When it comes to drawing lessons from the story of Adam and Eve, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint has a history of playing it fast and loose.
So argues Latter-day Saint Taylor Petrey, a scholar of Mormonism and gender and sexuality, in his new book, “Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos.” In the text, a theology-heavy follow-up to his “Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism,” Petrey observes that, at various points in the faith’s history, church higher-ups have used the biblical duo to argue:
• In favor of polygamy.
• Against polygamy.
• In favor of a hierarchical marriage structure in which the man rules (later softened by the then-President Spencer W. Kimball to “preside”).
• In favor of egalitarian marriage in which the couple are equally yoked.
• That Eve is the villain of the story.
• That Eve is the hero of the story.
And so on.
In other words, Petrey writes, “with the arrival of each new set of marriage practices, a new interpretation of the Adam and Eve story follows to lend legitimacy” to the new standard.
(Taylor Petrey) Taylor Petrey, a Latter-day Saint scholar of gender, Mormonism and the Bible is out with a new book, "Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos." In it, he argues that Latter-day Saint scriptural accounts of the Godhead and Adam and Eve are far less clear about marriage and gender than many church leaders have often suggested.
That means any “modern interpretations that say that the Adam and Eve story supports heterosexual monogamy are importing their own views just as much as” those who once used their example to push polygamy.
This constant reinterpretation doesn’t stop with marriage and gender roles. When leaders want to encourage childbearing (a topic of even greater focus of late), Adam and Eve are there. When they want to argue that there are only two immutable genders, Adam and Eve are ready to answer the call.
What if, given this history of constant reevaluation, Latter-day Saints (who, by the way, aren’t the only faith tradition to wield the biblical figures as the theological equivalent of a Swiss Army knife) were to strip away current assumptions around the text and read the story with new eyes?
“Queering Kinship” is Petrey’s own attempt at this experiment. The Kalamazoo College Bible professor spoke with The Salt Lake Tribune to summarize his findings. (The following has been edited for length and clarity.)
What do you believe the story of Adam and Eve actually says about marriage?
We need to accept that this text might not be designed to answer all of our questions about the nature and meaning of marriage. After all, there is never a marriage ceremony as we would understand it for Adam and Eve in the text.
There are other reasons why I bring some skepticism to the idea that this story is about marriage. One is there are so many other modern categories that we’ve imposed on it aside from the concept of marriage.
For example?
The notion of a biological male and biological female. The text does not make any claims about biology. The process of creation for both the male and female in the Genesis creation story is not a biological one. You’ve got God forming Adam out of dust and breathing into his nostrils and Eve being formed from the rib of Adam. That’s not a biological process of reproduction or gender difference.
The books of Genesis, Moses and Abraham [the latter two are Mormon scriptures] all say that male and female are created in the “image and likeness” of a singular being, challenging the idea that the sexes are somehow diametrically opposed or that there is any kind of inherent hierarchy.
(Library of Congress) 1848 Currier & Ives print of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Latter-day Saint tellings of the biblical duo do not, Petrey argues, make any claims about male and female biology.
Genesis isn’t the only place where Latter-day Saints encounter the story of Adam and Eve. What do other canonized versions of it have to say on these topics?
The fact that Latter-day Saints have so many additional versions of this story that also don’t support some of the presumptions that we might bring to it about sexual difference and about marriage further suggests we should approach these creation accounts not as a description of actual facts, but as myths communicating a variety of messages.
Are there other assumptions that Latter-day Saints hold about Adam and Eve that a closer reading of the story disrupts?
Procreation and reproduction. We misread “multiply and replenish” as a commandment when, if you look closely at the context, it’s meant to be understood as a blessing from God to creation.
So we’ve talked about what the story doesn’t say. What are the messages it’s actually trying to relay?
One of the primary messages of the story is about the relationships that humans might have with respect to one another — but that aren’t exclusively reserved for men and women. The way that Adam recognizes Eve upon her creation is to say, “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He chooses to focus not on their difference but rather their similarity, their sameness. That is how they establish their relationship to one another.
That exact same verbal formula is used time and time again to describe same-sex relationships of kinship in the Bible. So we’ve got a variety of instances in which men say to other men, “you are my bone and my flesh” or “these people are my bone and my flesh.”
It’s a way of recognizing a kinship, not necessarily based on sexual difference but rather based on a covenant relationship or a relationship of care.
“Kinship” comes up often in your book. What does it represent, and why is it so important?
Kinship relationships are most often associated with concepts of family. But a biological or nuclear family has always failed to account for the variety of ways that humans form relationships and relate to one another. So kinship, the way scholars use it today, becomes this way to create this broader category of family where all kinds of relationships are put on equal footing. What this does is disrupt the privilege of the heterosexual and the biological as the essence of family.
How does that disruption fit with the Latter-day Saint belief in a Heavenly Mother and all the implications there?
I have a couple of different approaches that I hope fully honor the Heavenly Mother tradition while also being sensitive to the ways the belief has been abused to assert the supremacy of heterosexuality.
One is to point to the other relationships in which Heavenly Father exists beyond Heavenly Mother, especially the Godhead in which Heavenly Father is in an eternal covenant with these other putatively male figures. Their relationship is described as one of unity of purpose, which represents the same language used to describe Latter-day Saint heterosexual sealings. It appears, then, that the relationship between male members of the Godhead is not distinct in kind from the relationship between Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) "She Who Shall Become," by Esther Hi'ilani Candari, as seen at the 2021 Reflections on Mother in Heaven exhibit hosted by Anthony's Fine Art and Antiques. The Latter-day Saint belief in a Heavenly Mother does not necessarily rule out, Petrey suggests, the possibility of eternal same-sex marriage.
So I don’t think that Heavenly Mother precludes the idea of there being same-sex relationships that are also eternally bound in covenant and purpose with one another.
The second way that I approach the Heavenly Mother question is to invite a reconsideration of the idea that she is engaged in eternal reproduction. To do this, I point to a tradition in the LDS doctrine that sees motherhood as something which is not limited to or defined exclusively by reproduction but instead involves those broader practices of kinship like nurturing and care.
And I think that that provides us a much broader understanding of the way that mothering might happen and the way that Heavenly Mother is honored without becoming a source of exclusion for nonbinary individuals, those in same-sex relationships, and women who do not bear children.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
