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My father, now eighty-five years old, tells a story of being five years old and visiting his grandparents in Heber, Utah. One sunny summer afternoon, Dad wandered into his grandmother’s garden and began harvesting and eating onions, which he claims were almost as sweet as apples. 

When Grandma DeGraff came out and caught him, she let him know that his behavior was bad, even sinful. By the end of the lecture, Dad believed he was bad. 

He can’t remember how long he sat in the dirt, stunned, simmering in shame, and stinking of onions when his grandpa finally came out. Grandpa DeGraff said, “Steve, what you did was wrong. But I love you. There’s no one I’d rather give these onions to than you. All you have to do is ask.” Dad said, “Grandpa’s forgiveness brought me back into my humanity.” 

We know how good, joyful, and freeing receiving forgiveness feels. It connects us to the person who forgives us and can even help us feel more connected to God. 

But forgiving is not always easy. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” More recently, Sister Kristen Yee, Second Consuelor in the Relief Society General Presidency, taught this same truth: “Forgiving can be one of the most difficult things we ever do and one of the most divine things we ever experience.”

It is normal to struggle with forgiving. It is normal to want retribution, or revenge, when others sin—especially when their sins hurt us. 

Yet when Christ was on the cross, He opened the door for our forgiveness and repentance. In a simple moment that was pivotal in eternity, Christ forgave His crucifiers: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” 

This Easter, as we contemplate our Savior’s Atonement, we can learn learn at least seven lessons on the nature of forgiveness from Christ’s time on the cross.

Lesson One: We Worship a Loving and Forgiving God 

The first word Christ utters in the process of forgiving His crucifiers is “Father.” Christ previously showed us in the parable of the Prodigal Son how our Father responds to an imperfect child: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”

There are no lectures in this offering of forgiveness; there is no delay. Christ tells us clearly in this parable that God forgives us lovingly and completely. When Christ reaches for that divine forgiveness at the moment of His own death, He knows the gift will be granted. Symbolized in Christ’s cross itself is a forever open-armed God—one who is willing to forgive us and is waiting to embrace us.  

Lesson Two: Even When We Forgive, We Might Still Experience Pain 

Even when we forgive, we might still experience pain, grief, or loss as a result of what has happened. When Christ forgave those actively hurting Him, the pain He felt did not immediately stop. So why should we forgive, knowing we might still experience the effect of the offense? 

Our pain might not be magically erased by forgiving, but forgiving can help us pivot. Elder Gerrit W. Gong has taught that, “Often condemnation focuses on the past. Forgiveness looks liberatingly to the future.” 

Lesson Three: Forgiveness puts Responsibility in the Right Places

During His ministry, Christ had forgiven sins Himself. But while on the cross, He asks God to do it: “Father, forgive them.” Christ gave their sins to God to manage.

We might be handed something painful, but it’s not our responsibility to hold onto that thing forever, to carry it, and wonder why our offender handed it to us in the first place. Elder David E. Sorenson said: “Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts.”

There’s a certain amount of relief in the fact that forgiveness is not conditional on our offender in any way. Forgiveness is a way of taking ourselves out of the equation with an offender: We get to work directly with Christ, and allow Christ to work with our offender.

Lesson Four: We Must Forgive Human Weakness

When Christ petitioned our Father for forgiveness of the people who were crucifying Him, He didn’t talk about their murderousness, He addressed their ignorance: “They know not what they do.” 

Our oldest son, Owen, was four years old when he let us know his feelings about not getting to have a family movie party one night. He left us a note on green construction paper: “I love you. But I’m still mad.” Forgiveness is what allows us to keep love in our hearts, even as we navigate the friction of daily life. 

Lesson Five: Through Forgiveness Our Pain Can Be Transformed  

In this life we will suffer. We are told this in the scriptures, and we have experienced plenty of it. German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand reminded us that we sometimes mistake “Christ’s transfiguration of all suffering for an elimination of all suffering.” Suffering is part of life, and yet through Christ we know that suffering is not meant to be our final destination. 

Christ’s suffering was not the end, but Christ had to experience death in order to be resurrected to a new life. Likewise, we have the promise that God can transform all of it—our pain, destruction, and mourning—not that the hard things will be erased from our lives but transformed. 

Isaiah tells us that beauty can rise from the ashes of our lives, that joy can come from our grief, and praise can come from heaviness. We don’t often quote the next verse in this Isaiah passage, but it conveys the fact that the most difficult things, the “desolations of generations,” the big things, even as big as “waste cities” shall be raised up through Jesus Christ.

Lesson Six: Forgiveness Should Become Part of Our Nature

Forgiveness is the only part of the Lord’s Prayer that Christ emphasizes through repetition. When He talks about our daily need of bread, forgiveness is mentioned as well. 

The immediacy of Christ’s forgiving those in the moment they were sinning against Him on the cross indicates that forgiveness was part of His very nature. I had a BYU Religion student write about how a forgiving nature could create a culture of love in her home. “I want to create a space where forgiveness is not withheld, not earned, not delayed—but simply given. I want my children and spouse to feel that mistakes are part of life, not the end of love.” 

Forgiveness is not a checklist we march through, but a mindset and a heart-set that can become part of who we are. We might even become so forgiving that we don’t look for offenses. Not picking something up in the first place means we won’t have to figure out how to set it down later. 

Lesson Seven: We Are Not Alone as We Forgive 

In the throes of His agony, Christ was not alone. He had heavenly help in Gethsemane and on Calvary when Christ asked His Father to forgive the people hurting Him. We are not alone in forgiving, either. 

Sister Yee has taught that Christ “does not ask us to [forgive] without His help, His love, His understanding. Through our covenants with the Lord, we can each receive the strengthening power, guidance, and the help we need to both forgive and to be forgiven.” 

“I stood there with coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. ‘Jesus, help me!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand, I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’

“Woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes, ‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart!’

“For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. 

I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.” 

What Forgiveness Is Not

When offering forgiveness feels insurmountable, we may be assuming that we have to do more than Christ has actually asked us to do. Elder Neil L. Andersen wrote a useful list about what forgiveness is not. 

• Forgiveness is not failing to protect ourselves, our families, and others. 
• Forgiveness is not continuing in a relationship with someone who is not trustworthy. Christ’s response to those threatening to harm Him at Nazareth is instructive: He did not lecture, try to persuade, or call down lightning bolts. Christ simply “went his way” (30)—and never goes back. Forgiveness does not always include relational reconciliation. 
• Forgiveness is not condoning injustice. The late Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught that Christ never called evil things good, and neither should we.
• Forgiveness is not dismissing the hurt or disgust we feel because of the actions of others. We should be patient with ourselves while we heal and progress toward forgiving.
• Forgiveness is not forgetting but remembering in peace. 

A Path to Joy

Elder Holland has explained that none of us have “traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines.” The divine forgiveness that God offers to us is complete and it is joy-filled. 

God has His forgiving arms forever open to us, waiting to embrace us without delay. When we choose to forgive, like Christ did on the cross, God’s love can flow through us, and we open ourselves to connection with others and with God.  

The post Forgiveness: Seven Lessons from the Cross appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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In our polarized culture, it has become commonplace to demonize or ridicule anyone who holds a different perspective. Such an approach, however, is inconsistent with the Savior’s example and teachings. I was struck recently with the following guidance from a revelation given to Joseph Smith: 

He that speaketh⁠, whose spirit is contrite, whose language is meek and edifieth⁠, the same is of God if he obey mine ordinances (Doctrine and Covenants 52:15). 

Do these traits characterize the media we consume? Do they characterize our own speech? 

As we ponder such vital questions, it is important not only to consider this verse in isolation and in the abstract. Concrete examples play an important role in helping us to define and visualize these traits. The Savior is the perfect example of these principles, as He is in all things. He acknowledged His dependence on the Father, taught the Father’s teachings, and did His will in all things. 

But what does that look like in the 21st century? Christ’s example remains relevant to us, but it can be hard to visualize how He might speak in our culture, the norms of which differ tremendously from those of the first-century Middle East. There is not always a clear or obvious answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” 

However, one of the messages of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that He has not left us with only ancient examples. He lives. He continues to call prophets and apostles. Through them, He gives us both teachings and examples that help us to come to know Him. Any of the Latter-day prophets and Apostles are excellent examples of the principles identified above.  

I have learned a great deal about them from President Jeffrey R. Holland. In the nearly thirty-one years in which he has served in the Quorum of the Twelve, he has given sixty sermons at General Conference. Studying the content of his sermons has helped me awaken to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Studying the style of his sermons has given me important insights into how I can apply the Savior’s teachings and example in the way I speak.   

President Holland’s speaking style is distinctive partly because of his agonistic tone. Agonistic comes from the Greek word, ἀγών, anglicized as “agon,” which means a struggle, contest, or conflict. We use this root in English when we refer to the main character of a story as a protagonist and the one who opposes him or her as the antagonist. In most of his sermons, President Holland sets up an antagonist that he battles with his words. I can identify an antagonist in forty-eight out of his sixty General Conference addresses. The sense of struggle makes for an exciting speaking style and probably contributes to the fact that his sermons are well-loved by many members of the Church, myself included. He has memorably taught and testified about battling against doubt, lust, sexual immorality, envy, feelings of being abandoned by God, existential meaninglessness, dismissive attitudes about mental health problems, perfectionism, apathy for the poor, the social trend of fatherlessness, unrealistic standards of beauty for women, and the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not Christian. 

One of his repeated targets is rote religious practice, going through the motions without real or complete devotion, an attitude he battled in his second General Conference as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve in 1995, in two different sermons about the Church’s programs for seeing to the needs of its members, one in 2016 and the other in 2018, and in his most recent General Conference address in April 2025. Variations on this theme show up throughout the years in addresses that rebuke a lack of focus on Christ, “comfortable Christianity,” and cynicism that prevents complete devotion. 

