What Can It Hurt?

Over a month since my last post! A lot has been going on though, so I'm not without reasons for my silence.

Most importantly, I have moved from Wisconsin back to Arizona. I brought only what fit in my car (which meant making FIVE separate trips to Goodwill. I hope people enjoy my stuff!) On the way I stopped in Denver to visit my brother and his family for several days. My little sister flew up from Arizona and drove the rest of the way with me. This was super awesome for me because I hadn't seen her since before she left for her mission, almost two years ago now.

Since being back in Arizona, I've gone through a great deal of emotions and thoughts. While I feel like I've done the right thing and I'm in a good place, I needed to really figure out where I'm going and what my life is going to be like and look like now that I'm back here.

As anyone who has been reading my blog with any sort of regularity knows, part of the past year involved a quasi-return to church after an 18-year absence. Reactions to this ranged from the surprised to the hopeful to the skeptical to the judging. Many people asked me why I was going back and what I hoped to gain by doing so. These have been difficult questions to answer, as I didn't fully know myself why I decided to go back. My stock answer, which is as truthful as I am capable of being, is as follows:

I was coming to terms with an on-going cycle of negativity, guilt, shame, and self-hate that stemmed from my early years, years that were spent steeped in the LDS church. After my brother John's death a year ago, and in conjunction with my discoveries about my past, I was feeling a need for some sort of spirituality. As several people have suggested, I could have chosen any church and certainly could have gone to a church that was more genuinely desirous of my presence there as a gay man, but on some level, I felt that in order to make peace with my past and the destructive things I experienced in it, I needed to go back to the source. It was solely through listening to interviews on MormonStories and GayMormonStories that I felt it was okay to attend church again. With this in mind, I did not return to the LDS church with a desire to rekindle a belief in its teachings. The things I knew to be untrue, I still knew were untrue when I made my decision to start attending sacrament meetings. I had no desire to reabsorb myself into traditional Mormon beliefs, doctrines, lifestyle, or culture.

While at church, I was lucky enough to meet an amazing bishop with whom I had several awesome conversations about life and faith and religion and scripture and dreams and music and philosophy and, occasionally, food. He was patient and kind and truly receptive to hearing what I had to say. The empathy and unconditional friendship I felt from him was unlike any I have felt with anyone else and encouraged me to want to continue talking to him, sharing my perspectives and experiences and listening to his. I feel like we both learned and grew through our conversations. He often encouraged me to pray about this or that concept or idea, and he gave me a blessing once when I was unsure about wanting to play the piano for Primary. I don't believe in either of these things, prayer or blessings, but, as he himself said, "What can it hurt?"

One of my biggest goals as far as the outcome of the process/journey I've been going through since starting this blog is to live with authenticity. This is a much more complicated and involved idea than I can go into here (*note to self: write a post about living with authenticity à la Brené Brown*), but suffice it to say that, to me, being authentic is more than just being honest. It is all-encompassing. It means that I live my life according to my own principals and do and say the things that are most important to me.

In the past several months, the LDS church as an organization has done more to convince me that it is not the place for me. I have known since I was about 16 that I didn't believe in its teachings, but I stayed an official member because "What can it hurt?" I saw no problem with my name remaining on the records even though I chose to distance myself from it.

But that is no longer the case. I have decided that I cannot any longer stand silently by while the church does and says things that go so completely against what I hold to be good and true, things that are so contrary to my concept of rational thought, things so out of touch with my reality. What follows is a list of reasons why I am choosing to sever my ties from the LDS church. I write this list mostly for the benefit of friends and family who are LDS. Please know that I have thought about these things long and hard, some for years. These are my truths, and I know full well that they may not be your truths. I make this list not to convince you of things I know to be true, but rather to express to you the process by which I have come to the place I now find myself.

So, my list:

• Human sexuality is not a "lifestyle choice" nor is it a "temporary and reversible condition" nor is it "a challenge some are given in this life." Sexuality has nothing at all to do with religion or the Bible or Satan tempting people. I say this as an actual gay man, a person who actually experiences and lives the thing that heterosexual church leaders so often attempt to describe and define. The LDS Church seems completely unable to grasp this concept that has been time and again scientifically proven to be accurate and true (with a new study that came out in February of this year). I will no longer have my existence defined for me by those who are ignorant of the realities of my life.

• Furthermore, homosexuality, bisexuality, and even asexuality do exist. They are real. The LDS Church seems to assert that there is only heterosexuality and those who "struggle" with so-called "same-sex attraction." I am not struggling, and the only reason that LGBT Mormons (or any religious people, for that matter) struggle with sexuality is because they have been inculcated with the belief that their biological needs and the physical (and, yes, sexual) manifestations of those needs are merely evil temptations, appetites, inclinations, or "desires of the flesh" that are contrary to God's plan for His children. 

• To that end, homosexuality is not, as heterosexual church leaders teach, solely about the sex act. Sexuality is an integral part of every person's psychological makeup. My attraction to men is not just because they have a penis, and my innate desire to be with a man is not just so I can make use of said penis. People MUST get over this misconception for there ever to be any progress made toward inclusion and equality. The fact that I am gay means that I want to bond with another man just as completely as a straight man desires to bond with his wife. This means that I seek a bond that is intellectual, spiritual (however you choose to interpret that concept), emotional, practical, physical, and sexual. This is not just something gay people say in order to justify "living in sin." 

