Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds forth out of the mouth of the father.

There is a mystical meaning in that saying. Christ is the Word, but the Father speaks other words, and those words too are made flesh. But the plain meaning of this saying of the Lord’s cannot be overlooked. Bread feeds the body, but the words of God feed the soul. We need meaning and purpose like we need food. In modern times we say there is a god-shaped soul in the human heart or we say that when you cease to believe in God, you don’t believe in nothing; you believe in anything. It is the same idea.

Most of that meaning and purpose comes from stories. These stories explain our lives and provide models for us. The scriptures are full of stories. They are not a gospel principles manual or a creed or a catechism. Nephi tried to be like Moses and lead his people to the promised land. Now we try to be like Nephi. The temple endowment is a story. Baptism is a story in which we die and come to life again to live like Christ, and then try to pattern ourselves on Him. The sealing is a story in which we mimic in this world below the family arrangement that is the basic reality of the universe.

The 1960s are a story. There are a couple of competing versions, but the basic story is the story of the civil rights movement. An oppressed people and their young, courageous allies faced up to brutality and indifference and through their own heroism and refusal to be silent engaged the conscience of nation and won civic equality. It is a heroic narrative. It is even, as far as these things can ever be, mostly factual.

It is a good story when its means that black Americans belong and black America should be treated with respect. It is a bad story when it is made into a model that must be re-enacted.

In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out – or invent – something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

The liberation narrative first moves on to lesser targets, like liberating women from skeezy bosses or marriage rights for the small percentage of the small percentage of the population that is homosexual that wants to marry, to the ludicrous, like the protest pants movement, to active deceit, slander, and fraud.

Don Quijote didn’t charge the windmills because he was mad.

He charged them because his narrative required giants, so giants there must be.

Mormons have our own persecution narrative. It is less malign, because it is balanced out with a number of other narratives and is disciplined by the master narrative of imitating Christ. But it still needs to be watched. All of our narratives need to be watched. Forcing facts to fit a cherished narrative may be the most dangerous form of ark-steadying in the modern world. Wait on the Lord. It is his word, not your imitation of it, that giveth life.