Summary
The Navigating the LGBTQ+ Experience as a Faithful Latter-day Saint panel discusses how LGBTQ+ individuals can balance their identities with their faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Panelists share personal stories, emphasizing love, maintaining relationships, and finding hope while staying grounded in gospel principles. They address topics such as reconciling personal identity with doctrine, the challenges of societal expectations, and the importance of fostering a relationship with Christ, with a focus on understanding, respect, and spiritual growth.
Introduction
Scott Gordon: We’re going to move on with our panel discussion. This topic is something that is in the press quite a bit these days, and we’re going to talk more about some of these social issues. I guess that’s the best way to put it, I suppose. We’re very pleased to have Ty and Danielle Mansfield. Ty is a practicing marriage and family therapist and an assistant professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. His wife, Danielle, majored in Spanish and went on to earn an MBA.
Then we also have Skyler and Amanda Sorenson. Skyler and Amanda Sorenson are in what’s called a mixed-orientation marriage and have been married for five years. Together, they host the podcast Sit Down with Sky and Amanda, which is dedicated to defending gospel principles through the lens of LGBTQ+ issues. Our moderator today is Cassandra Hedelius, who has a law degree and is also the chairman of the board for FAIR.
So, with that, we’ll turn the time over to them.
Panel Discussion
Cassandra: Thank you, everybody, so much. And thank you to both of you guys, especially those who just got off a plane in the middle of the night to be here today
The theme of our discussion today made me think of a quote that has been rattling around in my brain. Elder Christofferson, back in April 2015, was talking about people who have challenges with sexuality and gender. The title of his talk was ‘Why Marriage, Why Family?’ He said, ‘Much that is good, much that is essential, even sometimes all that is necessary for now, you who bear the heaviest burdens of mortality, stand up in defense of God’s plan to exalt His children. We are all ready to march.’ And so, for all of you guys to be here, standing up in defense of God’s plan to exalt His children, I think that everyone else here would agree with me that we are all ready to march. We’re so grateful for you all to share your perspective and your experience with us.
Let’s start with a brief introduction. We’ll start with the Mansfields and then the Sorensons. Just tell us—not the boring biography stuff—but a little bit more about your relationship, how you met, and anything you want us to know about your story before we start.
The Mansfields
: I’m going to let Danielle start there.
Danielle: So, Ty and I, we probably met when I was 20 and he was 19 at BYU. He sang in the BYU men’s chorus. I don’t want to make this too long, but basically, I had a crush on him but never really got to know him. Eleven years later, I ran into him and recognized him. Because I ran into him, I added him two years later on Facebook.
Ty: I had come to a place where I felt like I had a lot of love to give. I had this prayer where I said, ‘God, I’m still willing to do this. If this is my lot, to not ever be married in this life, I will do this, but can we come back to this question?’
And it was within that week that she reached out to me. We had had these sort of experiences on Facebook, and as you know, Danielle is really just affable and funny. Every time she would comment—we are a Facebook success story—every time she would comment, these were little things, and I was friends with her older siblings; I knew her older siblings actually better than her. Her brother sang with me in men’s chorus, and she would say these things that I just thought were so funny. I would find myself two or three days later still laughing about these things she said.
Danielle: But now he’s like, ‘can you just be serious?’
Ty: So, when she reached out, I thought, ‘A date couldn’t hurt.’ Worst case scenario, I won’t want to go out again. But, yeah, as she said, it was just one date after another. But I actually had a very strong impression that this would likely go somewhere.
Danielle: I knew about Ty’s sexuality, in that his natural sexuality was an attraction to the same sex, and knowing that but not really understanding what that meant, I actually wrote on his Facebook wall one time, ‘I’m your last hope if you ever want to be in my family.’
Ty: No, this is what I said. I said to her, ‘What did I say? ‘I really love your family.’ Or, ‘Have I ever said how much I wanted to be a part of your family?’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m your last chance.’
Danielle: All of my other siblings were married at that time, and my youngest sibling is seven years younger than I am, and she beat me to marriage eight years earlier.
Cassandra: All right, Sky and Amanda, it’s your turn. Please tell us about your story.
The Sorensons
Sky: Okay, I might go first, and she’ll steal the mic and fill in the gaps, because that’s how it usually works. She’s the history book of our relationship, and I remember things more broadly. So, hopefully, you can’t hear my beating heart in the microphone. Usually, we’re in the comfort of our living room, talking into microphones. This is a little bit different. We don’t do a whole lot of this, but I’ll try to get past the nerves.
