Latter-day Saint history is a long record of adaptation and workarounds: the 1890 Manifesto, the shift from the United Order to tithing, the Word of Wisdom hardening from counsel into commandment, the 1978 revelation, a temple liturgy (and garments) modified again and again. Each change arrived with a statement saying, in effect, that nothing essential had changed, let's all move on. That gap, between what everyone can see happening and what the institution is willing to say is the water we swim in, the fiction we live and breathe.
Imagine a short story set in 2036, when the Church announces that any loving, monogamous couple can now be sealed for time and all eternity. The story would not be about the policy; it would be about the people who have to make it sound inevitable.
The engine: it was always there
The story's driving irony is simple. Every theological resource the Church will use to justify the change in 2036 already exists today. Intelligence that was never created (D&C 93:29). A temple creation story in which Adam and Eve are organized, not conceived. Sealings for infertile couples, elderly couples, and the dead. Nineteenth-century adoption sealings that bound unrelated adults into one family. Even the Proclamation’s line that gender is eternal identity, quietly reread to include anyone we are attracted to. Don't forget Peter's vision in Acts 10, that no one is unclean. None of it needs to be invented; it only needs to be put to use.
So the reader should feel two things at once: relief that the change finally comes, and a quiet ache at the question underneath it. If the justification was available in 2036, it was available in 2026 and 2006. What held it back was never doctrine. It was willingness.
Point of view: the announcement writer
Tell it through someone inside the machinery: a mid-career PR writer in the Church Office Building, assigned to draft the announcement. Not a general authority, not a rebel. A faithful functionary who knows the scriptures cold and has spent a career making hard things sound gentle.
This choice does three things. It gives you a narrator fluent in the very workarounds the story is about, so exposition becomes action: every paragraph of the draft is a scene. It puts the moral tension inside one person rather than between heroes and villains. And it lets the reader watch doctrine being assembled, sentence by sentence, the way institutional language actually gets made.
Give the writer a private stake that is never stated outright. Perhaps a sibling who left. Perhaps a widowed mother sealed to a man who remarried. The reader should sense it in what they linger over and what they cut.
Write from love, not contempt
The easiest version of this story is a sneer. It would be satisfying for a page and forgettable by the end.
The harder and better version loves the Church enough to be disappointed in it. The writer should believe. The old sealer who hesitates at the altar should be tender, not bigoted. Even the traditionalists who walk out should be given their dignity, because they are now the ones holding certainty from a position of weakness, and the story knows what that costs.
A useful test for every scene: would a faithful reader recognize their own ward in it? Would a former member recognize their own grief? If both can see themselves, the story is doing its work.
Keep the politics offstage
The premise imagines a 2036 in which the political ground has forever shifted after some sort of backlash and the Church faces new pressure. Let that remain weather, not plot.
A story that names parties and cheers a winner dates itself and loses half its readers in the first paragraph. More importantly, it misreads the pattern it is about. The Church has never changed because one side won. It changed in 1890 for statehood and survival, and in 1978 amid global growth. It changes when the cost of staying put becomes too high.
So show the cost, not the election: empty Young Single Adult wards, a mission president's report on converts lost, a donor's letter, a granddaughter who stops coming. The politics can live in a single line of radio in the background. The pressure should feel human.
A story about a draft
- The assignment. The writer receives the brief: make it sound consistent with long-standing doctrine.
- The research. They pull the sources: D&C 93, adoption sealings, Acts 10, Kimball's remark that the rib is figurative. Each find is a small scene of recognition.
- The discovery. Searching for the clearest phrasing, they find it in an essay by a woman disciplined in 2016 for writing exactly these arguments. Her sentences are better than theirs.
- The choice. Quote her without credit, which is the institutional way, or find a way to honor her, which risks everything the writer has built.
- The sacrifice. Throw polygamy under the bus once and for all in favor of eternal monogamy. Everyone, at last, in a pair they freely chose.
- The church announcement. We hear the final statement read aloud. The reader knows whose words are inside it.
The story works because it turns a policy story into something about debt. Every workaround was first spoken by someone who paid for it. The ending does not need to resolve whether she is ever restored. It only needs the writer, and the reader, to know her name.
What the story is really asking
Underneath the fiction is a story about grace offered too late for many. Grace that was forced. Grace that came kicking and screaming.
The reader should leave not with a verdict on the Church but with a question pressed into their own hands. What justification do I already have, right now, for a compassion I am waiting to be forced into? That question belongs to every institution and every person.
If the story succeeds, a faithful reader will finish it and quietly wonder why we are still waiting. That is not an attack on the Church. It is the oldest kind of religious writing there is: a prophet's complaint made out of love. And if mistakes were made, it will all be sorted out in heaven where "the family arrangements will be more wonderful than you can imagine."
Sources
“The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, September 1995.
Henry B. Eyring, “A Home Where the Spirit of the Lord Dwells,” general conference address, April 2019.
