St. Peter delivers bad news to a man at the Pearly Gates in a “Bizarro” comic strip.
“You were a believer, yes,” St. Peter says. “But you skipped the not-being-a-jerk-about-it part.”
The joke got big laughs Tuesday at a BYU conference. But the cartoon carries a serious message for believers.
“I want to argue that the future of religious liberty in this country — the actual, durable, 50-years-from-now religious liberty — depends more than anything else on whether the believers in this country get the ‘not-being-a jerk-about-it’ part right," said Elder Robert M. Daines, a General Authority Seventy.
Even though formal legal protections for religious liberty in the United States have never been stronger, the actions or words of believers can damage it badly, he said during the opening session of BYU’s 2026 Religious Freedom Annual Review.
“I want to convince you that this is a serious legal and political claim and not just a sentimental one,” Elder Daines said. “If you want to defend religious liberty, I want to argue that it’s far more important that you are a good Muslim, Jew, Christian or Buddhist — a good peacemaker — than that you are a good litigator."
Religious freedom doesn’t need better lawyers, said Elder Daines, who worked as a lawyer before his full-time ministry. It needs better disciples and bridge builders.
“President Oaks got the don’t-be-a-jerk-about-it part right.”
— Elder Robert M. Daines
“We may have precedents sufficient for our needs,” he said. “What we don’t have in enough abundance are people willing to love, sacrifice for and compromise with people who do not share our faith and values, not as a strategy but because of who we are and who they are and who we are called to be.”
BYU President Shane Reese opened the conference by saying the university’s mission depends on religious liberty. That future depends on relationships, Elder Daines said.
“The legal protections for religious liberty depend in the long run on whether religious communities live up to the ideals and the principles they ask the law to protect,” he said at the BYU Harman Building Conference Center.
They depend on “whether (believers) become the kind of people and build the kinds of institutions that their neighbors — their non-believing neighbors, their differently believing neighbors — respect and want to inhabit.
“Religion absolutely, undeniably contributes to human flourishing, in all dimensions.”
— BYU President Shane Reese
“In the long run, the law will not protect religious traditions that do not earn their neighbors’ friendship.”
The stakes Elder Daines and others spoke about were underscored by a display of historic documents, including one of the five existing copies of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and documents written by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Elder Daines said the power of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution ultimately depend on the character of the nation’s people.
He shared one example and one story to illustrate his point.
The example came from his own experience decades ago as a new law student at liberal New York University. He was approached at an early mixer by a liberal legal lion, a former general counsel for the ACLU who was a giant in the development of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
“I’ve heard you’re a BYU graduate,” the man said. “Do you know Dallin Oaks?”
It turns out the man had clerked with President Oaks, now the 18th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the U.S. Supreme Court and had followed his life and career.
“I do not know a finer person,” the man said. “I have maximum respect for his integrity, his character and his intelligence and his goodwill and good humor. I don’t admire anybody more than him.”
Elder Daines said it was a lesson in engaging people with whom he might disagree.
“President Oaks got the don’t-be-a-jerk-about-it part right,” Elder Daines said.
In April, President Oaks taught — in his first talk at a Latter-day Saint general conference as the church’s new president and prophet — that relationships are vital.
“In a Democratic government, we should seek fairness for all,” he said. “In countless circumstances, strangers’ suspicions or even hostility gradually give way to friendship when personal contacts produce mutual respect.”
President Oaks also said it was an obligation of Christian living.
“As followers of Christ, we should seek to live peaceably and lovingly with other children of God who do not share our values and do not have the covenant obligations we have assumed,” he said.
After the Latter-day Saints settled in a malarial swamp they called Nauvoo, Illinois, God instructed them by revelation to build not only a holy temple but also a boarding house he also called holy.
Elder Daines found it strange that the revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 124 spent more time on the boarding house than the temple.
“I finally concluded that the Nauvoo House and the temple are a necessary pair,” he said. “They are the architectural form of the two great commandments of Christian life.