We met in… we’re a YSA FHE family group success story. We like to say it’s one step above Tinder, as far as unique ways to meet, or I guess not unique, yeah… creativity. But, I mean, they work. They do what they’re supposed to, and we’re grateful for that.
I was going to BYU, and she was going to UVU, but living at the Riviera. It’s an old apartment building—I’m sure many of you know about it. My apartment group were friends from my mission, and hers were some friends from her mission, and we all became friends. We would hang out a lot. Her roommate and friend was very persistent.
Cassandra: Skyler, I heard you have a book out. Would you like to tell us about your book, which is conveniently for sale in our bookstore next door? That’s an interesting fact, almost like it was planned.”
Sky: Um, yeah, so I wrote a book recently. It’s called Exclude Not Thyself: Thriving as a Covenant-Keeping Gay Latter-day Saint, and it’s a few different things. It’s, I guess, a letter to a younger me on the things I wish I would have known as a gay Latter-day Saint growing up in the Church—how to be successful in the Church, thrive, keep my covenants, and be all in on the gospel.
But it also acknowledges and works through the complex feelings I experienced with balancing my sexuality and my faith in God. It’s also my attempt to provide practical advice for other members of the Church who are wanting to love and support their gay or LGBT Latter-day Saint family members and friends without enabling a faith crisis or abandoning the gospel truths that we cherish and love.
So that’s kind of the elevator pitch, I guess. Ty was kind enough to write the foreword for me, and I’m thankful to him for that. But yeah, it’s just my advice. It’s very practical. I don’t go a lot into my specific story; there are kind of pieces of my story within it, but it’s more meant to be practical advice and commentary on social issues and church culture, and things like that, to hopefully provide some light to a very complex and often divisive issue that we face today.”
Cassandra: Great, thank you so, so much. And Ty also has written some excellent books that are also for sale in our bookstore.
Question #1 How to Teach Truth and be Loving and Sensitive
I’m going to jump into some questions here. First of all, parents and leaders in the Church are trying to thread a kind of difficult needle for teaching their children or for leading in their ward. On the one hand, you, of course, want to be loving and helpful to people who have challenges with sexuality or with gender. On the other hand, we need to teach what is true and make sure it is clear, especially to children—help them to be able to learn it and to not just hear it, but to feel the Spirit testifying that it is true.
And so, in threading that needle, some people feel that even bringing up these teachings is insensitive and adds to the suffering of those who are already going through so much. So, what would you guys say to parents and ward leaders who are trying to navigate that?”
Danielle: Ty does this professionally, why don’t you answer?
Ty: I didn’t know if you wanted to start. If I could—this is where it’s, I think, really tricky. When I hear that question, I think there are… and I’m just going to tell you, I’m such a heady person. I’m in my head all the time, and I work way too much, and I forget how normal people talk about things. But I’ve thought a lot recently about how polarity and paradox are the real catalysts for spiritual growth, and that most people struggle sitting with polarity and paradox.
We have a lot of ‘yes, ands’ and ‘both, ands.’ One of the things that I think is tricky for us as Latter-day Saints is figuring out how to hold, I mean, the title of this—right?—how to hold truth and love together. I think love gets weaponized in this conversation, and truth gets weaponized in this conversation. If you don’t affirm all, you’re not loving enough, and sometimes we can be insensitive in terms of how we talk about things.
The Sweet Spot Between Truth and Love
I think finding that sweet spot is key. I’m going to try to answer your question here because it’s more of a process, I think. We have to find those models. How do we talk about and affirm clear truth, but also recognize how people are going to hear that? My colleague Jared Halverson at BYU, who talks a lot about polarity, has talked about this masterfully. He’s got some stuff on YouTube you can look up.
He said that sometimes, as a teacher, (He’s been in CES for 5 years and now he’s at BYU) he’s teaching three to five different lessons because different people in the same class are hearing the same thing in different ways, right? Sometimes you have people who are a bit more apathetic and need the harder truth, and then you have other people who are perfectionists and need more grace. Sometimes the wrong people are hearing the wrong things.
As we try to hold that, being sensitive… who was it? Was it Kimball who said, ‘Don’t teach just to be understood; teach so you can’t be misunderstood?’ Whoever said that, I think it’s a good line here.
