What is the source of unusual LDS sexual morality?

[Spicy McHaggis]

Several years ago the SL Trib quoted a study done by two BYU sociologists who said 58% of women getting married in the Temple admit to premarital sex.
It also found that less than 70% of LDS marriages are intact after 10 years, the lowest percentage among whites citing religious affilition. To say LDS have better marriages than other religious people, simply isn't true.

According to the book titled "The Way We Never Were, in the 1870s in New York, the rate of children born outside of marriage was MUCH higher than it is today. The book essentially says there is a myth that somehow this current generation has lower "morals" than previous ones. It cites several other statistics that shows "morals" in the 1800s in the US was as bad or worse than they are now.

It could be argued that controlling member's sex lives has similarities to the control tactics of cults. It seems that scamming retired people out of their money is much more forgivable than two adults fooling around. I don't get that.

BYU was much less strict in the 50s than it is now. Leadership was so afraid of hippies on campus in the 60s that they made those idiotic arbitrary rules that are still enforced today. Some of them have even taken root in the church as a whole, # of earing women can have, white shirts, panty hose, etc.

As Seattle mentioned, JS got away with a lot of "activity" so it appears we're held to a higher standard than he was.

[SCcoug]

And I would also say that the Book of Mormon passages that have been interpreted as calling adultery the "sin next to murder" have something to do with it.

For some reason we don't remember that Corianton went right back to being a missionary after committing the "sin next to murder" and having a lecture from his dad.

[CardiacCoug]

Several years ago the SL Trib quoted a study done by two BYU sociologists who said 58% of women getting married in the Temple admit to premarital sex.
It also found that less than 70% of LDS marriages are intact after 10 years, the lowest percentage among whites citing religious affilition. To say LDS have better marriages than other religious people, simply isn't true.

According to the book titled "The Way We Never Were, in the 1870s in New York, the rate of children born outside of marriage was MUCH higher than it is today. The book essentially says there is a myth that somehow this current generation has lower "morals" than previous ones. It cites several other statistics that shows "morals" in the 1800s in the US was as bad or worse than they are now.

It could be argued that controlling member's sex lives has similarities to the control tactics of cults. It seems that scamming retired people out of their money is much more forgivable than two adults fooling around. I don't get that.

BYU was much less strict in the 50s than it is now. Leadership was so afraid of hippies on campus in the 60s that they made those idiotic arbitrary rules that are still enforced today. Some of them have even taken root in the church as a whole, # of earing women can have, white shirts, panty hose, etc.

As Seattle mentioned, JS got away with a lot of "activity" so it appears we're held to a higher standard than he was.

Link?

Pretty sure there was a peer-reviewed, reliable study in the 1990s that showed that LDS Temple marriages only had a 13% divorce rate.

I seem to recall a stat that said that when LDS people marry outside their faith the divorce rate is higher than 40%.

I'm not even saying that divorce is such a bad thing, or that there aren't a lot of LDS people who don't get divorced but should because they are miserable in their marriages. I jut feel pretty confident that the divorce rate for the Temple-married, active LDS folks I know would be well below the national average of 40-50%.

[FMCoug]

I think can mostly be attributed to the rate of change (or lack thereof). Go back 30 years and I think the Church's approach would have been considered lockstep with other Christian denominations. Over time, other churches have become more "worldly" relating to this while the Church has not.

[woot]

Link?

Pretty sure there was a peer-reviewed, reliable study in the 1990s that showed that LDS Temple marriages only had a 13% divorce rate.

I seem to recall a stat that said that when LDS people marry outside their faith the divorce rate is higher than 40%.

I'm not even saying that divorce is such a bad thing, or that there aren't a lot of LDS people who don't get divorced but should because they are miserable in their marriages. I jut feel pretty confident that the divorce rate for the Temple-married, active LDS folks I know would be well below the national average of 40-50%.

