On Love

The Thing That Was Never the Problem

There is a cruelty so precise it is almost surgical. To take a man whose entire spiritual architecture — Latter-day Saint to the marrow, built on covenant and testimony and a genuine, bone-deep love of God — and to tell him that the most tender capacity he possesses, his ability to love another man, is the very thing that disqualifies him from the blessings he has spent his entire life pursuing. Not a bad habit. Not a failure of will. Love. The thing the gospel says is the greatest commandment, the first and second both — love is the problem.

That is the wound this essay is written to examine. Not to dress it over, not to spiritually bypass the very real pain of it, but to look at it directly, with the tools of scripture, of theology, of Greek and Hebrew linguistics, of honest psychology, and of the living testimony of a God who is love — and to ask whether the institution got the diagnosis right.

The answer, stated plainly at the outset, is no. It did not. The institution confused a sacred and God-given capacity with a behavioral prohibition, and in doing so it handed gay Latter-day Saint men a doctrine that is not only psychologically catastrophic but theologically incoherent. You were not taught to resist sin. You were taught to resist your own heart. Those are not the same thing. And the healing that needs to happen is not the healing of a sinner returning to obedience — it is the healing of a man who was robbed of his own love and told to be grateful for the theft.

Let us start at the beginning. Not the beginning of your pain, but the beginning of everything: God is love (1 John 4:8). Not merely that God loves, though He does. Not that God approves of love, or administers love, or grades love on a curve. John's declaration is ontological. It is a statement about the nature of God Himself. Love is not a characteristic God possesses. It is what God is. This means that when a human being loves — any human being, in any of love's forms — they are participating in the very nature of divinity. They are doing, in whatever imperfect and mortal way, what God does in His eternal perfection.

To say that a gay man's love is broken — that his capacity to love a man is a defect of the Fall, a disorder of spirit, a trial to be overcome — is to say that he is participating in something corrupted. And that claim stands in direct contradiction to the declaration that God is love. You cannot simultaneously affirm that love is divine in its essence and declare that a particular human being's love is the exception — the one form of the divine nature that God did not mean to include. The theology does not hold.

What the Greeks Knew That We Forgot

The English word "love" is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. It covers territory so vast that it collapses distinctions the ancient world considered essential. When we say that God commands us to love, and then say that a gay man's love is problematic, we are making a category error so fundamental that the entire argument collapses when examined in its original languages. The Greeks — and the New Testament authors who wrote in Greek — understood love to be a family of related but distinct experiences. To conflate them is to lose the map.

Here is what the institution's framing requires you to believe: that when a gay man experiences philia — the love of a close companion, a man who knows and is known — that is acceptable. That when he experiences storge — the sense of belonging, of family, of being claimed — that is acceptable. But that when érōs enters the picture — the drawing-toward, the longing, the pull toward union and beauty and completion — that capacity, in him alone among all human beings, is disordered. The exact same person, loving in three of four modes, is fine. The moment the fourth mode is present, he has a problem.

This is not a coherent theology of love. This is an exclusion dressed up as one. And it becomes theologically stranger still when you examine what érōs actually is — because the tradition of Christian mysticism, from Origen through Bernard of Clairvaux through Teilhard de Chardin, understood romantic longing as one of the primary metaphors for the soul's orientation toward God. The Song of Solomon exists in the canon for this reason. The mystics were not embarrassed by érōs. They understood it as the very grammar of spiritual hunger — the engine that drives the soul toward union with the divine. To pathologize it in gay men is to pathologize one of the great metaphors for the spiritual life itself.

The Commandment They Taught You Wrong

Matthew 22 records the moment a lawyer asks Jesus which commandment is greatest. The exchange is brief, dense, and has been at the center of Christian ethics ever since. Jesus gives two commandments, not one: love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. Then He adds the interpretive key: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Everything else is commentary.

Gay Latter-day Saint men were generally taught the first commandment well. Love God. Honor covenants. Serve faithfully. Pray. Fast. Attend. They were taught the middle portion of the second commandment adequately — love your neighbor, serve others, mourn with those that mourn. But they were systematically undertaught, or actively mistaught, the final three words: as yourself.

Those three words are not ornamental. They are not a casual comparison. They are a theological presupposition so significant that it restructures everything that comes before it. Jesus does not say "love your neighbor." He says love your neighbor as yourself — which means that self-love is the assumed baseline, the given quantity, the very unit of measurement by which neighbor-love is calibrated. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself if you do not love yourself. You cannot give what you do not have.

For decades — and for many gay LDS men, for their entire lives — the institution taught them that self-love was pride. That acceptance of their own nature was capitulation to the natural man. That the loving thing, the Christlike thing, was to turn their love inward on itself and call it surrender. This was not the gospel of Jesus Christ. This was a cultural and institutional overlay that took the commandment and quietly removed three words from it. Three words that would have changed everything.

The Hebrew beneath the Greek

It is worth noting that Jesus almost certainly said this not in Greek but in Aramaic, drawing from the Hebrew Scriptures — and in the Hebrew tradition, the word at the heart of the great commandment is ahavah. Ahavah is love in its most comprehensive biblical sense: the love of God for Israel, the love of a husband for a wife, the love of friends, the love that is covenantal and particular and specific. The rabbis understood ahavah to include the love that makes you vulnerable, the love that requires you to be known. There is no sanitized, affect-free, orientation-neutral version of ahavah in the tradition. Love, in the Hebrew sense, has a body, a direction, a specificity. It lands somewhere, on someone, for reasons that transcend logic.

Your love for other men is not outside the tradition of biblical love. In many ways, it is biblical love — specific, embodied, chosen, and costly. The love of David for Jonathan is described in Second Samuel as surpassing "the love of women" — a phrase so striking that translators have been dancing around it for centuries. The text does not apologize for it. It celebrates it. Whatever we make of the nature of that love, the biblical author thought it was worth preserving, worth calling extraordinary. The Bible's most celebrated friendship language sounds, to honest ears, like love language.

What the Restoration Actually Teaches About Love

Latter-day Saint theology has distinctive contributions to make here that are more generous than the institution has generally admitted. The Restoration's theological innovations — premortal existence, eternal progression, the nature of God as a glorified, embodied, relational being — actually create a richer framework for understanding love than most Christian traditions possess. That this framework has been turned against gay Saints is one of the great ironies of the Restoration's unfinished work.

The premortal argument

LDS theology teaches that we existed as spirit children of God before mortality. We had personalities, capacities, inclinations. God knew us. The scripture in Abraham 3:22–23 describes "intelligences" that were "organized before the world was" — implying that what we are is not an accident of birth but an expression of an eternal nature. The Church has taught, in various formulations, that our essential character preceded our mortal birth.

If this is true — and it is a cornerstone of Latter-day Saint theology — then a gay man's capacity for love cannot be a defect of mortality. It cannot be a malfunction introduced by the Fall. It preceded the Fall. It was part of the intelligence God organized. Your love, in other words, is not a consequence of a broken world. It is part of the person God sent into this world.

The purpose of joy

Second Nephi 2:25 is one of the most radical declarations in the standard works: "Men are, that they might have joy." Not "men are, that they might endure." Not "men are, that they might comply." Joy is the telos — the purpose, the end, the whole point. Lehi's declaration is not a platitude. It is a theological claim about why embodied existence matters, why mortality is not simply a test to be passed but an experience to be had, a life to be lived, a love to be known.

For a gay man in the Church, "joy" was often implicitly redefined as something accessible only through celibacy or in heterosexual marriage. Joy-as-capacity — the capacity for romantic love, for partnership, for the particular kind of knowing-and-being-known that comes through a committed relationship — was quietly amputated from the definition and the absence was called righteousness. But Lehi was not describing the joy of compliance. He was describing the joy of being — of aliveness, of full humanity, of the whole soul turned toward God and toward life simultaneously.

What Lehi describes, and what the institution withheld from gay men, is not some specialized spiritual joy available only after resurrection. It is the ordinary, extraordinary joy of a human being living his actual life — loving the people he was built to love, in the body he was given, in the life God sent him here to live.

The Ninth Article of Faith and the unfinished conversation

The Ninth Article of Faith is a statement that has been treated as decorative when it is actually dangerous — dangerous to every premature certainty the institution has ever settled into. "We believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." Not may. Not has revealed. Will yet reveal. The verb tense is a theological commitment to incompleteness. The Restoration, by its own declaration, is not finished.

The history of the Church confirms this at scale. The revelation on the priesthood in 1978 did not merely correct a policy. It corrected a theological claim — the claim that Black men were, by divine design, excluded from the fullness of the priesthood. For over a century, that exclusion was taught as doctrine. Presidents of the Church defended it as revelation. And then God, apparently, said more. The question the Ninth Article of Faith demands that we hold is not whether the institution has been wrong about gay people. The question is whether we are willing to sit in the discomfort of "not yet fully known" without mistaking institutional silence for divine verdict.

