Covenant relationship offers healing and hope to youth and young adults navigating questions around same-sex attraction and other LGBTQ experiences, confirming their absolute belonging to the family of God. Photo by Zhivko Minkov, Unsplash.com.

Abstract: Our youth are experiencing a profound hunger for connection, evidenced by an epidemic of loneliness and increasing mental health challenges despite the seeming connectivity of a world swimming in social media. The deepest loneliness stems from disruption and disorder in family life, including ruptured or never formed family relationships. In answer to this relational fracturing, the gospel of Jesus Christ offers covenant belonging and connection. The revealed understanding of the nature of our covenant relationship with Jesus Christ and his work in enabling eternal bonds within the family and across the entire eternal family is at the heart of helping our youth respond to the complex questions they face, including same-sex attraction and other LGBTQ experiences.

Keywords: love, covenant, LGBTQ, mental health, religion, youth, young adults

In 2017 Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared an epidemic of loneliness, singling it out as the most common serious pathology of our day. At the time, 40 percent of adults in America reported feeling lonely.[1] In the years since, the epidemic has grown. A 2021 national survey by the Human School of Education found that 61 percent of young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time.”[2] This trend appears to be part of a simultaneous increase in mental health challenges, particularly among adolescents and young adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touched off a national conversation in 2023 when it reported that almost 60 percent of teen girls in the US felt “persistently sad or hopeless” and that 30 percent had seriously considered attempting suicide.[3] A study of twenty thousand adolescents in the United Kingdom recently confirmed that emotional disorders and symptoms have significantly increased among the current generation of adolescents across multiple parts of the world.[4]

This finding came on the heels of other research from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Project, which found that after decades of higher well-being compared to older age-groups, young adult well-being has dramatically declined—with young adults being less happy, less healthy, and less financially stable, also experiencing less meaning and having greater struggles with character and poorer relationships than young adults in the past.[5] Author Tyler Vanderweele concluded, “Relatively speaking, young people are not doing as well as they once were,” then suggested that it reflects a crisis in meaning and identity linked to loneliness and decreased relational connection.[6]

We can’t help but ask what is going on for our youth and young adults. What is shaping this crisis in loneliness, meaning, and identity? Ironically, amid increased affluence, we find ourselves suffering the hunger of relational poverty, a “closing of the American heart,” as described poignantly by one scholar.[7] Rampant individualism, workism, diminished community engagement, and less religiosity appear to have laid the groundwork, alienating adults, young adults, and adolescents from the core institutions that have provided grounding across time.

But the deepest loneliness stems from disruption and disorder in family life, evidenced in the effects of ruptured or never formed family relationships.[8] The past fifty years brought a dramatic increase in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, with the attendant relational fracturing and developmental risk, especially for children. This accompanied a dramatic drop in the marriage rate. In 1965 there were 76.5 marriages per 1,000 unmarried people. By 2021 that rate had fallen to 28 marriages per 1,000.[9] Less than half of adults are married today, down from 75 percent in 1960. Some estimates suggest that one in three young adults today will never marry.[10]

Parents’ priorities regarding their children marrying have also shifted. Recent survey data found that where nine in ten parents highly prioritize finances and careers for their children when they reach adulthood, only one in five placed an equal level of importance on their children getting married and having children.[11] For those young adults who do marry, the age at first marriage has risen dramatically, extending the years that young adults spend outside the grounding bonds of marriage and children. At the same time there has also been a precipitous drop in fertility, especially since 2009 when the rate began to drop from 2.1 children per woman to 1.6 children in 2020.[12] This means that a growing share of adults do not have either a spouse or children, and that young adults and adolescence have grown up without siblings.

Yet, during the same period, the link between marriage, children, and happiness has become only stronger. In 2023 marriage was identified as “the most important differentiator” of being happy or unhappy in the United States,[13] and being reared by stably married parents has become even more strongly linked to positive outcomes for children.[14] Adolescents and young adults today are much less likely to find themselves in the stable, committed, family relationships that are fundamental to the development of a clear sense of identity, meaning, connection, and purpose.

Technology use appears to have profoundly exacerbated the trend toward alienation, isolation, and disconnection for adolescents and young adults in particular. As Jonathan Haidt explains, the “great rewiring” of childhood and adolescence has interfered with social and neurological development, dramatically increasing loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.[15] Social media has been particularly harmful for girls’ social and emotional well-being, while boys have increasingly withdrawn from the real world into the virtual world, with “disastrous consequences” for their development and relationships and the broader society. The virtual world has replaced human interaction, depriving children, adolescents, and young adults of the relational experiences and development that are essential to experience and mature into a thriving adulthood.

