08/12/2026
BYU and Mormon church leaders have been increasingly vocal about a problem they see among young Latter-day Saints: fewer of them are getting married, and those who do are often waiting longer.
It’s become so serious that recently, Mormon church president Dallin H. Oaks openly invited missionaries to use their missions as tools to start finding other missionaries to date.
The church’s explanations are usually pretty predictable when it comes to an explanation. Young adults are focused on school and careers. Housing is expensive. Dating has changed. They’re afraid of commitment or divorce. They have unrealistic expectations about marriage, spend too much time online, or simply aren’t making marriage the priority Church leaders think it should be.
All of those things may contribute. But there’s another factor sitting right in front of them that almost never seems to enter the conversation.
A national study of Latter-day Saint students found that 22% self-reported that they were not exclusively heterosexual. More than one in five young Mormon college students said they were gay, le***an, bisexual, or identified with another sexual orientation. Nearly a third of the LDS respondents in that study attended BYU.
That study is inconvenient to the Church’s message about marriage because Mormonism still builds the entire expected future of its young adults around heterosexual marriage. Dating advice, singles wards, temple preparation, family proclamation lessons, and repeated counsel to marry all begin with the assumption that the young person listening is straight.
For a significant number of these students, that assumption is wrong.
No one needs to pretend this is the sole reason fewer young Latter-day Saints are marrying. Economics matter. Culture matters. People are marrying later across the country. But if more than one in five LDS college students are telling researchers they aren’t exclusively straight, that fact belongs in the discussion alongside every other explanation Church leaders are willing to entertain.
It might inconvenient—but it’s worth asking the question: who are a large portion of Mormon students actually attracted to?
