LDS Doctrine Through the Eyes of a Gay Latter-day Saint

The Premortal Existence and Divine Organization of Identity

The Doctrinal Concept

Latter-day Saint theology is almost unique among Christian traditions in its robust doctrine of a premortal life. Before mortality, each person existed as an intelligence, was organized as a spirit child of Heavenly Father, and progressed through a premortal estate. This was not a passive waiting room. It was a place of development, character formation, and relationship with God. Abraham 3 describes God surveying the spirits and finding among them “noble and great ones” whom He would call to leadership. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that intelligence itself — the core of who we are — is co-eternal with God and cannot be created or destroyed.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

The theological implication here is deeply significant and rarely preached. If your intelligence is co-eternal with God — if it cannot be created or destroyed — then the capacity for love that defines your orientation is not a product of fallen mortality. It is not a mutation introduced by the Fall of Adam. It is not a defect that emerged somewhere between your premortal perfection and your mortal birth.

The standard institutional framing — that same-sex attraction is a “mortal condition” that will not persist beyond the resurrection — rests on the assumption that your orientation is a product of mortality. But the premortal doctrine, taken seriously, points in the other direction. God knew you. He organized your intelligence. He evaluated your character and found you noble and great enough to send to earth with specific callings.

The Nature of Truth and Self-Knowledge

The Doctrinal Concept

In a revelation given to Joseph Smith in 1833, God offered one of the most philosophically precise definitions of truth in all of scripture: “Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” This verse establishes that truth is correspondence with reality — not with institutional preference, not with cultural expectation, not with what would be convenient. Truth is what is actually, actually real.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

For decades, gay Latter-day Saints were implicitly and explicitly taught that the most faithful response to their orientation was concealment. But D&C 93:24 simply will not permit that framing if taken seriously. If truth is knowledge of things as they are, then self-knowledge is a form of truth. To know yourself — your orientation, your capacity for love, your heart — with clarity and honesty is not a departure from gospel truth. It is an expression of it.

The Atonement as Covenant Rather Than Transaction

The Doctrinal Concept

The most common popular understanding of the Atonement within Latter-day Saint culture is transactional: Christ paid a price that offsets your debt. This framework, while not entirely wrong, is theologically incomplete and pastorally catastrophic when applied to gay Latter-day Saints who have been taught to understand their identity — not just their behavior — as the debt.

A more complete theological reading of the Atonement in LDS scripture emphasizes covenant. In the Book of Mormon, the Atonement is consistently framed as God declaring His love and binding Himself to His children. “Mercy can satisfy the demands of justice, and encircles them in the arms of safety” (Alma 34:16). The metaphor is an embrace, not a ledger entry.

Key Scriptures

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

The transactional Atonement creates an impossible theological trap for a gay Latter-day Saint: if your identity is the sin, then the condition for accessing the Atonement is to stop being who you are. The transaction can never complete, because the debt — your nature — never disappears.

The covenantal Atonement breaks this trap entirely. In the covenantal framework, mercy does not overpower justice by helping you earn your way out of who you are.

Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

The Doctrinal Concept

Fear is not a morally neutral emotion in Latter-day Saint theology. Fear — particularly shame-based, identity-level fear — is consistently identified as the opposite of love, not the opposite of courage. And the antidote to fear is not willpower, obedience, or self-discipline. It is love. Specifically, God's love for the individual.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

The fear that defines the experience of so many gay Latter-day Saints is not ordinary anxiety. It is the particular torment John describes: a deep, identity-level dread that your very nature is an offense to God — that to be known fully would be to be rejected utterly. This is not a peripheral discomfort. It is the central wound of institutional messaging around homosexuality within the Church.

What 1 John 4:18 offers is not a command to feel better, but a theological reframe of the source of healing. The verse does not say: “Cast out your own fear through greater obedience.” It says: perfect love casts out fear. The subject is love. The object is fear. You are neither the subject nor the object. You are the one being loved.

The Ninth Article of Faith — Continuing Revelation as Theological Humility

The Doctrinal Concept

The Ninth Article of Faith reads: “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.” This is a foundational theological commitment — an admission, built into the Articles of Faith themselves, that the Restoration is not complete, that institutional understanding is provisional, and that God's future revelations may correct or expand what current leaders understand.

This is one of the most radical doctrines in all of Christianity. Most Christian traditions hold their canon closed. Latter-day Saint theology holds it explicitly, constitutionally open.

Scriptural Basis

Official Declaration 2 (1978) — The revelation extending the priesthood to all worthy male members, reversing over a century of institutional policy, is the most recent major example of the Ninth Article's lived reality. The Church was wrong. God corrected it. The institution repented.

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

The Ninth Article of Faith offers not a license for wishful thinking but a theologically grounded reason for hope. If God revealed to the institution that a century-long policy excluding Black members from the priesthood and temple was wrong, then the Ninth Article is not merely rhetoric — it is a promise with a demonstrated track record of fulfillment.

A gay Latter-day Saint who holds their testimony and their questions simultaneously is not being faithless. They are being precisely as faithful as the Ninth Article requires.

