After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective

Abstract

Ten years ago, my article “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” was published in Dialogue.1 I did not know what to expect when it made its way into the world, but it ended up being a widely discussed piece and has been accessed tens of thousands of times.2 The public discussion about my ideas was both critical and appreciative. In the wake of the article, my own research and thinking have also developed. When I first approached this topic, I expected that my interest would be limited to a single contribution. However, in the ensuing decade I now count several articles, a book, and a substantial edited volume on Mormonism, sexuality, gender in my research portfolio. My fascination with this question has endured.Other things are also different now than they were at the time I wrote the original article. Same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in the United States. The Church has engaged in multiple public campaigns related to LGBTQ issues, including pastoral outreach, updated policies, and a reframed political project on “religious freedom.” In the ensuring years, several other thinkers have approached this question of same-sex relationships and gender identity with theological and historical sophistication. Here, I want to discuss in retrospect the origins of “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology,” the reception of the article, and the trajectory that my own work has taken. Despite all of these developments, the place of same-sex relationships in LDS thought and practice remains vexed.I was just preparing to go on a mission when Gordon B. Hinckley presented “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” a guiding document on LDS teachings on marriage and public policy released just as the same-sex marriage issue had arisen the United States. After I returned from my mission and to my university education in New York City, I became increasingly interested in feminist theory and the new approaches to sexuality and identity in the 1990s. While I was an undergraduate student, the Church had gotten involved in propositions to prohibit same-sex marriage in Hawaii, California, and Alaska. But being in New York City, it all seemed rather far away and I hadn't really worked out how I wanted to approach this social question.Heading to graduate school for a master's degree in New Testament and Early Christianity in 2001, I was consumed with learning the languages and the history of scholarship in that field. When I was admitted into the doctoral program in that field, I began to take more coursework in gender and sexuality. My advisor, Karen L. King, was a leader in thinking about gender in early Christianity, and feminist icons like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza loomed large in my program and in my own thinking. When Amy Hollywood arrived at Harvard, it opened up to me a whole new set of theories and approaches to identity, bodies, and desire. As I started writing my dissertation on how early Christians imagined sexuality and desire in the resurrection body, I turned to feminist theory, especially that of Judith Butler, to help me articulate the issues at stake in these debates.Meanwhile, Latter-day Saints were engaged in a substantive and contentious exchange about same-sex relationships in the first decade of the 2000s. I closely followed the topic in Mormon blogging, which had attracted a number of rising intellectuals in their twenties and thirties. Of course, the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, accelerating the issue in the United States. But the Church had done quite little to mobilize in Massachusetts. That helped to defer the question for me. However, when the Church formally announced that it would organize to oppose Prop 8 in California in 2008, I found myself deeply torn. By coincidence, I was scheduled to preach at Harvard Divinity School in an LDS-run service at the start of the new term in January 2009, after the election. Early protests had occurred against Latter-day Saints around the country, and I was feeling some dread about how to navigate the issue with my colleagues. I spoke from the heart about my conflicted feelings. The publications director for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin was there and asked to publish my remarks, titled “An Uncomfortable Mormon.”3My discomfort increasingly turned to a set of theoretical problems. I recall two pieces that had an impact on me in the year after the 2008 election. The first was by Valerie Hudson Cassler, at the time a well-respected political science professor at Brigham Young University, titled “‘Some Things That Should Not Have Been Forgotten Were Lost’: The Pro-Feminist, Pro-Democracy, Pro-Peace Case for State Privileging of Companionate Heterosexual Monogamous Marriage.”4 This was at the time hailed as the most significant, substantive LDS argument opposing same-sex marriage on putatively feminist grounds.5 I remember having a strong reaction to this piece and feeling deeply concerned about the oppositional framework between feminism and LGBTQ rights.The second piece was Judith Butler's short book Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death.6 Based on a series of lectures she had given, Butler addressed the question of kinship in queer contexts. I distinctly remember this book hitting me like a lightning bolt, and I rushed to grab a piece of paper to sketch out the outline for an article that would see same-sex marriage as claim about kinship, suddenly an obvious argument that I had not yet understood in my focus on gender and sexuality. For me, this realization was a potent reframing of same-sex marriage that had been analyzed as a legal or sociological issue, or even a question about sexual ethics. Kinship, for me, unlocked a whole new framework for a new theological imaginary.The sketch for the article that I put together was extremely compressed. It was just the stub of