I’ve had the outline of this blog post percolating in my mind for at least a decade. My plan was always to wait and write it after I marry, because at that point, I would have the social standing to question the status quo in a way that a single person doesn’t. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone to marry, and this message is too important to wait.
I have a firm belief that righteous single people will be exalted as single people – no afterlife arranged marriage necessary. God doesn’t view married people in higher regard than single people, and my eternal fate is not to be the servant of married folks.
The belief that marriage is necessary to reach the highest degree of glory fails for the following reasons:
1. It makes God appear to be very bad at math.
Any way you slice it, requiring marriage creates a math problem. Many people at church extrapolate from the gender imbalance in the pews and believe that there will be many more women than men who merit celestial glory. Others extrapolate from the imbalanced birthrates and infant mortality rates to believe that due to more baby boys being born and dying young, that there will be more men than women in the celestial kingdom. And this doesn’t even take into account people who aren’t interested in the opposite sex. Requiring everyone to pair up is like the worst game of celestial musical chairs, and people will be left standing when the music stops.
2. It ignores the diversity of human experience.
When discussing what life in God’s presence is like, Joseph Smith revealed in Doctrine and Covenants 130:2 “And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there”. We have people of all types here, so we’ll have people of all types there. Single people are part of the society of the church (in fact, we’re the majority of the church), so we’ll be part of the society of heaven.
3. The New Testament and Book of Mormon don’t support it.
Jesus was sinless, but he was baptized to show us the way and because baptism is a required ordinance. If marriage were likewise required, it would stand to reason that there would be some textual evidence of his marriage. The fact that the New Testament is silent on the marital status of Jesus indicates that God doesn’t think marital status matters much one way or the other.
Additionally, we’re taught that the Book of Mormon contains the fullness of the gospel and teaches us the way back to God. The Book of Mormon teaches the necessity of faith, repentance, and baptism. It does not teach the necessity of marriage. All it says about marriage is that polygamy is an abomination before God, and that the Lamanites were more righteous than the Nephites because they treated their wives with love and respect.
4. It implies that Jesus doesn’t have the power to save.
Acts 4:12 teaches that there is no other name given by which we can be saved, except for by the name of Jesus. Many scriptures, both Bible and Book of Mormon, remind us that the grace of Jesus is sufficient. By adding that we also need a spouse, that is saying that the name of Jesus is not the only name by which we are saved, and that Jesus is not sufficient for salvation. This is rank blasphemy.
There is a passage in Doctrine and Covenants 131:1-4 that appears to state that marriage is necessary for exaltation. However, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that that’s really what the scripture is saying, it doesn’t follow that the eternal fate of the unmarried is either damnation or being paired with a rando.
The scriptures are full of passages detailing the necessity of baptism. Yet, we don’t perform proxy baptisms for those who died as children, because of Moroni 8:8-15. Children are alive in Christ, and baptizing them is a mockery before God. And those children who die without baptism are nonetheless saved. If the grace of God is big enough to save unbaptized babies, it is big enough to exalt unmarried adults.
Single people are often told at church that we’ll be paired up with someone in the afterlife and like it because no righteous person will be denied any blessing in the hereafter. The implication is that the blessing that will be given to us is marriage. However, Doctrine and Covenants 14:7 states “And if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God.” Marriage isn’t the gift. Eternal life is the gift, and it is given to all who keep the commandments and endure to the end. No righteous single person will be denied eternal life, even if we are denied marriage.
19 Responses
Trudy, I love this post. It is brilliant. I think Joseph Smith was an authentic mystic who had some amazing revelations about God, but over the years of examining his ideas and how they play out applied to real life, I’ve come to believe he brought a lot of bias and his own personal emotional struggles into his teachings about sealings and exaltation. I love how you point out the inconsistencies between his thinking and the gospel of Christ.
