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.

Every few months, a new claim circulates about the state of the LDS Church in America. The institution points to record missionary numbers and a committed, practicing membership. Critics point to empty pews and a generation walking away. Both sides cite data. Both sound confident. And from the outside, it’s genuinely hard to know who to believe.

The snapshot picture actually favors the institution. Latter-day Saints in 2024 show higher levels of religious practice and commitment than Catholics, Mainline Christians, and on some measures, even Evangelicals. The members who show up — who pray, who attend, who say their faith is central to their lives — are doing so at rates that most Christian traditions in America can’t match. That’s not spin. That’s what the data shows.

But a snapshot only tells part of the story. When you ask not just “how devout are members today” but “how has that changed over time,” some important patterns emerge. Across retention, religious practice, and religious attitudes, Latter-day Saints are declining faster than comparable Christian traditions — not just losing members at the margins, but showing steeper drops in prayer, scripture reading, and church attendance among those who still identify.

Both things are true simultaneously. The question is which one you’re asking. Let’s look at both.

Across four measures of religious practice and belief, Latter-day Saints outperform both Catholics and Mainline Christians by wide margins. On weekly church attendance — perhaps the most concrete behavioral measure of religious commitment — 64% of LDS respondents attend weekly, compared to 56% of Evangelicals, 27% of Catholics, and 21% of Mainline Christians. Evangelicals lead on most other metrics, including prayer frequency (59% vs 46%) and certainty of belief in God (90% vs 79%), though the gaps are smaller than those between LDS and the other two traditions. By any reasonable reading of this snapshot, active Latter-day Saints rank among the most religiously committed groups in American Christianity.

But snapshots don’t tell us whether things are getting better or worse — for that, we need to look at change over time.

To do that, I pulled tracked questions from three of the most reputable surveys in the US: the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the Pew Religious Landscape Study (PRLS), and the General Social Survey (GSS). I organized the metrics into four categories: US population share, retention of those raised in each tradition, religious practice, and religious attitudes. For GSS figures, I pooled respondents across decades rather than using single-year endpoints, which smooths out year-to-year noise and produces more stable estimates.

The table below shows percentage point change for each metric over time, broken out across four Christian traditions. The average row at the bottom is most useful as a relative comparison across groups — it’s less meaningful as a standalone number.

A few things stand out. Across nearly every category — retention, practice, and attitude — Latter-day Saints show the steepest declines. The gaps are sometimes modest, but on several metrics they’re substantial. On retention, GSS data shows the share of people raised LDS who still identify as LDS has fallen 31 points since the 1980s — compared to 6 points for Evangelicals and 18 points for Catholics. On religious practice, LDS prayer frequency has dropped 17 points since 2008 according to CES data, compared to 3 points for Evangelicals. Weekly participation in religious programs is down 20 points since 2007, nearly double the Evangelical decline of 13 points over the same period.

The attitude numbers tell a similar story. The share of LDS members who say religion is very important in their life has fallen 9.5 points since 2008 — more than four times the Evangelical drop of 2 points over the same period.

The one area where LDS fare relatively better is raw population share, where Mainline Christians have declined more steeply by some measures. That’s a meaningful caveat — Mainline decline is severe and well-documented — but it doesn’t change the overall pattern.

So what about the youth?

Now, let’s look at a snapshot of those age 45 and under by religious tradition in 2024.

First, the good news for the institution. Even among younger Latter-day Saints — the generation that critics claim is walking away en masse — the snapshot picture in 2024 is genuinely strong. 70% attend church weekly, 68% say religion is very important, and 75% believe in God with certainty. These numbers would be the envy of almost any religious tradition in America. The rising generation, at least as a snapshot, looks committed.

But the trend data tells a different story — and it's where the findings get most concerning.

Among Latter-day Saints under 45, the rate of decline on religious practice is sharper than any other tradition we measured, and in several cases it isn’t close. Weekly participation in religious programs has fallen 24 percentage points since 2007 — nearly double the Evangelical drop of 13 points over the same period. Prayer several times a day has declined 18 points among young LDS, compared to 6 points among young Evangelicals. Weekly scripture reading is down 20 points.

The retention numbers are perhaps the starkest finding in this entire analysis. In the 1970s/80s GSS data, roughly 82% of people raised LDS still identified as LDS. In the 2010s/2020s, that figure is approximately 46% — a 35-point drop. The comparable drop for young Evangelicals is 12 points (73% to 61%), and for young Catholics 19 points (80% to 61%). By this measure, the LDS Church is losing its young people at roughly three times the rate of Evangelicals.

One important caveat: LDS sample sizes are modest across all three surveys. The GSS pools roughly 140 respondents under 45 per decade group(1970s/80s, 2010s/2020s), while CES and Pew have an estimated 200-300 LDS respondents under 45 per wave. For a group representing 1-2% of the US population, this is simply a data limitation we have to work with. Any individual estimate should be held loosely. What gives me reasonable confidence in the overall picture is the consistency of the pattern — three independent surveys, across multiple metrics, all pointing in the same direction. That convergence is harder to dismiss than any single number.

Conclusion

So, are Latter-day Saints beating secular headwinds?

The honest answer is: it depends on what you’re measuring — and that distinction matters more than most people in this debate acknowledge.

As a snapshot, yes. Active Latter-day Saints in 2024 show levels of religious practice and commitment that most Christian traditions in America would envy. The institution is right to point to that. It’s real.

But as a trend, no. Across retention, religious practice, and religious attitudes, Latter-day Saints are declining faster than Catholics and Evangelicals — the two largest and most comparable Christian traditions in the US. The margin isn’t small. On several metrics, it isn’t close. And the youth data, despite showing a committed core, reveals that the pipeline is narrowing faster among young Latter-day Saints than among young Christians in the breaks we looked at.

Next week I want to dig into individual Protestant traditions — Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals — rather than grouping them into broad Evangelical and Mainline buckets. That comparison may tell a more nuanced story. If you have thoughts on what I should look at, or think I missed something this week, leave a comment below.

Update: one note I forgot to mention, the pew numbers for retention in the tables have the same numbers for Evangelical and Mainline. This is because there wasn't a born again question asked in the religion you were raised in 2007, so this is just an average across Protestants overall. The actually numbers probably look more like the GSS where Evangelicals have better retention and Mainline have worse.