what would eventually become “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology,” but I contacted Kristine Haglund, then editor at Dialogue, to see if she thought it had any merit. She kindly sent it out for review, which came back confirming that it was underdeveloped. I'd written it rather half-heartedly, hoping someone else would flesh out my own idea to more productive ends. My reluctance to complete my thought was in part because I was getting ready to graduate from my doctoral program and in search of a job in biblical studies—an extreme rarity for Latter-day Saints. I didn't want to start establishing a Mormon studies publication record at that stage in my career. In any case, the reviewers and Haglund asked me to fill in the outline. Going on the job market, the birth of my second child, a move to start a new job, and other events delayed the revisions for about a year. The delay allowed me to do more reading, benefiting especially from new research on early Mormon kinship that further confirmed for me that this was a necessary starting point for a theological redescription.7I recall feeling that I was breaking some new ground, though I was building on decades of previous work. While I think “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” marks a distinctive theoretical turn, scholars and activists had been organizing, writing, blogging, and speaking about these issues for years. D. Michael Quinn and Connell O'Donovan had approached the issue from a historical perspective, chronicling episodes and changes to LDS teachings.8 Other scholars were looking at the question of sexual ethics.9 The causes or etiology of homosexuality often took special prominence.10 Others had attempted to carve out some ecclesiastical space for affirming same-sex relationships.11 Many of these texts and others focused on pastoral concerns about damage to LGBTQ members.12 Some of the analysis focused on the reputational damage to straight Latter-day Saints by holding on to anti-homosexuality teachings.13 Others provided an analysis of the legal and social scientific debates.14All of these made major contributions, but I still felt that the ground of the analysis needed to shift. Much of the discussion focused on homosexuality as a set of desires or analyzed the morality of certain sexual acts. I came to believe that the act/desires distinction was not especially useful. The framing of the question as a debate about desires and acts seems to concede the very terms that had been developed in anti-homosexuality culture—seeing “homosexuality” as primarily about “sexuality.” By contrast, male-female relationships occupied a larger conceptual footprint that had built into itself institutional acknowledgment of relationships that were fuller than their sexual dimension. In other words, I wanted to consider relationships and kinship as the potential theological desideratum and saving principle in a post-heterosexual theology, not the kind of sex that people were having.Second, it seemed to me that there were deep, structural issues in Mormon theology as it had developed that made it difficult to accommodate same-sex relationships. Answering the “clobber texts” or other apologetic or historical engagements seemed wholly insufficient because they did not address the deep ways that heterosexual supremacy had been braided into the Mormon cosmos. The question of sexual morality, or the etiology of homosexuality, or respectability did not address head on the presumed heterosexual reproductivity of the Mormon heavens. Legal or social scientific analysis of the effects of same-sex marriage did little to address the theological questions about reproduction. I wanted to question the received wisdom that reproduction and Mormonism were inseparably intertwined by examining the theological foundations of the idea as it had emerged in recent decades. The first part of my article then interrogated “celestial reproduction” as a supposedly essential feature of Mormon theology. I argued that the evidence for it was quite weak, that there were alternative modes of reproduction not rooted in heterosexuality in the tradition, and that adoption was a well-established theological and social practice in Mormonism that replaced biological kinship.The next major idea of the paper was a brief history of LDS teachings on kinship and the sealing ordinance. Both historically and today, sealing was not rooted in reproduction but was instead a way of ritually marking kinship as opposed to the biological, nuclear family. Here too I attempted to displace “sexuality” as the defining feature of sealing and instead pointed to care, commitment, and covenant as a potential route for including non-heterosexual relationships. I further suggested that centering heterosexuality in LDS kinship practices was bound to conflict with a wide variety of global and historical kinship practices. Kinship rather than sexuality would accommodate a wider array of historical and contemporary relationships.Finally, it seemed to me that some critical analysis of LDS ideas of “eternal gender” was a necessary part of this question, for the ways that it was used against both same-sex relationships and transgender identity. I came to see the link between sex and gender, and sexuality and gender identity, as an inevitable part of a post-heterosexual theology. LDS concepts of heterosexuality were intimately rooted in theories of sexual difference. They not only affirmed the existence of two separate sex/genders but also were based on complementarian notions of their interdependence. Such views upheld male-female relationships as superior to others because they were somehow more balanced or complete. I wanted to examine how Latter-day Saints defined “eternal gender” by contrasting it with the dominant view that had emerged in contemporary feminist and queer theory that the sex/gender distinction and the concept of gender itself was historically contingent, not an expression of a timeless ideal. This problem of decontextualizing