Thank You, President Nelson (LGBT Policy): A Scholarly Response

A direct, evidence-based reply to ldsdiscussions.com's “Thank You, President Nelson” blog post and its companion piece on the 2019 LGBT policy reversal.

Introduction: What LDS Discussions Actually Argues

The LDS Discussions blog posts “Thank You, President Nelson” (September 18, 2019) and “The Larger Implications of the LGBT Reversal” (April 4, 2019) advance a single core thesis: that the 2015 LDS policy on children of LGBT parents was explicitly declared divine revelation by Russell M. Nelson, and that its reversal in 2019 therefore proves that either (a) God changes his mind under social pressure, or (b) the prophets are not actually speaking for God. The author invokes Occam’s Razor to conclude the simpler explanation is that these policies come from fallible men responding to cultural forces, not from God.

This response addresses each major argument in sequence. We will show that the LDS Discussions argument rests on several critical errors: a theological framing error, a selective reading of what Nelson actually said, a misapplication of Occam’s Razor, and a failure to engage the robust scriptural and historical precedent for administrative policy adjustments within a living, prophetically-led church.

Claim 1: Nelson Called the 2015 Policy “Revelation” — Therefore the 2019 Reversal Destroys His Credibility

“Russell M. Nelson makes perfectly clear that the 2015 policy regarding LGBT members was revelation. There is no way to get around that, and it’s the reason why apologists have had to defend the policy for the last 3.5 years.” — LDS Discussions, “About the Church’s LGBT Reversal”

This argument depends on treating “revelation” as a monolithic, immutable category — as if any claim of divine inspiration automatically means the resulting policy must be permanent, unconditional, and irreversible. This is not how Latter-day Saint theology of revelation works, nor how revelation has functioned in any prophetic tradition from Moses to Paul.

Nelson’s 2016 remarks (“Becoming True Millennials”) described a revelatory process — extended deliberation, fasting, prayer, and ultimately a spiritual confirmation. He never claimed the resulting administrative policy was eternal, unchangeable doctrine. The distinction between the divine process of deliberation and the permanent status of the output is critical and is completely elided by LDS Discussions.

In 2019, Nelson himself drew the line explicitly: church leaders “cannot change the laws of God” but “can adjust policy when the Lord directs us to do so.” (Salt Lake Tribune, September 17, 2019.) The underlying moral theology — that sexual intimacy belongs within a man-woman covenant marriage — did not change. What changed was an administrative boundary condition about children’s ordinances, designed to reduce family conflict and which, upon gathered pastoral experience, proved in need of adjustment.

Claim 2: Policy Change Equals Social Pressure, Not God

“This reversal again shows us how revelation is more impacted by social pressures… than it is about consistency from God.” — LDS Discussions, “About the Church’s LGBT Reversal”

The “social pressure” explanation is presented as if it were a logical necessity, but it is in fact a post hoc attribution of motive that the evidence does not require. LDS Discussions assumes a binary: either the change is from God — in which case it must never change — or it changed because of social pressure, in which case it was never from God. This is a false dichotomy.

A third possibility — entirely consistent with Latter-day Saint theology — is that God works within human limitations, provides direction for present circumstances, and then provides further direction as new information and conditions emerge. Latter-day scripture states this explicitly:

“For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts.” — 2 Nephi 28:30; see also Isaiah 28:10

This is not a loophole invented after the fact — it is a foundational principle of Restoration theology that revelatory knowledge is cumulative, provisional in administrative application, and subject to refinement as the Lord’s purposes unfold. To claim this is merely “social pressure” masquerading as revelation requires dismissing this canonical framework entirely without any rebuttal of its content.

Furthermore, applying the social pressure argument consistently undermines LDS Discussions’ own preferred narrative about the 1978 revelation extending the priesthood to all worthy men. Historian Jan Shipps — a Methodist scholar of Mormonism, not an LDS apologist — noted that “an answer was not forthcoming in the 1960s when the church was under pressure,” nor in the early 1970s when liberal members agitated the issue internally. Organized protests at BYU athletic events had ceased by 1971 — years before 1978. If social pressure were the reliable driver of policy change, the 1978 revelation would have come a decade earlier, at the height of the civil rights movement. It did not.

Claim 3: God Would Not Change His Mind So Quickly — The 3.5-Year Gap Proves It Was Not Revelation

“If this church was truly led by God, would you really expect that God would change His mind just 3.5 years later after giving a revelation as controversial as the November 15 policy?” — LDS Discussions

The argument that God cannot provide differing administrative direction within a short span of time has no scriptural support and directly contradicts multiple canonical examples. Consider Acts 15 — the Jerusalem Council of approximately 49 A.D.

