Is There A LDS Religious Resurgence Happening?
New 2025 Survey Data Update of the Cooperative Election Study
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.
One thing this raises for me is that religious activity, religious identity, and personal conviction are not always the same thing. A group can look more committed on paper either because faith is genuinely deepening or because the core is staying while the edges are falling away. That’s why the revival/retrenchment distinction feels so important. The numbers may show more visible commitment, but they do not yet tell us whether that reflects broader renewal or a smaller, more consolidated base.
On gun control. Anecdotally, after the attacks, people around me were more likely to want the Church to remove its restriction on guns in church so that gun-toting members could help protect other members against attack from outside.