A few nights ago, my wife gathered—as they have many times—with her sisters around a table, food at the center.
Not just a dinner, really—one of those gatherings that carries more weight than the occasion itself. Her five sisters were there, their mom too. They had come together to celebrate Savannah finishing her master’s degree in Marriage and Family Science at UVU. A milestone, yes—but also a kind of reaffirmation. A moment that says, we are still here, still together, still part of the same story.
These women have spent a lifetime becoming known to one another. Their lives have been braided slowly—through births and grief, through laughter that only makes sense inside the family, through seasons of closeness and seasons of quiet distance. And running beneath all of it, like a steady current, has been a shared faith shaped within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It has never just been belief.
It has been recognition.
A way of saying, without saying it: this is who we are to each other.
But my wife said there was a moment when the room shifted.
Not abruptly. More like a subtle tightening—like something long held just beneath the surface had finally reached the point where it could no longer stay hidden.
Savannah had something to say.
And it wasn’t sudden for her.
This moment had been forming for a long time—quietly, privately, with a kind of internal pressure that builds when the cost of silence starts to outweigh the risk of honesty. She had likely rehearsed it in her mind, turned it over in different words, imagined different reactions. Not because she didn’t know what she believed—but because she knew exactly what it might mean.
Because when belief is shared, it does more than orient you to God.
It orients you to each other.
And to step outside of that shared world is not just a theological shift. It’s a relational one. It raises the possibility—unspoken but deeply felt—that something essential might loosen.
That belonging might become conditional.
So when she finally spoke, it wasn’t just a statement.
It was an exposure.
She told them she had stepped away from the Church.
And beneath that sentence—beneath all of its composure—was a quieter, more fragile question:
What does this mean for us now?
In communities like this, belief often becomes the architecture of belonging. It gives relationships structure. Predictability. A shared map of reality that makes connection feel stable.
To believe the same things is to stand on common ground.
But moments like this expose something we don’t often examine:
What if that ground was never as solid as we assumed?
What if we’ve quietly confused agreement with unity?
In Latter-day Saint discourse, the ultimate aim is Zion—a people described as being “of one heart and one mind.” But in practice, that phrase is often flattened into sameness of thought. We learn the language. We echo familiar expressions. We internalize what it sounds like to belong.
Over time, repetition becomes expectation.
And expectation becomes a boundary.
It works—until it doesn’t.
Because belief is alive. It shifts under pressure. It deepens, fractures, reforms. And if our relationships are built primarily on shared belief, then every internal change carries relational risk.
Which means moments like Savannah’s are not just personal.
They are revealing.
They show us what the relationship was actually built on.
The Book of Mormon offers a different center of gravity.
Its narrative does not climax in perfect doctrinal clarity, but in presence—in Christ appearing among the people. And what follows in 4 Nephi is not a society defined by synchronized belief, but one transformed at the level of relationship.
They have no contentions.
They deal justly.
They are “one.”
And the text gives exactly one reason:
“The love of God did dwell in the hearts of the people.”
That is the mechanism.
Not agreement—love.
But that word—love—has been so softened by overuse that it risks losing its meaning. It can sound like sentiment, like kindness, like a vague emotional warmth.
Scripturally—and philosophically—it is something far more demanding.
It is closer to what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a shared commitment to the flourishing of one another. A recognition that my well-being is bound up in yours—that I cannot fully become myself at your expense.
It is the movement from an I–It world to an I–Thou world. Not subject relating to object, but subject encountering subject. A way of seeing another person not as something to categorize, correct, or manage—but as someone whose inner life carries the same weight and reality as my own.
In that sense, love is not agreement.
It is a posture.
A refusal to reduce the other.
A commitment to remain in relationship even when understanding is incomplete.
This becomes especially important when we consider how we understand ordinances.
Within Latter-day Saint theology, ordinances are described as “essential.” But that language can easily take on a mechanical tone—as if something becomes real only after it has been properly authorized, enacted, and recorded.
As if heaven is waiting on paperwork.
But there is another way to see what ordinances are doing.
The Gospel of John begins with a claim that reorients everything: “the Word became flesh.” The Logos—the underlying pattern, the generative intelligence of reality—takes on form.
Creation, in this sense, always begins in the unseen.
Nothing has ever come into being without first existing as possibility—held in imagination, in intention, in vision.
But many things remain there.
Unlived. Unembodied.
And this is where ritual becomes essential—not as a transaction, but as a bridge.