Social media distorts the essential experience of human relatedness by tapping into our need to be seen and recognized but giving us a false sense of control over how we are seen. As Andy Crouch wisely notes, because we are not actually known and seen, we do not experience what we truly need.[16] In social commentator Michelle Goldberg’s words, social media “precipitated a revolution in consciousness, in which people are constantly packaging themselves for public consumption and seeing their popularity and the popularity of others quantified.” We should not be surprised that this is particularly challenging for adolescent girls, who are “in a stage of life where both fashioning the self and finding a place to belong are paramount.”[17] The virtual world of technology seems to have bulldozed through a world of already fractured core relationships of family life, further fragmenting and propelling relational disconnection. The results for adolescents and young adults are reflected in delayed development, decreased flourishing, a mental health crisis, and a loneliness epidemic.

The Truth About Our Relational Nature

All these findings point to a fundamental, undeniable reality. Our adolescents and young adults are not designed for isolation, social disconnection, and pleasure-seeking autonomy. We are all deeply relational beings, hardwired for interaction and connection. What was once theoretical is now so consistently captured in human experience that it has become undeniable. No person can really flourish unless they have other persons who know them and reflect back to them who they are.[18] As German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichman wrote, “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life, and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.”[19] It is in loving and being loved that we are “most fully and distinctively” ourselves.[20] Intimate connection within bonds of commitment and devotion in a community where they are seen and known is what adolescents and young adults are made for.

Research on Family Affirms Our Relational Nature

This research underscores why family relationships are so central to flourishing. Research on the role of family relationships in development confirm the reality of our relational nature. Decades of research have led to one of the most “law-like” findings in social science: the foundational, core relationships of family profoundly shape wellbeing, identity, and relational capacity.

Healthy development emerges from within strong family relationships. This connection is true from the beginning of life. Over the last decade, unparalleled progress in the field of neuroscience has confirmed that the development of the infant’s mind and body needs to occur within the context of a relationship with another deeply invested mind and body.[21] From the moment the infant leaves the womb, she is searching—primed to sensitively perceive and seek out a particular caregiver, first her mother, whose smell, tone of voice, and touch she already knows.[22] The mother is also primed to establish the bond through which the emotional communication that is essential for development can occur. Face to face, body to body, right brain to right brain, this bond of deep emotional connection builds the infant’s right brain, regulates her emotions, and establishes her sense of identity and belonging.[23] Development emerges within radical dependence because only in deeply bonding with others, beginning with mother and father, siblings and others, can we come to know who we are.

Marriage and Children’s Well-Being

Healthy development is also shaped by a strong, loving relationship between mother and father. For decades, researchers have explored what being born outside the bonds of marriage means in the lives of children, a rate that increased from 5 percent of children in 1960 to 41 percent of children today.[24] Hundreds of studies comparing outcomes show increased risks in every developmental area for children born to single parents: poverty, involvement in crime, failing in school, lower graduation rates, physical health, psychological distress, mental illness, suicide, exposure to aggravated parenting, and abuse.[25] Children in cohabiting families are also, on average, significantly more likely to experience challenges in part related to the increased rate of breakup for cohabiting parents.[26] The risks for children resulting from instability are exacerbated by the increased risk for poverty and abuse, linked to the presence of unrelated male partners living with a single mother.[27]

Divorce can be essential in creating a healthier developmental environment for children taken out of an abusive situation. But, in general, divorce is linked to increased risks for serious social, emotional, or psychological challenges for children.[28] Children who experience divorce are more likely to describe a feeling of “inner division,” loneliness, and exile as they try to bridge the gap between their parents’ separate worlds.[29] Deep within, many long for the original intactness of their being, the loving union of the mother and father who brought them into being.[30]

Marriage does not guarantee that children receive the best nurturing setting, but a preponderance of evidence suggests that marriage “offers the most reliable way” for children to receive the essential gifts of two committed parents, a stable home life, economic resources, and the experience of being wanted and welcomed.[31] In Leon Kass’s words, a loving, stable marriage is the foundation for that “durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world” that children depend upon.[32] When that relationship is ruptured by mistreatment, abuse and divorce, children experience a betrayal of the primal trust they have reposed in their parents.

Marriage and Adult Well-Being

The bond of marriage also benefits adults in nearly every aspect of well-being: happiness, health, and wealth.[33] Men who marry tend to work harder, with more conscientiousness, intentionality and saving. They are more emotionally and physically satisfied with intimacy. They live longer and engage less in risky behaviors, knowing others depend on them.[34] For women, marriage is associated with increased happiness, sense of purposefulness, hopefulness, health benefits, and less depression and loneliness.[35] As Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Project concludes, marriage is structured to satisfy the significant human needs for companionship, affection, socialization and intimacy while providing a stable source of social support. Marriage “promotes human flourishing in many ways at once, both meeting and harmonizing the distinctive needs and desires of men, women, and children.”[36] Our social experiment with abandoning marriage has left us untethered from the essential social structures on which human beings and their development depend.

