While I always knew about this talk, I don’t recall ever being taught it much (though it’s possible I simply blew it off if/when it was taught and that’s why I don’t remember it), luckily. And I’m very grateful that my mother (who is very faithful, orthodox, conservative, and was always a SAHM mom) not only didn’t teach it, but didn’t listen to it. Or rather, that she didn’t let it keep her from making the choices that she thought were best for herself and her family.

I was always aware that both my parents went to college and graduated at the same time, and that my mother worked as an accountant full-time to put my dad through business school (even when they had my oldest sister — she had a babysitter in the morning and my dad took care of her in the afternoons while he studied). Even though she didn’t work most of the time I was at home, and even though she spent an inordinate amount of time taking care of kids and the house, I always knew she was interested in other things and that she was simply sacrificing some of those things for a time because she loved us and was putting the family first. She also never taught that women need to curtail their own interests to put their family first — it was simply something she did (for a time) because that was her personal choice.

I remember when my youngest brother went to school (in 1994, so only 7 years after this talk) and my mom went back to school and then work part-time as an interpreter for the deaf, because it was something she was interested in and wanted to learn and do. Even when I went home to an empty house (I went home from school sick a lot in high school, and the nurse called one of our neighbors who’d give me permission to leave and then I’d drive myself home), I was never resentful. I was happy that my mom, after having sacrificed so much, was finally getting to do some things that she wanted to do for herself. I was aware of how much she’d sacrificed when her kids were little, and I appreciated it, but it filled me with joy to see her doing things for herself, that were important to her. I was even excited when she started collecting Beanie Babies — I knew she’d spent so many years spending all of our meager family funds getting stuff for the kids, and I was happy to see that she finally felt we had enough that she could spend money on something she wanted, simply because she wanted it.

I share all of this not to negate anyone’s experiences — I don’t even know what my mother felt in regards to this talk and if it made her life and her decisions harder. I share this because she did ignore a good portion of it, and I’m extremely grateful for it. Because of that I never felt burdened by its expectations. Whenever I despair of raising my kids in a church that (at least sometimes) teaches these things, I remember that I grew up knowing and thinking I could be anything and do anything because that’s what my mother taught me.

B. I don’t believe or advocate x.

C. Therefore, the Church must not teach x, regardless of the evidence. Since I don’t accept it, x must be folk doctrine, or “culture,” or a misunderstanding of what Church leaders actually meant.

What’s wrong with this line of thought?  Ideally, we should maintain an ability to evaluate what the Church teaches separately from whether we agree or disagree with it. Rather than taking our personal orthodoxy as axiomatic, we should evaluate our orthodoxy as part of our conclusions.

My patriarchal blessing paints a relatively detailed picture of a future life I have yet to realize. I’ve been reading my blessing, wondering if the life it depicts is the life I would currently choose for myself. I’ll admit there are some meaningful promises in my blessing, but at the same time, it paints a picture of religious dedication and service that feels discordant with where I currently am spiritually.

Also, given what’s happened the past few years, I’m not sure what sense to make of what it says about marriage. My patriarchal blessing says my “choice companion will be designated to … [me]” and if you’ve been reading my blog posts the past year or so, you know how that’s turned out thus far. I am happy with where I’m at right now, with dating and with my life overall, but in a number of ways, I’m abandoning the narrative of my patriarchal blessing. And that’s a bit scary.

Additionally, I’ve just started dating someone, and the process of trying to figure out this situation has amplified my fears and questions. Since I am approaching things differently, how will I know it’s what I want, and how will I know if it’s right? And what if God gets involved again in complicated ways? I know I recently decided to work on my relationship with God, but rebuilding is a slow process, and I’m still highly ambivalent about turning to him for guidance on this issue. The necessity of knowing what I want (since I am largely trying to follow a path of my own choosing) has never been so pressing.

To deal with my fears, I’m currently trying to take things as slowly as possible–to take things one small step at a time and to not jump into anything until I feel ready. I’m following a process similar to that in Alma 32: planting seeds, and then seeing if the seed produces “good” fruit. I am finding good fruit, and I’m hoping that as I take my time trying to figure things out, a clear path forward will emerge. But there are no guarantees, and relationships are nothing if not messy.

