The smoke was still rising from the ruins of a Michigan Mormon temple when the vultures began to circle. Before the names of the dead are even released, before the wounded are even stitched and stabilized, Twitter’s amateur brigade of moral virtue signalers had already sharpened their talons.

Tragedy had scarcely had time to breathe before it was converted into currency. The blood wasn’t even dry, and yet—predictably, inevitably—someone had to use it as a cudgel to scold “fellow Christians” for failing to embrace the counterfeit gospel of Mormonism as they weaponize the dead as props in a theological guilt trip.

Twitter is littered with these self-appointed moral superiors, perched upon a soapbox of sentimentality, declaring that if you don’t call Mormonism Christianity, you must not care about human suffering. This is the rhetorical double-dealing, the twisting of grief into a gag order against heresy, the conversion of compassion into complicity. It is emotional blackmail dressed up as piety.

But let’s pause—do Christians not weep when human beings are murdered? Do we not recognize the sheer horror of lives cut down by violence? Must we really be instructed, like dim-witted children, that murder is bad and people are precious?

Or is the real aim something else entirely—to force our hands into signing a blank confession of faith that Joseph Smith may have actually been right after all?

Imagine demanding that unless you affirm the theological soundness of a drowning man’s worldview, you cannot in good conscience throw him a life preserver. What madness is this? We can love Mormons as image-bearers while loathing Mormonism as soul-slaughter. We can cry over their coffins without canonizing heresy. To insist otherwise is not compassion—it is coercion. It is a hostage note scribbled in the ink of tragedy.

This tactic is as old as it is cunning. Wrap a lie in a shroud of grief, and suddenly the liar looks noble. Paint dissenters as heartless, and suddenly heresy appears humane.

This is the game: when the doctrine cannot stand on its own two feet, it limps into the spotlight draped in the bandages of the wounded. And while pretending to champion the victims, it uses their deaths as a cheap costume, dressing up falsehood in the garb of martyrdom.

So the refrain gets repeated like a drumbeat—“If you really cared, you’d stop calling Mormonism heresy.” Over and over, until the rhythm numbs the conscience. But repetition does not create truth. A lie chanted ten thousand times is still a lie.

And the lie here is quite repulsive. That compassion for victims requires applause for their doctrine, and that the price of sympathy is the surrender of discernment. That the cost of tears is silence about damnation.

It is a false dichotomy of the most transparent assortment. Do you hate people, or do you hate heresy? The two are not mutually exclusive. Christ Himself embodies both love for sinners and fury at false teachers, and the apostles wept for souls even while thundering anathemas upon wolves. To erase that tension is to erase the gospel’s very edge.

And make no mistake, the manipulation is deliberate. It’s not subtle—it’s theatrical. Picture a street magician demanding applause for pulling a rabbit from a hat, when in reality he’s just stuffed the rabbit in his coat sleeve beforehand.

“Care for the victims,” they say, and suddenly—abracadabra—you’re pressured to declare Joseph Smith a prophet. The bait is sympathy and the switch is surrender.

The trick is to turn tragedy into leverage, grief into currency, blood into bargaining chips. And the more you say no, the more they scold…how dare you? How dare you grieve without compromise? How dare you distinguish between people and doctrines?

Ultimately: How dare you cling to Christ as the only way to salvation?

But the truth stands like granite in a hurricane, caring about people is not mutually exclusive to despising the lies that enslave them. Compassion is not concession. Sympathy is not syncretism. Love is not a license for theological fraud. We can mourn without bending, we can cry without caving, we can grieve without groveling before the golden calves of false religion.

And when someone insists otherwise, when they turn coffins into cudgels and funerals into platforms, they reveal not love but manipulation. Their words drip with irony, demanding honesty about grief while dealing dishonestly with the gospel. Their rhetoric trembles with pathos, yet their logic collapses like a sandcastle in a tsunami.

So here we are, watching yet another tragedy twisted into a morality play, where Christians are cast as villains for daring to say the obvious—that Mormonism is not Christianity.

The stage is set, the lines rehearsed, the accusations hurled. But the script is tired, the performance hollow, and the audience is not fooled. Because in the end, the truth is simple enough to fit in a single aphorism:

…the death of men is a tragedy, the damnation of souls is a greater one.