Wayfare is thrilled to introduce Waypoints, where conversations about contemporary film, books, music and more meet the questions of the soul. Below, find a special introduction to the project by Waypoints editor Conor Hilton, and enjoy Shayla Whipple Frandsen’s exploration of godliness and regret in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Scroll to the bottom for more information and links to our other Waypoints pieces.

I sat transfixed as the credits rolled and John Williams’ rousing, celebratory score played. My dad turned to me and asked, “So, do you think that can really happen? Could Darth Vader repent and be forgiven for years of evil at the very end of his life? Does repentance and forgiveness work like that?” We talked over the question for what felt like hours. It was wonderful.

My dad’s question began my lifelong pursuit of seeking wisdom out of the best books, films, music, and every other artistic and cultural expression. In many ways, that question and the subsequent discussion is the seed that has grown and blossomed today into Waypoints, the home of Wayfare’s (pop) culture coverage.

Waypoints believes that we are here on earth to have joy and that movies, books, music, and any other form of art and (pop) culture is a part of how we experience joy. For me, that joy continues in the generous, thoughtful attention paid to works of art and culture. This joy is derived in part from the particular pleasure of coming to know and love something and in part by the ways that paying careful attention to works of art and culture reveals truth and helps us understand and interpret previously revealed truths.

I hope that Waypoints will bring a taste of that joy to you, dear reader. That we can capture the delight of long, meandering conversations basking in the light of your local cinema marquee, thrumming with the energy of just seeing something that changed you. That we can share the wonder and passion of being transported so thoroughly to another world and perspective that closing the book leaves you feeling a little alienated from your reality.

Below, explore a sample of what Waypoints hopes to offer you. Read Lorren Lemmons’ exploration of the interiority of a tradwife in the year’s most talked about novel, Yesteryear. Enjoy Theric Jepson’s insights into some surprising thematic connections between Napoleon Dynamite and the LDS-classic short film, “The Phone Call”. Get a glimpse of the numinous in Jason Rhode’s wandering through Zelda. Delight in a sampling platter of some of the “Movies that Made Us,” featuring Mallory Everton and others. And, enjoy Shayla Frandsen’s exploration of the epic journey through masculinity and heroism in the movie event of the summer, The Odyssey.

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Waypoints

Writing on contemporary culture from Wayfare Magazine.

By Zachary Davis

Godliness, Regret, and the Secrets of the Trojan Horse (They’re Not What You Think!)

by Shayla Frandsen

In a gritty world that prizes physical and elemental power—a world where helmets and armor are extensions of the self, straight arrows are flung from impossibly tight bows, where a loom woven and unwoven determines fate, and water and shadow move with the strength of a Greek army—it is the intangible Zeus’s law that remains paramount to Christopher Nolan’s huge new film The Odyssey. Unwritten but as integral to Greek society as the very belief in gods themselves, Zeus’s law requires a host to offer shelter and a meal to any who cross their threshold—even if your guests are terrible suitors who harass you while you seek your missing war general husband on the horizon. Any stranger who crosses the threshold could be a god in disguise, so one best act accordingly. Step wrong, and you might regret it.

While Zeus’s law is as constant as Helios charioting the sun across the sky, another word kept pressing on my brain during The Odyssey: godliness. One possible tenet (casual Nolan film reference for the win; watch me seamlessly work in Memento in a second) of godliness involves realizing that the interference of the gods is a foundational cornerstone in the lives of these characters. The gods are real; the stakes are paramount. If Zeus’s law is what steers the ship of narrative, the gods’ inescapable presence is the wind powering the entire vessel.

The more urgent definition of godliness within this essay, though, is the becoming or striving to emulate a god. If one is godly, are they also a hero? Perhaps being a hero comes with certain expectations of morality, but perhaps not. These questions find ripe soil to bloom in the field of Odysseus. While I can think of several actors who could have been able (literally and figuratively) to captain the ship, Matt Damon might have been the best choice of them all. I was consistently impressed, and maybe even surprised, by his ability to lead the movie with such a steady hand. He’s handsome, but not too handsome (by the end, his face looked as weathered as you’d expect of a man Going Through It™ for twenty years). Imperfect, yet someone you’d follow into battle. A Good Dude. A machine of war who is possessed of a heart that ticks with honor, a memento courtesy of his years as king and dutiful obeisance to the gods back home.

Yet, Odysseus’ home is in disarray, for something is rotten in the state of Ithaca. Telemachus and Penelope—Odysseus’s son and wife, the former played by a good Tom Holland and the latter by Anne Hathaway, blistering in her tenacity—live in a palace where the vibes can only be called shambolic. Led by a bratty, excellent Robert Pattinson, a horde of rude, drunken men have taken advantage of the king’s long absence and essentially taken over the place. Penelope and Telemachus mourn Odysseus even as they look for his arrival on the horizon. Prolonged years of such liminal hope does not a stable kingdom make. Mother and son feel their world closing in around them, egged on by suitors growing more bold by the day with little word from abroad. “All we know of the world is from travelers’ tales,” Penelope tells Telemachus, ergo every traveler who crosses their door is greeted with respect, a seat at the table, and a plea for any news that can be spared: Zeus’s law writ large across the kingdom, despite its crisis.

The film makes it clear society is on the brink of collapse—though dialogue surrounding this is clunky; there’s a line about the Bronze Age that made me recoil. My kingdom for Christopher Nolan to consider hiring a writers room!—even after a victorious war in Troy. And what a war it was. The film opens on a massive wooden horse marqueed across the screen, skewing wildly with hooves raised, half-buried in the sandy shore. We know what this is, even though we’re not yet given a look at what we know to be inside. Out on the beach waits a confused but loyal Sinon. The performance is a sensitive one by Elliot Page, rising full of youthful optimism before hammering down with a wallop of an emotional scene halfway through the film.

It’s not until later in the movie that we return to the horse in the sand and finally see the Greek warriors inside. The thrilling battle sequence after the horse is brought into Troy leads to Greek victory and widespread songs sung in honor of Odysseus the clever, the canny. The hero. When he pulled off one of the niftiest bits of battle trickery the world had ever seen, it was not glory that lingered in the aftermath, but shame. Odysseus had trespassed Zeus’s law in the most criminal way imaginable. Zeus’s law is not just about hospitality. It is survival, kinship, and connection. It is the one safe guarantee in a world where the handle of death’s dagger swings far too easily. Obeying such a law is not only seen as respectful, but sacred. It is treating men like they are gods, and in doing so, displaying godliness oneself. Breaching Zeus’s law transcends error: It is sin.

Contemporary eyes tend to see the Trojan horse as the final boss of wartime cunning. Odysseus shamelessly pwning the Trojans is what I expected from Nolan, whose explosions-go-boom tendency towards bombast has been well established for as many years as Odysseus’s journey. What I did not expect to see was regret as deep and swirling as Charybdis’s maw. His guilt is present in Homer’s poem, but I was not expecting the film to showcase it so thoroughly. The sirens sing that he is too ashamed to go home, and Athena, played by a compassionate Zendaya, haunts his every step. For Nolan’s Odysseus, the Trojan horse was an act so unthinkable that he languished with Calypso (a weak portrayal by Charlize Theron, though in fairness, she doesn’t have much to do) and the lotus flowers for years, so unwilling was he to face the full implications of what he had done in authoring the war’s final act of violence. The man of twists and turns holds one more twist.

The Trojan horse Trojan horsed us, and the movie is all the better for the subversion.

When situating The Odyssey next to Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer (maybe you’ve heard of it?) one suddenly finds a duo of men grappling with the horrors they unleashed upon the world. Less grandiosity, more guilt. Forget the specially licensed Trojan horse popcorn bucket, remorse is on the menu! Does Odysseus veer closer to godliness with his guilt, or to humanity?

A particular moment in the film might give us the answer. Calypso offers Odysseus salvation on her island, where he would see immortality in drugged nirvana. It would also represent forsaking his family and royal responsibility, and bar him from traveling to the unknown west to honor his fallen comrades. Instead of accepting Calypso’s godliness, Odysseus is determined to remain mortal. His rapsheet is leagues long, and choking guilt doesn’t exactly make the highlight reel of happy human moments, yet he builds his creaky raft and floats off at the mercy of the gods all the same. In doing so, he sheds not only the sails and oars of his previous vessel but also the hubris which had him believing he could control what the gods had in store for him. He’s done defying the gods, as he once told Circe (played by an utterly magnificent Samantha Morton and featuring a scene that is instantly one of the best of the year, horrifying in its beauty) in her hut, and has learned his lesson in a fascinating subversion of expectation: In choosing humanity, he is closer to the gods than ever.

A hero he must certainly be, right? Maybe. Nolan makes it clear that our idea of heroism stands on shaky ground and can shift as easily as the sands on Calypso’s shore. Heroism is a type of godliness. Curiously, revenge might be, as well. The suitors trespass Zeus’s law by overstaying their welcome at Penelope’s; therefore, the gods enact their divine retribution through Odysseus’s murderous actions. The film’s third act is one long Kill Bill-esque revenge fantasy, and is all the better for it.

At the very least, revenge seems to be the prize bestowed upon Odysseus when he passes the test of his journey and finally lands at Ithaca’s shores. That single twang after he strings the bow alone is worth the price of admission (it’s like a firework; you’ll feel it in your chest.) The word “prize” provokes, however: Taking his revenge might not be a prize, but it is finally a choice he can make on his own. It’s not rewarded either, because when the dust has settled, Telemachus is crowned king and Odysseus is exiled (perhaps people found it problematic that their revenant king murdered a significant portion of Ithaca’s eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds?) Exile is fine: After an epic amount of justifying the abandonment of his killed men, he is finally going to honor them by sailing into the unknown west with Penelope. It is another step towards casting off Troy’s long shadow, in what we might imagine will be a lifelong process for Odysseus. For somebody who lived and nearly died by the will of the gods, turning from godliness towards something a little more mortal is as welcome as an arrow shot cleanly through twelve axes, hitting its mark.

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Shayla Frandsen (she/her) is a writer, runner, reader, and mother of three. A proud Newsies apologist, she will watch Cher in anything, compel you to read romantasy, and can quote Back to the Future 3 verbatim. When she was a kid, she started doing the Jabba the Hut laugh as a joke but it’s...kind of just her laugh now?

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Waypoints

Writing on contemporary culture from Wayfare Magazine.

By Zachary Davis

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Trad wife discourse is everywhere. (If you haven’t been caught up in it, could you make some space for me under the rock where you’ve been hiding? But just in case—a “trad wife,” short for “traditional wife,” is a woman who follows traditional gender roles, often through homemaking, having many children, and submitting t…

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“Movies That Made Us” is a recurring series where various contributors share brief reflections on a movie that shaped them in some meaningful way into the person they are today—morally, ethically, professionally, familially, aesthetically, or beyond…

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May these pieces be the beginnings of ongoing, generative, joyful conversations! Read, comment, share, chat with your coworkers, stop your neighbor, call up an old family friend, preach in a public square!

If you like what you read and have some thoughts of your own along these lines, check out our “About” page for more information, and bring any questions, pitches, comments, complaints, beefs, and all manner of communication in-between to me, Conor B. Hilton (conorbhilton@gmail.com), Editor of Waypoints.

Thanks for reading!

Conor

Conor is a father of three who loves reading Gothic novels, watching everything Wes Anderson touches, and dancing to 90s ska-punk while doing the dishes.

BONUS: A MORMON LITERATURE STARTER PACK

Waypoints

Mormon Lit Starter Pack

At the third annual Wayfare Festival, held in July 2026, I had the pleasure of presenting alongside Rebbie Brassfield about Mormon representation and pop culture. Rebbie astutely decried most mainstream depictions of Mormons/Latter-day Saints as being caricatured, exploitative, or otherwise flat and reductive. Following Rebbie, I talked about some of th…

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a day ago

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Waypoints

Writing on contemporary culture from Wayfare Magazine.

By Zachary Davis

Here I sit on the yellow timber pew,
five minutes before Thursday six pm mass
the silence bearing down on closed hands
pierced —
by the drone of an old lady kneeling at the rear
gripping a white plastic rosary
her wedding finger on a tarnished plaque
              a mortal husband’s name worn thin

The moustached parish father in his white alb
not yet vested in his embroidered cross
sneaks
       a glance or two out of the sacristy doorway
counting parishioners
              one head,
                            the next
              and one venial sin

Ears attuned for the ring of the little brass bell —
                            I'm pulled to the right of the altar
                            of St Peter and his shepherd's staff striking a pose on a marble plinth                                                                           
                            then wander back past the unadorned weekday altar
a baby Saviour, his pink cheek nuzzled in his father Joseph’s plaster beard

From the crown of my head, right in the centre where brown hair thins
raw thoughts spin to a fine glass thread —
drifting in figure-eights
              gazing up — flaked clouds of white acrylic stained with old winter rains
between the tip of St Peter's mitre and Joseph's brown curls

Then it dives — pikes and straightens,
to wrap around St Peter's sandaled big toe
slows — the red flicker of the sanctuary lamp shines through the thread’s glass skin

Hesitates — touches tip to lace hem
of the white cloth on the altar

the spun glass turns page white
              a breath

returns — down the loops and curves of the single thread,
whispering
back
into my head, down
again into my lungs

exhale
              small
              thursday’s grace

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Trevor Foulstone is a poet from Melbourne, Australia. His work moves through the body before it reaches the mind — locating emotion in physical sensation, finding weight in ordinary moments of contact and loss. He writes with precision about what the skin knows before language catches up. His poetry has appeared in Words of the Lamb Magazine and the inaugural edition of The Bleeding Margin.

Eve hadn’t dreamed in Eden. But in the years since leaving Eden, she had gotten used to the strange sensation of waking up to the last wisps of a dream, soon forgotten.

This dream, however, felt different. She found herself in a dark and dreary waste, awash in greys, the edges of her senses soft and smokey. She perceived no ground, as if she stood on water. It was disorienting, but most dreams are if you really start analyzing them.

She started walking. Surely something must exist here, or this was going to be a very boring dream. She just had to start moving to find it. Whatever passes for time in dreams went by. Eve perceived it as an eternity. It felt like she was walking in figure eights, nothing to use as a way marker. Until she came across a large rock.

Eve considered walking past it. It wasn’t a particularly exciting rock. But it was the only thing of substance she had come across (if a dream rock can be referred to as having substance). So, she sat on the rock. Just as she was beginning to feel restless, she saw a light, growing larger as it came towards her. The light took the form of a person. An Angel.

The Angel—Eve felt a moment of familiarity as though from another life—sat down on the rock beside her. “You look tired, Eve.”

Eve thought maybe it wasn’t so much that she was tired, but perhaps that she had entirely forgotten what it felt like to be well-rested. Her muscles ached, her body was heavy. Her skin felt tight, stretched thin over her bones. Her mouth felt like she had swallowed a mouthful of sand. She was so thirsty. Thirsty for so many things. Her exhaustion felt like a tidal wave washing over her, crushing her. She wondered if she could ever rise again.

Eve meant to tell the Angel that she was fine. She would just rest for a moment on this rock, and then she would keep moving. But instead, she said, “I don’t know if I made the right choice in Eden.”

She could barely remember Eden anymore. It felt like the kind of fuzzy dream that slipped through her fingers like sand upon waking. She did remember long evenings spent talking with Adam, walking along a lakeshore. The water, a perfect temperature, lapping her bare feet. She remembered slow, warm, unhurried mornings. If she had the option now, she would return to the soft gentle womb of Eden and sleep, perhaps forever.

In response the Angel stood, drawing Eve up with her. With her hands joined with the Angel’s, Eve felt lighter, like her legs could once more bear the weight of this mortal body. Smoke pooled and billowed at their feet. “Come,” the Angel said. “If you are willing, I will show you what your choice created.”

Eve hesitated. Did she want to see? Eve took a fortifying deep breath. She was willing. With the Angel’s hand in hers, Eve stepped forward through the smoke.

Eve squinted in the blinding light of the sun revealed beyond the smoke that had surrounded them. Too bright after the dimness of the dark and dreary waste. The nonexistent dream ground beneath her feet was replaced by something hard, unnaturally flat. The Angel pulled her to the side just before someone ran into Eve. She gaped. People were everywhere.

The Angel gently pulled her to a flat, straight, wooden surface. “A bench,” the Angel explained. “I’m rather fond of them. More comfortable than your rock.” Eve barely registered the bench. The people filled her view.

They moved like a herd in constant motion, all seeming to go in opposite directions. Children darted past her, their feet not bare like Eve’s, but wrapped in colorful fabric. People moved with great haste, dressed in cloth so fine and bright it might have been spun from water and sand. Lights flashed like lightning. Everywhere she looked there was noise, color, and movement. She drowned in the sound of a thousand conversations, laughter, shouting, startling sounds she couldn’t recognize or name.

Eve’s breath quickened. The press of people and unnamed things felt crushing. She wanted to bury her face in Adam’s chest. Wanted him to name things for her, as he once had.

Even as Eve felt overwhelmed by everything, she also began to notice the familiar. She saw her daughter’s face in a baby who watched her from his mother’s arms. As the baby stared at her, Eve couldn’t help but smile, eliciting a wide, gummy grin from the baby before they disappeared in the crowd. She saw Cain and Abel in a pair of young boys who ran past laughing, jostling each other.

“Is there nowhere quiet?” Eve asked.

The Angel smiled. “Come.”

The Angel stood from the bench, startling a flock of birds, and for a moment Eve felt as though she were enveloped in feathers and wings, and she shut her eyes. When nothing touched her, she opened them again. She was surrounded by walls and hushed silence. Eve could hear the soft murmur of voices and the occasional shadow of movement in a doorway, but this room was empty of people. It was empty of everything except a few benches and images on the walls. Eve moved slowly, wary of the strange reverence in the air. The images portrayed landscapes, people in fine clothing, strange shapes, colors she had never seen before.

She stopped in front of one image that drew her in. A woman’s face, pale and soft, a wry smile, a fruit in her hand, held out as though enticing Eve. A serpent curled around the tree behind her, watching her with a strangely human, smug, knowing grin.

“It’s you,” the Angel said, startling Eve.

“Surely not. It looks nothing like me,” Eve replied with a frown, squinting at the painting.

Turning around, Eve fell back from another painting, startled. It depicted a young man tied to a tree, pierced with wounds, bleeding. Soothing landscapes, faint echoes of Eden, had given way to images of violence and blood, pained faces, blood spilt like that of sacrificial lambs.

“I need some air,” she said with a gasp, and the Angel gestured through an archway.

Eve stumbled through and they were once more outside. The air here was dry and heavy, as though no one here dared to breathe. The children here ran barefoot. Tents billowed and flapped in the wind. Dust and smoke stung Eve’s eyes. The wind carried the sound of crying. Here, like in the paintings, blood was spilt. Were those bodies? Eve couldn’t bear to look closer.

From a tent she heard hacking coughs. Eve looked around her, but she could see no water or comfort she could give. Eve hadn’t thought anyone in the world could feel as tired as she did. But she watched a mother who, with trembling hands, crouched by a cookfire. She broke bread and gave the larger piece to her child. The child’s ribs pressed against her skin like the bones of a baby bird.

“Is this the end of the world?” Eve asked the Angel.

“Not yet.”

“I did not choose this,” she whispered. “I cannot imagine how any child of mine would choose this.”

The Angel looked at her with sad, knowing eyes. Eve didn’t like that look. As though the Angel saw something in her future that would cause her to utter those words again.

She turned away, unable to meet the Angel’s eyes. Instead, her eyes met those of a child who was watching her. Eve crouched down to her height. The child had wide dark eyes, bright with curiosity. Eyes that reminded Eve of Adam. The child reached out her hand, and in her palm sat a small flower. Eve accepted her offering with a smile and was given a shy one in return. A voice called from one of the tents and the child turned and ran off.

The Angel touched Eve’s shoulder and quietly said, “Come.”

She breathed in the silence when they returned to the dark and dreary waste. Returned to the rock. The soft grey darkness was a relief to her eyes. They stung with unshed tears and ached as though they had worked too hard taking everything in. She dropped onto the rock. The Angel remained standing.

“What am I supposed to do with this knowledge?” Eve asked. She felt exhausted, not just in body, but in mind.

The Angel shrugged. “You wake up. Or I suppose you can just sit here on this rock.”

The rock was tempting. Eve could pretend there weren’t any expectations of her here. No world out there with millions of children still waiting to be born. Eve closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was silent here. No demands. The Angel was a warm, steady presence.

Eve’s buttocks began to ache. She shifted. Fidgeted. Her feet felt restless. The rock wasn’t really all that comfortable. Her mind began to wander. Adam would be wondering where she was. She would miss him sitting here. With a soft sigh, Eve opened her eyes and awoke. A small flower was clutched in her hand.

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This piece, “Eve Dreams,” appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

Michelle Graabek-Wallace is a Danish-born historian and writer interested in women’s history, lived faith, and personal voice. She aims to contribute to a Latter-day Saint literary tradition, exploring the ways ordinary lives carry enduring stories and insight, rooted in her Danish heritage.

Art by Ella Anderson (@ellart234).

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My eye was drawn in this week’s reading to a series of episodes in which the mandates of the law of Moses are bent or broken with varying effects, and I found myself pondering again what it means to honor the spirit of the law when circumstances make perfect observance difficult or impossible. Consider the following cases from the reading:

Case 1

In 2 Chronicles 26, we see the rise of a righteous young king, Uzziah, who appears in some way to have been appointed by the people when he was sixteen years old (v. 1). He is a successful military commander whom the chronicler portrays as receiving help from God in his military endeavors (v. 7). But then, in a pattern familiar from the Book of Mormon, pride sets in (v. 16), and in his pride, Uzziah commits an offense against the same God who had been helping him. He attempts to enter the temple and offer a sacrifice there, something that, as a non-Levite, he was not authorized to do under the law of Moses. Only the strenuous intervention of the priests of the temple prevents him from carrying out his intention, after which, as punishment, the Lord smites him with leprosy.1 Despite all the good he is credited with doing over his five decades as king, his attempt to enter into the sacred place and perform the functions reserved for the priests cost him dearly. He died with his leprosy. Like other kings before him, Uzziah found out the hard way that the order of the Lord’s house is not to be trifled with.

Case 2

In the next assigned chapter, 2 Chronicles 30, we find King Hezekiah, another righteous king after a series of idolatrous ones, uniting the tribes around the proper worship of Jehovah again. Via couriers with letters, he invites all members of any tribe to come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. And then the chronicler notes that Hezekiah and his court “had taken counsel to keep the passover in the second month (for they could not keep it at its proper time because the priests had not sanctified themselves in sufficient number, nor had the people assembled in Jerusalem)” (vv. 2–3).2 So, the timing of the observance of Passover is altered from what is legally prescribed. Then, in a further departure from the ideal, as the Passover is underway we read that “a multitude of the people . . . had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the passover otherwise than as prescribed” (v. 18) due to the short amount of time they had, even with the later date of the celebration, to get ready. “But,” we read, “Hezekiah prayed for them, saying ‘The good Lord pardon all who set their hearts to seek God, the Lord the God of their ancestors, even though not in accordance with the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness.’ The Lord heard Hezekiah, and healed the people” (v. 20).