A few months ago, a friend from Kenya who is deeply evangelical Christian was getting married. As he talked about his religious beliefs about marriage, he criticized LDS beliefs about marriage being eternal, quoting Jesus about no one being married in the next life. I found this obnoxious, but I keep coming back to the inconsistency. There is a lot of mystery here. I love the idea of eternal relationships and love continuing for ever. Especially exclusive love that is not polygamous. But what really matters about the gospel is not arranging everything in the next life, which largely needs to be left mysterious and open, but the question of how to live now, how to make the world a better place now.
I hate the hierarchies created between married an unmarried at church. It is oppressive. It is corrupt. I’m done with tiered ideas of heaven. Way too much is at stake with family situations we can’t control. I want to focus on connection, service, friendship, community and love. This is what can bring everyone joy and that fits everyone’s situations.
I wish I was part of a church where this post was silly and unnecessary—where every point listed was taught so regularly as to be taken for granted. I wish I hadn’t spent so many years waiting and hoping and trying to be attracted to somebody so I could stomach the idea of being married and hopefully see my family again after I die. I wish I didn’t run the risk, every week, of being cornered by somebody at church and sweetly told how God will assign me to someone after I die and make me like it.
I wish my faith community was working on being Christlike instead of being married.
This is an excellent essay – thank you for writing and posting it. If it were circulated in the proper channels, it could generate much deep discussion.
Thank you for putting my thoughts into words.
This: “I have a firm belief that righteous single people will be exalted as single people – no afterlife arranged marriage necessary.” As a single woman, who is happy and fulfilled as a single woman, I’m good. I’m good with God, I’m good with eternity, I’m good with me and the life I built, as well as the chosen family I have. I’m sorry (I’m really not) that my state of being makes people uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit and maybe that I make people uncomfortable because I’m not appropriately hopeful/sad re: marriage/children, but here we are. I’m tired of people trying to make me feel better, but actually trying to make themselves feel better, with statements like, “don’t worry, you’ll get married in the next life.” Not worried, thanks. Please stop saying that. It diminishes who I am both now and to God. (We really should stop using eternity as a fixer for mortality. Is anyone comforted by “it’ll be better after you die”? I think of the At Last She Said It hosts and their regular lament that they want a church that fixes things for them NOW, not sometime in the amorphous, never-ending future.)
Trudy – this is excellent. Thank you for helping me to understand this topic in ways I had completely missed previously. I am convinced that we know far, far less than we claim to know about the worlds beyond this one. Afterlife doctrine is a powerful way to keep us focused on what the leaders want us focused on and to help us feel better about the struggles and injustices that are part of mortal life. When we graduate from this life, I believe we will all be quite amazed at how inclusive, diverse and expansive existence actually is. I seriously doubt it will bear much resemblance to a gated community filled with intact nuclear families.
Random thoughts:
1 – my openly LGBT daughter was stared/glared at by the YW president during the lesson on D&C 132 – we MUST be in heterosexual marriages or we will only get to be ministering angels (obviously, a lesser position). When I asked Daughter about it after church, I got the biggest eye roll and she said, “Oh I’ll be a ministering angel all right – one of the evil ones like on Good Omens.”
2 – Above in the first comment: “But what really matters about the gospel is not arranging everything in the next life, which largely needs to be left mysterious and open, but the question of how to live now, how to make the world a better place now.” THIS!!! So much THIS!!! So many leaders in our church are so enamored with the Next Life that they’re completely disregarding this one. Everything is in the future to them. But it’s not. We can have one-heart-one-mind Zion NOW, with single people and LGBT people and neuro-divergent people and divorced people and whatever other arbitrary category you can think of. ALL of us making Zion together. We just have to be willing to focus on what and who is directly in front of us right this minute, rather than fantasizing about some fairy tale we don’t actually know about.
“Good Omens” should be required viewing for all Christians. That show is a delight and so spot-on.
Seeing as I have a lesbian daughter and an asexual granddaughter, I agree with you that heterosexual marriage cannot be required by God. I have known too many really good women who did not want to be, or absolutely hated being married to think one way of life works for everyone. Everyone isn’t a straight cis man, and THAT seems to be who likes marriage best.
