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Hey, everybody. We're thrilled to announce that RESTORE tickets are on sale now. And we're so excited to tell you about the new format for this year. We're calling it Restore Connect. It's designed to make your experience more interactive, more embodied, and more communal than ever before. This year it's September 24th through 26th at the Nordisk center at UVU. We'll have an opening social on Thursday evening with two days of smaller, more intimate sessions so that you can choose the topics that are most important to you and have lots of time to connect with other attendees. And the presenters space is limited, so you're going to want to get your tickets fast. You can go to faithmatters.org restore today. We can't wait to see you in September. Hey, everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. As we approach America's 250th birthday, we're reminded that every generation inherits the responsibility of shaping the nation's future. At a moment marked by fear, division and distrust, the invitation to become peacemakers has never felt more urgent. Today we're sharing a powerful message from Patrick Mason that he shared at our RESTORE gathering at Utah Valley University last year, just two weeks after the tragic shooting of Charlie Kirk on the same campus. Speaking only a few hundred yards from the memorial, Patrick reminds us that violence is never the end of the story. The gospel invites us to answer fear with courage, suspicion with curiosity and enmity, with love. We loved Patrick's conviction that peacemaking is the work of discipleship. It's the work of Zion. And as we prepared to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he invites us to declare our own independence from the politics of fear, from contempt, from tribalism, and from the habits that keep us divided. Instead, he calls on all of us to join a revolution of friendship and civility. When he finished speaking at restore, the room erupted. There was such a palpable sense of energy and hope that ordinary people can help heal a divided world. So as you celebrate this Independence Day, we hope that you'll be filled with that same conviction and with that, here's Patrick Mason at restore.
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I appreciate it. What Arthur Brooks said yesterday, I appreciated what's been said throughout the conference about the kind of healing that's been happening in our hearts and in this space, but especially on this campus. I took a few minutes yesterday, probably a lot of you have done this as well, to go over to the place just a few hundred yards from here where the terrible tragedy happened just a couple of weeks ago and a horrific act of political violence that, of course, went viral. We've been talking about it, thinking about it, and in some ways, what violence like this does sometimes is it unmasks some of the dynamics that are happening in our communities, in our nation, in our hearts. But when I was over there yesterday, just kind of seeing the space and soaking it in, I felt a taste of something that I felt a couple of times before in my life. Last year, I talked about my trip to Rwanda and visiting the sites of the horrific genocide that happened there in 1994. There it was a million deaths, not one. 24 years ago, we experienced one of our nation's darkest days. And about a year later, I went to the site of ground Zero. And at the time then, they'd removed all the rubble, but it was still just a gaping hole in the ground. But there were still these makeshift memorials, just like there is here on this campus, of notes from family members and friends and people whose hearts had been broken. And what I felt yesterday, what I felt 23 years ago visiting ground Zero, what I felt a year ago visiting Rwanda, is you can feel a sense of pain that is palpable in these places. There's something that persists. There's something that speaks to our spirit and reminds us of what had happened there. The Book of Mormon talks about voices that cry out from the dust. I think we can feel that. We can see that even just within a stone's throw from here. So as I did so, it cast my mind back to 9 11, and I was a graduate student at Notre Dame at the time. It was a Tuesday morning. I'll never forget it. I was studying up in my room, and all of a sudden, my roommate sort of shouts out. He's like, patrick, you need to get down here. You need to look at the tv. Something weird is going on in New York. Came down. We turned on the TV and watched as the second plane flew into the building. And those of you who were alive back then, you remember what that day was like. You remember the fear. You remember the confusion. What was happening? Were we all under attack? And then it's happening in Washington and Pennsylvania. Like, what is right? How do you respond to this? You know, we all went into lockdown. I mean, all these kinds of things. We'd never. You know, nothing like this had ever happened before, at least not since Pearl Harbor. And just all of the fear and anxiety and terror that we felt on that day. I was never more grateful to be at the University of Notre Dame a Place grounded in faith. Because what did that community