On Sunday morning, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints woke to the news that Russell M. Nelson—the leader of their faith, and a man they considered a prophet of God—had died. The sadness of the news was tempered somewhat by its foreseeability. Nelson, who had recently celebrated his 101st birthday, was the oldest living global religious leader, and he spoke freely about his own mortality. “At this point,” he said in a 2022 speech, “I have stopped buying green bananas.”
I had interviewed Nelson several years earlier for The Atlantic, and the late prophet was on my mind Sunday morning as I drove my family to our Latter-day Saint ward in Northern Virginia. After the sacrament meeting, I walked two of my kids to the Primary room, where they’d been given small assignments in that day’s children’s program. As the kids began to sing, I heard a fellow congregant behind me say, “There’s an active shooter at an LDS church.”
A quick glance at my phone revealed a stream of nightmarish news alerts from Grand Blanc, Michigan: Witnesses were reporting that a man had crashed his pickup truck into a Mormon chapel, opened fire on the congregation with an assault rifle, and set the building on fire. Early details were sketchy—the number of victims varied; some reports mentioned homemade explosive devices. But one image dominated my feed: an aerial shot of a utilitarian brick church, which looked strikingly similar to the one I’d driven my family to that morning, wreathed in flames.
I put my phone away. I watched my 7-year-old daughter say a prayer and my 10-year-old son read a verse of scripture. I flashed them a thumbs-up and slipped out the back of the room. Walking down the halls of the church, I found myself mentally noting the location of the exits.
As the day wore on, the discourse around the shooting took on a grimly familiar pattern. Conservatives rushed to declare that “Christianity is under attack,” while liberals circulated photos of a Trump sign hanging outside the alleged shooter’s house. The stampede to politicize the shooting dispirited me—I knew the story would likely vanish from the news cycle unless the killer’s motives proved narratively convenient to one party or the other. But I just kept thinking about Nelson. How would he have responded to the horrific violence in Michigan if he’d lived one more day? I doubt the shooter’s motives would have changed his answer. I suspect that Nelson—who spent his final years urgently pleading with Latter-day Saints to be peacemakers in a fractious and angry world—would have reminded us of that most radical, and unnatural, of Christ’s teachings: to love your enemy.
I first met Nelson in 2019, a year after he’d ascended to the presidency of the Church. His energetic tenure up to that point had surprised many observers—myself included—who expected the 93-year-old, a former heart surgeon, to play more of a caretaker role. Instead, he set out to transform the Church. He shortened worship services and introduced new hymns; he appointed the Church’s first Asian American and Latin American apostles and reversed a policy that restricted baptisms for children of same-sex couples. He announced scores of new temples to be built around the world and dramatically increased humanitarian spending to nearly $1.5 billion a year.
I had been assigned to write a feature on Mormonism, pegged to the faith’s bicentennial, and I was hoping that Nelson—who rarely sat down with reporters—would agree to an interview. To help make the case, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, had accompanied me to Salt Lake City. This convening of my boss and my spiritual leader made for a slightly unsettling dynamic, especially when Goldberg began talking up my qualifications.
“McKay is one of the most gifted young journalists in America,” he asserted, not without hyperbole.
The discerning prophet, looking surprised and perhaps a bit skeptical, glanced at me. “Really?”
Nelson agreed to the interview. But by the time I got on his calendar—10 months later—the world was unraveling. It was May of 2020, and a plague of biblical proportions was wreaking havoc on society.
As I sat across from the socially distanced prophet in a giant, wood-paneled conference room, I felt conflicted. I’d been struggling with the assignment. Should I approach the story as an observer or a believer? Could I really write thousands of words about a subject so personal to me while maintaining journalistic distance? In preparing for my interview with the prophet, I felt the tug of competing impulses. I had a list of reporterly questions to ask—about the Church’s history and its future and the painful tensions of the present—and the journalist in me wanted answers. But in the apocalyptic spring of 2020, I was looking for something more from the encounter—wisdom, hope, a measure of spiritual comfort.
I don’t know if Nelson sensed my ambivalence, but he had a doctor’s bedside manner that put me at ease. He prayed for each member of my family by name, and gave me business cards with little notes made out to each of my kids. About 15 minutes into the interview, he began talking about the various identities we carry through life. I mentioned that I sometimes found myself compartmentalizing the different roles I played—journalist, parent, person of faith—and his eyes lit up. “Don’t separate them,” he said.
He told me that when he was in medical school, a professor had once chastised him for failing to draw a line between his faith and his studies. “Why should I separate them?” Nelson recalled thinking. “If it’s true in one place, it’s true in another.” Studying human anatomy could enrich his faith in the creative powers of the divine; embracing the Christian ethic of patience and forbearance could improve his behavior in the operating room. Nelson chose not to be a doctor at the hospital and a Christian at church—he was both things all the time, and he was better off for it.
Some epiphanies are realized only in retrospect. I didn’t see it at the time, but Nelson’s teaching had a lasting effect on both my spiritual life and my journalism.
In his final years, Nelson concentrated much of his ministry on the ruinous divisions that define modern life. In a landmark 2023 sermon titled “Peacemakers Needed,” he called on his flock to reject the “venomous contention that infects our civic dialogue” and to instead build “bridges of understanding” to those with whom we most profoundly disagree. He pressed this point until the very end: In an op-ed published three weeks before his death, he wrote, “A century of experience has taught me this with certainty: anger never persuades, hostility never heals, and contention never leads to lasting solutions.”
Nelson’s diagnosis of our times wasn’t necessarily prophetic. He was seeing what we all see—a world riven by war, a country spiraling into hatred and violence. What made his prescription so powerful was how unfashionable it was. For all the talk lately of “lowering the temperature,” vanishingly few people seem interested in understanding their perceived enemies. Nelson’s example inspired me—and many others—to at least try.
Last night, I drove back to our chapel in Northern Virginia. There were no meetings to attend, but I had an urge to check on the building. It had been about 36 hours since news of the Michigan shooting first broke. The casualty count had been confirmed—four dead, eight injured—and the motives were becoming clearer: According to The New York Times, the shooter had nursed an irrational hatred of Mormons for years, apparently stemming from a breakup with a Latter-day Saint girlfriend.
But other stories were coming out, too—about the church members who used their bodies to shield children from bullets; about the nurses at a nearby hospital who, though they’d been on strike, left their picket line to attend to the injured.
Sitting in the church parking lot, I thought about one of the last things Nelson had said to me. We were nearing the end of our interview when he began to contemplate the questions he would face in his imminent interview with God.
“I doubt if I’ll be judged by the number of operations I did, or the number of scientific publications I had,” he said. “I doubt if I’ll even be judged by the growth of the Church during my presidency. I don’t think it’ll be a quantitative experience. I think he’ll want to know: What about your faith? What about virtue? What about your knowledge? Were you temperate? Were you kind to people? Did you have charity, humility?” In the end, Nelson told me, “we exist to make life better for people.”
Nelson was not naive about the world in which he lived. He surely knew that he would die before seeing peace triumph over contention. But he kept inviting us to reach for something better, because that’s what a prophet does—and because he knew that some of us would take him up on it.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, I passed the church’s VISITORS WELCOME sign. The sun had set, but a nearby light illuminated the sign just enough to reveal a small bouquet of flowers left on top of it by a stranger.
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