Review
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Title: Tender Leaves of Hope: Finding Belonging as LGBTQ Latter-day Saint Women
Editor: Meghan Decker
Publisher: CFI
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 177
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781462143283
Price: $16.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Meghan Decker’s Tender Leaves of Hope: Finding Belonging as LGBTQ Latter-day Saint Women will not please everyone. Like almost all books about the Latter-day Saint LGBTQ experience (throughout this review, I try to mimic the language that Decker uses in the book, rather than my own preference for terms like ‘Mormon’ and ‘queer’), members of the community will take issue with Decker’s perspective (some for the book being too ‘orthodox’ or for Decker’s mixed-orientation marriage and others perhaps for the book being too open to alternative, off-the-covenant-path choices). In other words, this book is not for everyone but has some value to offer the conversation surrounding LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women.
Tender Leaves of Hope is primarily a recounting of Meghan Decker’s own experience and insights she has gained from her life since coming out and the lives of many women (and some men) that have shared their experiences with her. Decker peppers the book with snippets from the stories and lives of other women, but her story is definitely the dominant focus of the book. Some of the closing chapters are much more concentrated on the wide variety of experiences that LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women have, which leads to some of the strongest moments in the book (and a model for what the book could have been, which may have strengthened some of the powerful ideas that Decker presents).
Decker displays a remarkable degree of humility and openness throughout the book. She talks repeatedly and explicitly about the need for each individual LGBTQ Latter-day Saint woman to make her own choice, with God, about what she should do (in terms of relationship to the institutional church, dating, marriage, etc.). While Decker works to include glimpses of stories of women making choices all along the spectrum, the bulk of the book is dedicated to her own story, as a covenant-keeping woman attracted to women and married to a man (I’m using the language that she tends to use to describe herself throughout the book). This imbalance in coverage may undermine the more expansive and inclusive ideas that Decker does seem committed to bringing in.
I found several of the ideas in Decker’s book compelling and particularly of value to LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women who desire to find a new, ‘covenant-keeping’ framework to think about their own sexuality. One of these insights comes as Decker describes the way she came to realize that her attraction to women was a desire from God and therefore, must have good in it. She writes:
what was the light side, the gifts from God that under the influence of the Spirit would transcend the natural and become sanctified to God’s good will? I began to ask, ‘What part of this helps me to become more like my Heavenly Parents? What interferes?’ (95)
Here, Decker is explicitly offering an expansive view of sexuality and attraction and sexual desire, suggesting that these desires are from God and that they include far more than a desire for some sort of sexual encounter. These ‘desires,’ for Decker, are part of her mortal journey to learn to become more like God, more like her Heavenly Parents. Rather than thinking about the desires as evil or bad or harmful, as she used to, Decker now looks for the ways that her attraction to women can be sanctified and lead her closer to God.
I love this expansive thinking about desire and, in my words—queerness. It rings true to my own experience, and I hope it will help LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women develop a healthier relationship with their own desires, thinking about how to sanctify them. I also hope this can help other non-queer Latter-day Saints begin to more fully understand the complexity and variety of ways that sexuality and attraction and desire are woven fully throughout our human experience and not exclusively about sex itself.
Later, Decker discusses the need for hope and wonder concerning the place of LGBTQ women in the eternities. She dismisses, in somewhat vague and a bit reductive terms, the broad strokes of what both queer advocates and more conservative latter-day saints offer. She argues that “Mortal solutions are short-sighted when compared to God’s compassionate, omniscient, and perfect plan, even though we have to wait for the veil to be lifted to reveal it” (118).
I am drawn to this expression of epistemic humility! And I love the implicit invitation to think more creatively and wildly about what “God’s compassionate, omniscient, and perfect plan” might entail. Even as I have more sympathies for the ‘inclusive’ vision of Heaven that she is somewhat dismissive/skeptical of.
To illustrate how she came to believe that each of us needs to make our way back to God, Decker shares a fascinating story about her mother leaving the church, converting to Catholicism, and then reconverting to Mormonism. Decker writes that when her mom first told her that God asked her to convert to Catholicism:
I was completely dismissive of her personal revelation. ‘God doesn’t lead people out of covenants,’ I said to myself, ‘I don’t know who she’s listening to, but it’s not God.’ Now I realize I put a box around God, constructed of my expectations and limited vision. I really don’t know what He did or didn’t say to her.…Today, rather than dismissing the experience that led her away from the Church and our family’s covenants for a time, I finally acknowledge I don’t understand all things. His ways are higher than mine, and His thoughts higher than my thoughts. (138)
Decker then connects this explicitly to the stories of LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women. She says that we can never know what God told them, so we should simply love them and trust that they can work out with God the rest. I love the incorporation of humility here and the charity that Decker extends to others, especially how she grounds that realization in the scriptural paraphrase that God’s ways are higher than ours. Decker ends the book with a variety of glimpses into the range of experiences, journeys, and paths that LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women take, embodying the humility and openness that she expresses here and elsewhere in the book.
Overall, Tender Leaves of Hope: Finding Belonging as LGBTQ Latter-day Saint Women is a fine addition to the growing body of work about LGBTQ Latter-day Saints. Noteworthy for its focus on LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women, and the expansive, humble ideas at its core, Tender Leaves of Hope is ideal for LGBTQ Latter-day Saint women still learning about and coming to terms with their sexuality and latter-day saints more broadly that want to have a better understanding of some piece of the LGBTQ Latter-day Saint woman experience.