose these things. We learn what beliefs are deep inside us. I grew up learning a gospel of rules and retribution, where the onus is on each of us to perfect ourselves as much as we can, and see if we qualify for grace to pick up the slack. But in recent years, I’ve stopped picturing a heaven with few people and locked gates, and instead seen a heaven where our Heavenly Parents want all of us to be there.

That has made all the difference for me. We won’t know what heaven looks like until we get there. But I know what I’m preparing for now.

The older boys caught on to the game immediately, recognizing that the answer would be “yes” every time, no matter how different or scary each person looked.

But their younger brother, probably three years old, saw it differently. With so many of these pictures being children of God, his tiny mind reasoned, surely the next one must not be. “How could they possibly all be children of God,” I imagine him thinking. Surely, he thought, this was going to end somewhere. Surely there was a limit.

Some of the things the Savior taught were impactful because they were countercultural, and even subversive, in Jewish culture at the time. A culture that taught that a law of proportionate retribution—an eye for an eye—was understandably baffled by the teacher from Nazareth who taught that not only should you not kill, but you shouldn’t get angry. Not only should you not commit adultery, but you shouldn’t lust. And not only that you shouldn’t demand an eye in return for losing your own eye, but that you should turn the other cheek (“a cheek for an eye” had decidedly less ring to it).

Among those teachings, arguably the most compelling—to the Jews, the Nephites, and to us in the latter days—is the Savior’s instruction to love those who have done the least to earn our love:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

And despite having these holy words for the last two millennia, I submit that they are just as countercultural today as they were in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

There’s an idea floating around that we live in a post-“love your enemies” world. The premise is that things have gotten so bad, and our enemies so evil, that surely we are no longer asked to love them. We have abusers causing meaningful pain, policymakers fueled by hate, and people in positions of authority who seem to delight in suffering they cause others to endure.

Surely, this is the time that “love your enemies” no longer holds. Up to now we’ve agreed that everyone around us is a child of God and deserves to be treated that way. But not anymore. Surely—surely—that was meant to end somewhere. Surely we’ve reached the limit.

But at the end of the day, it is wildly inconvenient that these people most deserving of our distrust (at least) and our hate (at most) are all children of God. Every one of them. And Jesus taught us to love them.

If you're on the one side, it stinks to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a child of God. And that Elon Musk is a child of God. And if you're on the other side, that Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are children of God. It's painful to acknowledge that Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il and Fidel Castro and Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden and Andrew Jackson and Idi Amin and all the worst people you can possibly think of are beloved children of our Heavenly Parents.

This is where “love your enemies” stops being a nice platitude, a pleasant thought among many from the Sermon on the Mount, and becomes starkly real. People that were just people before are now our enemies, because of labels we’ve put on them: conservative, liberal, privileged, lazy, woke, MAGA, bigot, feminist, anti-vaxxer, pro-vaxxer, illegal, boomer, Karen, elitist, and so many more. We’ve found ways to make everyone be either on “our team” or “their team.” It’s all black and white. There is no middle ground.

I believe the Savior taught us to love our enemies exactly for times like now. Exactly for the times when it’s terribly, terribly inconvenient.

If you only love those who look like you, who think like you, and who politick like you, and you’ve drawn the line at loving those who are on the other side, then that’s literally just what Jesus told us not to do. He gives us zero credit for that:

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

“Hating hate” just doesn’t work. Vitriol-fueled social media posts about how much we hate other people’s hate don’t accomplish anything. Adding more hate to the mix doesn’t make the other hate go away. Labelling other people as hateful to justify our own hate goes nowhere.

And getting real for a moment—if our instinct (I’m including myself in this) is to apply this only to other people, then we’re missing the point. We should be asking ourselves, as the disciples of old, “Lord, is it I?”

To be honest, it probably is. Because I think it’s pretty much all of us.

There is some nuance to this topic, of course. If you’re in an abusive relationship, this teaching from the Savior does not say to submit to the abuse. If a certain politician’s policies harm a marginalized group you belong to, the Savior doesn’t teach to just roll with it. Resistance against behaviors and ideas is another thing entirely, and is important in improving the human condition.

But the people perpetuating these horrible things, well, they chose—along with us and the other two-thirds of the host of heaven—to follow the Savior’s plan and come into this world. There’s just no way around the shared humanity, even when some people are denying basic humanity to others.

Now, of course, this is message coming from a white male, and I have just about every possible privilege afforded to me. I’m fortunate enough to not have been in positions where I was abused or even marginalized. So, to quote LeVar Burton, don’t take my word for it.

bell hooks, a Black feminist author, said that love—not anger, violence, or hate—is the only way to get any traction against oppression:

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.1

That’s a bit subversive on its own, isn’t it? Sometimes we get so excited about the Jesus who flipped tables that we forget the Jesus who embodies perfect love. Somehow, sometimes we think that overcoming the hate of others will only happen if we hate them back hard enough. But as Audre Lorde said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Dr. Howard Thurman, a Black theologian and a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes that hatred not only fails to move our causes forward, but it destroys us as individuals:

Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. He rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father.2

We find this message taught in the early days of this dispensation, too. Here we have it from Parley P. Pratt, who was arrested multiple times and eventually murdered:

We do not retaliate. We do not return evil for evil. We forgive our enemies and do good to those who hate us.3

The parade of quotes could keep going. But it was always going to end right back where we started, which is by quoting the Prince of Peace, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, who didn’t hold back.

“Love your enemies,” He said. But what about the people we hate, and who hate us? “Do good to them.” What about those who cause pain on us, for the sole purpose of lifting themselves up? What about the people who want to destroy us? “Pray for them.” Love them too, He said.

Jesus not only taught us to love everyone, He demonstrated it as they whipped Him, spat in His divine face, and nailed His hands—the hands that He reaches out to each of us—to a terrible, insulting cross. He loved even those who were in the process of taking His life, forgave them for what they were doing, and then died that those exact men might live again.

That is the example He set for us to follow. Even now.

Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, puts a fine point on it:

Why would we think that God requires less of today? That suddenly putting ourselves first… is now what God wants of us? That Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan no longer applies—we don’t have to love our neighbors. That is okay for the wealthy to oppress the poor; that it is okay to act cruelly to the vulnerable; that it is okay to bully the weak.

