Sex and Gender in Creation

M82 Galaxy, Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/UofA/ESA/AURA/JHU

So the whole approach that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has with gender, and it being an eternal binary and complementary? And they say that binary is necessary because sex is necessary to creation?

Let's unpack that and throw it into the recycle bin.

So Creation involves two different creative acts at its core, which I want to discuss:

1. Making Stuff
2. Making People

Scripture gives us a couple different accounts of the Creation. 

In Genesis, God (understood singularly) creates everything, with the exception of "Let us make man in our image." That statement remains plural in a way that goes totally unacknowledged and unexplained in the text. 

Moses 2 then has God speaking in the first person telling this story. 

We learn during the endowment that the Creation involved a collective effort between God, Jehovah (the premortal name of Jesus), and Michael (the premortal name of Adam). 

The creation of Stuff in these depictions are non-sexual in nature, and nonsensically male. Especially since Abraham 4 calls this a collaboration between plural Gods. With God being a title that is shared, according to Mormonism, between perfected heterosexual couples, it simply makes no sense that our conceptions of Creation do not include women anywhere. That's not how they're read, understood, or taught in any official capacity. 

The label of "God" didn't yet apply to Jehovah or Michael in their premortal, unembodied, unordained, and unendowed states. But somehow, we are more comfortable with their participation in the Creation than we are with acknowledging the perfected, resurrected, empowered contributions of our own Heavenly Mother.

We're supposed to base our entire notion of divinity on the power of sealed men and women—and no other type of relationship. But our understanding and presentations of the Creation are too timid to even acknowledge that any woman was even there.

If gender matters so much in the creation of Stuff that women don't even get to participate, or approach in no way supports the need for women in these partnerships. And if women were present for and are essential to the Creation, then the way we interpret and teach the Scripture needs to change drastically to include women. One has to give away to the other.

And then there's reproduction! Surely it takes a combination of the right equipment, requiring both men and women in the gender binary to reproduce! This may be where the sidewalk ends in terms of "the known world" in Mormonism, but this is the reason we give, more than any other, for the justification of why we cling to the gender binary.

The greatest incongruence between what we believe and what we teach on this front is apparent in the endowment. In that depiction, there are no women present. Returning to Scripture, there is no need to see it this way. Abraham 4 speaks plurally about the Creation of Adam and Eve, that there are multiple participants there. Genesis 1 or Moses 2 can also read this way if we get comfortable with the voice of God including both Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, a duet of voices instead of a solo masculine voice. That's not what we teach, but I believe it should be.

You can have a cosmology in which women are so important to a heterosexual couple, no eternal union is complete without one. Or you can contradict this notion entirely and maintain that God's children only need a Father. And these thoughts do contradict each other at their core. Yet somehow, they've existed together in the air we breathe for so long, we don't even have the language to name this contradiction unless we gather it from somewhere outside of our community. But pointing out that contradiction isn't enough for some people to challenge the gender binary as anything less than divine.

Nevermind that sex and gender are delineated separately in Scripture—male and female created first, Man and Woman named second.

Nevermind that there's no necessary connection between gender and what reproductive capabilities and equipment someone may or may not have.

Nevermind the way the flimsy eternal gender binary falls apart every time another intersex person is born neither male nor female, as if that detail somehow escaped God's perfect notice—whoops! Like God suddenly forgot their own rules.

We are at a place in scientific advancement where we can produce healthy biological offspring between same sex parents. That technology and capability is new to us, but none of it is new to God. God understands genetics, and has for the entire history of our relationship with them. The potential and ability to use genetics in this way has been there this entire time. As with all assistive reproductive technologies, creating life doesn't cease to be sacred just because a penis never entered a vagina at any point. And if that's the hill we're dying on, that battle was lost back in the 1980s when gamete donation and IVF became a normal part of reproductive healthcare. The children born from medical interventions in pregnancy aren't lesser people because of how they were conceived. There's no reason for this to be different for queer couples who use those technologies, even as it defies what we've traditionally thought as being necessary to create life.