do? Well, they canceled classes just like everybody did, but then immediately they scheduled Mass. So they called the whole community together and they said, we're going to meet on the quad, the biggest quad in the middle of campus, and the university president, who's always a priest at Notre Dame, is going to celebrate Mass for the entire campus community. So we came together in the midst of our fear, in the midst of our terror, in the midst of our confusion, of our uncertainty. And what did we do? We prayed and we linked arms. I wasn't Catholic, so I didn't take the host and the wine, but received a blessing where two or three or together, I will be there also. Jesus was in our midst. So we felt that. We felt that a couple weeks ago. We felt that 24 years ago. We felt that at different times in our community. And we know as Latter Day Saint Christians, as Restoration Christians, that the original sin was not Eve taking the fruit. Right? We're grateful to Eve for what she did, for her courageous act. That is not the original sin. The original sin was when Satan entered the heart of Cain and he hated his brother. That is the original act of alienation, of separation from God and from one another, when Cain hated his brother so much that he killed him. So we talk about the weeping God of Mormonism, this beautiful, beautiful doctrine that we have. Isn't it beautiful that we have a God who weeps well? If we go back to the text, why does God weep? Well, he probably weeps for lots of different reasons. But in the text, God weeps for a very specific reason. Enoch sees him weeping. He sees his heart broken wide open. How is this possible? For the God of eternity, for the God of universe to weep? What is happening? Because these are the workmanships of my hands. I ask them to do one thing, to love one another, and instead they're without affection and they hate their own blood. That is the original sin has nothing to do with fruit, has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with the enmity that we have in our hearts, one towards another. And I have that sin in my heart. I pray. I prayed 24 years ago on that quad at Notre Dame. I pray today. I prayed two weeks ago that God would change my stony heart, the stoniness that I have towards other people, and change it into a heart of flesh. And we know this because of the nation that we live in. Right? I'm just going to give you some really depressing stats. You're like, man, this is a terrible Way to end an awesome conference. Okay. It's going to get better. Hold on. Depending on what poll you look at, between -2/3 and 4/5 of Americans believe that our democracy is in serious threat. Over half of Americans are strongly polarized this week. I pulled this stat this week. This means that they have strong feelings of dislike, distrust of the other side. In fact, we call this affective polarization, that the fear and distrust and dislike of the other side is stronger than their affinity for their own side. More than half of Americans. Check this out. 80% of Americans think the other party's agenda will destroy America. Not just they have bad ideas or we're going to disagree about tax rates or something like that. The other side will destroy America to the point at which about one in three Americans want their state to secede from the Union. They are so sick and tired of living with the other 49 states that they want to secede. Now, you can see it's strongest in California and Texas and Alaska. I married a Texan when I first started dating Melissa. I walked into her dorm room, she had a big old Texas flag in her room. I was like, I don't have a Utah flag on my wall, right? Like, what's going. That's where I started to get initiated into, like, Texas culture. All right? But this. Many of our brothers and sisters around the country, they just want to say, this whole American experiment, it's over. Let's give up. Let's start over just in our own state. So this is the bad news. This is the state that we find ourselves in now more than ever, especially after what's happened the last two weeks. And you all know this. You've all been on social media. You've watched the news, you've talked to your neighbors. You know the stoniness in our hearts and how and why it got us to this place. Okay, well, here's the good news. We can do better. In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense. Now, if you had said, what is common sense? In 1776, you would have not put money on the revolutionaries. Britain's population was three or four times as big as the colonists. Their army, especially their navy, they were the superpower of the world. They could land troops wherever they wanted. They had the most highly professionalized army in the world. How in the world was a ragtag bunch of colonials going to face off with this global superpower? In fact, Thomas Paine, in the same pamphlet, he said no one colony could even support itself, let alone go up against the might of England. But he recognized, a few months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the secret sauce that the Americans would need and use for victory. It's not in our numbers, he said. All the numbers were in England's favor. It's not in numbers, but in our unity