I don’t think God requires less of us today. I don’t think the injunction to love our enemies is only for when it’s easy, or our enemies are mostly behaving themselves. I think it’s for right now, when our enemies are the most vile and our world the most divided. We are not expected to love or excuse or condone the things they do. But the idea that we can eschew evil and still love people is what both makes this teaching challenging and gives it its power.

President Nelson just talked about this in General Conference last week. Anger never persuades. Hate doesn’t work. These aren’t the things that Jesus Christ taught us to do:

Two years ago, I called upon us as covenant followers of Jesus Christ to be peacemakers. I repeat what I said then, "Anger never persuades." Hostility builds no one. Contention never leads to inspired solutions. True charity towards all men is the hallmark of peacemakers…

The present hostility in public dialogue and on social media is alarming. Hateful words are deadly weapons. Contention prevents the Holy Ghost from being our constant companion. As followers of Jesus Christ, we should lead the way as peacemakers.

We have a prophet to receive revelation to guide the Church in our day, but in this case the guidance is a couple thousand years old. As Latter-day Saints, we should lead the way as peacemakers. And as Christians, we should love our enemies.

Even the bad ones.

These days, all the cool kids are writing on Substack (and by “cool kids” I mean me, and whoever else).

If you’re unfamiliar with the Substack platform, it’s basically… blogs? That’s an over-simplification, but a single Substack is basically a blog, and if you subscribe to it then all that blog’s new posts get sent to your email. For those who lived during the golden age of the internet, it hearkens back to the blogs + Google Reader combo (RIP Google Reader, 2005-2013).

I follow a handful of Latter-day Saint writers on Substack, but I wanted to follow more, so I went looking—and they were hard to find. So I made this list, hoping that it will be easier for those who follow in these same footsteps.

This list is:

1. Focused on content that is promoting faith or seeking faith, in a Latter-day Saint context. (EDIT: Due to demand, I’m also adding a section at the bottom for non-religious content from Latter-day Saint authors.)

This list is not:

1. “Anti” or negative voices (realistic, yes; negative, no), or

2. vetted at all. The first few are those that I read and like. After that, the list is unvetted and I do not vouch for any of the publications listed; the point here is to list any many as we can find, and let you filter for yourself.

With those caveats in place, let’s go to the list.

Friends and favorites

We’ll start with this excellent one:

Roger Pimentel: From the Overflow

A committed Latter-day Saint's essays on the gospel and the Church, and the moments when they happen to overlap.

That’s this one! You’re reading it right now! I’ve been thrilled to have so many of you interact with the things I write, and I’ve learned a ton from all of you. I’m glad to be on this journey together. Subscribe now if you haven’t already!

Faith Matters

A companion on the journey of faith through expansive conversations about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you’re not familiar with Faith Matters, go check them out… and I’ll see you at their annual Restore conference, which is terrific.

Wayfare

Explorations in Faith

By Faith Matters

A magazine published by the good folks at Faith Matters (see above).

At Last She Said It

Amplifying the voices, ideas, and experiences of Latter-day Saint Women

Susan and Cynthia are leading the way for Latter-day Saint women (and men) dealing with tough issues in the Church. Some of this is paywalled.

Women on the Stand

A space for respectful and unflinching conversation about women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

By WomenOnTheStand

Great content on women’s issues in the Church from my friend Amy Watkins Jensen and other luminaries.

Mormon Metrics

weekly charts and data about Mormonism delivered each Friday morning

By Alex Bass

As a numbers guy, I enjoy this one.

The rest (Church or spirituality-focused)

Again, I have not vetted all of these, and I can’t take any responsibility for their content. Take a look and see if they’re a good fit for you.

Peacemakers Needed

A hub to share ideas, practices, and opportunities that support bridge-building efforts happening around us—locally, globally, in our homes, and in our hearts.

The Soloists

Nourishing conversations on singleness, dating, relationships, and religion. A new podcast by Faith Matters Foundation.

The Bright & Morning Star

Latter-day Saint, still in beta

By Scott Livingston

Second Sunday

For when you really just need that third hour of church....

By Zachary Davis

Echoes of the Past

Latter-day Saint stories and biographies

By James Perry

Navigate the Strait

I have ALS, which is a death sentence. These are my thoughts on eternal life and the doctrine and culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. This is a supplement to my book. Www.NavigatetheStrait.Com

By Bradford Smith

Sunday Bread Club

A Book Club for Latter-day Saint Seekers.

Come Follow Me Daily

Daily insights relating to the Come Follow Me curriculum for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

By Mary Stallings

The Latter-Day Living

By Chris W

Latter-day Voices

Faith-promoting content for Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other like-minded individuals to help each other build enduring faith in Jesus Christ and thrive even while living in turbulent times.

By Russ Anderson

Latter-day Liberalism

The intersection of Latter-day Saint theology and classical liberalism.

By Nathaniel Givens

Pioneering Sisterhood

I write about Latter-day Saint pioneer women—their faith, resilience, sisterhood, healing, love stories, & more. Join me for inspiring pioneer stories & reflections on modern life through the lens of the gospel.

By Kailey G

The Pearls

Treasuring gospel truths for Latter Day Saints

By Ashli Carnicelli

Latter-day Scripture Study

I'm just trying to read the scriptures more deeply and more often. More or less weekly musings about life, learning, and other things through the lens of the Latter-day Saint scriptural canon.

Becky Squire

If you’re craving real talk, spiritual depth, and a peek behind the curated feed, you’re in the right place. For paid subscribers, I’ll be sharing my raw, unfiltered thoughts—things I don’t post anywhere else. Let’s grow together.

C.S. Lewis for Latter-day Saints

Get weekly insights, reading recommendations, explore his connection to modern prophets, and learn how C.S. Lewis can illuminate scripture, challenge your thinking, and deepen your faith.

By Michelle Lehnardt

Tom @ Latter Day Insights

Gospel Insights explores various gospel topics from a faithful Latter Day Saint perspective. The focus is on forming a deeper understanding of core gospel doctrines though I also dabble in apologetics in defense of the faith.

Non-Church stuff, from LDS authors

Material Girls

You are what you buy

By Rebbie

let’s find joy

Finding joy in the seasons of motherhood, creativity, and faith. Through storytelling, poetry, art, and photography, I seek joy in the ordinary and meaning in the mess.