So what makes sex holy? Is it the gender binary? The monogamy? The presence of a sealing ceremony? The ability to produce offspring? Which parts of heterosexual coupling are the necessary elements to honor and serve God?

It's not monogamy, and there are many dead polygamists who will fight you on sight for suggesting it.

Infertile couples will tell you it's not the ability or inability to produce offspring. None of us are being thrown out or blocked from full participation in the Church because of that.

"Children are entitled to a mother and a father," they say. But single parents, widows and widowers who don't remarry, don't have their sealings cancelled because their children are missing a parent of a certain gender. 

None of these justifications for maintaining the gender binary as a necessary part of our faith holds up to scrutiny. And since the sealing ceremony is being withheld from people based on their adherence to the gender binary, queer exclusion is a policy with no real valid justification other than "We've always done it that way," and "because we said so."

But let's say none of this convinces you. The idea that queer people in same-sex relationships cannot bear their own children is the hill you're willing to crucify others on. Within the structure of eternal family building, this still doesn't matter because adoptive sealings exist! 

If my husband and I adopted a child and my brothers-in-law adopted a child, we are both equally shut out of those children's lives because we didn't give birth to them in the covenant, and are therefore not sealed to them. The circumstances are identical. The roll that will fix it is identical. Because sealing works for me and my husband in our relationship, there is no necessary reason why it wouldn't similarly work for queer couples of whatever configuration. 

The seating solution would exist deep into eternity, especially for the number of eternal families that will end up divided over queer rejection. According to one of the speakers at general conference last week, no one is going to be forced to remain in a familial sealing where they don't feel safe, valued, and respected. For that reason, there will be many queer people in search of families in eternity, from every age and culture in the world.

We have to start acknowledging that the formation of these families is a better solution than forcing queer people into celibacy—a state which is contrary to divine mandate, happiness itself, and the ability for anyone to receive their full inheritance in the Kingdom of God. If the only alternatives you can come up with for queer relationships are ones that God would reflect because of how they harm individuals and place their relationships on unequal footing with everyone else, it's a good indication that it's a man-made problem paired with shoddy human problem-solving. An all-knowing God wouldn't set someone up to fail from something they can't change in such an eternally unfair way. (See Genesis 2:18 and D&C 38:24-27)

What this really comes down to, the more I think about it, is the insecurity that comes to people of a certain age and status in the Church in admitting they are wrong. There is fear in having to acknowledge the holiness in all kinds of love, and all the many kinds of relationships that are born out of this love.

If anyone can fall in love with anyone and form a family, then doesn't that make MY family less special and holy?

No. Of course not. Unless your family relationships were born out of duty and obligation instead of love, and you now have to admit that there was no need to put yourself, or anyone else, through that. I've personally been left holding the bag with church policies that are disavowed only after they've done damage to me. The harm that has happened to others is no justification for ongoing harm. If the best time to have changed that approach was twenty years ago, the next best time is now.

The insistence of heterosexual supremacy in the Church is full of contradictions, which should be our first clue that it doesn't come from God. It's preventing us from taking the gospel "into all the world," according to the injunction the Savior gave to his original apostles. It's preventing the fullness of the gospel from reaching many who cannot access it because of their sexual orientation and gender expression, which have never been and never will be valid reasons to withhold access to God from anyone. (See Mark 16:15, 2 Nephi 26, and Alma 32)

Queer people deserve to participate fully in the Church. They deserve to be sealed in the temple to their partners. They deserve to know the joy that comes from being able to form eternal families. They deserve to be able to seek out valid and essential healthcare without having their positions in the Church threatened or questioned in any way. They deserve to be in the pews with us, presenting as who they truly are. Honesty is the Spirit of worship, and we need to stop asking queer people around us to build their lives on foundations of lies and deceit for the comfort of others at church.

Don't let anyone tell you this has to be difficult. It's not difficult to see the unnecessary obstacles created by policy. It's easy to recognize them for what they are and commit to getting rid of them. The love we have for God, which requires us to love ALL of God's children, should compel us to make these things right. We should want to envision the arms of God stretching out wide enough to include everyone in this world.