But I do have a quibble about there being proof that Jesus was married. I believe we have proof in the New Testament that Jesus was married because he was a Jew who was allowed to preach in the synagogue. There were two requirements for a Jewish man to preach in the synagogue back in Jesus’s day. 1. Age. And if you check your NT you see that Jesus waited to start his ministry until about age 30 IIRC. 2. Marriage. The second requirement was that the man be married. He could be widowed or not, but he had to have been married. I think it was simply that all Jews at the time the NT was written knew those facts, and so they would automatically know Jesus was married. You have your proof right where it says that he taught in the synagogue. Just because Catholics changed that tradition and started having unmarried priests, does not change what the Jewish tradition was during Jesus’ day. Jesus was a Jew who preached in the synagogue, not a Catholic priest. So, he was married. If his wife was still living at the time of his death, she would have been one of the women who went to dress his body, because that task was done by “next of kin” only. So, there to dress his body for final burial at the time of his resurrection, would have been his mother, wife, and sisters, daughters if they were old enough, and maybe sisters in law also. So, look to the women who went to his burial chamber the morning of his resurrection and figure out his relationship to them to find his wife. There is sound theory behind the idea of Mary Magdalene as possible wife.
I know we hear it a lot, especially in Mormon circles, that as an adult Jewish male who taught at the temple Jesus has to have been married, but it is not as simple as that. The rabbinic tradition that required marriage didn’t come about until after the destruction of the temple (70 ACE) and there were Jewish sects operating in Jerusalem who practiced abstinence, and abstinence was especially common among apocalyptic preachers like John the Baptist, and Jesus was also an apocalyptic preacher. And the evidence for Mary Magdalene isn’t conclusive, either. While the scriptures don’t come out and say he wasn’t married, we don’t have enough evidence to claim he was.
Here’s an overview of why some scholars think he wasn’t married: https://www.bartehrman.com/did-jesus-have-a-wife/
Apocryphal scripture, the book of Mary, suggests that Jesus was married. LDS scripture is silent on this.
Thank you for writing this Trudy. Today I just happened to listen to the Family Proclamations podcast episode called “One is a Whole Number”, and I loved getting multiple perspectives on singleness. This podcast hosts fascinating discussions. Here’s a link to that episode:
https://www.familyproclamations.org/e/one-is-a-whole-number-with-bella-depaulo/
Thank you, thank you for this article! I am of a very similar mind. I think salvation/exaltation is purely between the individual and God and that the eternal marriage thing is way too mixed up with polygamy. Besides, there are way too many exceptions and problems and diverse family situations to make the doctrine of celestial marriage deeply comforting except to the few who perfectly fit its requirements.
Amen to all this. Including the problem with it being too mixed up with polygamy. It’s a theological mess. Trudy, based on the comments it seems to me this post is being read by a large number of people.
What if I want an eternal marriage? To bad for me? We should probably be careful making up doctrine that is comforting to us, because it might not be comforting for someone else.
This comment isn’t fair or kind, though I can understand this is a vulnerable and emotional topic. Trudy isn’t making up doctrine as a kind of cop out to comfort herself. She is critiquing LDS teachings based on the scriptures and theology, as well as common sense and logic. The inconsistencies are real and we do have actual conundrums here. I’m pretty sure if there is an afterlife if people want to form eternal marriages, a loving God will support them in fulfilling these desires. She isn’t tearing apart that possibility or choice, just showing us it can and probably should be disentangled from salvation because this can do great spiritual harm.
She is absolutely suggesting that that will be denied: “Marriage isn’t the gift. Eternal life is the gift, and it is given to all who keep the commandments and endure to the end. No righteous single person will be denied eternal life, even if we are denied marriage.”
Thank you for commenting. You misunderstand. I never said that nobody gets an eternal marriage. I said that it’s not mandatory.