These two legal anomalies are handled differently by Hezekiah than Uzziah did when he tried to enter the temple and offer a sacrifice. Rather than acting unilaterally and precipitously, we read that the king counseled with his assembly as to how to proceed regarding the timing, and when the people turned up in large numbers ritually unprepared, the king took intercessory action: The difference between the case of Uzziah and the case of Hezekiah and his people is one of disposition rather than perfectly orthodox action. Hezekiah and his people are doing their best to effect a national repentance from idolatry, and while they make every effort in that direction, some allowances must be made for the change to take place in a timely way. They show they are cognizant of the exceptions they are making, and do so with humble consultation and prayer.

As a result, the Lord looks with favor and forbearance on them. I love the word used as the chronicle describes the result of the king’s prayer: “The Lord heard Hezekiah, and healed the people” (v. 20). In other words, in response to their ritual uncleanness—a state of outward, performative impurity—the Lord addresses the deeper need, the more enduring concern, which was that years of estrangement from true faith and true worship had left not just outward, ritual impurity, but spiritual wounds—most of them no doubt known only to God. In the language of healing, we hear the chronicler signal that more was set right than the formal preparation of the people for covenant renewal; their hearts, too, were touched and healed.

Case 3

That circumstance of repair and healing between the people and their God leads to the final exceptional action we read about in this lesson: “Then the whole assembly agreed together to keep the festival for another seven days; so they kept it for another seven days with gladness” (v. 23). This time the rules are bent not out of necessity for lack of time or preparation, but in gratitude for the abundant mercy of God. The people give freely another week of their lives to honoring and worshiping the Lord.

It is common in some theological traditions to think of the God of the Old Testament as the legalistic, punitive Lord who is quick to smite and slow to salve. The examples before us in this reading do include an instance of the rigorous discipline for which the Old Testament’s God is renowned. But if we are discerning, there are factors here that shift the temperature of that example. God was dealing with a king, the man who held the power of life and death over his people, the man who stood in the line of David and could bring about suffering and calamity—as many before him had done—through hubris and vanity. The Lord’s intervention here was little different than the rebukes he would offer the dignitaries of Jerusalem in his ministry among them as Jesus of Nazareth. And at the same time, the grace and mercy with which he treats Hezekiah and the celebrants of that unorthodox Passover is of a piece with the way Jesus healed on the Sabbath and countenanced his disciples “harvesting” grain as they walked along with him through the fields on that day. In every dispensation, it seems, the God of creation is quick to distinguish between the pride that bends rules for self-aggrandizement and the humility that bends them in service of genuine return and holy relationship. Perhaps this reading is an opportunity for us to likewise reflect on our relationship to pride and to gratitude and sincere devotion when it comes to how we “observe to keep” the Lord’s commandments.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Solomon Alexander Hart (1806–1881).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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There once was a desert as wide as the world, its dusty expanse speckled with cities. In the center of one such city was a well, tended to by a family of well-keepers. The well-keepers had many children over many generations. Some of them turned away from the family task, for reasons selfish or sincere. Others, for their own reasons, stayed to clean the well, scrub the surrounding stones, and distribute water across the city.

One daughter, like the generations before her, was raised to faithfully care for the well. She took pride in polishing the vessels, in knowing the stories of the stones, in catching debris before it could ripple the clear water. She loved being a well-keeper.

But, over the years, uncertainty trickled into her devotion. When she drank from the well, the water was not cool on her tongue; it did not fill her with sweetness. It was as though the nectar that poured effortlessly down others’ throats evaporated near hers. When others drank, they seemed to have an emptiness inside them soothed and softened. This well-keepers’ daughter did not feel soothed, but that wasn’t what troubled her most. She did not even feel empty. She could keep working when others panted and paused for a drink; she enjoyed her meals without anything to wash them down. Had something changed? Or had it always been this way? Had she only thought this water was life-giving because everyone told her so?

The well-keepers’ daughter was lonely and confused. She knew that well-keepers had their disagreements. She had often listened to her family fight about where the water came from and how it should be distributed. But, as she watched them spend their days ladling crystal water into many-colored cups, she saw how the water sustained them. They did the heavy, damp work because they saw a city full of thirst that their efforts could quench. They did it because they came from generations of well-keepers, and this was what well-keepers did. As she passed out cups with her family, the well-keepers’ daughter scrutinized those who drank. She tried to determine if there was power in the water, or if their confidence created its power, or if they were just tasting air like her and smiling anyway.

Eventually, she found herself holding two truths: the truth of others’ faces when they held a cup to their lips—joyful, peaceful, restored, made whole—and the truth of her own body. She was not thirsty, nor was she quenched. When she listened in absolute stillness and aloneness, she found that her body did not seem to have a place for water. It was as though when others drank, the water poured like a key into a lock, opening a door with light on the other side. In her, the water sloshed around uselessly, searching for a keyhole in an open field.

The stories she knew, however, did not make space for both truths. Some who had left her family’s well told her that it was poisoned; others talked of distant pools with sweeter water; still others claimed that water was only ever a desert mirage. In the well-keepers’ stories, those who abandoned the well spent the rest of their lives with a gnawing thirst that left them drained and parched. They might lie to themselves about it, or distract themselves with the city’s pleasures and sparkles, but they could never be truly refreshed without the well.

When she tried to tell her own story, the other well-keepers did not understand. With eyes full of concern, they reminded her that everything grew from the well: they and all their ancestors, the city and all its flowers. Was she just being foolish, mistaking water’s lack of flavor for worthlessness? Was her palate contaminated by city food? Did her cup have a crack (jostled accidentally? smashed deliberately?) that let its contents drip out before she could drink? She watched their hands tighten around their own cups as they talked to her, as though cracks were contagious.

Time passed, and the well-keepers’ daughter remained a well-keepers’ daughter. Some evenings, she stayed in the city, relishing hours when her questions receded from view. Other evenings, she polished the vessels with her family, everyone toasting from the well when the day’s work was done. The smiles in that room were all genuine: theirs because they loved the well, and hers because she loved them.

And some nights, she tiptoed from her bed to the edge of the well. She would lie on her stomach with her chin on her hands, her elbows supported by the smooth stones whose stories she knew. She would watch her reflection moving in the clear water, wondering what it would feel like to be full, wondering what it would feel like to thirst.

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Eliza Wells is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the normative dimensions of social roles, including gender, citizenship, and professions. She completed her PhD in philosophy at MIT and postdoctoral work at Harvard. She also works on feminism in the Mormon tradition and has an MA in religious studies from Stanford. Her analysis of gender in LDS general conference rhetoric appeared in Dialogue.

Art by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).

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To be a pioneer is to actively seek out God in an unknown place. It is a brave soul, a faithful soul, who hopes to find a new revelation of the Divine Nature amidst struggle and uncertainty. These souls look beyond the bend in the road. The authors in the following collection tell their own stories of witnessing God’s loving presence along the unfolding path.

THESE ARE THE BORDERLANDS

By Jenny Richards

After a three-hour journey on a winding highway that parallels the border wall, we arrive in Mexicali, a small municipality whose name was formed from the first two syllables of Mexico and California as a gesture of international friendship. “Borders are places of revelation,” Brother Keith, my professor, told me in our last Zoom meeting before our pilgrimage. I wonder what the border will reveal to me.

Reflecting theologically on the issue of migration is not only an outer journey, but also an inner journey into the human heart. If we allow it, the migrant experience can become a sacred text as we seek to understand the emotional and spiritual terrain of their inner landscape. The outer journey of a migrant—leaving behind the familiar, facing uncertainty, and seeking a place of safety, security, and rest—mirrors the inner journey of the soul in profound ways. Both journeys demand resilience, faith, and a willingness to embrace the unknown.

I approach this topic as a human being, a Christian, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a chaplain, and a student of theology. As a human being, migration speaks to me as the plight of my brothers and sisters in search of a more dignified life. As a Christian, migration speaks to me as both a blessing and a test of Christian faith, highlighting my calling to love the stranger. As a Latter-day Saint, migration speaks to me as a profound covenant challenge, reminding me of the responsibility I have to mourn with those that mourn and bear others’ burdens, perhaps particularly the burdens of the vulnerable and marginalized. As a chaplain, migration speaks to me as an issue that demands a pastoral response rooted in love, justice, and inclusion. And as a student of theology, I seek to open a sacramental window into the migratory nature of our universal spiritual journey, looking to our border-crossing Savior who left his homeland, entered into our mortal territory, and “journeyed through the borderlands of our broken existence to lay down his life on the cross and to give himself for the salvation of all.”

There is perhaps no better text through which to examine the complex inner terrain of migrants than that of the Psalms. Indeed, just as the “forced migrant-Psalmist” in biblical exile once lamented his plight beside the rivers of Babylon, so now do refugees weep in their own experience of exile, seeking relief from violence and oppression and yearning for freedom, self-expression, and a sense of community and belonging. Making up the “great hymnbook in the heart of the Bible,” the Psalms invite us to consider the full dimensions of the mortal experience. They invite us, as does Jesuit priest Walter Burghardt, into a “long, loving look at the real,” offering a window into both the bright lights and the dark corners of the human soul.

As we consider the “graced-human interplay” between the lived expression of modern-day migrants and the Psalms, we must ask ourselves, “How do our migrant brothers and sisters find hope amid some of the most hopeless of situations? How do they find life in the midst of death? And how do they ‘trust in God within some of the most seemingly godless of experiences?’”

These are the borderlands—and places of revelation.

We arrive at our destination: Posada Del Migrante, or “Inn of Migrants.” The concrete building’s exterior is painted pink, with a cheerful sign that reads “amor, esperanza y caridad.” Love, hope, and charity. A heavy iron gate with a large padlock seals the entrance. We wait quietly, taking in our surroundings for a few moments before we are greeted by twinkly-eyed Catholic Sister Suzanne Jabro. Unlocking the gate, Sister Suzanne leads us up several steps, and we find ourselves in a dusty courtyard. A brightly painted two-story concrete structure that resembles a low-budget motel forms one side of the courtyard; a tall, gray concrete wall flanks the other. Rusted iron railings line the outdoor hallway of the second floor, and sheets of fabric are strung over the top of the courtyard, offering a small barrier from the heat and the occasional rainstorm. A simple outdoor kitchen is located on the ground level. Children run to greet us. Adults sit quietly on stoops and worn lawn chairs. The atmosphere feels heavy and somber.

Sister Suzanne gives us an overview of the shelter’s history, which began when a local woman named Altagracia Tamayo Madueño started offering free lunches to the community. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting logjam, a daily community meal grew into the acquisition of this shelter and an additional one for hundreds of migrants in transit. “People needed a place to stay,” is how Sister Suzanne describes Altagracia’s impetus for such an ambitious project. “It filled a critical need in a critical time.” Sister Suzanne is the founder of Border Compassion, an all-volunteer nonprofit that is now the engine behind Posada Del Migrante. Her ministry is remarkable and life-giving, providing food and shelter to up to 300 migrant individuals and families here in this space of liminality. Sister Suzanne points out that despite the incredible work of Border Compassion’s ministry, migrant shelters like this are meant to function as temporary accommodations, not as permanent dwellings. Shelters offer a thin line of protection, but they are not ideal.

While we are greeted kindly by the migrant families, stress and worry are palpable. We learn that many have been waiting here for months for an appointment date secured through the CBP One app, a primary tool used by asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border to schedule appointments and start the process of claiming asylum protections. Most of these individuals and families have fled cartels, violence, poverty, and persecution, and returning to their home countries is not possible. Just three days prior, the CBP One app was shut down without explanation, and questions abound.

With us today are several immigration attorneys from San Diego, who have volunteered their time to go over each individual’s case and answer questions. The majority of the adults meet with the attorneys in the courtyard, and I go with some of the children to the makeshift classroom on the upper level of the shelter. The kids are eager to have visitors. I don’t speak Spanish, but the language of common humanity connects us. We draw pictures of flowers, butterflies, and hearts. We play card games. I play a dozen riveting rounds of Connect Four with a young boy who has created his own set of rules. We growl, squeal, and giggle. Despite the momentary distraction, I am aware of the reality that these children are not in school. They do not leave this iron-clad place to walk around the block or play soccer, and they know in their very sinews the deep spiritual pain of homelessness, exile, and nonbelonging. This is pain I do not know. “Behold your little ones,” Jesus taught. Today, beholding these precious little ones causes me to ask how we got to this point as a human community.

From below, I hear a sound—a guttural howl that takes my breath away. It is a mother, doubled over, clutching a lawn chair as she sobs in the courtyard. She has just been told that there isn’t a path forward for her and her children to obtain legal entrance into the United States. Today’s news is unbearably grim for her and so many others. Anguish fills the air like a dense fog. Gradually, each of the children leave the classroom and quietly rejoin their families. I feel, in this liminal space of profound suffering, that the migrants have joined the Psalmist as they cry out in their pain.

Several Catholic deacons arrived while I was playing with the kids. They are here to bless any and all who desire it, and I watch now as men, women, and children form lines to receive a blessing. Sister Suzanne appears at my side, urging me to “go to the front.” She nudges me forward. “Here,” she whispers. “You stand here. Touch each person. You can bless them, too.” As the deacon’s hands are placed on bowed heads, my hand rests on their shoulders. Tears flow audibly and freely. I cannot understand the words being spoken, but I feel their impact as I offer my own raw, generative, ungendered priesthood power to this moment of great need. Crossing borders of can’ts and don’ts, beyond questions of who and how and when, I glimpse, in that blessed moment, my full potential as a covenant woman of God. Blessed are the poor, the suffering, the persecuted, the stranger. This is who Jesus came for, who he died for. This woman, who shakes as she weeps. This dark-eyed girl, who studies me with a soft smile before bowing her head. This young man, who looks to be my son’s age and is here alone. You are blessed, and you, and you. Every trembling soul. Our God who dwells in both abundance and particulars is present in this pain. This is a God who is reaching into their inner journeys, crossing the border from heaven to earth in order to succor his people.

With my hands touching shoulders, I stand quietly and humbly not only as a participant in the act of blessing, but as a witness to the holy labor of lament. Stirring cries reveal pain, giving “utterance to the God who hears the cries of his people, accompanies them in their pain, and offers a sense of justice when all meaning is lost.” Just as the Psalmist was not afraid to speak to God about sadness, devastation, injustice, anger, and grief, the beloved people around me are naming their inner terrain and giving voice to this fundamental need for self-expression. Indeed, the recurring theme of lament is woven through the fabric of the doctrine of Christ’s Atonement. From Jesus’s cry on the cross to our tears for his suffering, and from our sorrow for sin to the grief we feel for the world, we are reminded that we can express our deepest sorrows to the One who understands grief. When we feel forsaken, he has felt forsaken too. In the saving, there is sorrow, and lament—like the Atonement—is a gift of grace.

It’s noon, and the kids are hungry. Eager to help, I ask what I can do to assist in preparing lunch. Several women insistently motion for me to sit at a special table prepared for today’s visitors at the shelter. They want to serve me. A sudden sense of reverence accompanies the recognition that I am experiencing a profound moment of radical hospitality. These women, pushed to the edge of their human vulnerability, have lost their homes and everything that is familiar to them. They are in crisis. Many have been separated from their children and loved ones. They have endured violence and exploitation. They are experiencing not only physical homelessness, but legal homelessness, cultural homelessness, and social homelessness, with all of the accompanying trauma. And yet, here in this moment, they are the hosts, and I am the guest. I am the stranger being welcomed. I am the foreigner being given a meal. I am the outsider who is being invited with open arms to come, sit, and dine. These women did not choose nor do they deserve the dire circumstances they are in, just as I did not choose nor do I deserve the comfortable, privileged life that I enjoy. This profound realization is revelatory.

I think of the banquet described by the Psalmist. Here in the Posada Del Migrante shelter today, this folding table has become the common ground where the Divine meets humankind and humankind meets the Divine. As is the case in so many table scenes, Jesus, as both host and guest, offers radical hospitality to the rejected of the world. He is known for eating with sinners and publicans—the disenfranchised of life. Jesus’s table is often a scene of divine leveling, where hierarchies, legalistic purity codes, and power dynamics are abolished through radical acts of friendship and fellowship, crossing borders created by narrow interpretations of the law. And here, today, in a most profound encounter, it is the very people who are disenfranchised and who have been rejected who are the hosts. In choosing to offer me hospitality, these women are exercising a form of agency in the midst of their powerlessness. Revelation in real-time expands my understanding of Jesus’s mortal ministry of persistent, subversive reordering. Jesus never plays by our rules. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, my heart burns within me as I begin to see. The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

A blessing is offered on the food, and bread is broken. The table, the feast, the guests, the hosts—all seem symbolic, a Eucharistic bending of time and understanding. This is Christianity in its lived, shared, eaten, and spoken fullness.

After lunch, mismatched chairs are pulled into a cluster, and a large portable speaker emerges. To my surprise, laughter erupts in the courtyard as both children and adults circle a row of chairs, their steps quickening with the lively beat of the music. When the sound suddenly cuts off, chaos erupts—everyone lunges for a seat, some sliding in just in time while others collapse in playful defeat. One player is eliminated with resounding cheers and groans, and the game continues, excitement building with each round. After a winner is declared with triumphant whoops, our eyes turn delightedly to a brightly colored piñata swaying from the upper railing of the shelter’s stairway. Shouts and laughter fill the air as children and adults take turns swinging, their blindfolds adding to the fun. With each near miss or glancing blow, the crowd cheers and teases until a final, mighty swing sends candy showering to the ground. Children scramble in joyful chaos, while the adults chuckle, watching the sweet reward of their shared excitement unfold.

I stand all amazed as I witness the energy and effort of deliberate joy taking place in the midst of heavy sadness that feels gravitational. Joy, in a theological sense, is more than mere happiness—it is an act of resistance against despair, injustice, and oppression. In the Psalms, joy often arises in the midst of suffering—a movement from places of pain to places of faith, gratitude, trust, confidence, and love. This kind of joy is not passive; it is a defiant affirmation of hope, a refusal to let darkness have the final word. It is the assurance that God’s kingdom is breaking into the world, even when circumstances seem bleak. To practice such joy is to proclaim that love and hope are more powerful than fear and destruction. To behold it today feels like a current of grace, leaving me with a silent, sacred recognition of the Divine at work.

Back at my hotel in San Diego after our four-day pilgrimage, I can’t sleep. I finally give up and head to the little gym on the ground floor as dawn breaks gently, painting the sky in soft hues of lavender, rose, and gold. No one else is there. I put in my earbuds and turn on the treadmill, hoping to get in a good workout to start my day.

This is not to be. After no more than a minute, tears form in my eyes and then begin to slide down my cheeks. I wipe them brusquely and try to keep running. Another minute passes, and out of my soul comes a ragged sob. One after another after another. I stop the treadmill and fall to my knees on the floor of the gym. Pain pours out of my soul. I cannot unsee what I have seen. I cannot unhear what I have heard.

“Increase your spiritual capacity to receive revelation,” President Russell M. Nelson has pleaded. Often we are culturally conditioned to think that revelation is only possible in austerity; in quiet, clean places carefully curated for optimal outcomes. But today, I learn that revelation from God can inbreak amidst low, wracking sobs on a dirty hotel gym floor, allowing me the opportunity to have my heart cracked wide open in solidarity with the pain and suffering of our migrant brothers and sisters. As I feel called into this solidarity, the revelation I receive here at the borderlands is that of anger—white-hot rage, in fact, at the globalized indifference of society towards the marginalized, victimized, and persecuted. Anger, I think, is more virtuous than indifference.

My experience might best be described as an intercessory prayer. Much like the Psalmist who expressed trust in God’s power and called on God’s presence in times of need, my petition is a plea to God to cross the border into my own heart, to break the chains that keep me isolated and separate from others, and to shatter me out of the paradigm that is centered on a pious pursuit of individual worthiness, salvation, and exaltation. My intercessory prayer is for the individuals whose interior lives had, for a brief moment, crossed into my interior life. “I am not free until they are free. I am not saved until they are saved.” This statement arises again and again as I pray and weep, and it continues to reverberate in my soul.

Jesus, the divine migrant, calls us to the kind of gritty, challenging, embodied love that transcends all prejudices, all petty interests—a love that rests on the “premise that our lives are ultimately interconnected and interdependent with each other.” Jesus’s divine love and divine anger challenge us to engage. He calls us to name and then close the gap between pious religious isolation and the “fundamental task of life, which is to work out the healing, just ordering, and integration of our relationships.” Christ, distressingly disguised as the poor, the hungry, and the migrant, is asking us to see, to care, and to act. What is at stake is our humanity, our journey through this world, or, in a word, our salvation.

These are the borderlands—and places of revelation.

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Jenny Richards recently received her Master of Theological Studies degree from the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego. She began a chaplain residency in Salt Lake City in Fall 2025. Jenny writes at @walkingtheroadtojericho

Art by Sarah Hawkes: @sarah.hawkes.art / sarahhawkesart.weebly.com

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“As we become more aware of the complexity and the internal contradictions in so-called orthodox Christian history, I see less and less room on any legitimate scholarly grounds for not taking Mormonism as really the most important innovation in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.” -Samuel Loncar

Samuel Loncar is a scholar who works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, science, technology, and art. Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis sat down with Loncar and Terryl Givens for a wide-ranging conversation about the meaning of the Latter-day Saint movement and why it should receive more serious engagement from theologians and scholars of religion.

You can listen to or read the conversation below.

Zachary Davis: Sam, Mormonism is new, but in your reading, it’s also recovering something much older.

Samuel Loncar: I’m somewhat heretical as a philosopher, in the sense that I take history much more seriously than is conventional in current academic philosophy.

Terryl Givens: Heresy is a positive term in our culture, you know.

Samuel Loncar This is great for me—I’m finally finding my people.

I’d had a background interest in Mormonism, partly out of respect for the people I’d met from the community. But as I did more work, I began to realize—somehow, in a way that’s really difficult to explain, just through coincidences—that Joseph Smith seemed to have uncovered aspects of what I came to see, on my own as a scholar, as essentially important parts of what we would call ancient Christianity, which I think of as essentially a philosophical school.

And there’s no way he could have had access to the materials I’ve had access to, which is basically the last hundred, hundred-fifty years of scholarship on ancient Christianity and its historical milieu.

Zachary Davis: Now, Terryl, you said heresy is not a curse word in our tradition. Maybe you could talk a little about some of the early heresies in the early centuries of Christian development. There are interesting linkages with some of our theology.

Terryl Givens: I think of three heresies in particular—well, you could actually go to four—that reemerge in altered form in Mormonism.

First of all, I’d point to Marcion, one of the earliest and most important of the heretics—important in the sense of how seriously the threat was taken by the rest of Christianity. One scholar, Adolf von Harnack, actually says Christianity is essentially just an extended response to Marcion.

Marcion was, according to some accounts, at one time a mainstream Christian who found it impossible to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with this new Christian message embodied in Jesus Christ. He came to believe that the Old Testament represented a creator God who was evil, whose character was completely at odds—the vindictiveness, the wrathfulness, the vengeful, retributive kind of justice he embodied could not be reconciled. So he believed that God had to be love in the sense that John said, “God is love.” It’s not just one of his attributes. In some ways, I think Mormonism recaptures that belief when Joseph Smith moves increasingly in the direction of a much more inclusive, universalistic faith.

