How do you reconcile your homosexuality with your church’s belief that same-sex relations are sinful? Nathan Kitchen’s THE BOUGHS OF LOVE seeks to answer that question, examining theology and LDS politics in an attempt to find common ground between Mormonism and the LGBTQ community within it.
A former president of Affirmation, an unofficial nonprofit Mormon group for LGBTQ believers, Kitchen is that rare thing: a believer who is ready to admit his church’s failings. He imposes a tripartite framework of “decline” on Mormonism. The first “decline” occurred through the ubiquity of polygamy, and the second through the non-admittance of Black people. The third is the hostility shown toward LGBTQ people. The 2015 LDS declaration of the apostasy of married gay people—only somewhat revised subsequently to define their marriage merely as a “serious transgression”—prompted suicides. (Kitchen was appointed as Affirmation’s first QPR suicide prevention trainer.) Kitchen does not pull his punches, describing the 2015 pronouncement as “drop[ping] a bomb into the middle of” the Mormon LGBTQ community.
LGBTQ Mormons are in a bind. What Joshua Smith and Sara Patterson (in a 2021 article for Culture and Religion) called “the covenantal hetero-captivity of the Plan of Salvation” must go very hard with those stuck in its meshes, but—as everyone knows—leaving the church is not easy. Kitchen understands this (he writes of the “rainbow stained-glass ceiling”) and feels the LDS’ antipathy, but sees its attitudes as correctable. Regarding the policy of “accepting” LGBTQ people on condition of celibacy, for example, he states: “If the modern church is serious about lovingly committing every one of its sexual minorities to […] lifelong singleness, it must […] deliver an effective support system of lifelong care amid the financial, social, relational, and professional ramifications of a partnerless life.”
But is it serious, though? While this reviewer is not professing any deep knowledge of Mormon teachings, it’s hard not to see Kitchen’s endeavor as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Kitchen notes the church’s recent willingness to soften its stance towards the LGBTQ community, a process that resulted in the 2015 Utah Compromise: an agreement achieved by “calling all sides to sit down together in good faith at a common negotiating table to hammer out constructive politics.” But what, really, is there to negotiate? The church’s assertion of homosexuality’s sinful nature is on record, only recently tempered by some weaseling language that admits the person but not the act. If the LDS were really fine with LGBTQ people, wouldn’t they champion their membership of the church without qualification while repudiating all prior statements asserting their fundamentally sinful nature? Why all the huffing and puffing to merely create “a bubble of belonging within a doctrine hostile to queer exultation” that gives “members of the Church permission to love their LGBTQ children”? This last statement hits particularly hard. I don’t need anyone’s permission to love my children, and any religion worth believing would not need to hand-wring about giving me its blessing to do so. It is morally repugnant that Mormonism claims that as being in its ambit.
Kitchen concludes by calling for a re-evaluation of today’s church’s attitudes, advocating political engagement with the leadership, and treating the status of LGBTQ Mormons as a moral issue: “these are not only our fellow Saints, but our own children, parents, and family.” I wish him well, but nothing in this intelligent, fascinating, moving, and ultimately depressing book convinced me they will listen—or that Mormonism counts in any way as a force for good.
Nathan Kitchen’s THE BOUGHS OF LOVE is an incisive, moving, and rather saddening attempt to find common ground between Mormonism and LGBTQ people.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader