What Do We Do with the Gay Mormon Afterlife?
Homosexuality in a Heterosexual Heaven
If you want to understand my church’s opposition to same-sex marriage, you need to start with a clear picture of how Latter-day Saints think about sexual orientation itself. “Same-sex attraction,” in the Mormon view, is a temporary, mortal experience — a trial to be endured or, in its previous iteration, a disorder to be cured. It is, essentially, an aberration from the correct, godly model, and will eventually be resolved upon completion of our earthly “probationary period.”
This belief need not necessarily imply a particular animus on the part of the average worshipper. Most of the church members I know are sincerely committed to loving their neighbor, but they resist full inclusion of gay people due to a series of deeply held doctrinal assumptions.
The Latter-day Saint theological view of homosexuality possesses a straightforward internal logic. It goes something like this: God consists of exalted man and exalted woman bound together in celestial temple marriage. We are literal spirit children of God, and as such, each person has the potential to achieve apotheosis through the same means that God achieved it: temple marriage to a member of the opposite sex.
The challenge, then, comes when we recognize the existence of people who are not attracted to the opposite sex. Successful temple marriages, for members of this group, are unlikely if not unattainable. (While some are able to find fulfillment in mixed-orientation marriages, most of these unions ultimately end in divorce— a reality recognized by the church, which no longer encourages these marriages as a matter of policy.) So we’re left with the fact that a fraction of God’s children, by default, will likely not attain the ideal of celestial marriage. And since we can’t believe in a just, loving God who would design any of His children to be permanently ineligible for exaltation, we must believe that homosexuality is a temporary condition that will be corrected in the next life. Once “fixed,” formerly gay people will be provided with opposite-sex eternal companions.
This view, believe it or not, is actually far better than many traditional theologies of sexuality. It doesn’t blame gay people for their sexual orientation, nor does it permanently condemn them for circumstances beyond their control. It refuses to consign anyone to a fiery hell — promising a “degree of glory” to all — while reserving divine status for those with temple marriages. It seeks to include gay people in the plan of salvation by promising the removal of mortal circumstances that make exaltation unachievable. Just hold on tight, endure to the end, and in time, “all that is unfair about life can be made right” (Preach My Gospel, p. 52). Or, to put it more bluntly — all that is gay will eventually be made straight.
My question for the faithful Latter-day Saint is a simple one: How are you so sure that this explanation is correct? How do you know that gay people will become straight in the next life? And since Christ has given us a useful metric to determine the truth or falsity of prophetic teachings, I would also ask: What are the fruits of this teaching? “I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.”
Any Christian justification for a doctrine would typically begin with an appeal to scripture. So what do the scriptures have to say about the status of sexual orientation in the afterlife? Which verses teach that gay people become straight in heaven?
I’ve yet to find any.
But don’t the scriptures have quite a bit to say about the resurrection? Alma teaches that “not so much as a hair of their heads [shall] be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame.” There you have it, some conclude. Homosexuality, as a mortal imperfection, will be fixed in either this life or the next, since, after all, “the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 3:7).
But wait — upon which basis do we know that sexual orientation is a condition which would ever need to be “restored to its perfect frame?” Nothing in scripture supports this notion of sexual orientation as a pathology — in fact, the scriptures have no concept of sexual orientation whatsoever. Why are some of us so quick to assign sexuality to the realm of disability or illness, especially when no current, competent medical or mental health professional would dream of doing so? And, more urgently, what is the effect of telling perfectly healthy young people that their most powerful, personal experiences of love and affection are fundamentally broken — an infirmity or a perversion that needs to be healed?
Before we ever believed that God would heal homosexuality in the resurrection, we believed that we could heal it in this life. Our past is marred by a persistent failure to cure what we wrongly assumed to be a disease. Conversion therapies have taken various forms over the years. Bishops once routinely encouraged gay men to marry women, promising that obedience would yield a cure. Church counselors urged participation in sports and other “manly” behaviors to help young men unlearn homosexual inclinations. Apostles prescribed prayer and scripture study as a panacea. They required gay members to shun their gay peers, writing that “many perverts will claim to have great ‘love’ for some with whom they have been involved,” but “since the problem is in the mind more than in the body, it is necessary to find a new climate.”
Nothing worked. Gay people stayed gay, and the church quietly updated its policies to reflect that reality. Ex-gay ministries disbanded nationwide and LDS Family Services eventually disavowed sexual orientation change efforts.
In one of the darker chapters of our history, gay men at Brigham Young University were strapped to electric shock machines and shown same-sex pornography. Their arms and genitals were electrocuted if they exhibited signs of sexual arousal. The university’s therapists (along with many secular psychologists of the day) hoped to trigger in their patients an aversion response to homosexual images. Instead, patients suffered untold damage to their physical and mental health. Homosexual orientation, it turned out, could not be cured.
