In a previous article, we looked at the ways that the contradictions in scientific studies, with some claiming that social and medical transitioning decreased the likelihood of suicidal ideation and self-harm while other studies showed that transitioning brought no decreases in either suicidal ideation or self-harming. How can we reconcile these two seemingly incongruent results – studies which demonstrate no change at all and others which do? The answer, I think, lies in testing the assumption that it is transitioning that made the person with gender dysphoria decrease his or her risk of suicide.

Most of these studies follow people who transition, subject them to mental heath screening (and hopefully testing), and find that many people with gender dysphoria who were at higher risk of committing suicide before transitioning are now at lower risk of suicide after transitioning, and then assume it was transitioning that caused the mental health increase. But there is another option, one factor that is incredibly powerful, one that decreases the risk of suicide in all people of every persuasion no matter where they live. One that if you can just get it, then it can transform everything.

What is this wonder factor?

Community.

In no better place is this seen than in religion. As one study explains:

The majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and higher morale) and with less depression, suicidal thoughts and behavior, drug/alcohol use/abuse. Usually the positive impact of religious involvement on mental health is more robust among people under stressful circumstances (the elderly, and those with disability and medical illness). Theoretical pathways of the religiousness-mental health connection and clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.

^{Religiousness and mental health: a review}

And a professional review of seventy-four studies exploring the connection between religion and mental health concluded:

Most of the past literature in this area reported that there is a significant connection between religious beliefs and practices and mental health.

^{Religiousness and Mental Health: Systematic Review Study}

And why is there this connection between religion and decreased suicide risk? Well, there are multiple reasons. But one of the major reasons is because religions create communities – places where people with a shared identity, culture, beliefs, values, hopes, dreams, morals, and goals come together to aid, support, encourage, and uplift one another. And communities are one of the most important factors in whether someone tries to kill his or her self or not:

Connectedness at various levels including peers, school, religion, and community have all been associated with lower levels of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in youth. Previous studies in youth found significant inverse relationship between connectedness and suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Consistent with the previous research, this investigation found positive peer social environment, positive school environment, religiosity/religious affiliation, and positive community social environments to be protective against suicidal ideation and suicide attempt in this population.

^{Undetermined Risk Factors for Suicide among Youth Aged 10-17 years-Utah, 2017, pgs. 64-65}

On the topic of religion specifically, the study reported:

In addition to connectedness in the school environment, several studies have observed an association between religiosity/religious affiliation and suicidal behaviors or some risk factors for suicidal behaviors such as depression. It has been suggested that the sense of belonging in religion and the network of relationships and ties among members of certain religious communities are protective against suicide. Religion may improve connectedness by providing youth a trusted community of people with shared values and beliefs to count on during difficult and stressful times. Consistent with the literature, the results from the PNA found that youth who reported being religious (defined as attending religious services 1-2 times a month or more often) were 49% less likely to report suicidal ideation and 58% less likely to have attempted suicide during the 12 months prior to the survey (Table 14).

^{Undetermined Risk Factors for Suicide among Youth Aged 10-17 years-Utah, 2017, pg. 66}

Religions create communities and not just generic communities or generic people like you might encounter in most places. Religions foster communities where people build long term interpersonal relationships based on shared values, beliefs, hopes, dreams, mutual service, and love.

Conservative Religious Communities vs Affirming Queer Communities

I can hear you response. It probably goes something like, “That may be true for straight kids, but religion actually causes more harm to LGBTQ+ teens, motivating them to kill themselves more than if they weren’t religious.” Many have made this claim. And not only can they not prove their claim, the evidence proves they’re wrong. Multiple studies prove they’re claim is nonsensical. A study from Austria indicates that religious affiliation and activity may act as a protective against suicide even for homosexuals and other “sexual minorities:”

Religion is known to be a protective factor against suicide. However, religiously affiliated sexual minority individuals often report a conflict between religion and sexual identity. Therefore, the protective role of religion against suicide in sexual minority people is unclear. We investigated the effect of religion on suicide risk in a sample of 358 lesbian, gay and bisexual Austrians. Religion was associated with higher scores of internalized homophobia, but with fewer suicide attempts. Our data indicate that religion might be both a risk and a protective factor against suicidality in religiously affiliated sexual minority individuals.