By Melissa Anderson

Oak & Bower

Hi lovely! My name is Jae, and I share personal treasures of lifestyle and wellness in Christ. Come and stay awhile - I saved a seat just for you! 🍄

By Jae C.

Corrine Stokoe

Longtime blogger, mom of 5 in South OC, married to a recovering addict. As a recovering codependent, my calling is to help others break free from codependency. I trademarked 'codafree,' meaning freedom from codependency.

Daily Reminders with Courtney Casper

Encouragement, conversation & community with likeminded women as we keep Choosing YES to all that God calls us to.

The Fairy Lab

Author, homeschooling mom, and failed chemist. We are living in a fantasy world, and I like to write about it.

By Elissa Nysetvold

finding the story

Stories that open the gate to better understanding ourselves and each other.

By Lorren Lemmons

The Goose Gazette

A glimpse into farm life, motherhood, and the pursuit of simple, meaningful living

By Ballerina Farm

The Foodletter (By Female Foodie)

A swoon-worthy, approachable recipe delivered straight to your inbox on Tuesday mornings, because life's too short to eat bad food.

By Brooke Eliason

The Linen Letters

Stories and reflections on motherhood, faith, and the quiet moments that shape our lives—woven with love and a little bit of humor.

By Rachael

Hope Smiling Brightly

Welcome to HSB! A place to explore hope and faith through a religious lense. Regardless of your relationship with the Church or hope itself, I invite you to stay awhile...there's room here for the hopeless, the hope-indifferent and the hopeful.

By Meredith Smith Sonneborn

Saints & Cinephiles

An interview newsletter profiling members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Hollywood.

By Isaac Bing Wright

Divine Speculations: Exploring Faith and Fantasy

an occasional blog about speculative fiction, spiritual writing, and the overlap between the two

By Liz Busby

DYING BREED

Cut from a stained glass mountain

By Brett McKay

The Utah Monthly

Thoughtful perspectives on all things Utah.

Girl Finding God

a confessional of sorts

By Hannah Larson

The Compass

News related to gatherings and events at The Compass Gallery.

By Faith Matters

CONORCOPIA

Thoughtful, generous engagement with the cultural abundance that surrounds us.

By Conor Hilton

What’s missing from this list?

Are you a Latter-day Saint writer, but your Substack isn’t on the list? Send it to me in a message via the button below and I’ll get it added.

Similarly, with any living list like this, it’s likely that some of these will go defunct as people move on to other things. Let me know if one has dried up and I’ll take it off.

Thanks! I hope this list can continue to grow, and that it can be helpful to someone.

I don’t drink coffee, but when we lived in Seattle for a number of years I became entrenched in the coffee shop culture that exists among professionals there. It was very common to meet someone “for coffee,” even if neither of you had any intention of drinking coffee; the point was that you’d meet at one of the million Starbucks locations and conduct your business there. The only time this didn’t work for me was when someone said, “Let’s meet at the Starbucks by your building,” and he and I ended up at two different locations a block apart because the designation “by my building” didn’t actually narrow it down to one.

When we moved to Utah, I found exactly no traces of this coffee shop culture, and since we moved here a handful of years ago I haven’t met anyone “for coffee” even once. It just doesn’t happen here, or at least in the circles I run in. But in those years of coffee shop meetings, I developed a taste for Starbucks hot chocolate, despite it being neither good for you nor particularly good hot chocolate. And occasionally I still stop in to get some.

Which is why it was funny to run into a Latter-day Saint friend on the elevator, while holding my Starbucks cup.

I know he probably didn’t care one iota what I was drinking (mediocre, slighty-gritty hot chocolate or not). I have active Latter-day Saint friends who do drink coffee, and I literally do not care at all. But I was immediately self-conscious about being spotted with the incriminating cup. I didn’t explain myself—we were only on the elevator together for a couple of floors—but I wondered if I should send him a message later so that he could know that I wasn’t actually drinking coffee. I finally convinced myself that I don’t owe anyone anything regardless of what kind of cup they see me holding. But clearly I’m still thinking about it, and clearly I’m still self-conscious about it.

Maybe that’s because I know that I notice. I wish I didn’t, but I’m programmed deep down to notice if a Latter-day Saint friend is drinking coffee. Do you know what I’m talking about? I can’t be the only one. Maybe it’s because I’m nosy and judgmental, or maybe it’s because I’ve been taught this. For decades.

It’s the same with checking to see if someone is wearing garments. There are zero reasons that we should ever be checking to see if someone is wearing garments or not. But even knowing that, it can be obvious when someone is wearing an outfit that would normally show their garments and it’s clear they’re not wearing them. I can’t think of anything dumber than taking such a vested interest in other peoples’ underwear. And yet, here we are; I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

The name of the game here is implicit bias or unconscious bias. These terms refer to any negative bias—and we all have them—that we’re not totally aware of.1 Sometimes we have explicit biases, which are the opposite; maybe you’re openly, vocally biased against fans of your rival college football team, or against people in a different political party, or people who watch certain news outlets on TV. But implicit biases live below the surface; we don’t know they’re there, and we may even deny them if confronted with them.

As Latter-day Saints, we often have implicit biases against people doing things that don’t fit with the most conservative parts of our Church culture.

To be clear, I have these biases. This isn’t me telling a story about how I overcame these prejudices, and came out the other side a better person. These biases are so baked into who I am—and who we are, all of us—that having them is not a choice. The nature of implicit bias is that it is the automatic judgment we have. But the good news is that as human beings we are more than just our built-in, instinctual reactions.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in his landmark book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes this in terms of “System 1” and “System 2.” They operate like this:

System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive, operating with little to no effort. This mode of thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences.

In contrast, System 2 is slow, deliberate, and conscious, requiring intentional effort. This type of thinking is used for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks where more thought and consideration are necessary.

This concept shows up in anti-racism and other anti-prejudice education. The idea is that sometimes we’ve been taught things, or even internalized ideas generationally, that are no longer satisfactory to us; System 1 reactions often manifest as stereotyping others. Maybe we were taught as children that White people shouldn’t associate with Black people, or that straight people should avoid LGBTQ+ people, or—let’s just say—that people who drink coffee are Bad. Our unconscious, implicit bias is to react that way, the way we were taught implicitly or explicitly when we were younger, when we’re suddently confronted with people who fit those bills.

