Is Ryan Gosling Mormon?

No. Ryan Gosling was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ontario, Canada, but he has said the faith belonged to his parents more than to him. At 21 he called himself “religious but nondenominational,” and in 2011 he said he keeps his spiritual life to himself.

Was Ryan Gosling raised Mormon?

Yes. Gosling was born in 1980 and grew up in Cornwall, Ontario, a paper-mill town, in a family that belonged to the church whose members are often called Mormons. “We were brought up pretty religious,” he told The Observer in February 2007. “My mother admits it: She says, you were raised by a religious zealot. She’s different now, but at the time, it was a part of everything,” down to “what they ate, how they thought.”

Church life also taught him to speak in front of people. In an October 2007 interview with Beliefnet he said: “There’s good things about going to church. [Being Mormon] socialized me at a young age. You have to pray in public, shake a lot of hands, talk in public, sing in church, stuff like that. It has definitely stayed with me.”

Is Ryan Gosling still Mormon?

No, by his own account. When the Village Voice interviewed him in May 2002, he described himself as “religious but nondenominational” and said of his upbringing: “My parents were more Mormon than I was, but it did help me understand. I see how happy it makes my mother and sister, and I think it’s beautiful. Maybe I’m too selfish, or I’m jealous of their humility—that somebody can say, yeah, it doesn’t make sense but I’m going to believe it anyway.”

He told Beliefnet the same thing in 2007 and said his mother had left the choice to him: “I grew up Mormon. I wasn’t really Mormon, my parents were. My mom was really cool. She said, ‘This is an option, but this isn’t the only option. This is an idea, but this isn’t the only idea. You have to find your own truth.’ I never really could identify with it.”

What religion is Ryan Gosling now?

He has not said. In July 2011 Kam Williams of the Bay State Banner asked him how important spirituality was to him and where he finds spiritual nourishment. Gosling answered: “I find spiritual nourishment through not discussing it. It’s something that’s very personal, and I prefer to keep it to myself.”

So he has not answered whether he considers himself a Christian. The church he grew up in holds that its members are Christians; its own essay on the question says they “unequivocally affirm themselves to be Christians.” The same essay notes that those who say otherwise point mainly to the church’s rejection of the creeds written after the New Testament, and to the fact that it is not Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. Latter-day Saints baptize, as Jesus commanded, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), but they teach that the three are separate beings rather than one God in three persons, and that difference is why Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches count the church as a separate faith.

How did his upbringing affect his career?

It played a part in his casting in The Believer (2001), in which Gosling plays a young Jewish man who becomes a neo-Nazi. The director, Henry Bean, told Nerve in 2002 that he had meant to cast a Jewish actor, but Gosling “knew what religion was”: “Mormonism is very demanding, and it isolates you the way Judaism isolates you. And he got all that.” Gosling told the Village Voice that he had to “understand the faith to understand what pushed him away from it.”

Related reading

• Do Mormons believe in Jesus Christ?
• Is Mormonism a cult?
• Mormonism and Christianity: the main differences