This is part 4 of a 4 part series on the Harvard/Baylor Global Flourishing Study and what it tells us about Latter-day Saints. Thanks for following along for the series! Here are links to the previous 3 articles in case you missed them:

Read part 1 Finally, A Closer Look At Members Outside the US

Read part 2 Are Latter-day Saints More Likely To “Flourish”?

Read part 3 How Are Global LDS Doing On Mental Health?

The Global Flourishing Study has a bunch of questions about personality traits. Of course this is all self-reported data, so people are generally more likely to rate theirselves as “dependable” and less likely to rate themselves as “uncreative.” But surely, there’s something that could be learned from how Latter-day Saints (and other religious folks) see their own personalities.

Chart

I don’t want to read into this too deeply, but let me point out a few fun facts according to our dataset of global Latter-day Saints:

• Global LDS are more likely to rank themselves as “Reserved, Quiet” and “Calm, Stable” and less likely to rank themselves as “Extroverted, Enthusiastic.”

• Interestingly, they are more likely to rate themselves as “critical, quarrelsome” than the global average.

• Latter-day Saints see themselves as more open and complex, more dependable and self disciplined, and less likely to be easily upset or anxious.

These ones I highlighted are all statistically significant comparing simple averages, but I did not look at this data using demographic controls.

There probably is some irony somewhere as the religion most known for talking with strangers through missionary work are more likely to be introverts 😂

Is there anything I missed in this data and what we can learn from Latter-day Saints? I’m sure there is plenty to look at with other religions as well.

Let me know what you think below.

See you next week!

Code available for the 4 part series is found here.

This is part 3 of a 4 part series on the Harvard/Baylor Global Flourishing Study and what it tells us about Latter-day Saints. Subscribe to read part 4 next week answering, “Are Latter-day Saints Prone To Certain Personality Characteristics?”

Read part 1: Finally, A Closer Look At Members Outside the US

Read part 2: Are Latter-day Saints More Likely To “Flourish”?

This is more or less a follow-up from last week where we saw that when we break down Harvard/Baylor’s human flourishing score into parts, while LDS scored highest across religions on “Meaning & Purpose”, their worst component was “Mental & Physical Health.”

I don’t think there’s much of a story with the physical health domain here—previous research have already well-documented that active Latter-day Saints outlive the general population by about 6 to 10 years on average.1 But for those curious, I’ve included a chart below for self-reported physical health, which tracks right at the global average.2 For mental health & LDS, the literature is a bit more nuanced and developing, and the Global Flourishing Study asks several mental health questions. So, let’s explore these today.

Specifically, we have some actual question scales psychologists use to help diagnose depression(PHQ-2) and anxiety(GAD-2). So let’s see how global Latter-day Saints break-out on these scales.

Looking at a simple average of each score, Latter-day Saints are lower than average on the Depression score and higher than average on the Anxiety score, but for both they are statistically indistinguishable from the global average at the 95% confidence level.

But, like we did last week, what if we control for demographic variables? Does that change our result?

There are some religions where identifying as them meaningfully improve your mental health score (I’m looking at Lutherans, Baptists, Just Christians), but it is not so for LDS. LDS are higher than the average for both anxiety and depression and rank higher on these compared to most other religions in our model’s placement; however, the LDS are not statistically different than the global overall. It does raise some questions though…

If you like forest plots, take a look at the results of the models predicting anxiety and depression. It seems like LDS originally scored higher because they are correlated with higher subjective income, education, and marriage rates which are all correlated with better mental health3

What Might Be Behind These Mediocre To Bad LDS Mental Health Scores? I’ve Seen Research That Says LDS Have Better Mental Health On Average!

A previous literature review found that “Latter-day Saints are typically found to have better mental health than those of other religions or no religion.”

So, how do we square these findings today with this review?

As the authors of this literature review note, “we have no peer-reviewed research on Latter-day Saints and mental health internationally” (outside the US).

The study I am analyzing today is a rare, large, international study across 22 countries and 200,000 respondents! Is it possible that the other regions outside the US could be dragging down the overall LDS mental health scores?

Let’s take a look.

These results are fascinating. Looking at the Global Flourishing Study, and zooming in on the US, US Latter-day Saints have lower depression and anxiety score than the US overall which is consistent with the study reference above. And, the differences are statistically significant (though notably this is a simple average without demographic controls).

But when you look at the international data, we see a reason the overall LDS mental health scores are worse than expected. LDS in Europe, Asia & Oceania, and Africa are statistically more likely to score worse on Anxiety than their regional average. And, LDS in Europe and Asia & Oceania, are statistically more likely to score worse on Depression than their regional average.

I also put a footnote for the statisticians among you with more details and a robustness check.4

What Does This Mean?

The data on other regions of the world is food for thought. Why would Africa, Asia & Oceania, and Europe all report statistically significantly worse mental health while the US report better mental health on anxiety and depression?5

Do you have any thoughts or theories on this point?

As an aside, this data also makes my warnings and advice in part 1 all the more meaningful.

In part 1, we saw that LDS in Europe had very low practice and religious experience metrics compared to the rest of the world and I raised that as a red flag 🚩.

But, in our post today, we see that despite a good European overall baseline for mental health, European LDS are statistically significantly more likely to score worse on anxiety and depression.

What this means is that across multiple metrics, the church as it stands is arguably doing the worst in the most secular environment, Europe. So, again, I will reiterate my unsolicited advice now with more supporting data points: prioritize efforts to understand and help the church thrive in today’s most secular environments (Europe). This advice is essentially “future-proofing” assuming the world continues secularizing.

Do you agree with my advice?

Come back next week to read part 4 (which will be a much lighter read 🙂) answering, “Are Latter-day Saints Prone To Certain Personality Characteristics?”

See you next week!

2

Self reported physical health score by religion

3

Here are the results for the Depression model

Here are the results for the Anxiety model.

4

One of the issues with the comparison of LDS by continents is that the control group may not match the LDS group. For example, in Asia, LDS will have a lot of representation in the Philippines and not is much in other Asian countries which means that these simple means might just show more of a country composition difference than an actual LDS difference. To this end as a robustness check, I statistically matched the control group within each continent to the LDS in that continent using several demographic variables (including country) with bootstrapping and calculated the anxiety and depression scores. I found a similar relationship that is reported here (though only Europe retains statistical significance on Depression at the 90% confidence interval, but directionally all point the negative direction and with more than 100 people in each cell we may see a more robust relationship). Also, the statistically significant premium in the US actually disappeared and the point estimate now points the other way. The code will be released for all of this in part 4. Here are those charts:

5

Though one important caveat to remember is that while this is the best publicly accessible data we have available for LDS in continents outside of the US, in the end, we still have between 100 and 200 LDS respondents per continent outside of the US. Weird samples can be drawn! Though to draw three weird samples in a row for three continents seems more unlikely…

This is part 2 of a 4 part series on the Harvard/Baylor Global Flourishing Study and what it tells us about Latter-day Saints. Subscribe to read part 3 next week answering, “How Are Latter-day Saints Doing On Mental Health?” Read last week’s global look at LDS religious practice metrics.

As a reminder, Harvard/Baylor gave public access to their global flourishing study fielded by Gallup. It includes over 200,000 survey respondents across 22 different countries across continents. Of the 200,000, there are 1,290 people identifying with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon tradition) in the sample represented in 18 of the 22 countries across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas.

Today, I want to look at one of the main objectives of their study which is understanding human flourishing, which Harvard defines as “a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.”

To measure this, they have 10 questions and to get the flourishing score, you just take a simple average of these questions below (answer the questions on a scale from 0-10). The 10 questions span 5 domains…

• Happiness & Life Satisfaction

  • Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?

  • In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?

• Mental & Physical Health

  • In general, how would you rate your physical health?

  • How would you rate your overall mental health?

• Meaning & Purpose

  • Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

  • I understand my purpose in life.

• Character & Virtue

  • I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations.

  • I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later.

• Close Relationships

  • I am content with my friendships and relationships.

  • My relationships are as satisfying as I would want them to be.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways you can debate whether this is actually “human flourishing,” but it is likely a decent measure of whether you think you are happy and feel confident in your life direction. But feel free to let me know what you think about their index.

So, are Latter-day Saints more likely to flourish according to this definition?

The answer is yes. They are statistically significantly more likely to flourish than the Global overall.

This is just looking at a simple average, but is there more to the story?

For example, like we saw last week, the majority of the LDS sample is from the US, so is what we are seeing just a U.S. flourishing bump and not as much to do with LDS (there are 21 other countries a part of this study)? Or is it some other demographic factor working in the background like income or marital status?

So let’s do some regression analysis to control for some of these demographic variables…

After holding several demographic variables constant (age, income, employment, geography, etc.), our chart changes meaningfully for several religions:

• We now see LDS in the middle of the Protestant pack in predicting flourishing. When testing for statistical significance, LDS no longer statistically more likely to flourish than the average though our best guess is still higher than average.

• Jews previously at the top of flourishing now fall toward the bottom of most other religions once controlling for demographic factors

• Hindus previously in the middle, have now shot up to the top with a comfortable advantage to other religious practices. Catholics see a similar increase now ranking at #2.

Why did LDS go from being the top 3 to comfortably in the middle when adjusting for demographics?

Well, it turns out certain demographic variables are correlated with the flourishing index and some of those variables are also correlated with Mormonism.

The likely culprits:

• Latter-day Saints are more likely to be married and married people score higher on the flourish index.

• Latter-day Saints are generally more likely to attend church than other religions and church attenders score higher on the flourish index.

• According to the sample, Latter-day Saints across almost every continent are more likely to report they are "living comfortably"—a subjective financial measure strongly correlated with overall human flourishing.1

Short methodological musings: Doing this kind of analysis raises a classic causal inference dilemma: What should and should not be controlled for?

Specifically, should we control for marriage rates and church attendance if LDS theology and culture actively encourage these behaviors?

In statistics, we have to decide if these variables are confounders (nuisance background factors we must hold constant to get an apples-to-apples comparison) or mediators (the actual mechanisms through which a religion produces flourishing).