^{Religion and Suicide Risk in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Austrians}

This trend proves true for Latter-day Saints specifically. Being LDS and LGTBQ+ actually makes you less likely to try and commit suicide. Another study published in the Journal of Homosexuality examined Latter-day Saints who identify as homosexual and found that those who had left the church had more struggles with depression than those who stayed:

A nation-wide sample of 634 previous or current members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), non-heterosexual adults (ages 18–33), were surveyed to examine how specific aspects of minority stress are individually and collectively associated with depression, and how such associations differ across sex, sexual orientation, and level of affiliation with the LDS church. When five stressors were examined simultaneously, need for others’ acceptance (NA) was the strongest predictor of depression, followed by internalized homophobia (IH). All minority stress factors were found to be individually predictive of depression and did not differ across sex or sexual orientation subgroups. Differences were observed, however, when considering current LDS status, such that participants who were no longer affiliated with the LDS church reported stronger relationships between some minority stressors and depression. Implications of religious identity salience as a potential mediator of relationships between specific stressors and depression are discussed.

^{Specific Aspects of Minority Stress Associated With Depression Among LDS Affiliated Non-Heterosexual Adults}

Consider what these studies tell us. LGBTQ+ kids coming from religious backgrounds had higher scores for “internalized homophobia” – i.e. they believed homosexual romantic and sexual activities are sinful and wrong. But in both studies the complete opposite of results occur than what the critics of religion claim should be the case. The first study shows that religiously active LGBTQ+ people were less likely to try and commit suicide. And the second study showed that even among Latter-day Saints, those reviled by their critics as being especially bigoted against LGBTQ+ people, the very opposite situation exists than what their attackers claim. LGBTQ+ kids who leave the church are more likely to suffer from depression whiles those stay active in the church, including accepting its conservative religious teachings, are less likely to suffer from depression.

This is a significant find because depression is “one of the most relevant factors” in whether or not someone will try to kill him or her self, with anxiety being a strong secondary contributing factor. The more depressed you are, the more anxious you are, the more likely you are to kill yourself. And conservatively religious LGBTQ+ teens are far less likely to be anxious or depressed or lonely than their counterparts.

How To Save LGBTQ+ Teen Lives

Religion is actually a major protection for LGBTQ+ kids and leads less of them to try and kill themselves while not being religious actually leads to higher risks of suicide.

Read that again to make sure you understand it.

Religion is actually a major protection for LGBTQ+ kids and leads less of them to try and kill themselves while not being religious actually leads to higher risks of suicide.

That is the exact inverse of what pro-homosexuality and pro-transgenderism advocates claim. The bigoted old religions that teach religion is a sin actually save peoples lives. Not being active in religion makes it more likely LGBTQ+ kids will kill themselves. Therefore, opposing these churches and telling LGBTQ+ kids to not go to them actually puts them at greater risk of killing themselves.

There is another, equally important message these studies teach us though. One that devastates the entire pro-LGBTQ+ agenda.

Whether you’re supportive or not of another person’s sexual orientation or gender identity has no effect whatsoever on whether or not they’ll be more or less likely to commit suicide.

How do we know this? Because in these studies the religious LGBTQ+ kids have higher rates of “internalized homophobia” – i.e. they were not supported in their homosexuality or transgenderism because they had been taught to believe that both were sinful and wrong – and but lower rates of depression and suicide. Now, don’t get it wrong. If a kid who identifies as transgender gets severely bullied then he or she will be more likely to be depressed and want to kill him or her self. But if the kid is embraced by the religious community and included in it, even if he is told his sexual orientation or gender identity is wrong and comes to believe that, he will still be less likely to be depressed or attempt suicide than his non-religious homosexual and transgender identify-affirmed peers.

That means that it is actually far more dangerous for LGBTQ+ teens to be part of the “queer community” than not It means that joining the “queer community” and embracing a “queer identity” makes it more likely that an LGBTQ+ teen will self-harm or kill himself than if that same teen stayed active in a conservative religious community that teaches that gender is eternal and unchangeable and that homosexuality is a sin. Then you start stacking all the other ways that that queer culture encourages depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide on top of this problem and things get really dark, really fast. According to the Addiction Center, “An estimated 20 to 30% of the LGBTQ+ community abuses substances, compared to about 9% of the general population.” LGBTQ+ people are almost twice as likely to use and abuse illegal drugs (starting Slide 12) and drug use among LGBTQ+ people is far greater than heterosexual people. Those who abuse alcohol or drugs are significantly more likely to suffer from depression. Heterosexual “women between ages 25 and 44 had a median of 4.2 sexual partners, while men in that age group had a median of 6.1 sexual partners.” (Source) In contrast, the “typical gay man has had 30 lifetime sexual partners and lesbian women have had 12 sexual partners.” (Source) Sexual promiscuity has been shown to increase anxiety and depression.