Cassandra: I think it was President Packer.
Ty: Could have been President Packer. One of them. But it was a good line, and I think that piece is really important. Maybe that’s all I have for now.
Danielle: I was just going to say, I think… and it depends generationally. You see different responses a lot of the time. It feels like younger generations of parents really want to lead with love, and older generations of parents want to lead with the law, and be like, ‘Well, here’s the truth, and you’ve got to get in line.’ Then the younger parents are just like, ‘I love you; just do whatever makes you happy.’ Obviously, these are, you know, caricatures, and I think it’s really important to try to find a balance where your children or your friends know that you love them as they are, but you’re also clear. Again, that depends—you don’t have to bear your testimony every single time—but they should also be clear on where you stand and what your values are.
I’m just going to go ahead and use their names, but Scott and Becky Macintosh wrote a book. They had a child who came to them, who came out as gay and was struggling with some things. He wanted to leave the Church, date, and find a partner, and he wanted his parents to read some things about his experience, so they would have a better understanding of what it was like to be a member of the Church and to have these attractions.
I just love what Scott’s response was to his child. He said, ‘I love you, and I will read this because I love you. But I also want you to know, I’m not leaving the Church.’ This is a really common thing—parents have their testimony shaken. I’m sure we all know parents who have left the Church because they couldn’t reconcile their child’s experience of having these attractions with the gospel and didn’t understand how to make it all fit together. But I loved that Scott’s response was, ‘I love the gospel. I’m staying with Jesus Christ’s gospel and the Plan of Salvation, but I will read, I will understand, and I will love you. But let’s just be clear.’ I loved that.
Cassandra: That’s great, thank you.
Worldviews
Ty: One extra thought that I had… and just to put a plug in here, I mean, I think Jeffrey Thayne—who I don’t know if he’s here today—has done some really masterful work on worldview. One of the things that we aren’t always aware of is just how much culture informs the way we see things and see the gospel, right?
He’s talked about expressive individualism as a big one. We don’t typically gravitate towards the word ‘hedonism,’ but the idea that you should pursue what makes you happy and avoid what causes suffering… to some Latter-day Saints becomes a philosophy that has the potential to become idolatrous and gets entangled with the gospel as we talk about the plan of happiness. Sometimes we have adopted or marinated in these broader cultural worldviews that don’t, on the surface, feel at odds with the gospel. But when you really get into them and get under them, they are.
Brent Slife, who’s not a Latter-day Saint but a retired psychologist, taught at BYU for a number of years. He wrote a piece that I was rereading recently, called something to the effect of Christian Family Values: Do They Come from Unrecognized Idols? He was looking at some of the cultural philosophies that even Latter-day Saints use in how we promote the gospel. These philosophies aren’t necessarily inconsistent on some level, but when used as a foundation, they can become a kind of idol for us. I think that makes us vulnerable to some of what we’re seeing, where people are unable to reconcile their faith with their love for their child. That is, their child should be able to do whatever makes them happy or live in the way God made them, right, in the way we frame that.
Cassandra: Yeah, I think he also brought up the writings and work of Jeffrey Thorne, who presented at FAIR last year and the year before, talking about that. I’ll make sure to publish links to those whenever anything related to this is published. These are really great and important talks, I think. With expressive individualism, the idea is just saying that what is most important is to be what you feel, to be who you are, to be your authentic self, and not to have to sacrifice that. But, I mean, in contrast, you have Elder Holland in the last conference saying, ‘I will not offer to the Lord that which costs me nothing.’
All right, Sky and Amanda, did you have anything you wanted to add?
Know Your Audience
Amanda: Yeah, I had something I wanted to say. I think knowing—kind of something Skyler and I talked about in preparation for this—was knowing who you’re speaking to. Knowing, the youth, or whoever, if you’re speaking one-on-one with someone, knowing the approach. That sounds like it’s some sort of war tactic or something, but knowing the best way to approach it. That doesn’t mean you’re watering down the truth or not stating or sharing the truth with them, but knowing the way they’re going to be most receptive to that truth is really important.
Sky: Yeah, we were talking earlier about how, with different audiences, you’re going to approach topics differently. I think there’s a difference in how we advocate for the gospel online versus in a group setting or individually. There’s a different way to approach each of those, and many times, we don’t see that distinction. We treat an individual like they’re a group, and we just harshly advocate for gospel truths without trying to understand who they are, where they are, and what their paradigm is. I think that’s really important.