So that’s one way in which the Marcionite tendency is recuperated by Joseph Smith. And of course, there’s the Origenist heresy, condemned by Justinian in the sixth or seventh century. Two principal aspects of that heresy: one was the eternal preexistence of the human soul, and the other was the apokatastasis—the belief that eventually God would find a way to recover the entirety of the human race into his kingdom.

Joseph Smith, of course, teaches very early on the doctrine of the eternal nature of the human soul—its premortal existence—which seems to be, again, a modern reenactment of that Origenist heresy. One could also point to Pelagius. As recently as—well, I think even since Pope John Paul II, Pelagianism has been invoked as a kind of modern threat to the church. Pelagianism is generally construed as the belief that denies original sin and affirms free will. In some interpretations of Pelagius—though I don’t think they’re fully accurate—Christ is not necessary, because we can simply choose to do good and effectively redeem ourselves.

Joseph Smith’s emphasis on the freedom of the will, and his absolute denial of original sin and depravity, seem to move in that direction. And then you could also talk about Arianism—the great debate of the first church councils: is Christ subordinate to the Father? Mormonism quite clearly and emphatically indicates that yes, there is a kind of hierarchy: Christ is subordinate to the Father within a priesthood hierarchy.

So all of those heresies find a comfortable place within Mormonism in one form or another.

Zachary Davis: Maybe another historical question for you, Sam: where is Christianity now?

Samuel Loncar: Well, that’s such a difficult question. I’m tempted to just comment on what Terryl was just saying, but I’ll try to get at it indirectly.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that Origen was originally, in many ways, the founder of Christian orthodoxy. It’s over the evolution of the Orthodox Church—by the fourth and fifth century, as you were saying, and by the time of Justinian—that, I think, the Council of Orange condemns a form of semi-Pelagianism, in a period that’s really post-Augustinian.

So the Western Latin Church after Augustine ends up with a kind of internal tension about its own history, which is truthfully connected to a long-simmering split between the Latin Christian Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church—which has always been more directly influenced by the Platonic tradition because of its Greek-speaking heritage.

Origen, in one sense, really was representative of something very mainstream. And this, again, is part of what I find very interesting about Mormonism: if you read the Gospels, they all seem to assume the possibility of Elijah coming back—which is a very strange thing that no one mentions, but it’s assumed in every Gospel that there’s a debate over whether John the Baptist is Elijah.

If you ask how that could have been possible—what was even the thought-world of the first-century Gospel writers?—it’s actually in direct continuity with Origen and what we’d call broadly Platonism. It seems Philo believed in the pre-existence of the soul, and it’s very likely, depending on how you interpret the Essenes, that they may have as well.

So there’s a very deep connection here, and it’s linked to a strong view of moral agency. In Plato’s Republic, part of the picture of the soul’s pre-existent state is that it’s the freedom which the soul misuses, or learns to use well, that results in aspects of its embodied condition.

Of course, Mormonism has a much more pro-material view of that. But I do think that’s a remarkable disconnection—that there’s something at the origin of Christianity itself that, in a way, is never really reconciled. There are deep internal contradictions, and I think that’s part of why Mormonism today, or Christianity today, needs to become more self-conscious.

After two centuries of what people would call critical scholarship, I think scholarship hasn’t been critical enough. If you think of Christianity as what’s possible using the best methods of all available scholarship—not just any given dogmatic teaching of a communion—then I think Christianity is in a space where it doesn’t know how to draw its own boundaries.

And that issue is deeply connected to the inclusion or exclusion of Mormonism from the self-understanding of Christianity by non-Mormon Christians. There are good reasons, from the standpoint of what we’d call lower or orthodox Christianity, that Mormons have been excluded—because they are indeed radically, self-consciously in contradiction to orthodox Christianity as articulated in the Nicene Creed and subsequent councils.

But we also know—as the Catholic Church has had to reckon with—that there are Eastern churches, like the Monophysite churches, which are technically heretical by those exact same creedal standards, and which the Catholic Church is now in communion with. So I think the truth is, as we become more aware of the complexity and the internal contradictions in so-called orthodox Christian history, I see less and less room, on any legitimate scholarly grounds, for not taking Mormonism as really the most important innovation in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation.

Terryl Givens: I’m really happy to hear that diagnosis, because I think it’s accurate. In some ways, Latter-day Saints have been deluded about the amount of progress that’s been made in the last generation. The growth and success of Mormon studies—both as an intellectual phenomenon and as a publishing micro-industry—has led many people to believe, “Oh, that means Latter-day Saints finally have a place at the table. They’re being taken seriously. They’re being published by academic presses like Oxford, Chapel Hill, Illinois.” In reality, I think that’s a misperception of what’s happening. It’s clear to me—in part based on my own personal experience with Oxford—that they found a ready market, mostly among Latter-day Saints themselves, for these books, and so it was a financial decision.

It doesn’t represent, I don’t think, any significant academic legitimacy that’s been achieved. If you look, for example, at Black studies or women’s studies, there was a time when it was clear their voices were being excluded from the canon, so demands were made for women’s studies and Black studies departments, and those demands were met.

But we’re now at a point where one would expect to find women and minorities represented in the canon—in general literature classes, general history courses. It seems to me that Mormon studies may be stuck, in some ways, because we’ve been content to have our own corner of the sandbox, where we talk to each other and present at conferences and publish.

But, as Sam indicates, we’re not yet actually part of the more general Christian conversation—we’re always kind of red-flagged as, “Well, that’s a Latter-day Saint voice participating in this more general dialogue.”

Zachary Davis: Sam—you’re an unusually creative and gifted scholar, and you’ve come to recognize there’s more to Mormonism than meets the eye, that there’s substance there that rewards attention. Do you believe other scholars in your field and beyond will rediscover the interesting aspects of our theology the way you have?

Samuel Loncar: If you think about it from a sociological standpoint, if you look at all the other Christian communions, you see phenomena that historians would point to as similar to Mormonism—just as you point out in much of your work.

But none of them create anything like the Mormon Church. Nothing like it. Methodism—none of these things create something so analogous to what we’d think of as more like an Orthodox Jewish community: so incredibly cohesive. It’s obviously very rocky and complicated in one deep sense, I’m sure, but it creates, to this day, an amazingly well-ordered social way of life.

Whether people like it or dislike it, there’s something quite distinct about it. And the ability to have done that under the crosswinds and pressures of what people call modernity, and to have done it as a modern phenomenon with these very unusual combinations of theological and philosophical commitments—that’s an extraordinary phenomenon historically, one that I think requires much more explanation.

There should be a kind of head-scratching wonderment at what this phenomenon is. And it’s complicated enough that there’s room for people of many different interests, as we see. But I do think the lack of sustained interest in intellectual history, and the lack of a deep connection between the history of ideas and the history of theology motivating social and cultural history, makes it harder for mainstream scholarship to recognize how significant Mormonism is.

Zachary Davis: Mormonism was born in modernity. It’s democratic in a quite modern way, and yet it still maintains a strict hierarchical structure that creates order. But there’s an interesting balance—a priesthood of all believers, and yet a way of ensuring you don’t get mass splintering into theological individualism. Do you think, Terryl, that this makes it more suited to the problems of modernity?

Terryl Givens: Yeah—I’m just thinking out loud here, but it seems to me that it’s modernist and postmodernist at the same time, in very different ways. On the one hand, Joseph Smith works from the presupposition that there’s a kind of master narrative, an ur-text, which he is recuperating.

And we get all these bits and pieces of that originary vision manifesting—he has visions of parchments, revelation is given to him, he recovers writings of Abraham and of Moses. But I think we’ve crippled ourselves, to some extent, intellectually and theologically, by thinking there was a totality of Christianity that flowered in the first two centuries, and that we’re just working in a kind of nostalgic way to recuperate and recover that.

I think David Bentley Hart is right that we have to divest ourselves of that nostalgia and realize that a growing tradition has to keep evolving new ways of engaging modern challenges and dilemmas. So yes, it’s true—the Articles of Faith say, “In the same organization that existed in the primitive church.”

But I hope Mormonism has a broader, more exciting vision than just recuperating a kind of ecclesiology that was present in the second-century Roman Empire.

Samuel Loncar: Yeah, I’d add that the primitivism so characteristic of Protestantism—all the reformers see themselves as returning to a pristine condition.

That’s a huge part, of course, of the nineteenth-century democratic primitivist movements—Campbell, the Churches of Christ, and other movements analogous to Mormonism from that broader cultural and religious-historical standpoint. And the problem with primitivism, historically, is that it always ends up being false.

Once you actually study the first- and second-century church—this is why church history in the German tradition ended up being so subversive of orthodox categories—no one finds their church there. The famous accusation, in question form, that Cajetan put to Luther was, “Where has your church been for a thousand years?”

So I think the Mormon emphasis, at least in its theological structures—as I understand it from your work on ongoing revelation—allows, at least in principle, an adaptability that’s very hard to achieve when you’re in a communion theologically tied to its own shoelaces.

If it stands on that point, it’s going to trip. It’s very difficult if you say, “This is exactly what this was.” Then you have to protect people from knowledge, because if they just study history, they’ll realize that’s not true. What’s striking to me is that Mormonism—the more we know about the complexity of ancient Christianity, the more we realize that “Christianity” itself is a kind of belated category.

So the ancient phenomenon of these messianic movements centered on Jesus—Mormonism increasingly looks like it fits uncannily well, not with one version of them, but with a strange, emerging composite of traditions we didn’t really recover until the recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Gnostic corpus.

These are quite recent—the last seventy years or so—recoveries of these texts. And my assumption is that, in that sense, Mormonism is still ahead—it may even be ahead of its own tradition, because there’s an integration of scholarship that I think is possible. That’s something I’m interested in, in my own work—like Joseph Smith’s interest in Enoch.

The Enoch Seminar in modern academia is maybe thirty years old. So the scholarly study of Enoch and the Enochic texts in the modern academy is very recent. But what it shows unquestionably—even to a person of zero interest or knowledge about Mormonism—is that the Enochic tradition, and these traditions of celestial revelation and revelations of knowledge about preexistent states, were very important in the milieu of what we’d call Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.

And somehow, from a scholarly standpoint, Joseph Smith’s interest in that, and his production of texts related to it, is an extraordinary phenomenon that requires—I think that’s a very direct example where it’s almost as if—maybe part of this is romantic imagination, but even then, I don’t think that knowledge was available.

So the very intuition—a kind of radical Protestant intuition, you might say—that there’s something very deep that isn’t present in any form of Christianity, as he told it in the original revelation, that the church isn’t yet in its full form... You could say there’s nothing more unoriginal than that; every new church basically thinks, “The true church isn’t here. I’m going to start the true church.” Well, then the question is: what happens in two hundred years to those traditions? Most of them don’t look anything like what Mormonism has achieved.

Zachary Davis: So are you saying that when it comes to Enoch or temple theology, Joseph Smith really couldn’t have known these were ancient practices, at least not in the way he articulated them?

Sam Loncar: Well, he could have known in the sense that he read the Bible and other texts, but in the way I mean as a scholar—this is something I’m actively researching. I’m trying to figure out what he could possibly have read, just to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

But it’s uncanny. Let me put it this way: the recovery of the importance of the temple in biblical theology is basically a generation old. That’s how recent it is. One of the leading scholars on that, for example, is Jon Levenson, who wrote an article in the Journal of Religion in the 1970s. Levenson is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and a brilliant biblical commentator and theologian who knows the rabbinic Jewish commentary tradition as well as critical scholarship, inside and out.

His work is brilliant, but there aren’t a lot of people taking it up. Of course, there’s also Margaret Barker, who I think is well known in the Mormon community, and Crispin Fletcher-Louis. It’s still very nascent. From the standpoint of the modern academic phenomenon, I think it’s simply the case that if someone wants to say Christians have always taken the temple seriously, that’s just false.

It’s just not true. Protestantism in general did not take the temple seriously as a phenomenon, and it was very hard to know much about the temple. But over the past two hundred years of historical scholarship—since Jewish scholars, since what’s called the science of the study of Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, founded in the nineteenth century by Abraham Geiger—there’s been more than a century of rigorous historical scholarship on the Second Temple, which is part of what people like Barker are able to build on.

Barker builds on the whole tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical scholarship to present what she’s presenting, and yet it turns out to be of extraordinary relevance to Mormons, because Mormonism seems to do something, sociologically, that no Protestant communion has ever done—and, to my knowledge, no communion has done, except arguably the early church: it combines what you could call a sectarian emphasis, in the way the sociologist of religion Ernst Troeltsch means it, as opposed to a state church.

So you have a kind of communal assembly that’s voluntary—people opt into it—but there’s also a very strong familial authority, with the priesthood of the male head of the home, which you could say is somewhat analogous to Jewish practice, where much Jewish ritual is observed in the family and in the home, and then you go to synagogue.

But then, of course, there’s no Jewish temple since the destruction of the Second Temple. So Smith recovers all three elements of something that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t really existed—certainly not in Protestantism: there’s a churchly element, in the sense of a voluntary sectarian community one freely chooses or is born into and stays in.

But then there’s also an essentially secret or esoteric ritual dimension, which isn’t just the church—it’s an actual temple. That’s so radical that I think, basically because of all the prejudice against Mormonism since its founding, it hasn’t been appreciated. I don’t think academics are even going to be able to appreciate it until they can appreciate the significance of the work on the temple in their own fields, like biblical studies and the history of theology.

So that’s a second dimension to the challenge of why Mormonism hasn’t been more justly received in the academic community—besides the issue I mentioned earlier. This is a very complex issue that’s at the heart of my own work: I think the temple was at the heart of what we call Christianity.

The temple is the literal body of the human being as a microcosm. The temple is the actual dwelling place of the God of Israel at the time Paul is writing. And the temple is, in some sense, the cosmos itself. But that seems to basically vanish, without much apparent trace. Then suddenly, since this revolution in scholarship in biblical studies and the history of theology, we now have the resources to actually look at Mormonism and say, “I don’t know how they did this, but this is somehow almost in conversation with the scholarship that’s happening now.”

Terryl Givens: What Sam is saying reminds me that Patrick Mason has pointed out that Joseph Smith never used the expression “restoration of the church.” In some ways, we’re never going to stop using that expression, but it serves us poorly, because the restorationist model was strip away, strip away, strip away—get back to the skeletal framework.

Joseph Smith is all about amplification, amplification, eclecticism, and syncretism. The expression he encounters, apparently sometime in 1833 or 1834—he gloms onto this expression: the coming of the church out of the wilderness. And suddenly that starts—

He re-edits some of the revelations, like what’s now section five of the Doctrine and Covenants. He’s captivated by this notion of a kind of inspired eclecticism, where he’s assimilating, gathering, harvesting all the best elements of these “voices in the wilderness” referred to in Revelation chapter 12.

I think that’s a much more productive and accurate model for understanding how Joseph Smith’s mind was working, and how the project was unfolding in absolutely unpredictable ways that weren’t constrained by a fixation on a primitive model.

Zachary Davis: Could you say a little, Terryl, about why the LDS Church has traditionally been hesitant to draw on theology as a mode of teaching and exploring? And do you see any changes recently?

Terryl Givens: Here’s just one symptomatic anecdote about the need. When Prop 8 was the most controversial topic in the Church—and in the country—I received a phone call from a beloved family member who said, “Dad, I’m being murdered out here in my graduate program, because all my colleagues want to know how on earth I can possibly defend or support the Church’s position.”

She said, “If I were Catholic, I’d have two thousand years of theology to draw on.” She said, “All I’ve got are pronouncements from the pulpit. There has to be some kind of reasoned basis for these theological and doctrinal positions we espouse.” And there was really nothing I could say.

Theology has had a very contentious, seesawing history in the Church. Few members realize that when Joseph Smith approved the Lectures on Faith for teaching and publication, they were originally called the Lectures on Theology. Joseph Smith said theology was the most important pursuit to which one could devote oneself.

But by the time we get to Wilford Woodruff, he’s calling theology the greatest tomfoolery in the world. Theology comes to be associated with an apostate tradition that no longer has revelation, and so relies on human reason to replace, rather than supplement, revelation. By the 1930s, suddenly, we have a golden age again, where intellect is valued and prized, and the Church deliberately chooses its leading intellects to write Church manuals and curricula.

Then we get to 1939, 1940, and it reverses in the other direction. We get to a point where, as recently as the 1980s, Eugene England is called on the carpet for publishing works he called speculative theology. He made no claims to doctrinal authority, yet he was still told to cease and desist publishing in the area of speculative theology.

So it’s still a term fraught with suspicion. Even Hugh Nibley—maybe the greatest Mormon intellectual of the twentieth century, or one of them—himself said, “Theology is what happens when revelation fails.” Which was a terrible thing to say. I think if more Latter-day Saints could understand the Catholic respect for and appraisal of theology—

They understand that theology works in service of authority. If you believe in an inspired leadership, an inspired tradition, then it’s the task of theology to explicate, expand, and enlarge the domain of critical thought about God and his revelations. So, yes, I’d like to see less suspicion in several quarters, because I think theology can provide an invaluable service.

There’s another kind of resistance—and this is probably just pop-cultural, not unique to Latter-day Saints—the assumption that discipleship is lived religion, and theology is just abstract speculation. Even people like Peter Enns—a great writer on faith, who erects a hard-and-fast distinction between doctrine and practice, and says one of the failings of Christianity is that it’s been so obsessed with doctrine when it’s really about practice—I’d say no, the danger is in separating those two.

Christ, by virtue of the kind of life he lived, embodied important principles and truths and ideals. I think Christianity goes astray precisely in not recognizing the overlap and congruence of those terms. Once you render the love of God into an abstract idea you can speculate about, separate and apart from lived religion, that’s where you get into trouble.

So that’s a long way of saying: I think our young people are hungering for theological investigations that enrich and supplement religious commitment—but don’t substitute for personal experience of the sacred.

One reason I think theology has lost its place of respect in the modern epistemic hierarchy is the rise of science as a counter-authority that generally receives more respect from modern subjects.

Sam, you’ve given a great deal of thought to the relationship between religion and science, and yet you still think theology is a critical field to engage with and study. So I wonder if you could share how you think about the terms “religion” and “science,” and why you believe anyone interested in the truth should engage with theology.

Samuel Loncar: Yeah. I recently published an article—I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, since it’s quite academic—called “Science and Religion: An Origin Story,” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, which makes a more complex version of the argument I’ll summarize here. There’s a very basic question, strangely not often asked by historians of theology and philosophy: where does theology come from?

The answer is Plato’s Republic. The first occurrence of the term theologia is in the Republic, when Plato is discussing the poets and the importance of theology as the foundation of any true state. So, first of all, the theological tradition isn’t separate from the philosophical tradition—this is one of the biggest myths that characterizes Christian theology in general, including academic Christian theology.

My work challenges this. It’s simply not true: theology is part of philosophy. Philosophy, in the ancient world, was the closest thing to what we now call religion. That word—”religion”—didn’t originate in its modern sense until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or maybe even as late as the nineteenth.

This is well known to people who specialize in the origin and concept of religion, like Peter Harrison. So, first of all, if we want to use the word “religion” for antiquity, we’re actually better off using the word “philosophy.”

Philosophia—philosophy, the love of wisdom. Think of Proverbs: “Get wisdom.” It’s the most important thing. What’s a sign of wisdom? That you love knowledge more than silver and gold. So the love of wisdom, and the fruit of wisdom, is the tree of life—wisdom is the tree; she’s the woman who yields eternal life to those who seek her.

So that’s at the foundation of a single source that we’ve split into what we now call philosophy and theology, or perhaps lived practice and theology within a tradition. I think all these splits have their reasons, but first of all, we should recognize theology has always been seen as inseparable from exactly what Terryl is saying—a way of life ordered toward truth and wisdom.

The idea that you could separate them is like saying science itself is a practice, not an intellectual activity—which would mean a person didn’t really know anything about what the word “science” means. The word “science” used to just mean rigorous knowledge.

And again, the word we used to use for science was philosophy. Look at Harvard—it still has chairs like the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Why? Because they thought moral philosophy was a science. The founder of economics in our sense—the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment sense—called it political economy, which is part of philosophy.

So we’ve used the word “science” in this narrow way in English only since roughly the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Victorian period. But really, according to Stephen Gaukroger, in his recent four-volume work with Oxford, not until the beginning of the twentieth century. So part of what we have to do is demystify our categories.

Science is knowledge. And if you want it to mean something very specific—like “science and religion are in conflict”—that’s just a story we’ve made up, for complicated reasons, in secular culture over the past hundred and fifty years or so.

Zachary Davis: So in ancient times, if you met someone from a different religion, how would you even talk about that? Would you say, “What god do you worship? What philosophy do you follow?”

Samuel Loncar: It’s a great question. But truthfully, one thing we know is, for example, if you look at the Jewish context—Philo and Josephus, the two greatest writers in Greek from the Jewish community, writing about the Jewish community at roughly the time of Christianity, both in the first century.

Josephus a little after Philo, after the destruction of the temple, in particular. They both refer to “the Jewish philosophy,” and describe it as having three major sects. The early Christian communities called themselves “the true philosophy.” So if they were going to call themselves anything, people would be interested in them as philosophers, like Plato.

Plato talks about the philosophy of the Egyptians. Pythagoras says he learned all their rituals and philosophy from the Egyptian priests when he was in Egypt. So if you look at the ancient Greek sources, they present the wisdom traditions of other cultures as those cultures’ “philosophies,” if they’re going to use a word at all.

But more generally, most people didn’t have a word for religion, and, like you said, Zach, they’d be interested in people’s gods. As scholars have shown, people were very respectful of one another’s gods in the polytheistic world. Gods essentially functioned as a kind of diplomacy. We know this partly because there are many inscriptions by non-Jewish people at Jewish synagogues we’ve discovered—synagogues thanking some Roman benefactor who gave a significant offering to the God of Israel worshiped in that place.

So, yes, if you were an intellectual, you’d basically call it philosophy—but most people wouldn’t have even thought of it as a separate thing. It was just an everyday part of life. Gods were everywhere. You couldn’t walk anywhere in the Roman Empire, as the Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen says, without practically knocking into an image of a god. They were just everywhere.

Zachary Davis: My whole life I’ve heard people say, “I don’t believe in religion, I believe in science.” Why is that a wrong way of thinking?

Samuel Loncar: Well, obviously, for that person, I’d want to respectfully help them clarify what they mean by that.

It’s understandable—we’ve obviously come to oppose science and religion. There’s a lot of work on that. But I think the sticking point—and here I’ll give ground to the people who attack religion—is revelation.

Theology, in the Christian tradition, was normed on the idea that it has infallible revelation. Once that became culturally incredible—basically around the nineteenth century, in the university system—the idea that theology itself is a science became incredible too.

But science, I think, is respected now because it seems more empirical, more open, more successful. Theology doesn’t have the equivalent of the technology science has produced. So I’d give every concession to the fact that, if you have to trust something as a word, people are in a way wise to trust science, because it means knowledge.

The question is: does trust in science mean you exclude religious considerations, or does it justify excluding you, as a human being, from taking religious considerations seriously? Many people think the former, and I’d just try to gently help them understand, based on the best historical and academic knowledge we have, that that’s not the case.