So we tried, and we tried, and we couldn’t fix this problem. We couldn’t turn gay people straight. For a while we could frighten or pressure them into living the kinds of lives we wanted them to live, but we couldn’t manage to flip the switch on their sexual orientation. In the process, we left behind countless broken lives and broken spirits as needless casualties to our ignorance. Eventually, the stain was so blatant and the destruction so irrefutable that we did the only remaining thing we could think to do. We punted the problem into the afterlife. We couldn’t fix it now, so we assumed that God would fix it later.
We looked at our hands, and they were filthy, and we couldn’t bear the thought that we in our good intentions could have made such a horrible mess. So we pushed the problem off to the next life and made God do the dirty work for us.
Let’s return to the Book of Mormon and read Alma a little closer. What else does he have to say about resurrection? “That same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world” (Alma 34:34).
We imagine that in the resurrection God will somehow isolate the gay part of a person’s spirit, correct it, and leave everything else untouched. Even that much is a violation of Alma’s teaching. But the fundamentally interwoven nature of spiritual identity and sexual orientation is evident to anybody who knows a gay person. Think of the gay person in your life who you know most intimately. Do you recognize in them any unique spiritual attributes, and do you really believe that those God-given qualities are entirely disconnected from their identity and experience as a gay person? Would they remain unchanged in every other way — their spirit, their heart, their personality — if you could snap your fingers and turn them straight? I’m not suggesting that sexual orientation is the only or even the most important component of a person’s spiritual nature. But it remains an inextricable element, as intimately wrapped up in the whole as oxygen is to water. Even if you could somehow suck out all the oxygen, the result would cease to be water.
If the scriptures don’t show that the supposed trial of homosexuality will be removed in heaven, then we would do well to ask if modern revelation has anything to say about it. There’s nothing in our canonized body of revelations that approaches the idea head-on. Nothing in the Doctrine and Covenants addresses it, and no modern apostle, prophet, or general authority has ever even claimed to receive revelation on the question. I don’t know if they’ve ever thought to ask.
It’s true, however, that the church and its leaders have propagated the idea that homosexual orientation will be corrected in the afterlife. There’s a reason why people believe it. The idea was first posed, without a revelatory claim, by apostle Dallin H. Oaks in a 1995 Ensign article. It was reiterated in 2007 by the First Presidency with a booklet entitled “God Loveth His Children,” which aimed at supporting members who “struggle with same-sex attraction.” I was handed this booklet myself as a sixteen-year-old boy. “Many Latter-day Saints, through individual effort, the exercise of faith, and reliance upon the enabling power of the Atonement, overcome same-gender attraction in mortality,” it teaches. “Others may not be free of this challenge in this life. As we follow Heavenly Father’s plan, our bodies, feelings, and desires will be perfected in the next life so that every one of God’s children may find joy in a family consisting of a husband, a wife, and children.”
A year earlier, Elder Lance B. Wickman of the Seventy gave a public affairs interview alongside Elder Oaks, seeking to clarify the church’s position on homosexuality. Elder Wickman cites no revelation or scripture, but claims, “Same-gender attraction did not exist in the pre-earth life, and neither will it exist in the next life. It is a circumstance that for whatever reason or reasons seems to apply right now in mortality, in this nano-second of our eternal existence.”
While the church has since discontinued “God Loveth His Children,” its current teachings still implicitly assume the same set of ideas. Church leaders continue to promise unmarried members that if they hold faithful, all the blessings of eternity, including celestial marriage, will be made available in the next life. That may provide a modicum of comfort to single straight members of the church, but for gay members the message is clear: you are not really gay in the grand scheme of things. And yet no attempt is ever made to demonstrate that this assertion is true. If it’s really God’s word, just show us where God says it. It’s not sign-seeking to expect that doctrinal claims be based in scripture or revelation.
There are those who presume that the mere statement of a teaching by an apostle or prophet is enough to qualify it as revelation. “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” I have nothing to say to persuade these people, by whose metric we would also have to accept as revelation the notion that the civil rights movement was a communist plot to destroy America (Ezra Taft Benson) or that black people were less valiant in the premortal existence (Joseph Fielding Smith). I could write a much longer list. The point is that something does not automatically become revelation as soon as it is spoken by a general authority or published by the church. Our leaders say lots of things, many of which I believe to be divinely inspired. They are general authorities called to speak to a general audience on a mind-numbing array of complicated issues. I have great respect and sympathy for those placed in that position. We, as individual disciples, are in turn called to use our God-given capacities of reason and faith to seek our own spiritual confirmation of what is taught.
I care a lot about getting at the truth of a question. Much of my opposition to our teaching about the gay afterlife is based on my belief that it’s probably untrue. And yet, if you could prove to me beyond any doubt that this teaching was absolutely, unequivocally correct, I would still consider it an unacceptable thing to teach the youth of our church. Why?
We’re telling gay people that the way to stop being gay is to die.