Code available here

While I wasn’t able to accomplish as much as I hoped this past week (and plan on sharing the “Are Latter-day Saints beating the secular headwinds?” post next week), I do have a fun post for today which is fact checking this chart I found (as seen below) online a while back. Do Utahns have the LARGEST homes on average? Fact or fiction?

The difference between Utah and the rest of the states is quite striking (almost 30% bigger homes than most states), but also the difference between the US overall and Europe. According, to whatever aggregation this is measuring (is just the overall home sqft across the state? Is this zillow listings? What is the time range? I have no idea), Utah homes are the largest in the US and easily double in size of homes in almost every European country.

This post got quite a bit of engagement with commenters sharing lots of theories…

• Utah has bigger families

• Utah is status oriented

• Utah has weird zoning laws

• Utah has a lot of single family homes

• Utah has basements

• etc.

I went searching online for the source of this chart and found a reddit post which also did not share any source.

I did finally track down what I think is the source from a website called Visual Capitalist. There you can find very large (and imo unhelpful) infographics. Sure enough, the authors are using Zillow sales listing in an unspecified time range.

So now that we found what I think is the data, I tried to verify their finding with another source and more recent data. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a lot of great national datasets including one on house listings from Realtor.com. I pulled the median house sqft size from February 2025 to January 2026 and plotted the data below.1

So, as you can see, I confirmed this trend. When you look at houses being sold, Utah ranks number one in home size with notable separation from all other states. I didn’t pull data on housing data in Europe, so that part is still unverified.

One caveat I will mention is a possible new building bias. Utah has been building out a lot of places with brand new developments. I believe the average new home today is much bigger than it was 50 years ago. Other more populated and dense states simply may have more existing housing and may not have as much room to build things out. It wouldn’t surprise me if Utah had a higher proportion of brand new house listings compared to other states. I haven’t confirmed this theory with data, just my own theory to add to the list above i guess.

Writing this post, I think there is more here to dig into in future weeks. Can I successfully explain or support any of the theories above with data? Do high LDS areas correlate to big homes? Is it a function of family size? Is it because of population growth and new housing? Perhaps there are other theories I can look at?

Let me know what you think below.

Next week, I plan on sharing the “Are Latter-day Saints beating the secular headwinds?” post. See you soon!

Code is viewable here.

1

One thing I learned writing this post is that average sqft in house listings have seasonal differences. Check out the chart below (👇) so I think the differences between my data (Utah avg sqft listing is 2422) vs the zillow data (Utah is 2800) could be that the zillow data was only pulled during a higher season whereas mine was averaged out over a whole year.

Introduction

As with many of my posts, this post is inspired by a previous Ryan Burge post looking at travel across large US religions here. He did not include numbers for Latter-day Saints because of the low n-size (n=58 of the total 3,576 sample; click here for the study). However, as with many of my posts, I think having a heuristic/fuzzy answer is better than just simply no answer at all.

Theoretically, we should expect Latter-day Saints to travel more on average because of missions which would take some out of the country who may not leave otherwise, but let’s see what our charts say.

Charts

Looking at the data, Latter-day Saints are directionally more likely to have traveled, with 20% having visited no foreign countries compared to 23% of the U.S. overall. With our small sample size, there is no real detectable statistical difference between these numbers, but it represents our best heuristic guess.

This aligns fairly closely with my perception. If a mission was a massive driver of international travel, we might expect the “1 country” bucket to be significantly larger than the rest. However, it’s important to remember that many missionaries originating from the U.S. are assigned to domestic missions.

Another reservation I have with the mission=more traveling theory is the wealth factor. As Ryan described in his post, wealthy people are generally more likely to travel. Furthermore, those who haven’t traveled are highly likely to say they want to (see chart below)—leading us to infer that financial constraints are the primary barrier.

While the modern Church structure ensures that lower-income individuals can serve via ward or general missionary funds if they cannot afford the monthly cost, the opportunity cost is a different story. Young adults from poorer backgrounds might feel more financial pressure to enter the workforce or support their families rather than taking two years off, making them less likely to serve. I'm curious to hear your thoughts/experiences or if someone has more concrete data on this topic.

What’s Next?

Next week, we are tackling a massive question: Are Latter-day Saints beating the secular headwinds?

We’ve already established three baseline facts:

1. Religious orthodoxy in the U.S. overall is experiencing a macro-level decline.

2. LDS orthodoxy has declined over time.

3. As a snapshot in time, LDS remain notably more religious than other groups (echoing recent BYU research).

But here is the real test: is orthodoxy declining faster or slower for LDS compared to other religions? Pinning down a perfect, causal answer with observational data is notoriously tough, but I’ll be diving deep into the numbers we have to see what the trendlines actually show.

See you then.

Code for this post is available here.

Introduction

This weekly post will be a lighter cultural follow-up to the more dense political data I shared last week (read below).

As you can see from our first chart, the headline takeaway is that Utah LDS really do not like the HULU Secret Lives of Mormon Wives show (though notably only 12% have watched the show compared to 21% of Non LDS Utah.) But, look at those numbers, net -71 rating among Latter-day Saints compared to the net -24 rating among non LDS which is a massive difference. Not only that, 64% of Latter-day Saints report a “very unfavorable” opinion of it compared to 26% of Non LDS. There is clearly a very strong distaste of this show (or the perception of this show as many have not watched it) among Latter-day Saints and a much stronger negative reaction compared to the broader Utah population.

Despite losing some basketball stars in the past several years, the Utah Jazz brand has strong positive brand approval (+22). To my surprise, Utah Latter-day Saints were significantly more likely to follow the Jazz than Non LDS Utah. And, not only that, the net favorability score among Utah LDS was almost double that of Non LDS Utah (+29LDS vs. +16 NonLDS)! Why do Utah Latter-day Saints love the Utah Jazz so much?

While the previous charts show some divisions of opinion, this next cultural question everyone seems to agree on: everyone equally dislikes the new Utah Olympics logo which is underwater by 23 points.

Nearly 1/3 of the Utah population “strongly dislikes” it and this number is similar for Utah LDS and Utah Non-LDS.

