David Archuleta talks about coming out and his conversations with church leaders about sexual orientation. He met with a high-ranking apostle who had never had an in-depth dialogue with a gay person before. His new book aims to help readers question their assumptions about faith and identity.
I had to test your courage. The stranger said, courage is the quality most essential to understanding the language of the world.
I mean, writing this had to have taken a lot of courage.
Yeah, the biggest hang up I get on is what will people think of me?
Yeah, you're vulnerable.
Yeah.
You're putting yourself out there, especially like your old
community that it's like you've now like grown out of what they are about. And for them, it's like they. You've changed. Like you've veered off, you've gone astray away from what you should be doing. Part in the book where I'm having a conversation with one of the apostles in my church. And this apostle, like, he was like the third highest ranking man in the world in our church and in our head, he third highest ranking man in the world because we thought they were the highest, closest to God that you could get on earth. And he said to me, he's like, you know, I've never spoken this in depth with a gay person before. He's like, I didn't know what, how y' all think and what y' all believe and your experience. And I was just like, well, it's. I'm like, it sounds like this conversation was overdue. I'm like, because you're making decisions for people like me. What was unfortunate for me was that him not challenging his beliefs was coming at a price of a lot of other, like hundreds of pro, you know, probably thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in his, under his watch. It was unfortunate, but that's my goal. My goal with the, the book is, with this book is to keep the curiosity and the question. It's like, hey, what if, what if it, you know, it isn't the way that you always thought it was?