• Gender roles are not, despite what the Proclamation on the Family says, preordained or "divinely designed" before birth. Gender and the roles associated with them, as shown by a great many social scientists, are social constructs. The external existence of specific body parts does not dictate what is happening internally. The external existence of specific body parts should not dictate what that person is allowed to do or what interests that person has. 

• The "laws of God" are not, as LDS Church leaders try so hard to get members to believe, immutable and unchanging. Even a cursory look at the Church's history shows this belief to be erroneous on many levels. Using this as an argument in support of current doctrines is both coercive and misleading. Calling a significant change in doctrine, tradition, or practice a "revelation" does not make it so. And even if major doctrinal changes are truly divine revelations, they still show that God does change the "rules" from time to time. The hard line that the Church draws between themselves and human sexuality and the role of women by calling their beliefs "eternal truths" only makes them more hypocritical to me, especially since the church's doctrine is based in part (as seen in the Ninth Article of Faith) on the idea that we don't know everything there is to know, and that God still has much to reveal.

• The church's recent disavowal of its racist past only plants more doubt in the ability of church leaders to be the "seers and revelators" we are taught they are. Leaders of the past, prophets and general authorities alike, preached nothing short of hate speech about people of African descent. (For specific instances, please see here.) To me, religious thinking is chock-full of too many conveniences, and saying that past leaders were simply part of a "racial culture" cannot justify their words and actions if these men are to be seen as being inspired of God and speaking on his behalf. Just because "the Church [now] disavows the theories advanced in the past" does not erase the harm that was done. Nor does calling the words of prophets and leaders "theories" downplay the significance of what was seen and treated as nothing less than official church doctrine. At what point in the future will the church disavow itself of its "theories" of gender expression? At what point in the future will the church disavow itself of its "theories" of human sexuality? How is one to know when a leader is speaking "as a man" who is nothing more than a product of the era and environment in which he lives and when he is speaking "as a man of God"? 

• Another religious convenience that drives me away is ability to suddenly change traditional interpretations of scripture to meet current needs. I refer here specifically to the many instances in the Book of Mormon that were used as justifications in the past for barring blacks from the priesthood. (see 1 Nephi 12:23; 2 Nephi 5:21; Jacob 3:5; Alma 3:6; and others) Brigham Young even preached the literality of the dark skin of the "Lamanites" eventually being returned to white (Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, p. 336). These scriptures were taken literally. To now say that "light" and "white" simply means pure and faithful and that "black" and "dark" simply means evil and unfaithful is a convenience that I cannot abide. 

• For some, questioning is a path to deeper faith and enlightenment. For many, myself included, listening to people talk about "the tough issues" is what brings them back to church or keeps them going to church: As I said earlier, it was solely through listening to John Dehlin's Mormonstories interviews (particularly the one with Edward Kimball, son of Spencer W. Kimball) that I was able to justify going back to church despite having reservations and differences of belief. To see people like John Dehlin, Kate Kelly, Rock Waterman, and others being called to disciplinary councils and excommunicated is disheartening and, frankly, disgusting to me. To accuse these people of "preaching untruths" and to be afraid that otherwise faithful members could be so easily swayed to believe those "untruths" exposes a lack of confidence in the church's own teachings. It is this same fear that is at the base of the church's aversion to and discouragement from history, academic research, and believing too much in science. A recent study by the Pew Research Center showed that a significant number of Mormons, one in five, in fact, have doubts about some of the church's teachings. Twenty percent is not a small number. Should all those people be excommunicated, or merely those who have the gall to speak out about them? If, as Pres. Uchdorf has now famously said, church leaders do make mistakes and are sometimes wrong about things, how are church members to discern that unless they actively seek for truth and guidance? And if Pres. Uchtdorf is right--and who knows if someday his words might also be disavowed?--then receiving personal revelation, one of the basic tenets of Mormonism, that goes against something a general authority has said simply cannot be out of the realm of possibility. 

This list does not take into account the issues I have with the hisoricity of the Book of Mormon, the details of the church's past, my complete disbelief in any sort of literality of the Bible, or my disbelief in certain basic tenets of general Christianity like the existence of a literal God or "Father" in Heaven or the concepts of an afterlife or eternity. Rather, these are the reasons that are, to me, significant enough to make my separation from the LDS Church official and permanent. They are grievous enough to make me not want to allow the church to use me as a number when it flaunts its 15-million-person membership. 

To this end, I sent an email to the church membership office (or whatever its official name is) asking that my name and information be permanently and immediately removed from its records. I do not want to be a hypocrite. It is important to me to stand firm in my beliefs, knowledge, and morals. I could no longer in good conscience remain a member of an organization I find to be fundamentally flawed on so many levels. I cannot belong, even in name only, to an organization that perpetuates ignorance about the human experience that results in psychological trauma, shame, self-hate, and at its worst, suicide.

Again, these are my truths, and I do not seek to impose them on anyone else. I am at peace with the fact that other people know things to be true that I know not to be true. All I can ask is that my family and friends are able to respect my beliefs and truths as I endeavor to respect theirs.