Be Ye Therefore Imperfect

I am Mormon in the same way I am American. I can never not be born into the covenant in the same way I will forever have been born in this country. Renouncing my citizenship or removing my records can do little to change that. It is intrinsically tied to who I am. You can hear it in my speech when I pronounce ‘both’ as ‘bolth’ in that classic Utah accent despite being born and raised in the South—a trivial but telling example.

Responses to my very first confessions regarding my stipulations about the Church introduced me to the adage: an imperfect church, but a perfect gospel! That “any organization run by imperfect people will have unsavory culture attached. This is why having the true restored gospel is so important!” People presented this concept to me as some miracle drug that cured all spiritual doubt. I must stress just how lifeless this rebuttal comes across. Most people are completely capable of separating a person’s actions and those of an institution. I dealt with bishops awkwardly lecturing me about my inclinations or ‘my trial.’ Counseling me on how my situation is much like an alcoholic needing to navigate sobriety. Family, peers, and adult leaders I respected spewing casual homophobia I would carefully catalog and internalize.

Many struggling with their faith have already reconciled with these experiences, because as novel as “imperfect people make mistakes” might sound in your head, that is not news. My wavering faith was not instantaneously repaired with the earth-shattering revelation that a church led entirely by men born in the late hours of the Industrial Revolution might have some prejudices. One greatly underestimates my pride in thinking that a collection of ignorant comments would be the catalyst for my step back from the Church. The issue for me originates not in the culture or the people of the Church, but in the perfected gospel itself. The solution offered for why I should stay was my problem to begin with.

In the fall of 2019, I enrolled in an Eternal Families religion class at BYU during a time when my faith was crumbling as my doubts were doubling. Unable to subdue some newly present “same-sex attractions,” I found myself on the cusp of iniquity. In an attempt to rekindle my once steadfast testimony, I used this course as an opportunity. Through careful study of God’s perfect plan made possible by Christ’s perfect gospel, I could claw my way out of the fog of sexual temptation. A reinvigorated understanding of a sure plan in an unsure world could cure my doubts and desires to stray. 

My professor, even as an imperfect servant, presented the Plan of Salvation and the gospel to me, strengthening and edifying my previously waned testimony. But in complete surprise to me, my rediscovered conversion to the gospel proved far more troubling than any gay thought ever could have been. I finally started to believe what people had been reassuring me—that while the Church would never be perfect, the gospel was perfect. The all-encompassing Plan of Happiness finally became tangible to me, a terrifying reassurance to my doubts. 

This clarity revealed another truth: that plan did not include me. And I know, I know, God’s fold offers room for all, but just reason with me for a moment. You can rationalize with scripture all day in order to discover an amendment of my inclusion, and for the many others also plagued with these “same-sex attractions.” But no, I learned that’s just not the gospel truth. With that final saving ordinance of temple marriage, exaltation is not possible for me. Period.

And yet, that sprint to the mat of mental gymnastics still exists for some hoping to clarify that God has something planned for people like me—that if not in this life, then in the next, right? If faithful, I am promised all the blessings of a covenant marriage in heaven if not presented with that opportunity here on earth. That once through the veil, a seraphim’s hot coal would purge my mouth and soul from all its debased desires like Isaiah of old, searing away any semblance of my past “preferences.” I should look forward to a day that my personality heals from its carnal inclinations, having somehow survived a lifetime of sexual and emotional repression and longing. Every Sunday for the rest of my life, some imperfect gospel doctrine teacher can reassure me that my divinely given yet somehow misaligned vessel would be perfected of its burden if only I would remain faithful. Within the Church, recent years have disproved the old beatitude of “pray the gay away.” Now remains the arguably even more harmful truth to “endure the gay away.”

Although probably imperfectly dictated by a Young Men's leader with his foot in his mouth, it was the gospel, not him, that taught me the consequences of my sexual immorality—particularly that of homosexuality. Because not only would my “slip-up” be regarded as a more serious transgression than with my hetero peers, it would never be rewritten as godly. My repentance process was never bolstered by the promise that one day, within a celestial marriage, this seemingly unavoidable yet universal desire would finally be ordained by a loving God as a gift of “the ultimate expressions of our divine nature.” Still gifted to me, but commanded never to open.

Intrinsically sewn into the gospel path, intimacy—sex–and I’m denied it. All of a sudden, Christ’s perfect gospel becomes elusive to me, lopsided, a respecter of persons. What a life to look forward to, one of dodging romance, practically waiting for death to initiate an all-too-convenient deus ex machina of a marriage sealing following my mandatory gay lobotomy in heaven. That’s the doctrine, you see, God’s perfect plan. Exaltation promised to most. Snide yet harmful remarks echoing in church hallways only do so much damage in comparison to deity. We give man too much credit.

After one particularly insightful lecture in that BYU classroom, I went home, drafted a note for my family, and made a plan to take my own life. I would choose one sin over the other. Because I didn’t have Job’s gift of faith, I wasn’t convinced the word of God alone could sustain me. Because although still sin, suicide was doctrinally less severe than that of breaking my temple covenant made at the ripe age of eighteen to keep the law of chastity. On some self-built cross, I would stand proxy for Christ and save myself from a life of transgression.

I remember praying to God that He would find it within His mercy to forgive me for that act offered on the altar of sacrifice. Partaking in the one sin I had seen handled with tenderness and delicacy, the only sin we have truly surrendered solely back to the judgment of God. I pictured my sacrifice adorned with flowers that read, “Only the Lord knows all the details…,” sentiments that would be missing from a grave dug in a life of abomination. What an unpleasant place I lived in then to have believed such a truth—better a life taken than one of sin.

My prayer was answered that night, by some imperfect people with unconditional love and support. Despite their lack of omniscience, their frames filled with faults, they lovingly guided me off that path, a path drawn out of the black-and-white think tank that is my mind. But the doctrine that propelled me toward that precipice, from its very definition, cannot change. That is not how perfect works. The culture may continue to shift and to change, under mandate of newly revealed standards, often contradictory to the previous decade’s handbook; but altered policy or procedures fail to make the Church available to me because that is not why I had to leave in the first place.

Maybe, there was a way to just put my shoulder to the wheel, to stay celibate within the seemingly only denomination within Christian tradition that penalizes a vow of abstinence. Sometimes I wonder about that person, another me that somehow endured a life under constant fear of receiving yet another spiritual confirmation of a mutually exclusive eternal truth. I remain unconvinced that God would call such a plan perfect. Because I bear testimony that the promise of a perfect gospel is lost on those wounded by it in the first place.