What Would Christ Do?

What Would Christ Do?

The question is older than the bumper sticker, older than the wristband, older than its own commercialization. It is, at its root, a serious theological inquiry — one that the Latter-day Saint tradition is uniquely equipped to ask, because it possesses a theology of a living Christ who is not distant or allegorical but personally known, personally encountered, personally involved in the lives of His people. The question was not coined for convenience. It was coined for moments exactly like this one.

You love someone who is gay and Latter-day Saint. Or you are trying to. Or you want to, but you don't know how — not without betraying something you also hold sacred: your faith, your covenants, the expectations of the community that has shaped everything you are. You sit in a real and specific tension. On one side, a person you love. On the other, a set of teachings you have organized your life around. The question "What would Christ do?" is not meant to dissolve that tension with false simplicity. It is meant to give it a center of gravity. And the center of gravity is a person — the Savior whose name is on the door of every Latter-day Saint chapel — and what He actually did when He encountered people the religious establishment of His time had declared outside the circle.

This essay is written for the sibling who doesn't know what to say at Thanksgiving. For the parent who has memorized the Church handbook but is losing their child. For the ward member who genuinely believes the institution's position and also genuinely loves a gay friend and cannot figure out how to hold both without losing one. It is not a court martial of the institution. It is not a demand for theological revolution. It is an honest, direct examination — from scripture, from doctrine, from psychology, and from the plain record of what Jesus of Nazareth actually did — of how a disciple of Christ is called to treat the gay Latter-day Saints in their lives.

What He Actually Did

We can debate policy. We can hold reasonable disagreements about institutional positions that faithful, prayerful, sincere people have reached through genuinely different discernment processes. We can acknowledge that the application of doctrine across complex human circumstances is never simple. But there is one thing in the Christian tradition that is not meaningfully disputed: the record of what Jesus of Nazareth actually did when He encountered people who were marginalized, stigmatized, declared outside the covenant, or considered less-than by the religious establishment of His day. That record is in the text. It is consistent. And it is undeniable.

Across every recorded encounter, a pattern emerges so consistent it cannot be accidental. Jesus consistently moved toward the people the religious establishment had placed outside the circle. He consistently led with presence, with touch, with conversation — with the refusal to let policy determine the quality of human encounter. He consistently challenged His followers not to use the law as a reason to withhold love from the specific person in front of them.

In Matthew 25, the final judgment is not rendered on doctrine or institutional compliance. It is rendered on how people treated the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner — the ones society had declared least. What we do to the marginalized, Christ takes personally. In Latter-day Saint theology, which takes the literal and embodied nature of God with full seriousness, that passage carries the full weight of its words.

The pattern, stated plainly

Christ's sharpest words in the Gospels are not directed at the sinners. They are directed at the people who used religious authority as a weapon against the vulnerable. "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" (Matthew 23:13) is not addressed to the woman at the well. It is not addressed to the leper or the tax collector or the woman taken in adultery. It is addressed to those who made others feel they did not belong — who placed themselves and their doctrinal precision between suffering human beings and the love of God.

This is the undisputed record. It does not resolve every institutional question. It does not tell us exactly where every policy line should be drawn. But it establishes a model — a clear, consistent, unmistakable model — for how a disciple of Jesus Christ is expected to treat the person in front of them, regardless of the theological complexity that surrounds that person's life.

The Institutional View, and Why Faithful Members Hold It

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that sexual relations are ordained of God within the bonds of marriage between a man and a woman, and that same-sex marriage is not recognized as such within the Church's theology or ordinances. This is the current institutional position, and it is held by millions of sincere, loving, prayerful people who have reached it through genuine discipleship. This essay will not argue them out of it, nor does it try.

The faithful Latter-day Saint who holds this position is not, in most cases, holding it from cruelty. They are holding it from a sincere belief that it represents God's revealed will, from a genuine commitment to covenants they have made, and from a real love for the gay person in their life whom they fear will be harmed by departing from what they believe those covenants require. The mother who weeps when her son comes out and who nonetheless holds the institutional position is not a villain. She is a woman holding two real things at once: her love for her child and her belief in a God who has established certain boundaries for reasons that extend beyond mortality. That position deserves to be named honestly rather than dismissed.

