A Safe Space to Worship
I must admit there are very few safe places for a queer Mormon to worship. I generally don’t consider the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a safe place for queer Mormons, though there are exceptions. Each must choose for themselves. Yet, as I’ve participated in ex-Mormon and post-Mormon communities it has become painfully obvious there are few spaces for a believing queer Mormon. When expressions of faith are met with ridicule, how could I feel safe? There are ex-Mormons who feel strangely comfortable telling me that a queer woman like myself should have long since left such an oppressive church and denounce faith.
Philosophy and academia can be just as unsafe. If I maintain belief in myths, angels, gods, and monsters, I belong in the stone age among the superstitious and delusional. Conversations about God or theism come with a healthy dose of quotations from “The God Delusion.” An atheist will tell me what God is then criticize that projection without once asking me what I think or believe about God. The nuances and shades of gray between metaphor and literalism, reality and fiction, myth and experience, legend and history, become harsh binaries where “true philosophers” and “religious nuts” can be parsed out like wheats and tares. They criticize me for my belief in God when they believe in such myths as “truth” or “objectivity.” A god by any other name is still a myth.
Yet, in Latter-day Saint spaces I’m often treated with skepticism, rejection, fear, and hostility. When I raise my hand to speak, the defenders of tradition hold their breath waiting to correct what the queer woman is about to say. It’s as if my experience as a queer woman has condemned me to the office of “diseased” and I must be quarantined for fear I infect the rest of the religious community with my philosophy, or worse, my queerness. Meanwhile, patriarchs patronizingly deliberate my existence behind closed doors only to inscribe their bigotry in Handbooks. My gender is enough to condemn me, yet my testimony is not enough to save me.
Mormon feminist spaces can be just as dangerous. The existence of queer non-monogamous women disrupt the white, cisgender, heterosexual narrative. Monogamy is the “one true church” of many Mormon feminist circles. They cannot imagine plural marriage and sealings as anything other than patriarchal and oppressive, but that’s simply not the case for all women. I’ve received nearly as much ridicule, rejection, and shunning from Mormon feminists for being non-monogamous as I have from the Church for being queer. Yet, the Church’s stance on plurality fails us both. It fails to address the needs of women who wish to remain monogamous, while also thwarting the desires of queer non-monogamous women by denying us plural sealings. We all lose.
For the record, I didn’t stop attending church because I don’t have a testimony of the restored gospel or stopped believing in Mormonism. Quite the contrary. I stopped attending because the pews were an unsafe place to worship our common faith. There are no safe places for queer believing non-monogamous women to worship.
As a believing queer Mormon, I feel lonely. I feel lonely in academic spaces. I feel lonely at church. I feel lonely in feminist spaces. I feel lonely in secular spaces. Where do believing queer Mormons turn for communal worship when secularists condemn my faith and Latter-day Saints condemn my queerness?
Despite the bad experiences I have had at church, I still miss it. I miss communal worship. I miss singing hymns with my peers. I miss the sacrament. I miss working with the youth. I miss ward council. I miss fast and testimony meeting. I miss having a place to share what I believe beyond the boundaries of secularism and academia. I miss my fellow Latter-day Saints, warts and all.
For now, I must continue to worship alone even though deep within my being there is a relentless spark of hope that someday we might be able to worship together in a chapel that embraces a full range of congregates. I still have hope that my community will robustly believe, as I do, that all are alike unto God and there is room for all of us in the eternities. Until that day, I must worship in the mountains.