“The temple is where the Saints met their God, and the boarding house is where they met their neighbors and welcomed immigrants. The revelation says in the most emphatic language possible that both are holy and neither is sufficient without the other.”
He said Latter-day Saints and other believers should be instructed by that history.
“The Saints had been driven from Missouri at gunpoint,” Elder Daines said. “They could have built the temple, shut the doors, and pulled everybody inside. But the Lord told them to do the opposite. ... They might have put up barricades; the Lord called them to put up a boarding house on the banks of the ferry landing where visitors arrived. The first thing a visitor to Nauvoo was to notice was a boarding house put up for him.”
The stakes are high, conference speakers said.
Religion has a massive positive benefit on people, said Reese, BYU’s president and a former statistician for NASA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Philadelphia Eagles.
He shared data from a recent BYU Wheatley Institution analysis of more than 1,000 high-quality studies on religion and health. The studies overwhelmingly found more positive associations between religious involvement and health than negative ones. The ratios were 7 to 1 for physical health, 10 to 1 for mental health and 31 to 1 for social and behavioral health.
“The evidence is remarkable,” Reese said. “Religion absolutely, undeniably contributes to human flourishing, in all dimensions.”
Reese said he recently sat on a panel with the presidents of the University of Notre Dame, Baylor University, Yeshiva University and The Catholic University of America, institutions whose sponsoring faiths he said have far more in common than they have deeply held differences in doctrine.
“Religious freedom not only enjoins us in advocating for the things that we share in common,” Reese said, “it requires us to advocate for one another when we have distinct differences.”
Another leader noted the fragile state of religious freedom in other parts of the world.
The Pew Research Center released new data on Monday that showed 78% of the world’s population live in countries with high or very high legal restrictions or social hostilities relating to religion, said Brett Scharffs, director of BYU’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies.
“We are here to ... celebrate one of the great patrimonies of the American Revolution,” Scharffs said. “The proposition that among the unalienable rights that all human beings possess, indeed, what is often called the grandparent of all human rights, is the right to religious freedom.”
The Founding Fathers declared that right is absolute, said Colleen Sheehan, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.
“Madison argued that the right of conscience is inalienable,” she said. “... Freedom of religion, then, is not merely a useful accommodation within political society. It’s not something you just carve out and make an exception for. It arises from the nature of conscience itself, which quintessentially stamps the human species.”
The Rev. Dr. David G. Latimore made a passionate call for the inclusion of Black Christian churches in the American landscape.
“To ignore the critique of the African American church is to silence the very witnesses who can tell us where the promise was postponed and where liberty has been most limited,” he said.
He said one of the greatest gifts of the African American church to the United States was providing a disciplined hope that tells the truth about how the Constitution promised equality but allowed slavery to continue yet still believes the country can achieve its lofty original ideals.
“This hope is not a cheap hope,” the Rev. Dr. Latimore said. “It’s a hope that was born in hushed harbors of slavery. It was a hope that was carried through auction blocks and lived through Jim Crow. It was a hope that was preached in the shadows of lynching trees in America’s slums. It was a hope sung in sanctuaries that doubled as schools and cribs of protests while providing shelters for those of melanin-kissed skins from the storms that all too often touch Black life. It was a hope that has learned to lament without losing faith, and to endure without confusing survival with true freedom.”
He considered how Americans might view the nation’s upcoming semiquincentennial.
“Maybe at this mark of 250 years, the most faithful way to honor the American experience is neither to romanticize it nor to reject it, but to recommit ourselves to completing it,” he said.
For Sharffs, the Christian ideal as spoken by Jesus Christ should be the foundation of the effort.
“We advocate religious freedom,” he said, “not because we want to belong to the church of religious freedom, but because it avails us the opportunity to live the best version of our own faith and, for most of us, that means to strive to live the inescapable admonition to love one another.”