President Holland’s choices of antagonists are instructive. His antagonist is never a person or group of people, but always an attitude, misconception, or sin. His agonistic approach does not excite anger at external enemies. Rather, it encourages introspection that leads to personal reformation. He reminds people of the importance of their commitments and creates a sense of urgency. He presents a positive agon, one that builds up (“edifies”) rather than a destructive one that turns people against each other.

In fact, President Holland tends to avoid referring to Satan at all. Only in that 2011 sermon, “We Are All Enlisted,” does he use the name Satan in his own words. Any other time he has used that name in General Conference, it is embedded in a quotation from another source. In the rare times that he does reference the devil, President Holland prefers using the pre-mortal name Lucifer, or titles such as “the adversary,” “arch deceiver,” “the father of all lies,” and, most colorfully, the bilingual, “el diablo, the diabolical one, the father of lies and lust.” Other times, he refers to him in general terms, for example, “remember that there is a force in the universe determined to oppose every good thing you try to do.” He has never made Satan an antagonist. He merely warns of the adversary’s role in encouraging sin and negative attitudes and the consequences of succumbing to temptation. President Holland has never set himself up as a champion who engages the adversary in single combat. Such a stance would be prideful and would forget the fact that it is our Savior who eternally bruised the serpent’s head. In Latter-day Saint popular culture, however, we have sometimes assigned President Holland the role of champion, including in a meme that circulated a few years ago that says, “When Satan goes to sleep at night, he checks under his bed for Elder Holland.” While amusing, this meme presents a characterization of President Holland that he himself deliberately avoids. I believe that we should follow his example both in not presenting him in such a role and in not presuming it for ourselves. We cannot fight with Satan as we would fight with a mortal enemy. The true struggle is internal. We win only by practicing and teaching repentance, faith in Christ, and obedience to His laws and ordinances.  

While President Holland frequently wrestles with an antagonist, his tone is not typically combative. In twelve of his General Conference sermons, he totally avoids an agonistic approach. He has spoken on motherhood twice in General Conference, and both times he did not identify or battle an antagonist. It seems to me that, in this case, an agon with sin would have distracted from the powerful tribute to women and the Savior. Such reasoning also applies to what seems to me his most uncharacteristic sermon, “Songs Sung and Unsung.” A plea for unity, this message culminates with the following passage: 

And someday I hope a great global chorus will harmonize across all racial and ethnic lines, declaring that guns, slurs, and vitriol are not the way to deal with human conflict. The declarations of heaven cry out to us that the only way complex societal issues can ever be satisfactorily resolved is by loving God and keeping His commandments, thus opening the door to the one lasting, salvific way to love each other as neighbors. 

It makes sense to avoid even metaphorical conflict in a message about belonging that decries divisive rhetoric. President Holland knows when to tread lightly. 

Most of President Holland’s non-agonistic talks were given in the first half of his tenure in the Quorum of the Twelve. In the last fifteen years, when he has treaded lightly, he has done so by setting up an agon and at the same time deemphasizing it. I call this technique “soft-pedaling.” President Holland uses various techniques to soft-pedal, including introducing his antagonist by using subjective, personal rhetoric rather than absolute statements; presenting the antagonist by quoting or paraphrasing someone else (as he does by quoting Elder Neal A Maxwell with regard to “comfortable Christianity” in “Waiting on the Lord”), using images or stories that emphasize discussion rather than conflict, confrontation or struggle. 

The soft-pedaling technique that President Holland uses most often—in what I count as thirteen different sermons—is waiting to introduce his antagonist until after he has delivered over half of his sermon. Instead of building towards a powerful climax, such talks tend to focus on comfort and empathy. A characteristic example is “Because of Your Faith,” a moving tribute to the efforts of church members to provide Christlike service. Implicit in the sermon is an agon with the idea that the unsung service of ordinary church members is somehow inferior to that of visible leaders. President Holland introduces this idea over halfway through the sermon by expressing gratitude, “to the near-perfect elderly sister who almost apologetically whispered recently, “I have never been a leader of anything in the Church. I guess I’ve only been a helper,” I say, “Dear sister, God bless you and all the ‘helpers’ in the kingdom.” Some of us who are leaders hope someday to have the standing before God that you have already attained.” A more direct agonistic treatment may have led to a powerful climax that would have displayed President Holland’s speaking powers, but doing so would have detracted from the idea that the contributions of others are at least as valuable as his. The soft-pedaling allows him to focus on others and, therefore, corresponds with the rhetorical purpose. President Holland sets an example by not only matching the style of his sermons to the message of the Savior but by focusing on the needs of his audience in terms of both content and style.

As disciples of Jesus Christ, our central message is Him—His life, His teachings, and His redemptive mission. That message needs to be the central focus of both what we say and how we say it. We can learn much about how to do this by studying the sermons of President Holland. At their most fiercely agonistic, they follow the scriptural admonition to “rend that veil of unbelief” (Either 4:15), trying to remove the sins, attitudes, and misconceptions that prevent us from drawing closer to God. At their gentlest, they comfort and provide encouragement. But all his sermons focus on the Lord, Jesus Christ. His 1995 sermon, “This Do in Remembrance of Me,” has a passage that helped me in my teenage years develop faith in the Savior:

To those who stagger or stumble, He is there to steady and strengthen us. In the end, He is there to save us, and for all this, He gave His life. However dim our days may seem, they have been darker for the Savior of the world.

In fact, in a resurrected, otherwise perfected body, our Lord of this sacrament table has chosen to retain for the benefit of His disciples the wounds in His hands and His feet and His side —signs, if you will, that painful things happen even to the pure and perfect; signs, if you will, that pain in this world is not evidence that God doesn’t love you. It is the wounded Christ who is the captain of our soul—He who yet bears the scars of sacrifice, the lesions of love and humility and forgiveness.

Those wounds are what He invites young and old, then and now, to step forward and see and feel (see 3 Ne. 11:15⁠; 18:25⁠). Then we remember with Isaiah that it was for each of us that our Master was “despised and rejected …; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (⁠Isa. 53:3⁠).

I have come to know the Savior, and the quote above was one of the catalysts for that process. 

President Holland has never made his messages about himself. Like John the Baptist, his stance is, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). In a world filled with selfish self-promotion as well as heated diatribes, I want to better follow that example.

Here is a list of President Holland’s antagonists, listed by talk from most recent to earliest. Only talks given in General Conference after his call to the Quorum of the Twelve are included.

“As a Little Child” April 2025—Vanity/ Rote religious practice

“I am He” October 2024—a Dumbed-down version of the Savior

“Motions of a Hidden Fire” April 2024—No main antagonist

“Lifted Up Upon the Cross” October 2022—Divided between 1) the cross as a symbol of Christianity, and 2) Comfortable Christianity (Soft Pedaled)

“Fear Not, Believe Only” April 2022—Divided between: 1) Discouragement, and 2) Suicide (Soft Pedaled)

“The Greatest Possession” October 2021—Incomplete devotion (Soft Pedaled)

“Not as the World Giveth” April 2021—Kind of scattered, but he does have an agon with Compromising our covenants (Soft Pedaled)

“Waiting on the Lord” October 2020—Comfortable Christianity (Soft Pedaled)

“A Perfect Brightness of Hope” April 2020—”Religious Deficiencies” in the Latter Days (Soft Pedaled)

“The Message, the Meaning and the Multitude” October 2019—religious culture and practice without focus on the Savior.

“Behold The Lamb of God” April 2019—irreverence (Soft pedaled)

“The Ministry of Reconciliation” October 2018—contention

“Be with and Strengthen Them” April 2018—rote performance of duty (especially Home Teaching) 

“Be Ye Therefore Perfect—Eventually” October 2017—toxic perfectionism

“Songs Sung and Unsung” April 2017—None

“Emissaries to the Church” October 2016—rote performance of duty

“Tomorrow the Lord Will Do Wonders Among You” April 2016—discouragement (rooted in something related to perfectionism) 

“Behold Thy Mother” October 2015—None

“Where Justice, Love and Mercy Meet” April 2015—existential meaninglessness

“Are We Not All Beggars?” October 2014—apathy for the poor. 

“The Cost—And the Blessings—of Discipleship” April 2014—comfortable Christianity

“Like a Broken Vessel” October 2013—mental health challenges/attitudes about mental health

“Lord, I Believe” April 2013—doubt

“The First Great Commandment” October 2012—looking back (to the former life, before conversion)

“The Laborers in the Vineyard” April 2012—misperceptions about the justice of God (based on 1) envy, 2) bitterness, 3) feeling that you are irredeemable) 

“We Are All Enlisted” October 2011—incomplete devotion

“An Ensign to the Nations” April 2011—comfortable Christianity (Soft Pedaled)

“Because of Your Faith” October 2010—the idea that the contribution of ordinary members is lesser (Soft Pedaled)

“Place No More for the Enemy of My Soul” April 2010—lust

“Safety for the Soul” October 2009—hearts failing in the last days, despair, and despondency

“None Were with Him” April 2009—feeling that God has abandoned you

“The Ministry of Angels” October 2008—fear, discouragement

“My Words…Never Cease” April 2008—the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not Christian

“The Only True God and Jesus Christ Whom He has Sent” October 2007—the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not Christian

“The Tongue of Angels” April 2007—unkind words. 

