The water in the font was warm that Sunday morning in March, some 20-odd years ago. This gospel must be true, I thought, feeling enveloped in the safe warmth that good decisions often bring.
I hadn’t heard of Latter-day Saints until I moved to New York in 2003. Their real and sure approach to eternal life baited me. My acute Catholic upbringing was rife with stories of fear that had been repeated to me over the course of my then 17 years, with no direct instructions for the eternities. But the early teachings in the Book of Mormon, the signature scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, seemed to stress the importance of knowing and loving our “Heavenly Father” rather than fearing him.
“We love one another,” Elder Meredith, in his white shirt and black nametag, explained to me back then. “We learn to forgive quickly, just as we want swift forgiveness. We barely understand our Heavenly Father, but we believe in him, because there’s a space and time for more than what we’re experiencing now.”
But in the years that followed, learning about King Benjamin and Moroni in the Book of Mormon didn’t explain the church’s deeply pervasive culture to me. Why did being a worthy, respected Latter-day Saint mean checking all those temporal boxes and forced milestones? There were so many items on the checklist: serving a church mission, marrying in the temple, having kids, making a home. There were disturbing ones, too, like sexism, learned discrimination, entitlement and homophobia. Outside of “linger longer” gatherings and fast Sunday potlucks, a warped sense of faith blanketed all the ills no one liked acknowledging: a moral superiority and discreet white nationalism veiled in Christianity.
Still, I delighted in the unconditional love the church professed to have for me, for anyone who came into the fold. Then I married at 26. And although the color of my skin left much to be desired in a fitting eternal companion for a white Idaho boy, we knelt across the altar from each other and were sealed for time and all eternity.
I loved Adam and knew I wanted to be with him. But I had to endure the cautious words from our bishop, “You know, different … backgrounds … can be a hindrance in a marriage.” I walked through walls of “why her?” and “she’s different” when Adam introduced me to his family. He gave his parents an ultimatum when our engagement was afoot, inviting them to either be a positive or absent part of our life together. “No, Dad. She’s not some Black phase I’m going through. I am going to marry her.”
And after we married, white church members and nonmembers assumed he had converted (read: “rescued”) me. Or that I had converted for him. Eleven years later, people still asked, “Did you join the church because of Adam?” If I had a dollar for every time I heard that question, I’d have been much happier when paying a full tithe.
I realized everyone knew before I did that the church was white on purpose. The saints they were “perfecting” didn’t look like me. Think like me.
The saints were the white men, upright and out of touch. The ones who upheld a church culture that upheld their social class. Promoted it. They unconsciously — or consciously — labeled people by their work, wealth or woes. “So, what does he do?” … “What does she look like?” … “How many square feet is that house?” This is the sorting hat we don to mislabel the same realities for different races.
Still, it all seemed bearable, even the racism and shortsightedness, the comfortable ignorance that kept damaging stereotypes afoot. These were challenges we knew we would face as an interracial couple in a skewed white world. But that’s what eternal companions did; they endured together.
Until he couldn’t endure anymore.
It started in 2020, when Adam and I took a step back from the church, due to its passive stance toward the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement. A step back from the gender roles and judgmental conference talks. From the church’s inability to be valiant in this existence with its minority members, much like they said we were in the preexistence (hah). After experiencing years of microaggressions and fluent prejudice, I could no longer occupy spaces that required me to shrink or distort myself for the comfort of others. And while I unburdened myself of everyone’s comfortable ignorance, my husband also did the same. He stepped away from church repression and familial homophobia.
And away from me.
One Friday last April, I found out that while we helped sound the alarm on racism and white fragility, my husband had been carefully silencing a truth of his own — that he could repress his sexuality no longer. For 11 years, he had regrettably chosen what was expected of him — what was easier: to be a straight white male in a world that catered to straight white males.
“You don’t know what it’s been like growing up Mormon with a homophobic family,” he kept repeating.
Was he right? Did I not know what it was like being Mormon in a space that was not tailored to cater to the likes of me?
Last year was a steep learning curve. Suddenly, having been sealed in the temple felt callously temporal, a covenant sown in half-truths and shame. While my husband eagerly sought to make up for his lost time, I was left to mop up the mess in its wake, facing financial uncertainty and an irreparable loss of trust.
And regret. So much regret.
My daughters and I are now living this very present devastation adjacent to the white male, main-character story of yet another sexually repressed Latter-day Saint finding his way to the truth. Here I am again, personally shouldering another Latter-day Saint deficiency. This time I feel utterly defeated.
While the church is (supposed to be) the instrument our Heavenly Parents use to administer the ordinances that bring us into a covenant relationship with them, it has instead become an institution of marginalization — ushering people to abandon their authenticity in favor of what is traditionally acceptable. The Mormon scripture verse “Be one; and if ye are not one, ye are not mine” (D&C 38:27) has become a call to uniformity. Like a Band-Aid over a growing tumor, this gospel message has been reduced and echoed in conference talks and firesides time and again to numb our individual identities, repress our differences and swallow the hurts we endure because of them.
I hardly believe our Heavenly Parents want us to dim the diversity and uniqueness within ourselves, and yet instead of “being one” in genuine love, the church subtly implores us to be one in kind to earn love. This is the persistent contradiction, and harm, in the church. Just as Black people were considered “spiritually inferior” until 1978, so too will the church see the LGBTQIA community as inferior until some future time when church leaders will once again need to catch up with what’s right and equal in the world, no doubt through divine revelation. Until then, many more stories like my own will surface. Many already have.
As Latter-day Saints, we are taught that the gospel delights in the truth of all things. And yet church culture has proved, many times over, that it delights in the bearable truths of some things. White fragility is an institutional flaw that is now as much part of the church as the Book of Mormon itself. So many members feel crayoned into these fragile areas of the church where real progress and understanding and genuine love should be, glued to a space devoid of growth and accountability.
Carlene Fraser is a writer and editor living in London. She’s the academic editor in Experiential Careers and Apprenticeships at Northeastern University London and an aspiring author known for her literary writing and awards. Recently writing more expressly for catharsis, her new blog journeys through her experiences and decisions with this major turn in her life (coming soon). The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.