• The case for controlling (Marriage & Attendance as Confounders): If we want to isolate the purely psychological or theological “premium” of being a Latter-day Saint, we want to compare a married, active Latter-day Saint to an otherwise identical married, active Catholic or Protestant. Controlling for these factors lets us do exactly that.

• The case against controlling (Marriage & Attendance as Mediators): If the primary way the LDS faith successfully helps people flourish is by successfully nudging them to get married and stay active in a tight-knit community, then controlling for these variables actually blocks the pathway of how the religion works. By “adjusting” them away, we are looking at a highly artificial counterfactual.

Ultimately, both models tell a story. When you remove marriage and church attendance from the model, the LDS “flourishing premium” reappears. But by looking at both the raw and adjusted numbers, we get to see both the structural benefits of the LDS lifestyle and how the theology holds up when those structural advantages are stripped away.

But, zooming out, all things considered and comparing it to the average person across continents (as you can see in the chart above), Latter-day Saints see a Human Flourishing premium. This premium is likely similar to other religions (especially protestant ones) as the global average is drug down mainly by religiously unaffiliated.

Now let’s look at the 5 flourishing domains. Where do LDS overperform? Where do they underperform?

To save space, I just skipped to the demographically adjusted heatmap, but if you want to see the raw heatmap here it is.2 There are a few more steps in creating the demographically adjusted map which I detailed here.3

I find this heatmap pretty revealing…

• Latter-day Saints score highest in the Meaning & Purpose domain compared to other religions controlling for demographic variables. This means LDS were more likely to answer highly on “Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?” and “I understand my purpose in life.”

• Latter-day Saints score third lowest across religions on the mental & physical health domain controlling for demographic variables. It is the third lowest religion (though quite close to some other religions), but meaningfully higher than religiously unaffiliated and buddhists. I imagine this is driven more so by the mental health measure rather than the physical health for LDS (I’ll explore the mental health part more next week in part 3)

• It is quite shocking that Buddhists and religiously unaffiliated are low (if not the lowest) across each domain.

Conclusion

• Without adjusting for demographics, LDS have a top 3 “flourishing” score across major religions.

• When you do adjust for demographics, LDS are about average for a religion and similar to other protestant denominations. We see this drop likely because LDS have many married, church attending, comfortable income folks on average which are correlated with human flourishing.

• Looking across the components that make up the flourishing score, LDS score the highest of any religion on the “meaning & purpose” axis and the third lowest across religions on the “mental & physical health” axis (more on this next week!)

Hope you enjoyed part 2 in understanding how Harvard/Baylors’s human flourishing index relates to Latter-day Saints.

Next week, let’s dive more into LDS mental health across continents using several relevant questions from the global flourishing study.

See you soon!

Code will be released in the last part.

1

I had to make a chart to check just to be sure haha

2

The unadjusted shows the same idea… meaning & purpose higher and mental & physical health lower

This is part 1 of a 4 part series on the Harvard/Baylor Global Flourishing Study and what it tells us about Latter-day Saints. Subscribe to read part 2 next week answering, “Are Latter-day Saints More Likely To Flourish?”

Usually on most of my posts — especially on social media — I have commenters asking, “well this data is just from the US, but LDS is a global church! What about the others?” Well, today let’s talk about the others.

Within the last few weeks, Harvard/Baylor gave public access to their global flourishing study fielded by Gallup. It includes over 200,000 survey respondents across 22 different countries across continents. Of the 200,000, there are 1,290 people identifying with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon tradition) in the sample represented in 18 of the 22 countries across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas.

Not only do we have a survey with reach across continents, there are several religious measures (prayer frequency, scripture reading, church attendance, personal religious importance). We’ve been tracking these metrics for the US Mormons, but what about members outside of the US?

Here is a look at our LDS sample by country…

Still the majority of our sample is from the US and while the sample is too small to look at Mormons country by country, we can combine the data by continent to consolidate our sample and get a cleaner read.

After combining by continent, we have over 100 people in each cell (with the most people being in the US). Obviously, we would appreciate higher sample sizes, but I’d love for you to point me to another publicly accessible resource with global church data and sample sizes larger than this.

Also, to be clear before we start, comparing these regions isn’t about making a value judgment on which culture or way of life is “better.” Rather, the value lies in treating these different regions as unique social ecosystems. By looking at how a global, standardized faith behaves in radically different environments, we can better understand the invisible forces—like social trust, culture, or institutional density—that shape how humans connect to the LDS religion in the modern world.

Charts

I think the big takeaway from this chart is there are regional differences in practice metrics! Africa, the US, Asia & Oceania top the list in self reported religious practice.

From previous analyses of members per congregation, South America and Central America have indicated higher inactivity rates, so seeing them on the lower end of the threshold (especially for church attendance) is not particularly surprising. However, with Europe, we don’t see the same members per congregation disparity we see in Central and South America, so seeing them so low was surprising to me.

However, looking at the past 15 years (2011-2025) of official membership record data, Europe has grown the slowest numbers-wise — including losing 171 congregations as shown in the chart below.

Note: these three dark, colorful bar charts were screenshots from my church membership dashboard freely accessible/exporable here.

Practice is only one side of the coin, what about LDS religious experience by world region?

Africa, US, and Asia & Oceania top the charts in religious experience. They feel religion is important, feel loved by God, and agree that religion guides their life.

Interestingly, looking at metrics looking at religious experience, Central & South America are more likely to be in line with the other regions.

Europe, however, is well below all other regions.

So, this raises the question…

What is going on with Europe?

A helpful place to start is looking at regional baselines. In other words, is Europe so low because everyone in Europe is low?

Well, let’s check.

In these charts, for readability, I combined the three metrics into a scale. Higher number indicates higher levels of religious practice or religious experience and vice versa for lower numbers.

I think these charts tell a story of the effects of cultural influence on religious practice. For each continent, LDS see a Religious Practice or Experience premium — with the exception of Africa which starts with an exceptionally high religious baseline. But, it’s pretty clear why Europe is so low. Look at the cultural environment of Europe — religion is least prioritized there.

The next question that comes from these charts is “why are the premiums different for different regions?” For example, in the US there is like 4pt LDS premium (where US LDS practice religion at higher rates than the US baseline) on the index vs in Europe we only have a 2 pt LDS premium?

The answer? I’m not sure.

Here are a few theories…

1. One potential theory for this difference in regional premiums could be the changing social costs of a secularizing environment. As a country or region becomes more secular, it’s possible that the social cost for individuals practicing a high-demand religion starts to climb. In other words, active religious participation might increasingly be viewed by neighbors as out of touch or countercultural. If that's true, a region like the US—which remains less uniformly secular than Europe—might offer a more normalized baseline where practicing faith doesn't carry as heavy of a social tax, potentially allowing the LDS premium on these metrics to stretch a bit wider.

2. I think the difference in Asia & Oceania LDS premium is at least somewhat composition driven. The Philippines is more religious than other countries in that region and the church has historically grown well in the Philippines. So, the overall Asia, Oceania sample is likely more secular, than the LDS sample which is more represented in the religious alcove of the Philippines.1

Wrapping Things Up & Implications

We got a rare look at global data across 22 countries and over 200,000 respondents to tell us:

• LDS religious practice and experience differ regionally, with Africa leading the pack across most metrics and Europe trailing behind.

• We find a correlation between regional practice and experience scores and LDS scores by region.

I theorize your home region’s religious environment can have a profound effect on your regional religious community and even your personal religious devotion and practice in that community.

This has important implications for the future!

If the world and the US (where a plurality of LDS members reside) continue to secularize, we see supporting evidence here that cultural climate can create real challenges in practicing faith and nurturing religious community.

The church may not have problems this year or next year with finding and retaining members, but imagine 50 to 100 years from now? Will other regions look like Europe looks today? If so, what will this mean for the health of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Here is my unsolicited advice to church leaders from a data perspective: If I were leading the church into the next century, I would be experimenting and focusing on figuring out how to grow a successful, thriving religious environment that coexists in a deeply secular (perhaps sometimes hostile) counterculture. So essentially, I would be throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall in Europe to see what sticks.

Of course I could be wrong, convert numbers have seen real growth in some European countries in recent years and perhaps that could continue. This just represents my best guess of what the future looks like and my recommendation for what to do about it.

A reader asked about full distribution of responses on the church attendance question (not just weekly or more), so I added another chart for additional context.2

Code will be released in the last part.

1

Here’s a look at the religious practice index by country in Asia & Oceania

2

Church Attendance with all response options

TLDR

• US Mormons are among the most patriotic US religions (if not the most) and most likely to believe in American Exceptionalism.

• Yet, Mormons are also becoming more divided politically (and are perhaps the most divided religion) on what the US should look like today.

Introduction

This weekend, the US will celebrate 250 years of independence and this past month PRRI released a report on Politics, Religion, and American Identity, so I wanted to talk through a few points on patriotism, the united states, and politics and how those things relate with Mormonism. In their sample of 5500 respondents, 99 of them were Latter-day Saints. I thought there were some interesting takeaways from this report and I wanted to share them with you here today.

Let’s jump right into it…

Charts

One of the most striking takeaways from this report was this data on American Exceptionalism.

When asked whether you agree that God has granted America a special role in human history, Latter-day Saints were the most likely religion to agree with this sentiment. A whopping 80% compared with only 44% of American overall and LDS even score higher than Evangelical Christians on this question. This is truly a question that divides America today and Latter-day Saints are on one end.

This high score isn’t terribly surprising since the LDS religion was restored/founded in the US (unlike the other religions listed here) and has some beliefs with the US constitution being divinely inspired, and even Joseph Smith running as a presidential candidate, and other prophets holding US government positions.

On other measures of patriotism, LDS also score high (though notably never the highest)

For example as you can see in the chart above, LDS score around 15pts higher than the US overall on whether they are “proud to be an American.”

Also, looking at agreement of “There’s no place I’d rather live than the US,” LDS score among the highest and 10 points higher than the US overall (81% LDS agreement vs. 71% US overall)

However, LDS are similar to other Americans in not being as proud about “America being a moral good in the world today” (LDS 38% proud vs. 24% US overall) and “the way democracy is working in America today” (LDS 24% proud vs. 18% US overall). This is a large drop off from the 64% of LDS who say they are proud to be an American.

