Scholars & Saints
Scholars & Saints is the official podcast of the University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies program, housed in the Department of Religious Studies. Scholars & Saints is a venue of public scholarship that promotes respectful dialogue about Latter Day Saint traditions among laypersons and academics.
Scholars & Saints
Queering the Mormon Cosmos (feat. Taylor Petrey)
Mormonism has been stereotypically conceived of as a patriarchal, heteronormative religion, from its past polygamy to its male-only priesthood. But what happens if you apply a queer studies lens to the faith?
This task was taken up by Kalamazoo College's Chair of Religion Taylor G. Petrey in his recent book, Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos. On today's episode of Scholars & Saints, Dr. Petrey discusses the results of such an analysis with host Nicholas Shrum, focusing particularly on deep relationships of care known as kinship. From considering the gendered inter-relations of the Godhead to the role of Heavenly Mother, Dr. Petrey seeks to open up the world of Mormon theology to consider new cosmologies for underrepresented people groups.
To find out more about Dr. Petrey and his upcoming projects, click here.
Introduction
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Nicholas Shrum
You're listening to Scholars and Saints. The UVA Mormon Studies podcast. I'm your host, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD candidate in American Religions at the University of Virginia. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism. We engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up-and-coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism’s relevance to the broader study of religion. Scholars and Saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.
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Nicholas Shrum
The podcast’s goal is to discuss some of the most pressing issues and cutting-edge methods in Mormon studies and put them in conversation with scholarship from the discipline of religious studies. While the podcast content explores Mormonism, the views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any organizations they represent or study, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the University of Virginia.
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Nicholas Shrum
Today on the podcast, I speak with Taylor Petrey, a professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, where he teaches courses on the Bible and biblical interpretation, Early Christianity, ancient Judaism, and theory and method in the study of Religion. As a scholar of gender and sexuality in religion, Professor Petrey has applied those theoretical lenses and approaches to multiple studies of Mormonism.
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Nicholas Shrum
This includes his most recent book and the topic of today's episode, Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos, published with the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. In this book, Petrey hopes to “contribute to the ongoing dialog on religion, queerness, and identity, inviting readers to reconsider and reshape their understanding of Mormonism and its potential for inclusivity and transformation within the queer experience.”
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Nicholas Shrum
It also “seeks to center kinship as a human practice that more fully accounts for the complex ways the people relate to one another.” I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Taylor Petrey.
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Nicholas Shrum
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Scholars and Saints. The UVA Mormon Studies Podcast. Today on the podcast, we have Professor Taylor Petrey, who is professor of religion at Kalamazoo College. He is the author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, which was published in 2020 with UNC Press. He's also the author and editor of a number of other books and articles.
00;02;33;19 - 00;03;04;28
Nicholas Shrum
But today we're going to be discussing his most recent book, entitled Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos, also published with the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. Really excited to have Professor Petrey on the podcast to discuss this book, especially because it's been a while since we've had somebody who works within theology. We've had a number of historians and we've had sociologists, and some religious studies people who take more ethnographic approaches. But it's been a bit since we've had somebody deal more with explicit theology. So excited to see what Professor Petrey has to teach us today. So welcome to the podcast.
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Taylor Petrey
Thank you, Nicholas. It's great to talk to you.
Professor Petrey’s Background
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Nicholas Shrum
To start out, I would love for you to share with the listeners a little bit about your background, for instance, your schooling, where you're currently at, and what kind of projects you've done. Yeah. Let’s start there.
00;03;30;02 - 00;03;53;10
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. Well, let's see. Starting from the beginning in the preexistence. We'll get lost, or I'll see how far back I go. But I'm a Latter-day Saint. I grew up in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Served a mission. And I did my undergraduate studies at a university in New York City called Pace University, where I had been recruited to be on the debate team there in college debate.
00;03;53;12 - 00;04;15;13
Taylor Petrey
And so that's kind of how I ended up out there and had a little bit of a different adventure. After coming back from my mission, I thought I might maybe want to be a seminary teacher or an institute teacher or do something continuing to think about religion and, decided to check out what kinds of course offerings were available at Pace University.
00;04;15;20 - 00;04;41;25
Taylor Petrey
And I took a class, and after the second day of that class, I decided this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. And, the rest is sort of history. I've gotten very, very lucky to have been able to continue to do this kind of work over the years. I ended up going to Harvard Divinity School for graduate school, where I actually studied New Testament and early Christianity.
00;04;41;25 - 00;05;12;25
Taylor Petrey
And I have some books and edited volumes, and articles, of course, in that subfield as well. But after I became a professor at Kalamazoo College, I decided that I wanted to sort of stretch my wings to do a little bit more in Mormon studies, and thought maybe some of the things that I learned in the study of religion and in early Christianity, and especially with respect to gender studies that I was working on in that field, might be relevant for some of the kinds of conversations that were going on in Mormon studies.
00;05;13;03 - 00;05;42;05
Taylor Petrey
And so I turned my attention there. And I've continued to do sort of these two fields simultaneously, at least as best as I could. But, that's been kind of my, my trajectory and how I ended up coming to not only the study of LDS history, but, as you mentioned, the study of LDS theology in this case, as well as, sort of part of that broader set of interests and concerns about questions about gender and sexuality and the Latter-day Saints tradition in Mormon studies.
Background to Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos
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Nicholas Shrum
Excellent. And you mentioned in your acknowledgments, kind of the foreword to this most recent book, kind of how this project came out of a bigger idea that was part of what ended up being your other book, which is Tabernacles of Clay. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about kind of what the groundwork was for this volume and how it related to the previous volume.