At the Jerusalem Council, the apostles gathered to resolve whether Gentile converts were required to be circumcised as a condition of covenant membership. This was not a peripheral question — circumcision had been commanded by God to Abraham as a sign of the “everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:10–14). It had been kept for approximately two thousand years. The apostles, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, decided that this requirement would not be imposed on Gentile believers (Acts 15:28–29).

By LDS Discussions’ logic, the Jerusalem Council should be impossible: God had revealed circumcision as an “everlasting covenant.” The apostles’ decision to set that requirement aside should prove that either God changed His mind arbitrarily, or the apostles were responding to Gentile social pressure rather than to God. But no serious scholar of early Christianity argues this. The standard scholarly understanding is that the Jerusalem Council demonstrates the church correctly discerning, through deliberation and the Spirit, which requirements were tied to eternal covenant principles and which were administrative expressions appropriate to a particular historical community.

The 2015–2019 policy arc maps precisely onto this paradigm. The eternal doctrine — that the new and everlasting covenant of marriage is between a man and a woman — did not change. The administrative policy about how children of LGBT households would be processed for ordinances was adjusted based on gathered pastoral experience. This is not incoherence. It is a living church functioning exactly as a living church should.

Claim 4: The Doctrine/Policy Distinction Is Incoherent — There Is No Meaningful Separation

“These statements contain some massive implications for what revelation is… the distinction they are making here completely contradicts the entire concept of revelation.” — LDS Discussions

LDS Discussions asserts that calling the 2019 change a policy revision rather than a doctrinal reversal is incoherent. This claim rests on a naive view of religious epistemology that conflates the permanent with the applied, the eternal with the administrative.

Elder Boyd K. Packer articulated the distinction precisely and far in advance of any LGBT controversy: “Procedures, programs, the administrative policies, even some patterns of organization are subject to change. We are directed by revelation to do many things differently than they were done in the early Church… But the principles, the doctrines, never change.” (Ensign, November 1996.) This is not a framework invented in 2019 to explain an embarrassment. It has been taught consistently for decades and is consistent with standard organizational theory in any context — religious or secular.

The 2015 policy addressed a specific administrative question: how should the Church handle ordinance requests for children being raised in households whose family structure falls outside covenant norms? The 2019 adjustment addressed the same question with accumulated pastoral data. The underlying doctrine regarding covenant marriage was untouched in either direction.

Claim 5: Spiritual Confirmations Are Unreliable Because Multiple Religions Claim Them

“This policy reversal illustrates why spiritual confirmations are not a reliable indicator of truth. All religions rely on spiritual confirmations to declare their church is the true one.” — LDS Discussions

This argument has the structure: multiple people claim X; therefore X is unreliable. But this logic would invalidate most human knowledge. Multiple eyewitnesses give conflicting accounts of events — that does not mean eyewitness testimony is worthless, only that it must be evaluated carefully. Multiple scientific teams have initially confirmed hypotheses later overturned — that does not mean the scientific method is worthless.

The Latter-day Saint epistemological framework does not claim that the spiritual witness is infallible in every person’s application. It claims that the witness of the Holy Ghost, properly sought and received, is a valid pathway to knowledge of divine things. The possibility of false positives — confirmation bias, emotional manipulation, sincere self-deception — is explicitly acknowledged in LDS scripture: “That which doth not edify is not of God” (D&C 50:23); spirits are to be “tried” (1 John 4:1). The existence of false positives does not invalidate true positives. The existence of counterfeit currency does not prove that no genuine currency exists.

Claim 6: Occam’s Razor Requires Concluding These Are Man-Made Policies, Not Divine

“Occam’s Razor is a very simple yet powerful concept, and the most obvious and likely conclusion here is that these policies are not from God, but from the men claiming to speak for Him.” — LDS Discussions

This is a misapplication of the principle. Occam’s Razor states that among competing hypotheses that equally explain the evidence, the one with the fewest unexplained assumptions should be preferred. It does not state that the most skeptical explanation is always correct.

If we accept that God works through imperfect human agents who receive divine guidance in an incremental, line-upon-line process — the explicit framework of both the Old and New Testaments — then a policy adjustment within a prophetically-led church requires no additional explanatory mechanism beyond what was already in place. The “social pressure” explanation, on the other hand, must account for several unexplained anomalies: Why did pressure succeed in 2019 but not in 2015–2016, when the backlash was more intense? Why did it succeed here but not on the Church’s firm stance on tithing requirements for temple attendance, which faces constant social pressure? Why not on the Church’s stance on abortion, on which enormous pressure is applied? Why not on the Word of Wisdom requirements?

The “social pressure” explanation is not simpler — it is selective. It explains one policy adjustment while failing to account for why social pressure does not produce changes on a dozen other contested issues simultaneously. A truly parsimonious explanation must account for all the data, not only the convenient subset.

