LGBTQ members

When the survey's authors plotted each issue against the year respondents went inactive, one line rose more steeply than any other: the treatment of gay members. Nearly half of respondents already called it a major factor in 2011, three years after Proposition 8 and four years before the policy that barred the children of gay parents from baptism. It was the top reason for respondents under thirty, and, along with more transparency about history, it was among the four things former members most often said would bring them back.

The comments describe two kinds of injury. The first is to gay members themselves: told their orientation was a choice, then a temptation, then a trial; counseled into marriages that failed; offered celibacy or exile. "I've looked, gone, suffered, and tried," one wrote. "There is no place for gay people in the LDS church." The second is to everyone who loved them. Parents, siblings, and ward members who watched the Church's teaching land on a person they knew could not square it with a loving God. "The last straw that broke my faith camel's back," a father wrote, "was the church's position on homosexuals."

The years since the survey have confirmed the trend. In November 2015 the Church declared members in same-sex marriages apostates and barred their children from blessing and baptism until adulthood. Within weeks, hundreds resigned in a single day in Salt Lake City. The policy was reversed in April 2019, described at the time as a revelation, three and a half years after the first one. For many members, a God who reverses himself on whose children may be baptized was not a God whose earlier instruction they could trust.