For me, the ethos of Pioneer Day is not just commemoration, but also consequence. What would the pioneers teach us today, almost two centuries later? What lessons do they learn from their struggles? What did they believe that drove them to sacrifice so much?

Latter-day Saint thinkers have come to a number of conclusions. Some point to their tenacity. (Utah’s official motto is “industry.”) Others point to their dogged defense of religious freedom. Others see them as master city builders or spiritual giants. I think these and other points are valid. But most of all, Pioneer Day is for me a celebration of immigration.

Latter-day Saint theology is a theology of immigration. For Latter-day Saints, the purpose of mortality, in the broadest sense, is progression: to improve and become pure through Christ, and ultimately to progress to live with God again. But Latter-day Saint faith is incredibly tangible. God is a corporeal being. The temporal body is divine and essential to spiritual progression. Physical labor is considered divine. Thus, not only is spiritual migration—from a heavenly preexistence to temporal life to the hereafter—our theology; physical migration is, too.

Central to this ethos is the idea of ​​“gathering together.” To perform some of the rituals and ordinances necessary for salvation, Latter-day Saints believe that believers must live in proximity. This proximity is both practical and spiritual: We achieve salvation individually, Latter-day Saint prophets have taught, but we are exalted—or reach the highest level of heavenly glory—corporately.

Thus, migration became an important part of the early teachings of the Latter-day Saints. Within a year of the organization of the Church in 1830, Smith—in accordance with a revelation given to him by God—sent out missionaries to “gather the elect from the four quarters of the earth” and bring them to Zion, or the gathering place (then in Ohio). In 1831, Smith was again told by revelation to gather people “out of every nation.” In 1832, he learned that he was to “gather the tribes of Israel.” The message was clear: the missionary program was to extend beyond North America. International migration would become a central tenet of the fledgling faith.

This idea was supported by early Latter-day Saint writings. In the Book of Mormon, a prophet named Lehi, who lived on the American continent 600 years before the birth of Christ, prophesied that it would become “a land of promise” and “of freedom,” and that all immigration to it would be directed by God: “… none shall come into this land save it be brought by the hand of the Lord.”

In 1837, Smith sent missionaries to the British Isles; beginning in 1840, waves of Latter-day Saints began to flow across the Atlantic. Latter-day Saint missionaries taught salvation and migration hand in hand: to learn from the mouth of a holy prophet and to gather in the fellowship of the New Jerusalem, potential converts must be baptized And migrate to the New World. The Latter-day Saint migration operation soon became a well-oiled machine. An office was established in Great Britain to organize the logistics of the journey. The Perpetual Emigrating Fund was established to provide loans to impoverished travelers (who would then work to pay off their debts upon arrival in Zion). Missionaries, sent from the United States, would serve as travel agents on their return journey across the Atlantic, overseeing boatloads of migrants.

The operation became “the only successful privately organized emigration system of the time,” as historian W. S. Shepperson has written. In 1890, more than 85,000 European Latter-day Saints migrated to the United States, constituting “the most successful example of managed immigration in the history of the United States,” historian Katharine Coman has written. Meanwhile, Latter-day Saints in the United States—at the time in Missouri and Illinois—were being forced from their homes and forced to move west to undeveloped Mexican lands in the Great Basin. At the same time, two major migratory forces were building the Latter-day Saint movement: Europeans coming to what they believed was a land of promise, and Americans disillusioned with their country, who were forcing them to leave.

When the Bible speaks of the mandate to care for immigrants, the authors in most cases use one of two motivations: empathy and charity. In the Old Testament, the command of the Israelites to care for the stranger is born of an empathetic recognition that, not so long before, they themselves had been immigrants. “You shall not molest a stranger…for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” “…You shall love (the stranger) as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” “Love the stranger therefore; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Even when the Levitical law spells out the rights of citizenship, it notes that immigrants were to be on an equal footing with the native-born. Why? “For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

In the New Testament, that shared memory is replaced by a charitable mandate to love everyone, regardless of one’s personal or ancestral capacity for empathy. There is no longer an explicit inheritance that comes through the children of Israel; instead, all are children of God and redeemed by Christ, and thus have a mandate to care for their brother. To the hungry and naked we are to give food and clothing. The stranger and foreigner become fellow citizens in Christ. Welcome strangers, for you may welcome angels.

For Latter-day Saints, who believe that their covenant was restored by God with Adam, Abraham, and Jacob, the view of immigrants echoes both Old and New Testament theology. Church leaders have recently taught the importance of extending Christian charity to refugees and immigrants in our communities and around the world. But those leaders echo the voice of Jehovah and declare that Latter-day Saints were also relatively recent aliens. “Their story is our story,” said one Latter-day Saint apostle, “not so very long ago.” More than any other Christian group, Latter-day Saint theology reflects this Old Testament mandate to remember the captivity of their fathers.

But it is a much more recent history that Latter-day Saints remember, not the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt. When the Latter-day Saints were ordered to exterminate in Missouri in the 1840s, expelled from Illinois, and forced to migrate across the Great Plains, they saw themselves as a modern-day Israelite band. Young, their leader, saw their exile as a spiritual exodus, comparable to the children of Israel. Young immediately became a kind of modern-day Moses, teaching his followers that their travels were evidence that they were God’s chosen people, called to restore His covenant with the world. Immigration was the central aspect of this: their migratory journeys were evidence not of misfortune but of God’s favor.

That idea is still prevalent, if more subtly, in the Latter-day Saint worldview. The institutional church is active in helping with refugee and migrant crises around the world. American Latter-day Saints, though generally conservative politically, are often among the most pro-immigrant religious groups. When President Donald Trump implemented his so-called “Muslim ban” in 2017, Latter-day Saint Republicans were among the first to voice their concerns. Utah’s two previous governors—both Republicans, both Latter-day Saints—have asked their respective White Houses for more refugees, while other GOP governors have spread fear.

Why? Perhaps, like me, they remember our fathers’ captivity and see ourselves in the plight of migrants around the world. Perhaps they have stories like that of my great-great-grandfather, Richard Pay, a shoemaker in Dover, England, who at age 28 learned a new American faith. Widowed at 29, he remarried in his early 30s and sailed to Boston. In Iowa, on the cross-country trek to Utah, his wife gave birth; in Nebraska, the child died. The grieving mother soon followed, dying in Wyoming. Pay buried her in an icy, shallow grave, picked up his other children, and marched on. Today, the intermountain West is dotted with hundreds of his descendants.

There are, I believe, many Richard Pays today, and they still come to America. “For ye were strangers.”