But, overall, US Latter-day Saints are very patriotic.

Despite Being Arguably The Most Patriotic Religion, It Is Also A Religion With The Most Disagreement On What America’s Role Today Should Be

For example, look at this chart below…

While some religions are mostly in agreement one way or another, LDS are split down the middle. Half prefer a nation of people who follow the Christian faith and the other half prefer a nation of people belonging to a wide variety of religions.

Or look at their views on Trump…

43% are more likely to agree that he’s a dangerous dictator where as 56% are more likely to say he’s a strong leader.

And one last one I’ll highlight is this one…

64% of LDS are more likely to agree that the US should play the role of a reliable neighbor, but the 35% are more likely to agree that the US should be a strong nation.

On all of these, LDS might not be the religion that shows the most disagreement, but disagreement is high across all of these items.

I was curious the religion that showed the most division on these tradeoff questions1, so I did a bit more analysis.

I found that LDS was the most likely religion to disagree with themselves on the political tradeoff questions.

Conclusion

US Latter-day Saints strongly agree in American exceptionalism and show strong patriotism more so than most other religions, but LDS are also among the most divided religion on what the US should look like now and going into the future.

• Some prefer the US to be made up of many religions, others prefer the US to be a christian nation

• Some think that the US should be a reliable neighbor cooperating with other nations, and others think that the US should be a mighty nation who is no hesitant to use force.

• Some see Donald Trump as a dictator undermining democracy and others see him a strong leader who we should give more power to.

Do you see Latter-day Saints as being patriotic? Can you see the modern political landscape dividing Mormons? Let me know what you think below.

1

There were a total of 4 tradeoff questions where they provided data for the religion break in the report. Here is the table:

Perhaps some of you in this newsletter know, but I am a fan of typologies. In fact, nearly a year ago I made my own for Mormons (categorizing 4 groups of Mormons from mathematical clustering). Pew Research Center released their 2026 Political Typology ahead of the midterms where they divide the American public into 9 categories. I couldn’t resist and I emailed Pew for some breaks for Mormons specifically and other religions as well. So, today we’ll explore how Mormons break out on Pew’s Political typology and compare and contrast with a few other religious groups.

As a quick reminder or quick intro to their typology if you haven’t seen it, here are the groups and a short summary about each…

• Leftward Progressives (7%): Young, intensely progressive across the board; often skeptical of the institutional Democratic Party.

• Loyal Liberals (11%): Highly educated, affluent, and reliably mainstream Democratic; strong supporters of global alliances and the social safety net.

• Left-Out Left (12%): Democratic-leaning but economically strained; deeply cynical about the political system and the future.

• Order and Opportunity Left (18%): The largest group; leans Democratic on the economy but favors strict immigration, law and order, and economic individualism.

• Tuned-Out Middle (9%): Young, diverse, and financially stressed; largely disengaged from politics and news with highly mixed, moderate views.

• Pragmatic and Polite Right (11%): The oldest group; economically conservative but moderate on race and foreign policy. Highly prize political civility and institutional decorum.

• Unconventional Right (12%): Conservative on culture and immigration, but younger and more moderate on abortion and the safety net; somewhat ambivalent about Trump.

• Faith First Conservatives (12%): Highly religious and deeply conservative; want government policies to actively reflect and support traditional moral values.

• No Apologies Right (9%): Combative, populist conservatives; champion intense nationalism, hardline immigration restrictions, and absolute military superiority.

If you are curious where you fit, take the quiz to find out for yourself!

So How Do These Groups Break Out By Religion?

As with most of our data points for a small mormon population newsletter, for the survey Pew clustered on, there were 136 Mormons putting the margin of error at +/- 11.5pts. So interpret these results suggestively. However, I still think we can see some interesting insight.

Let me point out a few things…

• For Mormons, the Faith First Conservatives and Pragmatic and Polite Right are the most dominant political types, and if you read the summaries for those types, I feel like they represent the current political landscape of Mormons pretty well. Also interestingly, there are more Mormons in the tuned-out middle group than the US overall which I can also see.

• The most obvious comparison for this newsletter is White Evangelicals vs. Mormons. And honestly, it’s a pretty good way to sum up how Mormons fit into the Religious Right. Mormons are about half as likely to be “No Apologies Right” and “Faith First Conservatives” and more likely to be the “Pragmatic and Polite Right” compared to white evangelicals. This is another great way to show some of the political divergence between Evangelical Christians and Mormons. Mormons breakout more similarly to Catholics composition-wise, but Mormons are a bit more likely to be conservative. I’ve actually written about this trend before!

What do you think about this chart? Are there trends or insights I missed? Let me know what you think below and see you next week!

There is no code this week. It is a chart made from an excel file Pew Research Center sent me!

Introduction

Previously, we discussed while most religions moved towards the Republican party the past 20 years, Latter-day Saints actually moved away from it. Also, we saw this change was driven by the youngest generation.

Today, let’s talk about the specific political/economic issues where Latter-day Saints are most divided by generation and how it compares the generational divide in the US overall. Perhaps it can give us some insight into what is driving this change.

We’ll use data from the Cooperative Election Study where ~ 60 issues were asked about. I just have one break in these charts under 45 and over 45 to consolidate the sample (for most questions, under 45 had 252 respondents and over 45 had 370).

Charts

For this first chart, I categorized the issues into different topics and as you can see the biggest generational issue differences were in the topic of immigration. For context, I also have a link to the largest category issue differences in the US overall.1 The issue gaps are similar between Mormons and US Overall. Interestingly, the Mormon generation gap is slightly larger than the gap for the US overall generation for every category except Economic & Welfare issues. So, it’s safe to say that Mormon generation gap isn’t likely due to that category.

In the chart below, I try and paint a bit of color into these categories by revealing the top 3 issue gaps by category.

Here are a few things that stick out to me from this chart…

• There are definite themes. Most immediately, the largest gaps in individual issues are related to public safety/police. Older Mormons think we should increase spending on law enforcement (73% vs. 40%) and increase the police force (75% vs. 39%) while younger Mormons are more likely to want to decrease the police force (30% vs. 10%).

• The next largest gaps are in attitudes toward Israel. Older Mormons are more likely to support providing arms to Israel (43% to 14%) and sending US troops to the Israel/Gaza region (34% to 14%) and Younger Mormons are more skeptical. Because the combined 17 item category for Foreign Policy & Military does not show as many differences as some of the others. It suggests that Older and Younger Mormons may not agree on Israel, but do agree on other foreign policy issues (such as “using the military to protect allies” 75% older Mormons to 78% younger Mormons)

• The last one I’ll point out is immigration. There are only 5 questions in the CES about immigration and there is a sizable generation gap for all of them.

  • “Deny Asylum at the border” 81% of older Mormons support while only 57% of younger Mormons do.

  • “Increase Border Patrols” 93% of older vs. 69% of younger

  • “Build wall on US Mexico border” 71% of older support vs. 56% of younger

  • “Citizenship pathway for dreamers” 78% of younger support vs. 58% of older.

What About Social Issues? Gay Rights? Racial Discrimination?

When you look at the average for social issues, it is about a 10 point gap across all issues asked about which is the second lowest category gap. But, this doesn’t mean the generations agree on everything. The results are mixed.

Here are a few issues with the largest differences:

• “Require federal same-sex marriage recognition” A majority of young Mormons support (61%), but only 44% of older Mormons do. A 17 point gap.

• “White people have racial advantages” 45% of younger Mormons agree, and only 26% of older Mormons agree. A 19 point gap.

• “Minorities overcame prejudice without special favors” A strong majority of older Mormons agree (72%), but not so for younger Mormons (49%). A 23 point gap.

And here are few issues with the smaller differences:

• “Prevent gender transition surgery for minors” 74% of younger LDS agree and 81% of older cohorts (7pts)

• “Prohibit mailing abortion inducing drugs” 53% of younger LDS agree and 56% of older cohorts (3pts) and most other abortion questions don’t show much difference by age.

• “Age verification for online adult content” 89% of younger LDS agree and 95% of older cohorts (6pts)

Younger Mormons are more likely to lean left on LGBTQ and Racial social issues compared to older Mormons with some sizable gaps (20pt+), but both groups share similar views on other ones such as gender transition surgeries, abortion, and pornography.

Below I included the full list of issues across all categories for LDS and in the footnotes included the full list of issues for the US overall so you can compare and contrast for those who might be interested.2

The Top Generational Issues Are Similar Comparing The US Overall & Mormons

Looking at the top issues overall, across each category the generational gaps are similar which suggests that the national forces are likely acting upon Mormons and Non-Mormon youth in a similar way.

One notable difference is in attitudes towards Israel. There is a larger generational gap among Mormons than the US overall in providing arms to Israel (29pt difference for Mormons to 23pts difference for US Overall) and sending troops the Israel/Gaza region(20pt difference for Mormons to 8pt difference for US Overall).

Conclusion

The largest generational political differences among Mormons are Immigration, Public Safety/Police Force, and the US Relation to Israel. These are largely the same as the generational difference to the US overall with some nuance in attitudes toward Israel.

What do you think of the post this week? Are these the issues you expected? Why are Mormons divided by generation on issues over Israel and more so than the US Overall?

As a caveat, we looked at 60 issues, but this is not an exhaustive list of political issues. There may be other issues that show interesting gaps, but we just don’t have the data for. For example, I think drilling in more to LGBTQ issues would yield some interesting findings. Do younger Mormons think its wrong at the same rate as older mormons?

As always the code is available here.

1

Numbers for US overall

2

Numbers for US Overall

Introduction

This past week, I got a question about trying to understand the young political gender gap among Latter-day Saints. Are young Latter-day Saint women liberalizing and young Latter-day Saint men shifting to the Republican Party? If not, what is going on?

I’ve talked about the Latter-day Saint leftward political shift in previous posts specifically identifying a generational gap in younger LDS moving away from the Republican party.

Let’s explore the gender gap (or lack of one).

It should be a fun one, let’s look at some charts.

