Choosing Life in an Affirming Church

I knew that I probably shouldn’t let myself be encouraged by the unexpected news a few weeks ago that BYU was softening their stance on same-sex dating. Over the years, after all, you learn better than to hope. I remember attending my first Affirmation conference in the fall of 2015, and being blown away by the faith of so many of the people there, the confidence they had that eventually the church would make more room for them. The sheer exuberance of that hope was hard to resist. Despite my skepticism, it infected me a little. I mean, here was a crowd of LGBTQ people, surely a demographic bound for apostasy if anyone was, and more than anything it felt like EFY for queer people—complete with a dance, cheesy music, and even a testimony meeting at the end. I looked at this crowd and thought, okay, maybe I’m too skeptical. Maybe the church really will come around on these issues. How can they possibly resist this sort of faith?

But that was just two months before the POX brutally collided with this enthusiastic optimism. The Policy didn’t devastate me the way it did some, but I think that to some extent that was simply because Prop 8 had already broken me so thoroughly that there wasn’t all that much left to break. By the time the Policy crashed in, I’d pretty much given up on Salt Lake, even as my years in an affirming Bay Area ward combined with my connection to a thriving progressive online Mormon community provided enough support for me to feel like sticking with the church was possible. Plus I was determined to stay, to not let it get to me. Mormonism was my heritage, and the Policy sparked a certain sense of defiance. You can’t drive me out, I thought stubbornly. You’re going to have to keep dealing with people like me.

Of course, life is unpredictable, and in the end I left in a way I never would have guessed, through a wholehearted conversion to another religious tradition. I don’t think I realized, however, the extent to which I’d given up any hope for things to change in the LDS world until I saw the news about BYU and found myself indulging in a kind of thinking that felt almost giddy. Could this really be happening? Could I envision a version of the church moving in the direction of fully including gay people, rather than asking them to embrace life on the margins while holding to thin promises that everything will be magically made up in the next life? It seemed much too good to be true, but I couldn’t stop that glimmer of excitement. And the intensity of my reaction made me realize just how much I still care. While I have no plans to return to my faith of origin, this still matters to me. I left not just informally but formally; I went through the effort of doing the paperwork to get my name off church records. And yet I to this day I have never described myself as ex-Mormon or post-Mormon, because those terms feel don’t feel quite right to me. They quite don’t capture where I am or who I am. I am absolutely in love with the Episcopal tradition; it has enriched my life more than I can say. I feel incredibly grateful and ridiculously lucky to have landed there. But Mormonism will never not be a part of my life story. Which is maybe why the possibility of the church finally softening on this question brought tears to my eyes. I was actually a little taken aback to realize how very much this still matters to me.

I wasn’t surprised, really, when they backtracked, but I have to admit that I was disappointed. And then I felt the familiar sense of being annoyed with myself for having been so gullible as to have believed this could possibly be real. Why on earth would I let myself hope for anything different, I asked myself bitterly. Don’t I know better than that by now? But it turns out that this sort of hope is a temptation to which I am not entirely immune.

As I’ve reflected on my reaction to this debacle, though, I’ve also reflected on the past few years, on where I am now and what has changed for me. And I’ve noticed some things. While I was in the church, I had little trouble intellectually rejecting the LDS position on gay people, which not only didn’t connect at all with my experience, but often didn’t seem all that coherent. But that was in my head. Getting that message through to the rest of me was an ongoing challenge. To be raised Mormon is to hear absolute authority, the voice of God, in the pronouncements of General Authorities. They speak with such utter certainty, projecting complete confidence that they are relaying the divine will with perfect accuracy. And I don’t think I have ever made it to that level of confidence about any of my own beliefs, large or small. As I’ve wrestled with what it means to be gay, I’ve said more than once through tears to my therapist: “But the church leaders are so absolutely sure that they’re right about this.” How do I respond to those assertions, I’ve wondered—not even so much in terms of speaking to members or leaders of the LDS church, but simply speaking to the Mormon in me who grew up equating these voices with Truth? I don’t have certainty in my arsenal. Far from it; it took years of therapy for me to even begin to consider that my own experience and my own perspective on the world might be something worth listening to. It’s daunting to to put that sort of tentative exploration against the full weight of the authority of the church.

So I can’t respond in the language of Mormon testimony, in the language of “I know,” in the language of absolute confidence. And yet, even lacking any such certainty, I notice that I am more at peace about these issues, that I feel more grounded. My faith has always taken a narrative form; I have never felt comfortable expressing it in the language of abstract propositions. It’s also not static; it keeps changing. And the only thing I really know how to do to explain it is to talk about my experiences, and the times when I have had a deep sense of encountering God, and the ways in which spiritual matters have made a real difference in my life, and how being part of a particular religious community has shaped my outlook and my sense of meaning. So that’s what I’m going to talk a little bit about here.

I’ve been going to Episcopal church for three years now. The Episcopal church is explicitly and formally on board with same-sex marriage. This has never felt theoretical to me; the person who was the rector when I started coming to my parish, and who ended up baptizing me, was in fact a man with a husband. This affirming stance was not specifically the reason I converted, but I cannot say that it was not part of my decision; a different position on this would have been a deal-breaker for me, no matter how many other things I might have loved about the tradition. I am acutely  aware that the decision to go this route came at a high cost, that a lot of Episcopalians left over it, that there were painful splits. Honestly I am grateful to have not joined until after that particular battle was (mostly) over; after years of grappling with these questions in Mormonism, I don’t think I had the energy in me to engage in it in another context. But that I can go to my parish and feel fully accepted and welcomed as a gay person is not something I take for granted, and I hope I never do. The Episcopal church has definitely taken some hits for this stance, including some tension with and even formal censure by the broader worldwide Anglican communion of which we are a part, and the idea that the church would decide that people like me were worth all this fuss—that still makes me a little emotional to think about.