I’m not really sure what kind of comments or feedback I’m looking for. I know I have to figure this out myself. I guess I just wanted to put this out there–to say I’m a bit scared and uncertain–and have other people hear that. Because I’ve found that it helps.

Of the nine plays I (originally) found that met my criteria, I think it’s no accident that almost half of them have premiered since 2008. Whatever the tensions were between the LDS Church and the gay and lesbian community before that year, the heated battle over California’s Proposition 8 has increased them exponentially. Whether or not any of these plays was written specifically because of or in response to those events, the environment of anger and resentment must have been on the minds of anyone with ties to either community, let alone to both.

Little Happy Secrets, by Melissa Leilani Larson

Melissa Leilani Larson’s plays have covered subjects ranging from the court of King Louis XIV to a Filipina mail-order bride with supernatural powers. She doesn’t typically write plays about Mormon characters, but at least two of her plays have Mormon protagonists: the short play A Burning in the Bosom and Little Happy Secrets.

When I first became familiar with Little Happy Secrets, I was struck by how different it was from other plays about homosexual Mormons I’d come across. It was the only play that was about a lesbian Mormon instead of a gay Mormon, the only play whose main character was still expressly committed to her faith at the end of the story, and, along with Facing East, one of only two plays by a female playwright. (I’ve since had the chance to read the script for Be Normal, which is similar to Little Happy Secrets in a number of ways.)

Little Happy Secrets is the story of Claire, a young faithful Mormon woman—a returned missionary, no less—coming to terms with the fact that she is not attracted to men. In fact, she’s in love with Brennan, her best friend and roommate. In contrast with the men of Ranging, who are aching for some sort of emotional connection with other men, the closeted Claire has the opposite problem, since Brennan tends to be physically affectionate towards her roommate, not knowing that Claire is attracted to her. (Molly, the main character in Be Normal, has a similar problem with one of her roommates. As an aside, I find this a very interesting commentary on platonic relationships in male and female cultures. While I’m very aware of many social advantages that men have, reading Ranging reminded me of the female social advantages that I tend to take for granted.)

As the play progresses, Brennan meets a guy, starts dating him, and, in rather stereotypical Mormon fashion, the dating turns into “serious” dating and then to talk of marriage. The fact that this relationship is so stereotypical is part of the point. Brennan isn’t sure if this is what she really wants, or if it’s just a cultural expectation. Claire, outside the relationship, sees someone taking away the woman she loves, and realizes that there is no “stereotypical Mormon” path for her.

Little Happy Secrets is a very intimate story. It’s a one-act play with only four characters, and the main character, Claire, switches off between acting out the scenes of her life and turning to the audience to comment on them. The device makes the play even more personal; it’s as if we’re reliving these events by reading Claire’s diary. I think this is what Gideon Burton meant when he said “This is not the Mormon lesbian play” (emphasis added). The play is not epic or grandiose or spectacular. It is the story of one woman’s life and decisions, no less, no more.

(As a reminder, this play can be downloaded as a free audio podcast from iTunes and the playwright is looking to raise money for a production in Salt Lake City next year.)

The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon, by Charles Lynn Frost and Troy Williams

Dottie Dixon started out in 2006 as a guest on a radio show called “Now Queer This.” Troy Williams, the show’s host, had asked his friend Charles Lynn Frost to draw on his theater background and create a humorous character for the show. Frost ended up creating a character based on his mother: A happily married, faithful Mormon, Spanish Fork native with a gay son.

Williams eventually convinced Frost that they should expand Dottie’s short radio spots to a full-length play, which premiered in May 2009. Dottie is committed to her faith but she also loves her son and she believes that it is her mission to bring together the Mormon and LGBT communities. If Facing East is about uniting communities through grief and loss, The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon is about uniting communities through humor and compassion (perhaps in the hope of averting such grief and loss).

In addition to being an advocate for gay rights, Sister Dottie is an advocate for women’s rights within the LDS Church. Steven Fales also expresses solidarity with Mormon women as he waits for his Church court to begin: “I always felt I needed to win some leader’s approval. I wanted desperately to be like them, for them to like me—to be noticed. I was invisible. No matter what I did or how well I did it, I felt I was never appreciated or accepted for who I was. I felt I knew what it must be like to be a woman in this Church.”