Trump Era Generational Polarization

This chart tells a powerful story. Even prior to Romney in 2012, Latter-day Saints of all ages cleanly identified as conservative; however, in the Trump era we see a generational growing apart. Latter-day Saints over 45 continued to identify with the conservative label at similar rates in the Trump era (and perhaps even more so with the 65+), but the new younger generations of LDS are distancing themselves.

So now, what does this trend look like broken out by gender?

The gender lines in each age group hug each other very closely. As you can see, there is no clear ideological political gender gap — among young or old Latter-day Saints. The differences we see seem to be an artifact of the clear generational gap we saw above. There is also no gender gap looking at party identification1 and vote choice2 the past decade or more.

In the most recent data point (years 2023-2025 combined), there seems to be an uptick in young men associating themselves with the conservative label while younger women have steadily disassociated with it since 2014. There isn’t a statistically meaningful difference yet, but something we’ll keep an eye on in the future.

The Lack Of A LDS Political Gender Gap Is Interesting Because We See One Emerging In The Western World

There is actually some debate about this point.34 Some surveys show gaps emerging and others like the CES do not show the same divergence. I created my own chart using the CES data for the US overall and am not seeing much of a gap, though there are statistically significant differences between young men and young women (young women being less conservative).5

But, let’s assume that we are seeing a growing young gender gap in the world and that we are not seeing a gender gap among Latter-day Saints. Why might this be the case?

Hypothesis: Do Singles Wards Bridge The Gap?

Over the past several years, we’ve seen a decrease in socialization among young people. Young people don’t hang out with each other as much as they used to (they also don’t drink, smoke, or have sex as much as they used to). They spend much more time online. Assuming a growing gender gap, perhaps a growing amount of young people are being radicalized online and diverging by gender. Perhaps the singles ward provides a space for young LDS to understand and build connections across gender in a way that keeps there politics in lock step even as they drifts further from the older generation.

What do you think about my hypothesis or this data? Let me know in the comments below.

Next week, I plan to map out the specific issues that separate the young and old LDS on political lines using 60 or so political/economic question in the Cooperative Election Study. See you then!

Code will be released next week and have both post’s analysis and charts.

1

Party ID by age X gender over time

2

Vote Choice by age X gender over time

5

TL;DR Latter-day Saints report the highest trust of religious leaders compared to every other religion measured and higher social trust on average. These two trends could be connected.

This post was inspired from a previous article written by Stephen Cranney analyzing the decline of trust in religion and other institutions. And, it’s true. One of the landmark pieces of Political Science literature shows that social trust and social capital have declined over time starting in the mid-1960s and have continued to the present day. But, how do Latter-day Saints fit into this picture? Are they more or less trusting of other people? Do they trust institutions? Does the type of institution matter? Let’s explore these questions today.

As a side note, Stephen has a lot of great work and data analysis that he writes over at Times and Seasons that I would recommend checking out if you like the content here.

In our dataset here we can see that (in the US Overall) the % who think “most people can be trusted” has steadily declined over the decades.

Along with social trust, fewer people in the US believe most other people “try to be fair” and “try to be helpful” than in previous decades.

So that’s our baseline.

Now, what does social trust look like broken out by religion?

Latter-day Saint Score Higher On Social Trust Overall

Aggregating all the data over the decades, we find that LDS average 11 points higher on social trust compared to the US overall. They are not the highest denomination (Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians all score higher), but still quite high.

Let’s look social trust across religions over time.

While many religions have trended downward, Latter-day Saints have stayed remarkably flat — hovering around 50%. This is quite resilient given the downward trend of most other religions and the US Overall.1

High Confidence In Organized Religion; Mixed Bag On Other Topics

To me, these next two charts are the most interesting.

Latter-day Saints are the most trusting of religious institutional leaders out of every single other religion.

Not only do Latter-day Saints have the most trust in organized religious leaders or clergy, there is over a 10 point gap between the next highest! So, there is quite a bit of separation.

When you look at the trend over time, this pattern becomes even more striking. Essentially every other religion has declined in religious leader trust; however, Latter-day Saints have become even more trusting in their leaders.

Interestingly, this is not true across the board of all institutions. Beyond religious institutions, Latter-day saints seem to be about average and follow the US Overall trend in trust in the military, supreme court, and big business as seen in the three charts below. So, in other words, Latter-day Saints’ religious institutional trust doesn’t carry over to other institutions necessarily.

Is There A Relationship Between Social Trust And Religious Trust?

For my last chart, I wanted to create a heat map showing the relationship (if there was one) between an individual having Religious Trust vs. Social Trust. It seems like there is definitely some correlation.

• Latter-day Saints are twice as likely to be in the high social trust high religious clergy trust bucket compared to the US population.

• Additionally, Latter-day Saints are nearly half as likely compared to the US overall to be in the low social trust low religious clergy trust bucket.2

Conclusion

Looking at the data over time, it’s clear that while the rest of the country is caught in a 60-year downward spiral of distrust, Latter-day Saints in some ways are defying gravity. By maintaining a “great deal” of confidence in their religious leaders—which has climbed to 51% while the national average cratered to 18%—they’ve built a unique institutional stronghold.

This isn’t just about loyalty to a church; the heatmaps suggest this institutional confidence is related to their social trust. Perhaps because they trust the institution, they are twice as likely to trust their neighbors and nearly half as likely to fall into the national cynicism bucket (being distrustful of people and religion). While they are just as skeptical of big business as everyone else, their religious trust may have created a landscape that is resilient to some societal forces of distrust.

I have actually written about some of this before using data from two different surveys. If you are interested in more data on this topic, check the links below 👇

Did you know Latter-day Saints have more friends on average?

See more social trust & community data here looking at the LDS Enclaves (the very LDS area in Utah and Southern Idaho):

As always, the code I used to write this post is available here.

2

I flattened some of the categories for ease of interpretation, but the full heat map can be seen here.

Introduction

Last week, we found that according to the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, Ex-Mormons were the most likely to be Republican among all childhood religious leavers, and that they have steadily moved toward the GOP over the last decade. Read the full analysis below:

Today, let’s explore why this might be the case. More specifically, let’s find the type of Ex-Mormon driving this rightward shift.

Ex-Mormons are meaningfully separating from other religious leavers in the most recent data point. But as it turns out, there isn’t a massive, insular "gotcha" that redefines how we think about Mormonism's unique theological footprint. Instead, this rightward shift seems to be an artifact of macro political and demographic forces.

Ex-Mormons Are In The Shadow Of A Political Realignment

One of the largest dividing lines in American politics today is educational attainment, and the alignment of these groups has transformed dramatically over the last twenty years.

As highlighted by Patrick Ruffini in The Intersection newsletter, the non-college working-class voters who anchored the winning coalitions of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama now form the backbone of Donald Trump's coalition.

How does this relate to Ex-Mormons?

On average, adults who leave the LDS faith are more likely to fall into this non-college demographic than those who stay.

Latter-day Saints maintain a higher proportion of bachelor’s degrees than the general population (a gap that widens even further when filtering strictly to active members). Consequently, the population exiting the church is disproportionately non-college educated.

Non-college Ex-Mormons have increased in their identification with the Republican Party, while college-educated Ex-Mormons have dropped. (Fascinatingly, sample sizes get thin when cutting the data this finely, but early signals suggest this contrast is at its absolute steepest when filtering strictly to women).1

The Micro Anchor vs. The Macro Gravity

Another political change in the last 20 years is the solidifying of the Evangelical Christian Republican base. So, what about the Ex-Mormon-to-Evangelical pipeline? While the data shows that fewer Ex-Mormons are joining Evangelical churches with each wave—with the vast majority opting to become religious "nones"2 — the minority who do transition to Evangelicalism are also shifting heavily to the right.

When we look at a regression model to see which variable actually wins the individual horse race, the statistical receipts show that personal religiosity is the single strongest predictor of whether an individual Ex-Mormon is a Republican.3 Holding all else constant, an Ex-Mormon who maintains personal religious devotion (like converting to Evangelicalism) has more than three times higher odds of being a Republican than one who secularizes.

So how do we reconcile these two findings?

Think of religiosity as a micro-level anchor and education as macro-level gravity. Maintaining a deep religious faith acts as a powerful anchor that keeps an individual leaver firmly in the GOP column. But once an Ex-Mormon undergoes the secularization process and cuts that anchor loose, they may shift into the default gravity of their demographic profile. Because nearly three-quarters of Ex-Mormons do not hold a college degree, the current of the modern working class pulls the aggregate group steadily to the right.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the rightward shift among Ex-Mormons is a demographic one. When people leave the LDS Church, they don’t enter a political vacuum; they are swept up into the same macro-forces reshaping the rest of the American electorate.

As the GOP increasingly becomes the party of non-college working-class voters, and the Democratic party becomes the place for college graduates, the ultimate political destination of an Ex-Mormon has less to do with the doctrine they left behind, and more to do with the degree they hold and whether they still consider themselves religious.

What do you think? If you are an Ex-Mormon, does this educational divide match what you see in your own social circles? Let me know in the comments.

As always, the code for this week’s analysis is available here.

1

Ex-Mormon women with a college education are significantly less likely to be affiliated with the Republican Party.

3

In a logistic regression predicting Ex-Mormon Republican affiliation, high religious importance (OR ≈ 3.32, p < 0.001) and lacking a college degree (OR ≈ 2.49, p < 0.001 are both highly statistically significant, independent predictors.

Ex-Mormons Aren’t Who You Think They Are

Every once in a while, I find a data point that conflicts with what I thought and makes me double-take. After triple-checking the code, when the finding holds up, these end up being my favorite moments — the ones where the data forces me to update what I thought I knew. Today I had one of those moments.

The dominant narrative — in podcasts, in books, in most coverage of religious disaffiliation — is that ex-Mormons are progressive, secular, and Democrat-aligned. This subset surely exists. But, Ex-Mormons are the only major religious tradition in America where Republicans outnumber Democrats among leavers, 41% to 37%, according to the pew religious landscape study in 2024.

If you've mostly heard from Democrat ex-Mormons, that's probably not an accident. Ex-Mormons who lean liberal — the memoirists, the podcasters, the Twitter voices — may be more likely to talk publicly about leaving the Church. The quiet ex-Mormons, the ones who drifted out, and kept voting Republican, may not be as public with their journey. This is availability bias: the most visible cases shape the mental prototype, even when they're not representative.