Your actual faith in science is part of the history of a religion you don’t understand, because science now functions for many people as a religion—and this isn’t something I’m making up, it’s very well known. The great French sociologist Auguste Comte thought science would replace religion; he was in the French positivist tradition. And many contemporary new atheists, like Dawkins, are unselfconsciously religious in their commitment—not to science as we’d all agree we should practice it, as an empirical, open-minded investigation of the natural world, but to something much more like a religious worldview that permits you to simply screen out certain questions you don’t want to deal with.

I think there could be nothing more unscientific than that. So as long as a person is open-minded, and science can include religion, then maybe they’re fine to think that way. But I think we’ve felt embattled because of an internal tension in our culture about whether our claims about revelation make sense.

If they don’t make sense, maybe we can replace revelation as an authority with science. That’s kind of been the big experiment Western culture has been running for the past hundred, hundred-fifty years.

Zachary Davis: Is Mormonism friendlier to science than other Christian religions?

Terryl Givens: I think it is—or certainly has the potential to be—in part because it has never embraced the kind of radical discontinuity between the material and spiritual worlds that, according to Coleridge, is the ground of all miracle: the heterogeneity of matter and spirit.

By not buying into that bifurcation, we don’t have to see them as in tension or opposed. Joseph Smith was a kind of naturalist theologian. The King Follett discourse is, in a sense, the ultimate naturalization of theology, where the whole border between the human and the divine just dissolves.

Natural law and moral law seem to function in similar, analogous ways. There’s never been a real conflict between science and religion in the Mormon past, except on the part of some individuals who were biblical fundamentalists within the Church and found Darwin problematic.

But there was never any official resistance to Darwinian developments, for example. I think there are all kinds of exciting things happening in consciousness studies today that posit consciousness as the ground of reality. And then you think of Doctrine and Covenants section 93, with its reference to the fact that, without agency—without an agential intelligence—there’s no existence.

So I think there are beautiful potential harmonies to be found between cutting-edge physics and cosmology and Latter-day Saint theology.

Zachary Davis: Should Latter-day Saints try to become more closely bound with the rest of the Christian tradition, or should we embrace our distinctiveness—stay that unusual church out in Utah?

Terryl Givens: That’s a great question. I think there’s been a shift in signaling, if I’m reading it correctly, from Church leadership on this topic.

As I’ve indicated before, it seems to me that the very architecture of the Utah temples reflects an attitude of aloofness and isolation—a kind of fortress mentality. I’ve been doing a study, in recent weeks, of how the language of the Book of Mormon describing “two churches only”—the church of the Lamb and the church of the devil—has been interpreted historically.

There’s been a historical reading that Latter-day Saints, as the one and only true church, means there’s no real bridge we can build to the rest of an apostate Christendom. All that language has shifted in the last generation. Zion now comes to be addressed from the pulpit as a multicultural, multi-religious project.

There’s a recognition that we have to engage diverse traditions and cultures, not condescendingly, but with an attitude of actual mutual appreciation. I personally think Zion is inconceivable as a project apart from the mutual participation of all people of goodwill and intent.

My own research over the past couple of decades has convinced me there’s a vast wealth of genuinely inspired prophetic utterance that has occurred in the so-called wilderness—one we would benefit from, individually, in our discipleship, by appropriating and appreciating. From Julian of Norwich to George MacDonald to Thomas Traherne, you name it.

So I think it’s not just possible but necessary for us to engage our fellow Christians more directly, and both sides would be bettered by the process.

Samuel Loncar: What do you think is the biggest misunderstanding the broader Christian community has of Mormonism?

Terryl Givens: I’m not sure the problem is really so much misperception as it is frustrated expectation. In my very first book, I was trying to answer this question: why did Mormonism elicit such a furious response, one totally disproportionate to any real threat it represented?

Polygamy is episodic—that’s one phase of it. But it seemed to me that the continuous thread running from 1820 to the present day is a kind of unabashed—some would say atavistic—impulse that refuses to modernize or allegorize the fundamentals of the Christian story, and their recapitulation in Mormonism’s foundations.

It’s the tangible facticity of gold plates and resurrected beings—what I call the collapse of sacred distance. And let me close with an anecdote that I think captures this for me. When I was at the beginning of my career, just beginning my work in Mormon studies and exploring these questions in depth, I had a colleague who had a visceral hatred of Mormonism.

It was tangible, and real, and we were friends in spite of it. One day, he reacted as if a snake had bitten him because I’d handed him a Mormon text and suggested he take a look at it. I finally said, “So what is it? What is it that creates this antipathy in you?”

He said, “All right, I’ll answer that.” He said, “Do you really believe that a million years from today, you’re going to be in heaven creating new worlds, new posterity?” And I said, “Let me ask you a question first. What are you going to be doing one million years from today?” He said, “Growing in the grace of Christ.”

I said, “No—11:30 a.m., the afternoon of November 3rd, one million years from today, I knock on your door. What will you be doing?” He thought a minute, and then all the air went out of his sails, and he said, “I see your point. Anything I could say would sound absurd.” And that, for me, captured it perfectly.

It’s that quintessential collapse of sacred distance—that Joseph Smith had the audacity to describe what the angels visiting him were wearing, the nature of a celestial sociality, and the project of engendering some kind of eternal posterity. Any definition of theology you’ll find in any handbook will tell you theology is the story of God’s dealings with man from the Garden of Eden to the final resurrection.

And Mormonism says, “No, we can go way beyond that in both directions.” It’s this audacity—it’s a reenactment, it seems to me, of what Christianity itself did in lifting the veil from God’s face. But we don’t have two thousand years of the mists of history to make that more palatable.

So I think it’s a kind of affront to a Christianity that has tried to render itself more respectable in the modern age.

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Samuel Loncar earned his Ph.D. at Yale University. He is a philosopher, scholar, and consultant who works at the intersection of philsophy, religion, science, technology, and art. His book Philosophy as Science and Relgion is forthcoming with Columbia University Press, and his scholarship has appeared in publications like Kant Studien, Religious Studie, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religions Philosophie, Metaphilosophy, and Zygon: A Journal of Religion & Science. Loncar is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, where he directs the Institute for the Meanings of Science.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare Magazine.

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This week’s reading marks five pivotal moments in the history of the house of Israel. Several of these moments are well known, but the central one is almost always passed over in silence or with scant mention. In this post, I propose to linger without apology over the consequential ministry of one of the Bible’s most unheralded figures, the prophet Huldah.

Of the five pivotal moments that structure our story, the first two and the last two are relatively well-known:

Moment 1: Israel (the northern kingdom) is conquered by Assyria and depopulated, its inhabitants either killed or taken into cities of exile (2 Kings 17:5–6).

Moment 2: The book of the law is rediscovered in the temple at Jerusalem and presented to Josiah, the penultimate king of the remaining southern kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 22:8–11).

Moment 3: To be addressed below.

Moment 4: In accordance with the law reiterated in the scroll, Josiah institutes earnest reforms in the worship of Jehovah throughout the kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 23:1–27).

Moment 5: Under Josiah’s rebellious successors, culminating with King Zedekiah, Babylon besieges and destroys Jerusalem and carries the remaining population away into captivity (2 Kings 24).

To appreciate the significance of the third and central moment, we return to the reaction that King Josiah had to the law being discovered and read to him (moment 2): “When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes,” a sign of extreme distress and mourning (2 Kings 22:11, NRSV). The reason, of course, is that, as recorded in the book, Jehovah had offered blessings for obedience to the law but also dire curses for disobedience, and Josiah immediately recognized that if this book was correct, Judah was in very serious trouble.

Shaken by the yawning gap between their current practices and what God prescribed in the law of Moses, King Josiah wanted to make sure there wasn’t a mistake in what he was hearing. So, “the king commanded the priest Hilkiah [and others], saying, ‘Go, inquire of the LORD for me, for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found; for great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:13).

Obediently, the king’s delegation sought out a prophet with recognized authority to speak in the name of Jehovah. They had a number of options here: Jeremiah was well known in Jerusalem for his dire warnings to the people, and the prophet Zephaniah was also active during this period. But on this occasion, they “went to the prophetess Huldah, the wife of Shallum,” who “resided in Jerusalem in the Second Quarter, where they consulted her” (2 Kings 22:14). What the prophet Huldah had to say was as blunt and powerful as anything her well-known contemporary prophets may have uttered. It was couched in a fourfold use of the oracular formula “thus says the LORD,” and should be quoted in full:

She declared to them, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus says the LORD, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read. Because they have abandoned me and have made offerings to other gods, so that they have provoked me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched. But as to the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the LORD, thus shall you say to him, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Regarding the words that you have heard, because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before the LORD, when you heard how I spoke against this place, and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and because you have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the LORD. Therefore, I will gather you to your ancestors, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace; your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring on this place.” (2 Kings 22:15–20; see also 2 Chronicles 34:22–28)

The king’s messengers brought this very sobering oracle back to him from Huldah, and over time, it all happened as she said it would. The chroniclers report that Josiah did his best to show Judah’s repentance. He abolished idolatrous equipment and practices from the temple and other sites and instituted an observance of Passover such as had not been seen “since the days of the judges who judged Israel” (2 Kings 23:22). Though he died in battle with Egypt, Josiah died a free man before he or his people could be brought under the violent oppression of Babylon. During his life, his people remained settled at Jerusalem, and he died “in peace,” having left his kingdom more in harmony with the Lord than it had been when he came to the throne. Nevertheless, though the Lord, through Huldah, had conceded to delay Judah’s fate until after the righteous king was dead, the doom of the nation as a whole was certain because of decades of unrepentant idolatry and neglect of the law of the Lord.

Huldah is referred to as “the prophetess” (emphasis added), suggesting that, in the author’s mind, she was a well-known figure with a stable reputation as a spokesperson for the Lord. As Jewish commentators have long recognized, she not only reiterated the consequences for idolatry spelled out in the law but, in doing so, she “authenticated the divine source of its teaching.”1 Robert Alter has pointed out that she apparently did all of this without even reading the text of the book in question,2 a seeric function that recalls how Joseph Smith himself operated when establishing scripture (for example, translating the Book of Mormon without reading directly from the plates, and delivering the contents of the lost revelation of John the Beloved in Doctrine and Covenants 7 without recourse to any textual artifact at all).

Perhaps most significantly, according to multiple scholars, Huldah’s confirmation of the validity of the book of the law of the Lord makes her “the first figure in Scripture, male or female, whose contribution to biblical history centered on verifying a written document as sacred and holy writ.” In other words, Huldah’s prophetic witness was a significant milestone in the formation of the Bible itself and in the emergence of a Jewish culture of respect for and diligent attention to the words of Torah that persists to this day. The practical reforms that took place under Josiah as a result of Huldah’s confirmation also sharpened the focus on the temple at Jerusalem as the exclusive ritual site for the worship of Jehovah, another defining element of Jewish belief and practice.

The female prophets of scripture seem too often to draw only the fleeting focus of modern commentators, but their presence in the ancient world was regarded as expected. Women as prophets are common in the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East generally, and the Israelite example is no exception.3 The Bible names four women who unambiguously acted or spoke with prophetic authority: Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Deborah (Judges 4:4), Huldah, and Anna (Luke 2:36–38). As Rabbi Neal Gold has written of these figures, “The Bible does not doubt their authenticity nor find their presence remarkable; it seems clear that female as well as male prophets abounded in Israel.” It is the modern era that appears to be more ill at ease with the idea of female prophets.4 But her contribution to the sacred history of the Bible is nevertheless well-documented in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.

Today, Huldah is most visibly remembered by a pair of gates—of double and triple arches, respectively—in the southern wall of the second temple complex at Jerusalem. These were the portals through which most worshippers passed into and out of the sacred site during the time of Jesus. The Lord himself would have used them on some of the most significant occasions of his mortal ministry. Tradition came to call them after her name to reflect that she had lived and prophesied in Jerusalem. Today, both gates have been partially obscured by later additions to the wall, and their arches sealed up with stone so that, to the eyes of the casual observer, the presence of Huldah’s gates, like her impact on sacred history itself, can be easy to miss. But for those with eyes to see, Huldah’s aperture onto the sacred can still be discerned. Just as the gates are structurally part of the edifice of the sacred precinct, Huldah’s prophetic legacy remains precious for the authoritative place it holds in the establishment of the word of the Lord and the building up of the kingdom of God.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Christen Dalsgaard (1824–1907).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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There’s an oft-invoked Zen Buddhist parable about a finger pointing at the moon. You’re supposed to follow the finger and fix your attention on the moon. If you instead focus on the finger, you’re missing the point. Or, maybe, caring too much about the point.

When it comes to religious texts, we talk about the literal meaning and the deeper symbolic meaning. But sometimes we make the mistake of assuming that the deeper meaning is just a “truer” interpretation of what the original author really meant.

You can read the Bible, for instance, literally. In doing so, you may accept it at face value and say that it aligns with your specific religious beliefs, or you can have the exact opposite reaction, launching into a tirade about historical and scientific inaccuracies. In both cases, you’re too focused on the finger to see the moon.

Taken one step further, you might understand that many of the stories in the Bible can be read symbolically or metaphorically. But even then, you’re still focused on the finger—you’re just looking at the finger from a different angle or a closer perspective.

The point of the Zen parable (or at least one point of the Zen parable) is that a religious text isn’t all about figuring out what the author meant, a task that may very well be impossible anyway. That’s not what the “deeper meaning” of a text is. The deeper meaning is the part that you co-create with the words on the page.

I would go so far as to add that the most important part of religion is not about the meaning of the words you read on the page or the ones you hear in the pews, or the art, or the music, or the rituals, or anything else. It’s about what those things are trying to point you toward. It lies beyond reason and cleverness and even language itself—beyond all the tools of your surface-level consciousness. It’s the thing that stands a chance of fundamentally changing you in some genuine, enduring way.

The Explanatory Story

This parable has been at the forefront of my mind lately as I’ve been rereading the story of one of my own life experiences.

When I was finishing up high school at the age of seventeen, I was a bit of a STEM prodigy. I was ready to dedicate my life to science. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.

With no mountains left to climb in the STEM curriculum, and a good deal of free time on my hands as a senior, I read a novel that changed all of that in nearly an instant: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Brave New World is, in part, a cautionary tale about blind faith in science gone too far. More broadly speaking, it is the story of a few central characters slowly waking up to the realization that the seemingly utopian society in which they live depends upon a carefully manufactured state of collective blissful ignorance. Everyone is happy, but only because of a gargantuan amount of state-sponsored psychological manipulation, the tools of which turned out to be quite prescient: an audiovisual landscape oversaturated with advertisements equating sex with happiness and success, a miracle drug with sedative properties, and so on. What is excised from this society is everything that has been so historically central to humanity: art, creativity, even love. And, perhaps most of all, religion and spirituality.

In other words, the very things I had been neglecting in my young life by being so hyper-focused on the sciences. As Mustafa Mond, the man pulling the societal strings in Brave New World, puts it,

[God] manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all. . . . Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

As I read the book as a teenager, this insight was a wake-up call to me on two levels. From a zoomed-out perspective, the novel caused me to question the extent to which this blunt statement from Mustafa Mond held true more than eighty years after the novel’s publication.

On a more personal level, it shined a spotlight on the same question as it pertained to me individually. And the answer to this second part of the question was a resounding, Yes. Yes I have been neglecting the many other dimensions of the human experience, including the arts and spirituality.

But this is just one half of the story. The finger-pointing half.

It’s one thing to come to an intellectual realization about some unquestioned assumptions you’ve been making and quite another to have an illusory shell so thoroughly shattered that you can never go back to who you were before.

Mystical (Re)reading

“Mystical experience” wasn’t in my lexicon at the time. But after so many years of studying religion, this is the term that I think best fits my experience with Brave New World. It was a noetic experience of deep, ineffable insight marked by the feeling of communion with something foreign and, possibly, transcendent.

I had never experienced anything like it before and have only had faint approximations of this experience with books since.

When I finished the novel, I was lying in bed in a kind of super-charged daze that would blossom into a full-blown altered state of consciousness over the course of the next couple of days. I didn’t understand what was happening. Perhaps more importantly, I couldn’t understand how a book could do this to me—how words could do this to me. I still don’t fully understand it.

In some sense, this echoed a scene from the novel in which one of the central characters, John, first gets his hands on Hamlet as an adolescent, and is struck by the power of words to stir and give form to one’s deepest thoughts and feelings—in this case, his feelings toward his step-father.

“Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain,” recites John, as he reads from Hamlet. “What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Pope before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic.”

Though my own reading experience had nothing to do with hate, it did share this same underlying epiphanic moment of encountering and recognizing the magical conjuring power of words.

Since the day I finished reading Brave New World for the first time, reading and writing have become spiritual practices for me, in the sense that spiritual practices reshape consciousness in a profound way that allows us to more directly catch a glimpse of something transcendent. But they are also necessary, if imperfect, tools for giving form to the transcendent.

Somewhat ironically, or fittingly, the two or three experiences I’ve had in my life that I’d describe as mystical or religious experiences could all be described with those dismissive words from Mustafa Mond: “[God] manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.”

In my case, though, there’s nothing dismissive about this. To the extent that I’ve experienced something transcendent, it’s always been characterized by absence or silence. The finger points me in the right direction before falling away, revealing the moon. But instead of the dazzling bright white full moon, it’s the pregnant nothingness of a new moon.

Brave New World revealed to me the individual psychological and societal dressings with which I had been identifying. But reading the book also triggered something else—some kind of mystical experience that stripped away all of those layers so that something new could flow through. It’s something that is wordless on its own, but which, through words, can be given a shape that can make it discernible and possibly even accessible to others.

In other words, the book reprogrammed me into a finger pointer. I can’t get away from writing. Or religion. I’ve tried. The moon keeps calling me back.

The Superstory

To be clear, this is how I read that experience now. It’s very different from the way I had been reading that experience for most of my adult life.

This alternate understanding of my experience with Brave New World is what my college professor and mentor Jeffrey J. Kripal would refer to as a “superstory.” It is a story that is being reread through the lens of what he calls “the superhumanities.”

“The superhumanities” refers to the comparative study of “super” (i.e., transcendent) human experiences through an open-minded empirical approach that treats these things as real, significant, and important, rather than shrugging them off as mere psychological aberrations or meaningless coincidences.

Those super experiences include religious and mystical experiences, other altered states of consciousness, and paranormal phenomena—all surprisingly common and recurring experiences that pop up all over the material that gets studied academically in the humanities (not just religious studies), if only one is perceptive enough to recognize them as such.

It’s not that I never entertained the possibility that my experience with Brave New World may have been “mystical” or “spiritual” or “transcendent” or “super” in one way or another. I’ve entertained that thought a lot, especially since Jeff has written so much about how reading and writing can be and often are mystical experiences, and how these “super” experiences often behave like texts or stories. Jeff even writes about how essentially all of his books have been written directly out of a single “super” experience of his own.

But I’ve explained away that particular interpretation of my experience in all sorts of ways because, despite how true it felt, it just didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that a book could “reprogram” me. It didn’t make sense that a book which had very little to do with religion could ignite in me such an intense interest in religion. And it really didn’t make sense to think that a book could make me a religious or spiritual person.

I’ve explained it away by dismissing it as nothing more than wishful thinking: I want to believe I had some sort of mystical experience because it would make me feel like a special little snowflake.

I’ve also explained it away by pointing to the fact that my symptoms of bipolar disorder began right around the same time as the Brave New World reading experience: This “reprogramming” was caused by the onset of mental illness and not any kind of mystical reading experience.

Then, of course, there’s the most obvious and simplest dismissal of all: “You were a seventeen-year-old who read a novel that exposed you to a bunch of new philosophical and psychological ideas; it amplified the voice of the angsty existential teenager that surfaces in all of us around that time in our lives. You’re not a prophet. Get over yourself.”

To reread my experience through the lens of the superhumanities does not involve a rejection of any of these quite reasonable objections to the “mystical experience” hypothesis. What it involves is what Jeff calls “both-and thinking.”

What I experienced when I read Brave New World definitely had both a physical component and a psychological one—the physiological shifts of chemical imbalance associated with the onset of bipolar disorder and the psychological shifts associated with an adolescent’s first realization that the world may not be as it seems, along with a corresponding introspective shift.

It’s clear that the mental illness and adolescent psychological factors triggered an experience. Together, they were the psychophysical finger pointing at the moon. They were not the moon itself. They were the “both,” not the “and.”

The triggers cracked me open, so to speak, allowing something else to flow through, the mysterious something that goes by many names—God, the spiritual, the transcendent—and which is the monistic ground from which all things both material and mental spring forth; it is the “and” of the “both-and.”

Choosing Which Story To Live In

To tie things back to the start of this essay, asking whether my experience with Brave New World was just a pedestrian, garden-variety book-reading experience or something approximating a mystical experience strikes me as akin to searching for the “true” meaning of a text. We can never know the truth in that sense. It is mere explanation-seeking. It doesn’t really take us anywhere new.

The deeper meaning of the text that is this story of mine is something that must be co-created. I am both a character and a reader of this story. And (the “and” of the “both-and” in this case) I am its coauthor. Rereading it allows me to re-author it. Re-authoring it means fundamentally altering what happens to me as the character in it.

If I continue reading this story in a way that dismisses it as spiritually insignificant, I will continue to coauthor and live in a spiritually insignificant story. That’s not great for someone who just can’t seem to stop swimming around in and writing about religion.

It’s also a tad depressing. And I know I’m not the only one who’s been trapped in such a story.

If I reread the story in a way that embraces its spiritual significance—as something that did not just make me “interested” in religion as an outside observer, but personally invested in it as an active participant with something real and valuable to explore and express (even if I still don’t know what exactly is trying to be expressed through me and my writing)—then I can more fully embrace every dimension of who I am and what I feel called to do.

In that, there is peace, purpose, liberation, and meaning, all of which help me to sleep at night and get out of bed in the morning.

And who wouldn’t want to be a character in that story?

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Allen Simon has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and writes avidly on Substack. He works as a freelance writer and consultant based in Boston, where he also enjoys playing ice hockey and making visual art.

Art by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858).

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OLD TESTAMENT

FICTION

POETRY

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Ha-Ye'or, great river, before thee I bend
in deep mud to bundle my son in this bed. 
Take thee, this child from my arms to thine
This basket the corpus; your current the wine. 
Ha-Ye'or, great river, take him from my breast
and carry him gently, far from the oppressed—
—my people, whose Lord has abandoned their pain
But not him, not my son, keep him unrestrained. 
Ha-Ye'or, great river, now cradle my boy
His breath is my sustenance; his survival my joy. 
I lay him at your mercy and humbly entreat
That you ask other waters to part 'neath his feet. 

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Brynn StClair is a poet and musicologist currently living in Arlington, VA, where she enjoys the museums, walkable cities, and view of the Washington Monument from her street but does not enjoy the exorbitant rent prices. Brynn works full-time managing a company that curates music programs for schools and part-time writing poetry cycle commissions and passion projects of her own.

How shall we construe the reports of Elisha’s dramatic miracles?

How might such accounts figure into our faith and our lives before God?