It seems like an unlikely pairing—gay ex-Mormons fighting for straight Mormon women to have a greater voice within the LDS Church—but perhaps not. After all, gay ex-Mormons find themselves positioned in opposition to the patriarchal Church hierarchy and to traditional masculine ideals, and Mormon women find themselves defined in opposition to those things, as well.

eHarmony

I like the idea of eHarmony, but as someone mentioned in a comment on one of my previous threads, the reality doesn’t really live up to the ideal. For me, I think a lot of this has to do with being Mormon. eHarmony asks a lot of questions when you sign up, and one is religious background. This doesn’t show up on your profile, but it does affect who you’re matched with. I found that a lot of my matches were people from non-traditional religious backgrounds (Muslim, Hindu, etc.), whether because eHarmony thought we’d match because of our non-traditional backgrounds, or because these members were more open to dating people from other non-traditional backgrounds. Overall, a lot of my matches were people that I didn’t really feel I was compatible with. Also, unless you limit your preferences to people nearby (which means fewer matches), eHarmony will match you up with a lot of people who live a good distance away. While I know this works out for some people, I decided that I’d prefer to find people nearby to date and develop relationships with in person (especially since I’m in a city with a lot of people, and there are quite a lot of people here to date). I am currently not subscribed to eHarmony–for me, the money wasn’t worth it.

Match.com

Match.com doesn’t really have a good matching algorithm. It doesn’t have the “29 dimensions of compatibility” that eHarmony has, and it doesn’t have the compatibility questions that OKCupid has. This means when looking for potential matches, you have to do all of your own legwork. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve found that a decently-written profile can tell me 1) if there’s no compatibility or 2) there might be compatibility. In cases where I think there might be compatibility, I will message the person (or respond if they’ve messaged me), and take things from there. My dates from Match.com have been all over the map–some great, and some not as great. I would recommend Match.com because there are a lot of users, and while you do have to do some sifting, you can meet some pretty great people. It’s definitely best used as a tool to meet up with people in your area that you might not otherwise run into. I am currently subscribed to Match.com, and currently, for me the money is worth it.

OKCupid

The biggest plus of OKCupid is that it’s free, but it’s also a good site in its own right. On OKCupid, the way they test compatibility is to ask you a lot of questions about you and your ideal match (lifestyle, religion, ethics, views on relationships, sex, etc.). Then they check your answers against the answers of other users and give you a match %. For all you statisticians out there (i.e. Ziff), here’s how they calculate this match %. The more match questions you answer, the more confident they are in their calculations. That being said, I’ve had a similar experience on OKCupid that I’ve had on Match.com—it’s a great way to meet up with other people in the area that you may not meet up with otherwise. And even though they’ve calculated your match %, you still have to do a certain amount of legwork–you have to look through the people with a high match % and see if these people are actually people you are interested in dating. And like with Match.com, I’ve met a variety of people.

My experiences overall

I was a bit slow getting started, partly because it takes some time to find compatible people and set up dates, and partly because my life was busy with school, and I only had a limited amount of time to pursue dating. However, since about May, I’ve been going on at least one date a week, and there have been a couple weeks I’ve had 3-4 dates. My average, however, is 1-2 dates per week.

The frequency of dates is going to vary from person to person. It will depend on how many people contact you, but it also largely depends on how big your filter is. I definitely don’t respond to people and go on dates if their profile indicates we wouldn’t be compatible (they use the words “lady” or “princess,” or if they talk about how they spend all their free time going to dance clubs and sports games). I started with a pretty wide filter—a little picky, but not super picky. If someone’s profile seemed interesting, he didn’t give me weird vibes or wasn’t too out of my age range, and if he wrote me a thoughtful message that showed he read my profile, I’d usually respond and go on a first date. I think this was a great way to start, but recently I have begun to narrow my filter a bit. Mostly because I’ve found myself getting overwhelmed with the number of people I needed to respond to (I wasn’t getting tons of messages, but it was enough that it was too much for me). I’m also finding that my instincts about whether I might be compatible with someone are pretty good.

