on disregard for heresy and the unrealized queer potential of Mormonism

As I’ve noted a few times before, I’m a de facto Trinitarian, but I can’t say that I’m tremendously invested in the Trinity as an orthodox doctrine of Christianity. I know that some of this has to do with my Mormonism—growing up in a non-Trinitarian tradition has surely shaped my thinking about this—but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. Yes, I’m often sympathetic to the beliefs of the tradition I spent so much time in, but I’m also a non-theist who tends to see God as more of a metaphor for humans’ fleeting experiences with the ultimate than as someone whose nature and consubstantiality can (and must) be understood in distinct terms.

However, this doesn’t mean that I reject the Trinity either. I confess that I get impatient with an insistence on Trinitarian thinking, but I can be brought on board. A friend of mine who also made the jump from Mormonism to Community of Christ has told me that as a gay man, he finds the Trinity to be particularly meaningful. Now, that was a fast-moving conversation, and I confess that I didn’t catch the connection between his identity and the meaning this teaching brings him, but at the risk of being flippant, that doesn’t really matter to me. If the doctrine of the Trinity is doing my friend some good in his religious life, I think that’s just great; in fact, I think that matters to me much more than whether the doctrine is orthodox or heretical.

I feel this way about a lot of traditional Christian doctrines, it turns out. I don’t know much about Gnosticism, and I don’t find the teachings of Gnosticism very useful, but that absence of utility matters a lot more to me than whether or not Gnosticism is heretical. If the Gnostics were teaching some cool things, I probably wouldn’t care what early Christian authorities had to say about them; in contrast, I don’t find dualism to be helpful or useful, so I’m not interested in defending them either. Returning us to Mormon views of deity, I’m not particularly invested in Latter-day Saint teachings that challenge monotheism, but other than “monotheism = good, polytheism = bad,” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a compelling case for why those are problematic views for Christians to have (I’m open to such an argument, and I’m not an apologist for the Mormon views, I just don’t see what the issue is). Likewise, while I think the incarnation does a much better job of emphasizing the divine present in the mundane and material, I think that Mormon views on theosis can have similar benefits despite not holding those beliefs any more, and so I’m willing to go to bat for them on those grounds, no matter how much they clash with Christian orthodoxy.

This last week, I got myself a copy of Taylor Petrey’s Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos from my employer’s library. I’ve only made it a few pages in so far, but there’s a passage from Petrey’s introduction that really spoke to all of this thinking I’ve been doing over the past few years:

This is no apologetic for Mormonism as a historical force. Mormonism, as we will see, is deeply imbued within its contextual values of patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism. But Mormonism’s emphasis on an embodied, material, sexual God; its history with plural marriage and kinship experimentation; and its theory of the human as a divine being are all places to challenge the ontology, sexuality, and emphases in contemporary heterosexualist culture. Notwithstanding Mormonism’s ongoing, active participation in such a culture, the tradition is unable to be reduced to and caricatured by this description. This is not a reclamation but a resignification.

I love how Petrey puts this: Mormonism as it currently exists is problematic for the way that it treats queer people. Full stop. But that’s more important than the purportedly problematic nature of Mormon theology. Conversely, there exists in Mormon theology the (largely dormant!) potential for those heterodox—even heretical—theologies to become queer-affirming in very powerful ways. If that ever happened (or to the extent that it is happening for individuals and groups within the broader umbrella of Mormonism), I would always value that theology above a more orthodox Christian approach that failed to stand up for queer identities, practices, and people.

I don’t really care about heresy—I care about whether theology is meaningful, useful, and healthy. I don’t mind pivoting from Mormon theological views to more orthodox ones so long as those orthodox ones are just as (or, often, more) meaningful, useful, and healthy for me. But in cases where Mormon (or other) theological views remain meaningful, useful, and healthy, I really don’t care how heretical they are according to Christian tradition.

• Mormonism
• lgbtq
• Taylor Petrey
• Christianity
• Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos
• Trinity
• non-theism
• Community of Christ
• incarnation