Was that per year? No way it's only 13%.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if the LDS divorce rate was lower than average, given all the religious pressures that keep couples together even when they hate each other.

[Spicy McHaggis]

Link?

Pretty sure there was a peer-reviewed, reliable study in the 1990s that showed that LDS Temple marriages only had a 13% divorce rate.

I seem to recall a stat that said that when LDS people marry outside their faith the divorce rate is higher than 40%.

I'm not even saying that divorce is such a bad thing, or that there aren't a lot of LDS people who don't get divorced but should because they are miserable in their marriages. I jut feel pretty confident that the divorce rate for the Temple-married, active LDS folks I know would be well below the national average of 40-50%.

Here is the link:

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SLTB&p_theme=sltb&p_action=sear ch&p_maxdocs=200&s_dispstring=allfields(Of%20LDS%2 0Women)%20(%2058%25%20Admit%20Premarital%20Sex)%20 AND%20date(1991)&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=1991&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=(Of%20LDS%20Women)%20(%2058%25%20Admit%20Premari tal%20Sex)&xcal_numdocs=20&p_perpage=10&p_sort=_ra nk_<img src=

and this is what it says:

Returned: 1 displays of 1 matches

Article 1 of 1
LDS Women: 58% Admit Premarital Sex
Date: August 9, 1991

Fifty-eight percent of Mormon women admit to having sexual intercourse before marriage. And fewer than 70 percent of Mormon marriages are intact after 10 years - the lowest percentage among whites citing religious affiliation.



These were some of the findings presented by two Brigham Young University sociologists at the 13th Annual Sunstone Symposium on Thursday.


Fourteen percent of LDS teens say they have smoked a cigarette in the last month.

...
Author: Peggy Fletcher Stack SLTribune
Page: B1
Word Count: 549
Publication: Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT)
Article ID: 1011763561594CAE


Click here for complete article

[CardiacCoug]

Here is the link:

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SLTB&p_theme=sltb&p_action=sear ch&p_maxdocs=200&s_dispstring=allfields(Of%20LDS%2 0Women)%20(%2058%25%20Admit%20Premarital%20Sex)%20 AND%20date(1991)&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=1991&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=(Of%20LDS%20Women)%20(%2058%25%20Admit%20Premari tal%20Sex)&xcal_numdocs=20&p_perpage=10&p_sort=_ra nk_<img src=

and this is what it says:

Returned: 1 displays of 1 matches

Article 1 of 1
LDS Women: 58% Admit Premarital Sex
Date: August 9, 1991

Fifty-eight percent of Mormon women admit to having sexual intercourse before marriage. And fewer than 70 percent of Mormon marriages are intact after 10 years - the lowest percentage among whites citing religious affiliation.



These were some of the findings presented by two Brigham Young University sociologists at the 13th Annual Sunstone Symposium on Thursday.


Fourteen percent of LDS teens say they have smoked a cigarette in the last month.

...
Author: Peggy Fletcher Stack SLTribune
Page: B1
Word Count: 549
Publication: Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT)
Article ID: 1011763561594CAE


Click here for complete article

Link doesn't work.

And looks like this study doesn't specifically look at Temple marriages or even marriages between 2 Mormons, as far as I can tell from your post. Marriages between an LDS person and non-LDS person are known to have high divorce rates.

Also, a determination of activity in the church would be important in looking at divorce rates.

[Spicy McHaggis]

Link doesn't work.

And looks like this study doesn't specifically look at Temple marriages or even marriages between 2 Mormons, as far as I can tell from your post. Marriages between an LDS person and non-LDS person are known to have high divorce rates.

Also, a determination of activity in the church would be important in looking at divorce rates.

You are correct, it doesn't specify temple marriages. The article says the BYU study was presented at a Sunstone Symposium in 1991 so there may be more details through Sunstone.