“Prophets in the Land Again” October 2006—no central antagonist (though a brief agon with 1) —the idea that the leaders of the Church are out of touch, and 2) the idea that it is possible to go too far away from the saving grace of God) 

“Broken Things to Mend” April 2006—the idea that we are broken beyond repair

“To Young Women” October 2005—unrealistic standards of beauty (Soft Pedaled)

“Our Most Distinguishing Feature” April 2005—the doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers (Soft Pedaled)

“Prophets, Seers and Revelators” October 2004—none

“Abide in Me” April 2004—casual commitment (Soft-pedaled)

“The Grandeur of God” October 2003—misconceptions about the nature of God 

“A Prayer for the Children” April 2003—cynicism or skepticism, incomplete devotion

“Called to Serve” October 2002—none

“The Other Prodigal” April 2002—jealousy, envy

“Like a Watered Garden” October 2001—none

“Witnesses unto Me” April 2001—none

“Sanctify Yourselves” October 2000—amusement (Soft Pedaled)

“As Doves to Our Windows” April 2000—ingratitude

“An High Priest of Good Things to Come” October 1999—hopelessness

“The Hands of the Fathers” April 1999—fatherlessness

“Personal Purity” October 1998—sexual Immorality

“A Teacher Come from God” April 1998—uninspired teaching

“He Hath Filled the Hungry with Good Things” October 1997—spiritual emptiness, focus on temporal things

“Because She is a Mother” April 1997—none

“The Peaceable Things of the Kingdom” October 1996—none 

“A Handful of Meal and a Little Oil” April 1996—none

“This Do in Remembrance of Me” October 1995—taking the Sacrament lightly (rote religious practice) 

“Our Priesthood Legacy” April 1995—none

“Miracles of the Restoration” October 1994—none

The post When Prophets Speak Meekly and Still Pierce the Heart appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

A: Well, first we need to answer the question: what is the official church history?

The church’s official history is the collection of historical narratives published in official church venues like the church website and church manuals.

Q: So, is it sin to hold a different view of history than the official one published by the church?

A: Of course not. There is no divine commandment anywhere, to agree with every point of official history published by the church. That said, are there situations where disagreement with the official history can become sinful? Yes. If we define sin as “that which would destroy you spiritually,” then disagreement with the church’s official history can take a number of forms that are sinful. Let’s consider a few examples:

Causing people to stumble

Think of Jesus’s statement about causing people to stumble in their faith. Here in Matthew 18, Jesus refers to “little ones,” meaning simple people. See what he says about causing simple people to stumble in their faith:

If your disagreement with the church’s official history is taking the form of activism that is leading people away from the covenant path and causing them to abandon temple worship and other basic covenant practices, then you are causing them to stumble. Your disagreement has become sinful.

Paul taught in Romans 14 that even behaviors that are perfectly innocent in one context can become sinful in a different context if they are causing other people to stumble:

Working in opposition to Christ

Whenever we study and develop church history, we make choices about what to believe, and what to value. We encounter people’s sins and failures, and we make choices about how to respond to those. Our choices reflect the perspective and intentions of Christ, or they reflect other agendas.

When our choices around history reflect the perspective and intentions of Christ, we envision people’s redemption in Christ. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, prophets of the distant past, and also people who have opposed God’s work- whenever we discuss any of these people, we understand that Christ suffered and died to redeem them. If our approach to history steers people away from that understanding, it is sinful.

Christ tells us numerous times in scripture that He is our advocate with the father. This is legal language; it portrays Christ as a perfect lawyer who can establish before God that we are redeemed and justified. If our approach to history leads us to become an accuser of Brigham Young or Bruce R. McConkie, or any other figure of church history we personally dislike, then we are taking the prosecutor role in opposition to Christ. To become an accuser of God’s servants is to oppose Christ as He advocates for them before the father. That is sinful.

Q: If those are sinful approaches to church history, then what should we do instead?

A: It depends whether you want to approach history as a Christian, or with some other worldview. If you were to sit down with Christ and ask Him to tell you the story of Brigham Young, you would walk away with a clear picture of how Christ sees Brigham, and it would be way more faith-promoting than anything the church has ever produced. 

If your intentions are not Christian – and “Christian” means leading people to share in Christ’s view of His servants – then it doesn’t matter how you approach history.

But if your intentions are Christian, you will teach people how to see the past through the mind of Christ. If you point out the sins or mistakes of God’s servants, you will also teach people to practice Christian mourning of those sins and mistakes, just like you mourn your own sins and mistakes. You will give them tools to grow spiritually instead of stumble. Your messaging regarding Christ’s servants will be relentlessly redemption-focused. You will help people to understand that fallibility in God’s servants does not disqualify them from experiencing God’s grace and power, because you know that from personal experience in your own life.

Related post: Dialogue with polygamy truthers

Much of the entertainment of the world will have a deleterious effect and there are many teachings directed at Latter-day Saints that warn about the dangers of the horror genre specifically. Many horror films and stories foster a sadistic appetite or fascination with the occult, which can erode faith and compromise virtue.

In writing this article, I acknowledge that I am walking a thin line. I do not seek to endorse darkness or violence but rather their opposites. I suggest that stories centered around themes of death, danger, and sin present a unique opportunity to educate the soul on the reality of evil, its consequences, and how to avoid it. Such narratives refine our ability to regulate negative emotions, prepare us for danger, help us process trauma, and, when approached thoughtfully, can ultimately strengthen our faith in God and His Plan of Happiness.

Lessons in Horror

While these stories may seem to glorify darkness, many horror narratives actually emphasize profound lessons about morality, family, death, and faith, showcasing Christ-like virtues like love, courage, forgiveness, and sacrifice. These virtues shine brightest when contrasted with darkness and danger, like diamonds on a black backdrop; the darkness amplifies their message of resilience, making it all the more memorable and impactful. Even though the most uplifting moments in these stories are often framed by terror, it is precisely this juxtaposition that makes their message so powerful.

The horror genre aims to evoke fear, often using supernatural or psychological threats to confront our own mortality. Stories in Latter-day Saint scripture and history resemble horror narratives as they highlight the downfalls of nations and individuals and warn the world of the dangers of straying from the Lord. Similarly, original Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White were dark and violent, using fear to teach moral lessons. Over time, these tales were softened, and in this process, they were diminished in their ability to teach moral lessons and help individuals, especially children, process fear and difficult emotions.

Additionally, for some, horror stories can emerge as a way to confront problems and find solace in difficult times. For example, following the world wars, horror saw a rise in popularity. At the time, horror stories symbolized societal fears of mass death and destruction, offering a way for people to cope with war-induced anxieties and process collective trauma. 

An “Exorcise” for the Mind

Horror stories can offer solace during difficult times by mirroring personal struggles and providing guidance. Research shows that engaging with fear in a controlled, fictional setting like horror films has therapeutic benefits by helping regulate emotions and reducing real-life anxiety. By acting as “mental simulations,” horror stories allow viewers to practice coping strategies for real-world fears. 

Similarly, most of our dreams, especially during REM sleep, are stress-related or nightmares and can function like horror films in processing negative emotions. Threat Simulation Theory suggests that these dreams help individuals rehearse responses to danger, enhancing survival instincts. Studies on trauma survivors support that dreams serve as a space for coping with future threats, aided by theta brainwave activity that reprocesses emotional memories.

Art—through film, books, or painting—can be seen as a form of conscious dreaming, weaving universal symbols into narratives that help process trauma. This shared function of art and dreaming serves a practical, biological function, helping humans become better equipped for both psychological and physiological survival by organizing and interpreting emotional experiences in a way that fosters resilience and adaptability.

Studies during the COVID-19 pandemic found that fans of horror and apocalyptic films displayed greater resilience and emotional regulation. Their exposure to fear in these controlled environments better prepared them for the chaos and uncertainty of the pandemic, reducing their reliance on avoidance when facing real-world challenges.

Similarly, Brigham Young taught when opening the first theater in Salt Lake City that theater can be an “exercise for the mind,” a safe place to understand “evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnanimity of virtue and the greatness of truth. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and a just dread of its consequences. The path of sin with its thorns and pitfalls, its gins and snares can be revealed, and how to shun it. The Lord knows all things; man should know all things pertaining to this life, and to obtain this knowledge, it is right that he should use every feasible means; and I do not hesitate to say that the stage can, in a great degree, be made to subserve this end.”

Know Your Limits

Regardless of the benefits of horror, which can come for some individuals, the research also indicates that for those who have previously existing types of psychological or PTSD disorders, watching horror films can act as triggers and cause major setbacks in their recovery. It is clear that gender, circumstances, age, sensitivities, and an array of other considerations should be taken into account when engaging in this level of intense storytelling. 

Additionally, just because a story or film was helpful once does not mean it will be equally beneficial upon rewatch. We need different stories at different times in life, and a constant dose of horror is rarely what anyone needs. Moderation and thoughtfulness in our entertainment choices require ongoing discernment between oneself and the Lord. The spirit, intent, and thought we bring to these stories often determine whether they’re helpful or harmful, oftentimes far more than the content itself ever could. 

Discernment

In the wake of the new For Strength of Youth pamphlet and many other modern revelations, it is clear the Lord is placing a profound trust in His saints. This is a call to a higher and holier life, one that is concentrated on revelation, covenants, and celestial principles over mosaic law-like checklists of dos and don’ts.

While Young obviously wasn’t referring to horror stories that we have in our day and age, his advice toward entertainment and the possibility of good can still be applied. My concern is for the saints whose minds and hearts could be uplifted by engaging with the horror genre in meaningful ways. While I admonish you not to force yourself to watch something if the Spirit guides you otherwise, I believe that, when approached with discernment, this genre has the potential to inspire, teach, and strengthen in ways that align with virtuous principles.

Elder Ballard has repeatedly offered a simple yet sure way of discerning what content is or isn’t appropriate to watch by directing us to the teachings of Mormon—a man who himself saw far more horror in this lifetime than anyone perhaps ought to. He says, 

The prophet Mormon said that each of us is given the Spirit of Christ to know good from evil; everything that invites us to do good is of God. On the other hand, anything that persuades us to do evil is of the devil, for he and those who follow him persuade no one to do good. This simple test will guide us in judging television and other media programs.