Conclusion

As I suggested in my previous post, Utah still seems like a tale to two groups: the culture and the counter culture. From the charts this week, the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives most clearly depicts this, but I’ll also share one additional chart.

A near majority of LDS Utahns thinks Utah is headed in the right direction (49% right vs. 27% wrong), and a majority of Non LDS Utahns thinks Utah is headed in the wrong direction(30% right vs. 51% wrong). As LDS birthrates continue to decline and more outsiders move into Utah making the LDS population a minority instead of a majority, I eventually expect to see a reversal between these two demographic groups where growing numbers of LDS Utah will say “wrong direction” and vice versa for Non LDS Utah. Though, this clearly hasn’t happened yet (at least in people’s minds). This, to me, is a signal that Latter-day Saints still feel like the dominant influence in Utah culture and politics at this point in time and Non Utah LDS still feel like the underdogs.

What do you think about my analysis? Do you agree or disagree with anything I said here? Leave your thoughts and see you next week!

Introduction

A new poll from Libertas Institute has revealed some stark truths about the Utah voter. While the headlines covered the basics, I wanted to dig deeper into the crosstabs to show you what the data actually says.

Reading through their methodology, it seems pretty robust. They invested in a large sample size (1000 registered voters) which included 504 Latter-day Saints. They used a multimodal approach (text and online panel) which is considered one of the best standards these days. Their methodology reads “sampling was stratified…during allocation” meaning they used demographic quotas. They also weighted the results post collection to match the Utah adult population.

Two methodological questions I would have (both probably a bit nitpicky):

1. What behavioral measures were used in weighting? I assume this is voting turnout?

2. Which online panel provider was used? Specifically, was the online portion matched to a registered voter file (like the text portion likely was)? This is the 'gold standard' for ensuring we aren't just getting random internet users, but actual Utah voters.

Charts

If asked today whether Latter-day Saints would vote for Trump again if an election were held today, 58% said they would. However, this is compared to 68% of Latter-day Saints that voted for him in 2024.

This 10-point delta creates a quantifiable 'Hold Your Nose' gap. Essentially, 1 in 7 Latter-day Saints who voted for Trump did so likely out of utility, despite not supporting him today. This confirms that for a chunk of the LDS electorate, the vote was a transaction, not an endorsement.

In the news, we hear about the “politically homeless” latter-day saints, but from this chart we can see that Latter-day Saints aren’t the only ones who feel this way. In fact, statistically non-LDS Utahns feel this way in the same numbers!

I would love to see this question asked of some national pollsters. Is this a Utah thing? What is the national baseline for this question?

Not so surprisingly, Utah Latter-day Saints are more approving of Latter-day Saint politicians. We can see a tale of two Utahs across LDS and non LDS in this chart: the culture approving of a candidate and the counter culture disapproving.

Interestingly, the counter culture opposes one Latter-day Saint politician more than the others. And yes, it’s Mike Lee. A whopping 41% of non-LDS “Strongly Disapprove” of him. Interestingly, Mike Lee has the most Strong Approvers from the Latter-day Saint crowd at 25%, yet also the most Strong Disapprovers among Latter-day Saints (21%).

All Utah voters really want only one thing… Affordability! And they want it in the form of…

1. A lower cost of living

2. More affordable healthcare

3. More affordable home ownership

4. Tax relief

I think I was expecting more differences between these two groups, but their top 4 (and more) priorities are exactly the same. Though, I probably would have chosen different issues in the list. For example, I would have excluded “Increasing Privacy from Government Surveillance” and included something like immigration, environmental protections (the great salt lake), attracting businesses in the silicon slopes, or other things.

This result stands at odds with the national stereotype that 'Suburban Republican = NIMBY.' While Donald Trump has campaigned against density, Utah Latter-day Saints break the mold with 84% support for ADUs. This suggests that for Utahns, housing isn't viewed through the lens of 'density'—it's viewed through the lens of Property Rights and Family Autonomy. The prevailing attitude isn't 'Not in my backyard,' it's 'It's my backyard, I'll do what I want.'

Conclusion

It is truly an era where voters are worried about affordability. Housing appreciation has been great for home owners the last decade, but the other side is now being unaffordable for the first timers. You can see some of this in my post last week — look at those home prices go!

Also, I found this poll interesting as it indirectly measures the LDS Trump hesitancy. I’ll try to find resources about Latter-day Saints and Trump as very recently there has been some regression in attitudes toward Trump even among the loyal evangelicals.

What do you think about what I shared here today? Would you add or take away anything? Did I miss anything?

Next week, I have more charts prepared from this poll, but with a lighter pop culture focus that I think many of you will find interesting.

See you soon!

Introduction

In my last report, I argued that the 'Temple Premium' is actually a 'Selection Premium'—meaning the Church builds in areas that are already set up for success. Today's charts support that theory. When you look at the raw numbers below, you aren't seeing a 'Temple Effect'; you are seeing the regional economic wave that these temples were surfing.

If you haven’t read the summary or the paper, here is a link:

Today, I thought it might be interesting to share some extra charts and analysis plotting how individual zip codes performed which might be interesting to some of you.

Of the 42 temple zip codes I analyzed, which performed the best? Which performed the worst? Which outperformed the national average?

Note: these 42 temples were announced at various points during the period of 2010-2023.

Charts

Note: To ensure the text is legible, I used an algorithm to space out the labels on the right. They generally follow the order of the lines, but some are nudged slightly to prevent overlapping.

As you can see, temple zip codes generally perform better than the average. Compare the blue 'Temple Average' line against the black 'US Overall' line—the gap is undeniable. The vast majority of temple zipcodes outperform the US average, but here are the exceptions:

• Elko Nevada (89801) - 48% average house appreciation since 2010. Compare this number to the national average of 83%.

• Tallahassee Florida (32309) - 68% appreciation.

• Casper Wyoming (82604) - 78% appreciation (this one is missing from the chart due to a few missing data points).

• Cleveland Ohio (44131) - 80% appreciation.

• Richmond Virginia (23060) - 81% appreciation

The highest performers were largely concentrated in the Mountain West. Here are the top 10:

1. Heber Valley Utah (84032) - 198% average house in zip code appreciation since 2010. Compare this number to the national average of 83%.