But System 1 is followed by System 2—the deliberate, conscious version of ourselves. And that’s where we get to choose. Will our second thought—from System 2—feed into the stereotypes that our System 1 is propagating? Or is it going to refute ugly prejudices? We’ll always have a first thought, whatever it is, but what matters is what we do with the second thought.

There’s grace for us in this idea. If you see someone of another race and have a knee-jerk reaction, we get to allow our System 2 to weigh in and change the balance. It doesn’t mean we’re bad, it just means we have baggage; the measured, thoughtful System 2 represents everything that we’ve learned more recently, which often represents a better version of ourselves. Your first reaction may reflect where you came from, but your second reaction reflects who you are now.

So, how did we get here? Why do we have implicit biases as Latter-day Saints?

Well, again, everybody has biases. But the specific biases that we have, the ones that are pervasive in our Latter-day Saint culture, do have sources we can trace back to. Our stories are all probably a little bit different, but I can tell you mine.

For one, I can tell you for sure that I was taught to be judgmental as a youth. When President Hinckley gave his “6 B’s” talk in 2000, when he suggested that young women looked better with only one set of earrings (I wrote more about that here), it became a thing. I sat in Young Men lessons where I was taught that if a girl had more than one set of earrings, then she was not someone I should date, let alone marry—I was taught that she was unwilling to follow the prophet and was unworthy. I now know many wonderful, faithful Latter-day Saint women who have multiple sets of earrings, but there’s still a touch of that implicit bias left in me. How do I know? Because my System 1 notices the earrings, even if my System 2 doesn’t care about them.

Same thing with modesty, as a youth. I was explicitly taught as a teenager that if a girl wore something that was deemed immodest, by whatever arbitrary bar was held at that time and by that person, then not only was she sinful but would probably also cause me to sin. Yeah, I was taught to judge a woman’s righteousness by what she wears. And if you’re sensing a theme here, of judging women and controlling their bodies, then you’re right on. Yikes.

There will be those who get pedantic about “judging”; surely, they’ll say, we need to judge between right and wrong. What is judging, they’ll also say, but making choices?

All right, I’ll play. This is not just a hypothetical contradiction; this is a literal scriptural contradiction. The same book of scripture that says “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”2 also says we should “judge righteous judgment.”

But that’s okay, words in the English language can have more than one definition. To “judge” can absolutely mean “to form an opinion about through careful weighing of evidence and testing of premises”; it can also just as easily mean, from the same dictionary, “to form a negative opinion about.” The former is what the scriptures refer to as potentially “righteous judgment”—you might substitute a word like “discernment” here.3 But the latter, when used to be judgmental of other people, is what we’re told to simply not do.

I’m just not interested in trying to justify ourselves in judging others. There’s simply no “righteous judgment” when our judging causes ourselves to lift ourselves over other people (or put other people below ourselves).

Or, how about this as a rule of thumb: If you’re judging a situation, or a decision to be made, fine. If you’re judging a person, you’re doing it wrong.

Do you see what this means? It means that if you understood President Hinckley’s earrings thing as a commandment (and many people did not), then you had the opportunity to choose whether to follow it or not. But nothing gave you permission to judge other people for what they chose to do.

We all have the agency to choose to dress to our own particular standards of modesty. But it’s not a righteous judgment if we judge others for how they dress.4

We get to choose whether we follow the Word of Wisdom, how we keep the Sabbath Day holy, how often to read the scriptures or pray or even attend church meetings, but nothing in the gospel of Jesus Christ gives room for us to judge others on when, how, or why other people do those things.

As BYU professor Dr. Catherine Corman Parry put it, “Our own sins, no matter how few or seemingly insignificant, disqualify us as judges of other people’s sins.” Or as Dr. Julie Hanks put it so concisely, “If I’m judging you and your commitment, the sin is on me for judging.”

And Elder Uchtdorf brings it all home:

This topic of judging others could actually be taught in a two-word sermon…

Stop it!

That’s easier said than done. Our unconscious biases, embedded in our System 1, are always going to go crazy. But our System 2 is also always there, to justify us, to break generational cycles, and to represent who we really are—not just where we’ve come from.

If we were capable of having Christ-like love for everyone around us naturally and instinctually, this mortal life would be a lot easier. But we’re not wired that way (or I’m not, anyway, maybe you are). My System 1 doesn’t have automatic love for everyone in my neighborhood, my ward, or my work. This could be what King Benjamin describes as the natural man.

But the good news of the gospel accounts for that. We can learn kindness and empathy, and it’s up to us to grow into those Christ-like characteristics as much as we can. They can be part of our System 2, the part we can control a little more. But the unmerited, unearned grace of Jesus Christ—the only love that does not fail, that Charity with a capital C—is given to all of us. That love is automatic. Nothing can change that or take it away.

When we’re taught to be Christ-like, that may mean a change in our behavior, a change in how our System 2 responds. But much longer-term, it also means a fundamental change in who we are. Changing our System 1, to be filled with automatic love for all our fellow children of God, isn’t something we can do on our own. And probably not even something we can do in this life. But it’s something we can do with divine help.

As Elder Uchtdorf also said, in the same talk as referenced above:

The pure love of Christ can remove the scales of resentment and wrath from our eyes, allowing us to see others the way our Heavenly Father sees us: as flawed and imperfect mortals who have potential and worth far beyond our capacity to imagine.

It’s pretty dumb that the Starbucks cup thing bugged me so much. I clearly had to come write this to clear my conscience. But it strikes right to the core of something I believe in very deeply: that the great commandment to love our neighbor is one of the few things we’ll take with us—that we’ll be judged on, even—after this life. And that its partner, the commandment to love God, is best fulfilled in how we treat other people. If our love of God makes us judge other people, then we’re doing it wrong.5

There’s no question in my mind that we’ve been taught, culturally, to judge other people. Let’s stop teaching that. And the best way to start is to just stop judging each other.

There’s no question that the Articles of Faith play a significant role in our Church. I’m sure most wards don’t give out certificates, but the Articles are still big in Primary. In our ward, one is recited at the beginning of the meeting along with the talk and prayer (this is normal), and they sing the Articles of Faith songs from the Children’s Songbook.

