The ✨BYU effect✨ On Church Attendance

How does attending BYU affect young mormons church activity vs. attending a non-church-affiliated school?

Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

Introduction

This article and the previous one are about trends and ideas around mormon college students - especially at BYU. Check out the last on whether higher education makes Mormons Democrats in my previous post.

We have arrived at yet another week of the 55k college student dataset looking at another question. Is there a ✨BYU effect✨ on church attendance?

We are specifically look at how mormon students answered the church attendance question which asks students to self-report how often they attend church.

Note that while there were 257 colleges included in this analysis, I did not find BYU-Idaho or BYU-Hawaii in the data - though I would have loved to analyze data for those too!

To better answer this question, a survey asking general Mormon respondents which college they attended would be more helpful. But, given the data we have today, we will try and find some insight into this question.

Charts

Well, things are looking pretty stable with BYU Mormon church attendance decreasing across years a little and Mormons attending other colleges increasing a little. But, WOW, look at the difference in self-id Mormon church attendance in and out of BYU. Around 8 in 10 Mormons at BYU say they attend church weekly or more, but only around 3 in 10 Mormons attending other colleges say that! Why is this such a big difference?

My first thought goes to church size? If you are in a college town outside of Utah, how big is your church community really? You perhaps don’t have as much pressure to attend if your college branch is very sparse or even non-existent. Also, we must remember there are ecclesiastical endorsements for BYU students in order to keep attending which perhaps plays a role in these numbers.

But then I got thinking, while we don’t have BYU-I or BYU-H, we do have data for two other schools in Utah: Utah State and the University of Utah. So how do these school break out?

I looked for UVU as well, but it was not included in this dataset.

Well, two observations…

1. There is such a large difference in weekly attendance by school! I honestly thought that all schools would be more or less the same, but there are really large differences in weekly attenders by school.

2. BYU and USU may decrease in students attending weekly as college year increases, but UofU and Other the trend may go the opposite way. More attend as college years increase in those schools.

When looking by gender, we see something that confirms previous findings - that mormon women are slightly less likely to attend church weekly or more. Those who identify as non-binary or other are very unlikely to attend church weekly or more.

When we look at a major breakdown, teaching majors are the most likely to attend weekly or more and social science and natural science majors are the least likely.

This supports our last post which saw a democratic shift most pronounced in Stem women and social science men. Well in this post, we see that mormon women in stem (engineering, business, and natural science) are less likely to attend church weekly or more, but are more likely to attend than the social science and humanities men. And, of course, there is a connection between identifying as democrat and leaving the mormon church (which would mean lower attendance!)

Also, I do think this data supports what I have written about previously that there is beginning to be a reversal where Mormon men being more religious than Mormon women among the youngest generation and we can see some of that here.

Religion Gender Gap Among Mormon Young Adults

Conclusion

So what are the takeaways today….

1. Does going to BYU affect church attendance?

   1. If we are looking at the overall weekly church attendance.. YES. Mormons at BYU have a really high weekly church attendance rate and much higher than Mormons at USU, UofU, and other colleges combined.

   2. If we are looking at the change in church attendance through school, Not necessarily. It seems more younger BYU Mormon students attend more than older BYU students whereas at some other colleges the weekly church attendance is higher for older Mormon students.

2. We see more evidence for the gender switch were young mormon men are acting more religious than young mormon women in college church attendance. Remember this data was collected in 2024 - very recent! The difference is small(Men+3), but I imagine if we collected this dataset 10 or 20 years ago, we would see a gender gap, but the other way.

3. There are some differences by college major with Mormon church attendance. Social science and natural science majors least likely to attend weekly; humanities, arts, and teaching majors most likely to attend.

Code available here.