2. Bentonville Arkansas (72712) - 194% appreciation

3. Meridian Idaho (83646) - 188% appreciation

4. Deseret Peak Utah (84074) - 170% appreciation

5. Lindon Utah (84042) - 168% appreciation

6. Provo City Center (84601) - 166% appreciation

7. Burley Idaho (83318) - 165% appreciation

8. Taylorsville Utah (84129) - 165% appreciation

9. Saratoga Springs Utah (84045) - 164% appreciation

10. Feather River California (95993) - 161% appreciation

A Natural Follow up question to these numbers is what the state appreciation look like during this time period…

Here are the top 5 cumulative appreciation states:

1. Idaho - 163%

2. Utah - 145%

3. Arizona - 144%

4. Florida 143%

5. Nevada 143%

And the bottom 5:

1. Louisiana - 15%

2. Illinois - 34%

3. Mississippi - 35%

4. North Dakota - 43%

5. New Mexico - 43%

For these numbers I averaged the zip codes at the state level which is by no means a perfect measure, but should work fine as a barometer.

“The ‘Chicken or the Egg’ in the Mountain West

You might look at these charts and say, ‘Of course they build in Utah and Idaho—that’s where the members are!’

Exactly. And that is the point.

The Church follows the members. And where are the members? They are in the highest-growth economic corridors: the Silicon Slopes in Lehi/Lindon, the tech boom in Boise/Meridian, and the lifestyle hubs of Heber Valley.

The top-performing Temple zip codes (Heber, Meridian, Lindon, Provo) are almost exclusively located in the top-performing states (Idaho and Utah). While temple zip codes do outperform the average zip code, it is largely connected to the economic success of the Mountain West over the last decade (high migration, tech sector growth, and remote work shifts).

Code for this post is available here.

If you live in the Intermountain West, you have heard the rumor. It is whispered in ward foyers and included in real estate listings: “Buy now! The temple is coming!”

For decades, a persistent folklore has circulated among Latter-day Saints and investors alike: the announcement of a new temple guarantees a 10–20% spike in neighboring property values. To the faithful, it is a spiritual blessing on the land. To the speculative investor, it is a sure-fire arbitrage opportunity. To the “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) critic, it is a looming crisis of traffic and lighting devaluing the area.

But my data doesn't support either conclusion.

For the last few months, I have been working on the largest-ever econometric analysis of temple housing markets. We looked at 42 temple locations announced since 2011, analyzing 15 years of Zillow data to separate the signal from the noise.

The results are in. And they are going to upset the conventional wisdom on both sides of the aisle.

The “Illusion” of Growth

If you look at the raw data, the folklore looks true. Home values in temple zip codes do perform well after an announcement—often trading at a 22% premium over the national average over time.

But correlation is not causation.

When we applied a Staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model to control for the neighborhood’s pre-existing trends, the “Temple Premium” vanished.

• The Red Line (Raw Data): What realtors see. Prices go up.

• The Blue Line (Causal Effect): What happens when you control for baseline demographics. Flatline.

The “Winner’s Profile”

So, why do prices rise if the temple isn’t causing it?

Selection Bias.

Our analysis reveals that the Church acts as a rational economic agent. They do not build temples in random locations that subsequently boom; they identify neighborhoods that are already winning.

Before a temple is ever announced, the chosen zip code is already:

• 35% Wealthier than the average zip code.

• 69% More Educated (Bachelor’s degrees).

• 447% More Populous.

The Church doesn’t create the real estate wave. It surfs it.

Bad News for NIMBYs, Bad News for Speculators

This report contains a “Null Result” that creates a fascinating dilemma for ideologues:

1. To the Critics: There is no evidence that temples destroy property values. The “nuisance effects” of traffic and lighting appear non-existent in the housing data (at least at the zipcode level)—even in “Mission Field” areas like New York where LDS density is low. While immediate neighbors could experience localized nuisance effects, our data confirms these are not severe enough to drag down the broader zip code.

2. To the Investors: There is no “free lunch.” The premium you see is priced in by the fundamental quality of the neighborhood (schools, safety, jobs), not the steeple. If there is an effect, it is more modest <=5% and not detectable in the model.

Read the Full Report

This isn’t just a blog post; it is a full 30+ page data journalism report. In the full PDF, I break down:

• Zion vs. The Mission Field: Does the effect change in Utah County vs. Westchester County? (Spoiler: It doesn’t as far as we have power to tell) .

• The Methodology: A “Plain English” guide to how we isolated the variable.

• The Implications: What does this mean for urban planners, home buyers, economists, and sociologists?

• Code & Statistical Appendix: Yep, we have that, too. A special treat for the data nerds among you. Replicate the models yourself with our step-by-step guide + code.

👇👇👇

Click here to download full 30+ page report.

As I have done in previous reports, I may update the report based on feedback and publish additional versions with new insights and/or improvements.

Excited to hear your thoughts!

Author’s Note: This project was born out of a desire to bring rigorous data to cultural questions. If you find this valuable, please subscribe and share. If you think rigorous analysis like this would be useful in your organization, please send me a note at contact@bassempirical.com.

We’ve heard the claim. “They just announced a temple in [City Name]. Property values are going up!”

Real estate agents promise it. Homebuyers fear it. Speculators may bet on it. But does the data actually back it up?

For the past few months, I’ve been building a rigorous causal inference model to shed more light on this topic. I didn’t just look at one or two famous examples. I analyzed 15 years of Zillow data across 42 different temples to separate the hype from the reality.

Next week, I’m releasing the full report. We are going to answer the questions nobody has hard numbers for:

• 🏛️ The Jackpot: Does a temple announcement actually trigger an immediate price spike?

• 🌎 The Zion Curtain: Do temples affect prices differently in highly LDS neighborhoods vs. the rest of the country?

• 💸 The Investment: Is buying land near a future temple a smart bet, or a statistical trap?

I found the results enlightening and am excited to share them with you.

Dropping 7am MT on 30 January 2026. See you then!

Introduction

I have previously written that, in the Trump era, Latter-day Saints are less likely to identify as Republican and more likely to identify as Independent and Democrat.

But why?

Are the most devout LDS moving away from the Republican party?

Are the less active members who still identify as Mormon moving leftward?

Is something else happening?

Our post today will shed some unique insight into this topic. Let’s dive in!