It all makes me wonder if this was what Joseph Smith intended.

The Articles of Faith, of course, came from a letter written by Joseph Smith to John Wentworth in 1842. Wentworth was the editor of the Chicago Democrat, and he had asked for a summary of the Church's history and beliefs. The letter is long—you can read the whole thing on the Church website here—and the Articles of Faith show up as a list of statements (not numbered) at the end.1 They were added to the Pearl of Great Price in 1851, seven years after Joseph Smith’s death.

Brother Joseph clearly meant for the statements, as part of the overall letter, to be made public. But could he have imagined how much attention they would be getting almost 200 years later? Would he have written them differently if he’d known that thousands of Primary children would memorize them every year, that they’d be printed on cards and posters, and that they’d be in our scriptures?

We think of the Articles of Faith as being a summary of our beliefs. And while that’s true, if you look at them with a critical eye, are they a good summary?

Or, put a different way, if you could write thirteen statements to summarize our faith, would one of them be about the literal gathering of Israel? Would one be about obeying the laws of the land? We absolutely believe these things, but are there other things you would choose to emphasize?

Why do we have the ones we have?

Despite those questions, it’s generally assumed that Joseph Smith did not write the Articles of Faith to be comprehensive; instead, he wrote some of them in response to what other churches believed at the time, or where the Church found itself at the time. RoseAnn Benson describes it this way:

During the twenty-two years that had passed since Joseph’s First Vision and twelve years since the official organization of the Church, scores of revelations and Latter-day Saint newspapers and pamphlets had set forth important doctrine. Many of these seminal doctrines, however, were not included in these thirteen brief statements of belief. Instead, it appears that the Prophet Joseph responded primarily to many of the conflicting philosophies and traditions of the day espoused in Catholicism, Deism, Calvinism, Arminianism, Lutheranism, Universalism, and Restorationism, as well as to millennialist expectations, in the process of clearly setting forth some central Latter-day Saint beliefs.

Sister Benson’s article sheds light on a few specific entries in the Articles of Faith that appear to be written specifically to set the Church apart from others’ doctrines. The first Article of Faith (We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost) is an example here. Within the larger context of the Wentworth letter, it’s clear that the first Article of Faith recognizes God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost as separate beings, and not as the Trinity as found in some other faiths.2

Another example is the twelfth Article of Faith (We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law). With the growing Latter-day Saint movement in Joseph Smith’s time having been viewed as a threat to communities and governments in their movement westward, it probably made a lot of sense for him to include an article that demonstrated Latter-day Saints’ deference to both governmental authorities and their laws.

The one that jumps out at me, though, is the second Article of Faith (We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression). While important, this is a curious doctrine to include, second only to the Godhead, when so many glorious doctrines came forth in the Restoration.3 Sister Benson suggests that this article specifically refutes Augustine’s idea that we are all born sinful and guilty (read her whole article here, it’s great).

But let’s also look at this through our modern lens. It’s striking to me that our second Article of Faith begins with “We believe that men will be punished.” As I have studied the gospel and come to understand it more, I lean less on the idea of a God that’s trying to catch me in the act of sinning so He can punish me, and more on the idea that I have loving Heavenly Parents who want me to return to Them. Which makes it seem all the more likely, to me, that Joseph Smith may have been running up against faiths that did believe we are born sinful because of Adam’s transgression. In which case it would make sense to try to differentiate the Church on this point.

Where would modern Articles of Faith come from?

If we want to speculate on what modern Articles of Faith would look like, we should look at other things that have been published by the First Presidency and the Church more in recent decades. This can give us insight into the principles and doctrines these recent Church leaders find most precious and worth talking about. Things like:

• Proclamations. In the last 30 years, we’ve seen proclamations from the First Presidency about families, Jesus Christ, and the Restoration. Jesus Christ is certainly mentioned in the original Articles of Faith, but not the other two proclamation topics—families and the Restoration.

• The mission of the Church. When I younger this was the threefold mission of the Church, as introduced by President Kimball, but this now has four points to it, as outlined in the Handbook here. While the mission of the Church and articles or declarations of faith aren’t the same thing, we still might expect these four points to be represented. They look like this:

  • Living the gospel of Jesus Christ (used to be “perfect the saints”)

  • Inviting all to receive the gospel (used to be “preach the gospel”; this one is not currently represented in the Articles of Faith)

  • Uniting families for eternity (used to be “redeem the dead”; this one is not represented either)

  • Caring for those in need (also not represented currently)

• The Preach My Gospel manual. What better place to find the Church’s most key beliefs, than in the manual missionaries use when teaching people those beliefs? We might expect to find these things in a newer incarnation of the Articles of Faith. This manual has five major sections of doctrine to teach:

  • The Message of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (the Restoration isn’t specifically mentioned in the Articles of Faith, outside the idea of continuing revelation)

  • The Plan of Salvation (not mentioned, outside of the atonement of Jesus Christ)

  • The Gospel of Jesus Christ

  • The Commandments (not mentioned)

  • Laws and Ordinances (not mentioned outside of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost)

Okay, then, what would modern Articles of Faith say?

Let’s do the thought experiment. If the Articles of Faith had never been written, and were being written now for the first time, what would they say?

This isn’t an exercise in what to take out, or what to replace with what. This is simply saying, what would they be? What topics would be included? What would concisely summarize official doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

This is purely subjective, of couse. But if the Articles of Faith were written today, I’d expect these topics to be represented:

• Families. This is clearly a differentiating doctrine for Latter-day Saints, and given how frequently families are taught about in General Conference recently—4-6x more in the last 50 years than before4—I’d expect it to be included.

• Temples. Is there a stronger symbol of our Church than our temples? We’re to the point where CTR rings are out, and we’re giving our kids rings and necklaces with temples on them.5 Combine that with the sacred work for the dead that we do in them, uniting the entire human family, I’d expect temples and temple work to show up.

• The Restoration. Maybe Joseph Smith didn’t include the Restoration as a discrete article because he was living it; the start of the Restoration wasn’t far enough in the past. We’re still living the Restoration, of course, but this is a foundational principle of our faith. It gets included.