[LA Ute]

SU, your inquiry does inevitably carry the odor of trolling and insincerity, since the subject of LDS beliefs regarding chastity (sexual morality, in your terminology) has been commented on extensively for oh, 180 years or so. If you are asking a bunch of people on a message board to enlighten you as to the "source" of those beliefs, you can't really be serious about learning or understanding how those teachings/beliefs are deeply held and based on serious thinking. You disagree with that thinking, but it is there. Some examples:

Jeffrey Holland:

If we stop chopping at the branches of this problem and strike more directly at the root of the tree, not surprisingly we find lust lurking furtively there. Lust is an unsavory word, and it is certainly an unsavory topic for me to address, but there is good reason why in some traditions it is known as the most deadly of the seven deadly sins.

Why is lust such a deadly sin? Well, in addition to the completely Spirit-destroying impact it has upon our souls, I think it is a sin because it defiles the highest and holiest relationship God gives us in mortality—the love that a man and a woman have for each other and the desire that couple has to bring children into a family intended to be forever. Someone said once that true love must include the idea of permanence. True love endures. But lust changes as quickly as it can turn a pornographic page or glance at yet another potential object for gratification walking by, male or female. True love we are absolutely giddy about—as I am about Sister Holland; we shout it from the housetops. But lust is characterized by shame and stealth and is almost pathologically clandestine—the later and darker the hour the better, with a double-bolted door just in case. Love makes us instinctively reach out to God and other people. Lust, on the other hand, is anything but godly and celebrates self-indulgence. Love comes with open hands and open heart; lust comes with only an open appetite.

Elder Holland give a fairly comprehensive summary of the "source" of LDS views on chastity here. Excerpts:

[M]ay I stress that human intimacy is reserved for a married couple because it is the ultimate symbol of total union, a totality and a union ordained and defined by God. From the Garden of Eden onward, marriage was intended to mean the complete merger of a man and woman--their hearts, hopes, lives, love, family, future, everything. Adam said of Eve that she was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and that they were to be "one flesh" in their life together.12 This is a union of such completeness that we use the word seal to convey its eternal promise. The Prophet Joseph Smith once said we perhaps could render such a sacred bond as being "welded"13 one to another.

But such a total union, such an unyielding commitment between a man and a woman, can only come with the proximity and permanence afforded in a marriage covenant, with solemn promises and the pledge of all they possess--their very hearts and minds, all their days and all their dreams.

Can you see the moral schizophrenia that comes from pretending you are one, pretending you have made solemn promises before God, sharing the physical symbols and physical intimacy of your counterfeit union but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects of what was meant to be a total obligation?

In matters of human intimacy, you must wait! You must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot give everything until you are legally and lawfully married. To give illicitly that which is not yours to give (remember, "you are not your own") and to give only part of that which cannot be followed with the gift of your whole self is emotional Russian roulette. If you persist in pursuing physical satisfaction without the sanction of heaven, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage that you may undermine both your longing for physical intimacy and your ability to give wholehearted devotion to a later, truer love. You may come to that truer moment of ordained love, of real union, only to discover to your horror that what you should have saved has been spent, and that only God's grace can recover the piecemeal dissipation of the virtue you so casually gave away. On your wedding day the very best gift you can give your eternal companion is your very best self--clean and pure and worthy of such purity in return.

Thirdly, may I say that physical intimacy is not only a symbolic union between a husband and a wife--the very uniting of their souls--but it is also symbolic of a shared relationship between them and their Father in Heaven. He is immortal and perfect. We are mortal and imperfect. Nevertheless we seek ways even in mortality whereby we can unite with Him spiritually. In so doing we gain some access to both the grace and majesty of His power. Those special moments include kneeling at a marriage altar in the house of the Lord, blessing a newborn baby, baptizing and confirming a new member of the Church, partaking of the emblems of the Lord's Supper, and so forth.

