As a heads up:
This post touches on church membership, religious trauma, LGBTQ+ issues, and youth mental health & suicidality.
A few notes:
This post has approximately 2,500 words. The words “Jesus” and “God” are only used one time each. “Jesus” is used as a reference to the long & unabbreviated name of the LDS Church, and “God” is used in a direct quotation from a church publication.
This post does not proselytize or reference any scripture. Promise.
There is zero mention of:
“He,” “Him,” “Heavenly Father,”
“Prophet,”
“Atonement” or “saved,”
“Bearing my testimony,”
“Savior,”
Any holy texts like the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, or Doctrine & Covenants.
If you are looking for a post like that, I can recommend a few writers, but you will not find it here.
Conversely, while a few public church policies on diversity and inclusion are constructively criticized, this post does not contain any “anti” material. Additionally, there is no mention of words like “cult,” “temple,” “garment,” “polygamy", etc.
In the summer of 2001, when I was just sixteen, I officially joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes, I was baptized into the Mormon church. Yes, THAT Mormon church. No, my family were/are not members. Yes, I chose it for myself. No, I did not go to BYU (but I did date a guy who went there). No, I did not serve a mission (but I did “Dear John” my boyfriend who was on his mission). Yes, there is absolutely a story behind everything, and yes, there was a very cute redheaded girl involved.
I know. Believe me, I KNOW. Me? The fat, queer, tattooed, liberal-to-a-fault, pro-choice, actively anti-racist, and social justice-oriented me? The one who loves coffee more than life itself, good beer, and has never voted Republican in her life? MORMON?! Yes, it’s true. I KNOW.
Like anything else in this world that has over 17 million members, the LDS Church (which is the shortened term that I use over “Mormon” or “The Church”) has its own lingo, customs, and traditions that exist within the culture. While some of these things are tied to official doctrine, a fair number of them are not. For example, abstaining from alcohol, coffee, and premarital sex all have ties back to official doctrine. However, the high prevalence of direct sales/multi-level marketing companies is not at all linked to an official tenet of the faith, but the founders of most well-known MLMs are church members (including LuLaRoe, HerbaLife, DoTerra, and Young Living.) In addition, Utah, which is known for its overwhelmingly large population of LDS members, has (and has had for decades) the highest per capita consumption of JELLO. It was named as the official state snack in 2001, and in 2002 when the Winter Olympics were held in Salt Lake City, the commemorative pin for the event even depicted a bowl of JELLO. One of the most popular ways to prepare it is, quite unfortunately, with shredded carrots in green JELLO. I promise, though, the connection is purely cultural. I am so, so thankful that as a convert who lived on the east coast, I managed skirt around the JELLO obsession, and I have never been served (or made!) green JELLO with carrots.
While most things fall into either the “directly related to doctrine” or “nope, purely coincidental” category, there is a third category that mingles in the gray area of “sort of related to the faith but is also cultural now.” The saying “Choose the Right” is one of those things that falls into the third category. It is not found anywhere in scriptures, and officially, it is in reference to a song written for the 1909 hymnal. The phrase was incorporated into the children’s program (known as Primary) in the 1960’s, and within just a few years, merchandise like jewelry, socks, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. with the phrase (or the shortened version of “CTR”) was everywhere. The most popular CTR item is a ring, and today, there are thousands of different designs available online for purchase in various languages. I do not know anyone who is (or has been) an active member of the LDS Church who has not owned something with the phrase at some point, including myself.
In the original hymn, the phrase “choose the right” is meant to remind people to “choose the right when a choice is placed before you” and to “let wisdom mark the way before.” There is a children’s song titled “Choose the Right Way” (which I never sang, by the way, since I joined as a teenager) that breaks it down a bit more for the little ones. It says, “There’s a right way to live and be happy; It is choosing the right ev’ry day” and “Choose the right way and be happy. I must always choose the right.”
The idea of free will, termed as “moral agency” or “free agency,” is an integral cornerstone in the faith, so the idea is that when – and not if – a choice is presented, it is important to make the righteous decision.
What exactly, however, makes something the righteous decision? Is there a difference between the right decision and the righteous decision? I have asked myself these questions time and again over the last 20+ years, especially as I learn to navigate this world in different spaces and explore my own identity.
Choosing the right means, for me, making decisions and taking actions that align with my values. For example, it is imperative that I invest in communities through service to others. There is a quote that has been attributed to everyone from Muhammad Ali to Shirley Chisholm that says, “Service is the rent we pay living on this earth, for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” It is especially true in my case as I have built my career around service and volunteering, and I have spent thousands and thousands of hours engaged in service over the last fifteen years. I have prepared and served meals in a community kitchen in downtown DC. I have worked on numerous Habitat for Humanity job sites, including some in Louisiana as part of the rebuilding processes for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. I worked to establish a tutoring program in a juvenile detention center in California. I helped to build a retaining wall in a community garden in Seattle that serves low-income senior adults, and most recently, I once again poured all my time, energy, and talent into creating a naked calendar for a local non-profit. Sales from the calendar generate about $5000 every year, and proceeds stay in our local county to support women and children.
My own personal definition of “choosing the right” has absolutely shifted and evolved over the last two decades.