• The Plan of Salvation. I think there’d be a statement about our belief that we lived before coming into mortality. It could also include some indication of what we believe happens after this life (maybe just in a general sense that we can live with God again? Any more than that and you’re trying to pack an entire Sunday School lesson into one sentence). This would also be the opportunity to include the idea that we can, in some way, become like God.

• Commandments. I’m not sure on this one. Clearly the Church’s adherence to some external commandments (the Word of Wisdom, keeping the Sabbath Day holy, the law of chastity, etc.) set us apart from some others. But are they so key to our faith that they’d be included? Given how we already index heavily on obedience, I’d say leave these out—but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them included.

• Topics already included. I’d definitely keep at least these topics, that are part of the current Articles of Faith (and which number):

  • God (1)

  • The atonement of Jesus Christ (3)

  • Principles and ordinances (4)

  • Priesthood (5)

  • Scriptures (8)

  • Continuing revelation (9)

But they’re not really going to change, right?

Right. That’s why it’s just a thought experiment.

I think we can agree on two things:

1. The Church has changed in many, many, many, many ways since the time of Joseph Smith.

2. Given that, the Articles of Faith that we have are surprisingly durable, and still relevant today.

If you think this whole exercise comes from criticism of the Articles of Faith, you misunderstand me. Instead, this is coming from a place of joy. The fact that we belong to a Church that has ongoing revelation from God, where things can actually change when we have new light, is an amazing gift we’ve been given.

And, if you’ll oblige me splitting hairs on terminology, the difference between “faith” and “belief” is useful here. We tend to use the two interchangeably. To me, “faith” is how we make sense and meaning of life; “belief” is agreeing that something is true.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a scholar of comparative religion, puts some meat on these bones. He describes “belief” as “the holding of certain ideas.” But he has a great deal to say about faith (bold added):

Faith is deeper, richer, more personal. It is engendered by a religious tradition, in some cases and to some degree by its doctrines; but it is a quality of the person not of the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one's neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension.

The Articles of Faith are useful in that they designate core tenets of our religious organization; maybe “Articles of Belief” would be a better name, per this terminology distinction. What they don’t do is prescribe the depth or breadth of our individual, personal faith as individual, separate people. My faith has grown and evolved in extremely meaningful ways that don’t have anything to do with believing the things listed in the Articles of Faith are true (I do believe those things to be true, incidentally). But that deeply-held personal faith is, as Smith says, a quality of the person and not of the system.

Some people have even written their own personal Articles of Faith, which don’t replace the official ones but rather supplement the organization-level beliefs with deeply held personal beliefs and express one’s deeply-held faith. My wife Anne wrote her own here, and they’re a beautiful personal addition to what we already have.

We all have the ability, and even a mandate, to receive personal revelation to guide our lives, to not only shape our beliefs but our orientation toward ourselves, others, and the Lord.

As Nadia Bolz-Weber put it:

I guess I just no longer think of faith as intellectually assenting to theological propositions, or as regularly confirming in myself that I believe all the wildest stories in the Bible are literally, factually, historically accurate. Faith functions in my life as something closer to gravity than ideology.

The Articles of Faith don’t need to exactly describe the 13 things that are most important to my faith at any given time. That happens at the personal level, not the organization level. And even if a few of the articles made more sense in the context of Joseph Smith’s time, they still assert meaningful, powerful truths. And while our Primary children can’t necessarily tell us what they all mean—and same for some of us adults, really—it’s a start as we develop our own personal faith, one that’s a lot harder to put into words.

In the course of the lesson, the teacher asked the group, “What are some distractions that can keep us from focusing on Christ and His gospel?” It was a good solid question, and the answers rolled in. Someone said work, our jobs, can keep us from being focused on Christ. Someone suggested that watching too much football might be a distraction. Someone else suggested that our phones are distractions. Someone else said golf. These things can all be distracting, for sure.

But the fascinating part was that these things were all brought up because of the time they take. The presumption was that by spending time on these things, you were by definition not spending time on a gospel thing. If you spend time watching football, that’s time you could have been ministering. If you play golf, that’s taking away from time you could have been reading the scriptures.

At that point, someone brought up Kobe Bryant, the basketball player (as one does, in elders quorum), and how he would hit the gym at 4:00am so that he could get in some practice time before anybody else even woke up. There was general nodding and agreement from the group in applying this to the gospel: yep, if you want to focus on Christ, you’d better get up early so you have enough time to do it.

But the problem with the idea that football and jobs and phones are impediments to our salvation is the conclusion that living the gospel requires time. There’s an implication that we should, ideally, be spending 100% of our time actively reading scriptures or praying or taking someone a casserole. If we’re not in the temple at this very moment, if we’re not currently ministering, if we’re spending our time frittering away at things like our jobs then we’re going to be terrestrial kingdom candidates at best. Good luck if you have two jobs, or are a single parent, or have any other commitment that keeps you from the full-time job of being a Latter-day Saint.

I’m being facetious, of course, but I just can’t think of when Jesus Christ taught us this. All of those things—scriptures, prayer, temple service, ministering, etc.—are all great things, and things the Lord has asked us to do.

But I would also suggest that those outward actions, those gospel checklist items, are pointing us to something greater; they’re there simply to help us build our individual, personal relationship with God. Here’s the point:

The Lord didn’t tell us how many minutes to read our scriptures, how often to attend the temple, or when to pray. But He did tell us to love God and love our neighbor, and we can do that anytime, in any place.

I believe each of us can live a Christ-centered life at work. I believe we can watch football games while loving God and loving our neighbor. I believe we can—heaven help us—play games on our phone and still qualify for the eternal glory our Heavenly Parents have promised. Living the gospel is not a separate activity, it’s the way we do everything as we live our lives. Or more precisely, it’s who we are while we do them.

I recently read the book “New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got it Wrong,” by Stephanie Harrison, which is spectacular and worth your time. The author explores, to good effect, the contrast between what she calls “Old Happy” and “New Happy.” Old Happy is largely still our society’s preferred understanding of happiness, and is anchored in achievement, perfection, status, and wealth. New Happy, instead, is based on being your authentic self, and giving of yourself to others. The irony of Old Happy is that these external goals can’t actually make you happy. New Happy, in turn, is much healthier, and much more likely to invite happiness into your life.