The Two Great Commandments and the Presupposition of Self-Love

The Doctrinal Concept

When Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest, He identified two: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39). What is almost never examined in Latter-day Saint teaching is the presupposition embedded in the second commandment: it assumes that you love yourself as the baseline. The command is not “love your neighbor more than yourself” or “love your neighbor and also try to love yourself.” It is: the measure of how you should love your neighbor is how you already love yourself.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

Gay Latter-day Saints have been systematically taught to treat self-acceptance as spiritual pride — to keep themselves at arm's length, to view self-love as a sign of apostasy rather than a commandment. The result has been a generation of men who can serve others with extraordinary generosity while treating themselves with contempt.

This is not righteousness. It is the violation of the second great commandment, which requires that your self-regard be the measure of your regard for others. If you cannot love yourself — if you are in a permanent state of shame about your nature — then every act of service you perform is drawing from an account that is never replenished.

Mosiah 18:8–9 — The Covenant of Mutual Bearing

The Doctrinal Concept

Alma's covenant at the Waters of Mormon defines the baptismal covenant in strikingly mutual and communal terms. Before anyone gets wet, Alma asks whether they are “willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light; willing to mourn with those that mourn; willing to comfort those that stand in need of comfort.” This is a covenant of mutual bearing — a community bound together by the commitment to share one another's weight.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

Gay Latter-day Saints have been asked to carry burdens that the community has systematically refused to acknowledge as burdens — told, in effect, that their suffering is not real mourning, their grief is not legitimate grief. This is a failure of the baptismal covenant — not on the part of the gay Latter-day Saint, but on the part of the institution that trained the community to withhold the burden-bearing it promised.

But the covenant also works in reverse. The gay Latter-day Saint who has carried the particular burden of this experience has developed a capacity for burden-bearing that is among the rarest spiritual gifts in the Church. The one who has experienced the weight most fully is the one most equipped to bear it with others.

The Plan of Salvation — Its Mercy, Scope, and Incompleteness of Current Understanding

The Doctrinal Concept

The plan of salvation — perhaps the most distinctive and beautiful theological contribution of the Restoration — is a vision of human existence so vast and merciful that it dwarfs every other Christian eschatology. Together these constitute a theological framework in which almost no one is ultimately lost, in which God's mercy has room enough for every kind of human complexity, and in which our current mortal understanding is explicitly a partial glimpse of something immensely larger.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

The plan of salvation is vast enough to hold questions that current institutional teaching cannot resolve. D&C 137 establishes that God judges not only by what occurred but by what would have occurred in different circumstances — a principle of cosmic mercy with enormous implications for those who lived in impossible institutional circumstances.

More significantly: if the plan of salvation is, at its core, a plan for joy — “Men are, that they might have joy” — then any reading of the plan that produces only shame, fear, isolation, and torment is a misreading. The plan cannot be simultaneously aimed at joy and also require its gay members to live in permanent joylessness as a condition of faithfulness.

The Gift of Discernment and the Light of Christ

The Doctrinal Concept

Latter-day Saint theology teaches that every human being, regardless of baptism or religious affiliation, is given the Light of Christ — a measure of moral illumination that enables them to distinguish good from evil, truth from falsehood, and the voice of the Spirit from the voice of institutional convenience. This light is not dependent on church membership. It is a birthright of human existence.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

Many gay Latter-day Saints have had the experience of hearing institutional teaching about their orientation and feeling, in Moroni's framework, a “stupor of thought” — a deep internal witness that something is wrong with what they are being told. They were then told to override this witness with obedience. To treat their internal discernment as pride or apostasy.

But Moroni 7:16 does not permit this reading. The Spirit of Christ — the universal human moral compass — is given precisely so that every person can discern good from evil. And Moroni 7:13 provides the test that any teaching must pass: does it invite you to do good and love God? Or does it move you toward self-hatred, fear, and despair?

The Character of Christ and the Specific Invitation to the Wounded

The Doctrinal Concept

The Latter-day Saint understanding of Christ is not merely that He performed an atonement to satisfy divine justice. He is a living, active, present Savior who has specific, documented instincts about the wounded, the marginalized, the institutional castoff, and the person who has been told they are not worthy of love. These instincts are recorded in granular narrative detail in the scriptures, and they tell a consistent story about the kind of person Jesus walks toward rather than past.

Scriptural Basis

Adaptation for a Gay Latter-day Saint

Every one of these texts is a window into the character of the Being in whose name the institution has sometimes done its most harmful work. And that character is remarkably consistent: Christ moves toward the wounded, not away from them. He does not require them to be whole before He approaches. He approaches and then heals.

The institutional narrative sometimes requires gay Latter-day Saints to see themselves as perpetually at the edge of the community, conditionally accepted, never quite fully belonging. The character of Christ, as recorded in every gospel account, tells a different story. In that story, the person at the edge of the community is the first one Jesus walks toward.

These theological reflections are offered in the spirit of the Thirteenth Article of Faith: “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” The love of God for His gay children is all of those things — and it deserves to be sought after, articulated, and defended with the same rigor we bring to any doctrinal question.