As a child, Clare Dalton would watch her dad go off to teach seminary or institute and ask if she, too, might be able to do that one day. His answer was no, as back then, the church encouraged women to stay home with their families. “That made sense,” Clare says, considering all she’d observed at the time. But after growing up in Arizona, Clare would pursue many opportunities. She served an LDS mission in Barcelona, studied linguistics at the University of Arizona while coaching high school girls’ basketball and a variety of middle school sports, worked at a group home, used her bilingual skills to teach driver’s ed, did door to door sales—which she says is everything they say it is (lots of money, lots of crazy), then ultimately ended up back in her parents’ basement, wondering what was next. One day, her father asked her to substitute teach a seminary class. This time, there was space for a woman in that classroom and Clare had an awakening—finally able to combine her two passions of teaching and working with kids. Clare spent the next eight years being called Sister Dalton in Gilbert, Arizona high schools where parents and students regularly asked for their kids to be placed in her seminary class. That is, until she came out as gay.
Clare had known since she was a child she was different, most consistently feeling “like an alien.” It wasn’t until the pandemic in 2020, at age 32, that Clare finally felt the courage to ask God: “Hey, this SSA stuff I’ve been researching and keep finding my way back to… this topic? Is this me?” She felt the affirmative answer she received didn’t need to be anyone else’s business, and fought God hard on that. Clare laughs, “God and I are good at fighting. I felt strongly prompted by God to come out on social media, and it took us months of back and forth to get me ready to take that leap of faith.” She was perplexed by the timing of it all, and taken aback by the immense outpouring of people in the space seeking connection. “People were starving to be seen and heard, as this affects so many lives.”
Soon, Clare understood the urgency of her prompting to be more open. A former seminary student reached out and said that on the day they planned to take their life, a friend had forwarded them a screenshot of Clare’s post, which ultimately proved life-saving. They told Clare her example made them realize, “This could be a part of my life that might not ruin everything. Maybe I can stay here.” Clare says, “That gave me added perspective of what God means by the invitation, ‘Come, labor in my vineyard and be an instrument in my hands.’ Now, I feel called to this space. It’s worth standing here, even if it feels lonely, to hold space for others coming along so we can make the space even bigger.” Clare credits Charlie Bird, Ben Schilaty, Meghan Decker and Tom Christofferson as some of the pioneers who first helped open that space publicly.
After her public announcement, Clare immediately noticed a shift in her seminary classes. Some students and families started behaving differently towards her. She started hearing secondhand conversations about her, initiated by parents and local leaders who had never actually met her. She says, “It hurt that those with accusations and even just questions didn’t have the courage or integrity to talk to me face-to-face. As a religious culture, we believe in the phrase ‘to stand for truth and righteousness.’ So when we feel we’re on the moral high ground, we like our faces to be seen. But when we don’t have that, we turn into middle schoolers and tattle up the chain to take care of uncomfortable situations we don’t want to face ourselves.” Clare saw “really awful” emails and texts that were passed around about her as she was accused of horrific things that were utterly untrue. She offered to meet with parents, to no avail. “The things I was accused of have left scars, and they’re from parents who had no valid ammunition—just fear. The scary problem is that they don’t need any. I didn’t have to ever actually do anything wrong to be perceived and painted as a threat. Just being gay was enough.” In contrast, Clare will forever remember how some families reached out and some colleagues stepped up to show how much they needed someone like her in this space—an LGBTQ voice who’s connected with God and the church.
Clare wanted to continue to help people, but started to feel the pushback and belittlement as if “I was being patted on the head, like, ‘You can be here, but don’t make any waves.’ But I kept seeing parents and students who were hurting and who didn’t want to come into a church building because of their experiences. The seminary and institute programs have done so many amazing things for years and can be helpful, but I can’t unsee the broken hearts who don’t fit into that system. Who’s helping those kids and families?” Clare says her faculty would look at the lists every year of students not registered or attending, and consider the tools they were trained and instructed to use to “rescue Israel.” But, “Those tools can be perceived as weapons to people who don’t fit in. Tools like, ‘Let’s go over to someone’s house and invite them to seminary and to read the Book of Mormon.’ What does that tool feel like to someone who was called a slur by someone in their seminary class, and they step into our building and hear that slur again? Or a person of color who studies 2 Nephi and their class discussion isn’t nuanced or sensitive? And in class, when we double down on weaponizing the Family Proclamation, are we gathering Israel, or inflicting wounds that lead to hemorrhaging faith and testimony? People say, ‘We need LGBTQ people in the church,’ but it is so hard to stay when everything from the overt to the subconscious message is ‘You don’t belong here’.”