Part of what was profoundly impactful to me about this book was how exactly it describes our church experience. You could turn this into a church book by changing a few words here and there, and otherwise it would apply directly.

Old Happy becomes Old Righteous, the belief that you are never doing enough, that there is always more to do, and that the atonement of Jesus Christ and His grace come into effect only after all you can do, only if you qualify, only if you’ve earned enough points to win God’s love. Old Happy, and thus Old Righteous, values:

1. Being perfect, or as close to it as possible

2. Conforming to the prescribed path

3. Working harder and harder (and never resting or slowing down)2

New Happy, on the other hand, becomes New Righteous, the belief that those things actually aren’t the key to your happiness or your salvation, and that if you live authentically to yourself and try to love your neighbor, then the grace of Jesus Christ has always been enough. New Happy and New Righteous are premised on:

1. Discovering who you really are, as a child of God who is loved unconditionally, and

2. Using that to help other people.

I was taught the Old Righteous model growing up. You probably were, too. I was socialized into a church culture that told me that I always need to do more, and also that it will never be enough. I could always read my scriptures more, and do more family history. Not doing my ministering in a magnifying-my-calling sort of way brought me guilt and shame (and still does).

The author describes it this way:

This voice in your head—the one that keeps telling you that you are not good enough—that's not really you. It's the result of growing up in a culture that told you that no matter what you do, you are not enough. That's why unwinding Old [Righteous] starts with learning a new way to relate to yourself—with unconditional self-acceptance, knowing that you are worthy exactly as you are.

Old [Righteous] has convinced you that your worth is based not just on your performance, but on constantly achieving more and more. It also has convinced you to perpetuate this idea by grading yourself constantly in your progress toward this inhumane goal.3

Does this sound like you? It sounds like me. And it sounds like my experience in the Church for many, many years. That’s not the fault of the gospel; it’s an artifact of our culture, that has focused so heavily on perfecting ourselves. We’ve taught ourselves convincingly, via a verse that has maybe done some of us more harm than good, that we should be “anxiously engaged.”

Somebody told me when I was young that certain Christian sects believe that when you get to heaven, you’ll spend eternity gazing upon the face of Christ. I don’t know that that is actually true (the closest thing might be the Catholic concept of beatific vision, which has more depth to it than that). But I still remember it now, thirty-some-odd years later, because I didn’t think I would enjoy doing only that for all of eternity (and I didn’t suppose Jesus would like it all that much either).

I don’t think the Lord has asked us to do that. He hasn’t asked to avoid anything non-gospel-related. He hasn’t asked us to spend every waking moment in the scriptures. He has not asked us to cut out employment, interests, and hobbies just because the activity itself is not inherently spiritual.4

It’s insightful to recognize that the prophets and apostles have generally had careers and interests outside of anything churchy. President Nelson famously had a career as a heart surgeon. President Oaks was a judge. Elder Cook and Elder Christofferson were attorneys. Elders Andersen, Rasband, and Stevenson were all business executives at different types of companies. A few did come up through Church employment or the Church Education System, but they’re outnumbered.

If these brethren did not eschew their careers—they were, on average, exceptionally successful in them—then I’m not sure I need to either. And while I don’t think the folks in the elders quorum lesson that day really meant that we should quit our jobs so we can have more time to live the gospel, it sure came across that way.

We haven’t even mentioned yet how our adherence to this perfection-oriented paradigm, and fetishizing always doing more, can actually distract us from having a positive, familial relationship with our Heavenly Parents. Elder Bednar said:

As we pridefully focus upon ourselves, we also are afflicted with spiritual blindness and miss much, most, or perhaps all that is occurring within and around us. We cannot look to and focus upon Jesus Christ as the “mark” if we only see ourselves.

And Stephanie Harrison’s take on it—again, not from a religious point of view, but striking very close to home—is this:

It's our quest to fulfill Old [Righteous]'s idea of good—perfection—that prevents us from accessing our own immutable inner goodness. The busier you are trying to be your perfect self, the less time you have to connect with your goodness and share it with others.5 (emphasis added)

I don’t want anyone to think I’m recommending that you don’t read your scriptures, pray, go to the temple, minister, do family history work, share the gospel, magnify your calling, etc. etc. You should absolutely do those things. But if we’re losing sight of the fact that those things aren’t in themselves the gospel, then we’re doing it wrong. Being Christ-like, and making Christ the focus of our lives, doesn’t require big actions or chunks of time. It means being Christ-like while we’re driving kids to baseball practice, while we’re making dinner, and while we’re sitting in yet another meeting at work.

We’re not going to make ourselves perfect. That’s Jesus’s job. Our job, devastatingly unprofitable servants as we are, is to love God and love our neighbor.

If we can make the time for that.

I’m not sure how often we talk about this, but it’s a key principle in our faith. The concept of an open canon is the basis for adding the Book of Mormon alongside the Bible as scripture in this dispensation, as well as later adding the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. We also sometimes include other words of modern prophets as “scripture” in a more general sense; Ezra Taft Benson famously said that the “conference edition of the Ensign should stand next to your standard works.”1

And even the narrowly-defined Standard Works have been added to, and within many of our lifetimes. Official Declarations 1 and 2—the documents that had ended the practice of plural marriage and the temple and priesthood ban, respectively—were added to the end of the Doctrine and Covenants in the 1981 edition. That’s pretty recent!

And little-known (or little-remembered) is that the Doctrine and Covenants gained two new sections in that edition, as well. Sections 137 and 138 first became scripture when they were added to the Pearl of Great Price in 1976, and then were added to the Doctrine and Covenants in that same 1981 edition. Section 137 is the vision in which Joseph Smith saw his brother Alvin in the celestial kingdom; Section 138 is Joseph F. Smith’s vision of Jesus Christ’s visit to the spirits of the dead.

It would be pretty amazing to see more things be added to the scriptures. There’s always the “sealed portion” of the Book of Mormon, comprising half to two-thirds of the golden plates, which could someday come to light. Or maybe more modern documents, like the Family Proclamation or Restoration Proclamation, could be added. Or maybe something else entirely we don’t know about yet.

But would anything ever be removed?