A kind of strange side effect of being in a church like this is that being gay has in a way become less a part of my identity. Though maybe that’s not quite the way to put it. It’s still a big part of who I am, of course, and it still matters, for a whole lot of reasons. But I don’t feel marked by it in the same way, and I like that. I like going to church and being just another person there, rather than A Person With a Special Trial. Absent that, I feel like I have more room to focus on trying to figure out the bigger questions of identity—like who God might be calling me to be. I sometimes see contemptuous comments about those pro-gay rights people who think that God just accepts you as you are and doesn’t demand change. And I do feel accepted at church for who I am, and that’s huge; I absolutely need that. But it’s not in a way that leaves me complacent. I find that church is a regular reminder of things I need to be doing better, such as loving my neighbor, reaching out to people outside my social bubble, forgiving and letting things go, remembering God in my day to day life, not getting so caught up in trivial matters. That sort of thing. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the fact that the church doesn’t call gay people to repentance for being gay doesn’t mean that we’re not being called to repentance. It’s the season of Lent right now, and regardless of sexual orientation, we’re all expected to be engaging in some serious reflection on our lives, and penitence. It’s not all warm fuzziness. Sometimes it’s ashes on your forehead and a reminder that you are dust.

I am undeniably a starry-eyed convert still, which makes me want to warn you to take everything I say with a grain of salt. Which really, you should. And my parish is no utopia. I cannot deny that there are people in my congregation who at times very much frustrate me. I actually sat several rows behind someone I’ve struggled with on a recent Sunday and found myself thinking, dang it all, now church is ruined because I’m just going to feel annoyed every time I glimpse this person. (See, I definitely need those calls to repentance! And no, church was not ruined, but it was definitely a reminder to me of things I need to work on.) There are disagreements and complaints and people who feel left out and the same ten people who do everything (that particular trend seems to hold across denominations) and hurt feelings and old wounds. There are definitely challenges. And for all that, I love going to church to church on Sundays. I really genuinely love it. It’s almost ridiculous how much I love it sometimes. Even with the people whom I find difficult. It feeds me. It reminds me of what actually matters to me. The familiar liturgy gives me a place to land. And most of all, it connects me, again and again, with a loving God. It gives me hope. Church has become the most grounding thing in my life; there have been multiple times when things have been overwhelmingly turbulent, and worship on Sundays has felt like the one stable thing keeping me going. Of course some weeks are better than others, and  sometimes I am distracted or restless. But it really is a spiritual anchor. And this has all happened in a setting which is kind of overrun by gay people. Sometimes it seems that there are gay couples everywhere I look. Our Education for Ministry group leans so much that way that we have joked about doing outreach to straight people, just for some balance. I share all of this because I grew up with the idea that the way to create a sacred space conducive to the Spirit is to exclude the “unworthy” (this actually caused me no small amount of angst as a Young Woman who wondered if she might be ruining things for everyone else), and as a result I can’t help wondering about fears that full inclusion of gay people would come at the cost of undermining the possibility of spiritual experience. I have come to very much dislike the worthy/unworthy paradigm in any case, but regardless, I can report that I have not found this to be the case. Perhaps the most basic continuity I can see between my spiritual life in my Mormon days, and my experiences now, is a line I learned long ago in Primary: “where love is, there God is also.”

My particular conversion story is not very unusual; a lot of people find their way to my parish from more conservative traditions. A lot them are gay, and more often than not they relate narratives of deep spiritual trauma and times of hating and giving up on God because of their past religious experiences. One of my favorite things is to see people who felt like there could be no room for them in Christianity find our church and discover that this does not in fact have to be the case, and to sometimes see them start to spiritually come back alive after years of hurt and skepticism. It’s a wonder and a privilege to witness, and I simply cannot not see it as God’s work. To heal. To build connections. To bring people into community. I still remember a particular Sunday, quite a while ago now, when I happened to be sitting next to three gay friends, and we walked up together to take Communion. Kneeling at the altar rail, I could see the three of them kneeling next to me, and it just struck me: here we are, all welcome at God’s table. How amazing it that? I sometimes still feel the urge to pinch myself and see if it’s real. You mean to tell me that I can have this beautiful tradition AND Jesus AND full inclusion? All in the same place? It makes me want to jump up and down in sheer delight.

I was recently reminded by a good friend that conversion is not a one-time, now-we’re-done event, but an ongoing process. It’s something I’m still making sense of. I’m still coming to terms with what my Mormonness means to me. And as much as joining this new tradition has changed my life in incredibly positive ways, I still at times wrestle with old doubts and fears and anxieties. Internalized homophobia is a real thing. Like I said earlier, I don’t have certainty. I grew up immersed in some deep messages about these issues, and it’s not like those were all instantly eradicated when I got baptized. However, my touchstone has become the litmus test that Jesus proposes: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” In my experience in an affirming church, I have seen so many good fruits. Above all, I have encountered a God that I want to worship. That feels worth embracing. I titled this post “choosing life in an affirming church,” thinking simply about my choice to join an affirming church. But I realized as I wrote this that there’s another way of reading it. Choosing to be part of an affirming church has meant for me, at a very basic level, choosing life.