Guest Post: An Open Letter to Elder Oaks: Is Heaven to Be a Lonely Place?

Guest Post by Christina Taber-Kewene. Christina is a lawyer, business owner, writer, and mother to four humans. 

Dear Elder Oaks, I have a few thoughts for you, one lover of human agency to another:

One of the traditional Christian doctrines Joseph Smith rejected when he was working out his beliefs was predestination. At the time, many Christian sects, including the the Presbyterians Joseph heard preach, believed God chose His elect for salvation regardless of human action. Any allowance for human agency would limit God’s ability to choose whom He saved, so free will was an illusion. Any religion that truly believes in divine omniscience and omnipotence will run into the logical problem that humans don’t truly have free will because an all-knowing, all-powerful God can’t create beings who can choose against what God wills them to do. Some Christian sects still preach this, regardless of what is “on the books.” Mormons definitely don’t.

Mormon theology elegantly avoids the free-will problem by having a God limited by human agency; in other words, our choices matter, and the only way they can matter logically is if our God has limitations and is neither all knowing nor all powerful. It’s one of mainstream Christianity’s principal objections to Mormon theology: how can we claim to be good Christians if our God has limitations? But the Mormon theology of human agency is too robust for this. We believe our choices in this life are real and that they matter.

Elder Oaks, when I was a young person, I accepted with only some hesitation what you and others preached about homosexuality: God has ordained sexual behavior as a positive within marriage only, and it is our actions around sexuality for which we will be held accountable. At first I too believed that we all were equally situated and must simply contain our sexual expression until a time when we found ourselves in a married state. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being homosexual, nor was there anything sinful about my being straight and single. We all had to keep it together until marriage. (I know you probably wouldn’t even say homosexuality is a state, and is instead a temptation, but out of respect for my gay siblings, I will not use that language).

But, as a straight woman, I could get married. In fact, I did. So did you– twice, right? A false equivalence between our states and those of our gay siblings if ever there was one. Although our gay siblings finally can be married under law in the US, they cannot do so and be in good standing in the church. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me until adulthood to disentangle doctrine from indoctrination and conclude that your teachings about homosexuality didn’t make sense in light of our shared views on agency. In other words, we cannot compare acting on homosexuality to acting on heterosexuality when heterosexual people can marry those to whom they are sexually attracted but our homosexual friends cannot and remain in the church.

I know the counterargument: The next life will resolve all of this! Our brothers and sisters who “struggle with same-sex attraction” need only wait to have God straighten this all out later. I suppose I could give some credence to that argument if you and the other people propagating it held yourselves to the same standard. But you don’t. I didn’t. I didn’t wait until after death to marry and have a family, nor did you. I cannot in good conscience hold others to a higher standard than I hold myself. I cannot believe that I am destined for a higher state of glory because I am differently situated in my birth than someone else. It “makes reason stare,” to quote Sister Snow.

So what do we do in light of this logical fallacy? I turn to what Jesus taught:

As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciple, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

When my son came out several years ago, all I felt for him was love. Yes, love from my own heart, but more powerfully, love from God. Nothing is wrong with this child, God whispered to me, overwhelming any concerns I might have once had. Love him.

Love, to me, and I think to you too, is action. We cannot speak love out of our mouths and act out exclusion and hatred with our hands and pens and money. We cannot speak of promoting agency while ignoring that not all of us face the same option set from which to choose. Love is seeking to make the world a welcoming and good place for everyone and recognizing that not all are the same as you.

Perhaps because you are not a mother you cannot understand how precious every human life is, how much effort it takes to create and nurture and preserve. I am not willing to lose one of my own children or any one of God’s children to suicide because of the homophobic and transphobic messages you are sending to them. By arguing that my child can “qualify” for eternal life only by obedience to your interpretation of God’s eternal plan, you are by definition excluding him from a path, regardless of the fact that you argue it is open for all. It is not. We know how damaging the church’s decades-long efforts have been to box gender non-conforming and gay people into heterosexual marriage. Only recently has the church begun to oppose conversion therapy after decades of supporting and promoting it.

I have one final thought on predestination. Doesn’t telling our gay children that the only way to return to God is to follow a plan that doesn’t make room for them remind you of the doctrine of predestination that you and I both reject? If homosexuality, gender variance, or anything that is not your own experience is a state some are born to but which God does not “elect,” doesn’t that make God an omniscient and omnipotent rejector of a class of persons? I cannot—do not—believe in that God. I don’t think you do either.