that our great strength lies. It's not in those numbers that I just showed you. It's not in those polls. It's not in those things. It is in the unity that still persists in this country. But this becomes our job. This was what Arthur Brooks told us yesterday. This becomes our mission when we leave this place, when we leave this campus that has been wracked with so much pain over the last two weeks. We have a mission. We have a job. And it's the same job that the revolutionaries had 250 years ago. And this persists throughout American history. This is what Abraham Lincoln said when America came at the precipice, at its literally, its darkest moment, as the nation was going to war, rendered apart by the sin of slavery. And President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address said. He pled. He said, we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. This is our charge to not break the bonds of affection with our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans, our fellow humans. And really to go beyond this, to not just be enemies, but what did Jesus say to love our enemies? And Martin Luther King understood this as well as anybody. Remember Arthur Brooks quoted that wonderful 1957 sermon by Dr. King, Unlove your enemies. And Dr. King said, Our goal as Americans is not just to live together. It's not just to not be enemies. It's not just to avoid civil war. But the end is reconciliation. The end is redemption. The end is the creation of the beloved community. So that's our mission. That's our task. When we walk out of these hallways today, we take all of this personal restoration we have, and we're going to go out and we're going to transform the world, because that is what we do. Okay, thank you. That's what we do. So how do we do it? It's one thing to have beautiful quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King. How do we do it? Well, let me give you just a few ideas. One of our most important doctrines, of course, in the restoration is that we have agency. We have choice. And so peacemaking is a choice. President Nelson has told us this over and over and over again. To choose to be peacemakers Let me just talk about four simple things. First of all, to think about the information that we are getting. I remember when I was on my mission, it was at the time when that evangelical documentary the God Makers was really popular. If you were a missionary in the 80s and 90s, you know, well, the God Makers that made all of these outlandish, ludicrous claims about Mormonism. But I remember so often I would knock on somebody's door and we'd start talking and they're like, oh yeah, I know all about your church. And I'd say, oh, yeah, cool. How do you know about it? Oh, I saw this movie, the God Makers, right? Or, you know, I was over at my church and we had a, you know, convert your Mormon neighbor night. And so like, yeah, I know all about you guys. And I was like, well, like, do you want to talk? Like, you know, I have a few ideas about what I believe. And they're like, nah, I'm good. I saw the movie. How often do we do that? How often do we do that about the other side, whatever that is? If you want to know what people who love Charlie Kirk think about him, you don't watch msnbc. If you want to know what liberals and progressives really believe and think, you don't turn on Fox News. Talk to the person who really believes that and cares about it and thinks about it and lives it right. Doesn't mean you can't do your own research and look at other views and so forth. But just like we don't want other people telling us what we believe, go out and talk to somebody who actually is that thing that you're scared of or that you don't understand and ask them about it. Another thing is not to let social media tell us what our values are. I learned this in a conversation with my wife this week. She was having conversations with somebody who had all of these beautiful values that she listed out in terms of love and kindness and open heartedness and generosity. These are her core values. And my wife asked her, so when you're on social media, is that what your algorithm feeds you? And she's like, no, hadn't really thought about it that way. Does your algorithm feed you your best values? Probably not, because that's not what it's there to do. It's there to feed upon your fear. It's there to feed upon your feeling of threat and danger from other people. It's there to reinforce what you already believe. It's there to give you confidence, confirmation bias. Your algorithm is not there to reinforce your best values. So think about that. Now, you can shape your algorithm a little bit in terms of what you choose to click on and so forth, but don't let your algorithm shape your values. Let your values shape your algorithm. So important for us to think about us as we as a collective, as a community. One of the things that I've been trying to do to check my own heart and my own language is to really be mindful about the way that I'm thinking and talking about other people because it's so easy for me to reduce them to labels. Oh, he's a conservative, she's a progressive. She's a Charlie Kirk person.
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She's.