00;06;08;24 - 00;06;38;15
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. So, after my first book, which is on gender and sexuality in early Christianity, I had to kind of decide what my second book was going to be, and I started kind of tinkering around with some ideas, interestingly, about kinship in early Christianity. That was an area that I was interested in. But I had become aware that there was a fellowship back at Harvard Divinity School in the Women's Studies and Religion program there.
00;06;38;19 - 00;06;59;28
Taylor Petrey
And I thought, well, let me see if I can maybe pull together some ideas about Mormon doctrine and Mormon history here that might be a good fit for this particular program. And I had written a couple of articles by that point already on Heavenly Mother and on the role of heterosexuality in Mormon theology.
00;07;00;07 - 00;07;18;04
Taylor Petrey
And, so I thought, well, let me put this together, and I need to do some history now. And so I proposed doing a project that was going to be half history and half theology. And I thought, well, they're never going to give this to me, so I won't have to actually write this. But I'll just jot some ideas down.
00;07;18;07 - 00;07;42;27
Taylor Petrey
And I cried tears of joy and fear when I got the phone call saying, you've been accepted to the program, and we'd love to invite you out. And I thought, now I actually have to write this thing. So I ended up at Harvard that year and was very fortunate to work with so many brilliant, excellent people there, and just have the time to kind of dive into this project away from many distractions that that otherwise might have occupied me.
00;07;42;29 - 00;07;58;03
Taylor Petrey
And I had this very ambitious project, as I said, to sort of do all of Mormon history and all of Mormon theology, and it was all going to be one big fat book. And everyone kept telling me, that sounds like two books. And I thought, I don't want to write two books, I only want to write one book.
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Taylor Petrey
So I resisted, resisted, resisted, and sort of got to the end of that year and finally consented. You're right. I just need to do a history book, and I cut all of the theological side of it out and just ended up writing Tabernacles of Clay over the next year or so after that, as I revised and filled it out, and so on.
00;08;21;00 - 00;08;39;07
Taylor Petrey
But I had some kind of stubs of a couple of other chapters on theology, that I thought, well, I think there still might be something here. And so every once in a while, I'd kind of come back and expand those or realize, oh, there's another set of issues that I think are relevant here that that I don't think people have talked about enough.
00;08;39;07 - 00;08;57;22
Taylor Petrey
And so I kind of would tinker with it. And then I ended up with another four or five, six, seven chapters that I thought, oh, well, I guess there's a book here, so I might as well try to pull it together. And, this is the result. So, sometimes it was an accident. I guess I ended up writing this book.
What do we mean by “kinship,” “cosmos,” and “queering?”
00;08;57;25 - 00;09;23;20
Nicholas Shrum
Well, it's a really interesting book, and I've read Tabernacles with Clay, and I'm more accustomed to reading academic history and so, that's not to say that Tabernacles of Clay isn't complex in it's theories and its methods, but this one is it's definitely, I mean, for people that aren't more familiar with systematic theology and stuff, it can be a little bit complex.
00;09;23;20 - 00;09;48;21
Nicholas Shrum
So I'm glad that we'll we have you on the podcast to kind of help listeners walk through some of those terms. And I'm actually wondering if we can start with even the title of this text. So it's Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos. And so you said that in your previous work in early Christianity and the New Testament, one of the concepts that you approached your studies with is this idea of kinship.
00;09;48;29 - 00;10;02;03
Nicholas Shrum
I wonder if we can briefly break down these three concepts of kinship, what is cosmos, and then, we can talk about this kind of methodological approach you have of queering. If you could start with kinship, though.
00;10;02;05 - 00;10;22;14
Taylor Petrey
Yeah, the whole thing is a little bit of a mouthful. And I think people are like, I don't know what any of those words mean anymore. So I think that this is a great place to start. So, let me start with the Mormon cosmos first, and then I'll move to kinship because I think it will become clearer for people there.
00;10;22;17 - 00;10;59;20
Taylor Petrey
This is the broad term that I use to describe what other people might call Mormon thought or LDS theology here. And the chapters kind of follow my understanding of the universe that Mormonism sort of occupies. And that includes the Godhead, other divine figures like Heavenly Mother, the relationship between the Godhead, Heavenly Mother, and human spirits, and, so I talk a lot about the preexistence and the relationship between human spirits and the Godhead.
00;10;59;22 - 00;11;34;03
Taylor Petrey
And then I move to creation, and then up to contemporary human relationships that we have as well. And, there are subsets of all of these questions, but I'm kind of interested in tracing from the divine realm to the human realm, how we think about a particular concept, that here I'm calling kinship, of these deep emotional bonds that are marked by a set of practices of care towards one another.
00;11;34;06 - 00;12;23;22
Taylor Petrey
Of certainly love, of course. Right. But, these kinds of kinship bonds are also ritually marked in distinctive ways from other kinds of friendships, or other kinds of relationships, like friendships or acquaintances, and so on. And so I became interested in this category of human experience around kinship, which has a long history in the study of anthropology and so on, that I wanted to think about what are the ways that the Mormon cosmos kind of imagines these kinds of deep relationships of care that are marked ritually as distinct from others, and particularly then, to question whether or not, heterosexuality is as necessary, as essential, to that
00;12;23;22 - 00;13;00;16
Taylor Petrey
sort of imagined set of relationships. And that's where the kind of queering element comes in here. Queer theory again, it's kind of an academic buzz word. And it has a lot of subpieces, too. So I'll try to be very simplistic about how I describe it, but it's a set of questions in some respects that are looking at issues about gender, sexuality, and human relationships that are skeptical of some of the dominant categories and norms that govern our society.