Claim 7: Nelson’s 2019 BYU Speech Was Manipulative Rather Than Pastoral

“This speech was a chance for Russell M. Nelson to apologize for the pain and depression that their own policies caused, but instead Nelson used the speech to reestablish his authority as prophet.” — LDS Discussions

This is an unfalsifiable claim about motive. LDS Discussions projects self-serving intent onto Nelson’s remarks and then treats that projection as an established fact. But the same speech contained explicit statements of pastoral care: Nelson acknowledged the Church’s genuine concern to “reduce friction between gay or lesbian parents and their children,” and affirmed that both the 2015 and 2019 adjustments “were motivated by love.”

Whether a public apology was owed is a genuine pastoral question on which reasonable people disagree. But the absence of a public apology does not prove manipulative intent. Leaders of any organization routinely do not offer public apologies for good-faith decisions that did not achieve their intended purpose, while still taking corrective action. Nelson did take corrective action in 2019 — and the LDS Discussions framing that simultaneously criticizes both the 2015 policy and the 2019 reversal as evidence of the same fraud reveals that no action by church leaders could, by design, satisfy the argument.

Claim 8: The Pattern of “Revelation Following Social Pressure” Exposes Polygamy, Race, and LGBT Policy as Equally Human-Invented

“The answer really becomes clear the more you research the church’s revelations and how they always fit into the current mindset of the prophet giving them. This was true on the ban on blacks, polygamy, and now with the LGBT community.” — LDS Discussions

LDS Discussions assembles three cases — polygamy, the racial priesthood restriction, and the 2015 LGBT policy — as instances of a single pattern. They are not. These three cases have entirely different canonical statuses, historical origins, and resolution mechanisms.

Plural marriage involved explicit canonical revelation (D&C 132) and was suspended through Official Declaration 1 — which the Church acknowledges was shaped by earthly circumstances while also being spiritually authorized. The racial priesthood restriction was never canonically enacted as revelation and the Church has explicitly stated it “originated with Brigham Young” and is “not based on any principle of righteousness.” (Gospel Topics Essay: Race and the Priesthood, 2013.) The 2015–2019 LGBT policy was explicitly labeled from the beginning as an administrative handbook adjustment — not a canonized revelation, not a declaration, not a formal “Thus saith the Lord” statement.

Grouping these three as instances of a single pattern requires ignoring those distinctions entirely. The priesthood restriction case actually supports the apologetic framework rather than undermining it: when the Church acknowledged that the restriction originated in human error rather than divine mandate, it demonstrated precisely the capacity for honest institutional self-correction that LDS Discussions elsewhere demands. One cannot simultaneously cite that acknowledgment as evidence of institutional dishonesty and then demand such acknowledgments as proof of honesty.

Claim 9: What the 2015 Policy Actually Said vs. How LDS Discussions Characterizes It

LDS Discussions repeatedly describes the 2015 policy as “excluding children of LGBT parents from baptism.” This characterization is imprecise in ways that matter to an accurate assessment of the 2019 adjustment.

The 2015 policy required First Presidency approval — rather than local leader approval — for the baptism of minor children residing with a parent in a same-sex relationship. It did not permanently exclude these children. It elevated the approval threshold and required that parents understand the doctrinal commitments their child would be making. The stated rationale was reducing household conflict between a child’s new religious obligations and a parent’s lifestyle.

The 2019 change removed the elevated approval requirement and clarified that same-sex marriage would be treated in the same way as any other serious transgression for purposes of church discipline — not as a categorical definition of apostasy. These are targeted administrative corrections to a policy that did not achieve its pastoral purpose. Characterizing them as a wholesale reversal of doctrine misrepresents both the 2015 and 2019 actions and obscures the nature of what actually changed.

Claim 10: Nelson’s “Prophets Always Teach Truth” Statement Claims Prophetic Infallibility

“Nelson is telling you that while you can’t trust social media, Google, or those who have left the church, you should obey the prophet because they always teach the truth.” — LDS Discussions

LDS Discussions reads Nelson’s statement — “we will always teach the truth!” — as a claim of personal infallibility. But the statement is better read in context as a claim of intent and commission, not a claim of perfect execution. A judge who says “I will always rule fairly” is stating a commitment and a standard, not claiming to have never erred.

Latter-day Saint doctrine is explicit and consistent: prophets are fallible. Brigham Young himself said: “I do not even think that there is a single revelation, among the many God has given to the Church, that is perfect in its fulness. The revelations of God contain correct doctrine and principle, so far as they go; but it is impossible for the poor weak little man to receive a revelation from the Almighty in all its perfections.” (Journal of Discourses, 2:314.) This is the orthodox Latter-day Saint position: revelation comes through imperfect human instruments and is subject to refinement. Nelson’s rhetorical assertion of teaching truth is a statement of prophetic purpose, not a claim of absolute inerrancy, and LDS Discussions knows this — the same website elsewhere correctly notes that the Church does not claim prophetic infallibility. The argument cannot have it both ways.

