Bruce C. Hafen

Bruce C. Hafen, Emeritus General Authority of the Mormon Church

Bruce Clark Hafen was raised in southern Utah. After serving a mission for the LDS Church in Germany, he married Marie Kartchner in 1964. They are the parents of seven children. He received an A.A. from Dixie College (now Dixie State University), a B.A. from Brigham Young University (BYU), and a J.D.from the University of Utah in 1967.

After practicing law in Salt Lake City, Utah for four years, he became an assistant to BYU President Dallin H. Oaks. He was on the original faculty of the BYU Law School, founded in 1973 His teaching and research focused on constitutional law, education law, and family law--particularly the legal rights of children. His professional scholarship was published in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, Harvard International Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Brigham Young University Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, and the American Bar Association Journal. Two of his articles were cited in opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. One of his central insights about children’s rights was that the legal system “limits children’s [legal] autonomy in the short run in order to maximize their development of actual autonomy in the long run. . . . [To] short-circuit this process by legally granting [autonomy]—rather than actually teaching autonomous capacity--to children ignores the realities of education and child development to the point of abandoning children to a mere illusion of real autonomy."

From 1976-78, Hafen was the Director of Evaluation and Research for the Correlation Department of the LDS Church. He served as the President of Ricks College (now Brigham Young University-Idaho) from 1978- 85. During this time, he was also President of the American Association of Presidents of Independent Colleges and Universities (AAPICU) and a Commissioner on the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities—the regional accrediting authority for higher education institutions in the seven Northwestern states.

Hafen was Dean of the BYU Law School from 1985-89. There he helped to create the J. Reuben Clark Law Society (JRCLS), an international organization for LDS and other lawyers. By 2017 the JRCLS had over 10,000 members in more than 100 chapters, a third of them outside the U.S. He also raised donated funds to establish a series of endowed professorships to support law faculty scholarship. The Law School later created an endowed professorship and an endowed annual lectureship in his name.

From 1989-96, he was the Provost at BYU, --the largest religious university and the third largest private university in the United States. As Provost, he worked with the faculty to develop a policy that appropriately blended BYU’s institutional academic freedom as a religious university with the faculty’s individual academic freedom, along with a new policy statement describing “The Aims of a BYU Education.”

Hafen was a full-time General Authority of the LDS Church from 1996 to 2010, serving as president of the Church's Australia/New Zealand and Europe Central areas. He also served in the North America Central area presidency and as an adviser at Church headquarters to the departments of Church History, Temples, and Priesthood--which included the women’s General Relief Society Presidency.

He has published several books and numerous articles on religious topics, including the Atonement of Jesus Christ, marriage, faith, Christian discipleship, and dealing with ambiguity. Two of his books won the year’s best book award from Deseret Book—The Broken Heart in 1989 and A Disciple’s Life: The Biography of Neal A. Maxwell in 2002. At a conference on grace at BYU in December 2017 (“My Grace Is Sufficient: Latter-day Reflections"), Hafen was said to be one of “several key figures in [a] renaissance of grace” who helped “alter Mormon culture by clarifying the understanding of LDS theology [about grace] over the past 30 years.” One conference commentator said The Broken Heart is “the first LDS book that brings to the fore what the LDS understanding of grace is.”[1]

One of his central insights about the Atonement is that it is “a doctrine of human development, not a doctrine that simply erases black marks.” Thus “because of the Atonement . . . we can learn from our experience without being condemned by our experience.” So “the Atonement is not just for sinners….[It] can also heal our other wounds, whether self-inflicted or from sources beyond our control, [and it can] help us become as He is” — all on the condition that we choose actively to “engage in the participatory process that results in our personal and spiritual development.” Moreover, “the [LDS] temple is an anchor for understanding and applying” the Atonement’s redeeming, strengthening, and perfecting blessings: “While the story of Christ’s life is the story of giving His Atonement, the story of Adam and Eve [the central story in the temple endowment] is the story of receiving His Atonement.”

At an Evergreen International conference in 2009, Hafen urged LDS Church leaders and members to reach out in love to those with unwanted same-gender attraction. In the context of describing the universal fatherhood of God, he said that "Having same-gender attraction is not in your DNA, but being a child of God clearly is in your spiritual DNA." Moreover, “there is . . . no scientific consensus about what causes homosexual tendencies. ‘[N]ature and nurture both play complex roles,’ [But, while] inherited susceptibilities, childhood experiences, and agency all influence a given person’s development, [the] idea that there is a ‘gay gene’ has little scientific support.” Hafen also said that in 1973 the American Psychological Association [APA] removed homosexuality from its official list of disorders “in response to increasing disruptions and protests by gay activists.” The APA took this action by “an open vote in their professional meetings--not because of any change in actual medical findings.” He also wrote that “the empirical research [demonstrates] that a child’s being [raised by] both father and mother is clearly the optimal environment for child rearing.”

On October 2, 2010, Hafen was released from the First Quorum of the Seventy and designated an Emeritus General Authority. He served as President of the St. George Utah Temple from 2010 to 2013.

