Back in late 2010, I began a seven-year stint of freelancing for the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine to help fill a gap in coverage of conservative religion. I wrote about Pentecostal serpent handlers, a female Jewish ambassador from Bahrain and the Orthodox Church in America’s rather controversial metropolitan, among other things.

Then sometime in 2017, a new editor came onboard and, after running my story on Paula White (which made quite a splash I might add), simply refused to respond to any more of my emails. “There goes in-depth religion coverage,” I thought, and turned to other markets.

But lo and behold, the magazine just ran a piece about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about a “battle for the future of Mormonism.”

Basically this article makes the case that the Mormons are veering left on gay issues. The reporter visits a very liberal congregation in Berkeley, Calif., and some conservatives in Rexburg, Idaho, considered a traditional Latter-day Saint bastion.

Not to my surprise, the reporter, in support of this thesis, only cites people in both locations who are gay or gay-friendly.

It felt like the reporter had a predetermined goal for the story that just needed the right quotes to scaffold it. Why? I see all the interviews going in one direction: Committed, serious believers who have come to the conclusion that many Mormons are secretly quite liberal. Here at GetReligion, we call this “Kellerism,” a nod to the teachings of a former New York Times editor.

Part of the story is based on an amazing — and inaccurate — assumption.

More so than in other conservative religious institutions, liberals — or at least those disaffected from conservatism — are making their presence known inside and on the perimeters of the church, provoking something of a Latter-day Saint identity crisis.

According to Jana Riess, author of the 2019 book “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” fewer Latter-day Saints are following behavioral mandates like the prohibition against alcohol and coffee. Polling conducted by Riess and others has shown that the percentage of Latter-day Saints born after 1997 who do not identify as heterosexual may be 20 percent or higher. 

One-fifth of the young Mormons interviewed aren’t heterosexual?

That’s a jaw-dropper, and those numbers raised a lot of eyebrows when the survey results were announced in June. Problem is, the survey was wrong and Riess & Co. had to run a retraction admitting they were 7-9 percentage points off, and the “one-fifth” figure was “in dispute.”

That sounds important. Why didn’t the Post editorial team add this vital factoid?

The survey’s conclusions sounded suspicious to me, and it took me only a few seconds to find this Deseret News column eviscerating the survey and then the retraction by Riess.

 When I wrote for the magazine, my work was fact-checked extensively, and a slip like this wouldn’t have happened. Did anyone bother to fact-check this writer, or is what she was saying congruent with the dominant Mormons-are-getting-gay-friendly narrative? (By the way, do read the whole Deseret News piece by Jacob Hess, as it has a lot to say with how some research is conducted in such a way as to pre-dispose desired results.)

Moving on to this paragraph:

And more recently, there was a profound sense of betrayal when apostle Jeffrey Holland — long considered one of the more liberal leaders of the church — urged the faculty of Brigham Young University, the flagship campus of the university run by the church, to take up metaphorical “musket fire” against peers who show public support for gay Latter-day Saints.

I have read Holland’s remarks a number of times and technically, Holland urged faculty to do a better job in supporting “the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman.” It was widely interpreted as an attack on homosexuals.

(You can read the transcript of Holland’s remarks here). Longtime Salt Lake Tribune religion-beat writer Peggy Stack did a more nuanced summation of Holland’s speech here.

The central idea was that Holland was reacting to something; maybe BYU faculty’s apparent squishiness on LGBTQ issues.

Meanwhile, I’m not totally convinced that the stance of faculty at one institution points to the direction of the church as a whole. I think faculty feel that speaking out either way on this issue is a no-win proposition; they’ll get shot down no matter what they say, so silence is the best strategy. And remember, it’s only been four years since the LDS’ers dumped the Boy Scouts partly because the latter was allowing gay leaders. That doesn’t sound lefty-trendy to me.

The reporter visited a liberal LDS ward (congregation) in Berkeley, interviewed a secretive group of gay men in Rexburg and then a succession of people who are agents for change in LDS polity. She spent considerable time at the Berkeley ward, even though she warns the reader that the group is an “outlier” from Latter-day Saint norms.

That’s not enough proof in my book that Mormons are softening on gay issues. I don’t doubt that many are changing to a point; that plenty of them visit Starbucks when they can. I do doubt whether you can hang an entire piece on a line-up of interviews with people all sharing the same point of view.

There’s a lot in the story that’s truly insightful, plus it’s very difficult to explain in a secular publication what “personal revelation” means in terms of individual Latter-day Saints deciding what’s right and what’s wrong on moral issues as well as whether to take a sip of wine. The story makes the case that plenty of Mormons believe God is more accepting of homosexuals than the church is, and that this sentiment will eventually make its way to the top of the Mormon hierarchy.

One caveat, as this Medium piece makes clear, such revelation is only for family or personal issues, and it can’t go against what church leaders are saying. The story suggests that if enough Latter-day Saints change their minds on a certain issue, church leaders will come up with a “revelation” to support that change, as it did in 1978 on allowing black men into priesthood positions. The story ends by suggesting that same-sex marriage and women in leadership are next in line.

Again, I appreciate the magazine running a thoughtful piece on changes that are afoot. I also feel the reporter shoe-horned in numerous examples and quotes to support the gay rights angle with no one offering a rebuttal or an opposing point of view. (She did ask the church for comment, which it declined to give.)

But there are traditional Latter-day Saints out there who could have addressed this matter.

That’s all I ask; that such a story include an element of doubt towards its thesis to give readers an idea of what the conservative majority still thinks. Running both sides of the story is a basic journalistic process. This story left one side out.