Our English term “prophet” descends from an old Greek translation, centuries before the time of Christ, of a yet older Hebrew term. We might take these Hebrew origins for granted, but they are worth noting. Most ancient cultures have produced seers, soothsayers, oracles, or shamans, some of whom may have been God’s messengers, for God sends out his word to all the nations of the earth (2 Nephi 29:7). However, it is specifically the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who serve as the prototype for God’s subsequent spokespeople in western civilization’s predominant religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. They were also the prototype for the founding prophet of the Restoration, Joseph Smith.

Scripture portrays these biblical prophets as sometimes foretelling the future or working other wonders, but their primary role was to translate God’s mind, heart, and will to a people—wonder enough by itself. According to one celebrated analyst, a Hebrew prophet’s fundamental experience was “a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos.”

If a prophet’s central task is to proclaim God’s mind and heart, our portrait of the prophet Elisha is striking by contrast, for it includes little of his teachings. Instead, the record of his days reads as a collection of miracle stories attributed to the prophet—more than two dozen such stories, in rapid sequence, in just chapters 2–7. Some of these miracles echo those performed by his predecessor, Elijah, such as Elisha striking the river Jordan with Elijah’s inherited cloak, causing the waters to part so he can cross (2 Kings 2:14). Others prefigure miracles later attributed to Jesus: feeding a multitude with little food (2 Kings 4:42–44), healing a leper (2 Kings 5:1–14), even raising a child from the dead (2 Kings 4:18–37).

Some of Elisha’s wonders are well-known among Latter-day Saints because of our attraction to simple lessons learned (the cure of Naaman’s leprosy by washing seven times in the Jordan River; 2 Kings 5:1–14). Others are remote to us and seem almost as either the practice of magic (Elisha causes a borrowed iron axe head to float to the water’s surface so it can be retrieved; 2 Kings 6:1–7) or similar to medieval faith in the healing power of relics (as when, even after Elisha’s death, a dead man is restored to life the moment his body touches Elisha’s bones in the tomb; 2 Kings 13:20–21). One miracle in particular is infamous among some audiences, who complain of the depiction of the prophet as petty, or his God as merciless, when Elisha, in the name of God, curses youths who mock his bald head, resulting in two bears emerging from the woods to maul dozens of the young people (2 Kings 2:23–24). As a cluster, the miracles establish Elisha as empowered to see into the future, to curse or heal and resurrect, to control nature, and to determine the fate of armies, among other matters. That is a lot of power.

How are we to assess these stories? And what place ought such accounts hold in our own faith and religious lives?

Depending on what we mean by “miracles,” Latter-day Saints are apt to make room for them in some form, as they are presented profusely in all four standard scriptural works. Christianity itself, of course, presents itself as based in part on Christ’s Resurrection. And the Restoration emerged as “a marvelous work and a wonder” through revelation, which is to say: the extraordinary, the miraculous.

We do well, nonetheless, not to approach miracles blithely. Jesus told (doubting) Thomas to “be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27). However, I do not imagine the Lord was praising gullibility. It would seem more likely he was counseling Thomas to be open-minded and -hearted toward awe, toward divine action, to trust principles and people who had shown themselves trustworthy, perhaps by a process like that sketched in Alma 32. There is nothing worthy to be gained, and something precious to be lost, by investing uncritically in superstition and error. Healthy and life-sustaining faith can be damaged, for example, when trust in a friend or a tenet proves misplaced. People are inclined to resentment, a sense of betrayal, or humiliation at having invested, often deeply, in something later shown to be errant. And if one thing is shown to be hollow, we may naturally be led to suspect related things. Overconfidence in everyday miracles can be dangerous for another reason too. One person’s exuberance over prompt divine help in recovering lost keys sometimes leaves neighbors at a loss when their prayers have gone unanswered for their sibling’s relief from cancer.

Our immediate topic—miracles and Elisha’s miracles in particular—is, of course, too large for our interests. In another setting, we might enter a long conversation with philosopher David Hume1 about the plausibility of miracles. Or we might consider all that the prophets have pronounced on the topic. Given our modest space and purposes here, however, let us be content to pose to ourselves a few questions (in italics), in eight areas below, that might promote reflection and discussion.

1.

What is a miracle? The skeptical Hume thought of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature—and believed any report of a miracle was more likely to be error or deceit on the part of a witness than a genuine breach of such laws. But what are these “laws of nature”? Who gets to define them? Do they change across time?

President Spencer W. Kimball wrote of “the miracle of forgiveness.” Asked in 2012 by the press if young women might sometime join young men in leaving on their missions by age 18, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland replied, “One miracle at a time.” President Russell M. Nelson urged us “to expect miracles.” Orson Pratt and other early leaders held that “miracles” did not break natural law but were merely divine control over laws we do not yet understand (and current notions in quantum physics might be put in conversation with the assertion). Finally, again, the author of 2 Kings writes forthrightly of Elisha’s many startling supernatural acts.

In light of these varying usages of the term and of your own experience, what does “miracle” mean to you? How might your understanding bear on how you strive to live gospel precepts? How might it bear on how we read 2 Kings 2–7?

2.

Laman and Lemuel famously witnessed supernatural beings and events which did not change their hearts and behavior in the long term. So also with the Hebrews released from bondage under Moses’ leadership. What do these instances imply about the role of miracles here on earth? Are they important for faith?

3.

Have you personally ever witnessed a miracle? If so, what effect has that had on your spiritual life and your lived experience? Has that effect changed over time? Has it affected anyone with whom you have shared the story?

4.

Might miracles ever backfire, prompting us to think of God as “a vending machine of blessings” rather than prompting us to learn or to experience God’s love or more actively to help build Zion?

5.

Are some miracles better discerned over time and in hindsight rather than instantly as they occur?

6.

Might there be a key for us in John 6 to discern the ultimate purpose of miracles? In this chapter, Jesus fed a multitude with a pair of fish and a few small barley loaves, but declined to repeat the feat the following day, offering instead his bread of life sermon, which caused many disciples to turn away from him.

7.

Might there be an additional key in Mark 2? In this chapter, Jesus is shown challenging those religious authorities who accused him of blasphemy by saying to them: “Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?” (Mark 2:9)

8.

My own experience will vary from yours, but I personally have not witnessed a miracle resembling the dramatic ones associated with Elisha. I have participated in blessing those who were ill, but I do not know whether to ascribe their recovery—where there was recovery—to the blessing, to medical care, or to natural processes.

On the other hand, I have experienced prompts to action, while listening in meditation and prayer, that later proved important.

I have over decades felt beckoned by the divine: to “Come, follow me”; to respond to the implicit invitation of life; to love; to relieve suffering; to follow the Light.

I have found myself or others in difficult straits, followed by a sense of inconvenient obligation by way of scripture that has come to my mind: “Who knows but that you have come to your position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

Only weeks ago, I prayed one morning while weeping and reading and listening to the lyrics of “Bring Him Home”2 (from the musical stage play, “Les Miserables”):

he’s like the son I might have known
if God had granted me a son

. . . then found myself not thirty minutes later—still moist-eyed, still humming and murmuring these lyrics while I drove to the car wash—only to enter the lot, begin to vacuum my floormats, be tapped on the shoulder, and look around and up into the soulful eyes of a new friend in need: a previously friendless young graduate student from Kenya. Like the son I might have known—and do.

Did these things occur by happenstance? Are they products of my own imagination? Or do they carry the scent of providence and miracle?

Does it matter that I do not know? Does it matter that I am comfortable in not knowing? Is it enough that I simply make room for the possibilities, carrying on in faith?

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Philip Barlow served as the Maxwell Institute’s associate director and is a Neal A. Maxwell Research Associate. Having previously served as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University, his teaching engages religion and human suffering, religion and the concept of “time,” American religious history, and Restoration movements.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Michel Simonidy (1870–1933).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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This week marks 222 years since the birth of Emma Hale Smith on July 10, 1804. Emma was a pivotal figure in the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From helping to retrieve the golden plates, to acting as the first scribe in the process of translating the Book of Mormon, to compiling the faith’s first hymnal, to serving as the inaugural president of the Relief Society, Emma’s contributions to the Restoration were undeniably significant. But she hasn’t always been given the respect or understanding she deserves. Over the years, she has been alternately revered and reviled, memorialized and maligned, celebrated and condemned. Because of her resistance to polygamy and her refusal to move west with the Saints after the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, she was dismissed by Brigham Young and other early Church leaders as an apostate.

Largely as a result of the research and writings of historians like Linda King Newell, Valeen Tippetts Avery, and Jennifer Reeder, Emma has come to be viewed with much more nuance and compassion and is now almost universally regarded as a sympathetic and even admirable figure by members of the Church.

Today, in honor of the birth, life, and contributions of this remarkable woman, Wayfare is pleased to offer you a series of three papers on Emma Hale Smith.

The first, authored by historian Jennifer Reeder, examines the “connections, complementary natures, and divine assignments of Eve and Emma” and concludes that, ultimately, both [women] are “archetypes connecting God and his children from beginning to end.”

In the second paper, Donald Bradley makes the case that Emma was a true “partner in ministry with Joseph” from the beginning, arguing that Doctrine and Covenants Section 25 offers “a restoration vision of partnership in ministry.”

The third paper, by Maxine Hanks, explores the context and significance of the word “ordain” in Section 25 and argues that it “established a foundation of real ordination for women in 1830.”

Archetype, partner in ministry, ordained leader. We invite you to consider each of these perspectives, the way they honor Emma, and how they might invite us to reimagine the place of women in the Church, past, present, and future.

Recommended additional reading:
Mormon Enigma, by Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippitts Avery, University of Illinois Press, 1994.
First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith, by Jennifer Reeder, Deseret Book, 2021.

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Sharlee Mullins Glenn is a contributing editor at Wayfare and has published poetry, essays, short stories, articles, and criticism in various publications, including The New York Times.

Art by James Rees.

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In discussions regarding the status of women and their relationship to priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the term “ordain” has sometimes been a flashpoint. After all, longstanding Church policy stresses that women “are not ordained . . . to priesthood office.” Nevertheless, LDS scripture contains a revelation given to Emma Smith in 1830 that includes a divine promise that: “Thou shalt be ordained” (D&C 25:7).

Typically, the explanation for this apparent contradiction has rested on an argument that the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints “sometimes used the term ordain in a broad sense, often interchangeably with [the phrase] set apart.” This suggests that the use of “ordain” in 1830 likely meant “set apart.” However, since Emma’s promised ordination appeared in a divine revelation that used the word “ordain,” it is worth more carefully considering the intentional choice of the term.

This essay argues that the use of the term “ordain” in Doctrine and Covenants 25—when considered in the context of related revelations—established a foundation of real ordination for LDS women in 1830.

CONTEXT

D&C 25 came amid a series of revelations regarding the earliest church organization, offices, and functions in 1830. For instance, D&C 20 laid the groundwork for a church in April 1830, which was further elaborated by D&C 24, 25, 26—a trilogy of revelations in July 1830 that established a remarkable gender equality. Then D&C 27 celebrated the fulfillment of D&C 25 in August.

In these early organizational outlines, D&C 20 and 24 prescribed ministry offices for men —namely elders, priests, teachers, deacons, bishops, apostles (”an apostle is an elder”), plus a “First Elder” and “Second Elder.” In 1830, all these offices were “ordained,” yet they were New Testament lay Christian offices, not priesthood offices. No one was being ordained to “priesthood” in 1830; ordination was, instead, to lay ministry roles. Elders were lay ministers tasked with preaching the gospel, baptizing, confirming, and leading meetings. Their authority came from God and the Spirit, evoking Christian discipleship rather than priesthood. “Every elder, priest, teacher or deacon is to be ordained according to the gifts and callings of God unto him . . . ordained by the power of the Holy Ghost which is the one who ordains him” (D&C 20:60).

The first “priesthood” ordinations began a year later in June 1831 with a new office of “high priest.” Joseph and Oliver were Elders, not priests—until they were ordained “high priests” in 1831. Also, there was no priesthood order to reframe and encompass the men’s ministry offices, until a “new order” of “high priesthood” was envisioned in 1831. This new order was not defined or named (as “Melchizedek”) until 1835 (D&C 107).

The development of women’s lay ministry followed a pattern similar to that of the lay ministry of men. D&C 25 prescribed a New Testament ministry office for women, the “Elect Lady.” In 1830, this office was “ordained” but it was a New Testament lay Christian ministry office, not a “priesthood” office. However, an order that would reframe and encompass women’s ministry offices “after the pattern of the priesthood” came later in 1842—which was defined and named as “Relief Society.”1

Historically, Emma’s ordination and the office of “Elect Lady” haven’t been viewed as equivalent to the ordination of Elder because the Elect Lady was not a priesthood office. However, in 1830, ordinations to the offices of First Elder and Second Elder were not priesthood ordinations either. Rather, D&C 25 established an “ordained” lay women’s office of church ministry in a parallel equality with the men’s ordained lay offices outlined in D&C 20 and 24.

In 1830, both men’s and women’s offices were based on early Christian ministry in the New Testament—not on Old Testament priesthood. Joseph Smith was “Called of God & ordained an Apostle of Jesus Christ to be the first elder of this church” and Oliver Cowdery was “called of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to be the second elder of this church.” (D&C 20:2-3) These were New Testament lay Christian offices. Likewise, Emma Smith was “called” of “the Lord your God” as “an elect lady” who “shalt be ordained” to “exhort the church.” The Elect Lady was a New Testament lay Christian office as well.

ELDER AND ELECT LADY

D&C 25 brought the Elect Lady into direct parallel with the First Elder in D&C 24, using the New Testament gender pairing found in 2 John 1: “The elder to the elect lady and her children whom I love in the truth.” Thus, the Latter-day Saint “First Elder” and “Elect Lady” restored two high offices of ancient Christian leadership found in the New Testament.

D&C 24 and D&C 25 were parallel revelations, both received in July 1830, which “called” and “ordained” Joseph and Emma (and Oliver) to the highest offices in the LDS Restoration at that point. Joseph and Emma were the subjects of these two revelations, which canonized their ordinations and offices. D&C 24 discussed both Joseph’s and Oliver’s offices, yet it mainly elaborated on Joseph’s divine calling and duties as the First Elder. Likewise, D&C 25 elaborated on Emma’s divine calling, office, and duties as the Elect Lady.

In 1830, the First Elder, Second Elder, and Elect Lady were the three highest positions in the LDS Church, with no others in that category. They evoked a triune leadership, like a primitive first presidency. Out of this proto-presidency, the male “presidency” of “high priesthood” came later in 1832 (D&C 81), and a female “presidency” of Relief Society came later in 1842—in parallel, as Joseph and Emma presided over each. That parallel began in 1830, when D&C 24 and D&C 25 established Joseph’s and Emma’s top offices with strikingly similar roles, duties, and authority.

The parallel nature of these revelations and the roles they outline is evident in the excerpts below:

D&C 24 (First Elder):

Behold, thou wast called and chosen to write the Book of Mormon, and to my ministry . . . . Magnify thine office . . . continue in calling upon God in my name, and writing the things which shall be given thee by the Comforter, and expounding all scriptures unto the church. And it shall be given thee in the very moment what thou shalt speak and write . . . go speedily unto the church . . . and they shall support thee . . . . Attend to thy calling and thou shalt have wherewith to magnify thine office, and to expound all scriptures, and continue in laying on of the hands and confirming the churches . . . and also all those whom thou hast ordained, and they shall do even according to this pattern. Amen.

D&C 25 (Elect Lady):

Behold . . . thou art an elect lady, whom I have called . . . the office of thy calling shall be . . . unto my servant . . . be unto him for a scribe . . . . And thou shalt be ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church, according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit. For he shall lay his hands upon thee, and thou shalt receive the Holy Ghost, and thy time shall be given to writing, and to learning much . . . thy husband shall support thee in the church; for unto them is (thy) his calling . . . . And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns . . . as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church . . . . And verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my voice unto all. Amen.2

ELECT LADY AND BIBLICAL WOMEN

As I noted above in reference to 2 John, the biblical “Elect Lady” was a prominent female leader in early Christianity, and the only woman in the New Testament with an epistle addressed to her. Likewise, Emma Smith was the only woman in the D&C with a section addressed to her. This gives similar exceptional status to both women.

D&C 25 used the Elect Lady as a prototype for Emma and LDS women. It also correctly interpreted her as a real woman, rather than as a metaphor for the church. This revealed in 1830 what feminist theologians would later assert in the 1980s—that the “Elect Lady” was a leader, and “her children” were the church. In 2025, a BYU scholar also interpreted 2 John 1 as addressing a real “lady” whose name was “Eclecte.” These scholars have reinforced the D&C 25 interpretation of the Elect Lady as a female leader, not a metaphor.

Specific roles assigned to the Elect Lady in D&C 25 further ground the office in biblical precedent. The revelation called Emma to “make a selection of sacred hymns as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church . . . the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me” (D&C 25:11–12). Emma’s hymn book was an official church liturgy used by all, thus one way to “expound scriptures” and “exhort the church.” Also, “the song of the righteous” evoked the biblical role of Miriam and Deborah, female prophets who led their religious community in music—and whose songs are the oldest texts in the Bible. “Miriam the prophetess . . . took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” (Exodus 15:20–21)

CONFIRMED, ORDAINED, AND SET APART

D&C 25 promised Emma both confirmation as a member and ordination to office—two separate roles and ordinances, paired together: “He shall lay his hands upon thee, and thou shalt receive the Holy Ghost . . . And thou shalt be ordained under his hand” (D&C 25:7).

Interestingly, to “confirm” and “ordain” and “set apart” all use the same form—a laying on of hands to confer a specific status, calling, or office. Each is being “called with a holy calling, and ordained with a holy ordinance” (Alma 13:8).

As others have pointed out (see here), the word “ordain” was used in different contexts from 1829 onward, yet its basic meaning was the same. For instance, in LDS scripture, the phrase “ordained of God” in Alma 13, D&C 20:60, and D&C 50:26 all reflect similar connotations. Likewise, in the 1830 revelations, the word “ordain” meant ordination to lay ministry, for both men and women. It did not mean ordination to priesthood.

Both the terms “ordain” and “set apart” were applied to men as well as women, in different settings. Yet “ordain” and “set apart” also were used together, suggesting they held different senses of meaning. “Ordain” carried a more specific connotation than “set apart”—meaning, what God has ordained; while set apart meant to separate or assign. In 1831, there were “bishops to be set apart unto the church,” since “he is called and set apart and ordained, bishop or high priest” (D&C 68:14, 19, 22). In 1842, Joseph’s teachings in the Relief Society minutes stipulated that “wherein [society members] are ordained, it is the privilege of those set apart to administer.” In 1850, Louisa B. Pratt was “called, set apart, and ordained” to serve a mission.3 The use of both “ordain” and “set apart” together posed them as mutually related and needful.

D&C 20, 24, 25 explicitly used the word “ordain” rather than “set apart” to convey that these ministry offices were divinely instituted by God. Likewise, in 1842, the word “ordained” was used for Relief Society “offices” to convey their divine authority.4 And in 1843, women were “ordained” to offices in the “holy order” of God in the temple.5 D&C 25 was the first of three ways that LDS women were “ordained” to offices in ministry—first in 1830, followed by repeated instances in 1842 and 1843. The ordination to “Elect Lady” was the first step in a female ordination path that continued in Relief Society and culminated in the temple endowment. Thus, there is no reason to reject the word “ordain” for women and replace it with “set apart.”

Emma’s ordination to high church office was very rare in 1830 America. At the time, although some women participated in lay preaching, only a few had a ministerial position or preached from a pulpit, and those were low-level and limited in scope. Only Mother Ann Lee, who led the Shakers, held a high church position similar to Emma’s—both formally instituted and recognized by their church, and titled as “elect lady.”6

D&C SECTION 26

“The law of common consent” or D&C 26 completed the July 1830 trilogy of revelations that established an uncommon gender equality in LDS canon. “And all things shall be done by common consent in the Church” (D&C 26:2). This meant all members could vote, including women. D&C 20 had stipulated that “no person is to be ordained to any office in this church . . . without the vote of that church” (D&C 20:65). Thus, Joseph and Oliver were ordained First and Second Elder and approved “by an unanimous vote” at the organization of the Church on April 6, 1830.

This raises a question: Was Emma’s ordination to office approved by member vote? It wasn’t reported in her private sacrament meeting in August of that year, nor in the September Church conference. Yet an approval vote of Emma’s ordained office did occur—when she was elected by female members of the church, at the Relief Society organization on March 17, 1842: “Mrs. Emma Smith be chosen President—passed unanimously . . . elected to preside.”

Joseph verified this: “[​I] read in the New Testament & Book of Doctrine & Covenants. concer[n]ing the Elect Lady. & Shewed that Elect meant to be Elected to a certain work &c, & that the revelation was then fulfilled by Sister Emma’s Election to the Presidency of the Society, she having previously been ordained to expound the Scriptures.

This clarified that Emma’s office was approved by a Church congregation. D&C 25 canonized Emma’s office and ordination, and the Relief Society minutes canonized her election by member vote.

D&C SECTION 27

Following the July trilogy of D&C 24, 25, 26, Joseph received D&C 27 for Emma’s promised confirmation at a private sacrament meeting in August. Joseph “set out to go to procure some wine for the occasion . . . and received the following revelation . . . ‘It mattereth not what ye <​shall​> eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory’” (D&C 27:2).

Joseph recounted, “We partook together of the sacrament, after which we confirmed these two sisters [Emma Smith and Sally Knight] into the church.” Curiously, Joseph didn’t mention Emma’s ordination, which would have happened immediately after her confirmation. He may have omitted it from this personal history (written a decade later), or her ordination may have been done privately.

Yet, Joseph indeed ordained Emma in 1830, as he attested in 1842: “She was ordain’d at the time, the Revelation was given.” This implied her ordination happened when D&C 25 was received in July of 1830, rather than when it was performed in August of that year; but Church policy put confirmation first, ordination second. In 1842, “at the time” could have meant “in 1830”; and the comma, as pause, could mean because the revelation was “given” i.e., it was official.

Whenever her ordination occurred, Emma stepped into a high office of ministry. Also, the Elect Lady in D&C 25 (like the First Elder in D&C 24) had a dual role as both an ordination to church lay ministry in 1830, and later as an office in an order of “priesthood.” In 1842, Joseph cited D&C 25 as verifying that Emma “was ordain’d . . . to expound the scriptures to all, and to teach the female part of community.” This validated Emma’s 1830 ordination to ministry office, yet it also elevated that office to “preside” over a women’s order in 1842—“a kingdom of priests.” Emma’s authority to expound scripture “to all” evoked a Church-wide ministry, while her role to teach “the female part” of community evoked specific leadership over the women.

“MY VOICE UNTO ALL”

D&C 25 promised “this is my voice unto all,” regarding Emma’s call to membership and confirmation, ministry, and ordination. This suggested that all women could obtain those same blessings of ordinances, leadership, and offices in the Church.

Like Emma, her counselors in Relief Society were ordained to offices presiding over the women of the Church. And, her successors, Eliza R. Snow and Zina Jacobs also held the title of “Elect Lady” along with the Church office of Relief Society President. Eliza was “ordained,” but Zina was “set apart.” The “Elect Lady” title ended with Zina.7 Thus, the office of “Elect Lady,” established by revelation from God, lasted nearly a hundred years (from 1830 to 1910) then disappeared into history—while the office of Relief Society President continues today.