Ordinances are not the music.
They are the scales.
They take what exists as idea and move it into action. They compress vision into time and space. They allow us to practice, in concentrated form, the kind of life we are being invited to live.
They do not make something real.
They train us to live as if it is.
In that sense, they are essential—not because they are exclusive, but because embodiment itself is essential to creation. Without some form of enacted pattern, vision never fully enters the world.
But when “essential” becomes equated with exclusivity, something distorts.
What should function as invitation begins to feel like qualification.
What should open possibility begins to narrow it.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the living reality those rituals point toward gets replaced by the performance of the ritual itself.
The symbol displaces the substance.
The rehearsal is mistaken for the life.
And when that happens, love itself can become conditional.
Maintained as long as alignment holds.
Offered as long as nothing drifts too far.
We don’t call it conditional.
We call it faithfulness.
But it raises a question that cuts deeper than we might expect:
Faithful to what?
To a structure?
Or to each other?
If Zion is what we claim to be building, then the answer matters.
Because Zion, as described in the text, is not a community of identical minds. It is a community of transformed hearts—people who have become capable of remaining bound to one another without requiring sameness as the price of belonging.
That kind of unity is harder.
It cannot be outsourced to shared belief.
It must be practiced, moment by moment, in the presence of difference.
It looks like staying when it would be easier to withdraw.
Listening when it would be easier to correct.
Holding someone in their divergence without experiencing it as a threat to your own ground.
Which brings us back to that dinner.
Savannah’s words did not just mark a change in belief.
They revealed the question that had been waiting underneath all along:
What actually binds us together?
Not in theory—but here, now, in this room.
Not whether she would be debated—
but whether she would still be held.
Not whether she would be brought back into alignment—
but whether she would remain fully inside the circle of belonging.
There is a quiet irony here.
She had just completed a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Science—a discipline devoted to understanding the forces that hold relationships together and the patterns that cause them to fracture.
And in that moment, she wasn’t speaking as a student of systems.
She was stepping directly into the tension those systems try to describe.
Testing, in real time, whether the bonds she had studied could hold under strain.
Whether theory could survive contact with love.
If what binds us is agreement, then relationships will always be fragile—contingent on shared conclusions that cannot, by their nature, remain fixed.
But if what binds us is something deeper—
something like the love described in 4 Nephi—
then unity becomes something else entirely.
Not the absence of difference,
but the refusal to let difference become distance.
Not the enforcement of sameness,
but the cultivation of a bond strong enough to hold what is not the same.
Because love, in its truest form, is not the reward for agreement.
It is the condition that makes enduring relationship possible without it.
And that kind of unity—
costly, exposed, alive—
might be the only kind that actually holds.
Discussion questions
- What role does shared belief play in creating durable and lasting relationships?
- Is it really possible to be bound tightly by something greater than shared belief?
Wheat & Tares 
Thanks. Yes, Zion and unity don’t mean sameness of thought, but they mean in relationship. My brother or son might lose his church membership, but he remains my family. My love for him has to be in our relationship, which is bigger than church membership status.
Along that line, throughout our scripture the words “true” and “truth” do not mean factual accuracy — rather, they mean fidelity, loyalty, commitment, and honor. One can be true, and one can have truth, even without the factual accuracy we seem to erringly insist on.
I hope your wife and her sisters are still in relationship.
ji – Luckily for my wife and her family, relationship has been built on a deeper and more solid foundation. They each left that gathering more deeply connected and appreciative of life together, and Savannah didn’t feel the least bit of them reaching to “rescue” her from deception. Just respect for the journey she is on. Their experience “in” the church is not diminished by someone else feeling fed elsewhere.
About 20 years ago, my daughter called me sobbing. I asked her what was wrong. She said nothing was wrong, that she had something to tell me. She was gay. She was worried I’d reject her. I was active in the church, been in Bishoprics and other callings, and been on a mission. She didn’t know how I would react because she had seen so many church members react negatively. Well, I told her that from the moment she was born, I loved her. It was something that just was, no questions. I said this didn’t change a thing.
Well, it did, of course, but not how I felt about her. I saw how my friends at church reacted and was hurt by some and reassured by others. When it came right down to it, and I started to reflect on the Savior and the emphasis on the Family by the Church, I realized that many in the church get it wrong and reject those they love because of something they do or are. I started to reflect even more, and eventually, I couldn’t go back to church, particularly after she got married to her wife and had two little boys via IVF. When the church condemned all of that and then reversed it, I realized there was a lot more “man” in the church than “God.”