This is something that comes up a lot in conversations we have as husband and wife and also with our podcast—just the balance of love and law, of grace and truth. I really like how President Oaks talked about this in his recent fireside to the youth. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend it. It was really, really phenomenal on these topics. He talked about how he has recently shifted how he thinks about this topic. He used to think about it as a balance, so imagine truth and love on either side of a balance. When you’re focusing more on one, then you’re focusing necessarily less on the other. It’s kind of, I guess, a zero-sum game. But he said he’s recently shifted how he thinks about this topic. Rather than a balancing act, it’s really that we are meant to pursue both love and law equally and fully. I really liked that distinction.
We often think that if we are to love those with differences—those with different opinions about issues or who have different lifestyles—we have to abandon truth to do so. On the other side, we feel that if we want to uphold the truth, we have to withhold our love. I think both of these are incomplete understandings of the gospel.
The Simple Truths of the Gospel
When I was on my mission, I often got frustrated with having to teach things so simply. I kind of wanted to dig deep into the gospel. And there’s something good about that—that’s why we have conferences like this, which is good. It’s not a bad thing. But there’s something beautiful about the simple truths of the gospel. Understanding that the reason we seek truth is because it’s the greatest antidote to suffering and misery. The more we understand the doctrine of Jesus Christ, the more we recognize that the best way to love is to point others to their Savior, the best way we can. Inviting—that’s our job, right? Inviting, not forcing or disparaging. We invite others to come unto Christ the best way we know how.
And I think that is really the distinction we should understand. The reason we teach about our Savior and His doctrine is because it has the capacity to help people become happier, better versions of themselves. I think that should be our motivating factor.
Developing a Relationship with the Savior
Amanda: Just adding on to what Skyler said, I think we need to focus on helping youth develop a real relationship with their Savior. As we all know, the Spirit is truly the teacher, not us, no matter what we may want to think. We really need to help our youth to feel the Spirit and have spiritual experiences with their Savior, and I think that will help. That’s one key component, I think, to working with youth in general, but especially LGBTQ youth.
Ty: Just to add to that, when I look back at the most turbulent and painful parts of my journey—which almost feels like another life, it was so long ago—it was a full two to three-year existential crisis–I couldn’t see my place. This is really kind of speaking to what Amanda was saying— I had some very profound spiritual experiences.
I’ve been drawn to President Nelson’s talk—I don’t even know how many years ago—where he talked about how there’s no amorphous entity called ‘the Atonement’ to which we may look for succor and power. He said everything has to come back to Christ.
Cassandra: I think the title of that talk is Drawing the Power of Jesus Christ into Our Lives.
Ty: You’re better than me at this—thank you, yes. But I think about that a lot.
For so much of my life, it was about following the rules and doing the right thing—you have to get married to make it to the third degree, right? We almost talk about those things within the context of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but almost separate from a relationship with Him. And the more those things were outside of how I could feel about them in my relationship with Christ, they felt oppressive, like this thing that was always going to be the mark of my failure, my inadequacy, and my shame—which led to shame. And yet, as I had some very, very powerful spiritual experiences, the Lord was teaching me those same things, but they felt so different.
I think the Spirit does have power to teach us things that words alone can’t. So, as parents, or as we’re trying to have these conversations in the Church, as our kids struggle, we need to honor the questions and honor the doubts. I recognize that this may be hard to reconcile right now. Let’s just focus on nurturing your relationship with your Savior. As we continue to come back to the relationship, rather than just ideas—even if they’re true ideas—I think the Spirit and our relationship with the Savior can bring us to a place where we can hold those things in a way that they can become life-giving. For me, they didn’t feel life-giving; they felt threatening and challenging. They were what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get there.
But the whole crisis kind of forced me into a relationship with God, which was the very thing I needed anyway. Once I was in that relationship, it all felt so different.
Question #2 Will The Church Will Change?
Cassandra: All right, we’ve got a lot of really great questions here, and I’m going to hit you with a hard one.
How would you respond to someone who says they have received personal revelation that the teachings of prophets and apostles regarding marriage and gender are wrong, and that the Church will change?”