That said, ex-Mormons are still much more Democratic-leaning than current Mormons. Some of the reason it feels like there’s a huge political gap between Mormons and ex-Mormons is because there really is one — it’s just that “less Republican than current Mormons” still lands further right than every other religious leaver group in America. This is despite Mormons moving away from the Republican party in recent years.

I can hear the comments now asking about evangelical vs mainline traditions, so I have a few more charts in the footnotes, using 2014 data since not all the data is released for the 2024 version.1

LDS are tied with Protestants for the largest political gap between current and former members. But the LDS gap starts from a much further-right baseline. Even after the longest political journey of any religious leaver group, ex-Mormons land further right than anyone else.

Mormons Are Moving Away From The Republican Party While Ex-Mormons Move Closer

Since we have three years of Pew Religious Landscape data, a natural question is how the political affiliation of ex-Mormons has changed over time. The answer is surprising: ex-Mormons have moved rightward over the past decade — from 32% Republican in 2014 to 41% in 2024.

The n-sizes here are small (a few hundred ex-Mormons per wave), so the 2014-2024 jump isn’t statistically significant in isolation. But it is interesting that ex-Mormons are now meaningfully separating from leavers of other traditions, who have stayed roughly flat or even moved slightly Democratic over the same period.

What makes this especially strange is that current Mormons have been moving the opposite direction. In my analysis of the Cooperative Election Study, I showed that Mormon members have shed Republican identification over the same period — pulling back from their 2012 peak. So the two LDS populations are diverging. Members are becoming less Republican. Leavers are becoming more Republican.

Where This Leaves Us

Three findings stack up here. First, ex-Mormons are trending the most Republican religious leavers in America — while still having a strong Democrat presence. Second, they’ve travelled the longest political distance from their religion of origin, but started so far right that even that journey leaves them right of every other leaver group. Third, the gap between ex-Mormons and other religious leavers seems to be widening, not closing.

The natural next question — which I’ll take up next week — is what kind of ex-Mormon is driving this directional rightward shift. Is it the Ex-LDS Evangelicals? Is it the Ex-LDS Nones? Older Ex-Mormons?

See you next week.

Code available for this analysis here.

1

Notably, Ex-Mormons have moved more Republican in the most recent time period, so once the data is released for protestant religious traditions, we can explore if Ex-Evangelicals are more Republican than Ex-Mormons.

In 2014, there was still the largest distance across all religions.

Introduction

If you asked an American to guess which religious groups in this country stay closest to where they grew up, the intuition runs in one direction: Catholics in Boston and Pittsburgh, Lutherans in the Midwest, Baptists in the South, Mormons in Utah. Each tradition seems anchored in a denominational geography that has barely shifted in a century. Of all those groups, Mormons might be the most place-bound of all — specifically thinking about the historic gathering doctrine to the Mountain West heartland.

The data doesn’t say that. By the General Social Survey’s standard migration measure — comparing where someone lived at 16 with where they live now — Latter-day Saints are among the most likely Americans to have left their home Census region and now live in another. They’re more mobile than Presbyterians, substantially more mobile than Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists, and statistically indistinguishable from the groups most likely to move in the country: Jews and Episcopalians.

29% of LDS respondents in the GSS now live in a different Census region than the one they lived in at 16. The U.S. average is 21%. Mormons are eight percentage points more mobile than the country at large, sitting alongside Jews (30%) and Episcopalians (31%) at the top of the religious mobility distribution.

It isn’t an education artifact

The obvious skeptic move is to explain this away by composition. Mobility correlates strongly with education — college graduates move for school and jobs at higher rates than non-graduates do. If LDS members had unusually high college attainment, their mobility might just be tracking that, not anything distinctive to Mormonism. Jews (52% with a bachelor’s degree or higher) and Episcopalians (43%) are exactly the kind of high-education groups that should look mobile for non-religious reasons.

That explanation doesn’t survive the data.

25% of LDS respondents in the GSS hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. The U.S. average is 23%. That’s a two-point difference. It can’t explain an eight-point gap in mobility. By their education profile alone, LDS members should look like Methodists or Catholics on the mobility chart — instead they look like Jews and Episcopalians.

Something specifically Mormon is producing the mobility pattern. The most plausible candidate, and the one the maps below support, is the Mountain West itself — a cultural-religious center of gravity that pulls LDS members across the country into and out of one specific corridor with unusual force.

The mobility runs through one corridor

When you look at where LDS members actually move, the picture is dominated by a single channel: the Pacific–Mountain corridor. California, Oregon, and Washington feed Utah, Idaho, and Arizona at a rate that dwarfs every other inter-regional flow on the map. The orange arrow from the Pacific into the Mountain region is the single thickest line in the data. The blue arrow returning from Mountain back to Pacific is the next-thickest. Other corridors — Mountain to Texas, Mountain to the Southeast, Mountain to the Plains — exist, but they’re a clear tier below.

This is what makes LDS mobility distinctive even within the high-mobility religious cluster. The movement isn’t dispersed across a network of destinations. It’s concentrated in one east-west channel between the Pacific Coast and the Mountain West, with a handful of secondary flows.

As a side, there is an often touted proportionally higher LDS presence in DC and in our map above the thickest outflow arrow from the mountain region (other than the pacific) is to the region where DC is.

The movement to and from the mountain region is not mysterious. The Mountain region contains the LDS cultural and religious heartland, the church’s headquarters, and two of the largest LDS-affiliated universities in the country (BYU-Provo and BYU-Idaho). The Pacific region contains the largest LDS diaspora outside the heartland. Movement between the two is a structural feature of how American Mormonism works. In the gif above, you can see younger LDS are more likely to have moved to the mountain region (particularly from the western coast) showing movement likely driven by folks going to school, but there's more going on as well with the younger group moving.

The pattern holds across education

It would be tempting to read the Pacific → Mountain inflow as mostly a BYU story — young members from the West Coast diaspora moving to Utah for college, with most of the corridor’s volume explained by the LDS higher-ed system. The education-split maps don’t support that.

The Pacific → Mountain inflow is thick in both groups. The outflow pattern from the Mountain region — back to Pacific, to Texas, to the Southeast, to the Plains — also looks broadly similar across the two maps. LDS members move into and out of the Mountain region from California, Oregon, and Washington at comparable rates whether or not they hold a bachelor’s degree. Whatever is pulling members westward is operating across the educational spectrum, not exclusively through the higher-ed system.

That’s a useful clarification on its own. It means LDS migration into the Mountain region isn’t best understood as an artifact of religiously-affiliated higher education. It’s a broader cultural-religious pull operating across the educational distribution — some mix of marriage migration (my number one theory), family relocation, post-mission stays, convert moves, parents following adult children, and yes, college migration, but not college migration alone.

Caveats worth naming

A few honest notes before drawing conclusions:

The GSS doesn’t ask why anyone moved. Reading the Mountain corridor as a “gathering” rather than a generic mobility pattern is an inference from the direction and magnitude of the flows, not something the variable itself confirms. Other interpretations are available, though most of them would still locate the Mountain region as the center of the pattern.

The nine Census divisions are coarse. The Mountain region bundles Utah with Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho. The gathering interpretation is strongest for the Utah- and Idaho-anchored share of the Mountain flow, weaker for the rest of the region.

The education maps pool all ages. The “no bachelor’s” group includes current college students who haven’t graduated yet — a 19-year-old at BYU shows up here, not in the BA+ map. That likely inflates the no-BA Pacific → Mountain corridor somewhat. The headline finding — that the corridor exists in both groups — almost certainly holds, but the precise comparison of the two maps comes with that asterisk attached.

What the data says

Take the findings together. American Mormons are unusually mobile by U.S. religious standards. That mobility is not an education-composition artifact — LDS members are only two points above the national average in college attainment, but eight points above the national average in inter-regional mobility. The mobility runs heavily through a single corridor connecting the Pacific Coast to the Mountain West. And the corridor is stable across education levels: members move into and out of the Mountain region at comparable rates whether or not they hold a bachelor’s degree, which means the gathering can’t be reduced to a college-migration story.

A majority of LDS members still live in the region they grew up in, and Mormonism’s geographic identity is genuinely anchored in the Mountain West. But the share that has left is unusually high. Nearly one in three LDS members lives somewhere meaningfully different from where they grew up — a rate several points above the U.S. average and substantially above every major Christian denomination in the GSS.

Do you have thoughts and theories about Mormons and migration? Share them below!

Edit: I had an ask about how the general population moves out of the pacific region vs. how LDS move out of the pacific region. I thought more of you might have this question (everyone always talks about the “california exiters”) so adding a little blurb at the end.

What I found is it is common for Pacific region migrators to more to the Mountain region, but LDS are much more likely to migrate there from the pacific region.

Data: General Social Survey, pooled 1972–2022. Sample restricted to respondents identifying as LDS for migration maps; all religious groups for the comparison bar charts. Migration measured as Census division of residence at age 16 vs. current Census division. Education cut: bachelor’s degree or higher vs. less than bachelor’s.

Code available here.

Last week I posted about US LDS membership declining for the first time, with a state-by-state breakdown. The post got more engagement than usual — and one reader, Jason from the Bay Area, CA (East Bay) / Walnut Creek Stake, emailed me a sharper version of the question and some of his own analysis. Instead of asking how much LDS membership grew in each state, ask whether it grew faster or slower than the underlying state population.

He’s right that this is the better question. If 100,000 people move to Texas and a few thousand happen to be Latter-day Saints, that’s not LDS growth — that’s population growth that happens to include some LDS people. The metric you actually want is LDS percentage growth minus population percentage growth: positive numbers mean the church is gaining share, negative numbers mean it’s losing ground.

This week is the corrected analysis, expanded to two time horizons and two geographic scales. Let’s explore.

Recent state-level: the corrected map

Plotting LDS growth against population growth from 2024 to 2025 shows the pattern directly. The diagonal is the breakeven line — points above it are states where the church gained share, points below are states where it lost ground.

The Northeast clusters above the line. Rhode Island, Delaware, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York all show real outperformance — LDS membership growing in states with flat or declining populations. That’s genuine ground gained, not migration spillover.

