The older I get, the fewer heroes I have in my life. They all fall, one by one, because they are all human. The more heroes try to hide their flaws, the easier they are to find out. But even the humblest, kindest human beings, are going to have bad days. Theyre going to lash out at someone who doesnt deserve it or they are going to be selfish because they need to be selfish for a little while as a salve against the pain of the world.

In Mormonism, there is no specific process to designate people as saints, but we do have prophets and apostles and other authorities (a few of them women), who get quoted often in church and whose lives we study as examples of how to be good. As Ive written more about Mormonism and studied its history, however, Ive been dismayed to realize how many of these stories are, at the kindest reading, exaggerated. From Joseph Smith to Brigham Young and even our scripture stories of Nephi and Alma in The Book of Mormon.

Why do humans crave these kinds of saintly, heroic figures, in religion, in politics, in sports? I think its because we want to point to them when we talk about what we should be trying to achieve or aspire to in ourselves. And while theres a good impulse in wanting to be better, I am extremely skeptical about setting any one person above others. We can admire someone for a choice that they made in difficult circumstances, yes. We can talk about if we would have the courage to make the same choice and to live with the consequences. But to make them super-human is also to make us less able to understand what goodness is, when you see it in person, or how to achieve it in yourself.

We arent any of us going to be saints if being a saint means having no flaws. I dont think there are any people, even good ones, who have no deep flaws, no one they have hurt deeply, and who struggle every day with selfishness, pride, with seeing the world and themselves truly. I dont think there are people who have greater access to God than I have, or who have made themselves closer to godliness than any mortal canwhich is a long way away. I dont think Im ever going to meet someone who I would be surprised to hear had been capable of making a terrible mistake.

Why does this matter? Because I think we cant learn how to hear Gods voice in our lives if we imagine that some people have an inherently greater capacity to be holy and that we are not among them. I dont think we can be better when we see ourselves as not destined to be in the elite category. And perhaps if we see ourselves as already saintly, there is the reverse problem. What need do we have to continually repent, to see ourselves as sinners, if we are already saints?

Its a problem within most Christian religions and maybe all religions, when we give in to the human tendency to set one person above others. We seem to see this as a natural and unavoidable reality, that one person has to be the learned one, more advanced, a teacher, an expert. But there are so many negative consequences for doing this. We often let go of our critical thinking and stop questioning as thoroughly as we otherwise would, leaving ourselves vulnerable to being taken advantage of in many ways. We are then surprised and hurt to discover our heroes have feet of clay, when this should not be a surprise, since we are all made of clay, from head to toe.

It is one thing in my mind to see one good trait in another person that we want to emulate. It is something else entirely to make someone else into a hero. It is one thing to see another person having an experience with God that we would like to have for ourselves. It is something else to imagine that God chooses certain people to communicate with who are holier than we will ever be.

I have come to believe more and more in the divine in all of us, and that we all have a responsibility to be the best that we can be, while acknowledging the evil within us. Instead of thinking of Satan as a being outside of ourselves, we accept that we are all Satan. We all have evil within us. We all sometimes choose to hurt others to protect ourselves. We all struggle to see as mistakes things we have assumed are normal for much of our lives. We cling to the past rather than doing the work of the future.

But we have Christ within us, too, and we are all worthy of love. We are all capable of choosing to do better. We all can make a choice to serve our friends rather than ourselves, to sacrifice ourselves in doing good. As long as we remember that we will never reach a point at which we rise above the flesh. We will never escape sin or the pull of selfishness that comes with mortality. We are all part divine, part human.

The hero worship of people in our culture seems unhealthy to me and even worse when it spreads to religion. It makes us unwilling to see the truth and more likely to be deceived by those who pretend to be heroes but are far worse than that. Lets do a better job of reminding ourselves that no one is perfect, though we have good people all around us we can learn from in one area or another. Theres no need to blind ourselves to reality and no need to look to a distant figure weve never interacted with and therefore do not know well enough to see a full picture of flaws and virtues. If you want to be better, be better one small thing at a time.