A personal essay by Benjamin Nielsen
I felt simultaneously that God guided the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and that its new policy was disgraceful and wrong. That tension disturbed me, but I firmly believed both.
Teenagers very casually say very hurtful things. During high school in Orem, Utah, a group of my friends used the term “gay” interchangeably with “stupid” or “disgusting.” They called each other “fags” when annoyed. Unbeknownst to everyone in our group but the closeted gay kid, every time those words were used so casually, he wished he didn’t exist. “Every time,” he later told me.
Even in college, at Brigham Young University, where educated adults should know better, I still hear those words and worse. Racial epithets, homophobic slurs, and bigoted language are thrown around nonchalantly. I worry that when it happens, someone wishes they didn’t exist. Both now and in high school, I knew better. Back then, I didn’t say those homophobic slurs, but equally cowardly, I didn’t confront those that did. My mom taught me to be especially empathetic towards those different from me. In my life, that all started with Masula.
Masula
Masula went to the University of Utah in 2001. My mom was in a graduate program for English and gender studies, and she saw Masula in passing a few times but had never spoken to her. She noticed Masula wore a hijab. Shortly after fall semester started, the Twin Towers were attacked. American fear of further terrorist attacks translated into extreme Islamophobia. My mom noticed discriminatory rhetoric against Muslim students on campus. The week following September 11, she noticed Masula sitting alone in a cafeteria. She instantly knew she had to approach Masula. My mom felt awkward, and didn’t want to intrude, but she also felt talking to Masula right away was a necessity. She sat down at her table.
“Hi, my name is Michelle. I’ve seen you a few times before. I just wanted to say that I hope you’re doing okay.”
Masula didn’t respond, but instead burst into tears. She told my mom of a crippling fear she experienced the past week as a Muslim woman in America right after 9/11. She had been praying to Allah for help and safety, feeling she could be attacked at any moment. My mom, with a small two bedroom house, one room occupied by my older brother Alex and me, and the other her and my dad, invited Masula to move in with us during their first conversation.
I remember teaching Masula to play Mario Kart (In the picture, I’m in the middle, sporting the striped Blue’s Clues sweater). She had never played before, but was soon ripping up and down the cartoon courses thanks to Alex’s tutelage. My mom put a rug in the garage for her, where she could perform her daily prayers in peace. I loved Masula. When she left, I cried. I asked my mom why she stayed with us, and why she had to leave. My mom told me people were being mean to her because they thought she was different from them.
That same year, Alex burst out laughing because a man on the news was struggling to speak English through a thick foreign accent. Alex thought he said a phrase funny. My mom looked at him and said “don’t you dare. You never laugh at someone trying their best to speak English.” Alex told me recently that was one of his most vivid childhood memories.
We tried to never laugh at someone trying their best.
Croatia
Thanks to my mom, I was always dialed into the consequence of bigotry, whether sinister or accidental. Towards the end of 2015, lying on a bed within a high apartment in Zagreb, Croatia, I received some frantic text messages. Earlier that year, the United States Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land. The Obamas lit the White House like a flickering rainbow in the Washington D.C. dusk. The LGBTQIA+ community and allies celebrated across the nation, but I just felt confused.
I was happy for the human rights victory that Americans could marry however they chose, but couldn’t reconcile that happiness with the response to the Supreme Court ruling I heard at church on Sunday. My Sunday school teacher told our class that the ruling was incompatible with the Church’s Family Proclamation (which states that marriage is only between one man and one woman), thereby making it an evil that Church members had a duty to oppose. I wanted to do my duty as a Church member, and support its doctrine, but also celebrate marriage equality and support my homosexual brothers and sisters. I figured it was possible to do both, and thought the Church did not necessarily support my Sunday School teacher’s position.
Until that night in Croatia.
“Did you see the new policy? I’m crying!” one text message read. Another friend texted me, saying she’d been attending church again for the past three months, but if the prophet was going to ban children from baptism just because their parents were gay, she was done going. Shocked, I clicked a link to the new Church policy. I read that the Church declared same-sex couples “apostates,” and would deny their children access to baptism and infant blessings.
Apostle D. Todd Christofferson said “we recognize that same-sex marriages are now legal in the United States, but that is not a right that exists in the Church. Same-sex marriage is a particularly grievous or significant, serious kind of sin that requires Church discipline.” I kept researching, covering every article I could find on the policy. As I desperately read, it wasn’t until I felt little wet drops splashing my wrist that I realized hot tears were streaming down my cheeks.
If my friend’s very existence was roiled by his friends’ use of the term “fag,” how would he feel about the Church he loved labeling him an “apostate?”
I thought about a boy I became close to as participants at Especially For Youth, a church-sponsored youth camp, the previous summer. He had publicly come out as gay, and told me he found his homosexuality and his church completely compatible. “It’s just the way I am, and I know God made me this way. I am excited to serve my mission for the church.” I wondered how he felt reading the policy.
The Church successfully made clear that night homosexuality and Mormonism were not compatible. My theory, or perhaps more accurately, my hope, that the Church didn’t agree with my Sunday School teacher was wrong. It did. Starting that night, I never wondered whether or not that policy was right for church members. Not once. I knew it was wrong.
I was in Croatia because Alex served his mission for the church there. He was showing our family the places he lived and the people he met. Sitting in a pizzeria on the coastal city of Split, I listened to a woman promise us Alex was sent to her by God. I heard his stories of divine coincidences during his years roaming the Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian countryside. I believed both her and him. I knew God guided them to each other. I also knew I wanted to go on a mission the next year.
So, the following day, I felt simultaneously that God guided the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and that its new policy was disgraceful and wrong. That tension disturbed me, but I firmly believed both. That tension disturbed me as I served my own mission in Atlanta, and shamefully listened as my companion told a happily married couple they would need to leave their union to get baptized. It disturbed me attending Brigham Young University, a place where I received further confirmations that the Church is guided, but can also be damaging. It still disturbs me today. I cannot reconcile it.
What I do know is this: homosexual Mormons exist. Members of the Church that are irreconcilably, irrevocably, intimately gay. They were born that way. Undoubtedly, some are closeted, but they surround us. They also irreconcilably, irrevocably, intimately love the Church and the Savior’s gospel. If they were “apostates,” the Church needs to get used to being the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Apostates, because some wanted to stay no matter what. I wish there were a safe place for them.
Provo
I thought BYU would be that place, following the removal of the “Homosexual Behavior” section from its online Honor Code in late February, 2020. Members of the LGBTQIA+ community at BYU celebrated. They felt a safe space had been made for them. Many, hiding their sexuality from fear of expulsion from the school, finally came out. I celebrated with them. Maybe there was a space for me, and people who believed like me, in the middle of the disturbed tension between celebrating homosexuality and celebrating the Church.
Two weeks after that Honor Code change, the Church again made clear homosexuality and Mormonism were not compatible. On March 4, 2020, Paul V. Johnson, Commissioner of the Church Educational System, sent a letter to all BYU students that read “out of respect for all concerned, we are releasing the following clarifying statement. Same-sex romantic behavior cannot lead to eternal marriage and is therefore not compatible with the principles included in the Honor Code.”
Whatever your opinion of the divinity of homosexuality, everyone agreed it was a public relations nightmare. At the very least, it was a cruel betrayal of trust for those that had come out, believing they finally had a safe space.
Salt Lake City
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When I stood at the base of the towering Office Building, my neck hurt looking up at the roof’s outline. But when I lifted my sign, standing shoulder to shoulder with other allies, the Church’s skyscraper before our collective gaze, I felt the margin between the tension of supporting the LGBTQIA+ and Mormon community was exactly where I belonged.
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