I also use my profile description to do some filtering for me. While I’ve certainly chosen to present myself in a positive light in my profile (who doesn’t want to do this?), I’ve also made deliberate choices to represent myself 1) honestly, 2) in ways that indicate I’m outside of the norm, which hopefully does some filtering. Some examples:

• I’m specific about things I’m interested in—I mention things I love, some of which people might not recognize, like Allegri’s Miserere, or Richard Powers.
• I use large vocabulary words like “pithy” and “insouciant” (and I’ve had multiple guys mention these words in their responses to me)
• I mention “feminism” and “spirituality,” indicating that I’m interested in religion and I’m liberal. (I don’t mention being Mormon, which I think is currently the right decision—read this post and the responses to hear my reasoning.)
• The first sentence of my profile talks about how my life consists of contradictions and how I don’t take the path of least resistance. I think it describes me well, but a guy who’s just looking for someone cute and fun is probably not going to view my profile or message me after reading this. Which is good.

The point of these choices is that I’m not trying to get the most guys I can to message me. Instead, I’m hoping the guys who do message me are interested in my uniqueness. And I’m finding that the dates that are going the best are with guys who seem to really appreciate the ways I’m outside of the norm.

Right now there are a few things I’m still trying to figure out. While I feel right about not putting my Mormon-ness in my profile, I do think I want to highlight my religiosity a bit more, but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do this. The other thing I’m trying to figure out (and I have a post coming up on this) is what to do when you move past that first date. When do I go on a second (third, fourth) date? And the bigger question, how will I know when something is right? I’m currently figuring out what works for me through trial and error and trusting my instincts/feelings, but it’s messy. But I know that’s pretty much the norm for dating and relationships.

Banging the Bishop: Latter Day Prophecy, by Dustin B. Goltz

Goltz was raised as a Reformed Jew, but became Mormon as a young man when missionaries came to his door. As a Mormon, he felt that he could be a good person who had a mission in life and divine potential. Also, he was told that his homosexuality was a result of excessive masturbation, and he would be welcomed into heaven if he’d stop. He couldn’t. And he didn’t stop being attracted to men, so he eventually decided he didn’t belong in the Mormon heaven, and he left.

In Banging the Bishop, Goltz retells his own story as a play full of tension between extremes. He pits the purity of Mormon heaven against his post-Mormon period of debauchery, and the sexual repressiveness of the culture he couldn’t live up to against the peace he finally found in fully exploring his sexual desire by visiting a gay bathhouse. Even the format is dichotomous, split between a live performer and prerecorded video and audio segments.

2001

Confessions of a Mormon Boy, by Steven Fales

Confessions of a Mormon Boy is an autobiographical one-man play written and performed by Steven Fales. The play takes place in a (quasi-)Mormon afterlife where Fales, who has been sent to the Telestial Kingdom, wants to visit his children in the Celestial Kingdom, but he must first get past St. Peter, who’s acting as a heavenly bouncer. Through the course of the play, he tells St. Peter about his life, starting with a pre-existence where he was tight with Heavenly Mother (described as a fabulous diva), and continuing through his childhood, college years, temple marriage (to Emily Pearson, the daughter of Carol Lynn Pearson), the end of that marriage because of his homosexual affairs, his excommunication, and what he terms his “gay adolescence.”

Based on the title alone, it would be easy to guess that Confessions of a Mormon Boy has a strong autobiographical element, which is not unique in this group of plays. (Is the subject of gay Mormons easier to address when it comes from someone who’s been there? Is it cathartic to write about your life? Or is it more simply a case of “write what you know”?) At any rate, at least four of the plays have autobiographical elements (Banging the Bishop, Confessions of a Mormon Boy, 14, and The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon—although the latter might better be considered loosely biographical) and three of them are performed by the playwright.

2006

Facing East, by Carol Lynn Pearson

Carol Lynn Pearson has a history with Mormon homosexuality in both the personal and public spheres. In the personal realm, her marriage to Gerald Pearson ended because of his homosexuality (and her daughter’s marriage would end for similar reasons). In the public realm, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her marriage, divorce, and subsequent experiences caring for her husband after he came home to die of AIDS. She has also become an active advocate for the acceptance of gay and lesbian Mormons within the Mormon community.

Facing East takes place just after the funeral of Andrew, a gay Mormon who committed suicide. Andrew’s parents, Alex and Ruth, have stayed at his grave, where Alex begins to express doubts about the way his orthodox Mormon worldview led him to treat his son. They are later joined by Marcus, Andrew’s partner. There are flashbacks about Andrew, but he isn’t a character in the play. Instead, each actor takes a turn playing him in the other character’s memories. It’s a fitting device, given that the conflict of the play has to do with how we define who Andrew is: Is he a Mormon who couldn’t overcome his temptations? Is he a gay man whose religious culture was blind to the good in him?