Books by Bruce C. Hafen

• A Disciple's Life: The Biography of Neal A. Maxwell

• Covenant Hearts: Marriage And the Joy of Human Love

• The Broken Heart: Applying the Atonement to Life's Experiences

• The Belonging Heart: The Atonement and Relationships with God and Family

• The Believing Heart: Nourishing the Seed of Faith

• Spiritually Anchored in Unsettled Times

• "Beauty for ashes" and The Restored Doctrine of the Atonement (Classic talk series)

• Law and the Ordering of Our Life Together (Encounter Series)

by Bruce C. Hafen, Thomas L. Shaffer

Quotes by Bruce C. Hafen

• "We can have eternal life if we want it, but only if there is nothing else we want more. "

• "In the long run, our most deeply held desires will govern our choices, one by one and day by day, until our lives finally add up to what we have really wanted most--for good or otherwise. We can indeed have eternal life, if we really want it, so long as we don't want something else more."

2009 Talk on Gay Rights and Same Gender Attraction

Bruce C. Hafen gave a talk at the Evergreen International 19th Annual Conference on September 19, 2009, that has garnered much media attention. (For a complete transcript, click here).

Some highlights of his talk follow:

• First, Elder Hafen expressed sympathy for those who struggle with same-sex attraction. He added, "But as hard as same-gender attraction is, your feeling it does not mean that your nature is flawed. Whenever the Adversary tries to convince you that you are hopelessly 'that way,' so that acting out your feelings is inevitable, he is lying. He is the Father of Lies."
• Elder Hafen then compared the struggle with same-sex attraction to other difficult and on-going problems, such as dealing with sexual abuse. These struggles are real, but are mostly hidden from others. They are intensely personal.
• Elder Hafen then explained the way in which the Lord judges us. He referred to the judging of Olympic diving, wherein a diver is judged not only by his technical execution of a dive, but also on the difficulty of the dive. The Lord judges us not only on our thoughts, desires, and behaviors, but on the difficulties we face, which are unique to us; in other words, on the difficulty of the dive.
• Elder Hafen then said that same-gender attraction is not programmed into one's DNA, but godliness is, since we are literal spirit-children of Heavenly Father. "If you are faithful, on resurrection morning—and maybe even before then--you will rise with normal attractions for the opposite sex. Some of you may wonder if that doctrine is too good to be true. But Elder Dallin H. Oaks has said it MUST be true, because 'there is no fullness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband and wife, and posterity. And “men (and women) are that they might have joy'” (LDS.org Newsroom, interview transcript).
• Elder Hafen related an old Indian legend about all men having within themselves two dogs, one evil and one good, equally powerful. The one that becomes dominant is the one you feed. Thus he counseled against doing anything that would encourage a person with same-gender attraction to act upon it. This includes pornography, enticing social situations, or feeding one's mind with defeatist ideas. Elder Hafen encouraged psychological therapy.
• Elder Hafen encouraged those who have acted out on their orientation to repent and rely on the atonement of Christ for forgiveness and reconciliation with God: "First, Christ helps us draw on His strength to become more at-one with God even while still overcoming the attraction....As a second healing blessing, the Atonement enables the grace that assures us of this grand promise: No eternal blessing—including marriage and family life--will be withheld from those who suffer same gender attraction, if they do “all they can do” to remain faithful always.
• Elder Hafen then examined the cultural and legal climate that make the challenge much harder than it would otherwise be. He gave historical background on family law. Though criminal laws against homosexual acts were seldom enforced, the Supreme Court considered those laws constitutional as recently as 2003. The main legal goal of gay activists then was to eliminate criminal penalties against homosexual acts, as a first step toward their goal of greater public acceptance. In the early 1970’s, the public and most lawyers, doctors, and therapists saw homosexuality not as normal adult behavior but as a psychological disorder. The change has mostly been political. Activists have been "trying to prove that they are a legitimate demographic category with fixed and unchangeable characteristics. They must present themselves in this way in order to justify their demand for the same legal protections now given to race and gender. Thus, they can identify themselves as normal and those who oppose them as bigoted and unreasonable." Elder Hafen quoted Dallin H. Oaks: "This is more than a social issue—ultimately it may be a test of our most basic religious freedoms to teach what we know our Father in Heaven wants us to teach.”
• Elder Hafen quoted James E. Faust: "The false belief of inborn homosexual orientation denies to repentant souls the opportunity to change and will ultimately lead to discouragement, disappointment, and despair.” He then discussed successful therapies that have helped with same gender attraction. These therapies have been particully successful with men whose tendencies arose in the early teenage years. Therapy does not always succeed, but it succeeds more often than it should, if these tendencies were inborn. One non-LDS therapist who has treated both men and women for many years reports that 40% of his clients find full heterosexual resolution, another 40% achieve enough resolution to control their attraction and behavior, and 20% are unsuccessful.
• Elder Hafen then discussed family and society, and the consensus against gay marriage both in the U.S. and elsewhere, citing legal actions and studies that support a heterosexual and monogamous relationship as being optimal for the well-being of children. France did not legalize gay marriage, because justifying the happiness of two adults at the sacrifice of the happiness and well being of children was not justifiable.