Sexual Fragmentation and Well-Being

Much of this untethering has been shaped by our social experiment with sexual relationships. The sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a breaking apart of marriage from sexual intimacy, initiating a dramatic increase in nonmarital childbearing and, with it, increased risks for children. But the disruptive psychological effects of bonding sexually, sharing part without the whole, then severing what was meant to be a total obligation have also been devastating for women and men.

For women, sex outside committed relationships has become expected, bringing with it risks for increased nonconsensual sexual contact, decreased mental health,[37] out-of-wedlock childbearing,[38] abortion,[39] and divorce.[40] Girls and women have been widely sexualized, held to a standard that defines value by sexual appeal, objectified as something for other’s sexual use, and had sexuality inappropriately imposed on them. The Association of American Universities found that 26.4 percent of undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent,[41] while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in ten adolescent girls experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2021.[42] Negative effects emerge in every developmental domain—cognitively, physically, emotionally, and sexually.[43]

For men, easy sexual access outside marital commitment has contributed to their languishing.[44] In Baumeister and Voh’s words, “Young men can skip the wearying detour of a getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex.[45] Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forgo other women forever.” Without marriage, men are no longer embedded in a social network where they are depended on to develop, learn, work, save, and live because others depend on them.[46] As a result, the share of men in the workforce has seen a steady decline, with a growing percentage choosing not to work at all.

Men have decreased in educational attainment.[47] The decline of stable, well-paying, manufacturing jobs, especially among less-educated men, has compounded the problem, making working-class men, in particular, less marriageable.[48] This languishing is most painfully exposed in “deaths of despair” where the fastest rising death rates in the US are from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease among unmarried white men who have not earned college degrees.[49] The effects of sexual fragmentation further confirm the reality of our relational nature. We see the disruptive psychological and developmental effects of bonding sexually, then parting—bonding and breaking—and the fragility and lack of wholeness in relationships that results.

Designed for Covenant Belonging

The effects of relational fracturing underscore this insight from the Golden Sufi, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: “If we follow the path of any pain, any psychological wounding, it will lead us to this one primal pain: the pain of separation.”[50] We are not, in fact, designed for self-actualized, pleasure-seeking autonomy. We are deeply relational beings, designed for radical dependence and connection. For centuries, poets, musicians, and religious mystics have recognized the persistent reality of a sense of longing in each of us, including our youth and young adults. It fills the music we are drawn to and is the fountainhead of creation in all the arts.[51] What is it we are longing for? Home. In Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s words, “There are many people who feel the unhappiness of a homesick soul and yet do not know its cause. . . . The longing of the heart is the memory of when we were together with our Beloved. The pain of separation is our awakening to the knowledge that somewhere we are, [we were], united with God. The heart longs for God, and seeks to find its true Beloved.”[52] C. S. Lewis identified this as an inconsolable longing that cannot be satisfied in the ways of this world, because we belong to another godly one.[53] This is the home we yearn for.

Columbia University professor of psychology Lisa Miller has identified the brain’s natural capacity for transcendence, to perceive a greater reality and connect with the divine.[54] As she concludes, we are not only physical, emotional, and cognitive beings. We are spiritual beings. Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain has illuminated specific areas in the cortex that thicken and increase mental health resilience when the natural inclination for spiritual and religious connection is nurtured. This spiritual nurturing is particularly open to molding and shaping during the adolescent and young adult period of development. Miller’s extensive research confirms that spiritual awareness and religious belonging are deeply protective for youth and more effective than any other variable beyond family relationships. Youth who have a positive, active relationship to spirituality report an increased sense of meaning and purpose, have higher levels of academic success, and are 40 percent less likely to use and abuse substances, 60 percent less likely to be depressed as teenagers, and 80 percent less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex, and . . . less likely to commit suicide.[55] Miller finds in youth biological roots for a natural inclination to connect with God in whom they have a sense that they are held, loved, and guided.

Development Within Covenant Relationship

It is into this world of relational poverty and longing for home that revelation about covenant relationship with God is being poured out. It is the truth our youth and young adults most need. Most of us could not have distinguished any difference in meaning between “keep your covenants” and “keep the commandments” during our growing up. Yet President Russell M. Nelson has repeatedly and powerfully confirmed that covenant is about relationship with God, not a list of instructions. In his words, “The covenant path is all about our relationship with God—our hesed relationship with Him. . . . When you and I enter that path, we create a relationship with God that allows Him to bless and change us. If we let God prevail in our lives, that covenant will lead us closer and closer to Him.”[56] Through ordinance administered covenant the Lord’s sanctifying power is allowed to enter us and change us into beings that are capable of being closer to him and capable of being ever closer to others.

