Your faith was forged in people who would rather be exterminated than assimilated. A soft version of it, eager to be liked and desperate to fit in, is not the thing they died to hand you.
So stop striving to be liked. Stop angling to be loved by a world that drove your fathers into the snow. That world would think no better of the gospel today than it did in 1838. Stop trying to file down every peculiar and glorious edge of the Restoration until the world finally finds you acceptable. It never will. And the wanting of its approval is the slow death of everything your people bled to preserve.
I am thinking of the proclamation on the family, and of how many have quietly gone looking for a way around it. Some say it aloud now. Some march under the world's Pride banners and tell themselves it is only love. They have done the quiet arithmetic and concluded that if they give the world this one doctrine, the world will finally stop hating them, finally let them belong, finally call them good.
It does not work that way.
It has never once worked that way. Understand what the world actually hates, because it is not a single teaching about marriage that it cannot abide.
It is the claim.
It is the unbearable, scandalous claim that the keys of the priesthood were restored to the earth, that there is a prophet who speaks for God, that this and no other is the authorized house of the Lord.
That is the offense. That is what it cannot forgive. You could surrender every doctrine the world finds distasteful, one after another, and you would not buy a single hour of peace, because the thing it objects to is not your position on this or that. It is that you claim to hold the authority of heaven, and it intends to see that claim humbled. The doctrine is only the doorway it is pushing on. The house is what it wants.
Embrace the truth. Embrace the battle that has always come with it, because there has always been a battle, and there is one now. It is the oldest war there is, good against evil, light against the dark, and you were born onto its field whether you wished to be or not. You did not inherit a museum. You inherited a war, and a banner, and a people who never once surrendered it.
You are a Mormon. The blood of the persecuted is in you, and the truth they died for is in your hands. You are not tourists. You are not spectators. You are the heirs of warriors, and the line they held is now yours to hold. So plant your feet on the ground they bled for.
Lift the banner they would not drop.
The Family Proclamation is the hill worth dying on. This is where we make our last stand. Who is with me?
the member below is in good standing with a calling
wake up my brother
you need to rally and clean house
"We are not a creedal people. We have no Nicaea, no list of clauses you must recite to be counted among us. And yet in 1995 the leadership put the doctrine of the family on a single page, signed their names beneath it, and that one page has become our shibboleth.
You know the word. At the fords of the Jordan the men of Gilead caught the fleeing Ephraimites by a single sound. Say shibboleth. The ones who could not shape the sh, who said sibboleth, were known in a heartbeat for what they were. A shibboleth is the syllable you cannot fake, the confession that reveals which bank of the river you are standing on.
But here is the strange thing about ours, and it took me years to see it. Every other shibboleth in history was a word. A password. Something you said. Ours cannot be said at all. We have no creed to recite, so the test could never live in the mouth. It had to go somewhere the mouth cannot reach. It had to become a life.
You do not pronounce this one. You build it, and the building shows. It is a man and a woman who took the covenant and then kept it, through the years and the dullness and the nights they wanted to leave and stayed, for time and for all eternity, while the whole world assured them the vow was a formality and the exits were always open.
It is a house with too many children in it by the world's arithmetic, the family that refused to treat a child as a luxury to be deferred and took it instead as the entire point, the cord carried forward into the next generation, the one most of the world has now decided it cannot afford.
It is the clean life. The thousand small refusals the world finds quaint or insane. The body kept. The appetites bridled. The Sabbath honored. The long sobriety of a people who say no to a hundred easy things on a Tuesday when no one is watching.
These are not three rules. They are the welding itself, done with a body, in time. And none of it can be faked at the ford. You can sign the Proclamation in an afternoon. You cannot fake a marriage of forty years, or a table that loud, or a life that disciplined. The signature is easy. The life is the shibboleth.
And so is the nerve to say it out loud, to stand up in the open and say that family is between a man and a woman, plainly, publicly, and where it costs you to say it, and to refuse to file the edge off the word because you would rather be liked, or because you have weighed the persecution and decided your own comfort is worth more than the truth. Anyone can affirm the parts the world still applauds."
