I believe the Book of Mormon to be inspired of God. Even those who don’t believe this should freely admit that its author had a deeper understanding of human nature than the young Joseph Smith should have possessed at the age of 21 or 22 years. In 2 Nephi, chapter 9, verse 28 we read:
O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.
Nowhere in the world, or in the Church for that matter, do we see this maxim displayed more than in the young, college-educated members of our faith who have yet to commit to the long haul of membership in the Church. College is a difficult thing for many of our young people. It seems to be the place that tests their faith more than anything else. There is a sifting process that takes place through our lives as circumstance and experience probes for weaknesses in our shield of faith.
For a Latter-day Saint youth, that testing begins in high school as their bodies reach the biological maturity for reproduction. The personal challenge of chastity begins in earnest. Biology and culture don’t necessarily harmonize here. American Indian tribes used to sequester girls for up to two years at the age where menstruation began. They didn’t want twelve and thirteen year-olds getting pregnant. Their culture recognized that girls of that age were not mature enough to become mothers, even though nature had made motherhood possible. During the sequestration, the grandmothers took care of the girls and began teaching them all they would need to know for Indian womanhood. I was joking with my adult daughter, a registered nurse with five children, that the entire summum bonum of the Church’s youth program is “Keep it in your pants.”
Bishops work with youth, counsel them, and encourage them to keep themselves worthy to enter the temple and to serve missions. Like the salmon swimming upstream to the spawning grounds, the youthful biological urges are like hungry bears waiting along the banks, waiting to gobble up the ones who show weakness. We do lose some of the youth at this point. A sixteen year-old who gets his girlfriend pregnant is not likely to end up in the mission field. A missionary who is burdened with guilt from masturbation is not going to have the Spirit and be able to teach others about Christ’s atonement and redemption. It’s what sends some missionaries home in discouragement.
If bishops and stake presidents manage to get their young charges out into the mission field and returned with their honor still intact, the next hurdle is marriage. I learned even before my mission that getting married is more important than career and college, a message that is the complete opposite of worldly advice. In the Gentile world, you are supposed to get your education, get a career, then look at settling down. Of course, the Gentiles also consider college a place of libertine sexual experimentation without expectations of building enduring relationships. One feminist journalist I read declared that your twenties are for sleeping with whoever you wanted indiscriminately, but in your thirties, you had to become more selective. That’s the way the worldly see it.
At any given moment in time, there are probably tens of thousands of young latter-day saints who enter college married or who marry while they are in college. They struggle together through the process of gaining an education together and they don’t delay having children. I served in the bishopric of a ward near a large medical university for several years. How great was my admiration for the many young couples who struggled through their studies, raised children, and served in important ward callings! Their dedication to the gospel was formidable and, I am confident, their families were strong and faithful because of their sacrifices.
So many young latter-day saints buy into the world’s philosophy today, even those who serve missions. They put education before marriage and often, in that libertine college sexual pressure cooker, they succumb to temptation. Even if they don’t, there is the academic pressures that get to them. I have encountered a fair share of apostates and anti-Mormons whose downward trajectory began when they couldn’t refute the arguments of a PhD professor. Rather than admit humbly that the Lord reserves some answers to be given by personal revelation or for the afterlife, they let go of their faith because their pride won’t allow them to face the professor’s scorn. “No rational person believes in divine creation,” one college professor told one of these young LDS “skulls full of mush.” Because the student couldn’t effectively refute the professor, it started his downward spiral of doubt.
For many today, the “woke” social justice climate of many campuses devours our young people. They desire to be seen as virtuous, but the world has its own virtue that doesn’t match that of the revealed gospel. Chastity is seen as regressive and oppressive, a relic of patriarchy. Instead, gender fluidity, transgenderism, is taught to students as the accepted morality. Hetereosexual dating becomes "rape culture." The worldly who reject prophets, revelation, restoration, keys, and authority challenge the beliefs of young members on the priesthood ban, polygamy, and “oppression” of women via polygamy. They are told for women to be “equal,” they must have the priesthood, and become bishops, stake presidents, and apostles. These “woke” advocates say that homosexuals and transgendered must be allowed into temples. (Just imagine some guy going into the women’s dressing room in the temple and heading for the initatory—or the bride’s room!)
Unable to handle the pressure and social isolation caused by these secular-progressive activists, many latter-day saints fail, not only to defend their faith, but they also abandon it and adopt the false, moral superiority of the “woke.” Then they bring that to Church. In Sunday School class, they start to harp on their politically-correct beliefs and disparage the long-held gospel tenets that their unenlightened, uneducated peers cling to. When they find those liberal views clash with the culture of the Church, they reach a decision point. Either the money they spent to become educated has been misspent or they must abandon the closed-minded rubes and the faith of their fathers and mothers.
When the young “salmon” reaches this cataract in the stream, the waiting grizzly often snaps him up as he flails vainly against the current, having momentarily lost his bearings and orientation. Many never recover. Because of their education, they think they are wise, as Nephi said. However, they are too young and inexperienced to see the folly in their letters to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, protesting comments made a generation or more in the past by Spencer W. Kimball, Bruce R. McConkie, or even further back to Brigham Young. They criticize current leaders of the Church, all of whom are endowed with a lifetime of wisdom, not to mention great worldly achievements in medicine, education, science, law, and business. It is as if these young people believe that accepting a call to be one of the Lord’s special witnesses negates the wisdom and experience of having performed hundreds of heart transplants, run a large corporation, employed thousands of people, argued cases before the Supreme Court, or presided over a major university.
No, instead the young, soon-to-be-college-graduate criticizes his Church leaders, castigates the tenets of his faith, and declares to his fellow saints during “Zoom Sunday School,” that they need to embrace the communistic goals of Black Lives Matter. Those research and critical-thinking skills he learned in college never lead him to discover that Black Lives Matter is a for-profit corporation that funnels its ill-gotten gains to Democratic candidates, which advocates destruction of the traditional family, promotes the cisgendered and transgendered agenda, and outright revenge and retribution against white people.
How true Nephi’s words, put to paper in our day by revelation to a young, twenty-something Joseph Smith, who only had two years of formal education, but a lifetime of divine tutelage, ring in our ears!
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