Basic Descriptive Information, Pt.1:
Religiosity, Sexuality, and Suicide Ideation

As we are using a non-probability sample, it is important to understand the basic characteristics of the sample to understand what type of individuals we are making generalizations about. This report is the first part of a basic description of the participants in our study sample. Here we will look at the key variables relating to LDS religious background, sexuality, and suicide ideation. The next report will look at more general variables such as gender, education, income, marital status, and geography distribution.

Highly Religious Mormons

A number of questions were asked to ascertain how committed the participants had been within Mormonism. As this was a study of current or former "highly religious Mormons," we expected to see high percentages on these questions which can be seen in Figure 2. Out of 183 participants, all but one participant marked that they had attended church meetings regularly and all but four listed that they had paid a full tithing. Eighty percent of the participants had served missions and fifty percent had been married (heterosexually) in the Mormon temple. Of those who were heterosexually married, just over a third of them (35.4%) were still in their heterosexual marriage at the time of the survey.

Although there was a broad range of ages represented in our sample, participants actively attended church meetings on average for 30 years, paid tithing on average for 25 years, and attended the temple on average for 14 years. These numbers show the high level of commitment of participants in our study to Mormon beliefs and practices.

A question on the survey asked participants to list "Important callings in the church (such as relief society officer, bishop, elder's presidency, etc.)". As the Mormon Church does not have a paid clergy, most members perform service assignments or callings which may take considerable time and energy. Within the church every calling is considered important, however not everyone is equally capable of the responsibility of leading a congregation (e.g. bishop or stake president), whereas almost any member could hand out programs at the beginning of services. To make sense of the variety of responses that resulted from this question, a measure was created ranging from 0-4, where the highest levels of responsibility and authority were given a higher number.^[1]

We will come back to this measure to see if this measure differs relative to subsequent religiosity but for now we consider only descriptive information. The most common highest calling was those who had been Elder's Quorum presidencies, scoutmasters, clerk/secretaries, young women/young men leaders which accounted for 38% (N=69)^[2] of the participants. Twenty-three percent (N=42) had served in bishoprics, as high counselors, or in relief society presidencies. Only 8 individuals were listed in the highest category (stake presidents, mission presidents, sealers, or special authorities).

Another observation about church callings is that there seemed to be an over-concentration of certain callings, fitting a gay stereotype. In particular, it seemed there were more than an average number of male participants involved in music related callings - particularly organ/piano players. Also there seemed to be a higher than expected number who served as clerks or secretaries, scout leaders, genealogy (family history) consultant, and temple workers, sealers, or translators. Of the women in the survey, we see some callings that might be stereotypical for lesbians such as girl's camp director, coach-athlete, and activities committee.

Although it is beyond our ability to test whether these callings are higher than average within Mormon congregations, we did tally up those who listed a music related calling, most of whom were organists and pianists and it came to 20 percent of those who responded to this question (27 out of 134). Limiting this to just the men in the sample, we see that 19% of the men had musical callings (24 out of 119). As men playing the organ and piano is fairly rare within Mormonism, this may suggests that men with these callings have a higher than average probability of being inchoate or strugglers.

Finally, we asked participants to indicate their current religious affiliation. Figure 3 shows the percentages in each of five categories. Two-third of the participants considered themselves as LDS or inactive LDS. Only 16 percent no longer defined their religious views in relationship to the LDS church.

Sexuality

Sexual Orientation Identity

Participants were asked to choose their sexual orientation from a choice between heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual. Several participants protested this question for different reasons. Some wanted a more nuanced item like the Kinsey Scale while others resist defining themselves as homosexuals as they do not accept that as an acceptable category as they struggle to develop themselves as heterosexuals in spite of homosexual attractions. Some were living heterosexual lives in spite of homosexual attractions and they often identified themselves as bisexual. One participant (#23) crossed out bisexual and wrote in:

Among the first time participants filling out the survey, 83.1 % (N=152) reported themselves as homosexual, 13.7 % reported themselves as bisexuals (N=25), and 3.3 % (N=6) participants reported themselves as heterosexual. Perhaps more interesting are the ten percent who were not consistent in reporting their sexual orientation between 2003 and 2007. Four participants who had listed themselves bi-sexual in 2003 listed themselves as homosexual in 2007 and one participant (#13) who had listed himself as heterosexual in 2003 now identified as homosexual in 2007. There were also three participants who had listed themselves as homosexual in 2003 who now identified as bisexual. Although most researchers agree that sexual orientation is particularly resilient to change across the life-course, how one identifies one's sexual orientation can change at different points of time.

Another item on the survey identified how open a person is about their sexual orientation with the following categories: not sure this is me, have accepted it about myself but haven't told anyone else, have accepted it and told a few close friends or family members, have accepted it and told most of the people I know, and have accepted it and am open about it. In our sample, this item seems to be bi-modal with the majority listing either being out to themselves and a few others (45%) or being completely open about it (32%). Only 10% listed themselves as not sure it was them or being only out to themselves.

