Church Tentacles Reach For Wayward Children

Elder David Bednar recently received pushback for his response to a question posed during a devotional about families and the gospel. The question asked, “How do temple covenants help us when someone in our family uses their agency to reject the gospel or chooses not to be part of the family?” Bednar’s answer followed a familiar pattern: he reassured parents that their continued faithfulness creates a kind of spiritual pull or divine tug that works on “wayward” children to draw them back. If parents hold to the rod, he implies, God will do the rest.

Now in terms of how do our covenants help us if someone is wandering? Joseph Smith and other Church leaders have talked about a pull — a bit of a spiritual tug, if you will. Orson F. Whitney referred to it as “the divine tentacles of providence.” It is not the case that the faithfulness of parents can save a wayward child, but the faithfulness of the parents in honoring covenants exerts a bit of a spiritual tug. Now I don’t know how that works, but it’s a part of the covenant connection.

So the best thing that a parent can do if there’s a wayward child is to honor the covenants so that that tug, if they’ll let it, can have an influence on the child.

David A. Bednar, BYU-Pathway Worldwide Devotional, “Creating Gospel-centered Families” October 31, 2025
https://www.byupathway.edu/speech/creating-gospel-centered-families

This framing is not accidental, nor is it not benign. It subtly hijacks one of the strongest human emotions—parental love—and reroutes it into deeper institutional loyalty. The anxiety, grief, and fear parents feel when a child leaves the Church are redirected away from empathy and understanding and toward increased obedience, devotion, and endurance within the faith. Instead of encouraging parents to strengthen their relationships with their children as they are, the teaching encourages them to double down on belief and wait for divine intervention. Love becomes a tool of retention, and faithfulness becomes the supposed mechanism by which children are spiritually reclaimed.

“They Will Return”

What makes this particularly harmful is that it reframes parental responsibility. Rather than asking parents to listen, reflect, and adapt, it places the burden of a child’s return on the parent’s righteousness. If the child does not come back, the implication—however subtle—is that the parent’s faith was insufficient or their covenants not fully honored. This creates guilt where there should be compassion, passivity where there should be engagement, and distance where there should be connection. Under the guise of hope, the Church offers a promise that delays healing, discourages honest conversation, and keeps families emotionally suspended in a perpetual “someday,” all while ensuring parents remain tightly bound to the institution that created the fracture in the first place.

Finding the Source

Bednar anchors his counsel to a quote from LDS Apostle Orson F. Whitney, which allegedly quotes Joseph Smith. This idea and this quote has been repeated by church leadership for generations.

You parents of the wilful and the wayward! Don’t give them up. Don’t cast them off. They are not utterly lost. The Shepherd will find his sheep. They were his before they were yours—long before he entrusted them to your care; and you cannot begin to love them as he loves them. They have but strayed in ignorance from the Path of Right, and God is merciful to ignorance. Only the fulness of knowledge brings the fulness of accountability. Our Heavenly Father is far more merciful, infinitely more charitable, than even the best of his servants, and the Everlasting Gospel is mightier in power to save than our narrow finite minds can comprehend.

The Prophet Joseph Smith declared—and he never taught more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children; hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the salvation of God.

Who are these straying sheep—these wayward sons and daughters? They are children of the Covenant, heirs to the promises, and have received, if baptized, the gift of the Holy Ghost, which makes manifest the things of God. Could all that go for naught?

Orson F. Whitney, LDS Apostle, Conference Report, Apr. 1929, 110
https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1929a/page/110/mode/2up

This passage is doing far more theological work than it appears at first glance.

First, it reframes a child’s departure from the Church not as a thoughtful, informed decision, but as wandering—a temporary deviation from an assumed correct path. The conclusion is already built into the premise: they will return. Not may. Not could. Will. This removes the need to seriously engage with the reasons people leave, because the outcome is predetermined by doctrine rather than evidence or lived experience.

Second, the phrase “tentacles of Divine Providence” is revealing in ways the Church likely does not intend. Tentacles do not persuade or invite; they reach, wrap, and pull. For many former members, this metaphor unintentionally captures the Church’s real-world behavior toward those who leave: unrelenting moral pressure, eternal leverage through family relationships, and the refusal to grant full legitimacy to a person’s decision to step away. What is framed as divine care often functions as institutional control.

Elder Bednar reinforces this framing in his own remarks by encouraging parents to remain faithful and patient, trusting that God will ultimately resolve the situation—even if that resolution comes “in the life to come.” The implicit message is clear: do not concede that your child’s choice might be valid, and do not allow their current life outside the Church to be seen as complete or whole. Any peace they have now is provisional. Any joy is suspect. Their story is unfinished until it ends in return.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Teaching

This is not an isolated idea from Elder Bednar—it fits a long-established pattern.

Bednar is the same leader who famously taught that “being offended is a choice,” placing the burden of harm on those who experience it rather than those who cause it. He routinely emphasizes obedience over empathy, submission over mutuality, and institutional authority over individual conscience. In each case, responsibility is displaced downward: if something feels wrong, you are choosing it; if you leave, you are wandering; if you are hurt, you misunderstood.

In that context, the Whitney quote functions as reassurance not just to parents, but to the institution itself. It tells faithful members they need not wrestle too deeply with doubt, criticism, or loss. God will fix it later. The Church remains right by default. Time and eternity will prove it so.

Spoiler alert, this whole concept presented to comfort family members when someon they love is allegedly wayward, is actually a misquote.

False Attribution

Even though this idea continues to be preached at Mormon pulpits, and attributed to Joseph Smith, the attribution is based on incomplete and misinterpreted notes. Modern research shows that he never said or even meant this.