Todd S, I hope your wife and family are doing well. I know I feel more in tune with God and the Universe since I began to question, think for myself, act for myself, and not worry about what the church would think. My daughter and her family are doing great. I don’t worry about them, but I admit I worry about some of the bigotry I see manifest here in Utah, but that’s another post.
“It is the movement from an I–It world to an I–Thou world. Not subject relating to object, but subject encountering subject. A way of seeing another person not as something to categorize, correct, or manage—but as someone whose inner life carries the same weight and reality as my own.”
I agree with this–and I would add that it is having an “I and Thou” relationship with the Savior that increases our capacity to see and love others the way he does. And so it is by virtue of developing that kind of understanding with the Savior that we can learn to be of one heart and one mind with each other.
Someone correct me if I’m forgetting a counter example here, but our scriptures don’t seem to have stories of people in mixed-faith relationships that persist through the narrative. We have Alma the Younger born in the faith, leaving and triumphantly returning to be a great leader. We have Ruth and Naomi and “you God shall be my God and your people, my people.” Lamanites stay separate from Nephites, and Israelites stay separate from Canaanites, and Jews stay separate from Samaritans. And any time we have lots of Nephites being unbelievers that is clearly bad and they are ripe for either punishment or conversion. In our pioneer stories we hail those who left their families in England who thought our ancestors were crazy for joining this new religion and moving to Utah.
Our stories always show that mixed-faith relationships are problems to be solved, and never situations that we live in. We have no model to follow for when our lives don’t end up that way, and many of us end up with feelings of failure, shame and rejection when we enter the mixed-faith realm. But these days, there are few members of the church that aren’t living in this reality, and nearly all of us here at W&T are in that camp.
I dare say that virtually every parent who has a child that has stopped participating in church knows it is possible to be bound by something greater than shared belief.
I have 3 very devout younger brothers (I’m 79), and one who recently visited us in our remote NM community. It felt dishonest for me not to tell him I have resigned my membership (about a year ago). My anxiety was excessive as I was searching for something online to help him understand why. Fortunately, I came across a YouTube video on the Leading Saints channel of Jeffrey Strong reviewing his new book, “Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church And What We Can Learn From Them”. I knew he wouldn’t watch anything that wasn’t very TBM, and this was perfect. After it was over, we discussed it a bit, then I told him I was using it as a preliminary to telling him I had disaffiliated. He asked a few questions, and in the end, he reassured me of his love and support. The rest of our time together, I have never felt such love from any sibling, including my SIL, who is fantastic!
With books such as this being written and talked about, greater communication and understanding will hopefully increase, and the ideas of lazy learners, lax disciples, etc. will fade out! Family bonds are what are most valuable and important!
DaveW:
I appreciated your comment. I take comfort in the stories of Abish and Ammon’s people. Group after group joins them and rejects warfare. They seem the most centered on each other and a gratitude for redemption more than making sure everyone believes the same. Other than they share the belief that other people matter more than being right. The book doesn’t give many details about the various groups that join them, but it’s a mixture of different strands of Lamanites and Nephites. And from what little is described, they seem to make it work.
@Jack
I think that’s right—that developing an “I–Thou” relationship with the “Christ” expands our capacity to encounter others the same way. The more we experience ourselves as deeply seen and loved, the more capable we become of seeing others beyond category, utility, or judgment.
What I find interesting, though, is the tension between that relational language and the way many of us interpret ordinances like the sacrament. We readily speak of having a personal, living relationship with Christ, yet often frame the sacrament prayer as a blatant transaction: if we properly perform, worthily partake, and correctly remember, then God fulfills His side of the agreement.
That shifts the relationship from “I–Thou” into “I–It.” God becomes the administrator of a covenantal system, and we become participants trying to satisfy conditions rather than persons entering communion.
To me, the sacrament seems less like a transaction securing divine approval and more like a ritual of reorientation—a rehearsal in remembrance, participation, and relational presence. Not a mechanism that makes God willing to be with us, but a practice that awakens us to the reality that divine presence was never absent to begin with.
What’s especially intriguing is that we as Latter-day Saints can read the New Testament and still miss the pattern Jesus is actually embodying. He consistently moves toward the people religion and society created boundaries around. He eats with sinners, touches unclean things, blesses the poor, speaks with outsiders, forgives enemies, and shares meals with those considered spiritually compromised. Again and again, he is practicing the removal of separation.
