The long-term study follows hundreds of participants
Tyler Lefevor is an associate professor of psychology at Utah State University. He grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but also as a queer man.
The church’s official policies state that people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are welcome in the church—so long as they don’t “violate the law of chastity,” and reserve sexual relations for “a man and a woman who are married.”
When Lefevor was growing up, he said, there really wasn’t any research looking into the mental health of people who identify as both LGBTQ+ and as members of the LDS church, so he embarked on studying the topic himself.
He is nearly four years into a 10-year study following hundreds of current and former LDS church members who also identify as LGBTQ+. Lefevor and USU doctoral student Sam Skidmore hope to better inform ministry practices and public policy with the data, they said, which is collected through surveys.
The next, and third, wave of data will be collected in January 2024. The idea is to track how mental health changes over time—how does a person’s mental health change if they lean more into one identity over the other? How does that balance fluctuate? How can LGBTQ+ LDS church members be happiest and healthiest?
“I think that Sam and I, and most LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints, know that LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints leave the church,” Lefevor said. “It’s really important to me to map that trajectory and document that that is what happens, and the rate at which it happens. I think that’s something church leaders need to see.”
What Lefevor and Skidmore have found so far, they said, is that when or if participants left the church, they felt they had less meaning in life: Lefevor said he’s interested to see how those participants find meaning again in the next six years of the study. Religion, he said, both helps and harms peoples’ mental health, but in different ways.
“We found that the prime drivers of becoming less religious were identity uncertainty—so, the more uncertain people felt about their sexual or gender identity, the more likely they were to step away from the church—and personal religious struggles, like conflict with other religious people,” Lefevor said. “But people who became more religious reported less identity affirmation in their sexual identity, and ironically, more doubt in life.”
The research has been published in a number of different papers using the two previous waves of survey data from 2020 and 2022. Recently, Lefevor and Skidmore have focused on how religious people can support those who identify as LGBTQ+: “the goal is to create this nuanced, deeper understanding of peoples’ lived experiences,” Lefevor said. “Once we have that, it’s hard not to be helpful.”
“If the day to day person wants to make the mental health of LGBTQ+ people better, the answer is just to learn how to support, learn how to help people accept themselves for who they are, and embrace them,” Skidmore said. “People often ask, what’s the thing we can do to help? And it really is just, treat them like a person, and allow them to be who they are.”