Amanda: Was it Elder Renlund? I would probably say to the person, you know, I don’t know if I would say it outright, but it’s like, you can have your delusions. The Lord does not reveal things individually that are contrary to His doctrine and His plan as the prophets have outlined it through scripture and through talks in many different ways. He is not going to individually reveal things that contradict what He has already revealed to the body of the Church through His prophet.
So, I have heard people say things like that, and I’m just like, are you sure the angel that told you wasn’t from Satan? That’s my thought. I’m just like, that’s not how the Lord works. I would probably find a diplomatic way—if they were actually having a conversation with me—to say that, but that’s just not how the Lord works. He just doesn’t do that.
Sky: This is something that I have run across—I’m sure many of you have as well. For better or for worse, and probably for worse, I’m on social media a lot, talking about these topics and kind of in that world within LDS circles related to these conversations.
Amanda: Follow him on Twitter, you guys, seriously.
Relics of Old Social Values?
Sky: Oh, no, don’t do that! But yeah, I’m kind of surrounded by this a lot and have encountered that idea a lot—receiving revelation that the doctrine, which has been repeated, emphasized, and clarified over and over, is actually some relic of old social values that is eventually going to change. I think that is such a damning thing to hear, especially for our youth, hearing about the potential for the doctrine on the family to change. I can’t think of anything more spiritually damaging, for me putting myself back into the shoes of my teenage self, than hearing that maybe one day, you know, the doctrine will change.
I feel like I would have frozen in my pursuit to know Christ—feeling too much love for the Savior and the Church I love, and the doctrine I love, to completely abandon it, but feeling paralyzed and not empowered to see myself in the gospel. Because if the foundation that I am securing myself to has the inevitability of changing so drastically, why pursue that direction or that path?
Is This Feeling the Spirit?
I think there’s also another dynamic that happens, where it’s really easy to attribute everyday emotions to the Spirit. We hear from our prophets, apostles, and in the scriptures that the Lord speaks to us through a burning in the bosom or, a lot of times, through thoughts or feelings. So, it’s easy to misattribute those feelings to the Spirit. I think a lot of the time, you might see somebody who gives up the perceived burden of the moral framework within the gospel, and feeling that sort of natural release or relief from that responsibility. It’s easy to attribute that relief to deity or to divine inspiration that what you’re doing is right, when in reality, it’s just the temporary relief of removing the burden of your moral framework. I think that happens many times, unfortunately.
Ty: Thank you. To add to that, I think the challenge here, again, is that… if I could come back to this cultural worldview piece, people who want to believe—and I think this has to be our starting place—people who want to believe that the Church is going to change are coming from a benevolent place. They want to see people happy, they want to see people have love in their lives, to have companionship, right? And we think of that as the primary purpose of life—that God sent us here to have love and companionship, to get married and have kids. And if that doesn’t work for you here, then look for that here, without fully recognizing how embedded 19th, 20th, and 21st-century cultural values have provided this larger frame of expressive individualism and Romanticism.
Quality of Eternal Marriage and our Worldview of Marriage
Ty: I mentioned this when I spoke here last year in my FAIR talk—that we, as a culture in the 20th century, as a Church, really almost fully adopted—not officially, but culturally—Romanticism as a framework for marriage. Even the term ‘eternal companion’—I have a colleague who has done some research on this—the earliest reference he’s been able to find to that language is from 1930. It’s sort of the ‘Disney-ification’ of marriage in our culture. We, as a culture, almost have this idea that eternal marriage looks like it does for everybody else, but we just get it for eternity, not just for time. But the quality is the same. I have students—and for the last 10 years, I’ve been teaching the Eternal Family class at BYU—and when I talk about marriage as an order of the priesthood, most of my students have never heard that idea.
What does it mean for marriage to be an order of the priesthood? We just have very romantic ideas about it, and it’s very companionate. We read Genesis when God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone,’ as if God’s ultimate concern for the universe was that Adam didn’t feel lonely, without understanding the context. It’s not about loneliness—it’s about creation. Adam could not create without the complement of Eve. It wasn’t about loneliness, and yet we don’t even know how to hear that outside of that companionate, emotional lens.