But there is a difference — and it is a difference this essay must name directly — between holding an institutional position and determining how to treat a person. The Church's current position on same-sex marriage does not instruct members to withdraw from gay family members. It does not teach that love should be made conditional on compliance. It does not suggest that a gay son should be spoken of in the past tense, or that a gay sister should feel unwelcome at the family dinner table, or that a gay colleague should be excluded from the ward's circle of pastoral care. These behaviors — common as they are — are not the institutional position. They are cultural accretions that have attached themselves to the institutional position and been mistaken for it.

The distinction is crucial, and it is the hinge on which this entire essay turns. A faithful Latter-day Saint can hold the Church's teaching on marriage with full integrity and still run to meet their child. These things are not in conflict. The father in Luke 15 held a view about what his son had done. He also ran.

The Commandment That Cannot Be Conditioned

The greatest commandment, as Jesus stated it in Matthew 22:36–40, is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind — and to love your neighbor as yourself. He then added the interpretive key: "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Everything else — every other teaching, every policy, every institutional position — is commentary on these two. Which means that whenever any other teaching is used as a reason to withhold love from a neighbor, it has been placed above the commandment on which all other commandments depend. That is not faithful interpretation. That is inversion.

The Doctrine and Covenants gives us, in precise language, the manner in which God's power is exercised — and by extension, how His followers are expected to exercise theirs: by persuasion, longsuffering, gentleness, and love unfeigned. Not by withdrawal. Not by conditional presence. Not by the implicit message that love is available only on the other side of behavioral compliance. The scriptural standard for how a Latter-day Saint is to relate to a person they disagree with — on any grounds — is persuasion and longsuffering. This is not a soft suggestion. It is presented in the Doctrine and Covenants as the only way in which heaven's power operates.

Moroni 7:47 defines the "pure love of Christ" — charity — as something that "never faileth." Not "never faileth except in cases of homosexuality." Not "never faileth until the institutional position on marriage is invoked." Never faileth. The qualification is not in the text. Any version of charity that comes with those conditions attached is not charity in Moroni's sense. It is something else dressed in charity's name.

The lost sheep

The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) is perhaps the most direct scriptural commentary on what the relationship between a faithful community and a wandering person should look like. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine. He does not wait. He does not require the sheep to find its own way back before welcoming it. He goes out. He searches. He carries it home on his shoulders — and the text says he comes home "rejoicing." The return is not a quiet, conditional re-entry with a period of proving worthiness. It is a celebration. Whatever else this parable means, it is an unmistakable portrait of the orientation a disciple of Christ is expected to have toward the one who feels lost: you go.

Notice what the parable does not say. It does not say the shepherd goes after the sheep if the sheep first acknowledges it was wrong to wander. It does not say the ninety-nine vote on whether to welcome the lost sheep home. It does not say the shepherd waits until he has resolved his theological position on why the sheep left before he goes looking. He goes. He finds. He carries. He rejoices.

Eternal Families and the Vastness of What We Don't Yet Know

The Latter-day Saint theology of eternal families is among the most distinctive and beautiful contributions of the Restoration. The sealing ordinance — the promise that families can be bound together not just for mortality but across the eternities — is a theological vision of breathtaking scope and merciful ambition. It is also, for many faithful members, the source of their deepest anguish when a gay family member seems to fall outside that framework as it is currently understood.

"As currently understood" is doing important work in that sentence. Latter-day Saint theology has a built-in epistemic humility encoded in the Ninth Article of Faith: "We believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." This is not a hedge. It is a theological commitment — the Restoration's formal acknowledgment that the restoration of all things is not yet complete, that God has not finished speaking, and that the framework as understood in any given generation may be — and historically has been — expanded by further light.

The history of the Church makes this concrete in ways that are painful and instructive. For over 130 years, the institutional position was that Black members could not hold the priesthood or receive the fullness of temple ordinances. This was not presented as a policy under review. It was taught, by prophets and apostles, as doctrinal. Faithful members held it in good conscience. And then, in 1978, God said more. The framework that an entire generation believed was complete turned out to be incomplete. The plan of salvation, as understood until that moment, was revealed to be more vast and more merciful than any single generation had grasped. Families theologically separated were included. The circle grew.

This is not a prediction that the current position on same-sex marriage will change. No one can say that with certainty in either direction. But it is a testimony to the principle that theological humility about eternal things is not faithlessness — it is the very faith the Ninth Article of Faith demands. The honest answer to the question "What happens to my gay child in eternity?" is: we do not fully know. And "we don't fully know" is not despair. It is the ground from which Latter-day Saint faith has always grown.

