Differing from Church Leaders: A Personal Experience

Stephen Fleming

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In this post at the Juvenile Instructor, I shared some of the spiritual prompting I felt I had in grad school, but a really big one was the persistent prompting I felt to vote no on Proposition 8 in 2007.

Throughout that year, 2007, I had this nagging spiritual feeling: “You need to understand the issue of homosexuality better than you do.” I guess nowadays we’d call that LGBT+ issues, but the prompting was something like that.

I’d always seen myself as wanting to be kind to gay people and figured that such people didn’t simply choose their orientation (I was very attracted to women, which wasn’t a choice). And yet, prior to 2007 gay marriage/sex seemed unquestionably beyond the pale. So I figured the right answer was we should be good and kind to gay people, not demonize or ridicule them, but the trend at that time of pushing for legalizing gay marriage seemed problematic.

So when the prompting kept coming, I kept thinking, “What more do I need to understand? Don’t I have the ‘right’ answer?”

I used to go through the book reviews in the Mormon journals, and going through Dialogue that year, I came across a review for In Quiet Desperation, a book published in 2004 by Deseret Book that focused on helping church members understand the struggles gay members were going through. I felt like I should buy it and though I felt a bit uncomfortable doing so in the BYU bookstore, that’s where I got it.

It felt too painful to read the Mattis’s story, the parents of the gay member who shot himself on the doorstep of the stake center, so I read Ty Mansfield’s part instead. I don’t want to try to go through all the thoughts I had as I read it (many many) but I started changing my views as I did so. Reading Mansfield really hit me of what a struggle gay members were having, so much harder than me as a straight member.

At this time, there was a push for Proposition 8 in California that the church strongly backed. We heard about it a lot at church and by that summer, we were being encouraged to encourage other members to promote it, including our home teaching families.

I felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing. Whenever the topic came up, I felt really bad. There was a whole lot of discussion of the topic and I started feeling really confused. I wanted to listen to good members of the ward I trusted who were promoting prop 8, but I didn’t find their arguments convincing. We lived in a pretty liberal place, so there were lots of advertisements for voting no all around us.

One day, not long before the November election, our son who was about 8 asked about the topic with genuine curiosity. I can’t remember his exact words, but he asked something along the lines of “what’s the right answer?” (neighbor friends were against it.). I looked at him and simply said, “I don’t know,” which was probably atypical for Mormon dads.

I worried I might be being swayed by the opinions of “the world” and worried that my discomfort might be due to not wanting to be disliked by our more liberal friends. I felt that I couldn’t just dodge this but needed to figure out what to do.

Again, I won’t do into all the details, but I well remember the setting. Sitting on a bale of hay why my kids and their friends went though some sort of pumpkin maze at the end of October. It was then where I felt I got the clear answer that God wanted me to vote no on Proposition 8. A prompting that came after a long process of following other promptings, study, pondering, and prayer.

I REALLY remember staring at the Proposition 8 question in the voting booth and thinking, “What’s it going to be, Steve? President Monson said vote yes, but the Spirit told me to vote no.”

I voted no, but had a LOT of questions and spent a lot of time trying to do research the next week. At that time, I got more involved in the Bloggernacle and felt the prompting of “just listen” to the people who felt very hurt by Prop 8 passing.

Since then, the church leaders endorsed the “Respect for Marriage Act” supporting gay marriage with protections for religious groups who don’t want to be forced to accept it in their institutions. I did see some conservative members expressing unhappiness over that position, but it also made me think my Prop 8 vote had become less unorthodox with the church backing that bill.

I’m certainly unorthodox in many other ways, and my experience with Proposition 8 makes me feel okay about that.

Comments

9 responses to “Differing from Church Leaders: A Personal Experience”

  1. Last Lemming

    I am very glad that the Church never told me to vote against Danica Roem.

  2. Kendall Buchanan

    Stephen, thanks for sharing—I think discovering elements of our own spirituality apart from institutional pressures is one of the most significant forms of spiritual maturity we can experience.

  3. Raymond Winn

    Stephen – many thx for sharing this incident. We here in Utah were unaware of the LDS Church’s role in the Prop 8 matter. At least I was, until I attended another Sac mtg being held in our multi-ward bldg, and the bishop of that ward read to the congregation a letter from some higher authority (I don’t remember which level he said had sent it) urging the members to donate time, money, and effort toward insuring the passage of Prop 8 in California. My first thought was: that’s a California issue, so it shouldn’t affect me. But almost instantly, my second thought was: wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right . . From listening to NPR and reading national newspapers, I had already concluded that Prop 8 shouldn’t be passed, so that is probably why I was instantly disheartened by the church’s support, but I had the distinct feeling that I and “church policy” were not on the same page.
    BTW, no other church group that I am aware of in this area received the “official” letter that I heard. I decided that the bishop must have received it from somebody in California, and decided on his own authority to read it in his Utah group.

  4. Stephen Fleming

    Indeed, Lemming. Thanks Kendall! That’s interesting about the letter, Raymond. I can’t remember all the details, but we got a whole lot of leadership instruction on the topic.

    I also just want to clarify that I don’t post this as a rejection or even criticism of our leaders, but more of a larger theme I want to address in coming posts of the fact that I see our leaders in a different paradigm than we (and they) often present. I see our leaders more as caretakers of the church and its doctrines than the “mouthpiece of God” as we often talk about them.