00;13;00;18 - 00;13;50;04
Taylor Petrey
And I wanted to consider whether or not there were gaps, areas of kind of rethinking some possibilities within the Mormon cosmos as described that might not always support a sort of heterosexual-only understanding of its own universe. And so I became interested in these features of the way that Latter-day Saint theology sort of exists, and to call into question some of the dominant interpretations of that theology that have privileged the heterosexuality to the exclusion of other kinds of relationships, and specifically focusing on relationships rather than sexuality as well, which is another important feature here.
00;13;50;11 - 00;14;00;03
Taylor Petrey
I'm much less interested in sex, and much more interested in the kinds of deep bonds that people form of long-lasting care for one another.
00;14;00;06 - 00;14;20;05
“Doing Theology” in Mormon Studies
Nicholas Shrum
That's a really helpful overview of the kinds of methods and the terms that you're using throughout this book. I'm actually wondering if you'd be able or willing to comment a little bit on just, just because this may be unfamiliar territory for a lot of listeners, of this podcast or people that are new to Mormon studies or just academic study of religion.
00;14;20;07 - 00;14;44;28
Nicholas Shrum
Curious if you could comment on the relationship of doing a theology or doing this applying these queer studies lenses to the people that you're studying? And what I mean by that, is I think in Mormonism, people are accustomed to not thinking that we do our own theologizing: this is what it is in scripture.
00;14;44;28 - 00;15;01;06
Nicholas Shrum
This is how it's been taught from leadership. This is what's in the manual. Right? And we don't think of ourselves as practitioners, as people that theologize or do these kind of systematic, constructive theologies. I wonder if you could comment on that kind of relationship.
00;15;01;08 - 00;15;27;02
Taylor Petrey
Well, that's a good question and I'd love to. We can maybe unpack it a little bit more and you can tell. Give me your thoughts on that. Still, I'd be curious, but I guess I think that one feature that's important to understand that scholars of religion sort of take for granted, and I certainly do as well, is that religions are historically and socially produced.
00;15;27;04 - 00;16;00;25
Taylor Petrey
And what we mean by that is that they sort of exist within a particular historical context. They are practiced by human beings. And so, I come to these kinds of theological questions, understanding that they are human interpretations of things. Right? Rather than maybe a more rigid, fundamentalist understanding of religion that these are divine revelations shared to us in unmediated fashion and don't require any interpretation at all.
00;16;00;28 - 00;16;24;13
Taylor Petrey
I tend to think that human beings are deeply involved in the production of religion, both as producers certainly and as receivers of that tradition where we're always kind of interpreting and refashioning and changing. And as a historian, having worked on other, projects not only in Latter-day Saint tradition, but in early Christianity as well.
00;16;24;15 - 00;16;48;00
Taylor Petrey
No historian thinks that there are no changes over time. Changes are always happening. Right? And I am suspicious of anybody who thinks that traditions don't change or cannot change. And I'm interested in when and why, and how they change, and for what reasons. And so, in part, the set of methods that I bring to this is, it's not about advocating for a different kind of change.
00;16;48;00 - 00;17;08;19
Taylor Petrey
It's about exploring the archive, the history, the genealogy of the particular set of ideas that have come to be dominant, that we come to take for granted in our own world, and our own understanding of things and say, maybe they're not as solid as they might appear to be, or as we might take them, for granted to be.
00;17;08;23 - 00;17;21;00
Taylor Petrey
And so the methods here are kind of poking around the edges of some of these things that we think are so settled and say, maybe not.
00;17;21;02 - 00;17;46;11
Nicholas Shrum
That's a great answer. Exactly what I’m getting at. And apologies for a little bit of the curveball there. I just, I think it that's exactly what I'm thinking of here. Is that one of the things that this book does such a good job of, allowing people to have space to think about how things have been different at different times and how things could potentially be different at any time
“Lusting for Kinship”
00;17;46;14 - 00;18;15;06
Nicholas Shrum
moving forward. It's an exercise, right, that people can go into. So I appreciate it. Thank you for that answer. Going into the content of Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos. Chapter one introduces this provocative idea of “lusting for kingship” as a way to move beyond the, you outlined this, traditionally understood binary of sexuality and kinship, looking at practices like polygamy.
00;18;15;09 - 00;18;25;28
Nicholas Shrum
Could you explain this concept further and discuss how it forms your broader analysis of queer potential within Mormonism? This idea of lusting for kinship?
00;18;26;01 - 00;18;59;01
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. So this was one of those ideas that came a little bit later to the project, but it became so clarifying for me as I was sort of wrestling through it. And it's a set of questions that I think animate, and explain a lot of modern culture as well as the study of Mormonism as well, is that we have this set of presuppositions, of a kind of tension between our sexual desires on the one hand, and our kinship practices on the other.
00;18;59;03 - 00;19;39;11
Taylor Petrey
And, sometimes those things come together happily, sometimes they are in deep conflict with one another and so I wanted to kind of think through this as a problem and it shows up as an interesting problem. And I think two places that are relevant to the analysis of this book, one is in the history of LGBTQ politics over the last 30, 40, 50 years, and in particular, a tension that has sort of emerged between the activists who have been involved and the theorists who have been involved in kind of thinking through this between, on the one hand, thinking of the LGBTQ movement as a sexual liberation
00;19;39;11 - 00;20;02;12
Taylor Petrey
movement, sort of drawing on the broader sexual liberation theories that come out of the 1960s and earlier, the 1920s, and this sort of unshackling of sexuality from the kind of strict normative values and practices that our culture had had. And on the other hand, there is simultaneously this other movement that thinks of
00;20;02;17 - 00;20;25;19
Taylor Petrey
the queer activist movement and LGBTQ activist movement as less interested in sex and more interested in relationships and establishin, for instance, the same sex marriage movement is, of course, the classic example of this. This is not a sexual liberation movement. Quite the opposite. It is about adopting a set of long-term care practices for people.
