A few days after Canada legalized same-sex marriages, BYU professor Brett Lattimer called this “a bigger [issue] than the Civil War,” and Richard Wilkins, another BYU professor, asserted that “the pivotal battle of our age has began.” When and how did LDS leaders begin to use war metaphors to describe Satan’s purported assaults on the family? How do Mormons understand this metaphor? How does this metaphor function within traditional Mormon discourse of calamity and doom?

Hugo Olaiz, Sonja Farnsworth