The Mountain West and Pacific Northwest cluster below the line. Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon all sit in negative-share territory. Some look fine in raw membership terms but lose ground once you adjust for state population growth.

And here’s the finding that most directly contradicts last week’s framing: most of the Bible Belt sits below or right on the diagonal. Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina all lost share. The exceptions are narrower than I implied — Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri — and concentrated in the inner South rather than the high-growth Sunbelt.

US regional: three of four regions are losing share

The regional aggregation is where the story really shifts. Last week I wrote that the West was driving the US decline while the other three regions grew. Under the share-relative metric:

• Northeast is the only region clearly gaining ground (+0.7%)

• Midwest is essentially flat (+0.1%)

• South is now losing share (-0.3%) — this is a change from long-term, where it had been outperforming

• West continues to lose share (-0.4%)

So the corrected regional headline is sharper than last week’s: the Northeast is the only US region meaningfully gaining ground, and three of four regions are now losing share against their populations. Last week’s “three of four regions growing” framing conflated raw membership change with the underlying demographic dynamics.

Long-term state-level: this isn't a one-year fluke

Zooming out to 2011-2025 confirms the patterns above are structural, not anomalies.

Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Washington sit dramatically below the diagonal. Their populations grew 17-28% over 14 years; their LDS counts grew 3-16%. Nevada is the most extreme case: 21% population growth, 3% LDS growth, a 17.8 percentage point share loss. The Mountain West has been quietly de-Mormonizing in proportional terms for over a decade — last week’s snapshot was just the latest data point in a long-running trend.

The long-term outperformers are a more interesting mix: North Dakota (likely Bakken-related), Arkansas, Rhode Island, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky. A few of these are small LDS bases where small absolute gains create large percentage moves, so weight the tiny states accordingly. But the broader pattern — Northeast and inner South gaining share, Mountain West and Pacific losing it — is consistent across both time horizons and across multiple states within each region.

Country-level: the US lags behind the globe

Pulling back to the global picture changes the interpretation again. Almost every country sits above the diagonal long-term — LDS growth has outpaced population growth essentially everywhere except a handful of high-income outliers. Africa dominates: regional LDS growth of 190% against population growth of 40%, a 150 percentage point share gain.

North America is lagging behind. Long-term share gain of just 1.2% — essentially flat. And in 2024-2025, North America showed share loss of 1.1%, the only region globally that lost ground.

The counterintuitive finding here: the US is doing worse than Europe in relative terms. Europe is usually framed as the church’s hardest market, but European populations are barely growing, so even modest LDS growth registers as outperformance. The US population is still growing fast enough that near-flat LDS membership reads as a contraction once you adjust.

Takeaways

A few things shift under the share-relative metric:

The Bible Belt growth story from last week was overstated. Most of the South’s recent LDS gains are actually just population growth, and the region just flipped to losing share in 2024-2025.

The Northeast is the bright spot — state-level (MA, RI, NY, DE, VT), regional (only US region clearly gaining ground), and consistent across both recent and long-term horizons. I don’t have a confident theory for why; my best guess involves small-base statistical noise combined with selective in-migration of LDS members to commuter cities like Boston, DC, and NYC, but I’d want to look more carefully before committing to it.

The Mountain West contraction is structural. Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado have been losing share for over a decade. The 2024-2025 numbers extend a long-running trend rather than mark a turning point.

In global context, the US is the underperformer. North America is the only world region that lost share in 2024-2025, and the only region where long-term LDS growth has barely outpaced population growth at all. The US is the most sizeable

The methodological point underneath all of this: be careful with raw growth numbers when underlying populations are moving fast. The right denominator depends on the question you’re asking, and “is the church gaining ground?” needs a population-adjusted denominator to get to the heart of the question.

Thanks again to Jason for the email (and for others who shared their thoughts) — posts like last week’s are better when readers actually engage with the data and push back. If you’re seeing things in the dashboard I haven’t covered, I want to hear about it.

You can explore the underlying numbers yourself in the dashboard.

Have theories on why the Northeast is outperforming — or skepticism about the metric? Drop them in the comments.

Analysis and charts are viewable here.

I used the new dashboard I released last week to write this post up. Answer your own LDS data questions by exploring the dashboard. View on desktop for the best experience.

While there have been notable increases in LDS membership in many countries world wide, for the first time, the United States has decreased in official membership.

Is the membership in states declining together? Or are there certain regions/states driving this change?

Our newly released dashboard has data at the US state level. So, let’s use our new dashboard to investigate these questions.

Membership In US Increases Over Time Only Slightly Dipping in 2025

When you look at the US over time, we can see a steady increase in membership over the time period with 2025 having a slight decrease.

Looking at congregations, while they increased this past year, the previous 3 years saw declines.1

Over 15 Years, 48 States Have Increased In Membership

Looking at the percent change in membership since 2011 to 2025, most states have increased over time. In fact, only two states saw decreases in this time period (California -6% and Oregon -1%). In answering our post’s question you can already see regional differences.

You may say that California is low because people are leaving! And, yes, when you look at migration data, people are leaving CA more so than other states, but over the time period (2011-2025) the CA population has actually increased (2011 it was 37M and in 2025 39M).

From this map you can start to see the regional picture, the yellow and red states are more likely found in the West and the Northeast.

So above is a 15 year view. What does a year over year view look like? What was driving the change this past year?

Over the last year, 27 states declined in Membership (2024 to 2025)

Make sure to note the color scale on this one, the color scale is calibrated so that yellow is always 0% and the lowest number is red and the highest number is green. While its hard to see on this map, Washington DC actually increased 9% in membership from 2024 to 2025 which makes the 1-2% gains in other states look more yellow than green. Find the state by state changes table at the end of the post.

Looking at the YoY change chart, we can see again losses concentrated in the the west and most gains concentrated in the east.

The Western Region Is Driving US Decline in Membership From 2024 to 2025

The aggregated numbers are shown above with the west evidently driving the decrease in membership.

In fact, the west is the only region that declined (the other 3 increased!) But, the west has a disproportionate amount of Latter-day Saints which mean declines there have a larger impact on the ecosystem.

Despite Membership Declines in West, Congregations have slightly increased

Let’s now look at YoY change in congregations from 2024 to 2025. For this we can see congregations have slightly increased for the West while we see declines in the Northeast.

Congregational decline is often a leading indicator of Membership decline, so this likely means in the next year or two the northeast will decrease in membership.

I also created a chart showing the Year over Year change from 2024 to 2025, so you can find your state.

I think there are some counterintuitive numbers on here:

• Do you expect DC to increase that much?

• What about New York, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island?

• Also, might it be time for the rise of Latter-day Saints in the bible belt?

Conclusion

So why did we see membership decreases in the US overall this year?

The western region of the US has seen membership declines especially in Washington, Oregon, and California, but in other western states as well. This drove the overall US number negative despite the other regions actually moderately increasing in membership from 2024 to 2025.

I hypothesize in the coming years we may see a membership decline in the northeast region following congregational patterns.

Did I miss anything? What do you think the future of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looks like in the US?

Find my newly launched dashboard linked at the bottom of this article and explore church growth for yourself. Click on your favorite country or US state and analyze 15 years of data 🙂

Most active members have had a version of the experience where they look through the ward list on LDS Tools and don’t recognize many of the names from their local ward. Perhaps some people on that list are active weekly attenders, but quietly come and go for church meetings. Others may attend every once in a while, but don’t draw a lot of attention. Some moved and didn’t take their records with them. Some were baptized as teenagers, but drifted before you ever met them. Clearly, the roster and the pews are different lists. When you separate membership growth from congregational growth and look at the two side by side, the global 'growth story' breaks apart into five or six distinct regional stories — some of them genuine expansion, some of them contraction hiding inside an accumulating roster. Let’s break it down region by region.

For this analysis, I looked at the last 14 years (2011-2025) of church membership record data by country. This data is from churchofjesuschrist.org in their worldwide country breakdown page over time.

Absolute Change in Members — South America Leads the Way

Over the last 14 years, the Americas and Africa have seen the highest absolute number growth where Asia, the Pacific, and Europe saw the least.

Looking at this chart, you can see how much Africa is punching above its weight in growth! Africa represents 6% of the total LDS population in 2025, but 20% of global growth the last 14 years.

Just to contextualize its significance, when you think about growth in a country/region, you should be thinking about at least 3 things…

• missionaries (the more proselyting missionaries the more people may be converted)

• members (the more members theoretically the more friends of members that might get converted)

• birth rates (the more births the more membership growth)

While Africans have a higher birthrate on average which is likely driving some of this growth, the other two metrics are stacked against Africa.

• Africa has only a fraction of the membership base of North America. In 2025, Africans made up 6% of the LDS world population vs. North Americans making up 40%.

• Africans see far fewer missionaries than North Americans see. In a previous analysis of 2023 data, I estimated that North America makes up 37% of the missionary population while Africa only makes up 12%. (read more in the link below for that analysis)

Yet, Africa saw just about the same number of absolute growth as North America the last 14 years.

Our next chart is looking at congregational change the last 14 years.

Africa literally doubled the congregations added (over 2000+ congregations) compared to any other region. We see significant growth in North America and Africa, but see some warning flags in Central and South America and Europe who all net lost congregations in the last 14 years.

Put the two charts side by side and each region's story becomes legible in a way the global number hides.

Lets talk region over region:

• In Africa, congregations have outpaced membership change! Both are very high. Africa has a higher proportion of branches to wards and because branches are smaller, you can create more of them per unit of membership growth which helps explain the rate of congregations outpacing the rate of members.

• Pacific + Asia & Middle East have seen more membership growth than congregational growth, but seeing congregational growth none the less.

• North America has tracked pretty well over the time period — not as much membership growth as other regions but steady congregational growth.

• Central and South America are seeing growth similar to other regions and double that of the US, but have lost congregations in that time period. Very clearly signaling membership retention problems in the region.

• Europe looks the most dire with among the lowest record growth and a loss of more than 10% of congregations.

I built this dashboard because the regional stories above are just the starting point. The country-level and state-level data tells sharper versions of each of them — Brazil vs. Chile, Utah vs. California, Ghana vs. Nigeria. Pick your country. Pick your state. Fifteen years of data, multiple metrics.

