Peace and Division

Mormons have an unsettling exclusionary habit. The habit, of course, is not exclusive to Mormons, but I'm in Utah, so I'm going to talk about them.

LDS parents forbid their children from playing with, going to dances with, dating, and often even going to college and weddings with "non-Mormons" (the hyphenated moniker itself being appropriately exclusive). The church systematically reinforces those practices, paying ministers to harbor and indoctrinate Mormon teenagers during "Released Time" Seminary and Institute, creating and ever-expanding the Brigham Young University network of universities. Mormons who wish to marry "non-Mormons", or even who wish to marry Mormons whose families are non-Mormons, face the unsettling prospect of explaining the exclusive nature of Mormon temple marriage rituals, which bar all but the most "faithful" Mormons from viewing any part of the ceremony (more on that, and the cradle to grave exclusionary pattern, perhaps, in a future post).

Most recently, the church has re-affirmed the exclusionary nature of their religion by posting signs on their portion of Main Street in Salt Lake, warning that they reserve the right to eject anyone from the premises, for any reason whatsover. This is, of course, in response to the episode earlier this year in which two gay men were physically assaulted and handcuffed for affectionately sharing a kiss on what is now unquestionably LDS church property.

Of all Mormondom's divisive practices, the most destructive is certainly the one in which parents forcibly shut out their children from their homes. Where I grew up in semi-rural western Davis County, as a relatively benign example, some parents actually kicked their kids out of the home when the kids turned eighteen, for no other reason than that the child was old enough to fend for herself or himself.

Another more insidious example invokes the all-powerful principle of "morality" to justify throwing children out of the home.

I am personally acquainted with two girls whose parents, upon learning of their daughters' pre-marital sexual activity, kicked the teenage girls out of the home, in one case going as far as tearing down all vestiges of the daughter's previous presence, from furniture and toys to the very wall-paper and carpet that adorned the girl's room (this case involved a former bishop of mine). In both of these cases, the girls decided eventually to break with their boyfriends and managed to return home to their parents.

The worst cases, however, involve Mormon kids who reveal to their parents that their sexual feelings are directed to those of their own gender. I was never personally acquainted with any openly gay kids growing up. As it turns out, of course, several of my friends and acquaintances were, but the social taboos were so great, and the unspoken consequences of coming out were so severe, those gay and lesbian kids I knew chose to remain the closet until they were old enough to actually fend for themselves. Not all kids make that choice.

Hence, at the annual Affirmation conference held last month in Salt Lake, one of the sessions that attracted news coverage was the one in which Mormons were "urged to stop shunning gay family members."

According to the Salt Lake Tribune's coverage, the point of this session was to encourage "LDS leaders to reach out to Mormon families -- and their clergy -- and provide clearer direction on how to respond when a daughter, husband, wife or brother comes out as gay."

The folks at Affirmation and elsewhere point to the high levels of homelessness, depression and suicide among gay and lesbian Mormon kids. There are even horror stories of Mormon kids committing suicide on the grounds of Mormon churches as last acts of desperation and unaddressed mental illness brought on by inappropriate and ignorant responses and pressures from church leaders and families.

In an apparent attempt to respond more constructively (than, say, Spencer Kimball's injunction for gay kids to beat themselves bloody), Jeffrey Holland in 2007 urged LDS families with gay children to keep your lines of communication open. Open communication between parents and children is a clear expression of love, and pure love, generously expressed, can transform family ties."

Holland went further, asserting to gay Mormons that:

"I love you. My Brethren among the General Authorities love you. I'm reminded of a comment President Boyd K. Packer made in speaking to those with same-gender attraction. 'We do not reject you,' he said. 'We cannot reject you, for you are the sons and daughters of God. We will not reject you, because we love you.'"

Nice words. Inclusive, loving, even. Yet....Holland mentions, almost parenthetically, that "love for a family member does not extend to condoning unrighteous behavior. Your children are welcome to stay in your home, of course, but you have every right to exclude from your dwelling any behavior that offends the Spirit of the Lord." And, as anyone knows who has confessed any degree of sexual activity to an LDS bishop, from "passionate kissing" to "dry sex" to intercourse (gay or straight), the church reserves for itself every right, and indeed instructs its leaders in no uncertain terms, to exclude from fellowship those whose behavior "offends the Spirit of the Lord."

In the LDS church, "Go thy way and sin no more" actually translates into "Go away and sin no more."

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So, we now come back to Affirmation's publicized plea to the LDS church to stop shunning gay family members. Aside from the church's immediate response in the form of Bruce Hafen's attendance at the concurrent Evergreen conference in which he insisted that the sources of same-gender attraction were not genetic in nature, Dallin Oaks seems to have seen Affirmation's apparently Christian call to love and inclusion as a challenge for his October General Conference talk, given last Saturday in the afternoon session.

It is certainly a tricky matter to try to defend, from a Christian perspective, those Mormon parents who would kick their children out of the home. Oaks begins, then, by citing one of the most powerful descriptions of Christian love and loyalty:

"'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?' the Apostle Paul asked. Not tribulation, not persecution, not peril or the sword (see Romans 8:35). 'For I am persuaded,' he concluded, 'that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, . . . nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God' (verses 38-39)."

Oaks, rather quickly, however, moves from that powerful invocation of the love of Jesus, to a quote from the Book Mormon asserting that "mercy cannot rob justice" to a general reminder of the wrath of God, to the conclusion that:

"God’s anger and His wrath are not a contradiction of His love but an evidence of His love. Every parent knows that you can love a child totally and completely while still being creatively angry and disappointed at that child’s self-defeating behavior."

I'm not sure what Dallin means by being "creatively angry" but I frankly don't like the sound of it. Is creative anger what motivated those parents mentioned above to kick out their daughter for normal sexual activity, tearing down, in their righteously creative wrath, the pink wallpaper in her room while totally and completely loving her? Is the love of an LDS parent evidenced in her total and complete prohibition against their seventeen year old gay son ever returning home because his mere presence "offends the Spirit of the Lord?"

Mormons often chafe at the suggestion that they are somehow not Christian. Yet how can you describe a people as Christian who systematically, and as condoned policy, throw their own children out on the street for nothing more than private, sexual activity?

The bold answer, from Dallin Oaks, is simple: Jesus did not come to bring peace to families. Quoting from Luke, Oaks explains:

"'Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:

'For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.'

'The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother' (Luke 12:51–53).

This sobering teaching reminds us that when family members are not united in striving to keep the commandments of God, there will be divisions."

Now, forget that these verses, in context, have nothing to do with the sexual activity of a teenage son or a daughter, or co-habitation, or drug addiction, but come rather on the heels of a parable in which Jesus proclaims his intent to punish his "stewards" for "beating the menservants and the maidens" and for eating and drinking and being drunken over their stewardship of a house they did not own.

Does Dallin Oaks really believe that the same Jesus described elsewhere as the Prince of Peace, who also taught the Beattitudes, to love, to forgive, to give liberally to the poor, that the same Jesus, from whose love nothing in the world, not nations nor principalities nor angels nor death, could separate us, really came to teach parents to disown their children for sexual indiscretions and in-born sexual desires toward their own gender?


Of course, the answer, for Mormons raised to believe that division, for all kinds of reasons, is precisely the route to peace, is, yes.