Ancient scripture professor Kerry Muhlestein describes how his intensive study of the Abrahamic covenant over decades led him to the conclusion that “the concept on which everything hinged and from which everything flowed, was that God wanted an increased relationship with His children.”[57] The Abrahamic covenant is an expression of the fact that “God wants to have a different relationship with His children than they are capable of when they are both in and of this world. He wants us to take a step away from the world and towards Him. Because of this desire, He willingly binds Himself to us if we are only willing to bind ourselves to Him.”[58] Our Father’s plan of salvation is designed to enable us to come ever closer to him, through entering and keeping covenants, ultimately experiencing a fullness of oneness made possible as we become more like them.

Our youth and young adults hunger to understand their own relational yearnings. They need to know that our Father and his Son answer those yearnings with the purest form of love—covenant. In a manner that parallels the remarkable mother-infant bond yet is infinitely more profound, covenant with the God offers us the relationship through which our souls can grow, learn our identity, experience meaning, and know love in its purest form. It is from the intimacy of our covenant relationship with him, built as we strive to keep covenants and receive his covenantal power, that we learn the path of oneness and pure love for others.

Christian writers Timothy and Kathy J. Keller once wrote: “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.”[59] This is the love God is calling our youth and young adults into. We are deeply relational beings, designed for love and connection, with God, and with one another. It is the way to heal our profound relational poverty, filling the hunger and satisfying the deepest yearnings within each of us, while bringing us into eternal oneness.

What Does This Mean for the Challenges Facing Our Youth?

Revealed truths about the divine pattern of covenant relationship provides a framework for addressing the most vexing questions facing our youth and young adults. In answer to the deepest longings of the human soul, we have been given the truths laid out in the proclamation on the family. We learn through the proclamation that the entire plan of salvation is the sacred work of relationships, of creating and experiencing home, and divine oneness in relationships forever. Yet the realities of mortality incurred by the Fall bring opposition that may seem to go against those truths and our deepest yearnings for relational connection in family. How do we make sense of experiences like same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria? How do we make sense of physical or mental impairments that prevent us from marrying, of having our marriage or our parents’ marriage end in divorce, of not being able to bear children, or of having a family member leave us or pass away? To some degree, all our relationships will be fraught with challenges, stretching, and pain. Our deepest pains will stem from disruption and disorder in the family relationships we yearn to be a haven of love and belonging, trust, and intimacy. All of us will fall outside ideal patterns in some ways.

Amid this seeming opposition, the divine plan for our learning, growth, and redemption is powerfully revealed. Our eternal Father covenanted to send his Beloved Son to be our Savior and Redeemer. Through covenant, his sanctifying power enters us, giving us power to do what is needed to fulfill our divine purposes and opening the way for us to be ever closer to him and ever closer to others. Miraculously, through his grace and redemption, we can become the kind of people in the kinds of relationships that define heaven, eternal oneness in the deepest form of connection. Jesus Christ is the being who brings at-one-ment to our souls and to our relationships. He is the Master Healer, the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer. He yearns to bless us with his love and pour out his healing grace in covenant relationship with us. Our purpose in life is not to experience perfection in relationships but to seek and experience the power of Jesus Christ as the only source of true at-one-ment in our relationships.

In fact, life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order. By divine design, we are led to the edge of our own resources and understanding. We confront the irreconcilable and try to make sense of profound contradictions. Yet what we long for is too deep and profound to be found anywhere else: God, in covenant, binding himself to us amid seeming contradictions.

Our unfulfilled yearnings play a sacred role in inclining our hearts toward our Redeemer to seek peace and direction he alone can provide and to deepen our trust in his perfect love and enabling power. Our broken and contrite hearts open us up to God. The reality that feels so painfully contrary to the ideal fulfills the sacred purpose of inviting us into a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ where he heals and sanctifies what feels broken, building wisdom, strength, and love in the process.

Questions Around Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

As an example of how truths about the power of covenant relationship can be applied, we can look more specifically at same-sex attraction. Sexual and gender identity development is a complex process. This process has become more complex in a highly sexualized culture framed by self-oriented ideologies: expressive individualism, personal fulfillment ethics, romanticism, and sexual liberation.[60] The truths revealed about family, including those taught in the proclamation on the family confirm what we see in research: the importance of marital union between father and mother, the importance of strong and stable family relationships, and the importance of sexual fidelity both before and during marriage. Yet the cultural ideologies we swim in shape our approach to these truths as well as our questions around them.

This means that the complex reality of same-sex attraction, among other LGBTQ experiences, is being worked out, interpreted, and understood within the cultural framing offered. Our youth and young adults are having real feelings and experiences in the process of sexual development, but the meaning they give those experiences and the identity they attach to them are shaped by the culture around them.