Click here for dashboard 🔗🔗 Please view on desktop if possible!

Come back next week for an exciting release of a new dashboard I’m building out with the latest data that I think will resonate with many folks here.

With the 2026 April General Conference just passing, we have the 2025 statistics to dig into. If you don’t want to get bogged down in the analysis, the TLDR?

The missionary story just got even better. The structural problems didn’t go away.

Convert Baptisms Hit An All-Time High

I’ll start with the headline number, because it deserves to be the headline.

In 2025, the church recorded 385,490 convert baptisms — a new all-time high. To put that in perspective, this surpasses the previous peaks from the early 1990s and represents a continuation of the post-COVID recovery I noted last year. We now have four consecutive years of significant convert baptism growth, and the trend line is pointing in a very good direction.

Missionary count also continues to climb, now surpassing 75,000 — nearly triple what it was in 1980.

One chart I find particularly interesting is the converts-per-missionary metric. Yes, today’s missionaries are still producing roughly half the baptisms per missionary compared to the 1980s (~4.9 vs ~8). The long-run secular decline is real. But 2025 shows a notable uptick from the trend — the best per-missionary productivity since before COVID and the first age change. That’s encouraging signal, not just noise.

What To Expect Next: Another Age Change Bump

Before moving on from the missionary story, it’s worth flagging something that will almost certainly shape the next few years of data.

In November 2025, the church announced another missionary age change. If the previous age change in 2012 is any guide — and I think it is — we should expect an increase in missionary count over the next 1-2 years as a new cohort of eligible missionaries enters the field ahead of schedule. Last time, missionary count jumped from roughly 55,000 to nearly 90,000. We won’t see as large of increase as last time of course since it only affects women going from 19 → 18 instead of both genders and larger age intervals, but we should expect an increase none the less.

The flip side of that surge may be predictable too. When the missionary population expands rapidly, converts-per-missionary tends to drop. The infrastructure, training, and teaching pipelines don’t scale instantly with headcount. We saw exactly this dynamic play out after 2012: total baptisms held relatively steady while per-missionary productivity fell off a cliff for several years before gradually recovering.

So the 2025 uptick in converts-per-missionary (~4.9) may be short-lived. Next year’s chart may look different.

The Problems Haven’t Gone Away

The membership number keeps growing (now at 17,887,212), and YoY growth ticked back up in 2025, driven by those record baptisms. But the YoY growth rate chart tells a sobering longer story: from ~6% annually in the 1970s-80s, the LDS church is now growing at roughly 2%, even in a banner baptism year.

Children of Record births remain essentially flat at 91,835 — almost exactly where they’ve been for decades, despite membership roughly tripling since the 1990s. It is an uncomfortable reality to learn that in 1980 (& 5Mil members) Latter-day Saints were seeing more actual total number of births than in 2025 (& ~18Mil members).

Births per 1,000 members now sits at 5.13, down from over 20 in the early 1980s. I said last year that a 5X decline is hard to explain by fertility rates alone. I stand by that. Something else is going on — most likely a combination of genuine fertility decline and increasing inactivity among members who simply aren’t blessing their children into the records.

The exits story is also worth watching. Exits per 1,000 members has roughly doubled since 2000 with the 2024 year being 8.3 — near its highest levels in the data. However, this past year its dropped below 6. A meaningful decrease, but we’ll keep watching this trend.

If the trend line persists, record numbers are coming in the front door and leaving out the back door.

The Structural Picture: Convert-Driven Growth

Here’s something worth sitting with. Church growth is now overwhelmingly convert-driven. Looking at the share of new joiners over time, converts have gone from roughly 60–65% of new joiners in the late 1970s to around 80%+ in 2025. Children of Record — kids born and blessed into active LDS families — are a shrinking share of total additions.

So What’s The Bottom Line?

The 2025 numbers are genuinely good news for missionary work. Record convert baptisms, improving missionary productivity, and a membership count that keeps growing.

But the underlying demographic picture is the same. The church is becoming more dependent on convert growth to sustain membership numbers, while organic growth through active families continues to weaken. Whether the 2025 baptism surge represents a durable shift or another cycle remains to be seen.

Worth watching next year: does the baptism trend hold, do exits stabilize, and how much does the new missionary age change reshape the missionary numbers?

My code is available here.

Come back next week for an exciting release of a new dashboard I’m building out that I think will resonate with many folks here.

This week I deep dive into the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study. Next week, I’ll breakdown the new official church numbers released in the april general conference. Subscribe if you haven’t already so you don’t miss it!

A Western Religious Revival?

You’ve probably seen the headlines around… The tides have turned! People are returning to religion!

At a national/international level, a few data points are floating around suggesting that the tides on religion are changing. In some other Christian religions decline has slowed and even showed some signs of reversal.

But do we see any of this for LDS? Does it feel like religious tides are changing for Latter-day Saints specifically?

Anecdotally in the online LDS space, a lot of LDS faith sharing and faith promoting social media creators are popping up and growing large audiences.

Do we have any recent data insights to pair with this? Well last week, the new 2025 Cooperative Election Study data was released. Let’s see what we find…

Interestingly, in the last two years, we’ve seen increases in the share of Latter-day Saints who follow each of the religious measures tracked in the CES.

Do note that at this sample size for the 2025 year (n=161 smaller in non large US election year), we can't reliably distinguish a real uptick/downtick from random noise on most of these charts. I’ll interpret the new data as suggestive trends to be confirmed with future data releases.

As you can see, for each of these measures the trendline has increased! And looking at the “devout” metric I’ve been tracking, It has also increased over these last two years.

Looking at these charts, perhaps a religious resurgence among LDS is happening! All the metrics are going up. I will note that of the 17000 respondents in the 2025 off year, there are only 161 LDS respondents which is the lowest number we’ve had in a CES study (looking from 2008-2025).

And that’s the catch. In 2025, LDS make up 0.9% of the population representing the lowest recorded on this survey.

Putting those two data points together (increase of religious practice + decrease in population share), perhaps this trend reversal in practice metrics could be explained in losing some people at the margins of the faith in the last two years — thereby leaving a more committed base (institutional retrenchment). However, we will want more data and time to confirm if this is really the case! It could just a blip in the trend line and continue downward on practice metrics, or it could continue upward; excited to see future releases of this survey! The 2026 survey particularly will have more sample being a midterm election year.

Let’s Talk About Politics

It wouldn’t be a Mormon Metrics post if we didn’t bring up some politics. I thought about doing a separate post, but I just decided to keep all the initial CES updates in one post.

Looking at party affiliation, in-line with the practice metrics and increasing “devout” status, we see a rise in Republican Party affiliation. This again shows how strongly correlated these two things are! Read my analysis last week of this correlation if you missed it.

The most interesting thing to me about this chart is the visual warm up LDS had to Trump from 2017 to 2020. They were clearly initially resistant to him, but warmed up quickly afterwards. In 2025, we can still see strong levels of LDS approval for Trump near in line with his approval in 2020.

Change in Gun Control Attitudes?

Previously, I have talked about how the 2017 Las Vegas shooting influenced LDS public opinion of gun control measures.

One of the things I was excited about with the new 2025 release was seeing if the recent LDS involved shootings shifted public opinion on gun control like the Vegas shooting had.

The short answer is… it doesn’t really seem like it with the exception of “support for background checks on all gun sales.” But, this is actually just a really popular policy across the all the US these days (90%+ acceptance rate across party lines).

When you look at the other two gun control policies LDS are inline with what they previously thought and perhaps even moving in the opposite direction toward lower restrictions on guns.

So, against my hypothesis, these LDS involved shootings this last year did not seem to have a strong effect on gun control attitudes.

Conclusion

We are nearing the email limit length because of all the charts on this one, but let me try to sum things up…

Are we seeing a religious resurgence among LDS?

Maybe, but the limited data we have more likely suggests a retrenchment where those who remain are more likely to participate in all religious measures, but people are lost at the fringes. We will continue to track this data to see how it unfolds.

From your experience do you see a revival or retrenchment? Or neither?

Next week, I plan on breaking down the official conference numbers, so stay tuned to dive into those results.

Code for this post available here.

Why Are Latter-day Saints Moving Left?

YouGov released a report last week with a striking chart. Throughout the period from 2007 to 2025, Latter-day Saints shifted nearly 20 points toward the Democratic party while nearly every other religious group shifted right. They went from the most Republican religious group in America to the second most Republican, moving in sharp opposition to White Evangelicals who continued consolidating around the GOP.

Pretty shocking! But is it what it seems?

Regular Mormon Metrics readers may already have some intuition about what’s driving this. I’ve written previously about the McMullin-to-Democrat pipeline — how a meaningful share of Mormons who abandoned Trump in 2016 have since drifted toward the Democratic party rather than returning to the GOP. In that same post, I’ve written about how younger, more educated, and single Mormon women have continued moving away from Trump while older and non-white Mormons have partially warmed back up. And I’ve written about how Mormon and Evangelical political compasses, once nearly identical, have diverged significantly since 2016.

Today I want to show how all of those threads connect — and suggest that it could be an underlying driver of the same thing: the decline of religious commitment among Latter-day Saints.

Two Things Are Declining At The Same Time

As Mormon Metrics readers know, I have been tracking a long-term decline in LDS religious practice and commitment. What I hadn’t fully explored until now is how closely that religious decline tracks with the political one.

When we plot both trends together, the correlation is striking. As the share of deeply committed LDS members has declined, so has Republican identification — nearly in tandem. The two lines move together so consistently that they appear to be measuring the same underlying phenomenon from two different angles.

To understand why, we need to look at who actually makes up the LDS sample.

Net Republican Advantage: Change in the estimated % that identifies or leans toward the Republican Party minus the % that identifies or leans toward the Democratic Party in each time period.

The Pool Is Changing

For this analysis I draw on three religious engagement clusters adapted from the Mormon Typology Report and translated to the Cooperative Election Study data.1 These three groups have very different political profiles. Devout Traditionalists are firmly Republican. Cultural Mormons hover near the political center. Adaptive Believers fall somewhere in between. And critically — those political positions have been pretty stable for years. On economic and social policy attitudes measured through political compass analysis, the clusters have barely moved over time.2

So if the groups themselves haven’t changed politically, what’s driving the aggregate shift?