Being the voice of a loving God, who doesn't fail and is not a hypocrite in that love, is the easiest thing in the world. We would all know that if that was the God we worshiped.

And, as a warning that is needed by some: just because you do not worship a God who loves and honors queerness doesn't mean that version of God doesn't exist. It does mean you've prevented yourself from perceiving God that way.

In the same way those who have claimed to serve God have justified slavery, you will end up with egg on your face when you realize God does not endorse forced subjugation and exclusion of anyone. Affirmation, like abolition, is simply the right thing to do. No appeals to Scripture will ever change that.

We don't have to keep making this mistake. We can believe that when God said he loves all people, that all are welcome and none are forbidden, that God is no respecter of persons, that we are all children of God—we can believe it.

Instead of fighting the will of God, we stop making excuses and just... do it.

As Man Now Is, God Once Was: Did God the Father Ever Sin?

The Noble and Great Ones by godwinthescribe

So the idea that there is a progression from humans into gods/becoming like God came about in the day of Joseph Smith, showing a pattern that would happen often. Someone would come to Joseph with a question or suggestion, he'd embrace it, and then more of the idea would be fleshed out over time as the need for knowledge related to the subject would become necessary for the Saints as a whole. This theology is an example of that pattern.

Here's a brief chronology. And here are the source texts of the King Follett discourse from the Joseph Smith Papers.

The King Follett Discourse is where I'm going to take the core of my answer from because of the explanation Joseph Smith gives in it for how this progression works.

Lorenzo Snow was the first one to approach Joseph with this idea that "As man now is, God once was; as God is now, man may become."

Joseph then went on to teach in the King Follett sermon (which was at a funeral) this same idea, and that it could be reasoned out with Scripture.

There's nothing else beyond those limited comments that have ever been revealed since then. So what I'm giving is pure speculation, but it's based on the comments Joseph made.

Joseph said that in everything Jesus did, he was doing what he had seen the Father do. Joseph then pointed to the council in Heaven and revealed what has become our beliefs about the preexistence. So in the very act of becoming the Messiah, atoning for humanity and bridging them to God by being the demands of divine law, Joseph is suggesting that Jesus was doing something in the act of atonement that has been done before.

If we take this as truth, it suggests one of two origins for God the Father:

1. He was an imperfect human in need of atonement, same as us, and that atonement was provided for by someone else who was the equivalent of Jesus to him.
2.  God our Father WAS a previous Messiah/Christ who atoned for his brothers and sisters, and Jesus was chosen to follow that pattern for us. This would mean that God the Father had to meet the same perfect standards that Jesus did in being sinless to perform this sacrifice. In which case, he would've been capable of sin but resisted all temptation for his entire mortal life. 
   

Based on what Joseph explains in the King Follett Discourse, I personally lean towards the second. I could see this pattern of the Firstborn atoning for the siblings in the divine family being the order that Godhood follows, that Christ is a priesthood office and atonement is an ordinance that has redeemed many before us and will be the pattern of how redemption works into all eternity.

But all of that is pure speculation. We could end up with an answer to this that says something else entirely. I will point out that I've only ever had one other conversation about this with anyone in the Church in almost 18 years. It was with one of the nephews of D. Todd Christofferson when we were in the same student ward together at BYU. I walked into the middle of a very intense conversation between him and some other guys in my ward about this. They got to the notion of "Grandfather God" and he could see the 404 Error screen all over my face. He was very kind in telling me none of this was important for me to worry about and they were just messing around and speculating. You have to be a theology and Religious Deep Lore nerd to even end up here. 

"I can barely handle worshiping one God. I don't need another," is what I said then. And in the end, I think I stand by that.

Christ-like Empathy: The Art of Treading Lightly

Someone was trying to encourage people in my circle online to prepare for General Conference by reposting this post from Hayley Clark from Instagram in full. It starts off by telling people there are no valid reasons not to tune into General Conference as it's happening, and deteriorates from there. And it reminded me so much of what I used to think when I was younger. It felt like looking at something I might've written and posted in my twenties. I've learned and grown a lot since then, and rather than pointing out how reductive and harmful that messaging is, I wanted to respond by explaining how I learned that lesson. And since it's a season of my life that's difficult to talk about, I wanted to preserve my response here so I can reach for it in the future if I need to.

