by Thomas R. Grover
I wish I hadn’t looked at X on Sunday night.
Earlier in the day, a gunman attacked a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan. He also set fire to the church building, which is a total loss. As of this writing, four congregants are dead, eight are in the hospital, and others remain unaccounted for.
According to multiple posters on X, the burning issue on Sunday, September 28, 2025 was… whether Mormons are Christian. Who looks at a mass murder, which includes child victims, and thinks this debate even matters?
Like cable “news,” X doesn’t survive on facts and reason, but by firing up our lizard brains, pitting us against each other in anger while teaching us nothing. Both media feed us empty calories for our worst instincts.
We Americans are losing our ability to see the humanity in each other. There are influencers, media personalities, and politicians actively trying to rile us up enough to hate each other. These voices and businesses respond to economic incentives that elevate anger and diminish reason. If we continue to consume their products, we incentivize more harm to ourselves and society. We must keep them out of our homes, families, and lives, not only for our spiritual well-being, but also to protect the nation’s civic health.
What matters right now is that there is an entire ward that, as they sang the sacrament hymn Sunday morning, could not have imagined their changed reality by that same evening. Some members of that ward are dead, others are fighting for their lives in a hospital. They have lost their children, spouses, siblings, and friends.
Sunday morning, during sacrament, at a time when I normally meditate, I could not shake the thought of what it must have been like for the Michigan congregants. I sat in my chapel’s peaceful silence, imagining what the abrupt sounds of a crashing wall and gunfire would feel like. To experience such a violent act at all, but during the most peaceful, contemplative moment of the week, is hard to fathom. All of the survivors, especially the children, are going to be traumatized forever.
Right now, the only thing that matters is praying for everyone in that ward, their extended families, and their friends. And when those prayers go up, God isn’t going to see or care about whether those supplications come from “the left,” MAGA, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Lutherans, or Mormons. And we shouldn’t either.
This chapter of American history is not about left or right; it’s about whether we’re going to allow ourselves to continue to be baited into hatred. Just hours before the attack, the President of the LDS Church, Russell M. Nelson, passed away. He believed that “we can literally change the world—one person and one interaction at a time. How? By modeling how to manage honest differences of opinion with mutual respect and dignified dialogue.”
That isn’t a naive invitation to cower from robust debate, which has kept our republic healthy for more than two centuries. In this moment, too many Americans have ceded the public square to the most hateful, loud, and strident voices. Rousseau might have been talking about our moment when he said, “People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.” Those with heightened self-awareness are most able, but ironically restrain themselves. Our nation needs people who can speak above the noise, who see the nuance in political debates, and place American brotherhood above tribalism.
We need to hear more from the people who are still reading books, who think deliberatively rather than reactively, and who show emotional intelligence in disagreement. If you have felt hesitant to speak up, you are probably one of those people. Your voice is likely one of those most needed to restore healthy stability to national discourse. I urge you to speak up and be heard.
Thomas R. Grover is a litigator in Las Vegas, NV.
