Part 3: Are Singles More Likely To Leave The Church?
Exploring Marital Status, Singleness, and Leaving the Church
Introduction
Most people have a loved one who has left the church. This is article 3 in a 4 part series exploring people who leave the church. Stay tuned where I discuss more findings from a statistical model I built predicting mormon leavers. Next week, I’ll specifically look at problems Mormons must confront in the next century.
Multiple times subscribers have asked me questions like… Are singles more or less likely to leave the LDS church? Does age play a role in this relationship? E.g. are older singles more likely to leave than younger ones? If so, what is the drop off point?
This post is my attempt at answering these questions. I designed another separate model with an extra added term specifically designed to test the relationship between marital status and age. So, we not only get a picture of how age affects singles and leaving the church, but also how it affects married people and divorced people.
The same considerations/limitations apply in this post as I detailed in part 2. If you are interested in reviewing those, I’ll point you to the previous post:
So now methodological notes aside, lets discuss the findings.
Charts
First, let’s look at the probability of leaving by marital status other demographic variables held constant.
As you can see, marital status is a very meaningful factor in whether someone leaves the church! People who identify as divorced are more than twice as likely to leave as married people. Singles are more likely to leave than married people, but not as likely as divorced.
Now we are going to explore how age affects the relationship between leaving the church and marital status.
Ok here are a few thoughts I have from this graph and theories as to why the data looks this way…
This graph suggests that young divorced people are particularly vulnerable to leaving the church. This vulnerability decreases over time presumably as older divorced people are more entrenched in their ways and have access to an easier social connection in their ward after losing the social connection of a spouse. Perhaps, older divorcees are not as adventurous in finding social connections as younger people and rely on their ward more and younger divorcees are more willing to take risks in leaving and finding another community.
Single people are more likely to leave the church than married people at every age, but it is more of a slow burn that adds up over time rather than a sharp increase in leaving. For example, a 30yo single is only 4% more likely to leave than 20yo single, but a 60yo single is 20% more likely to leave than a 20yo single. Perhaps singles increasingly feel left out in a pressure that builds over time.
Married people also are more likely to leave over time, but the chances increase quite slowly (slower than singles). Perhaps as children leave the home, married couples are not as motivated to stay at church.
I originally planned for this post to focus on singles and leaving the church as they age, but to me the most interesting part of this story was how divorced people behaved. They were significantly more likely to leave than singles and the relationship with age behaved unexpectedly. I expected the divorced number to stay more or less constant with age - not too see a sharp decline.
Growing up in the church and attending a single’s ward until I was 27, I often felt a sense of concern from church leadership. It felt like they were worried about us (the singles) leaving and thought we were in a vulnerable state. I think this priming led me to expect the single numbers to look more dire than they actually are! It’s true that the single probability of leaving the church is higher than it is for married people at any age, but to me the divorce numbers look much more problematic than the single numbers.
In our data of those raised Mormon, 14% are currently identify as divorced, separated, or widowed. 17% of those raised Mormon are single. There is only a 3% difference in these two groups, but (in my opinion) we focus on singles more than the other groups. These other groups are “technically“ singles, but I think they should be given extra attention than the never married singles. I hypothesize if the Church invested more in resources and help for those divorced, separated, or widowed, there could be notable gains to help bring down the 2/3 who leave in this group!
Concluding Thoughts
What are the main takeaways…
Yes, singles are more likely to leave the church than married people. And yes, as singles become older they are more and more likely to leave, but it is a gradual build up rather than a sharp increase. It's also not that much higher than the married numbers.
Divorcees are most vulnerable to leaving the church especially young divorcees! If I was the church, I would put more effort into creating resources and systems to help those divorced, widowed, or separated who make up a large % of those who leave!
The pressures seem to be reversed for married + singles vs. divorced. For married + singles, it seems there may be a slow growing pressure over time to leave. For the divorced, the older they are the more they look to the church for their community.
Let me know thoughts and theories. Stay tuned for next week which will be part 4!