Although Emma, her counselors, and successors were “ordained” to their “offices,” today women are “set apart” to “callings.” However, the offices occupied by men have continued to be ordained, thus resulting in a gender asymmetry of status. The terms “ordain” and “office” have changed for women, but their ministry roles have continued. Yet D&C 25 persists in calling us to understand Emma’s real ordination to both Elect Lady and President. This section bears testimony of women’s ordination in the LDS Restoration—an historical reality we have yet to recover.

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Note: This essay is excerpted from other articles I’ve presented on Emma’s 1830 ordination as the first step in a triune ordination path of: lay ministry, the order of Relief Society, and the Endowment. I first explored this model in my 1992 book, Women and Authority, then presented it in feminist groups, and later in 2011 at church meetings, 2012 Sunstone symposium, 2013 Mormon Stories podcast, 2014 workshops, 2016 MHA paper, 2017–2019 Church dept. discussions, 2018 BYU paper, 2018 Sunstone symposium, 2019 Dialogue journal, 2025 Dialogue podcast and other podcasts.

Maxine Hanks is an historian and theologian whose work has focused on women’s history and feminist theology in Mormon studies, Christian liturgy, and religion. She lectured in gender studies at the University of Utah and was a Harvard Fellow in ministry, theology, and liturgy. She has published several articles and books on Mormon history, feminist theology, women’s studies, and gender in religious culture.

Art by James Rees.

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Introduction

Who among the figures of the early Restoration went to the Hill Cumorah on September 22, 1827, to retrieve the golden plates? Who was called by revelation to produce a book under heavenly direction? Who was further commanded to minister to the Church and to expound the scriptures, with the promise “it shall be given thee” what to teach?1

One answer to these questions is, of course, Joseph Smith. Another equally correct answer is his wife, Emma Hale Smith.

The role envisioned for Emma in Joseph’s spiritual manifestations was that of a partner in ministry. This intended partnership is apparent from the angelic manifestations that resulted in the Book of Mormon and from a pair of July 1830 revelations. The earlier of these (Doctrine and Covenants 24) elucidated the ministries of the Church’s leading elders, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery; the latter (D&C 25) elucidated Emma Smith’s ministry as the Church’s “elect lady whom I have called.”

This “elect lady” revelation called Emma to a ministry that paralleled the ministries the revelation to the leading elders gave Joseph and Oliver, a ministry that also overlapped the ministerial prerogatives that the Church’s constitution, the Articles and Covenants, assigned to the Church’s various ordained officers. We can best understand Emma’s appointed ministry by reading the elect lady revelation (D&C 25) against the backdrop of the Articles and Covenants (D&C 20) and the leading elders revelation (D&C 24).2

Emma’s revelation, Section 25, described her authority without categorizing it in priesthood terms or explaining exactly how it related to priesthood. Surprisingly, although Sections 20 and 24 spell out the authority of the Church’s ordained officers, they also do so, in their earliest forms, without reference to priesthood. The ordained offices in the Church at this time—teacher, priest, and elder—were recognized as carrying divine authority but would not be referred to as priesthood or classified as Aaronic or Melchizedek until 1832.

This seeming deficit in those early revelations may actually be an asset in gaining a clear view of Emma Smith’s ministerial authority and the Restoration’s larger vision for women’s spiritual authority. Despite statements by several presidents of the Church (including, most recently, Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks) affirming that women in the Church exercise divine authority, women’s authority has been a subject of controversy.3 Twenty-first century conflicts over this subject have often centered on demands for women’s ordination to priesthood in what have heretofore consistently been male offices, without reference to how women’s authority manifested at the Church’s origins. Serendipitously, the absence of priesthood terminology from the 1830 revelations calls attention away from the label used for the spiritual power promised to Emma Smith (and from dichotomized positions in a latter-day culture war) and focuses attention instead on what Emma’s ministry actually was and what it empowered her to do. In examining the elect lady revelation, we can focus not on the form of godliness Emma possessed but on the power thereof.

Emma Hale Smith’s Role in the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon

Joseph needed Emma in order to bring forth the Book of Mormon. As I have documented in my book, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories, prior to Joseph’s final visit to the Hill Cumorah to acquire the golden plates, the angel told him he could only acquire the plates by bringing Emma to the hill with him—as his wife. It was thus Joseph and Emma who went to the hill on September 22, 1827, to bring home the sacred book. Months later, it was again Joseph and Emma who began the work of translating it, with Emma acting as the first translation scribe. Joseph and Emma began the bringing forth of the Book of Mormon as ministerial coworkers.

Joseph and Emma’s intertwined ministerial roles would be further clarified in the aforementioned tandem revelations given in July 1830. These revelations, in turn, built on the Articles and Covenants in whose light they must be understood.

Articles and Covenants: Background to Emma’s Ministry

Understandings of divine authority in the Church began to be formalized almost immediately upon the Church’s legal organization on April 6, 1830. By April 10, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery had revealed the Church’s Articles and Covenants.4 This revelation would be accepted as binding by vote of the Church’s first conference on June 9, 1830. The revelation identified Joseph as a presiding elder and Oliver with him as another presiding elder, one “ordained under his hand” (D&C 20:3).5

The Articles and Covenants laid out the authority of the elders, and of other officers, in ways that are often unfamiliar despite appearing in our canon of scripture. Although as modern Latter-day Saints we have become accustomed to identifying divine authority primarily as the power to perform sacraments, or ordinances, the Articles and Covenants expressly deny this authority to certain ordained offices, indicating that some were ordained to exercise ministerial authority without sacramental authority.

The earliest version of the Articles and Covenants appears to have established the offices of elder, priest, and teacher, but by the time the earliest surviving version was recorded, deacons had been added to the revelation as assistants to the teachers. Most of the duties and powers of each, as established in the revelation, were ministerial: “An apostle is an elder, and it is his calling to . . . teach, expound, exhort, baptize, and watch over the church . . . ” (D&C 20:38–42). The priest was called to “preach, teach, expound, exhort” (D&C 20:46). Teachers were called to these same ministerial responsibilities, and to “watch over” and “strengthen” the Church (D&C 20:53). In addition to ministering, priests were also authorized to “administer”—that is, to bless the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to baptize, and to ordain others. Elders received additional sacramental authority to give the gift of the Holy Ghost and to ordain other elders, in addition to the ordinances performed by a priest.

Whereas elders and priests could perform ordinances such as the sacrament and baptism, deacons and teachers were expressly forbidden to do so: “Neither the teacher nor the deacon has authority to baptize nor administer the sacrament.” Yet, despite the teachers’ absence of sacramental authority, the revelation went on to further develop and emphasize their substantial ministerial authority—“to warn, exhort, expound and teach and invite all to come to Christ.” Teachers (and eventually also their assistants, the deacons) were thus ordained to ministerial authority to teach, exhort, and expound, but not to sacramental authority. So, under the Church’s revelatory constitution, the authority of the ordained Church offices established in the Articles and Covenants sometimes included sacramental authority, but it always included ministerial authority. Divine authority was usually exercised ministerially and only occasionally sacramentally. In illustration of this, members of the Church are baptized only once but are to be ministered to throughout their lives (Moro. 6:4).

Subsequent developments in ecclesiastical practice have not changed this but may have made it harder to notice. Teachers and deacons—originally adult men—are now adolescent priesthood-bearers-in-training. As such, they have been given responsibilities to assist those who administer (i.e., bless) the sacrament by helping prepare the sacramental emblems and distributing them once blessed, neither of which constitutes an ordinance in itself or invokes sacramental authority.6 This practice may give the appearance that deacons and teachers exercise sacramental authority, when in fact, they only assist those who do, reinforcing the mistaken perception that all ordained authority is sacramental in nature. Emma’s promise via revelation from Joseph that she would be “ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the Church, according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit,” has therefore not been widely recognized as a promise of authority because it did not specify sacraments or ordinances she might perform.

Realizing that much of the ordained authority of elders and priests and all of the ordained authority of deacons and teachers is ministerial in character, we are prepared to recognize the authority granted to Emma in July 1830.

“Ordained Under His Hand”

Against the backdrop of the Articles and Covenants accepted in June 1830, the significance of Emma’s “elect lady” revelation given just weeks later begins to become clear. Both the leading elders revelation and the elect lady revelation were given in July, shortly after Joseph made his translation or inspired revision of the Genesis creation account of Adam and Eve.7 This work set the stage for revelations that would establish individual male and female ministries.8

When Emma is told in the elect lady revelation that she is to be ordained, the language of ordination is left theologically ambiguous for modern Latter-day Saints because the term “priesthood” is not used and her authority is not classified as either Aaronic or Melchizedek. Yet while the nature of Emma’s authority may appear theologically ambiguous, it is ministerially precise. Emma’s authority is not given a name or category but is given substance. Building on the Articles and Covenants, this revelation makes clear that Emma received authority and identifies what this authority empowered her to do.

Although it appears to have overwhelmingly escaped comment, the language the elect lady revelation used to describe Emma’s ordination by Joseph is identical to the language the Articles and Covenants had recently used to characterize Oliver Cowdery’s ordination by Joseph:

Oliver Cowdery . . . the second elder of this church, and ordained under his hand (D&C 20:3).

And thou [Emma] shalt be ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church, according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit (D&C 25:7).

Each was “ordained under his hand.” Because this language about Oliver’s ordination had been given in the Church’s constitution in April and accepted as canonical in June, the verbatim echo in Emma’s promise of spiritual power in July could hardly have escaped notice—particularly by Joseph and Emma. This echo of Oliver’s ordination in Emma’s ordination offered her an assurance: She would receive divine authority as real as his.

But to what was she ordained?

Not, it seems, to one of the offices established in the Articles and Covenants. The titles for these offices—elder, priest, and teacher—had been clearly identified there, yet none of these titles was applied to Emma in the July 1830 revelation. And the prerogatives of her authority, while paralleling and overlapping those of these offices in striking ways, do not precisely match any of them (as identified in the revelation). Thus, as noted in modern Church publications, she was given neither an office in the Aaronic priesthood nor in the Melchizedek priesthood. Rather, Emma was promised distinctive ministerial responsibilities and powers in connection with her role and title of “elect lady.”9

Emma was thus given, by revelation and by the imposition of hands, a vital ministry and the power to perform it; yet this power was not given a name beyond the title of elect lady, or given a theological explanation. In line with this, BYU Idaho professor Scott Woodward, summing up insights on Emma’s ministry from Church History Library historian Lisa Olsen Tait, has suggested, “she [Emma] was ordained to something. We don’t have a name for what she was ordained to.”10 But we do know specifics of what that power could do.

Emma’s promised power as elect lady specified two prerogatives she would share with the officers identified in the Articles and Covenants: to exhort and to expound. The spiritual power she then exercised did not extend to ordinances as it would in 1843, when she was authorized to officiate for other women in the ordinances of the temple. Rather, the 1830 authorization the elect lady received gave her ministerial responsibilities and prerogatives not identical to but evoking those of a teacher, whose authority was entirely ministerial in character. As a teacher exercised divine ministerial authority in his calling, so also did Emma in hers.

To more fully understand the responsibility and authority Emma was given, we need to understand the origin of her title of “elect lady.”

“The Elder unto the Elect Lady”

The title of “elect lady” given to Emma in July 1830 is widely recognized to have been derived from the Second Epistle of John in the New Testament, which begins: “The elder unto the elect lady . . . .” But to identify derivation is not to provide explanation. Why was Emma given this title from the scriptures?

The answer is to be found in the construction in which the title was used in 2 John, which juxtaposes male and female honorifics: “The elder unto the elect lady . . . .” This epistle is a sacred text given from the elder to the elect lady—not unlike the July 1830 revelation itself, which Joseph revealed for Emma. Joseph’s title in the Church at this time, it will be recalled, was “first elder”; Emma’s was elect lady, making Joseph and Emma a precise parallel to the male-female spiritual dyad introduced in the opening of 2 John. “Elder” and “elect lady” are masculine and feminine equivalents or counterparts—positions of distinction within both the New Testament church and the Restoration. Emma Smith was given the ministerial title of elect lady, almost certainly, to evoke the New Testament origin of her ministerial role and to establish the parallel of her ministry with that of Joseph as first elder.

The drawing of ministerial titles for both Joseph and Emma from the New Testament suggests not only a deliberate pairing of their ministerial roles but also a dual restoration. As Joseph’s divine calling restored the position of elder from the New Testament church, so Emma’s divine calling restored the position of elect lady from the New Testament church. A restoration of ministry and divine power from biblical times is reflected also in the 1842 establishment of the Relief Society and the 1842–1843 reception of temple ordinances by both men and women. As the Gospel Topics essay “Joseph Smith’s Teachings about Priesthood, Temples, and Women” on the Church’s website notes regarding a speech by Newel K. Whitney, who received private instruction from the Prophet Joseph Smith to the newly formed Relief Society:

These revelations and ordinances imparted new understanding of the interdependent relationship of women and men. As Bishop Newel K. Whitney expressed it shortly after receiving his endowment, ‘Without the female all things cannot be restor’d to the earth. It takes all to restore the Priesthood.’

Parallel July 1830 revelations given for Joseph and Emma Smith, respectively as the Church’s first elder and as elect lady, bear witness that divine power of ministry from the New Testament church was given in the restored Church to men and women alike.11

Parallel Revelations

The tandem nature of Joseph and Emma’s restored callings is reflected in the tandem revelations given for them.12 These revelations established parallel and intertwining ministerial responsibilities and powers between the elect lady and the leading elders, and these revelations show signs of having been structured so as to correlate the responsibilities of these male and female officers.

Oliver Cowdery had for some time served as a successor to Emma in her role as scribe. Yet the leading elders revelation commanded Oliver Cowdery to go on missions to bear “my name before the world,” supplanting his role as Joseph’s scribe (D&C 24:10–12). The elect lady revelation therefore gave Emma back her original scribal role, enabling Oliver to be sent to preach (D&C 25:6).

The revelations closely intertwined Emma’s and Joseph’s ministries, which each revelation referred to as “thy calling” and “office” (D&C 24:9; 25:5). Joseph was to visit the branches of the Church; Emma was to go with him and serve as a scribe (D&C 24:3; 25:6). Joseph was to “write” what was given him by revelation; Emma’s time would be “given to writing” (D&C 24:5–6; 25:8). Joseph would have many afflictions; Emma was to comfort Joseph in his afflictions (D&C 24:1, 8; 25:5) The Church was to support Joseph; Emma was to be supported by him from the Church (D&C 24:3; 25:9).13

Significant, distinctive ministerial powers were given to Joseph and Emma that were not given to others. For instance, the Church’s first elder and its elect lady were each authorized to expound the scriptures “as it shall be given” by the Spirit (D&C 24:5–6, 9; 25:7). While “expounding” was a ministerial prerogative of all the ordained officers specified in the Articles and Covenants, within the 1830 Church, only Joseph and Emma were specifically empowered to deliver expositions of scripture to the Church as these were given to them by the Spirit.14

Most strikingly, each had been called to bring forth a sacred book. Joseph was told, “Behold, thou wast called and chosen to write the Book of Mormon” (D&C 24:1). July 1830 was a curious time for the leading elders revelation to affirm Joseph’s calling to translate the Book of Mormon, since this was a work he had completed over a year earlier. The reaffirmation of Joseph’s calling to translate the Book of Mormon at this time suggests a deliberate parallel with the elect lady revelation’s affirmation of Emma’s calling to bring forth a sacred book under divine inspiration, “as it shall be given thee”—a book of hymns:

And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns, as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church. For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me (D&C 25:11–12).15

Viewed in light of the parallel leading elders revelation, the elect lady revelation can be seen to have carefully balanced Emma’s ministry with Joseph’s. Each had been divinely called (D&C 24:1; 25:3)—he as elder (D&C 24:3, 5, 9; cf. D&C 20:2); she as elect lady (D&C 25:3). Each was to expound the scriptures by revelation (D&C 24:5; 25:7) and to bring forth a sacred book under the power of God’s Spirit (D&C 24:1; 25:11). Thus, not only were Joseph and Emma’s ministerial titles of first elder and elect lady established in parallel, so were the responsibilities and prerogatives they were given in their ministries. The New Testament-based vision for men and women restored in the 1830 Church was thus one of partnership in ministry.

Conclusion

When we place the elect lady revelation in its original context, a new picture begins to emerge of Emma Smith’s spiritual power and relationship to Joseph Smith’s work, illustrating a Restoration vision of partnership in ministry.

We as a Latter-day Saint people have lagged behind the Restoration’s prophetic leaders in our vision of what the Restoration is. The Saints have often popularly understood the Restoration as the now-complete reintroduction of exclusively male positions of spiritual authority from the world of the Bible. Various developments in our early history—including the introduction of the Relief Society, women’s role in performing temple ordinances for other women, and Emma Smith’s calling to a ministry under the New Testament title of elect lady paralleling Joseph’s ministry as first elder—demonstrate that there was much more to be restored.

The vision of restoring female ministerial power was inaugurated in the very earliest days of the Restoration, but should we assume that the use of this power has been brought to its full fruition? President Russell M. Nelson admonished those who “think the Church has been fully restored,” “you’re just seeing the beginning. There is much more to come.” And President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has stated, “the Restoration is an ongoing process; we are living in it right now.”16

Atop the hill Cumorah, nearly two centuries ago, Joseph Smith could not initiate the restoration of our foundational scripture alone; only Joseph and Emma together could do that. And if the Restoration could not be initiated through the ministry of one gender alone, it surely cannot be completed without the full, divinely intended development of the spiritual powers of both male and female.17 Like the inspired promises to Emma, the form such spiritual flourishing will take must be given by the spirit of revelation.

As the work of restoration continues to unfold, prophetic revelation may yet further expound the spiritual power given to the elect lady to build a more perfect partnership of men and women in ministering to all God’s children.

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Donald Patrick Bradley, Sr. (B.A., BYU; M.A.; USU) is a historian specializing in the early Restoration. Don’s research focuses on Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and plural marriage. He is the author of The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon's Missing Stories, and winner of the Mormon History Association's 2021 Best Article Award. He is the incredibly proud father of Nicholas Bradley and the late Donnie Bradley.

Art by James Rees.

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“Mother of all living” and “Elect Lady” are compelling titles for two significant women whose memories have been both tainted and celebrated in Latter-day Saint memory, identity, history, and scripture. Eve and Emma were named by their husbands: Adam called his wife the “mother of all living” at the bidding of Elohim (Genesis 3:20; Moses 4:26), and Joseph voiced the appellation “elect lady” by the word of the Lord (Doctrine and Covenants 25:1, 3). When placed in parallel positions, Eve and Emma act as portals linking the beginning of mortality with the last days. They connect the Creation, the Fall, and the Restoration: Eve initiating the mortal separation from God, and Emma covenanting to return to his presence when she became the first woman initiated into the Holy Order.

A close reading of creation accounts and revelation provides understanding of the connections, complementary natures, and divine assignments of Eve and Emma. Their relationships with God, their helpmeet husbands, their offspring, and their distinct roles suggest participation in redemption, compensation, and grace. Eve and Emma are archetypes connecting God and his children—from beginning to end.

Relationships

“It is not good that the man should be alone,” the Gods assert in the Garden of Eden. They caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, then formed a woman or a “help meet”—defined in Hebrew as ezer, a strong protector or a rescuing force that is “meet”—suitable, proper, or sufficient in old English. Adam described her as “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” then named her Eve, the “mother of all living.” Eve was not named until after she was created—after she acted independently. The Hebrew meaning of the name Eve is significant. According to a nineteenth-century Bible commentary, Eve comes from Chavvah: life or living; breath. Eve is a living soul who produces life. Joseph Smith’s translation adds, “for thus have I, the Lord God, called the first of all women, which are many” (Moses 4:26; see Abraham 3; Moses 3–4; Genesis 2–3). Eve, most certainly, has become a type for all women and men.

Several dispensations later, the angel Moroni told Joseph Smith that his divine assignment required the “right person” to accompany him to receive the plates.1 He could not become the prophet of the Restoration without a helpmeet. God called her “an elect lady” (D&C 25:3). In Hebrew, Eh-ma is the word for “mother” or “mom.” The Old Germanic word Ermen signifies whole or universal; entire; all-embracing—an interesting commentary on what the Lord told Emma: “this is my voice unto all” (D&C 25:16). Emma also serves as a type for women and men.

Eve and Emma left Eden and Harmony to unite with their husbands. One flesh. One companionship. At-one. While Eve was created by the Gods for Adam, then led him out of the garden, Joseph envisioned Emma through his seer stone.2 On January 18, 1827, they eloped, against her father’s wishes, preemptively following the 1830 instruction of the Lord: “Thou shalt go with him at the time of his going” (D&C 25:6). Emma went with Joseph to New York, then back to Pennsylvania, then left for Ohio in early 1831. She never saw her parents again.

Eve and Adam and Emma and Joseph experienced thorns and thistles. Both Eve and Emma found their desires inclined to their husbands. While we don’t have Eve’s words to Adam, Emma was to be a “comfort” to Joseph “in his afflictions” (D&C 25:5). When the Smiths were separated by Joseph’s travels or imprisonment, correspondence reveals an intimate connection. After he left Kirtland in April 1837, Emma wrote, “I cannot tell you my feelings when I found I could not see you before you left.” A week later, she opened a letter to him: “Ever affectionate husband.” Joseph wrote to her from Independence: “My dear and beloved companion of my bosom, in tribulation, and affliction,” then closed, “Oh my kind and affectionate Emma I am yours forever, your husband and true friend.”3 They became bone of bone and flesh of flesh.

The two women completed their partnerships where the men were lacking. Eve, daringly, courageously, ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, because she desired to “be as gods” in whose image she was created. She then convinced, encouraged a hesitant Adam to partake, that together they would know good from evil. But God discovered their transgression, and she and Adam were cast out of the presence of God and out Eden (Genesis 3; Moses 4).

Eve and Emma; Eden and Harmony. Emma, too, had multiple sorrows. She was also beholden to her husband and his visions and possession of the plates. Like Eve, she was told that her office—her assignment—was to comfort her husband with consoling words in meekness (D&C 25:5). She, too, would submit to a prophet who had received sight, instruction, and authority, to watch him offer sacrifices, like Eve. Emma was told to “murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee” (D&C 25:4). Adam and Eve both “heard the voice of the Lord,” but “saw him not” (Moses 5:5).

Emma covered Joseph and the scriptures he brought forth. They did it together. She helped him hide the plates and provided a linen cloth to cover them.4 He could not translate when they were not in agreement. While he was Liberty Jail, she carried his translation of the Bible across the frozen Mississippi in two cotton bags sewed to a band around her waist under her skirts.5

As an educated, refined woman, Emma compensated for many ways in which Joseph lacked. Emma’s divine appointment was this: “The office of thy calling,” God said, “shall be for a comfort unto . . . thy husband” (D&C 25:5). The word is comfort, not support or sustain—not submissive, but vertical. She reached down to comfort him, wraps herself around him. Another Comforter is what Christ promised his disciples before his death—assumed as the Holy Spirit. “I will not leave you comfortless,” he promised. “I will come to you” (John 14:18). Then, as Jesus suffered in Gethsemane, an angel appeared from heaven, “strengthening him” (Luke 22:43). Did Emma embody the Holy Spirit or the strengthening angel for her husband? Did she empower Joseph from her own internal place of power?