Age of Onset and Acceptance of Same Sex Attractions

On the first survey (2003), open-ended questions (Q#8) asked participants:

Thirty percent (N=40) of those who answered this question in 2003 stated that their earliest perceived attraction towards the same-sex was under 5 years old or that they had always felt same-sex attractions. Another 33% listed their earliest age as 6-10 years old and 22% listing their earliest age as 11-12. This indicates that 85 percent identified their first attractions to the same-sex as occurring in years prior to their teen years. All but one of the remaining participants listed it as occurring during their teen years (13-19) and the other person listed the age as 20. No one in our sample listed an age older than 20 for first occurrence of same sex attractions.

The answer to the question as to when acceptance of a same-sex orientation occurred was on average at 36 years (SD=11, Range 15-73). Breaking these down into age groups we see that 8% accepted their orientation between 15-19, 13% accepted it during their early to mid-20s (20-28), 35% accepted it during their late 20s and early to mid 30s (29-36), 21% in their late 30s and early 40s, and most of the remaining 22% in the years 45-56 (exceptions: #91 was 68 years old and #160 was 73 years old).

This is an important finding because researchers of the coming-out process generally focus on teenagers and young adults, not middle age men/women as is a more typical age for those within highly committed religious communities that proscribe homosexuality. For our sample, which is probably fairly typical of communities where homosexuality is forbidden, it appears that the teen-coming out process in 2003 only involves about 13% of those in the population, and the greatest number of those dealing with the coming-out process were in the 29-36 year range.

To get better quantitative data, three questions were added to the 2007 survey to ask specifically age of first attraction, age at first awareness of attraction, and age of fully accepting attractions. The average age of first attraction was 9 years old with a range from 1-20 years old (SD=4.0, N=88) and the most frequent ages between ages 6-10 (43%, N=38). The average age of first awareness of same-sex attractions was 13 years old with a range of 1-50 (SD=4.2, N=89) with the most concentrated ages being between 11-12 years old (30%, N=27). The average age of first acceptance was 30 years old, with a range of 11-71 (SD=10.1, N=85) and the majority in the ages 20-28 (35%, 30 out of 85) and 29-36 (32%, N=27).

It may be noteworthy that the average age of acceptance drops from 36 to 30 between 2003 and 2007. This may reflect a small difference in the composition of the continuing sample or that there is a trend to lower coming-out ages due to greater acceptance and understanding in the culture at large.

Sexual desire frequency

The original survey did not include any questions about the level of sexual desire. This was due to two things. First, it was suspected that BYU human subjects committee might be less likely to approve the study if it had such intimate questions. Second, my own sex-negative upbringing made me reticent to ask such questions. In theorizing about coping dynamics it seemed possible that sex drive might be a factor related to how early one comes out and to what degree one eventually is likely to leave Mormonism, so I decided to include a question measuring sexual desire frequency on the follow-up survey.

The following question asked people to rate, "How often do you desire to express your sexuality?" and included seven categories (never, less than once a month, 1-3 times a month, about once a week, 2-4 times a week, 5-7 times a week, and more than once a day). As the differences between the first three categories did not seem to make much difference, they were combined into a "rarely" category. This left five categories with the following percentages (total N=90) in each in the 2007 survey: rarely (few times a month or less) 18.9%, about once a week 11.1%, 2-4 times a week 41.1%, 5-7 times a week 20.0%, and more than once a day 8.9%. The most common sex drive (41%) for this sample was 2-4 times a week with almost 30 percent less often and 30 percent more often than this.

Suicide Ideation

Unfortunately, we hear all too often stories of individuals who have take their lives, as in the story of Stuart Matis who killed himself on the steps of a Mormon Church. For each such story, how many others have taken their lives that we don't hear about?^[3] How many have attempted suicide or spent time contemplating and planning suicides that may have been averted? This may be the first time it is possible to provide an answer to the question of how common suicide ideation is within a sample such as this. It was not known in advance what to expect.

The 2003 survey included the following open-ended questions (#7) related to this:

Of those who responded to this question, 36% indicated they had considered or attempted suicide. To get better quantitative data, two quantitative questions specifically related to suicide were added to the survey in 2007. In answer to the question of how often they, "considered suicide when struggling against my sexual attractions," 41% of participants answered sometimes, often, or very often. In answer to the question, "I attempted suicide while struggling against my sexual attractions," 17 percent (15 out of 87 who answered this question) indicated that they had ever attempted suicide.

Although these numbers show that not everyone dealing with this issue considers or attempts suicide, it does show the importance of interventions to help those who do go that far. We will consider other variables measuring depression, anxiety, etc., in later reports.