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Michael is from a multigenerational Latter-day Saint family but has spent the majority of his life outside of the Mormon corridor. He’s not employed by academia but looks for opportunities to scratch his academic itch.

This is a follow-up post to his description of cultural challenges facing the LGB community within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As explained in the first post, the “T” is omitted intentionally out of respect for differences in transgender experience.

How can local Latter-day Saints and their leaders help to make our wards and stakes places of refuge, love, and sanctification for LGB Saints?

Based on my observations, I offer a few suggestions. I acknowledge, with deepest gratitude, my indebtedness to Eve Tushnet’s Gay and Catholic for her unique perspective and thoughts on LGB people in Catholicism. In addition, please note that I think many of the issues Latter-day Saints have with LGB Saints can be addressed by rethinking the place of single people in the Church, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Accept that some people will not marry on Earth.

We must acknowledge that at any point in history there are people who remain single throughout mortality — including men, including in the LDS Church. We should figure out how to minister to single people as single people, not as potential spouses or parents or as adolescents who require married chaperones.

Avoid stereotypes of singles and LGB Saints in Church.

Church discussions can often be uncharitable toward both singles and LGB Saints. Thus, while preparing lessons and talks, Saints should assume that the audience will include single women, single men, and LGB Saints who are trying to live the Gospel to the best of their ability. Avoid criticizing single people because they are unmarried. Avoid “culture wars” talking points that characterize LGB people as inherently sexual deviants, pedophiles, promiscuous, rebellious, obviously engaged in inappropriate sexual activity, incompatible with faithfully living the Gospel, etc. Remember: many mental health issues among LGB people stem from things like rejection, uncertainty, and despair, not from orientation or sin.

If other class members or teachers bring up stereotypes, or speak as if LGB people are a demographic entirely separate from Latter-day Saints, do your best to remind them kindly that there are untold thousands of LGB Saints and single Saints who are striving to do the best they can to follow in Jesus’s footsteps and keep their covenants. What’s more, stereotypes are a symptom of sin: pride in one’s own goodness and knowledge, unkindness toward the stereotyped, ill-speaking or gossip or false witness, idolatry of one’s own ideals instead of God’s, a rejection of the Lord’s perspective on his own individual children, and so forth.

Accept that single people can be lifelong faithful Church members.

If we truly want our ministry to be universal, we will accept single people into our congregations, treating them in all possible institutional matters like married and to-be-married members.

Single people should be considered and selected for every calling that does not explicitly require a married member. Faithful single people should be held up as role models for all ages. Lessons, talks, and activities should be planned in such a way that singles are visible and can participate (including single speakers, men and women, of various orientations in ward and stake meetings). Discussions at church should ideally not be limited to parenthood or childrearing.

Singles should not be reduced to their unmarried state at church. I have known very few singles for whom a leader’s lesson about marriage or dating made a difference; our time would probably be better spent with lessons about scripture and Christ.

Further, we should consider that singles and LGB Saints can receive personal revelation about decisions not to marry, to cease actively seeking marriage, to put marriage-seeking on the backburner, and so forth.

Married members should ideally seek singles’ consent before discussing singles’ marital status. Members should not demand or expect an explanation for anyone’s single state.

Exercise theological creativity and humility.

Too much of our theological thought about marriage and singlehood is simplistic and even punitive, when it needn’t be either.

Pastoral Counsel. We need to think critically and sensitively about how to incorporate single Saints into the body of Christ as single Saints, not merely as future spouses. After all, there’s plenty in the Gospel for adults to learn. How to be Christlike and how to become a Zion people are a full curriculum, in which marriage plays a part but is not the whole.

We can minister to single people to help them avoid, in Tushnet’s words, “sins other than lust”: “dishonestly, lack of charity, sloth or acedia, self-harm, self-pity, self-centeredness,” all of which can be provoked by loneliness and anxiety.

We should also be willing to entertain the notion that God is fine with the fact that some of his children are non-heterosexual — or even that He is glad for it. After all, we know that “to beautify and give variety” is one thing that God has commanded. This does not require that you believe that God created people straight, gay, or otherwise. It doesn’t require you to believe that sexuality and orientation are necessarily and invariably inborn or entirely unaffected by human agency. But it does require you to consider seriously that, in our experience, God doesn’t seem to wish non-heterosexual people or their non-heterosexuality out of existence on Earth — and might not do so in the hereafter, either. We don’t know.

Scripture. Save for places in which spouses or children are specifically mentioned, we should entertain the idea that scriptural figures are single. A couple examples: Elijah, Abish, Moroni, Ammon, Paul, John, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene — and, yes, Jesus Himself. We should also take seriously scriptures that suggest that marriage isn’t the only possibility for a righteous follower of Christ — see Paul’s endorsement of celibacy as a first choice, with marriage as a backup (see 1 Cor. 7:8-9).

Afterlife. We should recognize what about the hereafter we do not know with certainty, including the form, experience, and purposes of celestialized bodies and their sexuality — as well as the social structures of the next life.

