Why is the LDS Church softening on the cultural questions it once fought in public?
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
The Church is headquartered in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City became an aggregate of extreme leftists.
It is not complicated. Institutions are run by men, and men absorb the climate they live in.
Start with the ground under the Church Office Building. In 2010 the Church's adherents were about 59 percent of Salt Lake County. By 2018 the Church's own rolls put members at 49 percent of the county, the lowest share since at least the 1930s, and one independent researcher estimated that only about 24 percent of county residents were active members.
Statewide, Pew now finds that half of Utah adults identify as Latter day Saints, down from 58 percent in 2007, while 34 percent claim no religion at all, a higher share of nones than the national average. More than half of Utah's growth in 2024 came from people moving in. They are not arriving as converts.
In 2020 Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win a majority in Salt Lake County since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 2024 Kamala Harris carried the county by ten points, and Utah was the only state in the nation where she improved on Biden's share.
Salt Lake City has not had a Republican mayor since 1974, and it has already elected its first openly gay mayor. Today a majority of the seven member city council is openly LGBTQ, and one councilman is described in the press as the body's only straight white male.
When the Legislature banned pride flags from government buildings in 2025, the city answered within hours. It made a rainbow flag, a trans flag, and a Juneteenth flag official city flags with a sego lily in the corner, and the council passed the ordinance unanimously.
Now the 
culture. Gallup ranked the Salt Lake metro seventh among the fifty largest in the country for the share of adults identifying as LGBT, ahead of Los Angeles, and the Williams Institute found that no metro had shifted more since 1990. The Pride parade pulls close to 150,000 people through downtown every June, and the Pride Center keeps its offices on Main Street, a block from Temple Square.
The Saints themselves have moved with the city. In 2007, 24 percent of Latter day Saints told Pew that homosexuality should be accepted by society. By the latest survey it was 46 percent. PRRI found that 53 percent of Latter day Saints now support same sex marriage, up from 27 percent in 2014
The Church has more than seventeen million members on six continents, and its fastest growth is in places where the membership would find these moral debates unthinkable.
But the fifteen men who decide live within a short drive of one another in a single valley. Their grandchildren sit in Salt Lake County classrooms. Their employees at the Church Office Building, at KSL and the Deseret News, at City Creek, are hired from a county that is no longer half Mormon on paper and perhaps a quarter Mormon in the pews. Their neighbors vote for Harris. The mayor they must work with on downtown and the 2034 Games is a Democrat who raised a trans flag over city hall to spite the Legislature.
Every dinner table, every hospital visit, every grandchild who comes out, lands in the same few zip codes. A worldwide church takes its temperature from one thermometer, and the thermometer is bolted to a wall on North Temple.
That is the disproportion. The members are scattered across the earth. The decisions come out of one valley, and the valley changed its mind.
The pioneers walked into this valley to get away from the world. The world followed them in, bought the house next door, won the council seat, and raised its own flag over city hall.
Zion was supposed to change the valley. Unfortunately, the valley is changing Zion.
culture. Gallup ranked the Salt Lake metro seventh among the fifty largest in the country for the share of adults identifying as LGBT, ahead of Los Angeles, and the Williams Institute found that no metro had shifted more since 1990. The Pride parade pulls close to 150,000 people through downtown every June, and the Pride Center keeps its offices on Main Street, a block from Temple Square.
The Saints themselves have moved with the city. In 2007, 24 percent of Latter day Saints told Pew that homosexuality should be accepted by society. By the latest survey it was 46 percent. PRRI found that 53 percent of Latter day Saints now support same sex marriage, up from 27 percent in 2014
The Church has more than seventeen million members on six continents, and its fastest growth is in places where the membership would find these moral debates unthinkable.
But the fifteen men who decide live within a short drive of one another in a single valley. Their grandchildren sit in Salt Lake County classrooms. Their employees at the Church Office Building, at KSL and the Deseret News, at City Creek, are hired from a county that is no longer half Mormon on paper and perhaps a quarter Mormon in the pews. Their neighbors vote for Harris. The mayor they must work with on downtown and the 2034 Games is a Democrat who raised a trans flag over city hall to spite the Legislature.
Every dinner table, every hospital visit, every grandchild who comes out, lands in the same few zip codes. A worldwide church takes its temperature from one thermometer, and the thermometer is bolted to a wall on North Temple.
That is the disproportion. The members are scattered across the earth. The decisions come out of one valley, and the valley changed its mind.
The pioneers walked into this valley to get away from the world. The world followed them in, bought the house next door, won the council seat, and raised its own flag over city hall.
Zion was supposed to change the valley. Unfortunately, the valley is changing Zion.https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2100056387074347052?s=20
What I know of the mission department has black pulled me on church employees.
I think a majority of church employees are democrat progressives, and many of the 70 are, too.
yup
Nonsense. Church leadership has been rock solid on all of the important issues. They're one of the only Churches that hasn't bent to the wind. The language may be more inviting, but the rebar of the doctrine has stayed strong, and that's not changing.
In 2008 this same Church went to war over Proposition 8 in California. The First Presidency had a letter read from every pulpit in the state calling the Saints to give their time and their means, and they answered with an estimated twenty million dollars, roughly half of everything the Yes campaign raised, and the great majority of the volunteers who knocked the doors, and when it passed the protests came to the gates of the Los Angeles Temple.
Seven years later it publicly endorsed Utah's nondiscrimination law. In 2019 it reversed the policy that had labeled members in same sex marriages apostates and barred their children from baptism, and that same year it dropped its opposition to the state's conversion therapy rule once the language carved out religious counseling. In 2020 BYU deleted the homosexual behavior section from its Honor Code and then spent two weeks explaining what it still meant. In 2022 the Church endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act, praising it for "preserving the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters."
IDK, I think some of middle Church management might be vulnerable to this, but I don't the brethren are as much as you think. Based on what I know, which isn't a lot but maybe more than some.
doesn't middle management have a huge impact on the body? We are witnessing this firsthand. get in on this
Do you really think someone in their 90s knows what is happening on the ground throughout a church this large? Of course not. That is not a criticism of them. It is just reality.
At that age, and with an institution this big, you have to rely heavily on the people around you. Advisers, staff, department heads, committees, and middle management are the ones telling you what the problems are, what members are thinking, and what needs to be done.
And that is where the real issue is. If that layer of the Church is younger, more progressive, and more influenced by the culture than the senior leadership, then it has enormous influence over the direction of the institution. They decide what information gets elevated, how problems are framed, what solutions are presented, and how policies are actually carried out.
So the question is not just, “What does the First Presidency believe?” The question is also, “Who is advising them? Who is writing the reports? Who is framing the issues? Who is implementing the decisions?”
I think you underestimate the prophets and apostles and their ability to know what is going on in the world and what the current problems are. I also think you underestimate how in tune they are with God directly and Christ ability to lead the church.
I'm not disputing any of that
I always find it so fascinating that you speak so convincingly about Salt Lake City, and yet as someone who lives here, I can tell you are not getting your information from first hand experience. Most of the time it is so far off that I wonder what you are even taking about. It seems to me like you are expecting our church leaders to be fighting hand-to-hand combat (like they used to!), while God is flying a B2 stealth bomber in this battle.
1. Salt Lake City is a rainbow dumpster fire. Fact.
2. I just want you guys to engage in the culture war because the survival of the nation is at stake.
Remember this voice?
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