Suicide is a common topic in this group of plays. It is addressed most prominently in Facing East, since the play’s characters are still reeling in shock from the death of their son and partner, but suicidal thoughts or actions come up in over half of the plays I found. Three of the characters in Ranging have attempted or considered suicide, the main character in Little Happy Secrets briefly considers it, and the main character in Banging the Bishop tries to kill himself at least three times. In addition to this, 14 is based on the real-life events surrounding fourteen gay men who participated in electroshock “reparative therapy” at BYU to try to change their homosexual behavior. Two of the participants later committed suicide.

2007

14, by John Cameron

John Cameron is a faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa. When he was a BYU student in the 1970s, he was involved in experimental electroshock therapy designed to treat or cure his homosexuality. In his late 20s (and still gay), Cameron left the Mormon Church behind and didn’t talk much about his experiences with the therapy until he found the website for Affirmation and discovered an entire community of gay Mormons. Through Affirmation, Cameron was contacted by a journalist who wanted to interview him about the experiments. Reliving his experiences at BYU sent him into a long depression (and then the most difficult parts to relive were cut from the published interview), but when Cameron came out of the depression, he started writing the play.

The premise of the play is highly autobiographical: A college professor named Ron Sorenson is approached by a journalist who wants information about his participation in the BYU experiments. In talking to the journalist, Sorenson must revisit painful events in his past which start to affect his present life, as well. Cameron directed the premiere of the play and it was very well received in its first run at the University of Iowa, with every performance selling out.

Ranging, by Devan Hite

In contrast with Banging the Bishop, which is about the expression of physical desires, Ranging focuses on the emotional lives of men, especially within American culture. Ethan and Robert, two characters in the play, both have a need to have closer relationships with men than is culturally acceptable in American society. Ethan describes it as saying that the average man is happy to function at a level of 6.5 in terms of emotional connection, while he’s quietly struggling as a nine. Ethan and Robert’s “nine-ness” is not unconnected with their sexuality, but it goes beyond sexual relationships. Ethan recalls the day he went to give his dad a hug and was told he was now too old for such things (“I wasn’t aware that this was part of ‘growing up.’”) As an officer in the marines, Robert is naturally isolated from the enlisted men he commands. When he’s stationed in Iraq, he finds himself envying the way that men in Iraqi society are permitted to be more affectionate with each other, even as part of his military mission is to influence Iraqi culture to be more American.

Based on the above paragraph, you wouldn’t know that this play has anything to do with Mormons. In reality, the play has a lot of Mormon references, a few in passing, but many more direct. For example, Ethan talks to his bishop about his feelings for another man and why they’ve nearly driven him to commit suicide. The character description for the bishop says that “everything about him is conservative,” and he’s definitely towing the LDS party line throughout the story, but I found him to be more sympathetically drawn than I expected, especially during a monologue when he freely admits that he has no idea what to tell gay and lesbian Mormons when they come to him for advice.

Ranging isn’t the only play with a character who meets with their bishop or stake president. (This isn’t unexpected for a Mormon character who’s going through a religious crisis, but it’s the kind of situation that a non-Mormon author might have trouble handling believably.) Steven Fales and Dustin Goltz’ priesthood leaders are unsuccessful in “curing” their homosexuality (and both hint at having leaders who may be in the closet, themselves). Molly (the main character in Be Normal) has a better experience meeting with her bishop, who helps her negotiate coming out to her family.

A few weeks ago, I learned that a friend of mine is raising money to stage a production of Melissa Leilani Larson’s Little Happy Secrets next year. The play is about a lesbian Mormon who is trying to reconcile her sexuality with her faith. (It’s really unfair of me to condense such a thoughtful and nuanced play into a one-sentence summary. I promise I’ll say more about it later, or you can read about it and their fundraising efforts here.) It was staged last year in Provo, but Dave Mortensen (my friend) and Melissa would like to put on a larger production in Salt Lake City.

I decided that I wanted to write a blog post about plays by Mormons with gay and lesbian Mormon characters, both as a way of helping to draw attention to Little Happy Secrets and because of the topicality of how the Mormon community and the GLBT community interact.