00;20;25;19 - 00;20;48;00
Taylor Petrey
Right. And that's a tension that has sort of found itself right at the heart of a lot of queer analysis in the last several decades. And so I became interested in that problem. But I noticed that there's a fascinating way in which this problem has really been at the heart of Mormon studies as well, most specifically in the analysis of 19th-century plural marriage.
00;20;48;03 - 00;21;06;17
Taylor Petrey
And, you've got one set of scholars on one hand saying, this is all about sex. This is about challenging the sexual norms of the era. And it's about whether it's about a salacious and sort of negative interpretation or it's a liberated interpretation of sex that we need to understand Mormon polygamy as a sexual practice.
00;21;06;19 - 00;21;40;14
Taylor Petrey
And another set of scholars who have said, no, no, no, no, no, this is more about kinship. Sex is sort of maybe not even there at all or or diminished in some way. Right. And so I became interested in the tension and the problematic that has kind of guided the history of 19th century Mormonism and the contemporary issues in queer politics as something that I wanted to think through for myself, is where do I sort of fall on that binary between these two rival interpretations And in doing so and trying to think through all of that, I came across, this line.
00;21;40;14 - 00;22;18;16
Taylor Petrey
It's a very famous line from Richard Bushman when he's talking about 19th-century plural marriage, that Joseph Smith “lusted for kin more than he lusted for women.” And I'm not sure that's true. Okay, I'm not going to say whether it's true or not. All right? But, I became interested in the idea of lusting for kin as a desire rather than just as a set of practices and as a place where human beings fantasize in some respect about, not just sexual relationships, but kinship relationships.
00;22;18;23 - 00;22;50;06
Taylor Petrey
And so I wanted to sort of break through this binary and to look at Mormonism’s doctrines as an example of what I call lusting for kinship, as this sort of fantasy of how is it that we're all going to be related to one another, that we're going to be bound together, and so on. And so I wanted to kind of allow us to think of the overlaps between desire and kinship practices rather than as these two things, which are opposed to one another, or are in tension with one another.
00;22;50;09 - 00;23;08;25
Taylor Petrey
And, so anyway, that's the idea behind all of this and sort of litigating some of these long-standing issues in these two fields through some new interpretations that I hope are helpful in expanding the ways and the vocabulary that we have for talking about these issues.
00;23;08;27 - 00;23;31;04
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah, it's a really good chapter, especially to introduce kind of your methodology in queer studies, because if we're thinking about, like you say in the introduction, queering as a destabilizing verb, right, this is something that is, let's take kind of an assumption or let's think about how the academy is understood a particular phenomenon, and llet's destabilize it.
“Queering the Godhead”
00;23;31;04 - 00;23;56;02
Nicholas Shrum
And I love how the chapter kind of leaves it open, and it's like, okay, now through the rest of the chapters, here are some ways we can we can think about this. And you move on to that in the next chapter, which is about queering the Godhead. How do you approach that traditionally heteronormative and patriarchal structure from a queer studies perspective?
00;23;56;04 - 00;24;09;18
Nicholas Shrum
And what kind of implications would your interpretation have for understanding those divine relationships? The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and how it might relate to things like embodiment?
00;24;09;21 - 00;24;32;15
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. Well, I want to just make one other comment about this too, about, sort of picking up on this issue of destabilizing. Right. I am not making direct claims that this is the correct way to understand anything. Rather, I'm more interested in saying maybe the ways that we've understood things are less stable than we think and that there are possibilities within that, too.
00;24;32;18 - 00;24;58;23
Taylor Petrey
And one of those boundaries that I'm interested in destabilizing is the boundary between religion and sexuality in a way that, so often, I think that when we think of the LGBTQ movement, it's a secular movement. And anybody who studies religion knows that that's not actually the case. Right? There are a number of overlaps.
00;24;58;27 - 00;25;17;18
Taylor Petrey
But in the popular imagination at least, we kind of think of religion and sexuality as these two fields, which are in tension with one another in the same way that kinship and sexuality are whatever. Right? And so I became interested in kind of troubling that binary also between the religious and the secular, and the religious and the sexual.
00;25;17;20 - 00;25;50;06
Taylor Petrey
And, one place for doing that is how Latter-day Saints have described the Godhead. And this is something that I would say that other queer theologians have done in the broader Christian tradition as well, is to look at this notion of threeness in oneness, as its own sort of category breaking set of things, it holds together these two ideas that are in tension with one another at the at the same time. The Latter-day Saint tradition, of course, doesn't accept traditional creedal accounts of the Trinity.
00;25;50;06 - 00;26;12;25
Taylor Petrey
It has a different theory of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But it is a really interesting place for thinking about what seems on the face in the Latter-day Saint tradition to be a set of same-sex relationships between these three putatively male figures, right, who are bound in covenant to be one with one another eternally.