Some of the cultural worldviews that even we in the Church have, I think, require us to get more sophisticated in realizing that we’ve adopted ideas—we’ve embedded cultural ideas that are very Western, very American, in ways that we just don’t know how to read or hear the gospel outside of those lenses. And it can feel unfair. It just feels so unfair thinking that the whole purpose of the gospel is to find happiness, rather than to propel eternal growth and development into the attributes and nature of godliness. There is not a single experience anyone can have in this life that cannot serve the purpose to propel us to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ through which we can accomplish every single thing we came here to do. And for some people that will include marriage and for some people that won’t. And for some people that includes biological children and for some people that won’t. But the purpose of life is not to get married and have kids. The purpose of life is to have the experiences that God wants us to have that will help us to become like Jesus Christ, to develop those attributes of godliness. To the degree that we don’t get that, it’s just going to feel unfair. But there’s nothing unfair about it.
Cassandra: It brings to mind, in The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis was talking about that ‘Disneyfication’ of marriage—that in our modern culture, we are taught to think about this romantic storm of emotion as the only proper basis for a marriage. But actually, it’s what God promises as a result of the marriage. It’s an interesting way to turn that on its head.
Yeah, and I think it’s also become very common for people to cite the Ninth Article of Faith and say that we believe that God is going to reveal more things. So, of course, the Church can change on this. But if you turn it around, we also believe all that God has revealed, and God has revealed this immensely glorious, wonderful doctrine of eternal marriage. Let’s stay focused on that instead of what could happen, but hasn’t happened, and the Brethren have been quite clear will not happen.
Question #3 LGBT Friends and Church Activity
Someone says they have some neighbors, a gay couple with children, and they’ve become friends. This couple has expressed interest in coming to church. What would you recommend for people, and maybe from any experience that you’ve had, what kind of fellowshipping, friendship, and support has been helpful to you? What would you recommend for people who are just trying to share the love of Christ with their friends and neighbors, especially those who are interested in the Church?
Maintaining Relationships Without Abandoning Values
Sky: In dynamics like that, where I have acquaintances or friends who have different lifestyles or opinions on things—which, to an extent, is every single person that I know—but with more foundational differences, my goal is always to maintain the relationship without abandoning my values. My goal is to maintain a relationship with them, to help them see that I value them as a person and value my relationship with them. Then, hopefully, there come times when the moment is right, and we can have some sort of mutual conversation with respect about these hard issues and our different perspectives on them.
Facilitating Feeling the Spirit
Hopefully, I can create a situation where the Spirit can do the work and testify truth to them. My main goal is to maintain the relationship and look for opportunities to share my testimony in ways that resonate with them, with where they are and their paradigm and current understanding. The more that I understand the individual, the more I think I can speak to their fears and worries, and also what we agree on, which is good. Then I can offer my perspective on why I see things differently and hopefully just open up that respectful line of communication where the Spirit can do the heavy lifting.
Danielle: I agree with what Skyler said, and I think it’s really important to remember, like Ty was saying, that your hope is to help facilitate people in developing their relationship with Christ. I would never say to a friend who expressed interest, ‘Oh, we don’t drink coffee, do you still want to come?’ I would just say, ‘Yeah, come, come and worship with us, come and feel the Spirit, come and whatever.’
Because LGBT issues are so unique, I would probably explain a little beforehand and just say, ‘We have this revelation called The Proclamation on the Family, and this is what it explains. So, you may hear them talk about that, but we would love to have you come. Everyone is welcome. We would love for you to come and worship Christ with us.’ I wouldn’t feel the need to say anything like, ‘We don’t believe in what you’re doing.’
Everyone is Welcome
What’s really beautiful is that we have friends who are in gay marriages and remember the teachings of the gospel from their youth. They come with their marriage as they are, come to sacrament meeting, and come and worship as part of a family in the gospel. I think that’s great. I’m a mess of a human, with all of my mistakes, all of the things I do wrong, and the things that I’m continually working on. You don’t go to church because you’ve ‘made it.’ You go to church to worship, to commune together, and to feel the Spirit. It doesn’t matter where anyone is on their journey or what tenets they’re already living. Everyone is welcome, and I would lead with that—’We would love for you to come and be a part of our family.’
Cassandra: Great, thank you. And it reminds me, too, I think last year, I want to say the Mesa Temple was rededicated, and I believe it was in the Church News. They sent down Elder Gong, and maybe a couple of other General Authorities. Elder Gong has a gay son, and as part of inviting people in the community to come and see the temple before it was rededicated, they had some of the leaders from the local LGBT community come in to tour the temple. Apparently, Elder Gong was perfectly forthright with them—’Yes, this is our doctrine, and yes, we’re very happy you’re here. Please come and see our lovely temple.’