By restricting the plays surveyed to those by Mormons playwrights, I’m necessarily leaving out Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, easily the most famous play about a homosexual Mormon, and the winner of two Tony Awards and a Pullizer Prize, to boot.

The omission is deliberate, not because I have any particular axe to grind where Angels in America is concerned, but because I strongly believe that the members of a community need the opportunity to tell their own stories, and I’m tired of seeing so much attention go to non-Mormons writing Mormon characters, while Mormons writing about their own community struggle to find a national audience. Even setting aside no-Mo authors who get basic details wrong about Mormon life (such as Bradford Tice and Andy Greenwald), it’s still very hard to capture the nuances of a cultural mindset if you’ve been raised outside the culture. To quote Jonathan Langford’s review of Angels in America:

Angels in America, as I see it, is not really about Mormonism at all. That is to say, even though it uses symbols from Mormon history and theology and features Mormon characters, it’s not about what it means to be Mormon, even Mormon and gay. . . . When it comes to his characters, it seems to me that Kushner is using Mormons iconically—a rather different thing from presenting them realistically. Not that his Mormon characters aren’t realistic, but I don’t think they’re realistic in their Mormonness. By and large, they don’t act like Mormons, they don’t describe their beliefs in terms that would be terribly familiar to most Mormons, and their religion doesn’t seem to impact their day-to-day lives in the ways that it does for most active Mormons.

Of course, if I’m restricting my choice of plays to those by Mormon authors because I believe that members of a community need to tell their stories, it’s also fair to point out that members of the GLBT community deserve the chance to tell their stories, as well, so one could just as easily choose plays that are only by gay or lesbian authors. It’s a point I concede, but I’ll leave such an analysis as an exercise for the student.

A few general caveats: I must admit that I have not seen any of the plays in question. (Living over 2,000 miles from Utah is a significant drawback for anyone interested in Mormon theater.) I have read scripts for six of the plays, listened to an audio version of one of them, and two more I know of only from articles, press releases, and interviews. (More details will be given in the notes section and bibliography.) In light of this incomplete access to information, I consider this post to be more of a survey and less of a literary critique (much less a review) of the plays in question.

A second caveat is that many of the playwrights or others associated with these plays would probably object to my pigeonholing them all as plays on the same topic. Playwright Devan Hite says of Ranging “The play is not necessarily a ‘gay themed’ play; likewise, it should not be regarded as a play about Mormons.” Gideon Burton says “This is not the Mormon lesbian play” in his review of Little Happy Secrets. And Eric Samuelsen calls Borderlands a play about coming out, “Not just coming out in the usual sense, . . . [but] about all the other ways we come out as Mormons, about admitting that we don’t necessarily believe what we’re supposed to believe, or that we don’t always find it possible to live the way we’re expected to live.”

As a librarian (worse, a cataloger), my stock-in-trade is taking works that are beautiful, unique flowers of creativity and shoving them into some artificially-defined category after a cursory review. However, I feel that I can still understand why a playwright would encourage an audience to focus on the entire message of a play, rather than reducing it to one single (hot-button) issue. That said, I hope that they will forgive me if I take one aspect of their plays and use it as a thread to tie together an otherwise disparate group of works.

For inclusion in this group of plays, my criteria were (1) the play had to include a character who is a gay or lesbian Mormon, (2) the playwright had to be LDS (or formerly LDS), and (3) the play in question had to have been published, produced, or formally presented as a reading. (If you are aware of any plays meeting these criteria that I’ve missed, please let me know.) The plays will be presented chronologically (as nearly as I can determine) by date of premiere. Some plays have undergone significant revision since their premieres. What information I have about these revisions will be given in the notes section.

The first session on Saturday was “The Mormon Voice in a Pluralistic Society.” Since Kristine and Ralph Hancock have already blogged about what they said, here I’ll just mention some of the comments from the other two people on the panel.  James Burklo, the associate dean for religious life at USC, talked about the shift in America in which people are less likely to affiliate with a formal organized religion and more likely to talk about spirituality. He noted that increasingly people don’t believe in exclusive truth claims of churches, commenting that “people are starting to register as independents as they pray.” He proposed that this was a trend that Mormons should pay attention to, and concluded with this question—what does interfaith dialogue mean in a country full of people who are having inner-faith monologues?