The Atonement is infinite

The Atonement of Jesus Christ, in Latter-day Saint theology, is not a narrow mechanism for settling a small category of spiritual accounts. It is, as Alma 34:9 declares, "an infinite and eternal sacrifice." Infinite. The word means something. The plan of salvation is vast and merciful — so much larger than any single generation's understanding of it. Nephi saw it from a distance and wept. Alma described it as encircling the whole of humanity in the "arms of safety." The instinct to close the question of what God can do for and with gay Latter-day Saints in eternity — to declare the perimeter of His mercy with confidence — is an instinct toward theological certainty that the Restoration's own foundational documents explicitly resist.

What we can say, with full confidence grounded in the plain words of the Savior, is this: He who counts every hair on every head and marks the fall of every sparrow has not lost track of your gay son. He has not turned away from your gay daughter. He has not written off your gay friend. The Atonement that is infinite and eternal has not run out before it reached them. The plan of salvation that is bigger than any generation's comprehension has room that we cannot yet see. These are not platitudes. They are the theological commitments of the Restoration, plainly stated.

What We Know About What Isolation Does

This is the section of the essay that moves from theology to data — because the data is itself a theological matter. If we believe that every human being is a literal child of God with eternal worth, then what we know about the psychological consequences of rejection and isolation for gay Latter-day Saints must be taken with full moral seriousness. This is not a secondary concern. For many of the people this essay is about, it is a matter of survival.

The research is not ambiguous. Dr. Caitlin Ryan and colleagues conducted landmark studies on LGBTQ+ youth and family behavior. Adolescents who experienced high levels of family rejection were more than eight times more likely to have attempted suicide than those who experienced little or no family rejection. Nearly six times more likely to report high levels of depression. More than three times more likely to use illegal drugs. The variable that most powerfully predicted whether a young gay person lived or died, found resilience or collapsed, was not their theology. It was whether the people who loved them stayed.

For Latter-day Saint gay youth and adults, these numbers are not abstract — and the stakes are correspondingly higher than in almost any other community. The LDS social world is extraordinarily cohesive. Church is not merely worship for an hour on Sunday. It is the school friends and the neighborhood. It is the social calendar and the holiday table. It is the extended network of adults who show up for important moments and the community that has framed every significant relationship in a person's life. When a gay Latter-day Saint loses the community, they do not lose a religious affiliation. They often lose their entire social world simultaneously.

The psychology of belonging

Thomas Joiner's Interpersonal Theory of Suicide — one of the most rigorously supported frameworks in suicidology — identifies two factors that together create the highest risk for suicide: thwarted belongingness (the feeling of being cut off from one's community) and perceived burdensomeness (the belief that one is a weight on the people who love them, not a gift). Read those two factors against the experience of a gay Latter-day Saint who has come out to a family that has since grown quiet. Who sits in a chapel where the talks feel like indictments. Who watches their siblings' eternal family sealings from the cultural hall because their own relationship doesn't fit the current framework. Who hears their name spoken in family gatherings with a new, careful weight. The clinical language — thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness — becomes human. And the research tells us what these experiences do to a person over time.

Psychologists Baumeister and Leary demonstrated in landmark research that belonging is not a luxury or a feeling to be weighed against theological correctness. It is a fundamental human need — as basic as the need for food or shelter, as powerful as the drive for safety. To systematically deny belonging to a person is to do something to them. It is not a neutral act. And for Latter-day Saints who believe that every human being is a literal child of God with infinite and eternal worth, doing that to a person is not theologically neutral either.

What belonging does

The same research that documents the danger of rejection also documents something genuinely hopeful: the extraordinary power of even partial acceptance. Ryan's research found that LGBTQ+ young people with even one accepting adult in their family had dramatically better outcomes across every measure. Not a fully affirming family. Not a family that had resolved every theological question. One adult who communicated — clearly, consistently, in behavior as much as in words — I am still here. You still belong to me. You are not a burden. You are my child, my sibling, my friend, and I am not going anywhere.

That single relationship changes the calculus of survival. It is the difference between a person who has somewhere to go on Christmas and one who does not. Between a person who can call someone at 2 a.m. and one who cannot. Between a person who knows, at the cellular level, that they are loved in spite of a theological disagreement — and one who believes that the disagreement has voided the love. One adult. One relationship maintained. One seat kept at the table. The research is unambiguous about what that does.

