Hypotheticals and Our Christian Duty

A quick hypothetical. (For those of you who didn’t attend law school, a law school hypothetical is a carefully constructed situation meant to tease out the implications of a rule or a law. The hypothetical itself isn’t meant to convey any truth value. What I mean is, please don’t argue for or against my hypothetical: it’s the consequences I’m interest in.)

Let’s imagine that it has been established that homosexual behavior (however you want to define that) is sinful. What do we, as members of the church and the ward, do when an LGBTQ individual comes to church? And what if it’s clear that that individual is participating in homosexual behavior (again, whatever we want to define that as)?

Confession: as best as I can tell, this is a pretty easy hypothetical; it seems to me it only allows for one answer: we welcome, love, and serve that individual. The scriptures are replete with admonitions to love and serve our neighbors. And there’s no way to define “neighbors” that doesn’t include the LGBTQ community.

Which brings me to a second (non-hypothetical) question: why do we so often fail at this basic Christian duty? Because we do fail at it, frequently.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons, actually, but one struck me as I read this piece by Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons. You should read the whole thing, but in high-level summary, he calls out the media for buying into a narrative that puts religious commitment in opposition to LGBTQ identity.

I suspect that’s a narrative that we largely buy into. We’re suspicious of our LGBTQ neighbors because we believe for some reason that their sexual orientation is incompatible with religious belief, so, if they’re coming, there must be some suspicious reason for that.

That’s absolutely wrong, though. (Or, in the lingo of the day, it’s “fake news.”) As Graves-Fitzsimmons explains, a”vibrant and growing religious and queer community exits.” While members of that community has no obligation to choose Mormonism as their religious home, we do have an obligation to welcome them. Are they sinners? Like the rest of us, yes. Irrespective of whether homosexual behavior is sinful, the LGBTQ community isn’t any different from the non-LGBTQ community in that regard—we all sin. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t need Jesus and the Atonement. After all, as He said, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.”

It’s our duty to become like Christ; for me, I hope that someday someone will ask me, “Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” Because that strikes me as the best way to know that I actually have followed His example.

[And n.b.: again, I’m not arguing that homosexual behavior, however you define it, is or is not sinful, or that it’s different in kind from, e.g., drinking coffee or not paying tithing. I hope we can be as welcoming to those who sin in other ways as I hope we can with the LGBTQ community and whatever sins they may bring to the table. But we’re particularly bad, I think, with the LGBTQ community, so that strikes me as a good place to start on our journey toward being Christlike.]