What the Savior Actually Did With Love

The Gospels do not give us an abstract Jesus. They give us a Jesus who loved in the particular — specific people, in specific moments, with specific and observable emotion. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He touched lepers. He spoke at length with the Samaritan woman at the well, violating every social convention about who deserved his attention. He called his disciples "friends" — philoi in the Greek — a word that in his culture carried the weight of mutual self-disclosure, of being known. He washed their feet. He asked Peter three times: lovest thou me? — and waited for the answer.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not a figure who maintained safe emotional distance from human beings to avoid the complications of love. He was, by every Gospel account, a man who loved people in ways that left him exhausted, grieved, moved in his spirit, and ultimately willing to die for them. His love was not managed or moderated. It was given extravagantly, recklessly, to people the institution of his day had declared unworthy of it.

And then — in one of the most theologically significant moments in the Book of Mormon — he came to the Nephites at Bountiful. He did not give them a talk. He did not hand them a handbook. He invited every man, woman, and child to come to him one by one, to feel the wounds in his hands and feet and side, to know by personal encounter that he was real. The text says that when they had all come forward, and when he had wept with them, he looked at them and said something remarkable:

My joy is full. Not their joy. His. The God of the universe, who has all things, declared his joy complete in the moment of intimate encounter with broken, struggling, beloved human beings. This is what love looks like in the theology of the Restoration. It is not managed from a distance. It is not transactional. It is not conditional on compliance. It is the God of heaven weeping because he is so glad to be with you. You, exactly as you are.

He who loved the disciples

The Gospel of John contains a phrase that appears four times and has no parallel in the synoptics: "the disciple whom Jesus loved." The beloved disciple is not identified by name in the text. What the text insists on is the quality of the relationship — that this particular man was loved by Jesus in a way worth noting, worth preserving, worth repeating. Christian tradition has wrestled with this phrase for two thousand years. Whatever its full meaning, it testifies to something the institution has under-emphasized: that Jesus loved individuals, specifically, with a particularity that the text considered worth recording. He did not love in generalities. He loved in persons. He loved this one, and that one, and you.

The Atonement, in its deepest logic, is not a transaction that purchases compliance. It is a covenant that declares worth. The Savior did not descend into Gethsemane to pay a debt that your obedience could then discharge. He descended into Gethsemane because he loved you — you, not a category you belong to, not a demographic that deserves inclusion — and love, at its most serious, does not let the beloved be lost without a fight. The Atonement is God refusing to let love lose.

What Was Actually Taken From You

It is important to name precisely what happened, because vague acknowledgment of harm does not heal anything. Here is what the institution, through decades of teaching, actually did: it took the most fundamental human capacity — the capacity to give and receive love — and told gay men that their version of it was the broken version. Not the behavior. The capacity. The orientation itself.

This is worth sitting with, because it is stranger than it first appears. If the teaching had said "the expression of same-sex love in sexual behavior is prohibited" — that would be a law, harsh perhaps, but a law. Laws regulate behavior. They do not pathologize the soul. But the teaching that was actually delivered went further than behavior. It said that attraction itself was disordered — that the internal experience of being drawn toward, of finding beauty in, of longing for a man was a malfunction of the spirit. This is not a behavioral prohibition. This is a claim about your personhood.

And because love and personhood are inseparable — because you cannot quarantine the capacity to love from the person who loves — what was effectively communicated was: the person you are, underneath the performance of compliance, is the problem. Not what you do. What you are. Who you are. How you love.

The particular cruelty of mixed-orientation marriage

For many gay Latter-day Saint men, this wound was compounded by the institution's encouragement — in some decades explicit, in others implicit — to enter heterosexual marriage as a form of healing or obedience. This is worth examining theologically, because it reveals the incoherence at the heart of the institution's position on love.

A man who enters a heterosexual marriage while gay is not someone who has discovered how to love differently. He is someone who has agreed to perform a form of love he does not feel, for a partner who deserves to be loved fully, within a covenant the institution called righteous. He is not healing. He is extending the central wound — the wound that says the love he actually feels is the wrong love — into the most intimate space in human life. His spouse becomes, through no fault of her own, a participant in a performance. And whatever real love exists in that marriage — and there often is real love, deep and genuine, of philia and storge and commitment — it is built on the suppression of his érōs, and that suppression does not heal. It calcifies.

The marriages were not failures of the people in them. They were failures of a theology that confused compliance with healing, and performance with love. Both partners in such a marriage deserved better. Both were harmed by a framework that valued institutional safety over human wholeness.

Reclaiming Love as a Theological Act

Healing, in this context, is not a matter of forgiving the institution and moving on, as though the harm were a misunderstanding that time resolves. Healing is an active and specific process of reclaiming territory — of naming what was taken, going to get it back, and learning to inhabit it again. The territory that was taken from you is love. Your love. Your capacity to love and to be loved, without asterisk, without condition, without the hovering presence of institutional disapproval that turns every tender feeling into a question about your worthiness.