Hope as a gospel principle

The thirteenth Article of Faith includes hope among the things Latter-day Saints explicitly believe in. Paul places it alongside faith and charity in his great trinity: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three" (1 Corinthians 13:13). In LDS theology, hope is not wishful thinking. It is a confident, forward-leaning orientation grounded in the promises of God — the expectation of a future that He is still shaping. For a gay Latter-day Saint sitting in the particular darkness of isolation, the question is not abstract: Is there anything ahead of me? Is there any version of the future in which I belong, am loved, am whole?

The people around a gay Latter-day Saint are the primary human conductors of hope into that person's life. God is sovereign and the Spirit is real — these are not small things. But in the daily, embodied texture of lived experience, hope arrives through people. A phone call not withdrawn. A place at the table kept. A hand on a shoulder in the hall at church. An invitation that still comes. These are not small gestures performing a small function. They are, for some people in some moments, the answer to the question of whether life continues.

You Don't Have to Change Your Theology to Stay

Here is something this essay wants to say directly to the faithful Latter-day Saint who is struggling with how to be present to the gay person they love: you do not have to resolve every theological question to stay in relationship. You do not have to change your position on marriage or abandon your covenants or pretend the institutional complexity doesn't exist in order to be a Christlike presence in the life of someone you love. The theological questions are real. The institutional position is real. And your relationship with this person is also real — and it is not required to wait for theology to be finished before it continues.

The distinction that matters here is between condoning and accompanying. Christ did not condone everything He encountered. He did not tell the woman taken in adultery that her choices had no consequences. But He accompanied her. He placed Himself between her and the stones. He spoke to her like a person rather than a case. He offered her a future — "go, and sin no more" — which is a statement about the possibility of a forward life, not a withdrawal of presence from the present moment.

You can hold your theology and still call. You can believe what you believe about marriage and still set a place at the table. You can follow the institutional position and still say, out loud, to the person you love: "I don't fully understand this. I don't know exactly what God's plan looks like for you in eternity. But I know that you are mine and I am yours and that is not going to change." You can make that commitment without resolving a single theological question, because it is not primarily a theological commitment. It is a relational one. And Christ modeled it constantly, without exception, without condition, without waiting for doctrinal clarity before extending His presence.

What the research tells us — and what the gospel confirms — is that your presence is the thing. Not your doctrinal clarity. Not your institutional compliance. Not even your specific words. Your presence. The gay Latter-day Saint in your life does not need you to be their theologian. They need you to be their person. The shepherd in Luke 15 was not prepared with a speech. He went. He found. He put the sheep on his shoulders. He came home rejoicing.

What Christ Would Do

The question has been in the title of this essay the entire time. It deserves a direct answer.

Christ would go to them. Not wait for them to figure it out and return on terms that made the community comfortable. Not send a letter outlining the conditions of re-entry. Not hold the relationship open at a careful theological distance until they demonstrated sufficient alignment. He would go. He would sit down at their well. He would touch them. He would eat at their table — and in His culture, eating with someone was a declaration of solidarity so pronounced that the religious establishment found it scandalous. "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them" (Luke 15:2) was the accusation. Christ did not dispute it. He responded by telling them three parables about the joy of finding the lost.

He would trust the Atonement to be large enough. He would trust the plan of salvation to be merciful enough. He would hold, with absolute confidence, the conviction that the story of a gay Latter-day Saint is not over, that God has not finished speaking, that the Restoration is not complete, and that the love at the center of the universe is vast enough — infinite enough — to hold every person who is struggling to find their place within it.

He would do what He has always done: begin with the person in front of Him. Love them from that beginning. Refuse to let theological complexity become a reason to withhold human presence. Lead with compassion. Trust God with the rest.

He would look at the gay Latter-day Saint in front of Him — the son, the daughter, the sibling, the friend — with the same eyes that wept over the Nephites at Bountiful. And He would say what He has been saying throughout this essay, through every parable and encounter and commandment: come unto me. I see you. You belong to me. And I am not going anywhere.

That is what Christ would do. The question that remains — the one only you can answer — is what you will do with that answer. Whether you will stay. Whether you will call. Whether you will set the place at the table. Whether you will go while they are yet a great way off.

The prodigal son's father did not wait for certainty. He did not wait for resolution. He saw his child at a distance and he ran. In the economy of God's love, that running — that reckless, unconditional, theologically unresolved running — is the whole point.