Why does all this matter? Because all these issues lead to increases in depression and anxiety and when you stack them all on top of each other, as in having people who abuse alcohol and/or drug being promiscuous then you’re compounding the factors that cause anxiety and depression. Depression is one of the primary motivators for people who self-harm and/or attempt to kill themselves. As the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention bluntly states, “Depression is the most common condition associated with suicide.” The more you abuse drugs, the more you abuse alcohol, the more you have sex with more and more partners, the more likely you are to self-harm and kill yourself. And as we see above, LGBTQ+ people are more likely to do all these things and therefore are causing themselves more anxiety, more depression, and greater risks of self-harm and suicide that has nothing to do with so-called religious bigotry.

What is the tie to queer culture? This study, amalgamizing the work of studies spanning decades into a single comprehensive report, explained, “Notably, the associations between sexual identity and substance use/dependence were larger than the associations between same-sex attraction or behavior and substance use/dependence,” and ” Although Bux (1996) concluded, based on empirical evidence available at that time, that there was little support for the LGB lifestyle contributing to elevated substance use and substance-related problems, more recent research suggests otherwise.” It also notes that house parties and bars have been and continue to be primary factors in the LGBTQ+ culture, facilitating how LGBTQ+ meet and interact with each other, which in turn encourages alcohol and drug use and abuse. The study explains:

Homosexually-experienced men and women also reported higher lifetime use of illicit drugs and were more likely to report one or more symptoms of drug dependence than exclusively heterosexual adults (primarily marijuana for women and marijuana, cocaine, and hallucinogens for men). Homosexually-experienced women also were more likely to suffer from “drug dependency syndrome” than heterosexual women.

^{Substance Use in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: An Update on Empirical Research and Implications for Treatment}

This means that LGBTQ+ people who identified with the LGBTQ+ “queer” culture were far more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and have many more sexual partners than people who engaged in homosexual behavior but who did not take part in queer culture. This in turn means that queer culture specifically is driving alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity, and therefore the greater rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide caused by these destructive behaviors. Queer culture is killing queer kids. Queer kids are literally safer with those LGBTQ+ denounce as bigots than they are with queer-affirming people in the LGBTQ+ queer culture.

The Role of Christ

With these findings, the LGBTQ+ affirming community’s arguments against living a traditional Christian life collapse. The key to saving lives is not abandoning the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and affirming a teen’s sinful homosexual or gender identity. The key to saving lives is to teach that even though something is a sin that the sinner is still part of the community of believers. Sinners are meant to be embraced and served and saved. All of us are sinners and all of us need to be made to feel like an important part of the community of the faithful, wanted and loved, even as we undoubtedly sin, sin, and sin again. We need to openly live the power of repentance and the love of God. If we do we will be able to mitigate a great deal of the impact of the mental and emotional instability disorders caused by gender dysphoria. We will be able to not only teach our children the truths of God and how to live the Gospel without putting them at risk, we will help them be at less risk and find greater joys by living the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Inversely these findings also teach us that merely affirming the homosexual or transgender identity of a teen does nothing to mitigate suicide risks. The belief that affirming and transitioning decreases self-harm and suicidal ideation is proven false by the fact that teens in religious communities where their homosexual orientations and gender identities aren’t affirmed still have lower depression risks and suicide rates than those outside of religious communities. The facts is that people who identify as homosexual or transgender are actually at greater risk of depression and suicide when they leave their religious communities. The determining factor isn’t affirmation of the chosen identity. The determining factor is community. The likely reason why those who socially or medically transition and experience lower rates of depression and suicide do as opposed to those who transitioned and didn’t is because after transitioning they joined new, reliable communities. It is the community, not the affirmation, that lowers the risk of depression and suicide among homosexual and transgender identifying people.

With this knowledge it is no hard choice at all to encourage people to reject a community based on corrupting indulgence and choose a community based on Christ and eternal life. Because it matters what you believe and how you live and choosing to follow Christ will maximize the amount of peace, hope, and joy a person can have in this life. As the prophet, President Russell M. Nelson Nelson, taught:

If we look to the world and follow its formulas for happiness, we will never know joy. The unrighteous may experience any number of emotions and sensations, but they will never experience joy! Joy is a gift for the faithful. It is the gift that comes from intentionally trying to live a righteous life, as taught by Jesus Christ.

He taught us how to have joy. When we choose Heavenly Father to be our God and when we can feel the Savior’s Atonement working in our lives, we will be filled with joy. Every time we nurture our spouse and guide our children, every time we forgive someone or ask for forgiveness, we can feel joy.

Every day that you and I choose to live celestial laws, every day that we keep our covenants and help others to do the same, joy will be ours.

^{Joy and Spiritual Survival}