There’s no indication that earthly parents will reside with their earthly children in the Celestial Kingdom, as the nuclear family would suggest. If we look at the ramifications of sealings, the objective appears to be to link together all humans and link them to our Father.

We can also acknowledge the likely presence of single people in the Celestial Kingdom. There’s plenty of potentially troubling notions in D&C 132. It’s unsettling that one of our only scriptural bases for the doctrine of eternal marriage and families entwines it closely with polygamy (so much so that throughout the post-Nauvoo 19th Century “celestial marriage” was synonymous with polygamy). But for all its faults, the total exclusion of single people from the Celestial Kingdom is not one of them.

Nevertheless, Latter-day Saints tend to speak of D&C 132’s “ministering angels” in a pejorative manner. This is not justified. After all, we have renamed a major church program “ministering,” top our temples with statues of an angel who ministered, and (try to) awe deacons with the idea that they’re ordained to the priesthood that “holds the keys of the ministering of angels.” Further, most LDS discourse about ministering angels seems to read a position of service as inherently inferior and wholly undesirable; denigrating service seems contrary to all we know of Christ’s kingdom in which, presumably, ministry holds the highest honor. There is no evidence that God considers angels to be dishonorable — quite the contrary.

Acknowledge forms of Gospel-friendly flourishing beyond family, work, and church assignments.

Single and LGB Saints face pressure both inside the Church and out of it to find romance. Furthermore, meaningful work and magnification of one’s Church callings are unstable foundations of personal identity.

To these sources of life meaning Eve Tushnet would add that of vocation, something almost entirely missing in LDS discourse. A vocation, she says, is “the path or way of life in which God is calling us to pour out our love for him and for other particular human beings.” Vocations can take a variety of forms that one must discern in consultation with God — close friendship, volunteer service, aid to family members, and more — but Tushnet identifies two characteristics all her vocations have shared: “they all challenged me to sacrifice ego in the service of love; and they all formed my identity, rather than requiring me to form it myself before I was good enough to start the work of love.” Celibacy, a “refraining-from-action,” is not a vocation in itself — but it can enable celibate people to explore certain vocations that might be more difficult for married people.

We, as individuals and congregations, can come to respect singles’ activities as God-given vocations. This would allow for singles to practice discernment, build Zion, and be shaped by their relationship with God in ways that persist throughout their lives.

Invigorate and honor non-familial relationships.

One of the few other passages about the social structure of the afterlife is found in D&C 130:2, and is much broader than D&C 132: “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.” Note that it does not make reference specifically to family structures — meaning that the “sociality” there could easily include friendships and other non-familial, non-sealed relationships.

Accordingly, we can incorporate such relationships more deeply into our Church and personal practice. Friendships are not distractions from family or mere placeholders for future spousal relationships. Local leaders could consider allowing Church members to formally “minister” to ward members to whom they are particularly close. Individual members, taking cues from historical vowed friendships and “wedded brothers” of the sort that Tushnet outlines, might explore ways of pledging to each other mutually as friends.

That individual covenants not proposed or administered by Church authorities can nevertheless be praised by Church leaders is well established by Helaman’s defense of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies’ covenant of pacifism. See Alma 53:10-15.

Inclusion of singles in families.

Married Latter-day Saints should consider how they can meaningfully incorporate single relatives and friends into their family lives and structures.

To begin, we should distinguish between parasitic, neutral, and symbiotic forms of single co-residence with family members, encouraging better forms of single co-residence. For some married couples and families, inclusion of singles could mean living together with a single “uncle” or “aunt” under the same roof. For others, it could be sharing family responsibilities and resources with a single person. It could be regularly integrating single people into family events, celebrations, and traditions. It could be volunteering to serve as a single person’s local emergency contact or being on-call when they’re sick. It could be making it clear that employees won’t be penalized for taking time off to care for friends (Tushnet 208).

In a Church context, we should allow singles and LGB Saints to interact with children and adolescents, including in callings. We should not, in Tushnet’s words, allow “fear of the occasions of sin,” especially fears based on unkind and untrue stereotypes of LGB Saints as pedophiles, “to destroy possible occasions of virtue” or occasions of belonging (101).

Treat singles as adults.

Saints should take care to treat singles as whole people with their own lives, dreams, and anxieties. Married Saints and their children should seek to maintain interest and involvement in the lives of their single co-religionists, sharing the achievements, activities, sorrows, and joys of single people.

If we detect a difference between how we speak to single people and how we speak to married people, we should examine how we could engage with singles with more charity.

We should try to limit the effects of traditional courtship roles on our perception of singles. That is, we should avoid treating all single women only with pity and all single men only with contempt.

Respect singles’ emotions.

Singles need little help to be aware of their single status. Some are having trouble feeling worthy of marriage (or God’s love) after prolonged singlehood. Some are trying to understand what to do with a lifetime of singlehood staring them down. Sorrows shouldn’t be dismissed because of marital status. Our baptismal covenant requires that we mourn with those that mourn, not that we first adjudicate whether they are mourning for proper reasons.

Respect LGB Saints’ agency and life narratives.

We should make sure that our treatment of LGB Saints is appropriate for the person with whom we’re speaking, and not just for a stereotype of LGB Saints we have created or absorbed.

