There's a phrase near the end of Elder Stevenson's October 2025 talk that went by quickly—the kind of sentence you might miss if you were checking your phone or settling a toddler. But it stopped me cold:

"Peacemakers are sometimes labeled naive or weak—from all sides. Yet, to be a peacemaker is not to be weak but to be strong in a way that the world may not understand."

From all sides.

That little qualifier does a lot of work. It means the criticism doesn't just come from the hostile or the secular. It comes from within our own ranks. From well-meaning people at church who think standing firm means standing rigid. From family members who confuse peacemaking with capitulation. From the voice in our own heads that tells us, If you don't push back, you're letting them win.

Elder Stevenson named something most of us have felt but rarely say out loud: peacemaking is socially expensive. It costs you credibility with people who want you to fight. And that, I think, is the thread in this talk that deserves more attention than it got.

The Promise Hidden in the Beatitude

We quote Matthew 5:9 like a bumper sticker: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." It sounds warm. It sounds easy. But spend a moment with the grammar. Jesus didn't say peacemakers will feel peaceful. He didn't say they'll be called wise, or admired, or even understood. He said they'll be called the children of God.

Why that, of all the things He could have promised?

Because the reward for peacemaking isn't peace—at least not the kind the world offers. The reward is identity. Becoming. Peacemakers receive the designation that matters most in eternity: they are recognized as belonging to God's family.

Look at the very next verse in the Sermon on the Mount's parallel in 3 Nephi. When the resurrected Christ delivered these same Beatitudes to the Nephites at Bountiful, He said, "Blessed are all the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." That word all is an addition. It widens the door. And it came from a Christ who had just rebuked the Nephites for their disputations about baptism—reminding them, in 3 Nephi 11:29, that "he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil."

The sequence matters. Jesus arrived among a people who had just survived apocalyptic destruction. They had every reason to be afraid, angry, and defensive. And the first behavioral instruction He gave them wasn't about temple worship or priesthood order. It was: stop arguing with each other. Then He taught the Beatitudes. Then He promised that the peacemakers among them would be called His Father's children.

He was telling them—and us—that how we handle conflict is not a sidebar to the gospel. It is the gospel, applied.

The Quiet Radicalism of the Father's Answer

Elder Stevenson built his talk around an imagined scene: a teenager walking home from the Sermon on the Mount, burdened by a world in commotion, asking a question that resonates across two millennia: "Can I truly become a peacemaker when the world is in commotion, when my heart is filled with fear, and when peace seems so far away?"

The father's answer is deceptively simple: "Yes. We begin in the most basic place—in our hearts. Then in our homes and families. As we practice there, peacemaking can spread to our streets and villages."

This is not a platitude. It's a theory of change. And it runs directly counter to how most of us instinctively think about peace.

We tend to think of peace as a large-scale, top-down phenomenon—something governments negotiate, something that happens out there. Elder Stevenson flipped the direction entirely. Peace radiates outward from the smallest unit. Heart. Home. Neighborhood. Community. It's centrifugal, not centripetal. You don't wait for the world to calm down before you can be a peacemaker. You make peace in the places you actually live—the kitchen, the group chat, the comment section—and the world gets one degree less contentious because of it.

President Russell M. Nelson made this same argument in his landmark April 2023 address, "Peacemakers Needed", when he said, "We can literally change the world—one person and one interaction at a time." Elder Stevenson's talk is, in many ways, the practical companion piece to President Nelson's call. Where President Nelson diagnosed the disease—contention as a choice, charity as the antidote—Elder Stevenson offered the prescription: start with your own heart, practice in your own home, then carry it outward.

What the Children Knew

The most disarming section of the talk is the one you might be tempted to skim past—the responses from Primary children about what it means to be a peacemaker. "If there is one donut left and you all want it, you share." "I saw someone who didn't have anyone to play with, so I went to play with her."

Cute, right? But Elder Stevenson wasn't sharing these for charm. He was making a theological claim: "These children's responses are evidence to me that we are all born with divine inclinations toward kindness and compassion."

That's a quiet but significant statement. It pushes back against the idea that human beings are naturally selfish and must be trained into goodness. King Benjamin taught that the natural man is an enemy to God (Mosiah 3:19), and that's true—but the solution Benjamin gave was to become "as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love." The child is the model, not the problem. Children share donuts. Children go sit with the lonely kid. The natural man is what happens later, after years of learning to defend, posture, and retaliate.

Peacemaking, then, isn't acquiring some exotic spiritual skill. It's recovering something we already had. It's un-learning the habits of self-protection that calcified around our hearts over decades of living in a contentious world.

Strength That the World Doesn't Recognize

This is why Elder Stevenson's line about peacemakers being "labeled naive or weak—from all sides" hits so hard. Our culture—political culture, social media culture, even sometimes church culture—rewards the fighter. The person with the sharpest comeback. The one who "destroys" the other side's argument. We celebrate the takedown and scroll past the olive branch.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland recognized this same tension in his October 2018 talk, "The Ministry of Reconciliation", when he pleaded: "My beloved friends, in our shared ministry of reconciliation, I ask us to be peacemakers—to love peace, to seek peace, to create peace, to cherish peace." He described forgiveness as requiring someone to be "meek and courageous enough to pursue it." Meek and courageous. Not one or the other. Both, simultaneously.

Elder Stevenson said something similar: "Peacemaking requires courage and compromise but does not require sacrifice of principle." This is the razor's edge. Peacemaking isn't doormat behavior. It doesn't mean pretending you have no convictions. It means holding your convictions with enough confidence that you don't need to weaponize them. It means you can disagree without turning the disagreement into a campaign.

The Lord's own pattern for this kind of influence is right there in Doctrine and Covenants 121:41–42: "persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness and meekness, and love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile." Elder Stevenson cited this passage explicitly when talking about peacemaking in the home. But notice what's embedded in that list: pure knowledge. You can be informed, clear-eyed, and uncompromising about truth—and still lead with gentleness. In fact, the scripture suggests that's the only way influence actually works.

The Deepest Layer

Here's what I keep coming back to. Jesus didn't say, "Blessed are the peaceful." He said, "Blessed are the peacemakers." The suffix matters. A peacemaker is not someone who happens to live in a calm environment. A peacemaker is someone who creates peace where it doesn't yet exist. That's active. That's costly. That's the person who walks into a room full of tension and, rather than picking a side or fleeing, does the harder thing: stays, listens, absorbs some of the pain, and finds a way forward.

And for that, Jesus says, they will be called the children of God.

Think about what that means in reverse. If the reward for peacemaking is being called God's child, then peacemaking must be what God does. It must be a family trait. Matthew 5:44–45 confirms this: "Love your enemies … that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good." God's generosity is indiscriminate. His peace is offered to everyone, not just those who deserve it. When we make peace—especially with people who frustrate us, who disagree with us, who may have even hurt us—we are doing the most God-like thing a mortal can do.

Mormon understood this. In his great sermon on charity, he urged his listeners to "pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love … that ye may become the sons of God" (Moroni 7:48). Same promise. Same destination. Charity and peacemaking are not two separate projects. They are the same project, viewed from different angles.

Elder Stevenson opened his talk acknowledging that hearts were mourning—that "even devout people gathered in sacred spaces" had lost their lives or loved ones. He wasn't speaking theoretically. He was speaking to an audience that had every reason to feel afraid and angry. And into that grief, he offered not a policy prescription or a political argument but a Beatitude. The oldest, simplest, most radical invitation Christ ever gave.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Not because the world will reward them. Not because it's easy. But because in the act of making peace, they become what they were always meant to be.