Focusing on the Yes
Ty: Can I say something about that really quickly? I think the beautiful thing about what you just described, and what I think Elder Gong was doing, is focusing on the ‘yes.’ Sometimes we focus on the ‘no’s,’ right? ‘Yes, we don’t believe that, or yes, we do teach that’s not okay.’ But if we can find the ‘yes,’ this is our doctrine, and we’d love to have you with us, we’d love to have you be a part of our family, we’d love to have you come worship Christ with us. Identifying that ‘yes’—that attractive ‘yes’—can be the thing that propels some people over the hurdles. Even if they have to work through those hurdles, if there’s a bigger ‘yes’ beyond it, it can motivate people to explore more.
Okay, we’re going to take time for probably one more question.
Question #4 Teaching Hope
How do you teach a gay child to hope? This is, I assume, from a family within the Church. How do you teach a gay child to hope if they say they don’t want to be changed in the next life? They can’t see themselves in a heterosexual relationship. The Plan of Salvation has no appeal. So, for what do they hope in order to endure?
Danielle: Can I share a quick anecdote? So, our youngest is four, and when she was born, I realized I couldn’t see her up close—my eyes couldn’t focus. It was really surprising to me because I’ve always had better than 20/20 vision. I kind of prided myself on that, like, ‘I have perfect eyes—you may wear glasses, but I don’t have to.’ There were lots of little things like that about me, where I thought, ‘Look at what I have, you know, like I was able to get into BYU a year early because I’m smart, and I have perfect eyes.’ And when I started to lose my vision—because I still struggle with being able to see up close—it was this realization, this impression: ‘That was never yours to begin with.’
Our Mortal Identities and our Core Identity
It made me think, what other things am I holding on to in my identity that I think are mine but actually aren’t? The Lord has given them to me as part of my experience here. Such a basic thing like vision, but also characteristics like my Samoaness, or the family I belong to, or growing up LDS. Things that I felt were so core to who I was were really just parts of the experience I was given here on earth. I think sometimes people get so caught up in what their mortal identity is that they can’t let go of that.
I remember ruminating when I was little on the idea of, ‘But in the next life, will I have my Samoan nose?’ It really bothered me to think, ‘Will I still look Samoan?’ or ‘What will I look like?’ As you’re teaching your child to hope, and you have this child that’s resistant to being changed in the next life, help them understand what their core identity is—who they really are.
It’s funny, I gave a lesson about this two weeks ago, and I don’t remember the talk I based it on, but it was a General Conference talk about discovering your identity. The most core and important part of you is that you are a child of God. Helping your child, who is struggling with how to have hope for the next life and what this means about me and my sexuality in the next life, should focus not on what they won’t be or what will not happen, but on the ‘yeses.’ This is who you are—you are a child of God. There’s so much about this life and the next that we don’t understand. We don’t have all the knowledge, but this we do know. Help your child feel grounded in that and let there be some things they don’t have clear answers to. Create a foundation of hope in Christ instead of a foundation of hope in ‘Will I lose parts of my identity?’
Patience and Developing Faith in Jesus Christ
Ty: One writer referred to denial as ‘the shock absorbers of the soul.’ On some level, denial for me was a real gift, because I wasn’t trying to address things when I didn’t have the maturity or the neurological capacity to understand them. The challenge today is that kids are being asked to identify and embrace aspects of self or worldviews that they don’t have the developmental capacity to understand. The way I understand things now is so different from how I understood them in my early 20s. And I absolutely couldn’t have understood them as a 12-year-old or 14-year-old, who kind of first had some awareness, but I buried it as deep as I possibly could, and there was a gift in that because I had other developing spiritual experiences that helped me understand the world in ways that became a resource for me when I came to address them later.
So, I think the more parents unwittingly affirm identity, kids don’t know who they are when they’re teenagers, I didn’t know who I was at 25! Affirming identity is different. I think we jump on that versus just holding space. I understand that’s how we say things now, and that may or may not change. But part of living the gospel is learning to trust that God will give us today’s manna today. He’s not going to give you tomorrow’s manna today, and He’s certainly not going to give you 20 years’ manna today.
Part of developing faith is not focusing on when you’re going to get married and who you’re going to marry, and are you going to feel the way you think you’re supposed to feel, let’s focus on developing a relationship with the Savior today. What does that look like for you as a 12-year-old, or 16-year-old, or 18-year-old, or 20 or 30-year-old?
