My YSA ward recently held a fireside where the bishop and an institute instructor were to answer anonymous gospel questions that had been submitted beforehand. The Relief Society president, who was moderating, had four or five pages of questions; we got through one. These were questions about gender and sexuality, and they didn't hold anything back. The bishop did about as well as could be expected from someone who is supposed to be an official representative of the church. Most of his answers consisted of an expression of empathy, an acknowledgment of the difficulties, and a reminder that there is so much that is still unknown. The questions and discussion were remarkably frank, and the fireside went much better than I expected.
At one point during the discussion, a sister asked why gender dysphoria couldn't be a manifestation of one's true eternal gender. She expressed pain at hearing the church had filed an amicus brief in one of the bathroom law cases, especially because the doctrine around transgender issues is not clear. The answers followed the same pattern of love and support and statements that we don't know everything, and a friend noted that it's frustrating that the church can't countenance any sort of institutional uncertainty. Policy often goes far beyond what is doctrinally based, and implies a level of doctrinal certainty we don't have. Regardless of the doctrinal status of transgender people (which still seems not to have been definitively addressed), the church handbook has given specific instructions about what to do with transgender converts and members.[1]
Even when church leaders acknowledge such lacunae in our theology, the acknowledgment feels hollow. Like admissions of past errors made by the church, these statements are broad and nonspecific: "We don't know everything, but we do know God loves his children."[2] Official statements scrupulously avoid saying anything too overtly inflammatory or exclusionary, but little bits of rhetoric leak out in General Conference, comments that assume the question is really already settled. Consider President Nelson's 2012 comments about evolution:
Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, “Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?” The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own newer editions![3]
Statements like this wink at the Church's official nonstance on evolution, implying "Yeah, we can't say it officially, but we all know what the true doctrine really is."[4] If the Church has no official position on a question, we can't have leaders making quasi-authoritative micro-statements about it over the pulpit, at least not without qualification. This becomes worse when these statements are of the sort Elder Packer liked to make:
Some suppose that they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.[5]
People don't usually suffer mental health issues because of what church leaders have said about evolution; the same isn't true of statements about sexual orientation.
This gap between knowledge and practice was brought into stark relief last week with the changes to the temple endowment ceremony. The gender inequities in the endowment and sealing ceremonies have caused significant pain for many. As a white male, I am perhaps the person with the least standing to complain about inequities in the temple, but I was very uncomfortable with the covenant that women--and only women--were required to make in the ceremony. And this covenant came at the beginning, while the injunction that these were solemn, sacred obligations and God was not to be mocked still rang in my ears. This was not the God I was planning to serve for two years, starting in a week. How could he be so arbitrary, how could he so casually subjugate half of his children to the other half? I didn't know what to do with this pain. Where could I talk about it? How could I be an official representative of the church without endorsing wholeheartedly the most sacred rituals of the faith? I'm not trying here to claim the very real and often unnoticed suffering of so many women as my own—I can only imagine how the endowment might have felt to someone on the other side of the aisle. This story[6] is only the most recent of many I've read from women for whom the endowment ceremony was a devastating surprise. My pain came not from the deep angst of thinking that God saw me as inherently inferior to men, but mostly from the fear that I could not reconcile my Mormonism and my belief in equality. I felt that some part of me would have to be severed in order to be consistent.
And then, suddenly, this was no longer a thing. In an instant, the offending covenant and asymmetry were erased. I had longed for this change but had no hope or expectation of it ever actually happening. There was a gap, built by decades of institutional silence and inertia, between the pain and the practice. Those who suffered were to sit and patiently wait with no explanation, wondering if this really was the will of God. The only acknowledgment of the damage and pain caused is the change in policy, but this doesn't erase the past.
And that past will not be addressed. President (then Elder) Oaks has outlined the Church's approach to apologies.
I know that the history of the church is not to seek apologies or to give them,” Oaks said in an interview. “We sometimes look back on issues and say, ‘Maybe that was counterproductive for what we wish to achieve,’ but we look forward and not backward.” The church doesn’t “seek apologies,” he said, “and we don’t give them. [7]
Here's a piece of liturgy—a covenant even!—that the brethren have decided was counterproductive. This was a gap in our knowledge that many never even realized was a gap. And that's the nature of such unknowns: it's easy to assume that we already know everything we need to about evolution, or gender identity, or sexual orientation, or the endowment, when this is far from the truth. The lack of an apology or even of any official announcement of the temple changes aligns with the general pattern of acknowledging fallibility and uncertainty in the abstract, but never identifying any particular instances of these things. I'm glad for the changes, but frustrated and angry that so many people had to go through these harrowing experiences without so much as an acknowledgment of their pain.
More broadly, the way that the church papers over these gaps is sociologically fascinating. But as someone participating in the church and trying to understand how I can fit in spiritually, it's disheartening. Our reluctance to engage with uncertainty makes church participation feel inauthentic. When the tenor of discussion is driven by unexamined assumptions and psuedo-doctrinal carryovers from the past, I feel less able to endorse and immerse myself in the rest of the gospel. The dissonance between what I believe and what seems to be assumed in the church makes me feel like I can't sign on to anything.
Witnessing the magnitude of the liturgical changes in the temple has changed this. I have become more comfortable with making my own space within the church. Even things that seem absolutely essential to Mormonism can change for the better. I wasn't wrong for feeling uncomfortable with and hurt by the gender inequities in the temple. I can have my own ideas and thoughts and experiences and still be a member of the church, still be fully Mormon. The unrecognized gaps and uncertainties in our doctrine are a space that I can inhabit. I hope that we as a church can come to accept and respect our own lack of knowledge, but until then, I can work with Mormonism in my own way, and that's okay.
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