Adolescence and young adulthood are also a time of trying on identities, including those offered within both a highly sexualized, and self-identity culture. As Ty Mansfield, a faithful Latter-day Saint psychologist and a beloved friend and BYU professor who has experienced same-sex attraction, describes, “When we talk about attractions—whether those attractions are more fluid or fixed—we are simply talking about the qualitative inner experience, but when we talk about identity, we’re talking about what those attractions mean for us. . . . Identity and meaning-making never occur in a vacuum. We negotiate our identity to some degree or another with our relationships and environment.”[61] We provide clarity and support for our youth when we acknowledge the reality of their experiences while also helping them recognize their agency in giving meaning to those experiences, and the value of creating space to navigate those experiences before taking on identities.

Revealed truths about covenant relationship shine a beaming light on what can be a very confusing and difficult journey for youth navigating same-sex attraction. Returning to BYU after faithfully serving a mission, Ty Mansfield came face-to-face with the reality of his same-sex attraction, something he could not just push away but seemed to be inherent to his mortality. He wrestled. What did this mean for the core dreams of his life, his relationships, his future family? What did this mean for his testimony and faith in the plan of salvation? It seemed irreconcilable. How could he go forward? He could not bear to think of life without deep relationships, and he could not bear to leave the God and church he loved. He desperately needed direction and comfort.

During a particularly difficult period, he went to general conference fasting. He describes, “As soon as the opening prayer was shared, I felt this spiritual feeling completely envelop me; I hardly remember anything that was said during the session, but the feeling I had was unlike anything I’ve ever felt. For nearly the whole two hours, all the hurt, the pain, the confusion, the frustration . . . was completely gone. In its place was a feeling of Divine Love I had only ever experienced something similar to once before. . . . And with the feeling came the voice: ‘Just stay with me. If you do, this is the feeling you will feel someday. And it will be eternal.’”[62]

The answer Ty received was, in fact, pointing him to covenant relationship, binding himself to the God who has already bound himself to us. Covenant relationship is the grounding for providing support for our youth and young adults wrestling with questions of same-sex attraction. It specifically addresses four important aspects of their experience: confirms absolute belonging to the family of God; strengthens the capacity to be honest about their experiences; addresses the shame that can be inherent to these experiences; and enables the capacity to see through the false all-or-nothing choice offered by the world.

First, the truth about covenant relationship pierces through our loneliness, assuring every one of us complete belonging in a perfect family of heavenly parents who are divine love itself. “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.”[63] In covenant relationship we come to know this truth about ourselves and the Father and Son who have bound themselves to us. President Nelson prophetically asked the youth this very question, “So who are you?” and then answered: “First and foremost, you are a child of God. You are a child of the covenant. You are a disciple of Jesus Christ.” He then added, “The way you think about who you really are will have a profound effect on every decision of your life. . . . I plead with you not to replace these three paramount and unchanging identifiers with any others, because doing so could stymie your progress or pigeonhole you in a stereotype that could potentially thwart your eternal progression. . . . Worldly identifiers will never give you a vision of who you can ultimately become. They will never affirm your divine DNA or your unlimited, divine potential.”[64] As President Nelson explained, this does not mean that other identifiers cannot be help us understand ourselves and share who we are with others. But they cannot replace the core truth about our majestic identity.

With this foundational truth about eternal identity and covenant relationship, our youth and young adults can know with certainty that they belong to God. They are infinitely loved by heavenly parents whose entire desire is to experience deeper relationship with them. This is why Elder Patrick Kearon could testify, “Our Father’s plan . . . is designed to bring you home, not to keep you out. No one has built a roadblock and stationed someone there to turn you around and send you away. In fact, it is the exact opposite. God is in relentless pursuit of you. He wants all of His children to choose to return to Him, and He employs every possible measure to bring you back.”[65]

Second, the truth about covenant relationship makes possible a unique strength and confidence in being honest with God about the reality of our experiences, including same-sex attraction. We all fear that experiencing things that seem different from the ideal mark us as less worthy, second tier, not belonging. Instead, in covenant relationship, our Savior says, “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. . . . Thou wast precious in my sight, . . . and I have loved thee. Fear not: for I am with thee” (Isaiah 43:3–5). The Lord Jesus Christ answers the fear and pain and loss that is woven into the fabric of our mortal experience, with the purest form of love, covenant, entering our experience with us, and, in doing so, changing its quality. When in covenant relationship we open our hearts to God, sharing what we are and what we fear, he assures us of the fulness of his perfect love, and we are given strength to move forward with the assurance of his reality, love, and closeness.

Third, the truth about covenant relationship enables us to be healed from the shame and fear that can be inherent to experiencing things that seem to mark us as different or problematic, including LGBTQ experiences and realities. Latter-day Saint Spencer Thompson describes this important process in his experience with same-sex attraction: “When I started seeking healing with regards to my same-sex attraction, I thought that Christ would simply take my attractions away. But that mindset shifted with time as I began to discover what I really needed to heal from. My attractions weren’t the true source of my pain. Instead, there were deeper wounds of the soul that needed to be healed—deep shame I carried because of my attractions, feelings of inadequacy, and the mistaken idea that I wasn’t worthy of love and belonging. . . . Knowing that Heavenly Father and the Savior truly saw me, understood me, and loved me was a profound tender mercy.”[66] This is what covenant relationship offers us. We need not hide, for we are already fully seen, known, and loved.