These are moments when we quite literally unite our will with God's will, our spirit with His spirit, where communion through the veil becomes very real. At such moments we not only acknowledge His divinity but we quite literally take something of that divinity to ourselves. One aspect of that divinity given to virtually all men and women is the use of His power to create a human body, that wonder of all wonders, a genetically and spiritually unique being never before seen in the history of the world and never to be duplicated again in all the ages of eternity. A child, your child--with eyes and ears and fingers and toes and a future of unspeakable grandeur.

Neal Maxwell:

Clearly, unchastity and infidelity bring serious consequences such as the rippling, even haunting, effects of illegitimacy and fatherlessness, along with disease and the shredding of families. So many marriages hang by a thread or have already snapped. This quiet but deep crisis coexists with vexing international crises in our time, including war. Jesus spoke of latter days when there would be “distress of nations, with perplexity” and how all things would be in commotion (Luke 21:25; see also D&C 88:91; D&C 45:26).

Therefore, the keeping of the seventh commandment is such a vital shield! By lowering or losing that shield, the much-needed blessings of heaven are lost. No person or nation can prosper for long without those blessings.

Strange, in a time otherwise obsessed with entitlements, how little concern there is over our becoming entitled to the blessings of heaven. Instead, a declining belief by some in ultimate immortality has only intensified proximate immorality, “leading away many … telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof” (Alma 30:18). A Japanese thinker, looking at our pleasure-centered Western society, said, almost confrontingly:

“If there is nothing beyond death, then what is wrong with giving oneself wholly to pleasure in the short time one has left to live? The loss of faith in the ‘other world’ has saddled modern Western society with a fatal moral problem” (Takeshi Umehara, “The Civilization of the Forest: Ancient Japan Shows Post-modernism the Way,” in At Century’s End, ed. Nathan P. Gardels [1995], 190).

All this is only a few clicks away on LDS.org and many other sites.

[il Padrino Ute]

This is a serious issue someone could do a dissertation or write a fascinating book about. It addresses THE defining feature of today's LDS church, I submit (and arguably the source of a lot of its problems).

First, my premise: LDS sexual morality is extraordinary. Yes, all Christianity condems extra-marital sex, most of it condemns same gender sex, pornogrophy etc. But there is a special assiduousness, intensity and preoccupation about the way LDS LIVE sexual morality. Agreed? The world is agape at poor Brandon Davies' fate. An LDS virgin, even a male, in his twenties is not unusual. It's quite unusual outside LDS culture, at least in the West.

The difference between the LDS Church and the Taliban with respect to a sex code is that the LDS Church doesn't kill sinners. Regarding the practice of sexual morality, is there a difference between LDS and Amish?

I think the foregoing is pretty balanced. I'll also note though that the LDS fixation on porn as tantamount to the Gadianton robbers in terms of danger to civilization seems to me extreme.

Where does this come from? I don't recall much of it in the D&C and Book of Mormon. I don't recall that this extreme sexual morality pervaded the early church. So, has this feature of LDS faith arisen after the early church? Calvinist roots (yes, LDS have those)? The main source of it in New Testamente is Paul but he was a Greek speaking and writing Christian that does not seem central to LDS theology.

Could it also be a reaction to Joseph Smith's rampant sexual indiscretions? A sort of extreme correction?

Why the hell are you asking this? You know damn well what it is. You preached it for two years in Ecuador.

[Green Monstah]

In other words, education and planned parenthood (very much hopefully absent abortion), delaying marriage, not cruel medieveal sexual morality, is the salvation from the problem you identify.

Now, back to the question at hand, what's the source of the ultra strict and intolerant LDS sexual morality?

I like that you took two swipes at one message, particularly since the second was snarky and moderately witty, and you were likely very proud of yourself that you were able to turn his point on its head to support your own proposition.