sexual difference as an immutable feature needed greater theological reflection. Gender essentialism did not hold much philosophical credibility, at least not in ways that matched with Mormon theologizing. Further, I wanted to question whether the privileging of gender as a distinctive feature of human identity was necessary for a post-heterosexual theology.My arguments were a thought experiment to lay out problems that needed to be solved no matter the answers, and to propose possible solutions to those problems. I wanted to be clear that I was not advocating that my solutions were correct, nor that church leaders or members should follow my arguments. Rather, I wanted to raise critical questions about the best arguments that stood in the way of affirming same-sex sealing and explore their strengths and weaknesses.The finished article appeared in December 2011 on the dialoguejournal.com website. I wasn't sure that anyone would read it. The article made perfect sense to me as a someone who had been working closely in poststructuralist thought, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory. Yet I knew that the arguments were a still somewhat dense for most casual readers. The editors at Dialogue gently nudged me to tone down some of the jargon, but it meant something to me to say what I wanted to say in the idiom in which I had been immersed. Their advice was probably right, but I am pleased that the barrier to entry into the article was not so high that no one could make heads or tails of it. The misunderstandings that have emerged in the reception of the article seem to be more strategic misrepresentation than my miscommunication, though there are things that I might say differently now.My recollection is that there was still some anxiety on my part and the part of Dialogue about the article going live. Kristine Haglund was not only editing Dialogue but also blogging at ByCommonConsent.com and worked out the idea to announce it there. The entry received the innocuous title “Guest Post From Dialogue” and went live on December 9, 2011. In the entry, I wrote a brief introduction explaining that the significance of my article was to offer a model for future LDS theology, to connect mainstream Mormon theology with feminist theology, and finally, to “suggest that we think less about the types of sex that people are having and more about the types of relationships that people are building.”15 Between the blog title and my tepid post, we all seemed to be burying the lede. Still, the post received nearly two hundred (mostly) substantive comments and was the early place for generating attention about the article.Over the following days, weeks, and months, there were a number of blog posts responding to me. The article received mentions Slate, the Daily Beast, and the New York Times. Facebook was another hub for conversation as the article was being shared and praised widely. Kaimi Wegner wrote, “Holy cow. Have you seen Taylor Petrey's new article? It is a must-read.” Richard Livingston wrote on a listserve: It seems to me that the single most impressive aspect of Taylor's article isn't so much the many insightful possibilities that it suggests—which it does very admirably—but rather the questions it raises, or perhaps better, the way in which it raises those questions. . . . Sometimes just clarifying the significance of a single question can be every bit as illuminating as the discovery of a potential solution to some long-standing dilemma, and yet Taylor illuminates the true depth and breadth and scope of multiple questions in this essay. Thus, he isn't just asking the right question, but he's asking multiple thought-provoking questions in all the right ways.I was deeply appreciative of the positive feedback from many LDS readers.I learned over the next few years that the article was not only being read in Latter-day Saint contexts but was being assigned in courses throughout North America on theology, sex, and religion. One of my former advisors at Harvard mentioned that she assigned it in her undergraduate classes and that “it was the first article I read all the way through in years.” Since then I have received possibly hundreds of expressions of gratitude from friends, family, and total strangers for voicing their own concerns, giving them new frameworks and questions, and for creating space for further conversation.Not all of the feedback was positive. Several people challenged my ideas, some with greater sophistication than others. I want to point out three responses that I think were particularly important because of their substantive merit or influence on later events. The first came out of the small, but capable Mormon theological community that had been growing for much of the first decade of the 2000s. Joseph Spencer, then a graduate student, had a related expertise to many of the poststructuralist theories that informed my own work. He wrote a letter to the editor to Dialogue, first posted on the website and then in the next issue of the journal, responding to “Taylor Petrey's carefully executed, unmistakably informed, rightly concerned, and entirely productive essay.” Yet Spencer criticized me for not doing “any actual work on constructing a Mormon queer theory in this essay.”16 That is, Spencer suggested that my project went too far in abandoning the Mormon elements of a theology by questioning whether “eternal gender” was an essential church teaching. Spencer then took a different tack on this issue, briefly laying out a view of gender essentialism that is both critical and coherent. I remain unpersuaded that a reformed theory of gender essentialism is either a necessary starting point for a Mormon theology, or that it would not also be just as revisionist as my own. Still, Spencer's idea holds promise about how a coherent version of essentialism might be brought into conversation with LDS thought.The second piece of feedback arrived in the form of an organized protest. Far-right activist Stephen Graham, founder of the Standard