Yet somehow, we can administer the sacramental meal—the very ritual meant to remember him—and unconsciously turn it into a public display of worthiness and boundary maintenance. The irony is hard to ignore: the meal that symbolized radical inclusion and shared humanity can become a mechanism for measuring spiritual acceptability.
That doesn’t mean discernment or covenant disappear, but it may mean we have misunderstood their purpose. Perhaps the point was never to divide the worthy from the unworthy, but to dissolve the illusion that any of us were separate from one another to begin with.
Todd S has it right that it is about developing a relationship with others “as demonstrated” by Jesus Christ. And funny thing is we don’t even need to believe in Jesus Christ to do that. Oh, it works great if we really believe in Jesus’s love. But the Christian Nationalists demonstrate that it is not believing in Jesus that is important, but understanding Jesus’s kind of love that is important. There are just so many unchristian Christians out there. The name we put on universal love is less important than the actual love.
Latin has three different words for love and we use two of them a bit in English. But English has kind of missed the point on Agape. We know about eroticism and erotic love. We know about philia and even have a city of brotherly love of Philadelphia. Philia is not just for blood brothers, but meant love for our fellows, countrymen or tribe members. But we don’t have any words taken from the word for universal or God like love, kinda like the Roman pagans understood something we don’t in Christianity. Like we have lost the concept of universal transcendent love and the best we can do is love our own tribe.
And Christian Nationalisn is a good example of loving only our own kind and hating everyone else.
But that is not what Jesus actually taught or lived. He lived love for everyone. He healed anyone who came to him. But even his followers who personally know him had trouble with that concept. Peter didn’t think the gospel should be shared with any unclean (non Jewish) people and it took a vision to convince him. Christlike love is for everyone on earth, even the unclean.
But Mormonism thinks they should exclude the unclean and those married LGBT people are not following our purity code. That is not chastity according to our rules, so kick them out and stop loving them.
But, there was BYU teacher trying to teach Christlike love and one day there was a woman who had her newborn with her in class. So the teacher asks her about why she love this thing, this crying helpless thing. Would she still love him if he had birth defects. After several questions about why she loved this newborn so much, the woman said, “because he is mine.” That is how God loves us. Unconditionally. Because we are His. We belong to the family of humans.
We do not even need to believe in God or Jesus or Allah or any God to understand that all humans are family. That we are all human. We do not need God to love people. Yes, a concept of a loving God helps, but not needed. We just need to recognize the humanity of all of humanity. I recognize thou. Human relationship.
We don’t need God for that and lots of people have God but don’t have love. The love of God and the love of humanity can be tied together but not necessarily. There are some Christians who hate their brothers because their brother is gay, or Moslem or black or undocumented or Hispanic.
The point Jesus tried to teach was that we should love our fellow humans, and love our higher power whether that higher power is the Christian God or nature or the universe. We need to love our earth or we kill our fellow humans. We need to love animals or we kill our fellow humans. It all ties together and we need to care for it.
There is something to the idea that the Church wants our love to be merely conditional. Both Nelson and Oaks have tried to claim that the greatest two commandments (loving God and loving your fellow man) are somehow at odds with each other, and that you reject God if you love your fellow man too much. The Church doesn’t exemplify or preach the kind of love Jesus showed. Jesus repeatedly showed that your love of God is meaningless unless you love and serve your fellow man, that anyone who says they love God and doesn’t love their fellow man doesn’t actually love God.
I noted recently, in a short time period, two different family members who left the Church many years ago who said that they always felt like the outsider or that they were treated differently or they were the “black sheep” of the family. First of all, I think lots of people are prone to think they are the “black sheep” whether they are or not, so there’s always a grain of salt to be had in the insecurities people feel in their own families. In both cases, though, what was interesting to me is that they weren’t the first one to leave the Church among their siblings, and both sibling groups in question were roughly a 50/50 split on whether they were in the Church or out. These individuals really had no basis to believe they were singled out as the outsider–they were not alone at all. I also noted that when my kid came out, they were literally ready with the car packed in case we kicked them out–which we would never in a million years have even considered doing. But the messages at Church from the Church were so strong that they thought this was a real risk. It’s like the old adage, if you hang out in Nazi bars, you might be mistaken for a Nazi. If you take your kid to a church that hates LGBTQ people, even though you literally told them the opposite their whole life, they still have to wonder if you meant what you said.