God does not sanitize our mortal life but rather increases our ability to discern among the terrible and the virtuous from which we need to learn for our immortal progression. Likewise, I warn against sanitizing our stories, and I fear that doing so may lead to dangerous levels of naïveté and unrealistic expectations of happiness and comfort in this life. This practice of sanitizing, more than avoiding these stories altogether, can cause a desensitization towards sin, a blindness to its consequences, and a casualness towards human suffering that leaves us devoid of empathy, potentially leaving individuals incapable of mourning with those who mourn. It is far more valuable to learn how to find happiness, peace, and purpose in spite of the world’s darkness and evil.

Conclusion

Latter-day Saints have a responsibility to seek after virtue, to sift the wheat from the chaff and make from it bread, to shine light in the darkness, and to learn all that the Father yearns for us to know. I hope this Halloween season, if you decide to test your resolve on a horror story you find yourself staring your fears in the face, exorcizing your demons, and freeing your ghosts. I hope that your dread for sin and its consequences sinks deeper in your soul and your heart is lifted by Christ-like examples of courage and virtue in the face of true fear. I encourage you to take the opportunity with every story, whether it be a frightening dream or a ghost tale across the fire, to learn more about the state of your soul, what you fear, and how to overcome it. Horror stories can act as powerful catalysts to the healing and fortifying power of Jesus Christ—He who fears nothing, has overcome all evil and is eager to help you do the same, offering light in the darkest of circumstances and strength in the face of every fear.

The post A Case for Virtuous Fright: Latter-day Saints and the Horror Genre appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Modern peoples observe the violence, slavery, colonialism, sexism, racism, and homophobia of the previous ages and conclude that those people were oblivious to the blatant sins of their time. However, today “we know better,” due to our perceived enlightenment.

Answers to the ‘sin’ of our time usually reflect an underlying belief that the trends in society since the 1960s will continue unabated and that future generations will judge us for not being sufficiently advanced in our behaviors, education, and intellectual and political discourse. Common answers about the ‘sin’ of our time include not giving women enough rights, allowing our world to disintegrate through climate change, failing to acknowledge transgender and other related LGBTQIA+ movements, and not giving developing countries the help and rights they deserve on a world scale. Other answers include entitlements, which they believe those in the future will be surprised we didn’t have, such as universal health care or a basic universal income.

The common theme of this answer suggests that many Americans today share an ideology that history is deterministically linear. They believe that history will necessarily move in one direction, the direction it is currently moving. 

This idea has become more assumed than perhaps ever before. It was articulated by Alexandre Kojève, the French philosopher who was the father of the European Union. Kojève expressed that the Western liberal order represented the “end of history.” While Kojève’s work was influential in political change, Francis Fukuyama brought this idea to the masses in the 1990s and lodged it firmly in the imagination of today’s adults. 

To Kojève and Fukuyama, the phrase “end of history” meant that they believed today’s political systems were the endpoint of advancing ideologies. While we may have gone from feudalism and monarchy to communism and fascism, the progress of those ideas was over, and democracy had won. While these historic events would  continue to happen through time, the arc of history would always bend in the direction of the liberal world order.

While the popularity of these ideas made sense in the wake of the victory in World War II and the Cold War, the past thirty years have not been kind to Kojève or Fukuyama. Radical Islam, notably considered extremely conservative, has persevered as more than the mere roadblock that Kojève and Fukuyama predicted. Additionally, democratic reforms in Russia and China have reverted, creating the specter of an authoritarian world order.

Regardless of these setbacks, for the casual American thinker, there has been little change in the assumption that there exists an “arc of history” and that it bends in the same progressive direction as US politics have over the last sixty years. Even those who oppose this direction seem to accept the inevitability of the underlying premise. For example, one friend, in announcing her opposition to same-sex marriage laws, said she knew she was on the wrong side of history but wanted to be on the right side of God.

However, the set of assumptions I described as a “deterministically linear” view of history leaves us with two substantial blind spots. 

First, it blinds us to the excess of confidence in our own intellectual and moral prowess. Take, for instance, the popularity of eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several prominent eugenicists noted how the future would look down on their own age as primitive for not having universalized eugenics sooner. Nikola Tesla, a prominent advocate for eugenics, said, “The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. … A century from now, it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.” Not only was it presented as a legitimate vision for the future, its proponents saw it as the superior vision of the future. 

Eugenicists never imagined history would see them as extreme, corrupted, and morally depraved as we do today. The only judgment they imagined the future having for them is that they hadn’t gone far enough. This self-righteous aggrandizement is the same trait in those who can only imagine the future judging us for not going far enough in our liberal, individual-rights-based regime.

The second blindspot inherent in the deterministic linear view of history is that we can not fully appreciate the threat of old ideologies. It’s hard to spend too much time worrying about the threat of communism or authoritarianism when we’ve been assured that history’s endpoint will have rejected those ideas. On both the American right and left, authoritarian approaches are being adopted, perhaps naively assuming that history will necessarily prevent those tendencies from spiraling into an authoritarian state. 

This deterministically linear view of history has become baked into many of our media and educational institutions. For example, the fight for government-recognized same-sex marriage was often tied to the civil rights fights of African Americans, despite the fact that the substance of the movements was based on very different ideological backing.

These views each come with their own strengths and weaknesses. 

But as we approach the question of what the “sin” of our time is, what we are really wondering is where are the blind spots? How can we be better? And how do we want our communities to change in the future?

It’s more than a mere game; it’s an important question that gets to some of our most deeply held ideas. So rather than feeling trapped by our projection of a trajectory we had no role in creating, we ought to instead think of the question through the lens of first principles. 

Do we really want our culture to become even more individualistic? If not, maybe we can imagine a future where we don’t keep moving in that direction.

Do we want to risk our society falling into the traps of authoritarianism? If not, maybe we can take seriously the threat that old-fashioned ideologies still pose. 

What will be seen as the sin of our time? I can only guess. But I know it would be unwise to assume it will result from a deterministically linear historical progression. We owe ourselves and our future to have a bigger vision than that.

The post The Sin of the Era: Misreading the Lessons of History appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In this thought-provoking episode, the hosts of Family Bro Evening dive deep into one of the Church’s most notorious members, Ted Bundy, and the circumstances surrounding his time in Utah. The discussion extends to the role of the gift of discernment in our lives, both in the context of Bundy’s rampage and as a broader concept in faith and personal growth. It’s a gripping exploration of the intersection between faith, discernment, and the darkest aspects of human behavior.

The post Ex-Brother Bundy and the Gift of Discernment appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In all directions, these believers of many theological stripes see sin—some form of betrayal of God’s will—as the fundamental problem. Famously, there are many ways to sin—reflected in a hundred different flavors, varieties, and places. But through the eyes of the faithful, that’s what we are most basically dealing with in our struggle to improve the world—with everything going wrong and causing suffering potentially classified as a kind of sin.  

By contrast, when a devoted believer in the ideology of social justice wakes up and looks out into the world, what do they see as the great and essential problem facing society?  

Inequity, largely—far more than “iniquity.” This kind of inequity or unfairness, likewise, comes in a hundred different flavors, varieties, and places. In the minds of these adherents to this worldview, that’s what we are most basically dealing with in our struggle to improve the world. 

As an illustration, one social media influencer wrote in a 2021 Instagram post, “The biggest threat to families is gender inequality. Gender inequality is threatening families—the imbalance of power in families, the unequal access to family resources, the devaluation of caregiving, rigid gender roles, intimate partner violence, the disproportionate amount of women and children living in poverty.”

Some, I recognize, will chafe at any suggestion that these contrasting views represent a forced choice dichotomy—insisting that no such bifurcation is needed. While sympathetic to and supportive of such integration impulses (especially those of the “bring all truth to Zion” variety that carefully avoids any sort of corrupting syncretism), for purposes now, I draw attention to these schools of thought as jealous masters, which cannot be served well at the same time. 

So, what will it be: Iniquity or inequity?  

An all-pervasive reality. The answer, to an increasing number of Americans, is the latter. As University of Columbia professor John McWhorter summarizes on the issue of race:

Many people are under the impression that change for Black America can only happen in a real way if the rest of America is united in a profound understanding of what Black people have been through. This means that they see battling power differentials wielded by whites as central to intellectual and artistic endeavor and any questioning of this as “white supremacy.” I question these lines of reasoning—I want true change for Black America but do not see this kind of psychosocial reprogramming as necessary to it.

While praising earlier generations of civil rights work, McWhorter objects to what he calls “Third Wave Antiracism.” Whereas the first wave of antiracism battled slavery and its remnants in legalized segregation, Second Wave Antiracism in the 1970s and ’80s combatted racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. These are both distinct from “Third Wave Antiracism,” becoming more mainstream in the 2010s, which teaches, in his words, that “because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.” 

As this wise scholar goes on to say:

The general idea is supposed to be that whatever kind of Black person you are, you are constantly undergoing all of these racist slights from the cops and everywhere else. And it doesn’t matter what social class you are, it doesn’t matter what shade of Black you are … what neighborhood you’re in, you are always under siege from, you know, at least microaggressions. So it shouldn’t matter that you wear cardigan sweaters and like musical theater and my ex-wife was white, etc., because supposedly anybody Black is going through the same experience, because racism is everywhere.

Racism is everywhere. And sexism is everywhere. And classism and heterosexism are everywhere, etc. These, of course, are the kinds of things Christians would say about sin itself—and why these more popular claims present such a striking contrast, representing as they do newfound articles of faith. 

Not everyone believes these new dogmas that are being taught, however. 

Straining logic. In the BBC audio-documentary The Church of Social Justice, McWhorter is quoted further as saying, “We are sternly told that even a white person who grows up in poverty and has a life more hideous than that of most black people in the U.S. is still supposed to think about themselves as fundamentally privileged. It strains logic, but you’re just supposed to accept it.”

