THE CHURCH of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has, as I write in this week's print edition, run into some heavy weather by tightening both its rhetoric and practice over same-sex relationships at a time when public sentiment, including that of its own members, has been moving the opposite way. In the latter respect, the Mormons (to use their better known name) are changing even faster than most of their compatriots. All major categories of religious believer have been rapidly rethinking their ideas about homosexuality in the past few years. According to research published by the Pew Forum, a pollster and think-tank, there was an impressive rise, between 2007 and 2014, in the proportion of religious Americans who agree that "homosexuality should be accepted by society". Among Catholics the rise was from 58% to 70%, among mainline Protestants there was a jump from 56% to 66% and among Mormons (starting, as you'd expect, from a low base) there was an even faster increase from 24% to 36%.

Does that mean then that the shift in tone by the Mormon leadership (vowing to discpline and possibly excommunicate those in same-sex marriages) is simply a rearguard action in a broader battle to control the nation's culture and mores, one that the conservative side is destined to lose?

In fact, things are not quite so simple, because the Mormon leadership has always been a bit different from the other constituents of the religious right. Where does the contrast lie? Among conservative evangelicals, it is widely claimed that America was founded as an explicitly Christian country, that Christian authority was somehow overturned by liberal usurpers, and that Christianity's dominant position must be restored.

That is not the Mormon leaders' way of thinking. Although they certainly have their ideas on national politics, their history and DNA point them in another direction. As some important lines in the faith's "doctrine and convenants", adopted in 1835, make clear, this is a religious community which generally expects to be at odds with the social mainstream. Rather than dreaming of imposing ideas on society as a whole, the LDS offer the wider polity a tradeoff: we will support established authority and recognise its right to enforce the law of the land, but we also ask for the right to live by our own rules and (within well-defined limits) impose those rules on our members. Thus the document lays down:

We believe that all religious societies have a right to deal with their members for disorderly conduct, according to the rules and regulations of such societies...but we do not believe that any religious society has authority to try men on the right of property or life, to take from them this world's good, or to inflict any physical punishment on them. They can only excommunicate them from their society and withdraw from them their fellowship.

To put it simply, the Mormons are radically committed to religious liberty, including the (often contentious) liberty of sub-cultures to live by their own particular norms; but they do not indulge in theocratic fantasy of a national regime which imposes their theological line on everybody. That is a position which the Roman Catholic church fully accepted only in the 1960s, when the second Vatican council embraced freedom of thought.

That helps to explain the almost tortured tone of recent Mormon pronouncements on same-sex relationships. The message goes something like this: while sticking to our view that same-sex activity is a terrible transgression (and same-sex nuptials worst of all), we emphatically recognise the newly acquired legal right of people to "think and act" differently, in view of the Supreme Court's decision in June.

Indeed a Mormon elder, Dallin Oaks, publicly disapproved the action of Kim Davis, the county clerk who went to jail after refusing to issue licences for same-sex marriages. "All government officers should exercise their civil authority according to the principles and within the limits of civil government," Mr Oaks said in a speech last month, adding that a certain clerk (he clearly meant Ms Davis) had violated that axiom. He called for "civility" not just between church and state, but between those who disagreed over where the church-state boundary should run. Believers, he recalled, had paid a price when that civility broke down; a forebear of his had been jailed in Utah for acting on his Mormon belief, and a forebear of his wife had been murdered in Illinois by an anti-Mormon mob.

Whatever you may think of the Mormon position on homosexuality, this was not an Old-World theocrat speaking, but a particular, perhaps rather peculiar variety of New World libertarian.