July 24, 2026
Living the Freedom They Sacrificed to Secure
By: Julianne Young
On July 24th, we celebrate the day the first company of Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. It’s tempting to file this alongside every other westward settlement story — wagons, hardship, a new home carved from the wilderness. But something set these pioneers apart. Unlike most who pushed west for land or gold, they were searching for one thing above all else: the freedom to live their faith without persecution.
Their departure date wasn’t their own choosing. With Missouri’s extermination order hanging over them and mob violence at their backs, the risks of staying outweighed the risks of leaving. My great-great-grandfather Charles led the first company out of Nauvoo, across the frozen Mississippi, into the Iowa wilderness in February 1846. His wife, Julia Ann, and their three-year-old daughter, Harriet, would not survive the westward crossing — both died on the plains of Illinois of malnutrition and cold. Their 14-year-old son, Andrew, would become the youngest pioneer in the Advance Company that reached the valley the following year. My children also have a second pioneer grandfather in that same company: Lorenzo Dow Young, whose father had fought under General Washington — family lore says he carried home a cannonball from that war as a memento. Two generations: one fought to found a nation built on liberty’s promise; the next crossed a frozen river to claim it.
They sang, as they walked, a hymn that has outlived them all: “We’ll find the place which God for us prepared, far away in the West, where none shall come to hurt or make afraid… All is well! All is well!” They sang it despite burying wives and daughters in frozen ground — not because they didn’t grieve, but because they refused to bury their conviction that the sacrifice was worth it. They paid a terrible price, not merely for the right to hold a private belief, but for the right to live it without apology.
The pioneers’ wilderness was physical — frozen prairie, hostile tribes, wolves, starvation, a thousand miles with no guarantee of surviving the winter. The wilderness their descendants face today is daunting in a different way. We must not mistake the difference in landscape for a difference in stakes. No one is stalked by wolves for a religious conviction today. We do not face cold or hunger, but the social and political cost of speaking one’s convictions out loud can be vicious in its own way.
Too often, religious liberty is reduced to a right to worship quietly on Sunday and otherwise keep one’s convictions to oneself — tolerated only as a private habit. But the free exercise of religion has never meant only the freedom to believe. It has always meant the freedom to act on that belief — in civic life, in public debate, at the ballot box. A conviction that can only be held in private can’t really be exercised at all.
This cultural understanding of religious freedom is in jeopardy. Many believe religious conviction in a policy debate is inherently oppressive, or something to be embarrassed about. A recent Facebook comment went further still, dismissing religious belief itself as a kind of mental illness to be scorned rather than engaged. This reflects a broader cultural drift in which sincere conviction is treated as a private eccentricity or a threat rather than the first freedom named in the Bill of Rights.
Here is what might dismay our pioneer ancestors: we have the freedom they died for, and we are too polite, or too afraid of offending someone, to exercise it. We’ve accepted a quiet rule: good citizens keep convictions out of politics — faith belongs in the pew, not the public square. But a freedom unexercised doesn’t stay dormant — it atrophies, then disappears. We lose what we do not use. Yes, we should be civil, but silence is not civility, nor is enforced complacency.
The values our forebears carried across that frozen river — that human life and conscience deserve protection, that moral truth is self-evident natural law, not majority opinion — are the same values declared in the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate as well this July, and enshrined in the Constitution that followed.
Julia Ann and Harriet didn’t cross an icebound river in February so their descendants could worship privately on the Sabbath and disavow their sincerely held principles the rest of the week. They crossed it so we could stand in the public square and declare the truth as we understand it — unapologetically. Their frontier demanded courage; so does ours. All is well, indeed — but only if we will collectively pay the price to keep it so. This Pioneer Day, let’s live the freedom so many sacrificed so much to secure.
Julianne Young is a Bingham County Mom who loves faith, family, and freedom; a former state representative; founder of the nonprofit Idaho Family Strong; regional coordinator for Idaho Chooses Life; and 2nd Vice Chair of the Idaho State GOP.