More Political Compasses

I’ve been diving deep into these political compasses in my recent posts if you hadn’t noticed. To catch you up after the break, here are some insights from my previous political compass posts which provide helpful context for this post:

• For this first one, I plotted each religion on a political compass constructed from 66 political and economic questions. Interestingly, Mormons in 2024 are closer to Catholics than Evangelical Christians.
  

• For my next one, I made 5 political compasses for each of the past 5 presidential election years. You can clearly see Mormons and Evangelicals who used to be ideological twins drifting apart. Mormons toward the center and Evangelicals rightward.
  

But, what happens when we breakout Mormons by their typological clusters over time using insights from the Mormon Typology Report 2025? We can’t directly replicate the clusters since the Pew Religious Landscape data (from the original report) has richer religious questions than the Cooperative Election Study (political compass data) BUT we can try… So in this post here are how the groups are defined:

• Devout Traditionalist (maxing out every religious indicator) - Says religion is “very important” in their life. Attends church weekly or more. Prays several times a day.

• Adaptive Believer - The 'Middle' member. Attends monthly or more, but doesn't max out every single orthodoxy box.

• Cultural Mormons - Attends church once or twice a year, seldom, or never.1

And, when you plot them over time, there actually isn’t much change.

Looking through these, you can see some movement here and there. Some years the adaptive and cultural groups are closer together; sometimes they form a diagonal line. The Devout and Adaptive groups remain firmly in the conservative quadrant, while the Cultural Mormons consistently hover near the absolute center. But, compare the first (2008) and the last (2024) political compass. They seem nearly identical with one important difference: the size of the dots (which is proportional to the size of the group). In other words, the average political position of these groups has not changed much over the years, but the number of people in each group has changed!

Let’s plot out how the size of LDS clusters has changed over time.

If you’ve been reading Mormon Metrics, you know I’ve tracked the decline of the ‘Devout’ block before. But looking at these compasses, you can actually see that demographic shift in action. The reason the political center of gravity is moving left isn’t because the ‘Devout’ circle is moving—it’s because the ‘Devout’ circle is shrinking. The data shows the 'Devout' bloc has shrunk from a 52% majority in 2008 to just 39% today, while the cultural and adaptive groups have gone from a combined 48% to 62%.

So, this analysis suggests that the political shift among Mormons is not due to one group becoming more liberal or more conservative, but rather secularization changing the size of each group and groups with less religious intensity (which lean less Republican) gaining members proportionally.

What do you think of this analysis/hypothesis? Is it plausible to you? Am I missing anything? Is there anything more you would like to see? Let me know what you think below.

Next week, I am planning revealing more details about my forthcoming report on temples releasing two weeks from today on January 30th. See you then!

Code for this post is available here. I also have a google sheet tracking each question used in the political compass analysis, so you can get a sense of how these axes are constructed across time (a total of 198 questions across years!)

Introduction

Happy 2026 everyone!

Thanks for following along with Mormon Metrics this past year. Our audience has more than 10X-ed from last year at this time. Last year, we started with 64 readers and today we have just about 1k. Here’s to another good year! 🍾🎉🎊

I have some pretty exciting things planned for this coming year, so I hope you stick around. The first of these things is that I am releasing my second report on January 30th or the last Friday of this month. More details to come, but its about temples.

Today, I’ll be discussing a working paper I read in the Deseret News just before the break with the news headline, “Latter-day Saints are retaining faith at uniquely high levels in a secularizing society” written by five BYU PhDs from the psychology department, religious education department, and the school of family life.

The Good: The Data on Devotion is Solid

Let’s start with where the report shines. The authors utilize the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey to show that, statistically speaking, active Latter-day Saints are outliers in the American religious landscape.

The data confirms what we see on the ground:

• Attendance: Latter-day Saints report the highest rate of church attendance of any religion.

• Home Practice: 80% of Latter-day Saint parents pray or read scripture with their children—the highest of any group surveyed.

If the goal is to prove that active Latter-day Saints are highly engaged relative to Methodists or Catholics, the data supports it.

The Bad: Retention & The “Active Retention“ Metric

Things get stickier when the report tries to rank the Church’s retention against other faiths. In the executive summary, the report reads…

The Pew Religious Landscape Survey (2024) and the Spiritual Seismology Survey (2025) were used to examine national trends of Latter-day Saint retention. In these surveys, “retention” was defined as the percentage of those raised Latter-day Saint who continue to identify as Latter-day Saint in adulthood. Based on these two surveys, the retention rate today is approximately 50%. This rate is higher than all other Christian denominations, except Catholics who have a slightly higher rate.

This is factually wrong even looking at their own graph (figure 14) which has Orthodox Christians (a christian denomination) higher at 66% retention.

However, this is a table from Pew’s 2025 Religious Landscape Report which is the dataset they are using:

The Pew table shows all other religions have a higher “retention” (except Buddhists) than Latter-day Saints. Mathematically for the Protestant average to be 15 points higher, several individual denominations must have significantly higher retention than LDS. Grouping them by fragments makes a misleading comparison.

Update: As noted from one of the authors in the comments, the pew chart shows switching inside and outside protestantism where as the authors show switching in and out of protestant denominations (which may or may not still be within protestantism). So, I originally misunderstood the numbers here. See more of my and a contributor’s thoughts on this in the comments.

Additionally, the authors introduce a specific metric for “Active Retention,” defined as people who were raised in a faith and continue to attend services at least monthly as adults.

By this metric, Latter-day Saints rank #1 at 42%.

However, this metric effectively applies a Latter-day Saint definition of “faithfulness” to religions that function very differently. The report effectively penalizes groups like Jews (who have high identity retention but lower weekly attendance going from 76% to 18% from retention to active retention) by grading them on a curve designed to favor faiths with strong expectations around participation and lifestyle. It creates a statistical “home court advantage.”

The Missing: Sample Size & The "Black Box"

The most provocative part of the BYU report is the attempt to categorize former members into four types (e.g., “Faith Keepers,” “Faith Rejectors”).

From a data science perspective, there are two red flags here:

1. The Sample Size Problem Clustering algorithms are notoriously sensitive. This report’s typology is based on a subsample of only 527 individuals.