There are other doctrines equally challenging to accept within prevailing social justice thought. In that same documentary, the producer Helen Lewis reflects on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—wherein the wafer of communion is believed to become the actual body of Christ. Lewis compares this insistence that “this wafer is the body of Christ” to an insistence that “trans women are literally women—and there is no leeway.”

In a similar way, McWhorter highlights the conviction that white privilege is “a stain that can never be removed, where you’re responsible for regularly attesting to it with your hand up in the air — it is precisely like original sin.”

There is a dogmatism to this strong and fervent insistence. “Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging ‘power,’” McWhorter continues, “you are to divide people into racial classes in exactly the way that First and Second Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids be taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past fifty years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.”

Those who can see the truth. All this represents quite a mental seachange—and one which requires some significant exposition. Thankfully there are people up to the task.  

Borrowing a term from the author Joseph Bottum, John McWhorter refers to the prophets of the Third Wave as “the Elect.” They see themselves as “bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world.” This “priestly class” of “a few highly influential writers” includes most prominently, Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist), Robin DiAngelo’s (White Fragility), Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times’s 1619 Project) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (“Letter to My Son”). 

Referring to this group of scholars, McWhorter elaborates, “They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.”

In “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” McWhorter takes up one example, “DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too ‘fragile’ to admit it. The circularity here—’You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are’—is the logic of the sandbox.”

The sin of inequity. We know, of course, there is an overlap in these different ways of thinking, along with interesting and earnest attempts to reconcile them. As Latter-day Saints, for instance, we might point to the Doctrine and Covenants of our faith, where the Lord is quoted as saying, “But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.”

How can we all repent of this kind of inequality? That’s a weighty question for believers like me, who see the injustices of severe poverty and racial discrimination as two kinds of sobering sins—each reflecting a serious betrayal of God’s will and heart. 

On this basis, communities like the Church of Jesus Christ are seeking to marshal their resources to “eradicate racism” and any other prejudice that leads to unfairness. Far beyond leveraging Christian teaching and practice to address the sin of racism, however, others go well beyond this—beginning to fundamentally reconceptualize Christian teaching out of the lens of inequity ideology.  

For most Christian believers, by contrast, the central answer to racism (like all sins) is principally to look inward at what needs to be changed through the practice of repentance. As Elder D. Todd Christofferson said in 2009, “In the end, it is only an internal moral compass in each individual that can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay. Societies will struggle in vain to establish the common good until sin is denounced as sin and moral discipline takes its place in the pantheon of civic virtues.”

By comparison, a focus on inequity presumes that only some people are causing the problems centrally—those on the privileged side of the imbalance. Whatever other improvements might be good for everyone to consider, it’s really this unfairly elevated group of people that needs to change in order to bring us back to a healthy place. 

Ideologies as jealous masters. Without more consciousness of these kinds of distinctions, my concern is that many good people will end up embracing these popular notions in a way that minimizes prior religious commitments. That seems to be what’s happening all around me, with so many friends and family now looking upon sin and repentance as inherently “shaming”—lamenting that we don’t focus instead on inequality and unfairness in our discussions. 

What they would see as higher enlightenment, I’m calling here an ideological take-over. 

That’s why I call these ideologies jealous masters. In the absence of thoughtful integration (a project for another day), you really can’t embrace both well.  

Some might rightly object that inequality is a secular concept that we can work on extinguishing across religious lines, while sin is a religious concept, so perhaps it’s more limiting as a society-wide focus. While a fair point, that’s ultimately unsatisfying to religious people who can’t be asked to simply lay aside how they see the core drivers of the world’s problems.   

Competing narratives of overall threat. In the end, the contrasts between competing problem definitions in America today are striking, with different priorities for attention, different proposed solutions, and different questions that preoccupy us.  

This isn’t the first time we’ve had profound disagreements on what constitutes the great threats and dangers the nation faces—the most prominent example being the Civil War itself. 

Although our political armies haven’t yet become real armies, the contrast between visions and rhetoric has become sharper by the day. General Christian teaching (including the sin-focus noted above) used to be a kind of common ground for a country that saw divine providence smiling over its history. That’s no longer the case for many who see our national history shaped by repeated instances of oppressing rather than blessing. 

Just as we see our historical failings differently, Americans now see our present challenges in profoundly different ways. For instance, are threats to our country primarily coming from actions on the political right, the political left, or a combination of the two? And are they arising from our departure from God’s mind and ways or from embracing historic oppressions (or a little of both)? Where you stand—and what narrative you adopt about all of this—shapes a lot about how you see this moment and what you think needs to happen next.

The post Iniquity or Inequity: What is Our Fundamental Problem? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

It’s become increasingly common to hear insinuations that strong conviction and certainty are categorically bad things. 

This sentiment is not new. It was Nietzsche, after all, who said, “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.” But the notion is especially ascendant at the moment, and not just among the secular elite. People of faith are increasingly making similar professions.   

Popular interdenominational Christian magazine Relevant published last year on “Why certainty can be so dangerous to faith.” The late Mike Ovey, formerly with Oak Hill Theological College, reported on a prayer at a communion service asking to “forgive us our sins of certainty.” Shiao Chong, editor for The Banner, the official magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, similarly suggested that certainty comes from a “not biblical” approach to thought and the world.

Enns’s thoughts are considerably more nuanced than his title lets on—making the case that we ought to move from “a rigid certainty about God to a radical trust in God.” In doing so, he highlights the dangers of clinging more to “correct belief” rather than God Himself.

In this, Enns isn’t against certainty in God as much as overwrought certainty in our paradigms about Him. That can be a helpful distinction to make. Meagan Kohler, a frequent Public Square Magazine contributor, concurred—noting how “we can, unwittingly, create a model of God in our minds that is too flimsy for God’s purposes.”

All that being said, it’s not hard to read this as another part of the trend toward attacking clear conviction itself, as in the insistence that “claiming to know with surety is a bad thing” and “it’s wrong to claim to be very, very sure of spiritual things.”

Generating frustration towards those with conviction. Among other things, some of this blanket anti-conviction rhetoric holds the potential to condition people to be harshly judgmental towards anyone claiming a level of surety in their conviction. Peter Leithart writes in Patheos how even Enns’s critics have been “pre-classified” by some as “immature, fearful abusers of Scripture who want to press the Bible into their own modern molds.” 

Latter-day Saint commentator Sarah Allen remarks on how common it is to see people online saying that “no one can really know that the Church is the true Church of Christ” to the point that these same individuals “get irrationally upset or just roll their eyes when people say that while bearing their testimonies.” She continues:

There’s a lot about our doctrine and history that I don’t know, I fully admit that. But God has told me in no uncertain terms that this is His true and living church, that the Book of Mormon is a legitimate ancient record, that Joseph Smith was His prophet, and that the Priesthood was restored to this earth.

It’s precisely these kinds of confidence reassurances that can elicit an eye-roll from those who now see strong conviction (especially if it borders on certainty) as naïve or harmful.  BYU-Idaho Psychology professor Jeffrey Thayne wrote in a conversation about this issue, “In all the naysaying about certainty, we can inadvertently stigmatize conviction—full-throated conviction—the kind that leads us to bear pure testimony of God, his son, the Restoration, and of moral living is fully consonant with the Gospel.”

Belief and knowledge aren’t at odds. Implicit in this strange dynamic is the idea that cultivating belief is somehow antithetical to embracing any expressions of firm knowledge. Many Latter-day Saints, of course, see this very differently, thanks to Alma’s great sermon on faith and knowledge—where he details the beautiful way in which faith can evolve into perfect knowledge. 

In another text sacred to Latter-day Saints, the Lord states that both faith and knowledge are gifts of the Spirit:

To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful.

This angsty tension between faith and knowledge, then, seems on its face, to clash with some important scriptural teaching. In line with Paul’s New Testament teachings, The Doctrine and Covenants continues to elaborate on the fact that we all have different spiritual gifts and that all of them are necessary for building His kingdom:  “For all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby.” 

From passages like this, it seems clear that people who know with surety can benefit from those who aren’t so sure (but may still find within themselves the gift of believing) and vice versa. “So, let’s avoid talking about ‘certainty’ as the villain and ‘doubt’ as the virtue,” Thayne proposes, “This seems fundamentally off—and perhaps damaging.”

Conviction is not dogmatism. Given all this, to say something like, “Christ lives, and I have a conviction of this borne by personal experience with grace”—even if in shorthand, such as “I know that Christ lives”—is not only something worth preserving, it’s something disciples would celebrate. Much the same when it comes to resounding conviction about God’s word in scripture or the prophetic mantle in modern days.   

Thayne goes on to say, “There’s a difference between steady conviction and dogmatism. And sometimes people attack dogmatism using a vocabulary that also—in the attack—targets conviction. When it seems like conviction is being critiqued, it makes sense that many people with conviction would react.”

Aspiring for humility rather than uncertainty. Professor Thayne goes on to say, “To be clear, conviction is not incompatible with epistemic humility. Conviction is a virtue, humility is a virtue, and pride, arrogance, and dogmatism are vices.” These kinds of clearer distinctions can surely only help the public conversation on these important questions. 

BJ Spurlock, who runs the theology blog Things as They Really Are, suggests that one of the seeming paradoxes of the gospel is that “to gain certainty through the Holy Spirit requires us to drop the spirit of fundamentalism,” suggesting that “Moses wouldn’t have learned things he ‘never had supposed’ if he was too certain.”

Doubt has a dark side. Latter-day Saint physician Gregory L. Smith suggests that any healthy discussion of faith and doubt needs to cope with things like Jesus’s statement, “Doubt not, fear not,” in restoration scripture. Or from 3 Nephi: “And there began to be great doubtings and disputations among the people, notwithstanding so many signs had been given.”

These cautions pertain to doubt in the person of our Lord, however, rather than doubt in something else. As my friend Nathaniel Givens has reminded us effectively, doubt in things that are dubious or deceptive can be an inspired virtue that is redemptive in our lives.  

