True, Latter-day Saints may be increasingly comfortable with the idea of civil marriages for same-sex couples. But when it comes to solemnizing those nuptials for eternity in one of their faith’s ever-growing list of temples, enthusiasm cools off dramatically.
According to a new study published by the B.H. Roberts Foundation, 60% to 70% of U.S. Latter-day Saints are emphatically against same-sex sealings, and even more (between 65% and 75%) doubt the church will ever permit them.
Based on 3,865 responses to mailers and Facebook ads, the report asked self-identified members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints two questions on the topic: Whether they believed the Utah-based faith “should marry (seal) gay couples in their temples,” and whether they thought the church ever would do so.
“Not really” came the majority of responses to each question, particularly from those who participated via mailers and Facebook respondents living in the so-called Mormon Corridor stretching from Idaho to Arizona.
To be clear, the church officially and adamantly opposes same-sex marriage. It allows only a legally married man and woman to be sealed to each other in a temple — a practice that senior apostle Dallin Oaks, next in line to lead the global faith, has insisted will never change.
Should the church seal same-sex couples?
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
In response to the first question — whether the church should seal same-sex couples — roughly 8 in 10 of the mailer participants and Facebook respondents living within the Mormon Corridor disagreed to some degree. The same was true for about 7 in 10 of those Facebook respondents living outside that Intermountain region.
In contrast, around 10% of all groups supported the idea of the church sealing same-sex couples.
“What about the youth?” study co-authors Josh Coates and Stephen Cranney asked in their write-up on the findings.
Looking only at those respondents in their 20s, they found 60% strongly disagreed with same-sex sealings, while 13% agreed at some level.
If there’s good news in the results for advocates of same-sex sealings, it’s in the extent to which respondents disagreed.
Despite church leaders’ repeated reminders in recent years that God’s plan hinges on marriage between a man and a woman, barely half of all Facebook respondents were staunchly opposed to the idea of same-sex sealings. That number jumped to nearly 70% for the mailer respondents.
Will the church seal same-sex couples?
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
When it came to the question of how likely the church was to implement same-sex sealings, respondents were even more on the same page.
The overwhelming majority concurred that the global faith of 17.2 million was “very unlikely” to one day solemnize same-sex marriages in the hallowed halls of its temples. “Unlikely” came in second, with the few remaining responses splitting themselves roughly equally between “somewhat likely,” “neither likely nor unlikely” and “somewhat likely.”
Only a sliver opted for “likely” or “very likely.”
Law professor and Latter-day Saint scholar Nate Oman is among those who sees a possible world in which the church extends sealings — believed to be necessary to enter the highest tier of heaven — to same-sex couples.
The reason, he explained in a 2022 essay, has to do with the way the faith’s founder conceived of sealing power.
Rather than a tool to unite nuclear families, as leaders today often frame the practice, Joseph Smith viewed sealings as a way to bond everyone to everyone else — and to connect them all back to God.
Seen in this context, Oman argued, welding same-sex couples represents not a deviation but an extension of the practices of the early church.
Potential pitfalls in the data
Coates, one of the study’s co-authors, conceded their approach to gathering so many responses was not without hiccups. Opt-in surveys, like those that businesses try to persuade customers to take, typically inspire responses from only the most opinionated.
To get around this, he and Cranney randomized the distribution of the survey and avoided mention of a specific topic in the process of advertising it.
(Josh Coates) Study co-author Josh Coates said he was fairly confident the study of nearly 4,000 Latter-day Saints was representative of church members nationally.
Another possible source of biased sampling had to do with how the researchers sought out Latter-day Saints on Facebook.
To target members, they focused on users who showed interest in church-owned Brigham Young University and other Utah-centric educational institutions, along with their sports teams, and the Beehive State in general.
Given this, Coates said in an interview, “there are some segments of Latter-day Saints that we are unlikely to reach,” such as the convert with no social or cultural ties to Utah. Anyone living outside the Mormon Corridor who isn’t on Facebook would also have been invisible to the researchers.
Even so, the researcher noted that the study’s results matched other national surveys on Latter-day Saints, giving him and Cranney “some confidence that we were able to achieve some level of representativeness with members.”
U.S. LDS views on LGBTQ issues
A recent PRRI study, which included 400 Latter-day Saints, found that 41% of members opposed the right of businesses to refuse services to members of the LGBTQ community for religious reasons (for instance, a cake maker who turns away a same-sex couple planning a wedding), compared to 38% in 2015.
During that same time, support for nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ communities ticked up from 72% to 78%.
Far more noticeable was the jump among Latter-day Saints in favor of allowing same-sex couples to marry — a number that rocketed from 27% to 50% in 2022 before slipping 3 percentage points the following year.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