Many years ago now when I was a young teenage convert, while studying my patriarchal blessing and worrying about the future, I found out from God that I would never have my own children. I also found out that if I ever got pregnant, I would end up having severe complications and end up dying in childbirth.

This scared me when I heard it the first time. And the second time. And the third time. And every time I thought and prayed about it afterwards. The answer never changed, for years afterwards, no matter how much I tried to change the will of God afterwards. Not when I went to BYU. Not when I went on my mission. Not when I got married and was sealed in the temple. Not when my husband and I tried to have a family. Not when I got diagnosed with the cause of my infertility. Not when the depression related to my infertility got so bad, I couldn't stand the sight of children anymore because it caused me so much pain. And not in any of the years that passed as I continued to age, year after year, watching everyone else have the blessing I so desperately wanted.

I tried to throw my life away for the sake of giving my husband a child. Just one. And that was the only time God has ever truly scolded me in my life, as gentle as it was. I valued myself and my life so little, I would've traded it away because I thought that's what was expected of me. And even then, God wouldn't give me the thing I was asking for.

Anyone who hasn't been in that situation cannot know the pain I carried month after month, year after year, calculating the ages of the children I would have as I aged, what their names would be, what they'd be doing now. The other kids at church who would be their same age. The milestones they'd be passing. If I had gotten pregnant when we first got married, they would be 10 now. They'd be in fifth grade, getting ready to go to middle school next year.

So when I tell you there was a time when everything about being in church, including General Conference, caused me a tremendous amount of pain, that there was no peace for me there, you don't have to question me about that. I was there for talks in General Conference that were so hideous and spiritually violent to infertile and childless women like me, it made me nearly suicidal to think about them for years afterwards. But I did exactly what this post is telling people to do. I put my nose to that grindstone and did so much harm to myself because this was the expectation—not from God, mind you. From the people in the pews next to me. From leaders in General Conference who painted families with such broad strokes, it made me question what my purpose was in life if I couldn't have children and form the kind of family they were always talking about. What value did my life have, if not to do this?

The inability to put it all down, take a deep breath, and get some logical perspective apart and away from the social pressures church leadership was putting on me to be someone I would never be, was compounding my problem. Not solving it.

If the messages in General Conference are becoming tangled up in toxicity and social pressures that are destroying someone from the inside out, finding healthier ways of engaging is EXACTLY what they should do. If that means disengaging from General Conference, either in part or in full, then so be it. Their blessings and comfort from God can and will come from other places—including all of the talks and lessons at church over the next six months where everything that was said will be reexamined and contextualized through the lenses and voices of faith of their own community around them.

There was a woman in one of my wards, a real Mother in Israel, who carried me through so much of this pain in a way no one else could. She would see me run away from church during Mother's Day and knew what it meant. She followed me outside one day and told me her story. She and her husband had a child who had died young.

"For a long time, I hated Mother's Day and I hated babies."

She made me feel seen and understood. She provided the recognition of my struggle when I felt so totally isolated in it. She was a living example of the kinds of burdens people in the Church carry that never end, that can't be fully resolved through some miraculous act of God. When I think of "Relief" the way Sister Camille Johnson invited me to a couple weeks ago at the Relief Society devotional, that sister who helped me is the one I think of instantly. She was the stand-in for the Savior in that season of my life. Her hands were his hands.

I understand why people put social pressure on others to participate in absolutely everything the Church produces the moment it happens. They have a narrow sense of what it means to access God's blessings right then and there, with no sense of his compassion and timing. If that person isn't there, they'll miss it! Don't they see that?

No, they won't.