Kids like me grow up wishing desperately that we could be anything besides what we really are. We want to do the right thing, and we love the gospel, and we cherish the values that are taught to us. We grow up dreaming of a temple marriage and a minivan full of rowdy Mormon babies. At a certain point we painfully discover that our ideals don’t match the reality of our situation. In the meantime, we put up with bullying at school and hurtful remarks from those who have been called to shepherd us in love. We wish with all of our hearts that there was some way we could fix it, some way to just become normal like everybody else.
And so when we’re told over and over again that this is a temporary trial — that nobody will be gay in the next life — some of us conclude that the way to solve this problem is simple: we have to die.
Suicide is an immensely sensitive and complex subject, and nobody is served well by oversimplifications. We can recognize that many factors influence this phenomenon while taking care that our teachings and rhetoric don’t exacerbate the problem. With LGBT youth suffering from far higher rates of suicide than their straight peers, we need to think hard about the messages we send — well-intended though they may be. The church should be recognized for its efforts to speak candidly about this issue and to encourage church members to be more kind and loving. But as long as we perpetuate flimsy doctrinal assumptions of a heterosexual heaven, many gay youth will continue to feel that they have no place in this life or the next.
Our most devout, good-natured friends are trying their best to follow Christ’s example. They really do care about making the church a more charitable place for everyone. They hope that if they can just show more kindness and love, it will be enough to solve this problem. And while I can never overstate the importance of changing our words and changing our behavior, there’s one more thing we can do if we’re serious about loving our gay brothers and sisters: we can change our minds. We can stop believing and propagating unfounded ideas which suggest death as the solution to a nonexistent problem.
Well, now we have a problem on our hands. If we accept the notion that gay people might remain gay in the next life, what does that mean for our doctrine? One option is to conclude that God just doesn’t intend to save some of us. The standard, after all, is celestial marriage. And if the gays stay gay forever, they’re simply excluded from the plan because they won’t (or can’t) get on board with straight marriage.
The problem, of course, is that the blame here would have to lie squarely with God, since He created a heterosexual plan as well as a bunch of homosexuals. The notion that He would devise to eternally exclude any of us contradicts our conception of a just, loving deity — a deity whose “work and glory,” after all, is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).
So what do we do with all the gay people?
There’s another option here, and it’s not really that hard. We can just say “I don’t know.” President Oaks, to his credit, has spoken usefully on the humility required when considering the afterlife. He quotes, “When we ask ourselves what we know about the spirit world from the standard works, the answer is ‘not as much as we often think.’” Describing the concerns of a woman contemplating marriage to a widower already sealed to his first wife, President Oaks sidesteps the question of post-mortal polygamy and simply counsels, “Trust the Lord.”
It’s not a bad response, really. It’s much better than making something up. We could apply the same approach to gay people as we do to anyone else in an ambiguous family situation: trust that God is merciful and honestly acknowledge what we don’t know. It might be that in the next life, sexuality (and for that matter, everything else) will look vastly different than any of us could have ever conceived. “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
In recognizing the limits of our knowledge, we could abandon the hard-edged policies that presuppose complete understanding. We could, for example, grant the same grace to gay people as we do to those who have been divorced. Jesus, you may recall, spoke harshly on the subject of divorce, yet our policy treats the issue with a great deal of mercy. Why not extend the same compassion to the topic of homosexuality (an issue, by the way, about which Jesus was notably silent)? We could acknowledge that life is messy, that sometimes reality deviates from ideals, and that sometimes you need to do the best you can with the hand you’ve been dealt.
If temple marriage can’t include same-sex couples, we could recognize civil marriage as a viable path for gay couples to live equivalent chastity standards to straight couples (abstinence until marriage, fidelity within marriage). We could continue to teach our doctrinal ideals while recognizing, as the Family Proclamation teaches, that “other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.”
I wonder, though, if even this approach falls short. I wonder if we’re living far beneath our privileges as Latter-day Saints. If we would like to be members of a static, ossified religion — a religion that never changes, never questions the status quo, never challenges our preconceptions — then Mormonism is about the worst choice we could possibly make. How could we miss the blazing irony that we, of all people, should be satisfied with a closed canon; that we, in practice, should proclaim, “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible”; that Latter-day Saints, of all the believers on this planet, should be content to accept that the Lord really does not intend to reveal “many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” — at least not on this topic?
God really does intend to uncover His mysteries to us. But receiving depends on asking, and opening requires knocking. Dieter F. Uchtdorf once pointedly asked, “How often has the Holy Spirit tried to tell us something we needed to know but couldn’t get past the massive iron gate of what we thought we already knew?” Clearly there are elements of our understanding that require additional light and knowledge. And as long as we remain in the dark, the church will continue to hemorrhage both its gay members and its sympathetic straight allies — including huge swaths of the youth of the church.
So let’s love one another more than we ever dared to. Let’s lay aside our false traditions and presuppositions. Let’s live up to our birthright and dare to believe that God can still teach us something true. Let’s ask Him how He intends to give His gay children a place in His plan. Let’s pray that our leaders will do the same.
And since faith is the substance of things hoped for, let’s hold on to our faith while we take the Savior at His word. “As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.”