Freed from shame and fear, Spencer was open to the direction of the Spirit, illuminating a path of peace and hope that could not have been seen before. Ty Mansfield similarly described the Spirit teaching him “that whether I ever married, I was infinitely loved and accepted by God. My responsibility was to continue to live one day at a time while seeking and following the guidance of the Spirit.”[67] The continual, guiding presence of his Spirit is what covenant relationship opens to us, the power that Ty experienced in responding to the Lord’s call to “just stay with me.”

Covenant relationship opens the channel of divine power that can help our youth and young adults who experience same-sex attraction see through the false choice they are offered by the world. This false choice is poignantly described by Latter-day Saint Bennett Borden as he confronted the reality of his same-sex attraction in returning home from missionary service: “I can act on my feelings, be in a gay relationship, feel like I’ve got some connection, and be out of the church. Or I can keep my covenants, stay in the church, and die a horrible, lonely death.”[68] This false choice is no real choice at all, just choosing one seemingly despairing path over another.

Yet the whole mission of Jesus Christ is to expand our agency and offer us a narrative of infinite hope. When Latter-day Saint Stu Back faced what seemed to be a completely hopeless future in his experience of same-sex attraction, he felt despair that caused him to want to end his life. Pleading to the Lord, he cried, “There is no way!” The response penetrated his heart: “I am the way.” With a measure of renewed hope in the Savior he loved, Stu describes symbolically placing his yearnings, desires, and dreams on the altar before him. As he did so, he experienced new ways to peace, joy, and fulfillment he could not have anticipated. It seems that the work of the plan of salvation is to lead us to a place where Jesus Christ alone can save us. From within that place we come to know the depth of his love and the depth of his power to deliver. We are reborn by his redeeming love.

In covenant relationship, he becomes our Waymaker, opening a way we would not have believed possible through an infusion of power beyond our own. Within the intimacy of this profound relationship, we experience the wholeness that creates in us the capacity for deep connection, healing our fractured realities and assuring us of eternal oneness, even amid vexing questions. As Stu, Ty, Becky, Bennett, and many others would testify, this miraculous covenant power did not mean taking away their same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Rather, it meant a profoundly deepened relationship with the Lord through which they experienced a peace, joy, and fulfillment that could not be attained in any other way.

Together in covenant belonging, we can support our youth and young adults by creating and holding a nurturing environment of faith as they face very significant decisions, including those around same-sex attraction. Bound to God together, we can experience what Eva Witesman insightfully describes as a “reverent wilderness in which to wrestle before our maker as we each work out or own salvation,” recognizing that “for some, covenant keeping may be easy. For others, it is unquestionably a voyage into the refiner’s fire.”[69] Covenant belonging provides the structure and strength needed to enable what Ty Mansfield described about his own journey: “a gradual process of development, self-awareness, and evolving personal identity” in the midst of a wrestle that “demands greater patience, time, and a readiness to place our trust in God than what is offered by our prevailing cultural narratives.”[70]

Conclusion

The revealed understanding of the nature of our covenant relationship with God is at the heart of helping our youth respond to the complex questions they face. Our youth are experiencing a profound hunger for connection, evidenced by an epidemic of loneliness and increasing mental health challenges. Their deepest loneliness stems from disruption and disorder in family life, including ruptured or never-formed family relationships. In answer to this relational fracturing, the gospel of Jesus Christ offers covenant belonging and connection. In doing so, the truth of covenant relationship offers connection, belonging, and power to address the realities of mortality, including those like same-sex attraction that may seem to go against our deepest yearnings for wholeness in family life. Covenant relationship offers healing and hope to youth or young adults navigating questions around same-sex attraction and other LGBTQ experiences, confirming their absolute belonging to the family of God, strengthening their capacity to be honest about their experience, addressing the shame that can be inherent to these experiences, and enabling them to see through the false all-or-nothing choice offered by the world.

Notes

[1] Vivek H. Murthy, Together: The Healing Power of Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World (HarperCollins, 2020).

[2] Richard Weissbourd et al., “Loneliness in America: How the Pandemic Has Deepened an Epidemic of Loneliness and What We Can Do About It,” Harvard School of Education: Making Caring Common Project (February 2021), https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america.

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Data Summary and Trends Report: 2011–2021” (2023), www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf.

[4] Jessica M. Armitage et al., “Cross-Cohort Change in Parent-Reported Emotional Problem Trajectories Across Childhood and Adolescence in the UK,” The Lancet 10, no. 7 (2023): 509–17.