Frederick Mark Gedicks, a law professor at BYU, discussed conversation with other faiths, within faiths, and in a political context. He argued that in living in a world in which most people think differently, you need to frame your arguments in language that makes sense to them. He emphasized that we should keep in mind that we are a religious minority, and that we don’t have the allies that Protestant denominations do (even if their numbers are smaller). He also talked about the problem of politicizing the gospel, of requiring a political checklist to be culturally accepted in Mormonism. And he brought in a pessimistic note, commenting that at the level of the institutional church we are well on our way to being fundamentalist, that the choices we’ve made over the last fifty years have placed us further and further from the mainstream, and that in a few generations, fundamentalist churches will be small and increasingly disconnected from American society—in twenty or forty or sixty years, will a fundamentalist Mormon church really have much relevance or influence on American life?

The next panel was on Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Father James Masa talked about the hope for a greater understanding between the Catholic church and the LDS one. He proposed that a more positive Catholic assessment of Mormonism could be possible in the framework of Vatican II, looking to Catholic views on Islam as a possible analogy. The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate affirms that Muslims adore the one God, identifies areas of overlap between Islam and Catholicism, and recognizes the particular contribution made by Islam in the history of salvation. He raised the question of whether Catholics saw the relation with LDS as ecumenical or inter-religious—essentially, the question of whether LDS are Christian, and commented on a need to find a way to engage those who seek salvation under Christ even while not accepting other elements of traditional Christianity.

The panel also included a member of an Eastern Orthodox faith, Reverend Alexei Smith, who talked about Eastern Christianity’s approach to interfaith dialogue and ecumenism. He brought up the question of what exactly ecumenism is—is it a heresy? Is it a missionary activity, entering into dialogue in order to communicate the truth of the Orthodox faith? He commented on the need to remove the suspicion between Christian churches that led them to proselytize each other, instead of seeing each other as relatives and part of the household of Christ.  He also brought up some of the challenging issues of worship in an ecumenical setting, such as in areas of language or women presiding, where there was disagreement.

Jim Faulconer proposed a different way of thinking about Mormon beliefs. He noted the LDS wariness of creeds, and proposed that our relation to our beliefs is different than Catholic or Orthodox to their beliefs. As the term “creed” was used in the time of Joseph Smith, the Articles of Faith were not a creed, as they don’t go beyond a set of beliefs that anyone could understand without theological training. LDS remain committed to the idea that one only needs a few basic beliefs, and have resisted moving beyond this to official theology. This, combined with the freedom to speculate, means that there is little official theology, and unofficial theology is messy and speculative. He went over D&C 20,and its statement of basic beliefs, and touched a bit on the problem of what divinization means in Mormonism and its doctrinally ambiguous status. How can we live with this sort of theological confusion? Mormonism finds salvation in practices rather than beliefs. Thus it might be helpful to think of basic beliefs as performative, rather than mere descriptions of belief—to utter belief is to take part in witness and worship. Basic beliefs are liturgical acts rather than theological claims.

The next panel was on Protestant Christianity. Spencer Fluhman talked about the intertwined history of Mormons and Protestants, with Mormons existing in a Protestant context and developing in tension with Protestantism. He noted that in the 1830s Mormons saw themselves as distinctive but not necessarily in terms of doctrine, but rather in having new scripture, spiritual gifts, and an Israel identity, and one could see commonalities with Protestant. More difficulties came with the less conventional theology of the 1840s—he noted the problem that there are two religions in Mormonism: the Book of Mormon and early revelations, and the Nauvoo overlay, which leads to problems in interreligious dialogue, and proposed that we need Mormonism to articulate its varying themes. Protestants provide a foil against which Mormons can see themselves more clearly. He commented on the connections we’ve had over the years, and said that the saved by grace vs. saved by works argument has proved to be shabby way to define the distance between us. We need a future “more graceful and weird.”

David McAllister-Wilson, an elder in the United Methodist Church, gave his perspective on the LDS church as a mainline Protestant. He explained that historically, he sees us in the family line of Protestants in America, emerging out of the Second Great Awakening, and noted that the desire to get back to Christianity is very Protestant. Intellectually, he sees LDS as at the beginning of the attempt to engage the challenge of modernity; he paralleled that to Protestant struggles in the last century with the rise of the historical-critical method and the questioning sources of scripture, Darwin, urbanization and diversity, and ideas of relativity, and noted that we were beginning to grapple with these kinds of issues. He pointed to two things LDS have going for us—a well-educated lay leadership, and that Joseph Smith was dealing with issues of relativization and contextualization as he revised his own understanding of revelation, which gives us a warrant for looking intellectually and with faith at the tradition. And theologically, he sees us as Methodist and Arminian, with our theological optimism and progressivism: “Mormons are Methodists on steroids.” He also noted parallels between his place on the spectrum of Protestants which emphasizes building up the kingdom of God on earth, and the LDS emphasis on that.