The existence of an open canon presupposes that modern revelation will supplant previous revelation. This is by definition; it means that things said in the past can and will go out of date. The words of current prophets can carry more weight than their ancient, or even not-so-ancient, counterparts. So when something becomes out-of-date or irrelevant in the scriptures (and again, this is bound to happen because of the existence of modern revelation; there’s nothing apostate about saying this can happen), should that thing be removed from our scriptures? Or should it be left in?

There are arguments to be made on both sides. Let’s start with the argument for keeping scripture, even when it has been superseded by something newer and more relevant for our day.

Argument 1: Keep it in, we already have lots of scripture that doesn’t apply anymore

Have you read the Old Testament lately? This beloved book is the poster child for scripture being supplanted by something newer.

Looking for a scriptural justification for slavery? It’s got it (Exodus 21:1-11, Leviticus 25:44-46). Want to capture women in war and force them to be your wife? Got it (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). Do you ever have to work on the Sabbath? You should probably be put to death (Exodus 31:14-15). Wondering what you should eat? Definitely not pork or shellfish (Leviticus 11). So help you if you marry someone from another nation (Deuteronomy 7:1-6). And of course, if somebody pokes your eye out, you should absolutely poke theirs out. The Old Testament says so (Exodus 21:24).

As Christians, of course, we believe that these things aren’t true anymore. We believe that slavery is an abomination, and we don’t put anyone to death for working on a Sunday. We don’t necessarily have verses of scripture that specifically refute these Old Testament verses, but we also don’t need them; nor do we need modern prophets reminding us at every turn that we shouldn’t actually poke out someone’s eye or knock out their tooth, even in retaliation. We just know that.

And we use the Old Testament for entirely different reasons. We benefit from the stories that teach us Judeo-Christian values and morality. We see it as a source for prophecies fufilled by the coming of the Messiah in the New Testament. And while the many chapters spent detailing ceremonial and ritual laws are a slog to get through, the Old Testament overall provides valuable context for when Christ does eventually come.

In short, the Old Testament is full of things that aren’t part of our religious practice today. And yet, nobody is clamoring to remove those things from our scriptural canon. We’re okay keeping them in.

There’s also an argument to be made for convenience. If you took a chapter out of the Old Testament, or a section out of the Doctrine and Covenants, would you change the numbers of all the other ones? Or would you have a blank section/chapter that just now has nothing in it? It’s weird to change the numbers and move things around, but we’re changing all the hymn numbers, so I guess it’s doable.

Which leads us to the argument for taking out scripture that has become irrelevant. Buckle up.

Argument 2: Take it out, it’s wrong

Keeping the old, outdated stuff in the scriptures relies on us all, individually and as a church, understanding when it is actually old and outdated. Sometimes that’s not as easy as it sounds. We’re very quick to say, “The Church believes X,” when that’s actually what we personally think, and it can be a surprise to realize that other active, faithful members think something entirely different—especially when both views have a scriptural basis.

And that’s a good reason to not complicate things by having conflicting messages in scripture.

To be clear, things have been removed from our scriptures before. If something was removed now, it wouldn’t be the first time. For example: In his translation of the Bible, Joseph Smith indicated that the book Song of Solomon is “not inspired writings,” and the book was omitted from the Church’s 1867 publication of the Joseph Smith Translation.2

But it’s also not necessarily general knowledge in the Church that the Doctrine and Covenants has evolved, and yes—things have been removed from earlier versions.3 The first editions of the book had two parts: first, the “doctrine,” comprising teachings that we now call the Lectures on Faith; and second, the “covenants,” comprising revelations to the prophet Joseph Smith. In the 1921 edition, the Lectures on Faith were removed, and of course, you can read them as a separate book these days. There’s a lot more to this story, including discussion of whether this actually constitutes decanonization, which I leave to you to dig into, should you so choose4. But we can say for sure that these lectures used to be part of the book, and now they are not.

Another change had happened before that, though, which is even more germane to our conversation. The 1876 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants was a major reorganization over prior versions, and it omitted one section which had been included since the first edition (published 41 years earlier in 1835).

That may not sound like a big deal, but consider what these sections were. Section 101, the one that was removed, was titled “Marriage” and was a statement on various Church stances on marriage. It included this very specific statement (keep in mind that this is before polygamy was a public practice in the Church):

Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.

Section 131 is a brief section talking about the celestial kingdom. But section 132 is a big one; it’s the section that talks about the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, and introduces the principle of plural marriage. Section 132—if this framing of history is accurate—replaced the statement above, which denounces polygamy, with wording that not only condones polygamy, but appears to even command it.

Or in other words, this is a case when scripture was removed, because it had been replaced by something else!

Section 132, and its words on polygamy, has been understood a lot of different ways in the modern Church, and among Latter-day Saints you’ll find every possible different opinion on this section and whether it belongs in our scriptures. But as we go into a year where we’ll be studying the Doctrine and Covenants, there will inevitably—this is a 100% guarantee—be people who teach incorrect doctrine relating to plural marriage when we get to section 132.

What’s the correct doctrine, you ask? Well, that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it.5

I can tell you rather simply that we are not being commanded today to enter into plural marriages6. The Doctrine and Covenants has been modified before to change statements about the Church’s stance on marriage. Could section 132 ever be removed, like its predecessor was, to again assert the Church’s current stance, or future stances, on plural marriage?

Would it actually happen, though? I obviously have no idea.

Since it’s happened before, and recently enough that some people remember, I think we can say that a current or future prophet could absolutely change what’s in our scriptural canon. Full stop.

Whether or not they actually would—and it feels here like removing something from scripture is dramatically different from adding something—is another question entirely. It’s much easier to just say it would never happen. It’s hard to picture.

But change is always hard to picture. When President Nelson told us to take our vitamin pills, he also famously said, “If you think the Church has been fully restored, you are just seeing the beginning.” I never imagined that the eligibility age for missionaries would change, or that the church block would be shortened to two hours. I never imagined that visiting and home teaching would go away, even if they were replaced by something rather similar. But I don’t think those things were what President Nelson was referring to.

It’s possible that big changes are coming in our lifetimes. It’s possible that there is much more that needs to be restored. And for all I know, it’s possible that the ongoing restoration could include meaningful changes to scripture.

What good is an open canon, anyway, if things never change in it?