It is this precisely this distinction that too easily gets lost entirely by those who either demonize doubt without conditions or who glorify doubt as an unmistakable sign of greater enlightenment. This prompts one of my colleagues to warn of the “twin dangers of absolute skepticism and absolute certainty.”

In the same moment that we hold space for uncertainty, therefore, let’s not overly valorize doubt in a way that obscures its potential dangers. 

Extreme uncertainty as a barrier to new knowledge. As a final direction of inquiry, it’s widely appreciated how epistemic humility can catalyze our learning, as we are open to truth and welcoming of uncertainty, etc. But when taken to an extreme, can these same sensibilities undermine and erode our growth in spiritual knowledge? Gregory Smith adds, “It is ironic how certain some are that certainty is not possible.” 

More specifically, can an a priori aversion to any degree of certainty (or strong conviction) prevent people from ever seeking more direct reassurance, more definitive experiences, and more final and grounding forms of knowing? And in this way, can an overemphasis on uncertainty ultimately trip us up? 

Meagan Kohler also adds, “while I agree that forging ahead in the face of uncertainty is a necessary part of our moral development, I think too many people stop there, and it can close them off to real possibilities for additional knowledge.”

This points towards a deeper conversation about how real people respond in matters of faith when uncertainties are encountered and whether they should continue to trust in their spiritual experiences or start to doubt them. Kohler continued: 

God wants to reveal things to us, and I’m not sure what, if any, limits we should ever place on His ability to do that. I can’t always say how or when that knowledge will come, but everything in my life has led me to believe that He honors a believing heart with precious witnesses of His love and reality.  President Nelson has said we all, like Joseph, can know for ourselves what is true, and I would love to see more emphasis on that. (See especially his 2018 remarks, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives.”)

Staying open to being surprised by God. As one friend wisely said, “what I see as important in this is that we always keep greater faith and faithfulness as our goal in our journey,” adding: 

We shouldn’t close ourselves off to road-to-Damascus moments when God calls us in a completely different direction and everything changes. But those are relatively rare moments. And as we continue on our faith journey, I think strengthening our conviction over time through spiritual experiences, wrestling with and overcoming doubts, seeking light and knowledge from God in prayer and in the temple, and striving to grow our faith is absolutely key.

Compared with the example of Laman and Lemuel early in The Book of Mormon, this brother highlights Nephi’s model of “start[ing] from a point where he does not believe what his father says, but he softens his heart and receives a witness of the spirit. He then acts on that witness with trust in God and does not give up when he encounters obstacles and challenges.”

So yes, we, as a Latter-day Saint people, see the potential holy value of wrestling with doubts and ambiguities. But we believe that process is meant to give way to additional knowledge—a knowledge that is meant to change us. “If we are willing to trust in His methods and timing,” as Kohler adds, “surely there is much more knowledge and even certainty available for us than we generally take advantage of.” 

We may not always know what that will look like, but joining these friends so kind to allow me to cite them here, we encourage you to try the Lord. And see what He will reveal to you. If there is something God can’t give you at this time, He will surely still honor your strivings beyond anything you can imagine.

The post Conviction is No Sin appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In my experience attending The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the David and Bathsheba story has been primarily discussed within the context of sexual morality. The salacious nature affair and the intrigue of the ensuing cover-up lend themselves to this reading. Whether it’s seen as a warning against extra-marital sexual relations, a caution against impure thoughts, or an example of what happens when you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, church lessons taught me (and probably many others) to see this David’s action as a violation of what we call the Law of Chastity.  In fact, the June 2022 lesson material for the Church’s Come, Follow Me section covering this story has this same focus. Taking nothing away from this important emphasis, the prophet Nathan offered an additional way to understand why David’s actions were wrong, and it is one that I think is instructive for all of us. But before we get to Nathan’s prophetic response to what David did, let me outline two important facets of the Hebrew Bible that will help contextualize what Nathan says.

First, central to the commands that God gives Israel on Mount Sinai (which are included in the Torah) is the requirement to pursue justice.  In multiple ways, and in a variety of different contexts, the Torah makes clear that individuals who are part of God’s Torah-guided community are not supposed to exploit, take advantage of, cheat, deceive, or mistreat other members of the community (including the “strangers” who live among them but who are not Israelites).  A life lived according to the Torah requires avoiding unjust actions. Further, the Torah requires Israelites to proactively care for those who are disadvantaged (the widows, the orphans, the resident aliens, the poor, etc.) through actions like forgiving loans, providing the necessities of life, and redeeming property that had been sold or freeing Israelites in debt bondage. A life lived according to the Torah requires that members of the community seek to act justly. So, alongside the detailed ritual obligations (like which kinds of sacrifices to offer and when), the Torah outlines remarkably powerful social obligations that require the community to take care of each other and to pursue communal flourishing (even at the expense of self-interest—see Note #1).  As one good, concrete example consider Boaz’s actions toward Naomi and Ruth.  Boaz is representative of what an ideal, Torah-centered life looks like: Boaz both avoids exploiting Naomi and Ruth’s situation for his own gain and proactively provides for their well-being despite the fact that Ruth is from Moab and even though Boaz had to expend his own resources.

With this backdrop, we can return to Nathan’s reaction to David’s actions. After learning that David had taken Bathsheba and tried to cover up his indiscretion, eventually having Uriah killed, the LORD sent Nathan to deliver a message.  Here is a version of that exchange which I have recrafted in more modern language to emphasize the core message of 2 Samuel 12:1-13). 

Speaking to David, the prophet Nathan says something like: 

David, listen to this: There were two men living in the same city; one was rich and the other poor. The rich man had many, many animals … multiple flocks and herds in fact. The poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb. The poor man had raised and cared for this lamb since it was a baby; the lamb grew up alongside his own children and even ate his food and drank out of his own cup.  The poor man loved the lamb so much that it was considered part of the family. Well, one day a traveler came to visit the rich man.  The rich man wanted to host the traveler but did not want to use one of his own animals to feed him, so instead, he took the poor man’s lamb and killed it, and fed it to the traveler. 

David responds to Nathan with obvious anger and indignation: 

As the Lord liveth, the rich man that did this should be put to death!  What’s more, he should restore the poor man fourfold because of his callous and pitiless actions.

Nathan then responds to David accusingly: 

You are the rich man!  Thus saith the Lord God of Israel: I anointed you king and I saved you when Saul tried to kill you.  I gave you all that Saul had, including his wives.  I made you king over all of Israel and Judah … and if you had wanted more and asked for it, I would have given it to you. Why, then, did you despise Me and do evil?  You had Uriah the Hittite killed with a sword and have taken his wife to be your wife. Because of this, your family will be afflicted with violence and internal strife.  You tried to hide what you did, but all of Israel will see what happens to you now.

David ultimately acknowledges to Nathan: “I have sinned against the Lord.”

So, what is the lesson here? As noted at the outset, there is clearly a lesson in this narrative about the law of chastity. Setting aside the issues of David’s multiple wives and concubines (see Jacob 2:23-24 and D&C 132:38-39 which each discuss this), because Bathsheba was married David violated clear prohibitions against adultery.  But I think Nathan’s response to David points to additional lessons. On one level, this revelatory condemnation focuses on how Uriah was treated. For most of the critical parts of the narrative, Uriah is absent and thus unable to protect his family. While Uriah was a way serving as a soldier in David’s army, David “took” Uriah’s wife for himself (it is the same verb in Hebrew as the one used in 1 Samuel 8 referenced above, laqach) and there was nothing Uriah could do about it. Even when called back from battle, Uriah’s adherence to tradition and his sense of loyalty stand in stark contest to David’s deceit (2 Samuel 11:8-13).  To be clear, David’s taking of Bathsheba was not because David needed another wife—at this point in the story it is unclear how many wives and concubines David actually had (see 2 Samuel 3:2-5 and 2 Samuel 5:13), but he probably a lot of them— rather, it was because David simply wanted Bathsheba for himself.  Like the rich man in Nathan’s story, David wanted something that someone else had, and like the rich man, David had the means to take it. So, he did.  So not only was this act a violation of Uriah’s marriage, but it was also contrary to David’s Torah obligations.

On another, and I think deeper level, there is also clearly a lesson about the damage that follows when the powerful (socially, culturally, economically, politically, and institutionally) exploit the vulnerable. And, of all the people caught up in the story, Bathsheba was the most vulnerable and the one with the least social power. This is clear in a few ways. For example, Bathsheba is introduced in the narrative as, simply, “a woman” (2 Samuel 11:2).  So, as the story opens, Bathsheba is a nameless woman that is cast as a mere object of King David’s desire. It is a few verses later, only after David has taken an interest in her, that we learn her name. But even when we learn her name, she is not just “Bathsheba,” rather she is Bathsheba “the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite” (2 Samuel 11:3)—her identity is not hers alone, but instead she is expressly bound to two different men (this is not unique to Bathsheba; with some rare exceptions women of that time were often regarded as little more than property).  Further, her marriage to a Hittite (not an Israelite) could have also put her in a position of having even less social standing. All of this to say, Bathsheba was vulnerable to being exploited. She is like the “little ewe lamb” in Nathan’s story. And exploited she was. Like the lamb taken by the rich man, there is no indication that Bathsheba had any choice in the matter when “David sent messengers” to her home (2 Samuel 11:4).  As scriptures say, David simply “took” (again, laqach) Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:4).  When the king calls, you go. And perhaps the most painful part of the whole story—and the part that most reveals the deep exploitation inherent in this story—is that, after David “lay[s] with her,” the narrative makes clear that David was not affected by this affair because “she was purified from her uncleanness” (2 Samuel 11:4).  Said another way, the narrative makes sure we all understand David was all clear of ritual impurity because Bathsheba had bathed herself appropriately (see Leviticus 15:19-28).  Like the lamb (who never has a voice in Nathan’s oracle and whose view of the actions taken against it are never considered), there is no attempt to consider Bathsheba’s perspectives or feelings on what happened to her at all. But, make no mistake about it, damage was done.