Your initial post was fairly thought provoking, particularly the part about Joseph Smith's deviancy being the root of modern LDS sexual practices. Although I doubt Joseph Smith's sexuality is known or understood by many active LDS (whether 19th-century or otherwise), I think the practice of polygamy certainly had an influence on how we approached sex. It seems that we go to great lengths to prove that polygamy was not about old men tapping young and/or multiple booty (or as Brother Brigham would say, "passion"). I wonder if that was the root of our current notions of chastity, since we were so adamant that polygamy was not perversion.

Also, I think there are dozens of reasons we're prude (not the least of which is that we tend to marginalize or shun those who don't live up to our standards).

Good post, SU.

[Green Monstah]

Was that per year? No way it's only 13%.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if the LDS divorce rate was lower than average, given all the religious pressures that keep couples together even when they hate each other.

My dad and stepmom despise each other, but have stuck it out for a quarter century b/c they don't think "I hate my spouse" is an acceptable reason to divorce...and I think Jesus probably agrees.

[Green Monstah]

Several years ago the SL Trib quoted a study done by two BYU sociologists who said 58% of women getting married in the Temple admit to premarital sex.
It also found that less than 70% of LDS marriages are intact after 10 years, the lowest percentage among whites citing religious affilition. To say LDS have better marriages than other religious people, simply isn't true.

According to the book titled "The Way We Never Were, in the 1870s in New York, the rate of children born outside of marriage was MUCH higher than it is today. The book essentially says there is a myth that somehow this current generation has lower "morals" than previous ones. It cites several other statistics that shows "morals" in the 1800s in the US was as bad or worse than they are now.

It could be argued that controlling member's sex lives has similarities to the control tactics of cults. It seems that scamming retired people out of their money is much more forgivable than two adults fooling around. I don't get that.

BYU was much less strict in the 50s than it is now. Leadership was so afraid of hippies on campus in the 60s that they made those idiotic arbitrary rules that are still enforced today. Some of them have even taken root in the church as a whole, # of earing women can have, white shirts, panty hose, etc.

As Seattle mentioned, JS got away with a lot of "activity" so it appears we're held to a higher standard than he was.

Did you read that book in a history class at BYU with a guy named Grandstaff?? I read it too. It was an interesting read, for sure.

[SeattleUte]

SU, your inquiry does inevitably carry the odor of trolling and insincerity, since the subject of LDS beliefs regarding chastity (sexual morality, in your terminology) has been commented on extensively for oh, 180 years or so. If you are asking a bunch of people on a message board to enlighten you as to the "source" of those beliefs, you can't really be serious about learning or understanding how those teachings/beliefs are deeply held and based on serious thinking. You disagree with that thinking, but it is there. Some examples:

Jeffrey Holland:



Elder Holland give a fairly comprehensive summary of the "source" of LDS views on chastity here. Excerpts:



Neal Maxwell:



All this is only a few clicks away on LDS.org and many other sites.

LA, as usual, Holland is unsurpassed in his eloquence. He is your Augustine, and I think that of all the modern LDS leaders I am acquainted with his words will most endure. However, I am at ninety degrees with much of what he says, and I have regarded some of what he says lately to be disingenuous, especially coming from such a brilliant mind.

But I don't necessarily disagree with much of what he says here. Still, he is talking about rationale, not source. I think I am asking a good and serious question. Before submitting blindly to a harsh moral code, I think one question to ask is what is the source? I submit you can find it in the objective history of Mormonism. I agree with Holland's ideal, not necessarily the LDS Church's practical approach to or enforcement of the ideal. It is an interesting question anyway, and relevant, because in this respect I question whether the modern church resembles the Joseph Smith/BY church. And at least as to gay marriage, it has been a cause of some of the LDS Church's recent problems.

[wuapinmon]

LA,

I think the word "Lust" gets completely misused for lack of understanding what it means, and its origins. I lay the blame at the feet of a 17-Century Puritanical need to enumerate and name all sins. To lust is a joyful emotion. I think Holland means lechery.


I absolutely and totally lust after my wife, every single time I see her.