A Brief Visit To The Factory Where The Myths Are Manufactured

The teaching of the Book of Mormon on resurrection is clear and specific.  Here, for example, is Alma 11:43-44:

The spirit and the body shall be reunited again in its perfect form; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame, even as we now are at this time; and we shall be brought to stand before God, knowing even as we know now, and have a bright recollection of all our guilt.

Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame, as it is now, or in the body, and shall be brought and be arraigned before the bar of Christ the Son, and God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, which is one Eternal God, to be judged according to their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil.  (Alma 11:43-44)

Moreover, The Family: A Proclamation to the World,  a document that was jointly issued by the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1995, expressly states that

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.  (emphasis mine)

Now, it is being alleged in some locations on the internet that President Russell M. Nelson, in his recorded remarks at the conclusion of the most recent semi-annual general conference  of the Church, has directly contradicted The Family: A Proclamation to the World (and Alma 11:43-44) by announcing that those who do not attain the celestial kingdom will lack genitalia.

Now, you may be as surprised at this as I have been.  I think, had President Nelson really mentioned the word genitalia, or anything like thereunto, that I would have noticed it and remembered it.

Happily, though, the full video and the full transcript of President Nelson’s remarks are up and readily available on the Church’s website, so that anybody is entirely free to check them.

And here is what President Nelson actually said:

Mortality is a master class in learning to choose the things of greatest eternal import. Far too many people live as though this life is all there is. However, your choices today will determine three things: where you will live throughout all eternity, the kind of body with which you will be resurrected, and those with whom you will live forever.  (emphasis mine)

It seemed to be obvious at the time that I heard it that he had this passage from 1 Corinthians 15:39-42 in mind, as we understand it in the light of the great revelation on the differing kingdoms of glory that is recorded as Doctrine and Covenants 76:

All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.  There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.  So also is the resurrection of the dead.  (1 Corinthians 15:39-42)

But nothing is said about genitalia in either 1 Corinthians 15 or Doctrine and Covenants 76.  One frankly wonders here whether our particular culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality isn’t mingling with a zeal to find fault with Church leaders to interfere with simple reading comprehension.

But the allegation doesn’t quite end there.  In 1954-1956, Elder Bruce R. McConkie, a member at the time of the First Council of the Seventy and a son-in-law of Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, edited and published a collection of Elder Smith’s earlier writings under the title Doctrines of Salvation.  On page 288 of the second volume of that three-volume anthology, Elder Smith, who would assume the presidency of the Church in 1970 , expressed an opinion regarding the future state:

I take it that men and women will, in these [terrestrial and telestial] kingdoms, be . . . neither man nor woman, merely immortal beings, having received the resurrection.

On the basis of that passage and a similar brief passage in Elder Smith’s five-volume Answers to Gospel Questions (1957-1966), some have decided that Elder Smith taught that non-celestial bodies will be neutered in the resurrection.  Accordingly, they suggest, President Nelson’s speech in the Sunday afternoon session of conference merely restored the doctrine status quo ante.

Now, it would be nice to be able to ask President Smith for clarification of that remark.  But we can’t.  He’s not readily available.  Did he really intend to say that their resurrected physical bodies would cease to be, biologically or physiologically speaking, distinctively masculine or feminine?  Perhaps so.  But he never actually expressly said so.  Not, anyway, in the passages — only two of them — that we’ve been provided on the topic as supposed support for such a doctrine.  Moreover it would seem very difficult to reconcile such neutering with Alma 11:43-44, cited above, and with a significant number of similar passages.  And, honestly, it’s difficult to imagine how individuals would still really be themselves, or even recognizable as themselves, if they had been stripped of all of their primary and secondary sexual characteristics.

Could he not, just as reasonably, have been saying that, in the resurrection, terrestrial and telestial persons will not be married — that, of course, is standard Latter-day Saint doctrine — and that they will not enjoy the rights and privileges of marriage?  Indeed, he might even have been suggesting that they could be completely asexual even while physiologically intact?  In this life, already, we’re familiar with asexual people who have not been physically maimed.  (That is what the A in LGBTQIA+ stands for, is it not?)

There is no legitimate reason to claim that, at the conclusion of the most recent semiannual general conference President Russell M. Nelson repudiated The Family: A Proclamation to the World nor that he taught the neutering of the heirs of the telestial and terrestrial kingdoms in the life to come.

“Laws are like sausages,” goes the saying.  “It is best not to see them being made.”  (The aphorism is often attributed to the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, but it seems more likely to derive from the American poet John Godfrey Saxe [1816-1887], who is mostly remembered today for setting to verse the ancient parable from India about the blind men and the elephant, and for making that story popular in the United States.)

It’s fascinating, though, in its weird way, to see anti-Mormon talking points in the actual process of issuing forth from the baloney grinder.