This statement is often cited in support of the idea that children of faithful, sealed parents are assured the same blessings promised their parents in the marriage sealing ceremony. Later statements by church leaders and members have perpetuated this idea. But the attribution of the teaching to Joseph Smith is based on incomplete and misinterpreted notes from a sermon given on 13 August 1843, as published in the Documentary History of the Church 4:531 and the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 321.

There are two basic misunderstandings. First, reading Joseph Smith’s statement in context shows that the Prophet’s intended application with reference to the “seal… put upon the father and mother” was not meant to refer to the marriage sealing but rather the “sealing [of] the blessing [of] the everlasting covenant, thereby making their calling and election sure.” Second, more full set of notes taken by Howard and Marcha Coray that were not available to the compilers of the Documentary History qualified Joseph Smith’s statement about the salvation of children of parents who had received the second sealing to make it conditional upon the obedience of the children (“children who have not transgressed”).

B.H. Roberts Foundation: Orson F. Whitney teaches that wayward children of sealed parents will be saved
https://bhroberts.org/records/uSw9xc-0131Qz/orson_f_whitney_teaches_that_wayward_children_of_sealed_parents_will_be_saved

So church leadership again, caught misrepresenting history and facts by twisting historical ideas and words into an accepted and comforting doctrine of the church.

The Real-World Cost

The tragedy of this teaching is not theoretical. It plays out in living rooms and family gatherings, in conversations that never quite happen, and in relationships frozen in a state of hopeful denial. Parents who believe this promise are subtly encouraged to wait for God instead of meeting their children where they are now. Love becomes patient, but conditional. Acceptance is postponed. An authentic relationship is deferred in favor of a future correction.

And all the while, the Church avoids accountability for the reasons people leave in the first place.

If families are truly eternal, then the most honest work must happen in this life. A theology that teaches parents to tolerate distance now because of imagined unity later is not strengthening families—it is quietly dismantling them.

And if a church must rely on “tentacles,” inevitability, and deferred reconciliation to sustain belief, it may be worth asking whether what is being protected is divine truth—or institutional survival.

A Word to Believing Parents

If you are a believing parent reading this, it’s important to say this plainly and kindly: your love for your children is not in question. Most parents who hold onto promises like Orson F. Whitney’s do so because they are afraid—afraid of losing their children forever, afraid of failing God, afraid that letting go means giving up hope. That fear is understandable. It is also cultivated. The Church’s propositions around “wayward” children place an enormous and unnecessary emotional burden on families, and they are not healthy for anyone involved.

When a child leaves the Church, the doctrine tells parents to interpret that departure as temporary wandering rather than a legitimate conclusion. This framing quietly undermines trust. It can make it difficult to hear your child’s words without translating them into “they’ll come back someday.” Over time, that translation creates distance. Your child feels managed instead of met. Loved, perhaps—but not fully known.

Healing begins when the goal shifts from returning them to belief to restoring relationship.

A healthy starting point is simply this: believe your child when they tell you why they left. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to understand everything immediately. But listening without correcting, spiritualizing, or bearing testimony in response communicates something essential: I value you more than I value being right. That alone can begin repairing years of quiet strain.

Another step is to let go of the idea that acceptance equals endorsement. You can maintain your own beliefs while fully accepting that your child’s life, values, and moral compass are their own. Ask about their life—not their faith status. Celebrate their growth, their kindness, their achievements, and the person they are becoming. These moments rebuild trust far more effectively than patience rooted in future repentance.

Finally, it may be necessary to examine how Church teachings have shaped your responses. Ideas about eternal separation, conditional sealing, and inevitable return may feel comforting, but they often postpone the real work of love into an imagined future. A relationship deferred to the afterlife is not a substitute for presence now. No doctrine should require emotional distance, quiet grief, or withheld affirmation as the price of faith.

Your child does not need to be reclaimed to be worthy of closeness. They are not broken. And neither are you for choosing connection over control.

If families are truly sacred, then the healthiest ones are built on mutual respect, emotional honesty, and unconditional love—not on fear, leverage, or promises that everything will be fixed later. Healing happens when parents meet their children where they are, not where a church insists they must someday return.

Your Invitation

If this article resonates with you, we invite you to share your story at wasmormon.org. Stories matter—especially the ones that were never supposed to be told. By speaking openly about faith, doubt, discovery, and deconstruction, we help others realize they are not broken, alone, or deceived for asking hard questions.

When we share our experiences, we empower skeptics, destigmatize doubt, and normalize the refusal to believe the impossible simply because we were taught to associate belief with goodness. Many of us once mistook powerful emotions—love, belonging, spiritual elevation—as proof that the Church was true. In time, we learned those emotions were real, but their source had been misattributed and carefully managed.

Reclaiming those feelings for ourselves is part of healing. Love does not belong to an institution. Meaning is not owned by a church. And walking away from harmful systems is not a moral failure—it is often an act of courage.

Your story may be the one that helps someone else loosen the grip of fear, step out from under inherited certainty, and finally trust their own mind and heart. The truth does not need tentacles. And when it is faced honestly, it has a way of setting people free.

• https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1929a/page/110/mode/2up
• https://www.ldsliving.com/elder-bednars-counsel-if-your-children-are-no-longer-in-the-church/s/13061
• https://www.byupathway.edu/speech/creating-gospel-centered-families
• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/09/hope-for-parents-of-wayward-children
• https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-youth-of-zion-a-word-for-the-wayward-and-a-precious-promise-elder-orson-f-whitneys-april-1929-general-conference-sermon-on-righteous-parents-wayward-children-and-priesthood-sealings