[5] Weissbourd et al., “Loneliness in America”; Ying Chen et al., “National Data on Age Gradients in Well-Being Among US Adults,” JAMA Psychiatry 79, no. 10 (2022): 1046–47, doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.2473.

[6] Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Why Young People’s Mental Well-Being Is in Such Decline,” Psychology Today,August 25, 2023, www.psychologytoday.com.

[7] Brad Wilcox, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forget Strong Families, and Save Civilization (Broadside Books, 2024), 1–15.

[8] Jim Dalrymple II, “Why Are We Ignoring Family as a Solution to Loneliness?” Institute for Family Studies Blog,May 8, 2023.

[9] National Center for Family and Marriage Research, “Marriage Rate in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2021,” Family Profile no. 25, November 2022, www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/juteau-marriage-rate-US-geographic-variation-2021-fp-22-25.pdf.

[10] Wilcox, Get Married, 10.

[11] Rachel Minkin and Juliana Menasce Horowitz, “Parenting in America Today,” Pew Research Center Report, January 24, 2023, www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenting-in-america-today/.

[12] Wilcox, Get Married, 11.

[13] Sam Peltzman, “The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy & the State Working Paper No. 331, July 12, 2023, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4508123.

[14] Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 15–18.

[15] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic in Mental Health (Penguin Press, 2024), 1–17.

[16] Andy Crouch, “On Community and Human Flourishing,” Institute for Family Studies Blog, July, 20, 2022, https://ifstudies.org/blog/5-questions-with-family-studies-andy-crouch-on-community-and-human-flourishing-part-1.

[17] Michelle Goldberg, “Don’t Let Politics Cloud Your View of What’s Going on with Teens and Depression,” New York Times, February 24, 2023.

[18] Crouch, “On Community and Human Flourishing.”

[19] Jill Lepore, “The History of Loneliness,” New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

[20] Andy Crouch, The Life We Are Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Penguin Random House, 2022), 35.

[21] Allan N. Schore, “Modern Attachment Theory: The Enduring Impact of Early Right Development and on Affect Regulation,” presentation at Roots of Empathy Research Conference, October 26, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0sKY86Qmzo.

[22] Allan N. Schore, “The First 1000 Days of Life: A Critical Period for Shaping Our Emotional Selves And Social Brains,” UCLA David Geffin School of Medicine lecture, Oslo, Norway, (2017), 1:51:54, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7XOu0yi-E.

[23] Judith R. Schore and Allan N. Schore, “Moden Attachment Theory: The Central Role of Affect Regulation in Development and Treatment,” Clinical Social Work Journal 36 (2008): 9–20, www.allanschore.com/pdf/__SchoreClinSocWorkJ2008.pdf.

[24] Robert VerBruggen, “How We Ended Up with 40 Percent of Children Born out of Wedlock,” December 18, 2017, Institute for Family Studies blog, https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-we-ended-up-with-40-percent-of-children-born-out-of-wedlock; F. Michas, “Percentage of Births to Unmarried Women in the United States, 1980–2021,” Statista, March 23, 2023.

[25] Kristin Anderson Moore, Suzanne M. Jekielek, and Carol Emig, “Marriage from a Child’s Perspective: How Does Family Structure Affect Children, and What Can We Do About It?” Child Trends (June 1, 2002).

[26] Wendy D. Manning, “Cohabitation and Child Wellbeing,” The Future of Children 25, no. 2 (2015): 51–66, www.jstor.org/stable/43581972; Kelly Musick, and Katherine Michelmore, “Cross-National Comparisons of Union Stability in Cohabiting and Married Families with Children,” Demography 55, no. 4 (2018): 1,389–421; Alysse ElHage, “For Kids, Parental Cohabitation and Marriage Are Not Interchangeable,” Institute for Family Studies blog, May 7, 2015.

[27] W. Bradford Wilcox and Laurie DeRose, “In Europe, Cohabitation is Stable . . . Right?” Social Mobility Memos (Brookings Institution), March 27, 2017, www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/03/27/in-europe-cohabitation-is-stable-right/; Andrea J. Sedlak, Jane Mettenburg, Monica Basena, Ian Petta, Karla McPherson, Angela Greene, and Spencer Li, Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4): Report to Congress (US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, 2010).

[28] E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (W. W. Norton, 2002).

[29] Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown Publishing Group, 2005).

[30] Antonio López, “Child as the Guardian of Being,” in Torn Asunder: Children, the Myth of the Good Divorce, and the Recovery of Origins, ed. Margaret Harper McCarthy (Eerdmans, 2017), 105–30.

[31] Natasha Cabrera et al., Rebalancing: Children First, report of AEI-Brookings Working Group on Childhood in the United States, American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, February 8, 2022, www.brookings.edu/research/rebalancing-children-first.