of Liberty, an anti-gay group, planned a protest against me during a conference at which I was slated to speak at Brigham Young University. The conference was on the theme of “The Apostasy,” the proceedings of which were later published in an edited volume with Oxford University Press titled Standing Apart. At the 2012 conference, I was invited to deliver a paper on the concept of the Apostasy in early Christianity.17 The day before the event, Graham sent an email about me to a list of at least one organization he runs, called UtahsRepublic.org, which advocates for radical changes to public education.Graham was a known provocateur on same-sex relationships when I came on his radar. His Standard of Liberty organization protested BYU events on homosexuality multiple times. He objected to the BYU Honor Code change in 2007 and warned that BYU professors were teaching “homosexualism” as well as “socialism” and “anti-Americanism.”18 His email about me suggested that I was “an apostate” who had “written in opposition of male-female marriage and gender as an eternal characteristic” and “called for homosexual sealings in LDS temples.” Graham then instructed individuals to call BYU president Cecil Samuelson on this “urgent” issue and included a copy of the email that he and his wife Janice Graham had sent to Samuelson seeking to de-platform me. Their letter warned: We represent an organization of like-minded people with a subscription list of nearly 8000. Petrey must not be allowed to speak, as he stands in active opposition to Church doctrine, and as such is apostate, the very topic he is to speak on.Please respond and let us know how you intend to address this matter.We will be sending out an email newsletter addressing this issue, and we would like to say that BYU did the right thing when it was brought to their attention that a speaker at one of their conferences was in direct opposition to the Church and its doctrines.19I learned of this specific content of the email later on, but I learned of its effects immediately as the conference was getting started. I arrived in Provo the night before the conference and heard that multiple complaints had been made against my presence at BYU that day. I was distraught at the accusation, frustrated by the misrepresentation of my argument, and bothered by their labeling me as something that I was not.BYU was scrambling to respond to this protest that had be foisted on them at the last minute. On the day of the conference, the dean of humanities, who had been tasked by President Samuelson to address the matter, scheduled a meeting with me to assess whether I would be a problem for them. The dean expressed concerns about the content of “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” and wanted to be reassured that nothing that I said that day in my talk would cover those topics, among other things. I also learned that undercover officers would be stationed in the audience for my protection in case the protest led to a disruption of the event. I delivered my talk and afterward was approached by Stephen Graham and another man, who I was not able to identify. They grilled me on my views on homosexuality and gave me their perspective that homosexuality was something that someone could change with help. Later that year, Graham would protest other speakers and events at BYU on homosexuality.20The final early response that I mention came in the form of an essay by Valerie Hudson Cassler. As noted above, she entered into debates about same-sex marriage by making a conservative feminist argument against the practice. Since that time, she continued to lay out her views in a series of popular presentations and essays.21 I had drawn on some of her scholarship and responded to some of it in “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology.” But I was stunned by her post in the online blog/journal that she ran called SquareTwo.org. The Summer 2012 issue (published in September 2012) included a piece titled “Plato's Son, Augustine's Heir: ‘A Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology’?”22 While she called my article “thoughtful and thought-provoking,” her argument was that (male) same-sex relationships were misogynistic and that I was engaged in “occult misogyny.” I was and remain hurt by the personal attacks.Here is the logic of the argument. Celestial reproduction is an essential doctrine that cannot be changed because it is the thing that makes women necessary partners in the plan of salvation. If women do not reproduce then they have no value. Since one option that I put forward—in a variety of post-heterosexual options—does not rely on women's eternal reproductive role, then I have made women themselves obsolete. “Women are no longer necessary for the work of the gods in the eternities, or for there to be brought forth spirit children: indeed, there need not be a Heavenly Mother, or, for that matter, earthly mothers,” she wrote.23Her criticism was based on a selective misreading. In my article, I laid out theological and scriptural precedents for male-female, male-male, and female-female creative relationships that included both reproduction and nonreproductive generation. I called into question the theological necessity of heterosexuality and heterosexual reproduction based on the existence of male-male creative relationships already in LDS theology. I did not question the necessary existence of women whose existence and importance is both affirmed and self-evident. I pointed to scholars who were examining nonreproductive kinship in Mormon thought and even her own scholarship that had equivocated on celestial reproduction.24 I question Cassler's argument that reduces women's worth to reproductive output as a feminist argument.Cassler's perspective relied on feminists who believe in social “parity” between the sexes and a complementarian notion of essential gender differences. Such parity, rather than equality, socially balanced men and women in egalitarian societies. I don't object to these