My mormons,
"You are not a member of an organization. You are a member of a people, and you forget the difference at your peril. An organization has employees and customers and a mission statement. A people has martyrs. A people has graves it can point to, ground soaked with its own blood, stories that begin with "your fathers" and mean it.
The world will tell you that Mormonism is a religion you happen to hold, a set of beliefs you could set down tomorrow and remain exactly who you are. The world is lying. You cannot separate the faith from the people who bled for it, because they were never two things.
The pioneer past is not the backstory of Mormonism. It is the body of it. Carthage is not history you learn. It is inheritance you carry. The handcart companies are not an episode in a manual. They are your dead, your line, your tribe, and the covenant that binds you to God binds you just as surely to them.
This is the thing the modern Saint has forgotten, and the forgetting is a kind of orphaning. We speak of "the pioneers" as though they were someone else's ancestors, figures in a diorama, a heritage month. They are not someone else's.
Whether your blood crossed the plains or your baptism grafted you into the vine last spring, they are yours now, fully yours, because that is what it means to be sealed into a covenant people: their story becomes your story, their martyrs become your martyrs, their dead become your dead.
The convert from Manila and the seventh-generation rancher from Cache Valley stand in the same line, heirs of the same graves.
Joseph and Hyrum did not die for an institution. They died for a people that did not fully exist yet, a people they could see only by faith, and you are that people.
Their blood is in your spiritual veins. When you take the sacrament, you take it as one of them. When you enter the temple, you enter on ground their sacrifice purchased. You cannot claim the gospel and disown the tribe that carried it, because the gospel came to you inside that tribe, wrapped in its stories, paid for with its suffering, handed down grave by grave until it reached your hands.
And a people who know they are a people cannot be broken the way scattered individuals can. This is why the world works so hard to convince you that your faith is private, personal, just one option in the marketplace of beliefs.
A lone believer can be picked off, worn down, embarrassed out of his convictions one awkward conversation at a time.
A member of a tribe with martyrs cannot, because he does not stand alone, and he knows it. He stands in a line that runs back through the valley and the plains and the frozen rivers to a jail in Illinois, and the line stands in him.
So claim your people. Say "my martyrs" and mean it. Say "my dead" and feel the weight of it.
Take your children to the graves of the pioneers and teach them that these are not strangers, these are ours, this is who we are and what we came from and what it cost.
Because the day you understand that you belong to a people, the mockery of the world loses its power over you entirely. They are laughing at your tribe. And your tribe buried its children in the snow and kept walking, and outlasted every mob and every extermination order and every laughing generation since.
You come from the unbreakable."
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