[32] Leon Kass, “The End of Courtship,” The Public Interest 126 (Winter 1997): 39–63.

[33] Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (Doubleday, 2000).

[34] W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Debunking the Ball and Chain Myth of Marriage for Men, research brief, Institute for Family Studies, February 7, 2017, https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/men-and-marriage-research-brief.pdf.

[35] Ying Chen et al., “Marital Transitions During Earlier Adulthood and Subsequent Health and Well-Being in Mid- to Late-Life Among Female Nurses: An Outcome-Wide Analysis,” Global Epidemiology 5 (December 2023), doi.org/10.1016/j.gloepi.2023.100099.

[36] Brendan Case and Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Marital Bliss: New Evidence That Marriage Promotes Flourishing,” Institute for Family Studies, (blog 2023), https://ifstudies.org/blog/marital-bliss-new-evidence-that-marriage-promotes-flourishing-.

[37] Rose Wesche, Shannon E. Claxton, Emily A. Waterman, “Emotional Outcomes of Casual Sexual Relationships and Experiences: A Systematic Review,” Journal of Sex Research 58, no. 8 (2021): 1069–84, doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2020.1821163.

[38] Michas, “Percentage of Births.”

[39] Jeff Diamant et al., “What the Data Says about Abortion in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, January 11, 2023,www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/11/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-u-s-2/.

[40] Brian J. Willoughby et al., “The Myth of Sexual Experience: Why Sexually Inexperienced Dating Couples Actually Go On to Have Stronger Marriages,” Wheatley Institute blog, April 2023, https://wheatley.byu.edu/00000187-81c5-d575-ad9f-c5d7c4f10001/the-myth-of-sexual-experince-the-wheatley-institute-april-2023-pdf#:~:text=A%20series%20of%20recent%20studies,divorce%20rates%20in%20future%20marriages.

[41] Association of American Universities, “AAU Campus Climate (2019),” www.aau.edu/key-issues/campus-climate-and-safety/aau-campus-climate-survey-2019.

[42] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Data Summary and Trends Report: 2011–2021 (2023), www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf.

[43] American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, Report of The APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2007), www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf.

[44] Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (Oxford University Press, 2017), 144–92.

[45] Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends,” Society 49 (2012): 520–24, doi.org/10.1007/s12115-012-9596-y.

[46] W. Bradford Wilcox and Robert I. Lerman, “For Richer, for Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America” (American Enterprise Institute, 2014).

[47] Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (Brookings Institution, 2022).

[48] Wilcox and Lerman, “For Richer, for Poorer.”

[49] David Introcaso, “The Unrecognized Tragedy of Working Class Immiseration,” The Healthcare Policy Podcast, December 31, 2021.

[50] Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “From the Heart: Feminine Mysteries of Love,” Personal Transformation 8, no. 2 (July 1999): 78.

[51] Susan Cain, Bittersweet (Crown Publishing, 2022).

[52] Vaughan-Lee, “From the Heart,” 78.

[53] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1952), 119.

[54] Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child (Macmillan, 2015), 23–50.

[55] Miller, The Spiritual Child, 23–50.

[56] Russell M. Nelson, “The Everlasting Covenant,” Liahona, October 2022, www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[57] Kerry M. Muhlestein, “The Unique Relationship with God We Are Promised in the Covenant,” Meridian Magazine,February 25, 2021, https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-unique-relationship-with-god-we-are-promised-in-the-covenant/.

[58] Muhlestein, “Unique Relationship with God.”

[59] Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Riverhead Books, 2011).

[60] Ty R. Mansfield, “An Open Letter of Hope to David Archuleta,” Public Square, April 3, 2024.

[61] Ty R. Mansfield, “Loving Truth and Truly Loving: Mapping the Problems and Possibilities in the Latter-day Saint/LGBTQ Conversation,” lecture at FAIR Conference, August 5, 2022.

[62] Ty R. Mansfield and Danielle Mansfield, “Living with Same-Sex Attraction: Our Story,” LDS Living, May 2012.

[63] “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” (1995), www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[64] Russell M. Nelson, “Choices for Eternity,” devotional for young adults, May 15, 2022, www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[65] Patrick Kearon, “God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home,” Liahona, May 2024, 87–89.

[66] Spencer Thompson, “Same-Sex Attraction and My Journey from Shame to Joy,” Liahona, October 2021, www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[67] Ty R. Mansfield, Voices of Hope (Deseret Book, 2011), 5.

[68] Bennett Borden & Becky Borden, “Why We Married in the Temple After 20 Years in Same-Sex Relationships,” Leading Saints podcast, December 1, 2021, https://leadingsaints.org.

[69] Eva Witesman, “BYU Should Feel Like Eden for LGBTQ Students,” Deseret News, March 9, 2020.

[70] Mansfield, “Open Letter of Hope.”