In my own recent report, The Mormon Typology 2025, I conducted a similar analysis with a sample size of 1,810—more than three times the size of this study. Even with that much data, I framed my typology as exploratory. To see this report draw conclusions about the population of former members based on less than a third of that data feels premature. There is also no cluster diagnostic stats or information for replication leading to my next point.

2. The “Black Box” Methodology The report lists their survey source (the “Spiritual Seismology Survey”) but provides no information on how these 527 former members were recruited. If the survey was distributed via BYU networks or church-adjacent channels, it would naturally over-sample “Faith Keepers” who still feel warm toward the Church. Unlike the clear methodology provided for the national datasets, the recruitment method for the SSS is not disclosed in the text. This is important information that should be shared before conclusions and news articles!

Update: One of the authors reached out to clarify that the 'Spiritual Seismology' dataset comes from political scientist Ryan Burge’s national survey. This is excellent news, as it indicates the sample is nationally representative and not, say, a convenience sample from BYU channels. I look forward to seeing this information in future versions of the report, but it effectively alleviates my concern here.

The “Real” Story: The Decline of the Devout Core

In this report they focus on aggregate averages (e.g., “LDS attendance is relatively high”), but do not discuss how the composition of the Church is fundamentally changing.

My analysis reveals an internal shift:

• The Decline of the Traditionalist: According to the Mormon Typology Report 2025, in 2007, the Devout Traditionalist—the members doing the heavy lifting of practice and certainty of belief—made up 62% of the Church. Today, that share is 25%. I also did analysis of the Cooperative Election Study confirming this trend though the decline is not as drastic (52% → 39%).

• The Rise of the “Cultural” and “Adaptive” Mormons: We are seeing more Cultural Mormons (now 27%) and Adaptive Believers (42%). These groups may still identify as LDS, but their engagement metrics are structurally different.

• The Gender Nuance: Perhaps most concerning for future retention is the suggestive gender shift within the core. According to the Mormon Typology Report 2025, in 2007, the “Devout” category was majority female. Today, it has flipped to majority male. Women—historically the spiritual anchors of the faith—are changing in the modern age. Interestingly in this working paper, (pending more information on sampling, weighting, etc.) they show a gender gap in retention where young women appear 20 points more likely to exit than men. From my perspective, these important results should be highlighted as they help us understand a changing church membership and cultural landscape.

  

Conclusion

The BYU report is correct that the Church is still higher on many practice metrics compared to other religions as they have been for many years; and I support celebrating that continued win. But, “better than average” shouldn’t be confused with “stable” or “beating the trend.” For example, LDS orthodoxy could be declining faster than everyone else, but are still higher at this point in time since their baseline was so high! I would have loved to see more analysis comparing Latter-day Saints to the US religious average over time. Relative to the baseline disaffiliation and lowering belief, how are Latter-day Saints fairing? This, to me, is the more interesting story and analysis.

Perhaps after releasing my temple report the end of January, I will turn for better answers to those questions.

What do you think about my review? Do you think I was fair in the points I brought up? Do you disagree with me on anything?

Let me know what you think in the comments and I’ll see you next week!

Thanks for reading and being engaged with Mormon Metrics this year. I truly appreciate your readership and support. Today will be the last post for the year and posts will continue again in the first half of January. Assuming I am able to set aside enough time over the break, I am planning on releasing my second report in January on a topic I know many of my subscribers will find interesting, so stay tuned 😉

Introduction

In my last post, I visualized the US electorate on a political compass using 2024 data.

The standout finding for many was the positioning of the average Mormon respondent, who appeared ideologically closer to Mainline Protestants and Catholics than to Evangelical Christians.

Naturally, this raised a few questions: Was it always this way? Is this a recent phenomenon, perhaps a reaction to the Trump era? Or have Mormons always been the “moderate” cousins of the Religious Right?

To investigate, I went back to the archives. I applied a similar methodology to Cooperative Election Study (CES) data from 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 to try and trace the movement over time. I hope you like political compasses because today I have 4 more of them for you 🧭.

If my last post was a snapshot, I view this as an attempt to assemble a timeline.

A Note on Methodology A quick but important caveat before we look at the charts: The CES survey questions change every cycle. In 2008, the survey might ask about the Iraq War; in 2020, it asks about COVID policies. Because the inputs change, we shouldn’t focus on the absolute coordinates (e.g., “Mormons moved exactly 0.5 units left”). Instead, I think it is more useful to look at the relative distance between the groups. Who is standing next to whom?

The “Twin Pillars” Era (2008–2012)

Let’s look back at the Obama years.

In 2008 and 2012, we see significant alignment between Mormons (Purple) and Evangelicals (Green).

• Visually: The groups are positioned quite close together in the conservative quadrant. Our Evangelical and Mormon dots are either overlapping or equally as far into the conservative quadrant.

• The Interpretation: In both of these time periods, both Evangelicals and Mormons are squarely conservative. In 2008, they are essentially overlapping! Interestingly in 2012, we can perhaps see a slight skew/preference Evangelicals drifting more populist and Mormons drifiting more libertarian.

The Divergence Begins (2016)

Then comes the 2016 election.

Here, we start to see what looks like a drift.

• The Shift: While both groups remain in the Conservative quadrant, a gap begins to form, particularly on the Social Axis (Y-Axis). The average Evangelical respondent plots slightly higher (more authoritarian/populist), while the average Mormon respondent stays put or drifts slightly more downward. Evangelicals appear to be moving away from other religious groups and Atheist in the other direction (religion is becoming more predictive of politics).

• Context: This visual seems to capture the initial Mormon hesitation toward Donald Trump. While Evangelicals largely embraced the new populist direction of the GOP, many Mormons (perhaps the Evan McMullin voters) appeared to separate slightly from the coalition — while remaining firmly in the conservative quadrant.

The Decoupling (2020–2024)

By 2020 and 2024, the separation becomes much more distinct.

• The Gap Widens: The relative distance between the Green and Purple dots has grown. It appears that Evangelicals have moved further into the “Populist Right” territory—higher on the authoritarian scale and further right economically.

• Mormon Moderation: In contrast, the average Mormon appears to have drifted toward the center. By 2024, the Mormon dot is physically closer to the “Mainline Protestant” (Blue) and “Catholic” (Green-Yellow) clusters than it is to the Evangelical one. Contextualized by the political compasses before, we can again see a slight Mormon skew toward the libertarian quadrant.