Twelve years later, on April 28, 1842, Joseph taught the Relief Society that an increase in virtue would expand hearts. “Do like Jesus, and carry your fellow creatures to Abram’s bosom.” He encouraged women to treat others “with mildness and affection. When a man is borne down with trouble—when he is perplex’d; if he can meet a smile, an argument—if he can meet with mildness, it will calm down his soul and soothe his feelings. When the mind is going to despair, it needs solace.” Did this council come from personal experience? On June 9, he expanded this Christian apotheosis: “Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin as to take them by the hand and watch over them with tenderness.” Perhaps, then, the consoling words and comfort from Emma’s instructions were directions to embody Christ. Joseph continued: “The nearer we get to our heavenly Father, the more are we dispos’d to look with compassion on perishing souls—to take them upon our shoulders and cast their sins behind our back.” Emma, having been counseled twice in her revelation to be meek, may have been Joseph’s impetus in instructing the Relief Society. Perhaps Joseph voiced his hope for Emma’s meekness and support. Or perhaps Emma’s office was to embody Christ in her relationship with her husband.

A third way in which we can examine relationships is through offspring. God commanded Adam and Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, which could not happen until after they were cast out of Eden. It wasn’t until after the Fall that Adam called Eve “the mother of all living” (Genesis 1:28; 3:20). Eve literally had leave the garden, experience the Fall, then forge a life in the wilderness to bear children and fill her title role.

Multiplied seed meant multiplied sorrow. Eve experienced multiple sorrows in the fatal encounter of her sons Cain and Abel (Genesis 4). Emma’s first baby did not survive. Shortly after, Martin Harris lost the Book of Mormon manuscript pages, scribed by Emma. The manuscript was also Emma’s seed, and it, too, was dead. Her next biological pregnancy was also lost with the death of twins. Of the nine children she bore, only four lived. Of the two adopted, only one survived. One died as a toddler. One struggled with a debilitating mental illness, perhaps due to prenatal PTSD as his father was murdered while he was in utero. These losses devastated Emma.

Right before Emma died in 1879, she recounted a dream: Joseph brought her to a beautiful mansion. There, in a nursery, she found her son Don Carlos, who had died as a baby. Joseph promised her that she would soon have the rest of her children.6 They would all be restored—at-one.

Personal Missions

Eve and Emma were foreordained to certain tasks (Alma 13:3–4; D&C 138:39, 55–56). Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and, as modern Latter-day Saints believe, chose to enable the fall, or separation from God. “Were it not for our transgression,” Eve later wisely said to Adam, “we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil.” She continued, associating good and evil with “the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11). Eve’s choice allowed Emma—and all men and women—to choose.

Another charge extended Emma’s office to her husband. Joseph’s calling was to the church, but the pronouns in Doctrine and Covenants 25 give pause for examination: “Thy husband shall support thee in the church.” Does this mean that he and the church would financially provide for Emma and her children? On 18 May 1834, Joseph wrote to Emma “a few lines to you to let you know that you are on my mind and that I am sensible of the duties of a Husband and Father.” At least he was mindful of his familial responsibilities, even if he wasn’t always present. Just a few weeks later, he sent money and a letter: “I want you to make use of the money I send you in wisdom, for such things as you need, and make yourselves comfortable and contented as you can and continue to pray to the Lord to hasten the day when we shall be permitted to behold each other’s face again and enjoy the blessing of the family circle.”

Or does it mean that he was to support her in her ecclesiastical office? Both with her selection of hymns and as president of the Nauvoo Relief Society, Emma expounded scripture and exhorted the church (D&C 25:7, 11–12). John Taylor, in attendance at the first society meeting, suggested that Emma “preside and dignify her Office.” Emma’s election gave her and the women new authority. At the first meeting, she remarked, “We are going to do something extraordinary. When a boat is stuck on the rapids with a multitude of Mormons on board we shall consider that a loud call for relief. We expect extraordinary occasions and pressing calls.”7 On March 31, Emma taught the women, “we were going to learn new things. Our way was straight. Said we wanted none in this society but those who could and would walk straight and were determined to do good.” Perhaps Emma turned a key to them, so to speak, opening the door, leading the way for them to be the Word, just as Eve opened a door to women.8

As Emma gained momentum with Relief Society, Joseph expanded his network of plural wives. This caused some difficulty, privately and publicly. Did Emma, like Eve, strain to keep her bone-of-bone and flesh-of-flesh with her? She required that Joseph bend his ear to her, as had Eve of Adam.

Another responsibility for Emma came with the restored endowment, figuratively entering the presence of God and receiving a “crown of righteousness” (D&C 25:13). On 28 September 1843, she became the first woman initiated into the Holy Order by her endowment. In this way, Emma restored Eve’s separation from God. The development of temple ordinances evolved for Joseph, and the highest rites could not be received until after the Relief Society, or order of women, was organized. In turn, the Elect Lady then led other women into the Order.9 The endowment gave Latter-day Saint women a new understanding of their role, as equal partners to their husbands—a proper form of unification—in the plan of salvation and in the church.

Eve and Emma—the “mother of all living” and the “elect lady”—both probably best known for their husbands, but both vital contributors to the plan of salvation and the restoration. As daughters of heavenly parents, wives of prophetic heads of dispensations, and mothers of generations and of orders of women, these two women exemplified their assigned responsibilities.

Unfortunately, time and memory have decimated both Eve and Emma to women dependent upon their husbands. A Washington Post article affirmed that “the story of Eve in the book of Genesis has had a more profoundly negative impact on women throughout history than any other.” By 1845, Brigham Young had developed a distinct rancor toward Emma, the Relief Society, and Eve. He officially shut down the Nauvoo Relief Society in a speech to the High Priest’s Quorum: “What are relief societies for? To relieve us of our best men—They relieved us of Joseph and Hyrum.” He then threw Eve into the mix: “God knew what Eve was. He was acquainted with woman thousands and millions of years before.”

While Young’s position on Eve and Relief Society shifted over time, he maintained a public animosity toward Emma, publicly condemning her for denying polygamy and not following the body of Saints to Utah. He also accused her of attempting to murder Joseph in anger and surreptitiously causing his death, calling him back to Nauvoo, then Carthage.10 As a result, many Utah Saints also carried this disdain. As much as her actions contributed to the restoration, Emma’s reputation was deeply marred. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Relief Society, 17 March 1892, women gathered at the Salt Lake City tabernacle for a jubilee celebration. Displays on the organ pipes included life-sized portraits of Joseph Smith, Emma Smith, Eliza R. Snow, and current president, Zina D. H. Young. While some worried about the propriety of acknowledging Emma in the celebration, church president Wilford Woodruff responded that “any one who opposed it must be very narrow minded indeed.”

Careful analysis of the story of the Creation and the Fall and section 25 provide insight into two powerful women. Their relationships with God, their husbands, and their children provide archetypal patterns, as do their distinct assignments. In 2027, the Salt Lake Temple will be reopened, and while attendees will not experience a “live” depiction of Eve, they will see her visual representation. And they may also see a portrait of Emma Smith, the first lady of the Church—Mother of all Living and Elect Lady, restored to their divine positions.

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Jennifer Reeder is a historian/curator with Historic Sites in the Church History Department. She has a PhD in American history from George Mason University. She was the lead historian-editor on the collection of Eliza R. Snow discourses found on the Church Historian’s Press website and in the book, Rise Up and Speak: Selected Discourses by Eliza R. Snow. She published a biography of Emma Smith in 2021, First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith.

Art by James Rees.

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In his remarks accepting the 2024 Republican nomination to become the Vice President, JD Vance spoke of a small cemetery plot that his family owns in Kentucky. Describing the many generations of his family that are buried there—and after articulating how he hopes he and his children will one day be buried there, as well—Vance shifts from discussing personal family history to considering moral and political philosophy:

Now, [seven generations of relatives buried in a Kentucky cemetery] is not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and principles are great, that’s a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight and die for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

This quote has returned to me again and again over the last few weeks as I have contemplated the coming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and as I have specifically thought about the charge Church leaders have given us to prepare for, think about, and express gratitude for that commemoration. To be clear: nothing in this essay suggests that voting for or against JD Vance (should he run in the future) is consistent with or contrary to gospel principles—all candidates represent and advocate for a whole host of positions and principles, and all of these must be considered carefully in the context of all a candidate’s beliefs, values, and policies as well as in the context of those promoted by other notable candidates. But it nonetheless matters that we consider, discuss, and debate the ideas major candidates advocate, and this idea can be considered in the context of gospel principles.

In this context, Vance’s words above catch my attention. He is asserting here a theory of what the US means and why we all should honor it—this is his version of American exceptionalism, a version based not on principle, but on the supposed superiority of a particular group of people and their ties to a particular place at a certain time. And the idea of US exceptionalism matters to us as Church members for at least two reasons.

First, we believe that something about America is supposed to be special. After all, both the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants—two of our three planks of expanded canon—testify with striking specificity to the importance of the American founding. The special status of the American continent is spoken of in many places, including 1 Nephi 13, 2 Nephi 1:7, 2 Nephi 10: 19, Omni 1:6, Mosiah 2:22, Alma 9:13, Alma 37:28, Alma 45:16, Ether 2:8, and Ether 2:12. In the Doctrine and Covenants, the text speaks at length and in detail about the divine origin of US government in sections 98, 101, and 124. A verse from section 101 sums up the spirit of these verses:

According to the laws and constitution of [this] people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles; that every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him.

Unsurprisingly, modern Church leaders, including Brigham Young, George Q Cannon, Joseph F Smith, Spencer Kimball, Mark Petersen, Ezra Benson, and Dallin Oaks, have spoken with emphasis and eloquence to the importance of this idea.

Second, the election and re-election of Donald Trump have set in motion a realignment of political parties and partisan allegiances unlike anything we have seen in at least the last hundred years. In a time of such volatile politics, the very definitions of words and ideas are up for grabs. We may now be defining political terms in ways that will stick for decades. It matters that we get this right.

But as we think about the commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and as we see a newly assertive US populism—and as JD Vance ponders a run for the presidency—I believe our theology and our understanding of history call us to reject Vance’s thesis that the United States is exceptional because of a mystical connection between the land and those who live here—especially those whose US roots stretch back many generations.

This rejection matters precisely because we assert such a robust respect and admiration for the founding of the United States of America. Rightly understood, that respect and admiration can inspire us to support and advance the principles that can make the US great. But understood wrongly, that same respect and admiration could turn us toward insularity and even a dangerous and corrosive form of nationalism.

My testimony is that there is greatness and divinity in the American founding—and it is vital for us to understand and support that greatness in meaningful ways. Doing this means rejecting Vance’s thesis, because the paradox of the American founding requires that we reject blood and soil nationalism in favor of embracing America as an idea, a set of principles that call us to return again and again to the better angels of our nature.

The Paradox of the Founding and the Founders

In the first place, there is no question that the governmental system that emerged from that handful of years in the late eighteenth century was nothing short of remarkable, even acknowledging deep-seated problems of various kinds. Despite imperfections, the democratic republic birthed into the world in 1776 (or 1787, choose your official starting date) has weathered challenges and even existential crises and has grown and thrived for 250 years. And this is an achievement both historic and world-changing. As Yale Constitutional Scholar Akhil Amar commented in a lecture at Stanford in 2024:

In most places, in most times, in the history of planet Earth, there are not self-governing societies. The history of the world is the history of kings, emperors, czars, sultans, [and] tribal chieftains—thugs all. And even the places that have self-governance, even if they had some form of organization or schema that could be called a constitution, even if they had a written constitution . . . [with] democratic constitution-making processes, these processes have never been voted on by those they purported to govern.

He then noted that nascent forms of self-government existed at the time of the founding, but none of them had anything like the self-forming, self-governing mechanisms put into place in the American founding. He concluded that for all of these reasons, the founding of the United States as instantiated in the US Constitution comprises the “big bang”—or the “hinge point of history”—that took us from a world where almost no one lived in a place where people organized themselves under self-rule as defined by written law to a place where most people in the world live in societies with at least some measure of just this type of government.

Similarly, President Dallin H Oaks has repeatedly voiced his respect and admiration for the US Constitution and other founding documents—as the prophet of a worldwide church, as an apostle of Jesus Christ, and as a former Utah Supreme Court Justice and University of Chicago Professor of Law. Specifically, while speaking at the University of Virginia, he said, “I love this country, which I believe was established with the blessings of God. I love its constitution, whose principles I believe were divinely inspired” (italics in the original). President Oaks later explained, while serving as a counselor in the first presidency, the constitutional principles he views as divinely inspired: 1) popular sovereignty; 2) federalism; 3) the separation of powers; 4) personal rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights and later amendments; and 5) the formal enshrining of the rule of law. This is a powerful legal and spiritual articulation of just what it is about the US Founding and our foundational documents that demands respect.

And yet.

To the modern eye, there is a great deal about the founding of the United States that stands out as not only insufficient but outright hypocritical. Before exploring the inspiration inherent in the founding, it is important for us as Church members to turn our eyes toward and let them linger upon these difficult facts: Many of the men involved in the founding lived lives that stood in stark opposition to the principles they enshrined in our founding documents; indeed, even the documents themselves contained foundational contradictions that worked against the most important “just and holy principles” those documents articulate. In varying ways whose details lay beyond the scope of this essay, the founding of the United States itself—and the instantiation of US law in the government and cultural life of the United States—ran afoul of the very principles that made the US founding so important.

That contradiction is nowhere more evident than in the paradox defining the life, speaking, and writing of the man who was long revered as the beating heart of the American Founding: Thomas Jefferson. For generations, Jefferson was venerated as one of the geniuses most responsible for the success of the establishment of America as a nation. He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and worked in various capacities over decades to outlaw the importation of new slaves to the US. It is clear from his writing and some of his official governmental actions that he understood the moral problems associated with slavery.

But this recognition creates at least as many problems as it solves. Often, when considering the views of those from the past, we rely on the sense that the past is a “foreign country” to persuade us that problematic views, words, or actions from decades ago should not trouble us. But the very fact that Jefferson was aware of the moral problem of slavery—and the energy he put into pursuing slavery’s eventual eradication—make his own words and actions all the more troubling.

For example, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson pens a long passage regarding how Black people are inherently less attractive than white people. Then, he continues:

Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

It cannot but disturb our modern collective conscience to hear the author of The Declaration of Independence speaking in this way.

But more to the point are Jefferson’s actions with regard to the many human beings he kept in bondage. Even as he worked toward making importation of new enslaved persons illegal in the colonies and then the states, first as a founding thinker of the new republic, then as political leader in the new nation and, eventually, as the nation’s third president, he still kept many people enslaved on his property in Virginia.

While the detailed dynamics of Jefferson’s enslavement practices were complex and varied, it’s important to look at some numbers and other raw facts. Over the course of his life, Jefferson enslaved around 610 men, women, and children. At any one time he kept from 130 to 200 people in bondage. Most of those were people who were born in the United States, though it is possible that some may have been brought from Africa during Jefferson’s lifetime. There is evidence that Jefferson both bought and sold other humans and employed other men as overseers who were known to be physically aggressive toward those whom he enslaved. In addition, significant evidence suggests that Jefferson had multiple children with Sally Hemmings, whom he enslaved on his property for many years. Finally, Jefferson never granted emancipation to any person enslaved on his properties, even at the time of his death, except to the individuals believed to be his children (details about Jefferson’s enslavement of other humans can be found here).

This contradiction does not appear only with Jefferson or only with regards to the American treatment of Black people. After all, when the Constitution was ratified, the franchise was extended only to white men who owned land and not even (at least functionally) to all of them. On a national level, women would have to wait until 1920 to be enfranchised, and that came only after a monumental campaign, culminating in the 19th amendment. Peoples native to the American continent were too often treated abusively, even treacherously. It would take a civil war to end slavery and, even then, the emancipation and enfranchisement of Black men after the Civil War (via the 14th and 15th amendments) was largely clawed back by revanchist forces who tried to limit the advancement of Black people by limiting their opportunities, keeping them in segregated ghettoes, ensuring they had access to fewer (and poorer) resources than their white counterparts, and physically brutalizing them. Many aspects of the history of America feature a consistent assault on the rights of those who were powerless in favor of the desires of the powerful.

So, What Do We Make of America?

All of this presents us with a deep quandary, as Americans, but especially as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After all, if the Book of Mormon looked forward to the founding of the United States as a signal event in modern history and as a divinely sanctioned prerequisite for the restoration of the full gospel and Church of Jesus Christ, and if the Doctrine and Covenants repeatedly reaffirms the divine origins of the republic and of the US Constitution—even as the early saints were effectively expelled again and again from within the confines of acceptable American society—then we are left to wrestle with the weight of contradiction inherent in the paradox outlined in the last section.

Given all of this, we are left wondering: How do we reclaim something of the Good or the Beautiful from what seems a significant degree of moral duplicity? Indeed, given the special condemnation Jesus reserved for those who feigned goodness while ignoring the weightier matters of the law, we might even suggest that all this evidence simply proves the overwhelming hypocrisy of the American project. Might it not be better to simply tear down the facade and admit that America is as corrupt and reprobate as any other country on Earth?

Yet it is at precisely this moment when we realize the great danger in the quote from JD Vance that began this essay. Vance is suggesting a dangerous idea: that there is something inherent in that Kentucky cemetery that makes it, de facto and forever, more hallowed than a similar plot in Nairobi, Tokyo, or Moscow. Of course, Vance might counter that he is not attempting to generalize anything special about that cemetery—it is special to him because his kin are buried there but other places (within or outside of America) are similarly special to others—but, if so, then he is not really framing a political theory at all, except perhaps one that would leave us all as warring tribes and soon land us in a place where life returns to being “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

But if he is attempting to articulate the foundation for a more nationalistic form of American exceptionalism, then it is crucial to scrutinize our troubled history, demonstrating as it does—in incontrovertible detail—why his thesis cannot be true. If US leaders and citizens had come close to embodying our own ideals over the last two and a half centuries, then we might reasonably consider the idea that our land or our people are imbued with divine favor. But given how clearly and often that has not been the case, we are left to see a different conclusion.

I still believe in the divine provenance of the American Founding and the American Dream, but for reasons that reject the Vance hypothesis. In my view, what matters about the American Founding is not alone the reality it immediately bequeathed to the world. Nor is it that I believe the founders were perfect.

Rather, what matters to me about the American Founding, and the reason I still accept it as having been divinely inspired, is the persistence and tenacity of the ideals those men enshrined in our founding documents and the way that subsequent generations have taken those ideals up, in a noble succession stretching out now over the course of more than two centuries—and across many countries and continents where those ideals continue to hold sway—in a way that redeems the American project and that invests the legacy of the founding with a moral luster it lacked in 1776.

It is not nothing, for example, that Lincoln—a profoundly spiritual man who articulated a metaphysical vision of the country better than perhaps any other leader the country has seen—appealed quite directly to those founding ideals in his most famous speech. As he arrived in the middle of 1863 to dedicate a battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln undoubtedly felt the enormous weight of the protracted and horrifically bloody conflict that was initially staged primarily to “preserve the union.” Perhaps sensing that the tide of the Civil War was finally beginning to turn, he used the dedication speech, in part, as a lever placed on the fulcrum of those founding ideals, one with enough power to turn the attention of the nation and the aims of the Union army away from merely restoring the pre-war detente that would nominally keep the nation together. With timeless prose, he pointed all eyes instead toward a future where slavery and the legal inferiority of one race would be banished to infamy and the precincts of receding memory.

To do so, Lincoln turned not to the idea of revolution, but, instead, to the matter of fulfilling the promise the nation had made to its citizens at its inception. Lincoln’s opening overture makes this explicit:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It matters a great deal what Lincoln is doing here, and what he is not doing. He is not repudiating the founding. He is not condemning the founders as hypocrites—even as he is helping to heal the moral wound they did not close. Rather, Lincoln is choosing to believe in the rightness of their cause, in spite of their failure to measure up to the standard they articulated. It is largely for this reason that Columbia University historian Andrew Delbanco wrote:

Immediately after his death Lincoln began to undergo the transformation into martyrdom . . . that made him the central figure in America’s historical understanding of itself. He became the key symbol of the idea of universal rights and the most eloquent witness to the tragedy of its betrayal, and thereby established himself at the center of our national story.1

But the pattern does not stop there. For all the progress brought about by the Union victory in the Civil War, the nation soon enough settled into a new and still decidedly unequal state of affairs, with lynching and Jim Crow as the de facto, if not explicit, law of the land. It would be another hundred years before a leader would rise to rally the American public to further right this lingering historical wrong.

In the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., what is riveting is the degree to which he appeals to—rather than distancing himself from—the ideals of the founding. King explicitly ties himself to the legacy of Lincoln and then, more distantly, to the lodestar of the founding ideals. Very near the beginning of his “I Have a Dream” speech, he writes:

Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree is a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later the Negro still is not free.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

At least in part, King may have been ingratiating himself to his audience by quoting from the thinkers whose words would have felt familiar and comfortable. Yet I am struck that, at the time of the speech’s delivery, a full 187 years after the issuing of the Declaration of Independence, King is still able to appeal to the poetry and moral substance of that document.

President Barack Obama would hearken back to the same legacy—and would trace a consistent moral arc across the sky of the American story—when he gave a speech to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the march across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as part of the Civil Rights movement decades before:

And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people—unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People . . . in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

An argument can be made, of course, that all of this says little about the actual founding of America. After all, what real significance can any speech given in the 1960s or the 2000s truly invest in the founding documents or the political philosophy of men who came some two hundred years or more before? But, in a sense, this criticism also gestures toward what makes America truly great. It is noteworthy that we have been debating the meaning of—and attempting to hew more closely to—the words of our founding charter for two and a half centuries. It might be easy to dismiss the founders as hypocrites. It could be more tempting to abandon their project and declare, instead, that we will begin a new nation or, anyway, an entirely new way of understanding our own history. But the American way has been different. We have insisted, over and over, both in the halls of power and in the precincts frequented by common citizens, that the most powerful moral move we can make comes not by abandoning but by striving to fulfill those founding ideals.

Part of what matters here is the dogged insistence—over generations and by comers from all walks of life—that Jefferson’s words matter. These things are also true: that Jefferson did not fully succeed in shaping his life to those words; that the nation as it was originally conceived looked nothing like what we understand those words should mean; that it would eventually take a Civil War to settle the question of slavery and then another hundred years of individuals, coalitions, and actors in government working together to bring Black people, specifically, and all members of minimalized groups, more generally, more fully into the arena of American equality; and, finally, it is true that America as constituted in 2026 still does not measure up to the ethos Jefferson articulated in those immortal lines.

But all of that notwithstanding, what staggers the imagination is that the words have woven themselves through generations of struggle, conflict, ascent, decline, wrestling, grappling, debate, change, turmoil, and even conflict. And the words still stand. In a nation this large, variegated, and tumultuous—and in a world where words, whatever romantic notions we often cultivate to the contrary, have too often been overwhelmed by the powers of the sword and spear—the persistence and endurance of those words as an animating force matters deeply.