00;26;12;27 - 00;26;39;25
Taylor Petrey
And it's a fascinating thing to sort of observe the ways that Latter-day Saints have come to talk about and define this relationship as one bound in eternal love and covenant in the same language that they talk about heterosexual marriages, as also bound in eternal love and covenant. And, furthermore, we can see the ways that these are creative relationships as well, between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are sort of creating the world together.
00;26;39;27 - 00;27;08;05
Taylor Petrey
That there are ways in which this, again, challenges the idea that heterosexuality is the only meaningful form of eternal relationship, and rather says, no, it's quite different. And, I also look at the history of interpretation that Latter-day Saints have offered about the maleness of these characters, and notice a number of places where that maleness is often challenged or breaks down by Latter-day Saints themselves.
00;27;08;07 - 00;27;35;20
Taylor Petrey
Not to get into all of the examples, they're all in the book, but the most direct examples, of course, the Holy Spirit, which has a number of different iterations in the history of LDS thought as a non-personal substance, as a personage, which whose gender is not specified, to sometimes there are Latter-day Saint leaders who have taught that the Holy Spirit is female, and others have taught that the Holy Spirit is male.
00;27;35;23 - 00;28;13;09
Taylor Petrey
And of course, in the history of the Christian tradition more broadly, we also see that the Holy Spirit is sometimes rendered as neuter, sometimes as masculine, and sometimes as feminine, depending on which language we're talking about. Because of the gender of the languages themselves sort of produce these various images. So I became interested in looking at the LDS tradition in the broader Christian tradition that challenges or troubles, at least the idea that there's even a binary gender that's operating in the heavenly realm here among these figures as, again, places to sort of think of archetypes, prototypes, places where heterosexuality breaks down.
00;28;13;12 - 00;28;24;23
Taylor Petrey
And there's maybe a broader set of possibilities already within the tradition that point to alternatives, that that can be a maybe more inclusive space.
00;28;24;26 - 00;28;47;22
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm curious if you, and you can take a second to think about it. I'm wondering if you have an example that sticks out to you among one of maybe these three figures of the traditional godhead that you could give listeners a taste of kind of the challenge that you're doing to this.
00;28;47;24 - 00;29;14;01
Taylor Petrey
Oh, man. There there are there are a lot. But let me, I guess I'll point to Jesus as the other, kind of key figure here. There are a couple of places where, and this is something that's taking place in broader historical and New Testament scholarship of thinking critically about the gender of Jesus, here and again, we take for granted, like, well, Jesus is obviously a male.
00;29;14;01 - 00;29;41;26
Taylor Petrey
And that seems clear from the tradition. But in many ways, he is acting quite contrary to the ancient norms of masculinity. At least as far as we know in the text, he never gets married. He doesn't have children. The fact that he dies violently, in the way that he does, crucified on a cross, is meant as a feminizing, a sort of embarrassing way to die, right?
00;29;41;26 - 00;30;10;16
Taylor Petrey
This was not a masculine, heroic Jesus. This was one who was rendered feminine, rendered weak by the Roman government itself. Right. And that that feminized Jesus, unmanned Jesus, comes to be so central in the Christian tradition, I think, forces us to call into question the value of social gender norms at all, that his own actions are challenging the norms of masculinity there.
00;30;10;19 - 00;30;57;13
Taylor Petrey
And relatedly, in LDS atonement theology, there's a fascinating problem, where, and this draws from a broader set of issues in feminist theology, where if we accept the idea that Jesus is male and that male and female are in opposition, are fundamentally eternally distinct from one another, then Jesus's ability to atone for women seems to be called into question here, because it would be impossible, just as it along the idea of gender essentialist theory that a male can never be a female, in the sort of opposition to trans identity here, then Jesus can never be a female and can therefore never experience what it's like
00;30;57;13 - 00;31;22;14
Taylor Petrey
to be a woman and therefore not atone for women's sins. And fascinatingly, a number of Latter-day Saint thinkers from all across the orthodoxy spectrum have all solved this problem by saying that Jesus becomes a woman at the time of his suffering, not just theoretically, not just intellectually, but like his own body experiences things that only women's bodies can experience.
00;31;22;14 - 00;31;44;03
Taylor Petrey
Right? He knows what it's like to feel pregnant, they say. Right. And, so I find this a really, really interesting place of this transgression that Jesus does in the moment of the atonement, the sort of central moment of human history here, where this gender boundary has to be broken down in order for it to be effective.
00;31;44;05 - 00;32;12;17
Taylor Petrey
And I think that it forces us to call into question whether or not the gender boundary, even at the level of bodies, is as rigid as we maybe pretend it to be. And looking at these divine archetypes, not necessarily as exceptions to the rule, but perhaps even as prototypes of ways of helping us to understand what it means to be empathetic across a gender binary.
00;32;12;19 - 00;32;39;29
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. That's a great example, I think, of how you're able to take something that is kind of commonplace in maybe everyday Mormon discourse. Mormons go to Sunday school, they're studying Alma chapter seven, right? And they learn about what Jesus does in the atonement, and they think about how he's able to take on all of these pains, all of these feelings, all of these, just the full-on human experience.
Heavenly Mother and the Divine Feminine
00;32;40;01 - 00;33;02;08
Nicholas Shrum
And sometimes it just kind of stops there. Right. And then there's another step that you can take. And I think that's a really excellent example of that. So I appreciate that. Thank you. And and speaking of this gender divide that you're speaking of here, your next chapter dives right into, a chapter on Heavenly Mother and the Feminine divine.