Looking back at the first book I wrote, In Quiet Desperation—next year will be the 20th anniversary—and I was going back through it because I’m writing a 20 year follow-up, lessons learned. And as a 26-year-old, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I was so dramatic and immature, and I didn’t understand.’ I’m kind of embarrassed, right? I was so heartfelt, and I believed everything I was trying to communicate, but I didn’t have the 20 years of experience that have so fundamentally changed me.
We Can Trust God
The things that felt so unfair, 20 years later, I look back now and think, ‘God is good. God is really, really good and we can trust Him. He’s good at what He does, and if we focus on that instead of trying to figure out 20 years down the road—’Will I find someone who’s attracted to me?’—we do youth and young adults a disservice. Anything we can do to keep people grounded in their relationship with the Savior, in seeking revelation and understanding truth, will help. We get so lost in identifying with ego and the human mind and body that we don’t realize how much that identification eclipses our ability to experience eternity and our eternal self and eternal identity.
Some of the things the Lord has taught me have shown me how much we over-identify with mortality generally. It wasn’t until the last five years that I started getting this. Even I, who’ve been so lost in things that felt so important, have realized they aren’t. That peeling away of layers is a lifetime process—it’s not something you figure out before getting married, going to the temple, and, you know, live the ‘Mormon dream,’ right? So anyway, that’s my thought—don’t get too far ahead of ourselves.
Over emphasis on Sexuality as a Core Piece of Identity
Sky: I hate to add to that slam-dunk finish, but, I just want to give my ‘Amen’ to a lot of that. Danielle, you took a lot of my key points that I was going to say here, but, I think a lot of the pain associated with same-sex attraction and reconciling that with faith in God and belief in the restored gospel is due to an overemphasis on your sexuality as a core piece of who you are.
My friend Preston Jenkins—some of you may know him—was on the podcast with me and also wrote a really wonderful book. He had a beautiful way of explaining how he sees his sexuality. He uses the word ‘orbital.’ He has a core piece of who he is—those three things that President Nelson has instructed us: child of God, child of the covenant, disciple of Jesus Christ. Those are his core. Even within that are roles that he fulfills, like father and husband, and those are part of that core identity. His sexuality is a part of him; it’s an important part, it’s a big part, but it’s ‘orbital’—it’s something that orbits around his core sense of who he is.
In modern culture, there’s very much a reverse of that, where there’s an overemphasis on attributes that make you who you are but aren’t core to who you are. For me, that has been revolutionary in helping me thrive in the gospel—just recognizing that this is an important part of myself, but there are more important things that bring more fulfillment in my life.
There’s great wisdom in the structure of eternal families. I know I’ve experienced that firsthand. I’ve had a lot of fears, worries, and uncertainties about what the future would hold for me, but I was thankfully able to find such an amazing woman who would love me despite my annoyances, my annoying qualities, and my imperfections. We’ve been able to really cultivate something that is beautiful and fulfilling.
I know we’re all different, and we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and I don’t prescribe my marriage onto anyone in my situation. But I would just warn against the finality of getting your foot out of that door completely or removing the expectation or hope that you could find an eternal marriage. Do what’s best for you, but be careful about removing possibilities from your future. I would say that I’m very grateful for the future I’ve been able to find.
The timer’s blinking at me, so I’m going to wrap up here, but it’s been a pleasure to be here.
Personal Revelation
Cassandra: I’m just going to add really quickly that I think sometimes we put too much of a burden of expectation onto personal revelation. People say, ‘I got a revelation about my identity, I got a revelation about getting married or not getting married,’ and especially when kids are young and not even developmentally there yet, revelation doesn’t necessarily work that way. It’s as the ‘dew from Heaven’—it’s line upon line, worked out over time as you move forward in faith. It might be a mistake to think, ‘I got a bolt of lightning telling me everything all at once.’
Anyway, the timer is blinking at us. Thank you so much to you guys—time flies!
Scott: Thank you very much. I want to mention something that wasn’t talked about, but I got a private message on it. Someone said, ‘It must be difficult to have your private married life thrust into the spotlight and become a spokesperson for that.’ People were admiring how difficult that could be and how glad they were that you stepped up and did that. So thank you very much.
TOPICS
LGBTQ
Affirming Sexual Identities
Faith
Jesus Christ
Hope
Truth