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He's a Rachel Maddow person. What I've just done. Now, that might be true descriptively. It might be true that he is a member of the Republican Party, that she's a member of the Democratic Party. That might be descriptively true. But what I've done often in my own mind is I've reduced them to that label, as if that tells me everything I need to know about them. And whatever side I'm on, as soon as I say that somebody else is on the other side, as soon as that's the label that I assigned to them, now I'm not even interested in them anymore. I'm not curious about them. I don't have compassion towards them because I've already decided where they are. I know everything about what they think, about what they do, how they spend their time, what they cheer for, what their values are. I know everything I need to know about them. So I'm trying really hard. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do because our minds categorize, but not to reduce people to categories and then finally to actually choose peace. Now, in some ways, that sounds like a lame bumper sticker, right? But as President Nelson has told us over and over again, when we're confronted in a moment of conflict, and conflict is just natural, we swim in it. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just part of life. But when we're confronted with that moment, we have a choice to make. The water can flow on one way or the other of the continental Divide. Which way do we want it to flow? Based on the words that we are going to choose to speak, the actions that we are going to choose to make, the thoughts. Thoughts are really hard to control. But as best as we can, the thoughts that we are going to choose to have about that person or about that situation, will that water flow towards love and forgiveness and open heartedness and generosity and curiosity? Or will it flow towards fear and recrimination and contempt? Well, so what does that look like? Every day Here is a terrible slide with way too much text on it. Okay, there are a million things that you can do every single day. Here's just a few ideas. Next time you see somebody wearing a piece of clothing that marks them as a member of another tribe, try smiling at them rather than scowling at them. Try checking your thoughts in terms of reducing them to their hat or their T shirt. Even better. Invite them to lunch. Listen to them again. I wish that those people on my mission had invited me in. Even if they didn't want to convert to my religion, at least that they would learn about my religion from me, not from the God makers. And when you go to that lunch, don't go into it saying, oh, I can't wait for them to ask me what I believe so that I can really say, they might not. They might not show any curiosity about who you are, what you believe. That's not the point. The point is not to convert them. The point is not to manipulate them into getting around to your position. The point is to listen and to love. Get involved in a group. Now, we're pretty good at this as Latter Day Saints, but we can do better. Get involved in groups that have nothing to do with tribal identities. I don't care if it's a book club, a dog walking club, the pta, whatever it might be. Because what you will find is that the people you serve with, that their political identity is probably the least interesting thing about them. President Nelson has recommended at various points for us to go on the social media cleanse to get the junk out of our system. I'm not saying we have to unplug totally, but it helps sometimes to go on a cleanse. And then maybe as we're doing that, we can replace all the junk with some positive stuff to fill our hearts, fill our minds with inspiring, uplifting words of peacemakers like Lincoln, like King, like Nelson, to learn about the stories of great peacemakers. Just a couple nights ago, I hosted a Nobel Peace Prize winner up at Utah State University. Just hearing her share her story. Her name's Lima Bowie, by the way. A Liberian peacemaker. Amazing. But to hear her tell her story inspired me. It gave me all kinds of ideas about how I can be a better peacemaker. This one's hard. Right now, our political leaders and other public officials are getting more threats and death threats than at any other time. In recent memory, why don't you send them a letter instead of a death threat saying I've got your back. Send it especially to the people that you disagree with, the people that you didn't vote for. And say when I see you threatened on social media, when I hear somebody talk about you, I'm going to stand up for you. Thank you for your service. I might disagree with you, I may vote against you the next time, but I've got your back. Thank you for serving our community and our nation. That means I've got lots of letters to write. And then after the Charlie Kirk shooting, thanks to some amazing peacemakers here in the state of Utah, we came together in collaboration and created a website called Turntour Us that you can go to, highly recommend go to. It's got all kinds of resources that you can go to to learn more about how you can be a peacemaker. Yeah, turntor us. Next year, July 4th, 2026 will be the 200th anniversary of America. That's right. Go America. Right. There's gonna be all kinds of celebrations. There's gonna be all kinds of things. We've got a little over nine months between now and then. I want you to think about what is the birthday gift you're going to give to America? How are you going to spend