Faithful Mormons don’t drink coffee or tea. Sometimes they even flip over their coffee cups at restaurants, sending a visual cue of their orthodoxy.
This practice may help identify Latter-day Saints, but is shunning these hot drinks "essential" to being a good Mormon?
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Other Mormon poll findings
82 percent store food for emergencies, while 35 percent have enough to last more than three months.
77 percent believe “wholeheartedly” in Mormon teachings, but 22 percent (30 percent of converts) find some tenets hard to believe.
57 percent say most of their close friends are Mormons.
11 percent say women should be ordained to the current all-male LDS priesthood (13 percent of men say that compared with 8 percent of women).
Source: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
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Not necessarily, at least according to the group that matters most: Mormons themselves.
They rank helping the poor, holding regular "family home evenings" and believing that church founder Joseph Smith saw God as more vital.
So says a massive new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life titled "Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain in Their Place in Society."
The survey of 1,019 self-identified Mormons nationwide measures LDS attitudes about everything from politics to prophets, missions to marriages. It also asked how happy Mormons are within their communities, about discrimination against them and about misrepresentation of their faith by other religions and the media.
"I was struck by the degree to which Mormons, on one hand, feel misunderstood in American society and discriminated against," says chief Pew researcher Greg Smith. "On other hand, most Mormons told us acceptance of Mormonism was on the rise."
Part of that misunderstanding clearly is linked to polygamy, a practice the Utah-based faith abandoned more than a century ago, but which has made a comeback in popular culture through shows such as HBO’s "Big Love." That may be why most poll respondents (54 percent) say TV and movie portrayals of Mormons hurt their image.
As for polygamy itself, 86 percent of Mormons soundly condemn the practice as "morally wrong," higher than the 79 percent who decry sex between unmarried adults.
"When Mormons are answering this question … they are speaking about what will, in the contemporary church, cause you to lose your membership," Aaron Reeves, a Mormon blogger who teaches at the University of Essex in England, writes in an email. "As such, they are right to suggest that polygamists will be excommunicated more readily than those guilty of premarital coitus."
On gay rights, an issue that has divided many church members and drawn the LDS Church into a sometimes-fierce political fray, 65 percent say homosexuality "should be discouraged by society" while 26 percent say it should be accepted. That’s practically the opposite of the general public, where 58 percent argue homosexuality should be accepted and 33 percent say it should be discouraged.
The poll, which has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent, also provides a telling glimpse of how Mormons view their own faith.
Virtually all the respondents (97 percent) say their religion is Christian. Barely half (52 percent) those in a recent Salt Lake Tribune nationwide survey of all voters agreed that Mormons are Christians.
The vast majority of Mormons say religion is "very important" in their lives and "wholeheartedly" embrace the faith’s distinctive doctrines. For instance, 94 percent believe the church’s president is a prophet; 94 percent believe God the Father and Jesus Christ are separate, physical beings; 95 percent believe families can be bound together eternally; and 91 percent believe the Book of Mormon was written by ancient prophets.
Some of these novel beliefs prompt others to question whether the faith is Christian, but don’t expect LDS leaders to change those teachings to win approval.
"Mormons want acceptance, but not assimilation," Michael Otterson, head of LDS Church public affairs, writes in The Washington Post. "No church leader I have ever heard preach has suggested that Mormons should drop their distinctiveness — the very characteristics that the Pew study identifies — in order to become more popular with the world at large. In the mainstream or out, Latter-day Saints will strive to be good Mormons, true believers, kind neighbors and faithful friends."
Some 83 percent of Latter-day Saints in the survey pray every day, 77 percent say they attend religious services at least once a week, 79 percent report paying tithing (10 percent of their annual income), 65 percent say they have a recommend to enter Mormon temples and 27 percent say they served a full-time LDS mission.
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