The Deeper Issue: What Kind of God Does This Argument Require?

Underlying all of LDS Discussions’ arguments is an implicit demand: a true God would produce perfect, permanent, consistent policies through His prophets from the first iteration, with no course corrections. Any policy adjustment is therefore evidence of no God at all.

This standard would eliminate not only the Latter-day Saint prophetic tradition but every major world religion. The God of the Hebrew Bible commanded animal sacrifice for millennia, then through Christ declared those sacrifices fulfilled and superseded. The God of the New Testament instructed the Jerusalem church through its apostles to suspend circumcision requirements that God himself had commanded Abraham to keep as an “everlasting covenant.” Paul’s letters show policy disputes among the earliest apostles — including Peter being publicly corrected by Paul on the question of table fellowship with Gentiles (Galatians 2:11–14). None of this is a crisis for Christian theology, because Christian theology has always understood that God works through progressive revelation and imperfect human instruments who require correction and growth.

The Latter-day Saint doctrine of a living, continuing prophetic office is specifically designed to address this reality. It is not a defect that prophets sometimes implement policies that require later adjustment — it is the announced, theologically coherent feature of a church that believes God continues to speak. A church in which nothing ever changed would not be evidence of divine guidance. It would be evidence of a dead religion.

Summary of Key Responses

Point-by-Point Rebuttal

The policy/doctrine distinction — was not invented in 2019; it has been taught by LDS leaders for decades and is consistent with standard organizational and theological frameworks.

Nelson’s 2016 statement — described a revelatory process, not a permanent edict. He explicitly labeled the result as an administrative handbook addition.

The 2019 adjustment — corrected the approval threshold and disciplinary category, not the underlying moral theology, which remained unchanged.

Line-upon-line revelation — is a canonical, scripturally grounded framework that specifically predicts and accounts for incremental policy adjustment (2 Nephi 28:30; Isaiah 28:10).

Acts 15 (Jerusalem Council) — the early apostolic church suspended a 2,000-year-old divinely commanded practice without undermining the theological coherence of the prophetic office.

The social pressure argument — fails to explain why social pressure succeeded here but not simultaneously on tithing, abortion, chastity, or the Word of Wisdom, where equal or greater pressure is applied.

The polygamy/race/LGBT pattern — rests on treating three canonically and historically distinct situations as identical; the distinctions are substantive and cannot be dismissed without argument.

Occam’s Razor — actually favors the line-upon-line framework, which requires no additional mechanisms beyond what is already in place; the social pressure theory introduces anomalies it cannot explain.

Conclusion: A Living Church in a Living World

The LDS Discussions argument against President Nelson’s handling of the 2015–2019 LGBT policy arc is rhetorically effective but logically thin. It requires a theology of revelation in which divine guidance produces permanent, perfect, unconditional outputs from the first attempt — a standard no religious tradition has ever met and which the scriptures of every tradition explicitly deny. It mischaracterizes what Nelson said as a claim of policy permanence when he described a deliberative process. It invokes Occam’s Razor without applying it rigorously to its own alternative explanation. And it treats theologically dissimilar cases as instances of a single pattern without engaging the substantive distinctions between them.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have engaged seriously with the 2015 and 2019 policy changes have done so within a mature theological framework that accounts for human imperfection, incremental revelation, and the pastoral complexity of applying eternal principles in a changing world. That framework is coherent, scripturally grounded, and historically consistent. It does not require a God who is infallible in every administrative output. It requires a God who is faithful in purpose, patient in teaching, and persistent in guiding His covenant people line upon line — which is precisely the God revealed in both the Old Testament and the New.

President Nelson’s 2019 BYU address was not the evasion LDS Discussions portrays. It was a forthright articulation of the theological framework that grounds the Church’s approach to revelation — a framework that was already in place, already taught, and which the 2019 adjustment illustrates rather than contradicts. Reasonable people can disagree with the Church’s moral theology on human sexuality. But disagreement with the theology does not require the additional claim that the prophets are fraudulent. Those are separate arguments, and LDS Discussions has consistently conflated them to rhetorical effect without establishing either one on its merits.

Primary sources consulted: 2 Nephi 28:30; Isaiah 28:10; Acts 15:1–31; Galatians 2:11–14; D&C 50:23; 1 John 4:1; Boyd K. Packer, “The Twelve Apostles,” Ensign, November 1996; Russell M. Nelson, “Becoming True Millennials,” January 2016; Russell M. Nelson, BYU Devotional, September 17, 2019; LDS Gospel Topics Essay: “Race and the Priesthood” (2013); Jan Shipps, FAIR analysis of 1978 revelation timing; Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 2:314.