Are more people leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? If so, why?
Are more people leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? If so, why?
Date: Thursday, March 14th
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 PM
Location: Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute, LNCO 2910
Since the early 1990s, the “Nones”—people with no religious affiliation—have grown from a single-digit minority to roughly a third of the U.S. population. For many years, Latter-day Saints resisted the national trends toward secularization, their numbers bolstered by three reliable factors: religious conversions, deep religious commitment, and large families. But the last decade has seen all three of those pillars weakening, judging from multiple national studies as well as a fresh wave of data from the Next Mormons Survey, which was fielded in 2016 and again in 2022–23. Today, Latter-day Saints remain more religious than most other Americans, but less committed to church activity than they used to be. What’s going on? This lecture will give an overview of current research about Mormons’ religious affiliation and commitment, and place that into the context of the overall secularization that’s happening throughout the United States. It will also discuss why some people leave the LDS Church and the language they use to describe that decision and their post-Mormon lives.
