Elder Holland's BYU Talk and the Practical Question

Greetings,

Last week I had nothing to say on any Latter-day Saint topics, so this week I have nothing but inside Mormon baseball.

Last week, Elder Holland, a member of the Church’s governing Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, gave a talk to the BYU faculty urging them to be more aggressive in defending the Church's position on same sex marriage, less critical of the Brethren, and less celebratory of LGBT students.  There has been a lot of Internet in response. Understandably, most of that talk has centered on the experience of LGBT Latter-day Saints and BYU students, the merits of the Church’s stance on same sex marriage, and whether Elder Holland's rhetoric will embolden those Latter-day Saints who launch online attacks against LGBT members and their supporters. Others have kibitzed about BYU’s status and the nature of a Church university.

Lost in all of this discussion is the question of whether the course urged by Elder Holland will accomplish the things that I take it Elder Holland wants it to accomplish. Seen in terms of its own goals, do Elder Holland’s prescriptions make sense? The Church is not doing as well as once it did at retaining its youth as they transition to adulthood.  I take it that this is the primary concern motivating his talk. I believe that Elder Holland is correct that hostility toward the Church’s position on same-sex marriage is driving much of this disillusionment.  His talk presupposes that if BYU faculty are more aggressive in defending the Church's position, then the ability of the Church to retain its youth as they transition to adulthood will increase. Is this true?

Consider some of the Church’s past experience: Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, American public culture turned against the idea that there was anything immoral about premarital sex. During this same period, the Church doubled down on chastity as a moral ideal. Insisting on abstinence from premarital sex imposes high apparent costs on young Latter-day Saints as they make their transition to adulthood. One might have thought in the 1960s or 1970s that the efforts of the Brethren to hold the line on chastity would be devastating on the ability of the Church to retain its young members. However, the opposite proved to be true. Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s likely represent a high watermark in terms of the Church's ability to retain its youth. I suspect that this is the experience on which Elder Holland is implicitly relying in his talk. In the face of changing social norms about sexuality, if the Church insists on its own standards and does so with clarity, then young Latter-day Saints will stay true to the faith. This isn’t unreasonable. Given the Church’s experience in the face of the revolution in social attitudes toward premarital sex, it not crazy to believe, as Elder Holland apparently does, that clear and forceful defenses of the Church's position on sexual morality will prove effective in retaining the youth.

I confess, however, that I am skeptical. My reasons lie in the dis-analogies between the Church’s stance on same-sex marriage and the Church's defense of premarital chastity. On the issue of premarital sex, the Church offers its members a coherent sexual morality, despite diverging from wider cultural trends.  The Church affirms the basic goodness of sexuality and the desirability of its expression.  It simply insists that sex be confined to a context of mutual commitment through marriage. It holds out to heterosexual Latter-day Saints a model of a sexually coherent and satisfying life, albeit one that places demands of self-discipline on the unmarried. To be sure, lots of Latter-day Saints have premarital sex and chastity has always been a difficult sell to young people who are naturally eager to “get it on.” But in terms of the brute demographics of member retention, the sexual morality propagated and defended by the Church proved successful, the sexual revolution of the 1960s notwithstanding.

In contrast, the Church has no story of a coherent sexual or romantic life that it can offer to gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints. Having discarded the idea that homosexuality is a choice that can be eliminated through therapy or pastoral care, the Church now accepts that sexual orientation is more-or-less immutable. Having seen the many catastrophes that have resulted from encouraging gay and lesbian members into heterosexual marriages, it no longer counsels such unions.  The only option left to a faithful gay or lesbian member within the Church is a life of voluntary celibacy.  Yet in contrast to several strands of the Christian tradition, Mormonism has never exalted celibacy or denied the intrinsic value of a sexual life. Indeed, it insists that eternal marriage is constitutive of exaltation.  The Brethren cannot now deny the desirability of a romantic and sexual union and suggest that it is not an important aspect of one’s life.  Hence, whatever its theological bona fides, the Church’s current position in practice fails to offer an alternative to the secular culture that can be coherently lived by gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints.  Many young people recognize this fact, and I suspect that it is this reality rather than a failure to clearly articulate or defend the Church’s position that is resulting in the disaffection of Latter-day Saints making the transition to adulthood.

There is even some empirical evidence to suggest that doubling down on the defense of the Church’s position on same-sex marriage will not change things.  Over the last twenty years, the Brethren have been increasingly vocal and explicit in teaching the Church’s position on same-sex marriage in General Conference and elsewhere.  It is being vigorously defended by the Church.  However, the best available data suggests that this rhetorical push has not been successful in persuading Latter-day Saints.  According to the Pew Research Center in 2014 roughly 26 percent of Latter-day Saints supported same-sex marriage, with an additional 6 percent unwilling to endorse the Church’s position.  This is actually slightly higher than the percentage of Church members who told Pew Research in 2008 that homosexuality should be accepted. In other words, the needle wasn’t moving on this issue, and nearly a third of Latter-day Saints rejected the Church’s position. A mere three years later, Pew found that support for the Church’s position had dropped from 68 percent to 53 percent. In contrast, another survey found that Latter-day Saints had the lowest levels of premarital sex of any religious group, with a mere 12 percent of regular sacrament meeting attenders.  In other words, the Church’s message on premarital sex seems to find a receptive audience among Church members, but its message on same-sex marriage wasn’t moving the needle ten years ago and is now losing ground among Latter-day Saints.  It seems unlikely that getting professors to push down harder on this defensive message at BYU will prove successful when it hasn’t proven successful in the wider Church.

Elder Holland’s remarks are, I think, a well-intentioned and good-faith effort to address a serious problem that the Church faces: How to retain youth in the face of disaffection over the Church’s stance on same-sex marriage.  The question of whether or not his proposed solution will prove successful strikes me as a much more important than the concerns of the very online as to whether or not his chosen metaphors will empower this or that faction on Twitter.  I don’t think that there is any evidence, however, that his strategy of clearly emphasizing the Church’s doctrine will work as a solution to the this problem, despite its effectiveness in addressing the challenge that faced the Church with the normalization of premarital sex.  New problems require new and more radical solutions.  I don’t claim to know what those solutions might be. I believe that the Church needs to provide LGBT members with a more coherent option than voluntary celibacy in mortality and an ill-defined eternity, but I don’t know precisely what that would look like. I do, however, think that just pounding the same message but harder is a losing strategy.

See you next week,

Nate

PS — Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested, and if you haven’t done so yet, please subscribe.