A lifelong athlete, Clare’s sports brain recognizes the best change can come if we recognize that humans do feel the difference between being “allowed” and being “needed,” or between feeling “welcome” versus “essential.” She likens it to a team on which a coach says, “Here’s a jersey, get used to sitting and watching” versus, “We need what you have. We’re going to build this team and offense around you.” Clare decided that since God had called her, she didn’t need to just sit there, she needed to do something. And if that space didn’t exist, she needed to help create it. She credits many others as being part of the “explosion of people right now wanting to create spaces (books, podcasts, support groups, etc.) with God that haven’t been created before. God isn’t just allowing it, God is inspiring it,” says Clare.
Now on the advisory board for the Gather conference, Clare says it’s been so eye-opening to work in a space without a manual; just a connection to God in which one can ask, how can we do this? With this newfound flexibility, Clare’s been able to tap into part of her spirit that she says has felt dormant to channel the Christlike attribute of creativity. She says, “When we move into the unknown with God, we sample what it’s like to be a creator. We get to accept the invitation to create with God.” Along with a committee of four (including Allison Dayton, Ben Schilaty and Austin Peterson), Clare is now developing the Gatherings curriculum (the free curriculum is available on gather-conference.com under “Gatherings”), a companion study for Come, Follow Me, designed for “the population of those who might find church to be unrelatable, painful, or unsafe. It’s for those who may nervously anticipate General Conference, awaiting the next ‘you’re no longer welcome here’ stone to hit. The team hopes that with the Gathering curriculum, someone can jump into scripture with a different perspective and find themselves in the sacred text … and say, ‘Oh, I’m more like Nephi than I thought’.” Clare reasons, “Constantly deflecting stones from friendly fire takes such an emotional toll and can be a barrier to spiritual growth. When you’re ready for a blow to come, it’s hard to have a soft heart that can be receptive.”
Reflecting on the recent inaugural Gather conference in which she was the second speaker, Clare says she arrived two hours early, stepped into a giant meeting hall with 1200+ chairs waiting to be filled, and had this moment of, “This is unreal… I didn’t even know to dream on this level. No part of me as a little kid was like ‘I want to get up on a stage and talk about the thing that makes me different.’ But I had this moment of awe—how good God is to be able to move so many things and people. I was able to stand at one of those connection points where so many lines come together and connect you to everyone else. That’s what Gather was—seeing people friendly, happy, smiling, using different pronouns or clothes or for the first time, trying something they had not been able to before. And we all fit in the family of God, in a future that had been described with so much uncertainty for us…” Clare continues, “It doesn’t take away our problems, but it does give us a foundation so we have a place to stand for all the things to come. That’s what I see and want; that’s what Gather is doing… It’s a beautiful sentiment to feel we’re not just taking up space in Zion, but that we literally cannot build Zion without this essential part-us. As we move closer to the Second Coming, God’s moving more and more people.”
A self-proclaimed introvert who is a voracious reader of fantasy and YA fiction, Clare is now happily dating her girlfriend and figuring out what their path in the church looks like together. They are active in their local ward, and Clare says that living the gospel for them is “more focused on trying to become like Christ and less focused on checking all the to-do boxes. While I hope every week that Sacrament meeting and second hour will be the sacred renewal that I crave, there are times that I have to leave the church building and find that connection with God elsewhere.”
But Clare says, “What gets me out of bed and keeps me going is faith. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s the first principle of the gospel. We have too many cultural patterns that have become patterns of fear. And God is trying to root out that fear. In order to do that, we have to check our patterns, assumptions, and mindsets.” Clare says she did all she could to live a life where she “moved within those patterns and fit in and looked really good on paper, but that wasn’t where God was guiding me. I hope that every member of God’s family remembers that God invites us to talk to Them and find out our individual purpose together with the divine.” As for Clare right now, she is focused on the gathering to come.