One answer is composition. The share of LDS respondents who qualify as Devout Traditionalists has declined steadily — from 52% of the LDS sample in 2008-12 down to just 39% by 2021-25. Meanwhile Cultural Mormons have grown from about 21% to 31%.

This matters enormously for the aggregate numbers. Every time someone drifts from the Devout bucket into the Adaptive or Cultural bucket, they move into a less Republican group.

This is the first explanation for the 20-point shift.

But, There’s More Going On Then Only A Compositional Change

When you look at party identification by cluster over time, in the core devout groups we can see some movement.

Cultural Mormons are essentially flat throughout the entire period — hovering around 10-15% net Republican advantage regardless of what’s happening in the broader political environment. They were never strongly Republican and haven’t changed. That’s consistent with the compositional story.

But the Devout and Adaptive lines are not flat. Both decline away from the Republican party, particularly after 2016. Devout Traditionalists went from about 67% net Republican advantage to around 50%. Adaptive Believers dropped even more sharply, from about 48% to around 30%.

Here’s the key insight: when you look at those same groups on a political compass measuring actual economic and social attitudes, they don't seem to have moved much. What changed is their willingness to wear the Republican label — likely not what they actually believe. Latter-day Saints may not have changed what they believe, but they did change what they’re willing to call themselves.

That’s not realignment. That’s dealignment.

Who Is Actually Moving?

So which Latter-day Saints are driving both the religious and political shifts? The answer turns out to be the same people.

Look at these two charts side by side (both from previous Mormon Metrics analyses). The first shows the Mormon age gap in voting — young Mormons collapsing toward Democrat post-2016 while older Mormons hold their Republican vote. The second shows the Mormon age gap in religious engagement — young Mormons losing Devout status fastest while older Mormons hold steady.

The pattern is almost identical. Same age groups moving. Same direction. Same timing. Young Mormons are losing their Devout status while they are losing their Republican vote. Older Mormons are holding on both dimensions.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same people doing both things simultaneously. The 18-30 cohort that dropped from 57% Devout to 37% Devout is the same cohort that is now hovering near zero net Republican vote share. The 31-45 group that dropped from 55% to 38% Devout is the same group showing the steepest political movement away from Trump. Meanwhile the 66+ group is flat on both — still about 47% Devout, still firmly Republican.

Religious disengagement and partisan loosening are happening to the same people, in the same age groups, at the same time. Whether one is causing the other is a question this data can’t fully answer. But the connection is hard to ignore.

Two Explanations Not One

Putting this together, at least two distinct things help explain the LDS leftward shift in party identification:

First, composition. The Devout bloc is shrinking as secularization draws more LDS members toward lower religious engagement. Because lower engagement members are in aggregate less Republican (in the data we have), the overall shifts left mechanically as the pool changes.

Second, partisan dealignment. Even among high-practice members who are classified as Devout or Adaptive, the Trump era appears to have created some friction with their Republican identification. Their values and policy views may not have changed. But the Republican party’s direction under Trump conflicted enough with LDS cultural norms — civility, institutional trust, character in leadership — that some members stopped calling themselves Republicans even while remaining ideologically conservative.

These two mechanisms could be operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other. Secularization loosens religious attachment. Loosened religious attachment weakens the cultural infrastructure that kept LDS members reliably Republican. And Trump-era Republicanism gave members at every level of engagement a reason to reconsider the partisan label even if their underlying beliefs stayed put.

What Does This Mean?

I don’t think this is a piece about a new wave of liberal Mormons. Latter-day Saints are still +33 Republican. What I am arguing is that the decline in LDS Republican identification is deeply connected to the decline of religious engagement3 — and that the demographic groups I identified in previous posts as driving the political shift are the same groups driving the religious one.

But here’s what makes the LDS case genuinely unusual. Nearly every other major religious group in America moved more Republican over this same period. White Evangelicals consolidated further around the GOP. White Catholics followed. Latter-day Saints moved in the opposite direction — alone.

That asymmetry is the clue that secularization alone can’t be the whole story. If declining religious engagement were the only mechanism, you’d expect other secularizing groups to show the same leftward pattern. They don’t. Something specific to LDS identity is operating here. The most plausible explanation is that LDS institutional culture — its emphasis on civility, institutional trust, and character-based conservatism — created a values conflict with Trump-era Republicanism that simply doesn’t exist for White Evangelicals. The McMullin phenomenon in 2016 made that conflict visible. A meaningful share of Latter-day Saints, including committed ones, chose not to follow the broader rightward consolidation of religious America.

There are still important unanswered questions.

Is religious decline causing LDS members to leave the Republican party — or is aversion to Trump-era Republicanism accelerating religious disengagement? Or maybe there is a third thing that pulls on both of these? To take this analysis to the next level it requires tracking the same individuals over time. These are questions I'm actively investigating and plan to return to in coming posts.

Code for this post is available here.

Researching a community famous for its politeness turned out to require a lot of rejection tolerance. Though, I get it. While I did get 4 interviews from random people, most people did not want to talk about politics with a stranger on the street even if it was “for a research project.” I think people have a fear of going viral for a terrible take or me setting them up for a gotcha of some sort. I would likely feel the same way.

This week, I published an article on Latter-day Saints and Polite Polarization (scroll to the bottom for the link) which turned out to be a very fun project. A few comments previously have mentioned wanting some qualitative color to my typical charts and data here at Mormon Metrics, so I figured some of you may appreciate this.

I will say the qualitative work is definitely a bit out of my comfort zone, but I think the article came together well and it was fun to hear people’s stories in person.

The premise of the project is essentially… the LDS Enclaves region(Utah and southern Idaho) reports feeling more worried about political polarization & extremism than every other community in the US. Why?

I had a total of 6 interviewees (though only 5 are included in the article; one sent me their answers after I submitted it) and I found them LDS missionary style:

• knocking on doors in Utah County (mostly knocked in Lehi)

• I approached random people at the University Place mall in Orem, Utah

• I had a few friends of friends by referral who were willing to interview

Here is my hope for the article:

• Help the outsider understand some theological aspects of Mormonism (e.g. recent focus on peacemaking and more context of the word “contention”)

• Challenge the negative outsider with positive aspects of Mormonism such as missions helping with world exposure and communities that arguably are closer and function better than many other communities in the country today.

• But also, challenge Latter-day Saint readers in the costs of committing to a life without contention.

Give the article a read and tell me what you think. Very open to your thoughts and feedback 🙂 Do you agree or disagree with my qualitative analysis? Do you see “polite polarization” in your own experience?

Read the full article here.

Last week, we compared Latter-day Saints to broad christian categories: Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and Catholics. This week, I break these categories into names other christians might identify with (baptist, presbyterian, etc.)

Our previous main takeaway was that when looking at the largest Christians Traditions in the US, while the snapshot in 2024 shows Latter-day Saints resistance to secular headwinds, looking at a trend most metrics across practice and belief (but, mostly practice) are declining faster. Read the full post below:

Now, let’s dive deeper into denominations…

As a snapshot when we look across religious measures, Latter-day Saints are consistently near the top breaking things out by tradition — particularly with weekly church attendance! Using the belief in God GSS question, Latter-day Saints are at 84% who say they believe in God without doubts.

Now let’s look at the trend lines across religious denominations…

So there are a few things that immediately standout:

1. Not all Christian denominations have declined, Non-denominational Christians have doubled in their size according the the GSS data from 1990s to present day. Our numbers are more contextualized seeing that Latter-day Saints look similar to other Christian traditions in population share decreases — with Non-denominational numbers bolstering the Mainline and Evangelical overall numbers.

2. We see a similar pattern in disaffiliation. Latter-day Saints look pretty middle of the pack in those leaving the tradition compared to other denominations. As I have noted before, most protestants are remaining protestant, but switching denominations within protestantism (many likely moving to non-denominational christian) as seen in this chart from pew I’ve shared before. It is more common for Latter-day Saints to identify with no religion after leaving.

One other thing: You’ll notice the practice metrics in this chart don’t look as bad for Latter-day Saints compared to my post last week. This is due to our time range for the Pew data being cut off prematurely. In this post we have pew data for 2007 to 2014 instead of 2007 to 2024. Unfortunately, the protestant denomination variable is not available in the public use file for data privacy reasons, but I will update these numbers when it is eventually released.

But, this early data access cutoff actually revealed something interesting…

If you look at the full trendline for pew (2007-2024) the practice metrics show strong overall decreases most dropping between -10 and -20 points (see my last post for that data)! But, looking at the 2007 to 2014 time period, many practice metrics actually increased. This suggests that the stronger decline in religious commitment and orthodoxy among Latter-day Saints occurred between 2014 and 2024.

In our CES data in the table above, we can see the full trend line validated from 2008 to 2024 which show strong drops in practice that are much more stark than other denominations.

These stats actually validate the trend we found from the Mormon Typology Report (pictured below).

Particularly after the 2014 year, we see a large drop in the “Devout Traditionalists” which is the group showing the highest levels of devotion and practice.

Conclusions

So what are my takeaways from this two part secular headwinds exercise?

1. As a snapshot in 2024, Latter-day Saints show strong resiliency to secular headwinds with high scores on metrics across belief and devotion compared to most other christian traditions.

2. Looking at trends over time,

   1. For population share and retention, Latter-day Saints fare similarly to many Protestant denominations — not better and not worse. Non-denominational Christianity is absorbing much of the Protestant exodus, which inflates overall Protestant retention numbers.

   2. For practice and belief metrics, LDS are likely declining faster than other Christian traditions and denominations across all the data points and full time periods we examined — though we would want to confirm this with the full 2024 Pew data when the restricted-use file is released.

3. As suggested in this post, sharper declines in religious practice and commitment for Latter-day Saints occurred after the year 2014, which passes the smell test for me since after 2014 was a period of cultural and institutional disruption (inside and outside the church).

Let me know what you think about this analysis in the comments. Do you agree with my findings. Did I miss anything or overlook something?

Code for this post available here.