00;33;02;08 - 00;33;26;17
Nicholas Shrum
And, this is in, for those that are unaware, in Latter-day Saint culture and discourse, kind of a controversial, for some reasons and some good reasons. Some not good reasons. Right. But, I think that this is a really good sustained treatment of the implications of having a Heavenly Mother theology and what that means.
00;33;26;19 - 00;33;33;26
Nicholas Shrum
I'm wondering how your queering of kinship extends to this figure of Heavenly Mother, in the Mormon cosmos.
00;33;33;28 - 00;34;03;07
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. Well, this is a big question, and it's one where I'm not sure I've got the last word on it. I hope that there's more analysis of this issue, but the basic trajectory of the debates over Heavenly Mother, from the late 1970s to the early 2010s, had been over a feminist or anti-feminist interpretation of Heavenly Mother. Basically,
00;34;03;07 - 00;34;29;17
Taylor Petrey
is she this a symbol of power for women, a divine woman alongside her male companion as an argument for egalitarianism, or is she the example of the quiet housewife who is neither seen nor heard and supports her husband in the background, right, while he's out doing the important work.
00;34;29;17 - 00;34;55;07
Taylor Petrey
And so we kind of have these dueling interpretations of what does Heavenly Mother mean for women here? And I became interested in a separate but not unrelated question of the way that Heavenly Mother is used as an example of heterosexuality. Again, that if Heavenly Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, well, they're off doing their like God stuff, right?
00;34;55;07 - 00;35;39;29
Taylor Petrey
But God goes home to his wife at the end of the day, right? And he only has heterosexual sex with her whenever they're creating spirit babies. And so Heavenly Mother was used really by all sides of this feminist debate as a way of affirming the heterosexual heavens. And so I wanted to see if there's a way that we can both think of the pro feminist version of this Heavenly Mother, while not necessarily having to accept, not only the heterosexual implications of that relationship, but specifically the reproductive implications of that relationship, because for so many women, again, from all across the spectrum, the idea that Heavenly Mother is
00;35;39;29 - 00;36;09;27
Taylor Petrey
just a spirit baby factory, eternally producing billions and billions and billions of spirit babies, is not a particularly attractive view of the heavens for some women. Right. And, so I wanted to look at the tradition of spirit birth as it's related to Heavenly Mother and look specifically again at kinship practices and queer kinship practices around motherhood which are not tied to birth, necessarily.
00;36;09;27 - 00;36;43;17
Taylor Petrey
And so we have adoptive parents, we have step parents, we have lesbian parents. We have all kinds of ways in which mothering is taken quite seriously without having to be thought of as reproductive. And in a way, again, I think that for so many people, that kind of long-term kinship-related care of mothering is far more important than the 24 hours or nine months and 24 hours of gestation and parturition.
00;36;43;17 - 00;37;06;27
Taylor Petrey
Right. So putting maybe more emphasis on the kinship side, I think, also has important ethical implications for us as well. So, that's how I wanted to kind of get out in describing the problems there or the potential limitations there and point to alternatives, which, again, already exist within the tradition. And, we’ll maybe talk more about adoption as a practice in Mormonism, too.
00;37;07;00 - 00;37;23;20
Taylor Petrey
But, we have some sort of hesitancy and resistance already to spirit birth again, across an ideological spectrum in the Mormon tradition, as maybe not the only way that we might imagine what that relationship is like.
00;37;23;22 - 00;37;47;16
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah, it's a helpful chapter. I think that it it introduces problems. And, I think you actually strike a really nice balance between offering some new thoughts about it while not coming across as that this is the definitive answer, which is, I don't think that's what your project is about at all. So I think that you do a really good job of striking that balance there.
00;37;47;19 - 00;38;01;16
Nicholas Shrum
You do mention adoption, and I would love to get to that in just a second, because you do have a chapter and we don't we don't have quite enough time to talk about all the stuff in your book, even though I'd love to. You have a wonderful chapter just for the listeners to be aware of.
00;38;01;19 - 00;38;34;02
Nicholas Shrum
It's entitled Gender Fluidity and Kinship Creation, talking about the role of the creation narrative in both in the history of thinking about gender and you have a wonderful quote that says that “Adam and Eve often do the heavy lifting of normalizing social change or protecting against it, as the case may be.” So, just another great example of thinking about how at different periods, these archetypes, these figures, and what they represent at the time, have represented and protected certain things.
Embodiment and Materialism
00;38;34;04 - 00;39;05;26
Nicholas Shrum
But then through your methodology, we can also think against the grain in some helpful and productive ways. I would like to before we get to the adoption, I would love to hear you speak about the the chapter after that, which is entitled “Embodiment and Materialism.” And this is probably the most theoretically dense chapter. It requires, I think, quite a bit of sitting with it and rereading sentences, which is great because it is eally productive.
00;39;05;28 - 00;39;20;02
Nicholas Shrum
You introduce this concept that you call “mythological materialism.” I'm curious, how does a theological emphasis on materiality and embodiment intersect with your queer analysis and in your book?
00;39;20;05 - 00;39;47;16
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. So, I will say that the creation chapter is my favorite. And, it was so good and so fun. And the materialism chapter was by far the hardest to write and to explain. And that probably comes through in the writing. And so you go from this, like, I think very beautiful and clear and inspiring chapter, to this very dense and heavy chapter on materialism.
00;39;47;21 - 00;40;25;09
Taylor Petrey
And so I don't fault readers at all for stumbling a little bit on it. But, so here again, I'll step back and sort of describe the problems as I see them. Latter-day Saints, are again distinct, relative to their broader Christian peers coming out of a post-enlightenment era where Latter-day Saints are challenging this division between spirit and matter, and they're arguing, as Joseph Smith does, and ends up being canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants that “all spirit is matter,” all spirit is material in some way.