Thus, Nathan seems to be teaching David that a central part of David’s sin was that David abused his power and exploited the very people he should have been protecting.  Nathan helped David see that the way he had acted toward Uriah and Bathsheba was exactly contrary to how the Torah says he should have acted. Uriah, one of David’s soldiers, was faithfully serving David. Yet rather than treating Uriah justly, David took advantage of Uriah’s absence to take Bathsheba.  And Bathsheba, one of David’s subjects, was potentially vulnerable due to her husband’s absence. Yet rather than provide protection for Bathsheba, David exploited that vulnerability for his own pleasure.  In taking these actions, David did exactly what Samuel warned the Israelites that kings would do: he took what he wanted in direct contradiction to what the Torah demanded of adherents. So, yes, on one level this story is about the Law of Chastity, but it is also about our responsibility to live justly. And for Nathan, it seems, David’s lack of justice seems to be the more serious problem.

The kind of life David should have lived, and the life we have been called to live as Jesus’s followers is one in which this kind of exploitation does not exist, and inequities are remedied.  In fact, part of what makes a Zion community is the eradication of such exploitation. Consider the description of the Nephites following Jesus’s visit: “Every [person] did deal justly one with another. And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi 1: 2-3).  Similarly, in the City of Enoch, “they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18).   In both of these cases, true Christian living is characterized by a lack of exploitation and proactively correcting any inequality that may have existed. In short, they lived as the prophet Micah said they should: “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8).  Nathan’s challenge to David is as pertinent now as it was more than two millennia ago. I hope we can all take it to heart.

Notes:

1. For a book-length discussion of this topic see Jeremiah Unterman, Justice for All, How the Jewish Bible Revolutionary Ethics, 2017 (Jewish Publication Society: Philadelphia, PA).

2. Yet, even after hearing this, the people said, “we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.”

The post David’s Other Sin with Bathsheba appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Core truths are unchanging—but the most effective language inspiring transformation changes with circumstance and most pressing needs. We live in a world—and in a church—that is beyond any dispute, wounded and afflicted to an unprecedented degree. Depression is stratospheric. Anxiety disorders are magnitudes beyond past numbers. More than 25% of American adults will be suffering from a mental disorder this year—the most common being anxiety disorder. And only one in three of that latter group receive professional help. Increasingly, the syndrome afflicts teens and children (8% according to the above study). Several studies indicate one in three women will experience sexual violence in their life (see, for instance, this regional study consistent with larger studies). Twenty-five percent will experience domestic abuse. In the last two years, 25% of young girls contemplated suicide. 44% of teens in America feel persistent “hopelessness”—an all-time high. Tragically, some varieties of mental illness are aggravated by misapprehension or misapplication of religious truth: the obsessive-compulsive disorder called scrupulosity is defined as a sense of shame or guilt that becomes pathological. In sum, “Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country.” These numbers are almost incomprehensible, and I can’t read them without tremendous sadness.

I do not claim, and the scriptures do not claim, that sin is not a feature of the contemporary world or individual conduct. I do believe, and scripture suggests, that in our modern era something else has been introduced into the human predicament in addition to or alongside sin. That “something else” (woundedness in all its varieties) has its own etiologies, manifestations, and needed remedies. At times, both ancient and modern scripture treat sin as itself one variety of woundedness. In Luke 7, Christ forgives the woman who “sinned much” and then told her: “hē pistis sou sesōken se.” This identical phrase appears verbatim in Mark 5:34; Mark 10:52; Matthew 9:22; and Luke 17:19. It is translated every time as “thy faith hath made thee whole.” Clearly, these four employments of the term sesōken tell us that Christ’s healing encompasses the plague, blindness, hemorrhaging, and paralysis. And here in Luke 7, we learn with the troubled woman, Christ heals our sins as well. In 3 Nephi 9:13, the point is made explicitly by Jesus Himself. “Repent of your sins,” He pleads, “that I may heal you.”  Christ portrays Himself as a healer of sin as well as of every other kind of affliction. 

Church leadership has responded to the particular conditions of our modern moment with an enormously increased attention to the varieties of woundedness about us. A simple General Conference word search, for instance, reveals that the word “heal” is occurring with almost 500% greater frequency than in any previous decade in the nineteenth or twentieth century. “Wounded” has also been occurring with greater frequency since 2010 than at any previous period in history. After this past April conference, that statistic will need to be revised upward even more dramatically, because the conference witnessed an unprecedented, explicit recognition of the extent of human woundedness and the scope of Christ’s healing concerns. 

• Sister Reyna Aburto referenced Christ’s capacity to “make us whole” from “emotional strife,” invoking “the healing power of the savior.” 
• Elder Patrick Kearon’s talk, “He is risen with healing in his wings,” referenced Christ’s capacity to remedy “abuse, violence or oppression” and heal those who feel “beyond repair,” to “heal the unhealable.” 
• Elder Jeffrey Holland addressed suicide, “depression, despair” and “self-harm” as afflictions Christ can heal. 
• Elder Dale Renlund (who in April 2017 gave a landmark address likening us all to Christ’s “diseased sheep progress[ing] toward healing”), spoke of those who have been “marginalized, oppressed or subjugated.” 
• Sister Amy Wright offered her testimony that “Christ Heals that which is Broken.” 
• Elder Ulisses Soares said, “Christ’s atoning sacrifice can heal our emotional and spiritual wounds.” 
• Elder Gerrit Gong said in his talk “Christ heals the broken-hearted.” 
• Pres. Russel Nelson also testified of Christ’s “healing … power.”

It is impossible to miss these sweeping currents that recognize a new landscape needing new emphases alongside the old ones. I do not read this as a new doctrine dismissing the reality of sin, or claims that we have no need for repentance. I see it as a new emphasis for a new series of challenges unique to this era. 

I have reflected on the spectacle of the campus preacher in the many years since, and found in it a powerful reminder to ask, how do we witness most effectively? What is the end we seek, and how do differing stewardships configure the kind of witnessing and ministering we are called to do?

Some forms of woundedness need therapy and perhaps medication. Most of us are not therapists or physicians. Some types need repentance and forgiveness. Most of us do not have keys to exhort. Some kinds of woundedness—the kind that scripture associates with the loss of plain and precious truths—might be addressed by a more vibrant encounter with the healing truths of the restoration. Presumably, this is a ministry in which all can and should participate who have themselves experienced and come to appreciate the unique strengths and virtues of Restoration principles, and Christ’s healing power—of which I can bear personal witness.

Our American culture also suffers under a number of ideological afflictions. Rampant, atomistic individualism—which distorts the principle of agency and communal responsibility into an ethic of self-expression and “authenticity.” The prosperity gospel—which makes gospel living just a more enlightened form of self-interest and acquisitiveness. And moral therapeutic deism—which alarms some members concerned about too much emphasis on healing and sin as woundedness. In that morally lax school, you are perfect as you are. God loves you (just not enough to want you to improve). Guilt is in this view inherently destructive, because you only need to be true to yourself, and not to any outside Person or ideal. And offenses you commit against a moral order are never your fault because genes or environment or emotional damage is always the culprit. 

Emphasis on any principle—torn from context, intent, and audience—can lead to danger. In the seventeenth century, an emphasis on election as a theological principle, trust in Christ as personal savior and one’s assured salvation through faith, led to an extreme orientation called “antinomianism.” In this school of thought, one was no longer responsible to human interpretations of law, because God’s promises exempted one from social or legal accountability. In this case, reasonable doctrines led to outrageous interpretations. Much earlier, Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, realized that the gift of Atonement itself could be taken to shocking extremes. If I am saved by grace, and grace is a response to sin, then should I not “sin the more, that grace may abound?”  “God forbid,” he replied. It is hard to imagine any true teaching that cannot be perversely interpreted by taking it to extremes. 

God’s love is never absolution for our own accountability. Our agency may never be whole and unimpeded (by genes, training, environment), but neither is it ever completely extinct. That God loves us in our sin and weakness does not mean He does not want to lead us out and upward. I hope that those who deplore the tendencies in our contemporary moment to rationalize rather than eliminate human evil in all its forms will continue to explicate those moments of subterfuge and self-deception that are their legitimate concerns.

We are all at different places in the covenant path. Some members need to up their game. Some need to be more gentle with themselves. I am happy I don’t have to discern which is which and that the Spirit can minister to each as needed. Meanwhile, I believe we cannot go wrong in seeking everywhere and always “to comfort those who stand in need of comfort.”

The post The Urgent Need to Console the Wounded appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Be of sin the double cure, Save from wrath and make me pure.

—“Rock of Ages,” Hymns, no. 111

Every person alive stays alive by destroying things. Be as environmentalist and vegan as you like, shop only at the most ethically sourced grocers, and the fact remains: we are members of kingdom Animalia and cannot produce our own food. Instead, nutrients painstakingly assembled by other living creatures must be taken from them by force, usually killing them or their germinal offspring, and then smashed into a paste, drowned first in acid and then in bile, fed to foul-smelling bacteria, and gradually converted into excrement. When they cease to be useful they’re disposed of and forgotten, but by then we’ve already moved on to our next victims.

It’s not optional. You do that or you die. But let’s be honest—we don’t want it to be optional. We like eating. We like it so much we plan our days and our years around it; the old word for “holiday” is “feast,” and from “Turkey Day” to Fourth of July barbecues, it still fits. Even our religious service often revolves around eating. We weekly commemorate the holiest moments of human history by consuming the crushed remains of grass seeds and the scorched corpses of microorganisms that we murder by the millions just to make the grass seeds more pleasant to consume.