Deidre Green talked about the need to engage the religious other, and the tension between searching and certainty. The advantage of not being circumscribed by creedal commitments is that we can embrace all truth, wherever it is found, which requires openness to genuinely learning from others. She brought in a feminist ethics of risk—risk is entailed in any action, but is worth taking because we cannot be moral alone; the discernment of norms and strategies requires interaction of different communities. She proposed ways in which we might learn from others without theological capitulations, and noted that as people of faith, we all have insights to offer one another with regard to faithful and ethical living. She also suggested that we break away from the either/or of dialogue vs. proselytizing, and instead adopt a teleological agnosticism—we do not know what the results of our dialogue will be.

Terry Muck, from Asbury Theological Seminary, talked about wanting to have more people involved in dialogue, and said that the problem with dialogue groups is that they often cater to experts. Dialogue doesn’t mean that you have to know about the other religion or your own; it is for people who want to learn. He also saw a false dichotomy between mission and dialogue. What do we do about the problem of mission creating inter-religious conflict? We can give up on mission, or we can say that we don’t care because eventually everyone will be converted. But he proposed that instead, we need to develop better mission practices. He also commented in that in the future, theology done without people of other religions will be meaningless. And he talked about the challenge of religion finding a public voice, and observed that we’ve end up creating our own heterodox religions which reduce religion to being something to do with personal choice.

The final panel was on Islam, and unfortunately by this late in the day, I was somewhat on intellectual overload, so I only have notes on the first two presentations. Bradley Cook went over some of the similarities between Mormonism and Islam, such as faith in an omnipotent, just and merciful God; obedience to God’s will as leading to peace and prosperity in this life and life with God in the next; observance of religious rituals such as prayer, fasting, acts of charitable giving; an emphasis on strong families; values of chastity, fidelity, and modest; a long history of misunderstanding and persecution; and the idea of prophecy and a line of prophets. Though he was also careful to mention the real differences in aspects of these. He commented that while the LDS tradition is almost unknown in the Islamic world, he’s found that when Mormons and Muslims talk, there is a kinship because of these things.  He also mentioned an interesting comment from Howard W. Hunter, that if a bridge is ever built between Christianity and Islam, it must be built by the Mormon church.

Maher Hathout talked about issues of pluralism from a Muslim perspective. He said that in posing certain basic questions we go wrong because we don’t see the obvious—we begin with God and often create a God that suits us, which leads to a strange kind of discourse in which we refer to “my God” or “their God”—but once we contain God, it is not God.  Since God does not have needs, the only way to express devotion and love to God is to offer to those who have the needs—he mentioned Mormon humanitarian efforts in this context. He brought up the question of right and wrong, and said that organized religion, including Islam, had generally failed to do it justice. A religious person frequently assumes that there is only one truth coming from God, but that goes against the Quran, which speaks of several manifestations of truth; God communicates in different ways. Thus instead of trying to prove to me that you’re right and I’m wrong, God is telling you do goodness, and let us see who will do more good—and then we’ll come back, and God will tell the rest of the story. It is not tolerance that we should be calling for, but submission to the will of God—and the will of God is that we are different. Our failure to respect each other arises from ignoring our understanding of God and an emergence of religious tribalism in which religion is no longer a message of mercy from God to the whole world, but the property of my tribe.

So—there’s my rather limited attempt to highlight some of what was said. It was a very thought-provoking conference; it left me with a lot of ideas which I’d like to pursue further.

It would seem to me that this idea arises fairly naturally from the notion that God has crafted individual plans of salvation in addition to his general plan, and that salvation (more precisely: exaltation) is facilitated by marriage.

Does God tell us whom to marry? Should we wait to marry until God confirms our choices? Where does this leave singles, or people in unhappy marriages they feel God inspired them to enter? What have your experiences been?