Come Follow Me: Ether and Moroni answer Evan’s question about hope for LGBTQ church members
TheChurchofJesusChrist.org
by Marci McPheeWatch how Ether and Moroni team up to answer one of the questions addressed in Evan Smith’s Gay LDS Crossroads. Evan asks: is there hope for a joyful heaven, not a sad heaven, for LGBTQ folks in church doctrine?
The Come Follow Me lesson for Nov 23-29, 2020 highlights this scripture from the prophet Ether:
Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast…(Ether 12:4, emphasis added)
Moroni adds his second witness in that same chapter:
Thou hast prepared a house for man, yea, even among the mansions of thy Father, in which man might have a more excellent hope; wherefore man must hope, or he cannot receive an inheritance in the place which thou hast prepared. (Ether 12:32, emphasis added)
(Notice Ether’s verb “might have hope” vs. Moroni’s “must hope.”) Neither ancient prophet describes the “sad heaven” that many LGBTQ church members envision. Here’s Evan’s description of how that sounds to many:
Some people say . . . everyone will be changed in remarkable ways in that highest degree of heaven. For most of us, that just means envisioning a sort of eternal self-improvement process. But it’s different for gay people. A fundamental part of that highest heavenly life is presumably predicated on being in a type of relationship that, for the vast majority of them, feels opposite to their very nature and causes psychological trauma. Their vision of that afterlife is accordingly very bleak. And yet, the way our church leaders are currently teaching the trust-in-the-Lord doctrine requires that gay church members find a way to believe that they will nevertheless be happy in that traumatic vision of heaven. That can make them view their sexuality as something that is fundamentally at odds with heavenly joy. It can make them think they were born defective, which studies have shown frequently results in suicidal ideation (see Chapter 8). Unless church leaders allow the trust-in-the-Lord notion to at least imagine ambiguity about gay couples being in the highest degree of heaven, it unavoidably results in a degrading view of a gay person’s state in this life. (Also see “Does the Proclamation on the Family prohibit marriage equality?”)
That “traumatic heaven” idea doesn’t sound much like Moroni’s “house . . . among the mansions of thy Father, in which man might have a more excellent hope.” Neither does it sound like Ether’s confident promise: “whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world . . . which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men.” That’s the kind of anchor I believe in.
EXTRA CREDIT: In case you’re thinking that Ether’s “hope for a better world” (Ether 12:4) might include a better version of THIS world in addition to the next, here’s other questions about hope that Evan addresses in Gay LDS Crossroads:
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