This is what it means to be human—to be, as Tocqueville put it, the beast with the angel in him, our rational and spiritual natures shot through with desires that would be instantly recognizable to a wolf or a weasel. Solzhenitsyn expressed deep wisdom when he said the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. But in fact, you can rarely see the line; in fact, good and evil are usually twisted up together even in the best things we do. Did Bach write the St. Matthew Passion looking up to God in humble worship, or looking down his nose at his better-known and better-paid contemporaries who couldn’t dream of composing such a thing? Does an exhausted mother walking a frustrated child through long division show us Christ-like patience or the same selfish Darwinian need for successful offspring that sent Lori Laughlin to prison? Being human means the answer is almost always “both,” both good and evil together in some ever-changing mix that even we ourselves cannot certainly measure.

The foregoing reflections were prompted by my feeling that, despite its merits, Fiona and Terryl Givens’ book All Things New is missing some important truths—truths as necessary to discipleship as the gentler truths the book emphasizes instead.

The Givenses are concerned that many Latter-day Saints struggle with guilt, inadequacy, and fear that they will not qualify for salvation. According to the Givenses, these Saints can blame their struggles in part on a false story our culture has inherited from Augustine (by way of Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards), a story of “sinners in the hands of an angry god,” a wrathful sovereign proving His majesty by creating a whole human species that deserves to be damned and then, for no reasons outside His own arbitrary will, electing some few of them to save from their rightful fate.

The “traditions of the fathers,” embedded in an inherited religious language, continue to injure us. Language calculated to operate on nineteenth-century minds (and those of earlier epochs) may not be the most efficacious for our moment in history. The work of Restoration, to be complete, must include the casting off of those traditions, presuppositions, frameworks, paradigms, and vocabulary that still fill the garden of the gospel like tenacious weeds. The “plain and precious things” restored cannot attain their full splendor unless and until they are fully unencumbered by those traditions that still pervade our language and our conceptions alike. We need a new vocabulary, a new gospel grammar, freed from the corruptions of our Christian heritage.

To that end, the Givenses make a “tentative effort” to redefine key Gospel words. Sin should be understood not as “guilt” but as “woundedness,” salvation not as “rescue” but as “realization,” and justice as “restoration” rather than “punishment.” The Fall of Adam becomes the “ascension” of Eve, and the penal substitutionary model of the Atonement is replaced with “radical healing.”

I find much of this interesting and valuable. I had never realized, for example, how much of the Restoration aimed to correct errors specific to Protestantism rather than Christianity at large, and I’m sure there are people who, as the Givenses claim, do not appreciate the extent to which God is on their side, doing everything He can do to help them repent and be healed. I expect many of those readers will benefit from the Givenses’ book.

My problem is with the Givenses’ implied either/or: Why can’t sin be both woundedness and guilt? Why can’t salvation both fulfill our natures and also repair our (rather obvious) flaws? Why can’t the Atonement, as the hymn teaches, “Be of sin the double cure, Save from wrath and make me pure?” After all, though the Givenses have found scriptural evidence for their preferred side of each binary, scripture gives us plenty of evidence for the other side, too.

“The natural man is an enemy to God”: It’s not a rhetorical flourish dropped carelessly into a single Book of Mormon sermon. It would make a decent subtitle for the whole book, which begins with God telling a prophet His own chosen people are so corrupt that He’s about to destroy them, and then plays variations on the same theme for most of the next 530 pages. Over and over, God calls prophets to tell people to repent; over and over, the people respond by trying to kill the prophets. Sometimes they repent a bit, usually when they’re enslaved or death is imminent, but usually, it doesn’t stick. When God delivers them from their enemies or sends rain to end the famine, they pray gratefully and then, sooner or later, go back to their old ways. Sometimes it only takes a year or two, and often they end up worse than they were before.

The book ends with two different civilizations, each given every opportunity to repent, deciding almost to a man that they would literally rather die.

And Restoration scripture doesn’t get any more optimistic as it goes. The Doctrine and Covenants presents itself as a warning to a wicked people that desperately need to repent but mostly won’t, which is why the Saints have to “go out” from Babylon instead of turning it into Zion. The book of Moses teaches that humans are “conceived in sin” and proves it by recounting the invention of fratricide, of genocide, and of secret combinations through which much of mankind literally “covenanted with Satan.” Then the book of Abraham begins with the patriarch’s own father volunteering him for human sacrifice. As the Givenses famously teach, the Pearl of Great Price reveals a God who weeps. It also reveals a human race that gives Him a lot to weep about.

The Givenses briefly acknowledge some of this, writing (for example) that “we are complex beings, with complex motivations, and we are seldom wholly guilty or wholly innocent of any misdeed,” and that people are “capable of sin in the sense of a deliberately chosen action that is wrong and harmful.” They acknowledge that by choosing to sin, humans block the current of God’s love, interfere with His designs, and cause “pain, suffering, [and] alienation.”

But they also ask us to see sin as “Needful. Fruitful. Productive of good”—“a necessary part of our education.” They dislike the word sin because it is “so drenched in connotations of the vile, the evil, the malicious,” and they prefer to replace it with metaphors that minimize human guilt and responsibility: bitterness, for example, or their favorite metaphor woundedness, a sort of damage that happens to everybody and needs healing rather than expiation or justice.

The Givenses aim to heal souls suffering from self-recrimination, and their healing message seems to be something like “sin isn’t really you.” You sin mostly because your free will is limited and “contaminated”; your responsibility for sin is always “mitigated” and “extenuat[ed].” The real you, they seem to say, is the part “that never assents to sin nor ever shall.’” It’s the part that “tend[s] only toward God as its true end. … [S]in requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue” (emphasis added).

What then of the Book of Mormon’s teaching that the natural man is an enemy to God? The Givenses first argue the natural man is a person corrupted by society: “it is not a statement about … inherited nature, or innate attributes.” Later they write that the “enemy to God” is “our natural Darwinian selves” left “unchecked”—our inherited “instincts, appetites, and tendencies toward self-preservation.” Whether sin ultimately comes from social man or from biological man, however, the Givenses’ key meaning is clear: the natural man, the enemy to God, is “not our innate self.”

But why is it supposed to comfort me that my “innate self” is free of the natural man when the “self” I live with plainly isn’t? What does it matter if the enemy to God is the social man or biological man when everyone I know is both?

I can’t escape by blaming my sins on my “corruptible flesh and blood” or the way others have wounded me. That’s like a drunk on trial for murder saying the liquor did it—yes, defendant, but who made you drink?

We’re not Gnostic sparks of divinity, tied up in corrupt matter through no fault of our own and becoming more truly ourselves as we escape our fleshly entanglement. We as premortal spirits chose our embodiment, and as postmortal spirits, we’ll miss it once it’s gone. Our imperfect flesh is us, just as much as our imperfect spirit is; its corruption is our corruption and its sins are our sins. The same is true of our relationships: we chose life knowing it would involve relationships that wound us, and our wounding relationships are as much a part of us as our flesh and bones. We are responsible for what they lead us to do.

And further: we are responsible not merely because we chose to be born and thus put ourselves in temptation’s path; we are responsible because, even now, we would not have it any other way. We like devouring other creatures to satisfy our bodies’ hunger, and that is hardly the only biological urge we’d be sad to lose. The worst of these come from the social side of our genetic inheritance: we like craving and winning status; we like feeling superior. We like resenting it when others wound us, like it so much that we stop our wounds from healing, and maybe open them a little wider, just so we’ll have more to resent. We also dislike it, of course—dislike the pain it causes and the imperfection it represents, but our desire for what hurts us persists, and even in our best moments none of us has wholly repudiated it.

If sin is woundedness, then we like our woundedness.

What then would I say to Latter-day Saints like the ones who write the Givenses, people struggling with guilt, inadequacy, and fear that they’ll never qualify for salvation?

To begin with I’d ask them, “Are you sure you should be asking me?” You need inspired counsel from people who can receive revelation on your behalf, and you need to receive revelation yourself. I believe what I’ve written here is true, but the truth about these subjects is often made of paradoxes: both woundedness and guilt, both mercy and justice; salvation as both an unearnable gift and the fruit of long repentance. My story here is only one side of this paradox and maybe not the side you need to hear right now.

Imagine going one by one through your sins and finding reasons you’re not responsible: your addiction is a neurological disorder, your temper is from your upbringing, and so on. For each sin you might be perfectly right, but what happens when you do the honest thing and apply the same process to your virtues? Your professional achievements are a combination of the genetic lottery, chance connections, and hard work, and your hard work is a habit you were dragged into, literally kicking and screaming, by your mother. You learned kindness from Grandma, and you learned how to make a marriage last by watching your parents. Your gift for teaching the Gospel is a fire kindled by those who taught you.

I’m not saying you should take the blame for the bad so you can take credit for the good—if you’re really struggling with guilt, that tradeoff won’t attract you. Rather, I’m asking a question: if you start pointing to parts of yourself influenced by our fallen world and saying, “That’s not really me,” then what will be left of you when you’re done?

When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, He did not say, “Father, take this cup from me—these sins I’m suffering for aren’t my fault!” He did not seek to escape our shame on the grounds that we’re actually good people, deep down, and He didn’t atone only for the eternal God-like intelligence in each soul while leaving the rest of the spirit and body to their fate. Instead God “made Him to be sin for us” even though He knew no sin, and Jesus drank the bitter cup without a filter. He accepted and bore it all.

I hope, when I stand before my God, that I will follow His example and accept responsibility for everything: my wisdom and my foolishness, my work and my laziness, my sin and my virtue—for wounds suffered and wounds inflicted—for my daily steps toward repentance (three forward, two back) and the million steps left to go. It is all me, I own it all, and I cannot claim it merits salvation. The wages of sin is death.

But although I own it all, I do not own myself. I sold that to the Savior in a font in West Jordan and—not because of who I am, but because of who He is—I do not doubt that He will save me.

The post The Natural Man Is an Enemy to God appeared first on Public Square Magazine.