the next nine months? What gift could you give to this country that has given all of us so much? And here's what I want to suggest, that the greatest gift that you can give, the most essential skill of a citizen in 21st century America is to be a peacemaker. So that over the next nine months when somebody tries to recruit you for hyper partisanship and fear and enmity towards other people, that you're going to celebrate the independence of America by declaring independence. I invite you to declare independence from the politics of fear. Declare independence from enmity. Declare independence from hate. Declare independence from the hostility that's dividing us. Declare independence from red, from blue and all that other crap. Declare independence and say we are going to join a revolution of friendship and of civility. Let's be part of the revolution. It didn't look like they were going to win 250 years ago. They looked outnumbered, they looked out manned. It looked like they had no chance. Common sense said they were going to lose, but they said it doesn't matter. We're going to fight because we believe in this. We're going to fight for a nation built on the principles of E Pluribus unum and out of many one. And we're going to do this not just as Americans. One of my favorite documents in Mormon history is this. You probably recognize it. It's the plaid of the city of Zion. Joseph Smith drew out on the back of a napkin in summer of 1833. He's like, I got to build the City of Zion. Okay, what does the city look like right now? I love this for lots of reasons. I love Joseph Smith's audaciousness. In the middle of a New England town, there'd be, like, a church. He's like, let's build 24 temples instead. Right? It's just like, you know, evangelicals like, hey, everybody has a chance to be saved. Joseph Smith is like, guess what? Everybody's going to be saved. Right? So there's kind of audaciousness to this, to this city. There weren't even 10,000 Latter Day Saints. He's like, let's build a City for 10,000 people. And then when we're done with that, we'll build another one. Another one, another one, okay? But the thing that I love most about this, so there is temples at the center, this place where we commune with God, where we encounter Jesus, that will be at the center of our city. But then look around. It's all these places where we're going to live. And here's the beauty of it. You know the Taylor Swift song, Blank Space. I got a blank space, Baby, I'll fill in your name right? We needed a Taylor Swift reference before we closed Restore. Joseph Smith left it blank. Fill in your name. What are you gonna do in your plot in the city of Zion? He didn't fill it out for you. We know we've got Jesus at the center. We know we got temples at the center. We know it's at the center of that city. But when we live in that city, we have to fill in the blank space. What is it going to look like? What are you going to contribute to the building of Zion? Joseph Smith didn't tell you. President Nelson didn't tell you. I'm not going to tell you. You've got to figure out how are you going to fill out that space? Your plot in the City of Zion, how are you going to do it? Only you know that. But I do know what the building codes are. When Jesus gave us a sermon on the Mount, he said all these things about being blessed. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are, you know, the pure in heart. Blessed are those you know who are persecuted for his sake. All these kinds of things. Each of the Beatitudes spoke to a condition of the heart, except for one of all of the Beatitudes, which He gave both in the Old World and in the New World, in the New Testament and in the Book of Mormon. Right? We should care about the Sermon on the Mount twice as much as any other Christians because he gave it to us twice. We have it twice in our Scriptures. Only one tells us how to act. Blessed are the peacemakers. So if you want to be a child of God, if you want to be seen as a child of God, there's a building code for the City of Zion, and that building code is to be a peacemaker. So when you go out over the next nine months and make peace in your homes, in your neighborhoods, in your nation, in the world, do it. Yes, because we're Americans who believe in unity. But do it because you've been called by Jesus to do his work. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are all you children of God, because we will do it. We will bring healing to a nation desperately in need of it. Because Jesus has called us to God. Bless you.
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All right, thanks so much for listening. We really hope that you enjoyed this session from Patrick Mason at Restore last year. And we are thrilled to announce that registration for Restore this year is now open. It's happening September 24th through 26th in Orem at UVU again. But we are doing something a little bit different. This year will be very, very interactive. So it will be a totally new format. We're calling it Restore Connect. You'll be able to choose from smaller classes with lots of options, and there will be lots of opportunities to meet other attendees, to ask presenters questions, and to do deep dives into the topics that matter to you most. You can go to faithmatters.org restore to register. And if you'd like to hear more from Patrick, we highly recommend his podcast, Proclaim Peace, which he hosts with Jennifer Thomas from mweg. You can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks again for listening.