Believer

However you wanna express yourself, gay or lesbian,

or transgender, or gender queer,

you are beautiful.

This could be our opportunity to take control of our lives.

You can't stop fighting for the ones you love.

Please understand, I'm not fighting about bathrooms.

I'm fighting about her life.

Well I ask you, can you see me now?

I like the idea that the world is changing

and I get to be whoever I want.

When it comes to war, I fight.

When it comes to love, I don't choose sides.

This is just basic equality. That's all it is.

There's no way to get an accurate count of.

LGBT suicides in the Mormon community,

but we do know that youth suicide rates in Utah,

where a majority of the populous is Mormon,

have skyrocketed over the past decade.

I grew up gay, and Mormon, and in Utah.

In my morning prayers, I would ask that God

would do something drastic, like

cause me to die in a car accident

or for me to get cancer or something awful like that.

When the God that you believe in,

and the family that raised you and loves you,

when they reject you,

you don't have a lot left to live for.

You see the church between kind of a rock and a hard place

when it comes to gay issues.

We've taken this topic on a number of occasions.

It's not going away. Where do we stand on this?

We regard same-sex marriage

as a significant, serious kind of sin.

Simply being attracted

to someone of the same gender is not a sin.

It is when we act on

the inclination or the attraction.

The church finally said there's nothing wrong with being gay.

Yay!

As long as you don't do gay stuff!

So, if you're a gay Mormon,

and you're in a relationship with a man, you're fine,

as long as you don't hug him or kiss him

or hold hands with him or have sex with him

or marry him or live with him or be in a relationship with him.

And today, I'm talking with Las Vegas resident Dan Reynolds,

who is the lead singer of Imagine Dragons.

Reynolds is on a mission

quite apart from his musical career.

He's putting together a documentary examining

policies in the Mormon Church regarding the LGBTQ community.

Dan Reynolds, it's great to have you back.

There are far too many Mormons

in Utah that are taking their lives.

And so, this is,

this is an issue that needs to be discussed now.

Uh, the families need to be having this,

this discussion in their homes now.

You grew up Mormon.

You don't have to be a member of the church.

A lot of people will say, you know what,

if you don't don't agree, just get out.

I don't feel a need to denounce Mormonism.

I do feel a need, as a Mormon,

to speak out against things that I think are hurting people.

Dan, do you feel like, in some ways,

you, yourself, might be leading people astray?

People have reached out and said, hey,

you know, you've lost your way,

and God believes that being gay is a sin,

and you, you know, you're dragging down, you know...

you are spreading a message of, uh, against God's will.

Like a lot of rich people, you could just ignore all this,

go on with the rest of your life.

Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself out there?

The community I was raised with is Mormonism,

and I was always taught

that if you want to make a difference in the world,

you start with your community.

That's a question I had as well, Dan. I mean,

do you actually think you're gonna change the church?

This song, I think, is probably gonna be our next single.

It's been... a little bit

of the bane of my existence for the last couple months,

'cause I just haven't felt like it was

totally right yet.

I woke up at, like, 3:00 AM this morning,

with like a counter-melody idea in my head for this end part.

This song is... it's called "Thunder,"

but it's like, you know,

this, you know, this time in my life was

lightning before the thunder.

It was like, you know, when I was young,

feeling a little misplaced, feeling never quite...

like I settled in a pocket.

Go and get Dan.

I am the seventh son of nine kids.

Hey, Danny.

I was raised Mormon, Latter-day Saint,

as Mormons say IDS.

It was really all I knew growing up,

'cause when you grow up, you just,

you think everybody's Mormon,

or at least most of the world's Mormon.

So, in the Mormon Church,

you're supposed to go on a mission

when you turn 19 years old.

A mission is two years away from your family.

You knock doors all day.

We're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Okay, we have our own religion. Thank you.

Okay, that's okay.

When you start as a missionary,

you get into one

like out of every hundred doors you knock.

What carries you on is

your complete, resolute belief in what you're doing.

You are resilient about it,

and so you knock those hundred doors.

If there's anything I can leave with y'all tonight,

it would just be that my testimony of this gospel

is that I know it's real,

and it does bring true happiness.

When I came home from my mission,

and I allowed my brain to really think about life

and what I wanted out of it, and who I wanted to be...

Everybody, you know,

in the Mormon community who knew my family was, like,

the smart Reynolds, the doctors,

the lawyers, the good kids.

You want your daughter to date a Reynolds boy, you know?

They're good kids.

You know, my brothers all went to BYU. They all married,

you know, great Mormon girls, had great Mormon families,

and I didn't want to be the one to break that cycle.

And so it just, you know, it seemed like,

"the easy route," like, you follow the line.

Okay, can you give that to Daddy?

Daddy?

Yep? Get her dressed.

Okey-dokey.

Dad, both of the babies look like little aliens.

When their eyes are open, they look like little aliens.

Yeah? They do look like little aliens.

That's kinda what they are.

Hi, my little alien.

Can I kiss her, Dad?

Oh!

It's not on you.

I know, but we just cleaned...

Well, it's okay. Just leave it for a sec. I'll deal with it.

Let me just look and see. Oh!

Yeah, honey, just don't...