    For the “caretaker model” I appreciate our leaders’ commitment and oversight of the church and am okay with disagreeing sometimes, and I’m okay with all of us, leaders included, learning and growing through trial and error. Not everything they say or policy they implement has to be perfect or directly from God’s mouth.

  5. ji

    A way that I look at things is to ask myself, “What does God want from the church?” and “What does God want from me as a church member?” And these questions lead me to a re-framing: “Does God want a church where every member awaits instructions from a priesthood leader, and then follows those instructions?” The answer to me is obviously a decided NO. No, it seems to me that God wants individual members to think and act independently, self-propelled in righteousness, so to speak, and that church leaders (and other members) give helpful advice to each other but not commandment.

    D&C 121 speaks to this. Nothing in the priesthood should be done by dominion or compulsion — surely, relying on higher office and the revelation associated with that higher office as authority for commanding the actions or thoughts of others would be dominion or compulsion. Rather, everything in the priesthood is done by persuasion, brotherly love, kindness, patience, and so forth. There can be no decree by fiat or claiming the imprimatur of revelation — even when revelation has been received, and we rejoice when it has, it cannot be imposed on others by dominion or compulsion with the authority of office; rather, it can only be shared by persuasion, brotherly love, kindness, patience, and so forth. The idea of common consent is important to our God.

    To me, God wants a church where men of the priesthood are self-propelled and independent. Church leaders and other members teach each other correct principles, as best they understand them, and encourage each other, and sustain each other as they govern themselves. We are all sojourners in the land. Sustaining isn’t just an uphill exercise [underlings sustain the decisions of their leaders] — it is also downhill [leaders sustain the independence and autonomy and dignity of their underlings] and sideways [everyone sustains the independence of everyone else].

    To me, speakers in general conference do not “channel” the Lord — rather, they do their best to offer something from their own experience and learning that might be helpful to fellow members. Members have a responsibility to stand independently in their own agency. I believe this is what God really wants. Doesn’t the notion of home-centered and church-supported fit well with this? Doesn’t this fit with D&C 50:22 and D&C 1:20?

    May our God continue to bless us, as a church and as individuals.

  6. Matthew B

    Coming from someone who was coming of age and never heard about the whole Prop 8 controversy until my service mission, I personally never agreed with that amendment. I always thought that the church could use other means to protect their 1st Amendment rights and protect itself from legal liability without forbidding gay couples to enjoy the monetary benefits and other goods that come from marriage.

    Sure what these couples were doing is a sin against their Creator. Sure there was the concern about kids being taught ideological things behind the backs of their parents, which I strongly oppose. But the way I see it, I think individuals themselves should be the arbiters on whether or not homosexual relationships are a sin or not. I personally think that it should be the individual who should decide whether or not homosexual relationships are good or bad, not the government.

    Don’t get me wrong. I strongly defend the church’s doctrine on marriage and will strongly resist anyone’s attempts to alter it, especially given what the Bible says on such matters. I just merely think that Christians who promote the Biblical definition of marriage and those who promote homosexuality can coexist in peace in our society and that neither side has to compromise on their personal values. Those of us who prefer to live as God commands us to live will go our way and continue promoting the Gospel while those who have no desire to give up homosexual relationships can have their relationships and their dignity in peace. It might not please either side of the political spectrum, but as long as my church is free to operate as it so chooses free from government interference, I generally don’t care what people do in terms of sexual relationships.

  7. anonyformercalif

    I was in CA for prop 8. I’d been struggling with the role of the lgbt community since the prior prop 22. I kept my head above water until one Sunday our stake pres came to our ward and spent sac meeting hard selling our ward on donating and volunteering. That was hard but what broke me was when he said, ‘if you don’t work to support prop 8, then you don’t really believe pres. Monson is a prophet of God.’

    He backed me against a wall and forced me to choose between my own promptings/revelations and the church. It took me 10 years to work through it to a place a peace.

    He’s now a general authority so I guess from the church’s perspective what he did would be considered being a good leader. This wasn’t a lone incident of how he thought, approached his role in the church. Interestingly, a large percentage of the super active families in that ward left the church between then and now.

    If what he said was hard on me, i can’t imagine how the secret lgbt members in the ward/stake felt.

  8. RLD

    I honestly don’t know if the Church supporting Prop 8 was a mistake, or if circumstances have changed enough that supporting it was the right thing to do then and supporting the Respect for Marriage Act is the right thing to do now. Both seem possible to me. I confess I’m glad I didn’t live in California at the time.

    I think Church leaders are in the same boat as the rest of us: sometimes the Lord tells them what to do by revelation, sometimes they do their best on their own and it turns out okay, and sometimes they make mistakes–even when they think they’re being told what to do by revelation. That said, I’m confident the Lord generally calls the people he does because they’re less likely to make mistakes and have experience that makes doing their best on their own more likely to succeed. (As I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s a coincidence we had the first doctor-prophet of our dispensation during the pandemic. But that implies that prophets aren’t puppets, or President Nelson’s medical expertise wouldn’t have mattered.) They also have the advantage of counsellors and councils to help them avoid errors.

    I can’t quite agree with describing them as mere “caretakers” though. When the Lord wants to tell the Church something, he reveals it to the leaders of the Church. So yes, they make mistakes, and yes, you can disagree with them. But keep in mind that at any given moment they may well be speaking for God.

  9. John Mansfield

    Of all the things the church has done over the last couple decades, including many things it has changed which a person might disagree with either before or after the change (or both), why does the concern which this post uses to flesh out the concept come from the same small set that seemingly every blog writer who disagrees with the church gives primary focus?

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