Is Ken Jennings Mormon?

Yes. Ken Jennings grew up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served a two-year mission for it in Madrid and graduated from Brigham Young University. In August 2025 KUOW, the public radio station in Seattle, described him as a practicing member of the church “formerly known as the Mormon church.”

He has been open about his faith, about where he has disagreed with his church, and about why he stays. He gave a tenth of his record Jeopardy! winnings to the church. He once called one of its policies “shocking.” And he is still in the pews, because, as he told KUOW, a religious background “reminds me of what kind of person to be.”

Is Ken Jennings still a practicing Mormon?

Yes, by his own account. Talking with KUOW about a new book of trivia questions, he said: “I’m very lucky that I attend a lovely, fairly progressive, diverse, open-minded congregation here with great people. I just feel like a religious background has made me a better person, it reminds me of what kind of person to be.” Not every church does that, he added, but “in my case, it’s been a really great fit, a blessing in my life.”

Two years earlier The New Yorker interviewed him about 100 Places to See After You Die, his travel guide to the afterlives of mythology, religion, literature and popular culture. The interviewer, Sarah Larson, called him “a lifelong Mormon.” Asked whether he grew up believing in heaven and hell, Jennings said: “Yeah! And, to some degree, I still do, perhaps more out of a sense of aesthetics than conviction.” He described the heaven of his own church this way: “growing up in the Mormon faith, that’s a very complicated, esoteric Heaven that’s trying to harmonize a bunch of Biblical traditions.”

His mission and Brigham Young University

Jennings, who was born in 1974 near Seattle, first studied at the University of Washington and then spent two years as a volunteer missionary in Madrid, Spain. In 1996 he transferred to Brigham Young University, which the church founded and still supports, and graduated in 2000 with a double major in English and computer science.

In a 2011 interview with LDS Living, a Latter-day Saint magazine, he traced his love of knowledge to what his church teaches about the next life: “[Latter-day Saints] don’t just believe but actively teach that most of what you gain in this life you cannot take with you. One of the only things that you can gain that will come with you at some future time is not your bank account, not your car, but the stuff you learn, what you have in your head.”

Did Ken Jennings tithe his Jeopardy! winnings?

Yes. When his run of 74 wins ended in 2004, the Associated Press reported that he had won $2,520,700, then a record for a television game show contestant, and that “Jennings, a Mormon, will donate 10 percent of his winnings to his church.” Latter-day Saints give one-tenth of their income to the church. They call this tithing, and the church teaches that God’s people kept the same law in Bible times.

The subject came up on the show itself. Jennings told LDS Living that the host, Alex Trebek, asked him: “So you’re a Mormon. Does that mean you’re going to donate to your church?” Jennings recalled: “At the time it was a pretty sizable check, and he seemed impressed. It was a chance to talk about the Word of Wisdom on national TV, talk about tithing on national TV. You don’t get too many of those chances. I felt at times like I was serving a second fulltime mission, except this time being much, much better paid.” Asked whether he felt he was representing the church, he answered: “I just wanted to be myself. I wanted people to see that Latter-day Saints are not a monolith—they’re not all clones being stamped out by some factory in Salt Lake City somewhere.” The Word of Wisdom he mentioned is the church’s code of health; among other things, it forbids alcohol, tobacco, tea and coffee.

His criticism of the 2015 policy on same-sex parents

In late 2015 the church changed its handbook to treat a member’s same-sex marriage as apostasy and to bar the children of same-sex couples from baptism without the approval of the First Presidency, the church’s highest governing body. Jennings, then a Sunday School teacher, criticized the change on Dan Savage’s Savage Love podcast, as Jana Riess reported for Religion News Service on December 1, 2015. He called the policy “shocking,” because he had understood there to be room in the church for different opinions on same-sex marriage, and said it “just seems crazy.”

He appealed to the words of Jesus: “Jesus is on the record about how he treats children, and that’s not usually it. He suffers them to come unto him. He says if anybody is mean to a child you might as well put a millstone around his neck and dump him in the sea.” He was paraphrasing two passages. In Mark 10:14 Jesus says, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” In Matthew 18:6 he warns that whoever offends “one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

He said he tends to give church leaders the benefit of the doubt and to believe their intentions are good. “They’re well-meaning and experienced men, but of a certain age and cultural background, obviously,” he said. “But they’re not scheming supervillains.” He predicted that “this [policy] is not going to be around,” and said he felt no “fundamental urge” to leave the church: “I don’t want to see a version of the Mormon Church where everybody like me who has qualms about this has left. That would scare me more.”

On April 4, 2019, the church changed both rules. Children of parents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender may now be baptized without the approval of the First Presidency if their custodial parents give permission, and a member’s same-sex marriage is no longer treated as apostasy for church discipline, though the church still calls it “a serious transgression.” Jennings had said he did not want a church where everyone with qualms had left. He did not leave.

Related reading

• Latter-day Saints or Mormons: the church and its nickname
• The Bible and the Book of Mormon: how their teachings compare
• How many Mormons are there?