Have faith in our Heavenly Parents to know and love their children. Have faith in their perfect compassion. They know exactly where each and every one of us are on the journey of life. None of us are lost to them. There is a way forward through every trial, but it doesn't always look like being at Church and listening to other people. Sometimes, it looks like Jesus going up alone on the mount to pray. Other times, it looks like a very specific person, who is not you or anyone whose names you will ever know, reaching out to them because they have what that person needs.

What I don't like about this post above is it is tone deaf and lacking in compassion. It's purposefully leaving out the context that is going on right behind the words: that those who are struggling are only doing so because they're doing something wrong, and it would all just be resolved if they started doing the right thing.

It doesn't take into account the times when bad things happen to people that cannot be changed or minimized by anything that anyone can say or do. The pain just has to be felt, and the careless, compassionless, and reductive things that people say are making it worse.

If you want to love others like the Savior does, you can't always ask them to come to you. Sometimes, you have to go to them where they are. And if where they are means they make some accommodations and are doing the best they can, you accept that and celebrate with them that they found a way to the Savior, no matter what it looks like. You thank God that you've been fortunate enough that you've never experienced what they have to need those accommodations, knowing that some day that might change. And if you are wise, you learn from their example of how to keep their faith alive when the harsh realities of life try to extinguish that faith.

No one is obligated to perform their faith in the ways you want them to. You don't know what is best for everyone. You can't cajole anyone to heaven, no matter how much you may want to. And if you try, you're in a lane you don't belong in. That space belongs to Jesus Christ alone, and you have much to learn about his methodologies if this is how you approach him.

You have the privilege to witness the miracles that God will do in your presence. He is the source of that healing and those miracles. Not you. And when you truly believe that, your words won't gloss over the feelings and pain of other people you don't know like this. You'll take them seriously and not offer weak and feeble solutions to their pain.

If you want the skill set to relieve pain, to be the kind of person others trust with their most profound struggles in life, there are many right ways to do that and only one wrong way. Invalidating others through the oversimplification of their needs is easy. Earning trust by listening long enough to believe people about their own experiences, learning from them, and fixing what is broken in yourself before you try to help others is hard.

There's no confusing the difference between the two, of who has done that work and who has not. Once you see the difference, you can't unsee it.

The Youth Fundraiser—Then and Now

 

It's that time of year when various congregations are doing their annual youth fundraisers to raise money for their youth camps this summer. The emails went out last week setting the date for our silent auction and asking other members of the ward to volunteer items and services for the youth auction. I've decided to make a crocheted blanket (maybe two) for it. We did a dessert auction in my last ward and people paid $200 for cake pops that the Young Women made, so I'm imagining some version of that will also happen here.

That was one of the last years girl's camp was a thing before they made a lot of changes to the youth program. From what I see now, the single fundraiser pays for a co-ed overnight trip that all the youth go on to the same place, and have the chance to do the same activities. It's wildly different from what my experience was as a youth, where the Young Women would raise most of the money and the lion's share of it would end up paying for the Young Men to go to Scout Camp because it was more expensive. I went to Church in Delaware when I was in Young Women and there was an enormous discrepancy between Camp Rodney (the expensive and very nice facilities owned by the Boy Scouts) and the cabins we went to, all of which were in poor conditions and didn't have a fraction of the amenities and offerings that Scouting did.

I hope those days are gone for good. I would not wish them back. And now that I know the stuff I donate isn't being allocated in ridiculously gendered ways, I'm happy to support in whatever way I can to give the youth a fun experience in the outdoors together. Especially if it means I don't have to come along because these Idaho people feel the need to climb up vertical surfaces to the tops of things, and I do not enjoy it. If I'm going to pop a lung, I can think of better places to do it than in the middle of nowhere down the dirt roads of Idaho.

All this to say: if you're so inclined, start thinking and planning the goodies you want to offer up for your youth fundraiser.

And if you were in Young Men as a youth, know that more likely than not, the other youth in Young Women you went to church with probably paid (at least in part) for you to go to Scout Camp. You can thank them by making sure the Young Men and their leaders in your congregations pull their own weight during these fundraisers instead of making the Young Women do all the work and raise all of the money.