What is the Story Here?

When viewing these charts in succession, the story isn’t necessarily that Mormons are all “Liberals” now (the average remains in the top-right quadrant). Rather, the data suggests that the Republican Party may have moved, and Mormons didn’t fully go with them.

As the GOP—driven by the Evangelical base—shifted toward a specific style of governance characterized by higher Social Authoritarianism, the Mormon electorate appears to have acted somewhat as an anchor, staying rooted in a more traditional, institutionalist conservatism.

In 2008/12, a Mormon and an Evangelical were politically indistinguishable in this model. Today, they appear to be distinct voting blocs with diverging priorities.

Other Observations in the Data

While my primary focus was the Mormon drift, having the full dataset reveals a few other interesting trends happening in the background:

The “True Center” is ‘Nothing in Particular’ In political science, we are always hunting for the median voter. It is interesting to note the position of the Pink Bubble (”Nothing in Particular”). In almost every chart (2008–2024), this group hovers incredibly close to the dead center (0,0) of the grid. While the parties race to the edges, this disjointed, secular-ish middle appears to be the most stable group in the field.

The Catholic-Mainline Convergence We often talk about the “Protestant Ethic” or the “Catholic Vote” as distinct cultural forces. However, these charts suggest that, politically speaking, they are functionally very similar. The Blue Bubble (Mainline) and Green Bubble (Catholic) move in lockstep almost every year.

The Movement of Atheists If Evangelicals are moving to the Top-Right corner, Atheists/Agnostics (Orange/Red) appear to be moving further to the Bottom-Left. The “Culture War” seems to be visualized here as the tension stretching between these two groups.

General Polarization In earlier years, the electorate looked like a round-ish blob occupying plenty of space in all quadrants. In the most recent years, the blog looks more like a line with less variation suggesting deeper political polarization.

Thanks for reading. See you next year!

Code for this post is available here (nearly 1500 lines of code for a heavier lift this week). I also have a google sheet tracking each question used in this analysis, so you can get a sense of how these axes are constructed across time (a total of 198 questions across years!)

Introduction

So, you’ve probably seen a political compass floating around online. I view it as an attempt to move beyond simply Republican and Democrat dichotomy and see more nuance in political beliefs. The beliefs are divided onto two axises: Social and Economic. Social refers to positions on social issues (should we legalize marijuana? abortion?) and economic is exploring preferences on government size and economic regulation. An individual is then placed into 1 of 4 quadrants: Progressive(bottom-left), Conservative(top-right), Populist(top-left), and Libertarian(bottom-right). I am always supportive of projects like these that dig deeper. You can take a political compass test and find your own placement on it.

My question was what if we try and plot the US electorate on a political compass using survey data and then find the average respondent by religion using the most recent, highest powered data available. So, that’s what I’ll be writing about today.

I’ll list a few takeaways upfront…

1. In 2024, the avg Mormon is ideologically closer (with respect to politics) to the avg Mainline Protestant or Catholic than the avg Evangelical Protestant as seen in the political compass chart.

2. There are more than twice the progressive Mormons vs. progressive Evangelicals. Progressive Mormons are more likely to be younger and more likely to be female.

3. Zooming in on the conservative quadrant, Mormons are more likely to be religious libertarian and establishment republicans than populist republicans.

Method

I divided 66 political questions asked in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (n=60,000) into social or economic attitudinal categories. I recoded each question to point in the proper direction, then I averaged and normalized them by the two dimensions. I plan on writing at least one more post using this data at which point I will release all the code and variables I used. If you are curious about the questions before then, feel free to peruse around the 2024 CES questionnaire and if its a political attitudinal question, I most likely used it.

To find each religious mean, I used a weighted average of both dimensions by religion.

Charts

Overall Talking Points

As you can see, politics differs by religion(!) with Evangelical Christians on one end of the spectrum and Atheists on the other.

As I pointed out previously, Mormons on average in 2024 are closer ideologically to Mainline and Catholics than to Evangelicals. I plan on exploring other years in another post to confirm this has changed over time, but my impression is that Evangelicals and Mormons used to be very similar, but now are distancing.

Another interesting finding is a clear relationship between our two axes. If you have more social authoritarian views, you are also more likely to economically right views. I interpret this relationship as evidence for political polarization in the modern age. If people didn’t feel shoved into one of two parties, perhaps this relationship wouldn’t be as strong.

Now let’s break down the 4 quadrants by religion

Interestingly, breaking things down, Mormons are about twice as likely to be in the Progressive quadrant than Evangelicals. As I have written about before, there is a growing group of Mormons identifying as Democrats which I have interpreted as political sorting in the Trump era.

Our data suggests that Mormons are slightly less likely to be in the populist quadrant than the US Overall and Evangelicals.

Next, I was curious about how groups broke out demographically across quadrants. I note nsizes in each group and only divide each demographic group once to have better estimates.

Notably, I found that Progressive Mormons are more likely to be female and have a lower average age compared to the Conservative group. Interestingly, the ‘Ideological Fringes’ (Populists and Libertarians) are slightly less concentrated in the Mormon Corridor than standard Conservatives or Progressives. The Jello Belt appears to be a moderating force, keeping members in the traditional partisan lanes.

Conservative Subtypes

I had a subscriber ask me about the prevalence of libertarians among Mormons, so I wanted to talk about this for a second.

Libertarian Mormons are about as common as in the US population. But, I believe there are more than one type of libertarian…

In the libertarian quadrant, I might suggest this group is called “secular libertarians” who want minimal government intervention in economics and socially. Legalize gay marriage. Small government.

However, I thought perhaps there is another related type of libertarian hiding in the conservative quadrant that I might call the “religious libertarian.” They don’t hate rules; they just hate the State making the rules. They believe order should come from God, family, and the Church—not Washington D.C. Perhaps they oppose legalizing gay marriage defending religious freedom, yet also want a small government so the church has room to breathe. Essentially, politics and positions that feel more like Mike Lee than a classical libertarian.

