Is Mark Rober Mormon?

Yes, so far as Latter-day Saint media tell it. LDS Living, a magazine published by Deseret Book, called Mark Rober a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in two articles in 2021, and he graduated from the church’s Brigham Young University in 2004. Beyond these reports, the public record of his faith is thin.

Rober is known for what he builds and does: the Mars Curiosity rover at NASA, a YouTube channel, a campaign to pull trash out of the sea. His faith is quieter. It reaches us in other people’s words, a magazine’s and a university’s, and he has left the rest of it largely out of view.

Who has described Mark Rober as a Latter-day Saint?

On October 14, 2021, in a story adapted from BYU’s magazine for graduates, Danielle Christensen of LDS Living introduced him as “YouTube star and Latter-day Saint Mark Rober” and later called him “the Latter-day Saint engineer.” On November 3, 2021, Emily Linder wrote about Team Seas, the campaign Rober led with other YouTubers to raise money to remove 30 million pounds of trash from oceans, rivers and beaches, and began: “If anyone can clean up 30 million pounds of trash in two months, it’s Latter-day Saint Mark Rober.”

The BYU profile behind the first story appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Y Magazine. It lists Rober as a 2004 graduate and follows his career from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on the Mars Curiosity rover, to Apple and then to YouTube full time in 2019. The university describes itself as “founded, supported, and guided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Did Mark Rober serve a mission, and is he still active?

No reliable published source says whether Rober served a mission for the church or how active he is in it now, and none reports that he has left it.

Is Mark Rober a Christian?

No published source records Rober addressing the question. Latter-day Saints regard themselves as Christians, and the church’s full name places Jesus Christ at its center. Other churches do not all accept that claim. In June 2001 the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ruled that baptism conferred by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not valid. In a commentary the Vatican published with the ruling, the Jesuit Luis Ladaria explained that “the words Father, Son and Holy Spirit, have for the Mormons a meaning totally different from the Christian meaning.” How the church’s teaching on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost differs from the creeds is set out in what Latter-day Saints believe about Jesus and God.

So what we have is the outside of the story: two magazine articles, a diploma, and a church that carries the name of Jesus Christ. What Mark Rober holds in his own heart, no published source tells us, and Scripture leaves that to God: “for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, KJV).

Related reading

• How Mormons and Catholics differ in their beliefs about God
• Mormonism and Christianity: the main differences
• Latter-day Saints or Mormons: the church and its nickname