Education, for example, has been an important value for a long time, and I make it a point to never stop learning. In the last ten years or so, I have intentionally sought out ways to educate myself on - and dismantle my own biases around - privilege, oppression, intersectionality, inclusivity, equality, and equity. One time when I was teaching a class of first year college students, I found myself trying to define “social justice,” and I compared the idea of social justice to laundry. The analogy has stuck with me. I think it is fair to apply the same analogy to education: it is both a process and a goal that I want to reach (but never will). Over time, I became dissatisfied with only breaking down my own biases; I wanted to start dismantling larger societal systems of oppression. I started standing up for voices and populations that are marginalized and often overlooked, and in many ways, this is simply an extension of the community service philosophy that I have embraced for a long time. For example, serving a meal at a shelter and speaking at a town council meeting to protest the installation of hostile/defensive architecture are more similar than they are different: both take action to demonstrate that unhoused people deserve dignity and respect simply because they are human beings.
In so many ways, I have struggled to align my own personal values of what it means to choose the right with how the church I joined long ago defines it.
There is a common analogy in the LDS community about a shelf that, as far as I can tell, traces back to 1975. The idea is that whenever something that is not easily understood or does not make total sense, it is “put on a shelf” and examined later. Everyone has a shelf, and it is the place for most unanswered questions. In the ex-Mormon (ex-mo) community, a common question is “what broke your shelf?” which means “what was the final straw that made you decide to leave?” While my own personal shelf is not completely broken, it is cracked and weighed down, due in large part to the LDS Church’s long and storied past with discrimination.
The LDS Church was established in 1830, and from 1852 until 1978, members of the Black community were expressly forbidden on the basis of race from participating in specific sacred ceremonies. In addition, the LDS Church is, and always has been, vehemently pro-life. Until the 1980’s, they were also vocally opposed to birth control, but the current view is that decisions about birth control (and the consequences of those decisions) are up to each individual married couple. However, until February 2023, birth control was not covered by the health insurance policy for church employees.
It is the numerous homophobic and transphobic actions, though, from the LDS Church that have particularly stung, and continue to sting, for me. The most obvious reason is that I am a queer person who is still exploring my gender identity, but also, I have seen and experienced them happen in real time over the last twenty years.
It all started, for the most part, in 1995, which was six years before I joined, with the release of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” This document, which says, in part, that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God” and that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” The proclamation was not just distributed to members; it was — and still is — frequently printed and hung in homes and church spaces. I truly cannot remember a home I visited that did not have this proudly displayed somewhere. As a closeted queer teenager, seeing this message often and everywhere reinforced the narrative that who I am at my core is wrong.
In 2008, the LDS Church provided an estimated $20 million in support of Proposition 8 in California that overturned the gay marriage amendment, and in large part due to the money and support from the LDS Church, the proposition did pass.
In 2015, the LDS Church released (what I would argue is) the most homophobic and transphobic policy to date. It described members in a same-sex relationships as “apostates” (which is the harshest term the LDS Church uses to describe someone). It also forbade children of queer couples from taking part in any official ordinance until they do the following: 1.) turn 18, 2.) move away from their parents, and 3.) denounce same-sex relationships. There are only a few official ordinances for those under the age of 18, but they are significant both spiritually and culturally. For example, a baby is not baptized, but there is a similar ceremony called a blessing where many out-of-town family members and other significant adults in the child’s life are present. Under the 2015 policy, a child with same-sex parents could not receive a baby blessing, nor could they be baptized (which traditionally happens at the age of eight). Without baptism, the child could not hold an age-appropriate leadership position among their peers, nor could they participate in culturally expected spiritual activities normally done by pre-teens and teens.
By prohibiting children from participating in activities simply because of something they have no control over – their parents – the LDS Church was intentionally othering children, and with that, I firmly believe, causing both harm and lasting trauma.
The 2015 policy was officially reversed in 2019, but the implications continue to reach far and wide. Research has demonstrated for a while that, overall, queer teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. Overall rates of youth suicide have tripled over the last decade in Utah, and the rates are twice than that of the rising national average. In Utah, 69% of the population are members of the LDS Church, and more Utah teens die from suicide than the four other leading causes of death—poisoning, car accidents, homicide, and other injuries—combined. While it is entirely possible that the LDS Church’s homophobic policies, queer identities, and the stark increase in the youth suicide rate in Utah are correlated but not caused directly by one another, it is hard to say for sure. Collecting suicide mortality data on demographics like age, race, ethnicity, sex, substance abuse use, etc. has been a common practice across the country for a long time, but as a 2022 National Institute for Health (NIH) study points out, it is just now starting to become an accepted practice to collect a decedent’s sexual orientation and gender identity.
A few years ago, a church leader notably said, “May we ever choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.” As someone who has experience with the LDS Church and happens to be queer, I would argue that, as a whole, they are choosing the easier wrong. The harder right would be to acknowledge the harm that past discriminatory policies have directly caused on various marginalized communities (i.e. women, the BIPOC community, the queer community, etc.), learn from their mistakes, work to mend the damage, and establish lasting change moving forward. As much I want to see “the harder right” actually happen here; history demonstrates that it is highly unlikely. For now, I have added it to my cracking shelf, and it sits alongside so many other things.
At some point, most likely over the course of the tumultuous and highly politicized last decade, I feel as though the sentiment behind “choose the right” shifted. It used to mean solely that by focusing on “right” simply meant that there was a “wrong.” While that may still be the case, it feels as though there is also now a sharp division in society between “right” and “left.” With that, the phrase “choose the right” is a much more loaded phrase that can mean both choosing “right” over “wrong” and choosing “right/conservative/Trump/MAGA” over “left/liberal/WOKE/socialist.”
For me, though, choosing the “right” will always mean “right over wrong,” and making the best decisions I can that align with my own values, which, these days, coincidentally, almost always fall counter to “THE right” (&, respectively, the LDS Church) – and I am okay with it.