00;40;25;09 - 00;40;58;29
Taylor Petrey
Right. And I think that the dominant way that Latter-day Saints have understood the implications of that theology has been that the material itself is quite malleable. That we can be resurrected from the dead. Our flesh can come back to life again, be reassembled from being scattered all over. Right? That divine beings, angels and gods can appear and disappear and go through walls and do all kinds of things, right?
00;40;59;04 - 00;41;30;03
Taylor Petrey
The material is expanded in its possibilities in that Latter-day Saint understanding. At the same time, Latter-day Saints who have accepted binary gender and heterosexuality have often appealed to the materialist tradition to say, oh well, science says that male and female are opposites and not interchangeable.
00;41;30;03 - 00;42;09;21
Taylor Petrey
Or reproduction can only occur in this one specific way. And so, rather than seeing the materialist tradition as an expansive and opening kind of theory here, many Latter-day Saints have looked to gender and sexuality to sort of constrain it by the materialist tradition. And so I became interested in reexamining some of those arguments and saying, look, the tradition that we have, or what I call mythological materialism, says that matter can change and do all kinds of stuff.
00;42;09;21 - 00;42;46;21
Taylor Petrey
There are all these different variations, and we ourselves are going to be changed from one kind of material to another kind of material. The Earth is going to be changed into a ball of glass. Right? We believe that material has multiple permutations, and rather than seeing a specific human way of dividing sex or a human way of thinking about reproduction, the mythological materialism that the Latter-day Saint tradition offers us opens us up to thinking about trans identities, intersex identities, in much more expansive and open ways
00;42;46;24 - 00;43;03;13
Taylor Petrey
than I think that the misreading of the tradition of material fixity and determinism sometimes offer us. Sorry again, that's a lot of big words and big concepts there, but hopefully, the main idea comes through and makes sense to people.
00;43;03;15 - 00;43;29;28
Nicholas Shrum
No, I'm really glad. And I would have loved to talk about the creation chapter. Just for people that are going to read this book who maybe aren't versed in a lot of these theoretical and conceptual frameworks, to hear you kind of describe the problem, so that they can go into it. It really is, I think, an important chapter for thinking about the kind of ontological questions of like, what is, what is reality?
00;43;29;28 - 00;43;48;22
Nicholas Shrum
How does this work? What kind of assumptions am I bringing to the way that I think about religious experience, the way that I think about the relationship to other people, and to the divine? It's a it's an important challenge. Yeah. Thinking about that. Okay. I would love for you to talk about your last chapter and adoption.
00;43;48;22 - 00;44;15;20
Nicholas Shrum
There's been some scholarship in the last, oh, ten years or so that's really tried to understand this practice of adoption. And you put it into conversation, as it should be, with plural marriage in the 19th century. What potential resources for thinking about kinship do you find in, what you kind of describe as this complex and often patriarchal history?
Plural Marriage and the Practice of Ritual Adoption
00;44;15;22 - 00;44;22;08
Nicholas Shrum
And what kind of challenges are associated with plural marriage, and then specifically with adoption? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
00;44;22;10 - 00;45;04;06
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. So, plural marriage and adult ritual adoption were developed really side by side. And you mentioned that there has been this kind of scholarly revival of thinking about early Mormon adoption practices as a kind of theological key to understanding early Mormonism, 19th century Mormonism. And I tend to agree with that. I think that it's a further example of the way that Latter-day Saints are troubling the idea that the biological, heterosexual, monogamous family is the kind of center of the universe.
00;45;04;06 - 00;45;26;27
Taylor Petrey
And they're saying let's reimagine this entirely. Let's take all of these concepts and be creative here about how we form bonds with one another. And so I became interested in the practice of adoption as a way of thinking about how these consenting adults would form these long-term relationships of care with one another.
00;45;27;00 - 00;45;54;18
Taylor Petrey
And, I think that both adoption as practiced and plural marriage as practiced fail to meet some of their best ideals in a lot of cases, there are a lot of terrible examples in both of those traditions and both of those sets of practices that I don't think we want to recreate or emulate. And so I'm interested in looking to history, but not necessarily reproducing it.
00;45;54;18 - 00;46;18;13
Taylor Petrey
exactly. More what I'm interested in looking to that history of doing is to say there was a time when we were quite open to thinking about kinship and all of these new and different ways, and, it was in adoption, it was in plural marriage. It was in all the different subtypes of plural marriage. We were having people get married eternally, but not for time, and for time, but not for eternity.
00;46;18;17 - 00;46;49;18
Taylor Petrey
And having people marry someone on behalf of someone else who was already dead, but they're going to be married in this life. But, there are all kinds of just experimental ways that we're thinking about forming human relationships among the living and among the living and the dead that I think is an interesting part of our tradition where we could go back to that era of creativity to think beyond the heterosexual, monogamous family as the only model available to us in the heavens.
00;46;49;24 - 00;47;07;12
Taylor Petrey
And so I think our history provides us with some cautionary tales as well as really quite interesting resources for thinking through the contemporary issues that we face in terms of kinship and family.
00;47;07;15 - 00;47;24;16
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah. Thank you for that. And just really quick for, for people that aren't versed in Mormonism or even those that are that aren't familiar with the practice of adoption in the nineteenth century as an ordinance, can you give a brief description of kind of what that looked like? That we're not talking about contemporary adoption practices.