But what most strikes me as I conclude this reflection is this: While it is easy enough to quote Lincoln, King, and Obama as they recognize the importance of these words, it is not, in fact, this recognition by our leaders that really matters. Or at least, it would matter very little if not for this: we, the people, very much care about the words too. And—over now twenty-five decades—we, the people, have driven the country toward more fully embodying the ideals enshrined in our founding documents. Together, we, the people, have worked to bend the arc of history toward justice.

Two centuries ago, when the republic was yet very young, a young French visitor observed this very thing. After touring America on a quest to discover what makes American democracy exceptional, Alexis de Tocqueville considered and rejected multiple hypotheses. In arguably the most important and prescient section of his book, Tocqueville attempted to discern what distinguished the success and durability of the American democratic project as compared to others that had floundered. Considering and then dismissing in turn the possibility that either the continent’s geography or the country’s laws and constitution are the explanation, he comes at last to this striking observation:

I am convinced that the most advantageous situation (e.g. geography) and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the customs of a country; while the latter may turn to some advantage the most unfavorable position and the worst laws. The importance of customs is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. It may be regarded as a central point in the range of observation, and the common termination of all my inquiries. So seriously do I insist upon this head that, if I have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence of the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, the customs of the American upon the maintenance of their institutions, I have failed in the principle object of my work.2

In other words: American greatness does not flow from a divine investiture in the land. It does not flow, per se, from the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It does not even flow from the words of our most eloquent orators. Rather, what makes America great is the willingness of Americans to organize themselves as people—a body politic—willing to push our nation, in spite of its imperfect history, toward fulfilling the ideals we still hold dear, the ones written upon the fleshy tablets of our collective hearts 250 years ago.

Therefore, the degree to which the nation’s founding principles rise to a place of godliness depends entirely on what we the people make of those principles. Certainly, as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we see in the founding principles of the United States of America a type and shadow of the most fundamental theological truth we both learn and sing about in primary: that we are all God’s children and that, as such, we are called to come together as a religious community to build a politics—wherever we live, in the United States or not—that reflects what C. S. Lewis once called “the weight of glory.” We can and should have endless debates about policy details and political platforms. But we simply cannot participate, countenance, or even allow a politics that dehumanizes anyone, anywhere, for any reason. As followers of Jesus Christ, we carry the special weight and burden of ensuring that all we do personally and politically most especially treats fully as children of God those who are, for any of very many reasons, “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40).

It is with this foundational ideal very much in view, that we are brought to the words of Gordon Wood, an eminent historian of early America who died just a few weeks ago. In writing about the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Woods captures both the paradox and the promise of the American founding with this coda:

As Lincoln grasped better than anyone, Jefferson offered Americans a set of beliefs that through the generations have supplied a bond that holds together the most diverse nation that history has ever known. Since now the whole world is in the United States, nothing but Jefferson’s ideals can turn such an arrangement of different individuals into the “one people” that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe something. And that something is what Jefferson declared.3

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare.

Art by Minerva Teichert (1888–1976).

Images of Lucy Cottrell (died c. 1855) and Peter Farley Fossett (1815–1901), individuals enslaved at Monticello from “Slavery at Monticello.”

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the beating heart of summer
slows in torpid heat
of weeks with no rain—

a searing sirocco
melts the sun, vanishing
in lakebed molten

wildfire haze, orange
torn by too red-hot—
one glance brands its floating

shape into the retina,
wavers a frantic dance
behind the lid for hours,

calms only when dust unites
with earth again in wet veils
enclosing afternoon

with evening showers,
skittering monsoons
that patter, falter, stop and start

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Rachel White is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Velvet Earth After Rain (Moon in the Rye Press, 2024), selected as a “Notable Read” by the Utah Humanities Book Awards. She co-founded and edits THE NOMAD Literary Journal, the-nomad.org. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Deseret Magazine, Dark Mountain, The Ecological Citizen, and elsewhere. Rachel grew up in Ogden, Utah and lives in Davis County. rachelwhitepoetry.org

And after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)

Like many, I love the dynamic example of revelation Elijah experiences in his oft-cited encounter with the divine in 1 Kings 19. The contrast of that quiet voice with the tempest, earthquake, and fire that precede it is striking, especially in light of the way it inverts the pattern of theophany that has been established already in the record. At Sinai, for example, when the mountain shook, and thunder and smoke came upon it, there was to be no mistake that God was there. The cloudy pillar by day and the pillar of fire by night were constant signals of God’s presence among the people of Moses. But in Elijah’s experience, he is told specifically that God was not in any of the showy or violent displays.

The sense of difference with the Moses stories is all the more remarkable when we recall that 1 Kings narrates details of Elijah’s ministry in ways that leave little doubt that in the narrator’s mind he was the prophet like Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. Like Moses, Elijah provides food and water by miraculous means, demonstrates miraculous control over the elements, flees for his life, fasts forty days in the wilderness, and is summoned to a divine encounter at Horeb (Exodus 33:21, 1 Kings 19:11). And yet here, suddenly, is a very dramatic difference. God is not in the awesome displays; instead, there is a still small voice. What is going on?

Elijah was no stranger to displays of divine fearsomeness. In the chapter right before this one, we see him call down fire from heaven to consume his sacrificial offering in his contest with the priests of Baal, whose god fails them in their own attempt to have their sacrifice acknowledged. Elijah’s God memorably consumes not only Elijah’s sacrifice but the altar of stones on which it lies and even the ditch full of water that Elijah had poured all over it. After winning the contest over whose God was real, Elijah ordered the execution of the 450 priests of Baal.

And yet the show of force doesn’t work. Ahab, the wicked king of Israel, and Jezebel, his just-as-awful queen, are still unrepentant in their idolatry, just like Pharaoh, who continued to resist Moses’s demand to let Israel go after Moses had called down ten terrible plagues. Threatened by them, Elijah flees for his life. It is at this point that the similarities between the stories of Moses and Elijah begin to be inverted in significant ways.

In Exodus, Pharaoh’s intransigence is met with a divine command to Moses to prepare the first Passover, as the destroyer is about to go through, killing the firstborn child of anyone not under the protection of the blood of a firstborn lamb on their doorposts. Note that no Israelite lifts a sword here. But in Elijah’s story, without divine command, the prophet orders the slaughter of the priests of Baal.

Ahab, Jezebel, and their idolatrous priests are not characters with whom anyone is meant to sympathize in this story. And yet in the ensuing events, there may be a gentle divine rebuke of some of Elijah’s tactics, too. Had he pressed his advantage too far in taking up the prerogative of divine judgment and capital punishment upon the priests of Baal? That is a question that attentive readers might carry with them into this chapter.

The theme of Moses inverted plays out further as Elijah, fortified by an angel’s food for the road, journeys forty days back to Horeb, mirroring in reverse, as it were, the exodus of the children of Israel through the wilderness of Sinai over the space of forty years. There in the cave that recalls the “cleft of a rock” in which Moses was hidden, “the word of the Lord” comes to Elijah, asking, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” He answers defensively. “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts:1 for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Here is some irony, since Elijah himself has just presided over the killing of hundreds of prophets—albeit false ones. God hears his explanation—rooted firmly enough in defending the first and second of the Ten Commandments—and responds with the famous object lesson:

And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11–13)2

While God is explicitly not in the dramatic phenomena that precede the stillness, and the text is ambiguous as to what there was to be heard—a sound? a voice?—it is clear that its quietness was the point and that Elijah was meant to detect something divine in it. He clearly does, for upon hearing it, Elijah “wrapped his face in his mantle.” Then, in a gesture of both fear and attraction, he moves to the entrance of the cave.

What was Elijah supposed to learn from his encounter with the voice of perfect mildness? There are various ways to read this story. Drawing on the deep wells of the Jewish commentary tradition, a modern interpreter of the Hebrew scriptures, Jonathan Sacks, observes that the Lord approaches the issue obliquely yet knowingly, asking just as before, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” Such a pointed question, asked in the exact same words as before, but now after a potent object lesson, suggests that God was trying to convey a message. But Elijah responds with the same answer he gave before: “I have been very [zealous] for the Lord God of hosts. . . .” The zeal is still there, and so some Jewish commentators have suggested that he may have missed the point.

“Elijah, by giving the same answer after the vision as he had done before it, showed that he had not understood that God was telling him to adopt the way of the ‘still small voice’ in the future. As a result, God then told him that someone else must take his place. Elijah must hand his mantle on to Elisha.” And, almost as an aside, God lets Elijah know that, in fact, there are seven thousand others in Israel who have never bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18)—a quietly devastating unlacing of the prophet’s fantasy of being the last righteous person standing.

If this seems a harsh reading of Elijah, note that it, too, has a Mosaic parallel, since Elisha’s name is etymologically related to Joshua, Moses’s successor after Moses’s own rash act at Meribah cost him the right to enter the promised land (Numbers 20:12).3

God’s remonstrance with Elijah is not because there was no legal warrant for putting the priests of Baal to the sword. The law of Moses was clear that he could have been justified in doing so (see Deuteronomy 13 and 17). That is perhaps why God is not more severe than he might have been with Elijah. The issue being quietly explored in this story, however, is whether zeal is the path of wisdom. Specifically, is extrajudicial violence—even as punishment for an offense against the law—not itself a perpetuation of lawlessness? As Jonathan Sacks writes, “It is exceptionally dangerous to believe you have privileged access to the mind of God and that you have the right to act on His behalf. God is God, and humans are all too human. That is why legal and political processes exist, and why the zealot, who circumvents both, is often more of a danger than the danger he claims to avert.”

There is a wisdom higher than zeal in restraint, in the measured response, in due process, and in truth spoken with the potency of a lowered voice.

Our modern culture is saturated with zealotry. Think of the burgeoning genres of vigilante fiction or revenge thrillers in literature, television, and film; think of the polarized rhetoric of social media; think of the scorched-earth partisanship we see in today’s political theater, and the grotesque displays of bravado with actual weapons, real armed forces, and lives at stake. If we suppose God is pleased with such behavior, with such zealotry, then we may expect soon to find that we have no more need of the still small voice at all. Perhaps it has already ceased to strive with us, having found even less it could teach us than it taught Elijah.

In the Book of Mormon, we read of peoples like ourselves in need of repentance who experience fearsome manifestations of fires, earthquakes, and clouds of darkness, and after these “a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper” that “did pierce even to the very soul” (Helaman 5:30; and compare 3 Nephi 11:3–5). The voice, of course, is the voice of Christ, and at first it can be hard to understand. Why? Is it because Christ mumbles? Or is it because his is “not a harsh voice, neither . . . a loud voice”—the only kind of voice we now have ears to hear? Perhaps his voice will remain unintelligible or even unheard until we finally settle down and listen with renewed humility—with hearts and ears and eyes pointed “steadfastly towards heaven, from whence the sound [comes]” rather than in whatever other direction our polarized environment has dragged the needle of our inner compass.

President Dallin H. Oaks, in his first extended remarks after becoming the president of the Church, focused on the pointed message of his predecessor, Russell M. Nelson, becoming a second prophetic witness that “in coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.” President Oaks added his own warning: “You live in a season in which the adversary has become so effective at disguising truth that if you don’t have the Holy Ghost, you will be deceived. Many obstacles lie ahead. The distractions will be many.”

If the still small voice—the quiet “voice of perfect mildness”—is a sound we can only hear when we are listening, are we listening?

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Max Beckmann (1884–1950).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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Phil Christman, a writer and lecturer at the University of Michigan, is a committed Protestant Christian. He grew up attending a fundamentalist church which embraced a strict Calvinist theology, and although he shared that perspective, he struggled with and eventually rejected it. His rejection of the Calvinist approach to Christianity didn’t lead him to renounce his faith; instead, his faith evolved, and with that spiritual evolution came a political one as well. In the excellent Why Christians Should be Leftists, he explores and affirms that evolution and calls other Christians to join him. Most probably won’t, but that takes nothing away, I think, from his powerful testimony. Here, as a literal card-carrying leftist (assuming my monthly dues to the Democratic Socialists of America are up to date), as well as a believing LDS Christian, I want to explain why.

The fact that Christman’s book is best understood as a testimony is something that Steven Smith observed in his review of the book in Wayfare last December. Smith acknowledged that he doesn’t share Christman’s political convictions (at least not all of them), and also that he isn’t a fan of testifying when it comes to complex political topics, which he characterized as providing “soft or simplistic reasons . . . in defense of a prior inspiration.” But he also admitted that “it would be a mistake just to dismiss such testimonies.” Sharing convictions that come to us through spiritual inspiration rather than argument is, Smith thought, a major part of what allows us to realize attachments across all sorts of boundaries; by respecting the idea that God’s grace may work in ways unknown or disagreeable to us, we are better able to apprehend “the imago dei that makes you and me and everyone else intrinsically worthy of love and respect.”

I’m sure that Smith must have chosen that formulation intentionally, because it parallels exactly the spiritual conviction which grounds Christman’s account of his own political evolution. In his account, Christman was a college student attending a Calvinist university, feeling lonely, confused, and frustrated—he was, in his own words, an “ungirlfriended loser” (8). One day he was reading from the Bible outdoors with a group of similar losers—at least compared, in his mind at the time, to the other groups of students playing guitar, smoking, or flirting all around him—and as they worked through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew, he found himself thinking about everyone around him quite differently:

I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces. . . . Each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love. (8–9)

From this point on, step by step, the idea that the Christian message of God’s grace, forgiveness, and love entails an absolute, universal equality of persons unfolded in Christman’s life and thought. “Part of the point of being a Christian,” he writes, “is that you’re supposed to unlearn the human instinct to circle the wagons, identify the outsiders, prioritize the in-group,” and instead develop “the deep conviction that every stranger, every enemy, is a neighbor” (30–31). And he concludes that since the structure of capitalism depends upon the private or corporate accumulation of profit and property—and thus functionally excludes others from possession of such wealth—that means that Christians must move beyond capitalism, even liberal versions of it. Similarly, Christman concludes that since the structure of national borders depends upon territorial claims to sovereignty—and thus excludes others from the systems of law and care which sovereign governments establish—that means that Christians have to move beyond borders too, even democratic versions of them. The universalizing, the absolute neighboring, of the resources of the world and the people who live within it is the socialism that Christman comes to believe the plain teachings of Jesus require.

Smith would say that, admirable as the lessons which Christman drew from his spiritual insight may be, things are not actually that simple. I disagree with Smith on this point—but not because I think it is that simple, or because I think Christman’s testimony actually amounts to a complex argument. Rather, it’s because Christman’s spiritual insight parallels socialist arguments that I find persuasive. The fact that many socialists are instinctively dubious of religious testimonies is as unfortunate as the fact that many Christians cannot see parallels to socialist insights in their own scriptures and revelations (and, insofar as the LDS Church goes, even our own history). But such facts don’t change, I think, the undisputable leftist reality of the Christian teachings in question: namely, that Jesus’s message of love, forgiveness, and redemption is antithetical to any human-built system that results in humans experiencing division, discrimination, or deprivation. Jesus’s call was one of abundance; it is “to go and be generous,” and to trust in God to enable us to transcend “the urge to fear our own capacity for generosity” (38–39). Martin Luther King, Jr., a confessed democratic socialist, called the goal of the Christian message “the beloved community”; his invocation of Christian hope was hardly the same as Karl Marx’s prediction of universal communist revolution, but the shared sympathies between these two leftist visions are strong enough that Christman—at least once his eyes had been opened on a college campus long ago—cannot avoid them, and he doesn’t want us to avoid them either.

Admittedly, the way Christman talks about “leftism”—which he refuses to capitalize, stating in an early footnote that he thinks the term describes an “overall direction” and not a destination “where a person can definitively arrive” (16)—might initially seem incompatible with leftist economic arguments. Rather than starting out by defining terms and unfolding a discourse premised on the materialist language that has defined so much of post-Marxist leftism over the past two centuries, Christman’s reflections are rooted in a grab-bag of deeply religious, even Biblical, concepts and a concern that every believing Christian, in one way or another, confronts. Nonetheless, his testimony of leftism, when seen as an argument, connects.

It might seem that the main obstacle to that connection is Marx himself, who would have had all sorts of problems with Christman’s account. Marx’s deep contempt for Christian socialism, which he called “the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat,” made his perspective fairly clear: socialism is something that must be built historically, structurally, materially—that is, scientifically—and not something that emerges from the guilty feelings or inspired insights of religious believers. His perspective is certainly at least partly responsible for the hostility to religion widely associated with the left over the centuries.

But as anyone who spends any time amongst actual leftists can tell you, this incompatibility between leftism and religion is a perspective that 1) was obviously wrong from the beginning and has remained so over the years, and 2) has been basically ignored by tens of millions of leftist religious believers over the same period of time, Christians most certainly included. In regards to point 1, the revolutionary force which Marx’s analysis of the history of capitalism provided—whatever its usefulness and insight insofar as understanding the alienation experienced under industrialization is concerned—has been questioned, denounced, and re-interpreted and re-affirmed in different ways that gave shape to every socialist argument since the mid-nineteenth century on; to stick resolutely to a plain linkage between an opposition to capitalism and therefore an opposition to religious faith is to do as much damage to the heritage of that argument as is done by non-leftists who insist that the egalitarian and communitarian demands of “socialism” can only ever mean the tyranny of Stalin or Mao. And in regards to point 2, the fact that Christian socialists—the Methodists who helped form the British Labor Party, the Catholics who organized the Catholic Worker Movement, and hundreds of other examples—have, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of genuine intellectual agreement, appropriated and articulated their views in manners borrowed from Marx (talking about “class struggle,” for example) hardly means that their socialism is therefore Marxist, and necessarily carries all of its materialist, historicist, anti-religious baggage.

This is especially the case for believers in the words of Jesus as presented in the New Testament, since of course those words immediately inspired believers to—as recounted in the Book of Acts, chapter 4—sell their goods, distribute them equally, and have all things in common, right from the beginning. (For members of the LDS Church there are additional examples, such as the Book of Mormon story in the book of 4 Nephi of a people who, after a visitation by the resurrected Christ, built a Zion where all things were held in common, such that divisions between rich and poor disappeared.) So when it comes to socialism, one might suggest that Marx himself was a late contributor to a long-standing Christian tradition, and as important (for both good and ill) as Marx’s contributions were, the left has no reason to feel more beholden to him than to religious socialists like Leo Tolstoy, Eugene Debs, Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb, or Dorothy Day (and maybe even Hugh Nibley too).

Christman, for his part, suggests treating Marx’s thought “as we’d treat a buffet: you pick the stuff you think is helpful and ignore the rest, the same as you would any other economist or political theorist” (144–145). For people whose approach to these matters is grounded in historical and theoretical arguments over ideology and the intellectual trajectories of particular individuals, this is a pretty frustrating approach. Partly because it gets stuff wrong, as Christman does on occasion. (For example, at one point he goes much too far in condemning the liberalism of John Locke as incapable of responding to the threats of capitalism, forgetting that Locke himself wrote that the rights of property-owners oblige them to make sure that “enough, and as good” will always be available to everyone else (70).) But more importantly, I think, because opponents of this testimony-led approach will insist that these are, by necessity, political debates that we are having, and as such being guided by one’s revelatory experience with the Sermon on the Mount leaves much unsaid.

But that doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, that defenses of socialism like Christman’s need to be considered wrong; they aren’t. They just aren’t complete—as I think Christman himself would be quick to acknowledge. Again, his book is a testimony of why the Christian message made it clear to him how he should think about inequality, about war, about borders, about wealth, and thus found himself moving leftward, hand-in-hand with his faith. As someone who wants to be faithful to the truth he came to understand, he does what every actually serious socialist has ever done: think seriously about addressing social and economic inequalities and divisions, and how to address them. In an impressively succinct series of paragraphs, Christman thoughtfully considers all sorts of leftist arrangements which the socialist tradition has inspired reformers and revolutionaries alike to consider over the centuries: worker co-ops, government ownership, wealth funds, and more. Ultimately, he acknowledges that there is plenty of thinking and working yet to be done in pursuing these Christian ends, and that no one is certain of the best means to achieve leftist ends. At one point, he ruefully comments, “I don’t think it pays to get too dug in at this point on any of those systems” (121). But that doesn’t mean that his inspiration has been judged wanting. Rather, it just means that Christman, like any other religious believer whose eyes have been opened to the socialist imperative, is in the same condition as the rest of us Christians: asking for God’s grace as we make our way—experientially, creatively—towards more justice, more fairness, more beloved communities in our world.

It is worth noting that Why Christians Should Be Leftists has been extensively reviewed in Christian publications, including some quite right-leaning ones, and without exception, all these reviews recognize that any proper understanding of Christianity imposes a universalist vision of neighborliness and love upon believers. Consequently, they acknowledge the salience of Christian condemnations of how wealthy citizens and countries police their borders and protect their wealth. Yet they demur from recognizing that such condemnations put them, however partially, on the socialist left. One reason for this—one that Smith explicitly pointed out as a hang-up for himself as well—is the left’s association with sexual freedom. What about personal sin?, they ask. What about moral purity? Of course, the records we have of Jesus’s words suggest that he didn’t talk about sexual morality nearly as much as he talked about sharing your goods with your neighbor, and didn’t condemn personal lifestyles nearly as much as he condemned exploiting the poor. But still, to insist that he never talked about the former isn’t correct either.

So those who want to find reasons to doubt the sincerity of Christman’s Christian faith—and thereby avoid facing up to the leftist insistence upon socio-economic equality and community in the Bible which Christman makes clear—solely on the basis of what he thinks about abortion or homosexuality or any other culture war issue can certainly do so. And sure, when I put on my political scientist hat, I can explain at length how predictable it was that Christman, as he moved away from the Calvinist socialization of his youth, likely came to follow well-established patterns of liberal thought that granted enough importance to individualist expressions of moral choice such that he simply couldn’t take the sexual traditionalism of much of American Christianity seriously. But frankly, as something of a left conservative myself, I am happy that Christman felt no need to warp his testimonial writings so as to defend those aspects of his current political beliefs which actually have nothing to do with the heart of his political evolution. That heart is, simply, a pious conviction that we must apply the Sermon on the Mount—apply a complete abandonment of any kind of distinction between winners and losers—to public life. Compared to that, everything else is secondary, as one of his final reflections makes clear:

The machinery of history is not ours to operate even if we could, which we can’t. But that’s OK, because there isn’t any machinery anyway. There’s the kingdom of God, which God is bringing about and will bring about. We live in a way that anticipates it. We forgive debtors, we hasten to resolve conflicts, we try to love our enemies. We try to build a society where the meek, the peacemaker, the person on the bottom of things is abundantly blessed. Leftism at its best helps us to do that. We are leftists only insofar as it is a name for our doing that. (153–154)

Christman’s last words of testimony are, appropriately, “Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus” (174). Both the unreconstructed Marxist and the Christian conservative who struggle to accept Jesus’s call to have complete solidarity with the poor, one’s enemies, and everyone else as both a serious and a socialist statement would likely sniff at such a conclusion. But this Christian socialist loved it, and the book itself.

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Dr. Russell Arben Fox is a local democracy expert who comments on Kansas politics, edits "Front Porch Republic," and has published widely in academic journals. He lives in Wichita with his wife and four daughters.

Art by Georges Rouault (1871-1958).

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