We should take care to describe LGB Saints with the words (“same-sex attracted,” “gay,” “queer,” etc.) they prefer. If we have concerns about a word’s use, let’s be willing to learn what the word means for the person who’s using it instead of assuming the connotations it has for us. (A story in this post demonstrates a negative effect of prioritizing linguistic correctness over companionship and pastoral care.)

Even when trying to be encouraging, we can cause unneeded pain. We should avoid performative support that imposes our perspective on LGB Saints’ life narratives. For instance, a compliment for “bravery” or “honesty” might be well-meant, but it implies a narrative that the complimented person might reject — and therefore can be offputting, undesired, trite, or impersonal. In any case, it’s good to express gratitude for their sharing with us and offer the support they desire and we can give.

We should avoid unsolicited advice, including to leave the LDS Church or to adopt another faith tradition. As this article argues, such suggestions are an attempt at a “quick fix” that ignores that the LGB Saint could love a lot of what they have in the LDS Church — and ignores the large differences between churches in doctrine, history, and practice. Friends should also refrain from automatically advising LGB Saints to abandon their (non-abusive) families. Because of long histories of rejection of LGB people by their families, leaving family behind can be treated as a default; however, as all families and LGB people are different, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to family conflicts.

Make sure our love is unconditional — and that singles and LGB Saints know that.

While conditional support can appear to ensure compliance, it commonly creates feelings of confinement, instability, and resentment. One of the most important things we can do is to express that we love them without conditions — and specifically express that they can come to us to speak about anything without judgment or reprisal.

As much as possible, do not penalize LGB Saints.

Same-sex marriage is presently a gray area of Church discipline; the recent announcement that it is no longer defined as apostasy makes implementation of disciplinary action more ambiguous. The announcement says that “the immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way.” Does this mean that same-sex marriages be treated in the same manner as long-term heterosexual cohabitative relationships?

Local leaders have significant leeway in their treatment of LGB Saints and should sensitively seek discernment about meting out disciplinary measures, including the insertion of permanent notes into their Church membership records that would restrict their interactions with their fellow Saints in perpetuity. Let’s make sure our perceptions of LGB Saints and their actions are based on their individual actions, not on stereotypes of LGB people or on double standards that exaggerate the severity of non-heterosexual actions.

Honor the goodness in LGB Saints’ feelings, even their attractions.

We should explore meanings of single and LGB sexuality. After all, LGB Saints’ love is like that of straight Saints: complicated, melded with sexual, romantic, tactile, and companionate desire, all things that should not cease to be considered beautiful because their objects are different. As Tushnet mentions, bringing soup to a hypothetical girlfriend would count as acting on lesbian feelings, but would be far from intercourse — and by no means sinful. She discusses other ways in which she’s expressed her love for women outside of sexual or romantic relationships.

For LGB Saints who wish to remain celibate, we should remember that so-called “sexual” desires are God-given and can be founts of love and beauty in their lives. We should labor to learn how best to honor these desires. For each person, the solution might be different, but exploring ways of respecting sexual drive and desire — including sublimation into art, service, and non-sexual expressions of love — would help not only LGB Saints, but single and married Saints of all sexualities and ages.

We should also avoid only talking about the potential pitfalls of LGB lives. As Tushnet said, “if, as I describe various ways people have found to live [celibate] queer lives, you find yourself seeing only the dangers, let me suggest that you may have let your prudence harden into callousness or even cruelty. I do think it’s cruel to argue that queer people — and only queer people — should have only those vocations that can be lived without fear or temptation.” There must needs be opposition in all things, after all: deliberately trying to live life without pain is trying to live a life without joy.

We should also take care to find and honor the good in our relatives’, friends’, and neighbors’ same-sex romantic and marital relationships, as well as in LGB communities, instead of focusing solely on their (presumed) performance of certain sex acts. While the Church still considers sexual activity within such romantic and marital relationships “serious transgressions,” such relationships and LGB communities can be arenas in which participants develop and practice Christlike attributes: sacrificial self-giving, commitment, faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. Just as we would not want our lives and works of faith to be discarded because we do not follow the Law of Consecration in its fullness, we should acknowledge where others follow the Lord.

Realize that your best efforts will not keep everyone in the Church.

We could follow all of these suggestions (and more) and still see LGB and single Saints among your friends and family let temple recommends lapse, go inactive, or leave the Church. After all, there are tensions that cannot be resolved by local leaders and congregation members, and there are draws from outside the Church that can appeal to LGB Saints’ desires for family, purpose, and beauty. At best, the changes suggested above will help LGB Saints live richer lives inside the Church; however, they can also help to reduce tensions between straight and LGB Saints, between the Church and LGB former Saints, and between Saints and broader LGB communities.

But we should also remember that these suggestions to make the Church a more welcoming place are good in themselves, not only because of their potential social effects. As Tushnet says, “The reward for loving gay people better isn’t better PR, or even more souls saved…. The reward for loving gay people better is that you love gay people better. And in them you love Christ.” (205) We love better; we approach Christlikeness; and the Kingdom of God grows within and around us.