00;47;24;18 - 00;47;50;00
Taylor Petrey
Right. Yeah. Well, yes. So, one of the things that happens is that we have a sealing ritual that would occur. I mean, these are adoptions where one is sealed to another person. So Joseph Smith would adopt, and his wife Emma would adopt another couple. In one case, Joseph Smith seems to adopt another male all by himself, who is an unmarried man.
00;47;50;00 - 00;48;15;16
Taylor Petrey
And we then have this practice extending into the trek west, where Brigham Young and other church leaders sort of form these large networks of adopting people into their families, and again, it's a ritual sealing. It's actually the same sealing ritual that seals spouses together and seals spouses and their children together.
00;48;15;19 - 00;48;40;12
Taylor Petrey
And I point out that it is the language of adoption that gets used here not only to describe non-biologically related kin, but also biologically related kin. For much of the 19th century, the way that biological parents were sealed to their children was an adoption ritual. You had to adopt them in the temple, right?
00;48;40;19 - 00;49;03;18
Taylor Petrey
And then you were sealed to them, being born in the covenant is a sort of later idea where the ritual is sort of already done enough, and so, but even today, parents need to be sealed to their biological children if they join the church later on. And there are all kinds of ways in which that sort of ritual takes precedence over biology.
00;49;03;18 - 00;49;28;18
Taylor Petrey
Again and again and again and again. And so I became interested again in ritual kinship, as something where Latter-day Saints have thought these biological bonds are insufficient, and it is really the ritual itself that is actually the thing that is eternally significant. Right? Biology is otherwise irrelevant in this, because if you're not sealed, you're out of luck here.
00;49;28;18 - 00;49;49;17
Taylor Petrey
Right? So this idea then of adoptive sealings is not just a practice where adults are making this sealing relationship with one another, but again, even their own children in this early stage as well. Now, this fades out in the course of the 20th century. And adoption and sealing theology are constantly under change.
00;49;49;19 - 00;50;23;10
Taylor Petrey
Nathan Oman has a really great article on this in the Journal of Mormon History from a year or two ago that was influential for me in the final stages of this book. But I think that kind of thinking about the ways that Latter-day Saints would seal themselves to one another in a whole variety of different contexts in that early period, again, points to us some resources perhaps, for confronting the contemporary issues about the conflicts between Latter-day Saint theology and the practices of kinship among Latter-day Saints.
00;50;23;13 - 00;50;45;22
Nicholas Shrum
Yeah. Thank you for that. That explanation of kind of what the practice looked like and some of the reasons for doing it. Really, really interesting chapter. To conclude our discussion today, I have a couple of questions. I always like to end the podcast thinking about how authors of these books think about their work contributing to the larger field of the study of religion.
00;50;45;24 - 00;51;02;15
Nicholas Shrum
And so specifically with this one, with conversations about queer theory and the queer study of religion, how do you hope that it contributes to the broader academic field? And what does a study of Mormonism offer to other traditions? Other people working in other fields?
00;51;02;17 - 00;51;19;29
Taylor Petrey
Yeah. Well, this is such a great question. And it's one of the things that really motivated me in the final stages of this book, that I thought, well, I think I maybe have something interesting and important to say to these academic fields. For people who aren't in these fields may not going to be as geeked out about them as you and I might be.
00;51;19;29 - 00;51;56;11
Taylor Petrey
But, number one, I think it's really interesting that, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that queer theory has often just sort of had this presumed secularism to it. Many of the major thinkers sort of establishing queer theory were indifferent to or hostile to analysis of religion. And I think that that left a lot of gaps in thinking critically about religion as a place not just to oppose, but as a place where queer practices are happening.
00;51;56;11 - 00;52;36;08
Taylor Petrey
Right. And, so I really wanted to kind of trouble that. Now, queer scholars of religion have known this and have been saying this for a long time, but I hope to provide yet another example of of that in this book. But I also hope that the example that I provide and the really rich and interesting history of Latter-day Saint practices around kinship, theology about embodied gods who have sex, these are things that are distinctive about the LDS tradition that are quite interesting and quite, I think, ripe for queer analysis, as I hope that the book shows.
00;52;36;11 - 00;53;01;13
Taylor Petrey
And so I'm also hoping that queer scholars of religion might start to think about the Mormon tradition itself as a place for doing queer religious studies and mostly it gets ignored right where we're not the old timey theologians or we're not radical practitioners in some way. And so we kind of fall through the cracks, I think, in that analysis.
00;53;01;15 - 00;53;32;18
Taylor Petrey
And I hope to show that careful attention to really quite strongly heteronormative traditions like the LDS tradition are also places that have some potential resources for thinking about religion queerly, meaning to challenge some of these categories of heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity, religion and secular, and so on that too often we just take for granted.
00;53;32;20 - 00;53;43;07
Nicholas Shrum
I think that's an excellent place for us to kind of end our conversation, unless there are other things you wanted to make sure that we covered in the last few minutes, that you didn't feel like you had the chance to.
00;53;43;09 - 00;53;45;15
Taylor Petrey
Now this was great to chat with you. Thank you so much.
00;53;45;18 - 00;54;00;20
Nicholas Shrum
I really appreciate it. Again, this is Professor Taylor Petrey. Talking about his recent book, published last year with the University of North Carolina Press. Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos. Professor Petrey, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
00;54;00;23 - 00;54;03;28
Taylor Petrey
Thank you.
00;54;04;00 - 00;54;20;15
Nicholas Shrum
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversation soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production editing and to Ben Arrington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit mormonguitar.com. Thank you for listening.