The theological act of healing is to return to the texts — the scriptures, the Articles of Faith, the words of Christ himself — and read them again as someone who has not already been told what they mean. To read "God is love" and sit with it long enough to let it mean what it says. To read "men are, that they might have joy" and notice that Lehi did not add exceptions. To read the commandment to love yourself and take it seriously enough to actually try.

Agápē begins with receiving

One of the most liberating insights in Christian theology is this: agápē — the unconditional, divine love — flows in one direction first. It begins with God, not with you. First John 4:19 is exact: "We love him, because he first loved us." You do not generate agápē by effort or obedience or willpower. You receive it. And having received it, having let it land on you in its full weight, you discover that you are capable of passing it through — to others, to yourself, to the world. The sequence matters. Receiving precedes giving. Being loved precedes loving well.

For a gay man who has spent decades performing love — performing devotion, performing compliance, performing the version of love the institution said God required — the healing act is to stop performing and start receiving. To sit, even for five minutes, with the possibility that God is not waiting for you to fix yourself before He loves you. That He loves you now, fully, in this body, with this heart, with this capacity for love that the institution told you was broken. He loves that part of you. He made that part of you. And He has been waiting, not for your compliance, but for you to stop running long enough to feel it.

You know this verse. You have lived inside the torment it describes. What you may not have been told is the verse's active promise: the love does the work. Not your love for God — His love for you. Your job is not to fix yourself or correct your nature or suppress your heart until you are worthy of receiving it. Your job is the simpler, harder, more radical thing: to stop running from a love that has been chasing you your entire life.

Self-love as obedience

There is a reframe that is both theologically defensible and practically transformative: self-love, for you, is not optional. It is commanded. When Jesus says "love your neighbor as yourself," he is not suggesting a spiritual aspiration. He is giving an instruction, and the instruction has two parts. If you have spent your life excelling at neighbor-love — serving, mourning with, lifting, healing — while systematically refusing the second half of the equation, you are not being humble. You are being disobedient. You are refusing to do part of what Christ asked.

This is not the pride the institution warned you about. The pride Latter-day Saint theology identifies as dangerous is the pride that "putteth down the power of God" (Moroni 8:27) — the pride that substitutes human judgment for divine love, that places institutional approval above the witness of the Spirit, that makes the opinions of others the measure of your worth. Loving yourself is not that pride. Loving yourself is the foundation from which every other form of love is possible.

Your love is not the exception

The last thing to name, and perhaps the most important, is this: your capacity to love another man is not categorically different from the love that the gospel celebrates. It is the same family of experiences — philia, érōs, storge, and when you are brave enough, agápē — directed toward a particular kind of person. The direction does not corrupt the love. A river flowing west is still a river. Your love, flowing toward men, is still love — still capable of being tender, sacrificial, faithful, covenantal, and Christlike. Still capable of being the thing the Great Commandment commands.

You were not given a broken form of love. You were given love, full and functional and real, and then handed a theology that told you it was broken so that you would be more manageable. You were not more manageable. You were more damaged. And the damage was not your fault.

The Love That Was Never the Problem

You will stand before God one day. You have probably imagined that meeting with dread — the ledger, the review, the accounting of all the ways you fell short of an institution's ideal. But that is not what God is. God is not an institution. God is love.

What you will find in that meeting — if you can let go of what you were taught to fear long enough to imagine it clearly — is not a judge with a handbook but a Father who has been watching you struggle toward love your entire life. Who has seen every time you suppressed what you felt in the name of what you were told God wanted. Who has seen the genuine faith underneath the performance, the real tenderness underneath the compliance, the love that would not stay buried because it was never supposed to.

He will not ask why you loved the way you loved. He made you the way you love. He will ask what you did with love — whether you let it make you generous, or whether fear made you small. Whether you let it make you tender toward the suffering of others, or whether self-protection made you hard. Whether you let love, in all its forms, flow through you toward the people in your life who needed it.

And if you have — even imperfectly, even through decades of pain, even while carrying wounds the institution never acknowledged — then I believe the answer you will hear is not a verdict but a welcome. Not a judgment but a coming-home. The God who is love, recognizing in you the work of love, and saying the thing He has been saying to you your entire life, if only the noise of others had not made it so hard to hear:

"Come unto me. You are mine. You have always been mine. And I am so glad you are home."

Your love was never the problem. It was always, in some form, the answer.