goals, but I do question enforced heterosexuality as the means of achieving them and the binary ontology that Cassler uses to sustain them. This is one of the other areas of misrepresenting my argument in her response. Cassler suggested that I was putting forward a unitary ontology of gender that erased the differences between male and female. Rather, I explicitly said that I was using a pluralist ontology of gender that did not reduce sexual difference to two options: “To admit the social basis of gender does not entail the elimination of gender, nor does it require a leveling of difference toward some androgynous ideal. Quite the opposite. Instead, we may see more of a proliferation of ‘genders,’ released from the constraints of fantasies about a neat gender binary.”25 Hardly an heir to Augustinian ontology.I submitted a reply to Hudson privately. In my email I laid out the areas where we agreed and where there was further area for disagreement, but I also wrote: I think that you mischaracterize my argument about women's reproduction when you put quotes around the word “absurd” following a quotation of mine as if it is a continuation of what I have actually said. Of course, I never say such a thing, nor do I think it, and my argument about divine reproduction explicitly mentions both male and female reproductive processes, even in the quote you offer. Further, I spend over a page discussing the problems of women being excluded from creation in our ritual and textual accounts, as well as the dependency of women on male actors in those accounts. I do not single out women's bodies as messy, dirty, disgusting, contemptible, polluting, let alone does anything I say suggest a “profound contempt for all things female,” as you accuse me of doing. I find this accusation unfair and having no basis in anything I have said.The essay was quietly updated to correct a few errors, but her response to my email was dismissive. A week later I submitted a brief response in the public comments section of the article. My comment was held “under review” for two weeks and then appeared with her response.Cassler became the source for a particular misreading of my project. I've been frustrated that this argument has been considered a serious response and cited as such. The idea that expanding the heavens to allow for same-sex relationships and non-binary gender identity was somehow anti-women or anti-mixed-sex relationships remains unconvincing. An expansion does not eliminate what is already allowed but draws a bigger circle around what could be allowed. Yet this kind of argument that sees egalitarianism for others as diminishment for oneself has become a familiar form of grievance. Feminists should recognize the pattern of these arguments used against them as well.These responses, among many others, pushed me to think through some of the problems they raised, even when I fiercely disagreed with them. When I first wrote “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology,” I expected two things. First, it would not receive much readership or interest outside of a small group of scholars. Second, the ideas in the piece were the only real contribution that I had about the subject and I would soon return to other research projects. Both turned out to be false assumptions. Processing its reception, I found myself back on the topic again and again. Just what was the place of essential difference in Mormon theology, how does one account for reparative therapy, and what role would Heavenly Mother play in a post-heterosexual Mormon theology? On these questions, I wanted to engage broader feminist philosophy of religion to help me.In 2013 or so, I began writing in earnest what would become “Rethinking Mormonism's Heavenly Mother,” published in Harvard Theological Review in 2016.26 I hoped that one of the leading journals of the field would appreciate these questions and was grateful for their positive evaluation to publish it. In this essay, I tried to tease out the differences between women and heterosexuality that had taken hold in a variety of feminist theologies, including those in LDS circles. In “Rethinking,” I examined LDS feminist theology alongside broader feminist philosophies of religion that also insisted on the need for a divine Woman as the basis of women's importance, especially in the thought of Luce Irigaray. I examined how the role of “mother” had taken on central importance in these kinds of theologies, how they were tied to particular understandings of gender essentialism, complementarianism, and a reproductive imperative for women. Here, I tried to connect the ontological assumptions about women shared between competing schools of Mormon feminist thought: apologetic feminists like Cassler and critical feminists like Janice Allred.In this article, I also wanted to offer something constructive in the terms of a “generous orthodoxy.” That is, I hoped to find within the “orthodox” theologies of LDS thinkers some resources for solving the problems of gender essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality. This would extend the analysis of “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” that looked for alternatives to heterosexual kinship and essential gender internal to Mormon thought. I won't rehearse the arguments in detail here, but I thank Valerie Hudson Cassler's work on the atonement as one among many instances that showed how divine characters are not defined by binary gender differences. I admit that my essay is still more pointing to a problem, namely, the singular Heavenly Mother who must represent all women, and who does so imperfectly, than clearly answering that problem, in part because of the constraints of orthodoxy I was working within. My solution was to alleviate this strain by weakening essential gender differences and therefore the processes of identification between devotees and divine figures. It was satisfactory to me, but some felt that it went too far.27 In response to some criticism, I clarified: “My caution is no