To try and capture this nuance, I further divided the conservative quadrant into a few subtypes:

• Standard GOP - While the factions get the attention, the ‘Standard GOP’ voter—who might like Trump’s judges but hate his tweets, or like Romney’s character but hate his vote on impeachment—is still the dominant force (51%).

• High Populist GOP - The intent was to find the Trumpers. This group is defined as having low trust in Election Results and supporting the US-Mexico border wall.

• High Establishment GOP - The vibe for this group is Romney Republicans. They trust in institutions and have more interventionist foreign policy mindset. They are defined as high trust in elections and supporting sending weapons and military support staff to Ukraine.

• Finally, the High Religious Libertarian - as mentioned above thinking of Mike Lee for this group. Fiscal hardliner who wants to slash federal involvement. I defined this group as opposing an infrastructure spending bill (for construction and repairing roads and bridges) and opposing medicaid expansion.

These definitions are obviously very rough versus a more formal analysis, but I think they work decently to sketch things out.

When we break things out this way, we can see that Mormons are less likely to be considered High Populist GOP in our standard definition and more likely to be considered High Religious Libertarian or High Establishment GOP.

But, that wraps things up for this post.

I am planning on exploring the political compass trends over time in coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe as I dive in more in depth in coming weeks. Has the political compass position of Mormons changed in relation to other religions the last 20 years?

What do you think of this analysis? Do you feel like this is helpful in understanding LDS place in politics? Is there anything that surprised you? Are you interested in analysis like this? What am I missing?

Feel free to share your thoughts below and see you next week.

Introduction

I was reading a post from Ryan Burge here a few weeks ago exploring the fear of death by religious denomination and other demographics that I really enjoyed. I wondered if LDS data was available in the dataset, so we could zoom in closer there. Sure enough, with recoding and cleaning, there were 90 Latter-day Saint respondents across 5 waves of the Chapman American Fears survey and a total US sample of 6,016. So, perhaps you can think of this as a complement to Ryan’s post.

Because of the amount of time it takes to go through each survey individually and clean the data, I only include 1 chart today showing an overall breakdown, but if I find other interesting questions asked across waves, I may include more exploration of this dataset in the future.

Chart

Latter-day Saints scored similarly to Protestants in their fear of death which is on the lower end. I interpret this as a good news signal for Latter-day Saints as the doctrine on the Plan of Salvation may quell fears that might otherwise exist and perhaps does so at higher rates in other religions. The No Religion group being more afraid didn’t particularly surprise me as they may not believe in an afterlife, but the Catholics being our most afraid group did. I am not terribly familiar with Catholic theology, but perhaps one of my readers can shed some light on this point who might know more than me.

Let me know if you have any thoughts to share below.

See you next week.

Code available here. Data downloadable here. Read more about the survey and methodology here.

Introduction

I hope my U.S. friends are having a wonderful holiday weekend and my other friends are having a wonderful weekend.

A few months ago, I explored the interesting American Communities Project where each U.S. county is segmented in 15 diverse community types from Aging Farmlands, Big Cities, and Hispanic Centers to the LDS Enclaves (the only contiguous community found in the most dense Latter-day Saint region in the nation). If you look at their map, the LDS Enclaves are easy to spot.

I have two exciting updates to share with this project:

• Over the past few weeks, I worked with the American Communities Project to publish a piece exploring Americans views on higher education across the nation. I did this in conjunction with several other contractors across the nation where we went to college football tailgates and interviewed random individuals aaking their thoughts on higher education, AI, and the Trump administration’s actions toward universities. For my part, I interviewed a few individuals at the BYU LaVell Edwards Stadium before the BYU vs. Utah game a few weeks ago. If you are interested in reading more, here is the link to the article and to the BYU part.

• They released a new poll (just two weeks ago) with a lot of insight into the LDS Community, so I want to share a few topline findings today zooming in on the LDS Enclaves.

New Poll Insights

If you want the quick takeaways before diving into the charts, here is a brief executive summary:

• The economy is the top concern at the community and national level. LDS Enclavers are worried about affordability, inflation, and taxes. Many see negative changes in affordability and tariffs in their local community in the last year.

• LDS Enclavers are more worried about political polarization than the rest of America and are increasingly more worried about it. It is a top 2 national issue that has grown consistently the last three years.

• LDS Enclavers are increasingly worried about government and business corruption. Their concern for this issue has jumped up from 2024 to 2025.

I have previously shared analysis similar to this here looking at top community and national issues but from their survey in previous years 2023 and 2024. Now let’s look at 2025!

All communities seem to agree they noticed inflation and rising prices. However, the LDS Enclaves seem to agree more being the most likely community to say they have noticed inflation and rising price changes in the last 12 months with overwhelming numbers saying the changes are negative (75%).

A Majority of LDS Enclaves noticed changes from tariffs in their community again with a majority saying that the changes are negative (65%).

Now, respondents were asked about their top community issue.

Like we have seen in previous years, economic related indicators are of top concern for LDS Enclavers with 64% saying inflation was a top 3 issue (vs. 50% in the US overall saying the same). Secondly, LDS Enclavers are worried about taxes. Notably, these have been the top two issues for the LDS Enclaves for all 3 years of the survey 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Now turning to national issues…

LDS Enclavers rank inflation as the top national issue (44%) and close behind is political polarization (39%). Numbers like this may suggest a distaste for the Trump-era culture war and wanting to find a new path.

When you compare to every other community, the LDS Enclaves are the most likely to mark Political Polarization as a national issue and are twice as likely to mark it compared to Trump’s Evangelical Hub strongholds.

Notably, with each passing year political polarization is increasingly seen as an issue for the LDS Enclaves! In 2023, 30% of LDS Enclavers saw it as a top-3 issue compared to 39% in 2025. It is increasingly becoming a concern now almost surpassing inflation for LDS Enclavers.

One of the top rising national concerns for the LDS Enclaves is corruption. Over the last year, Americans and LDS Enclavers both are worried about government corruption.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of these results. Feel free to comment below…

• Why are the LDS Enclaves disproportionately more worried about political polarization than the rest of the country?

• Why are Americans and LDS Enclavers increasingly more worried about political and business corruption in the last year?

• Is there anything else that stood out to you about the new poll results?

I hope everyone can enjoy their weekend.

If you are interested in more methodological details and national results, click the link to read their full report.

See you next week!