Nearly six years after their landmark study on generational divides within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” research duo Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll are back with a second installment.
Or nearly. The book’s publication date has yet to be announced, but an early glimpse at some of their key findings on the faith’s U.S. membership provides additional insights into a question dogging religious groups of all types in today’s era of institutional decline: What causes a person to leave or remain in the fold?
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jana Riess pictured with her — and Benjamin Knoll's — 2019 book about millennial Latter-day Saints.
The researchers’ observations suggest that the answer is not just a matter of personal preference but also a decision determined partly by a person’s demographic profile — albeit not always in the ways one might expect.
Whether someone disaffiliates or not is “not all about individual choices,” said Riess, a columnist for Religion News Service. “Those are important. But it’s also about the kinds of societies and institutions we create and who feels comfortable in them.”
Leavers, liminals and loyalists
Riess and Knoll gathered responses from nearly 1,600 respondents, whom they categorized into three buckets: leavers, liminals and loyalists.
Leavers, of whom there were 178 in all, were those who had been a church member at one point but had since left. Pretty straightforward — although, notably, only a fraction of this group had actually followed through the formal steps of removing their names from the faith’s rolls.
Liminals, who at 878 constituted the largest chunk of respondents, bucked the “in or out” binary by either participating regularly despite major doubts, or the exact opposite — holding onto their beliefs in the faith’s teachings despite inactivity. According to the study’s authors, this understudied group constitutes the majority of current Latter-day Saints.
Finally, the book applies the term loyalist to full-tithe payers who self-described as “very active.” The researchers included 542 such individuals in their study.
How the groups differed
Church leaders have raised eyebrows in recent years with their support of nondiscrimination laws for the LGBTQ+ community, going so far as to put their support behind a 2022 federal law legalizing same-sex marriage.
Nonetheless, higher-ups, and particularly senior apostle Dallin H. Oaks, next in line to lead the Utah-based church, have been adamant that there is no room in Latter-day Saint theology for anything but marriage between a man and a woman and that gender is defined as biological sex at birth.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Dallin H. Oaks, a senior apostle and next in line to lead the worldwide faith, has been one of the most vocal among church higher-ups on the issues of gender, sexual orientation and marriage.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that sexual orientation jumped out as one of the most impactful factors on whether a person disaffiliates, with 80% of leavers reporting being heterosexual, compared to 98% of loyalists. Liminals, at 86%, most closely match the total U.S. population on sexual orientation.
Education, too, had a meaningful — and startling — role to play in a person’s decision to stay or go. Contrary to the trope of school as a secularizing force, the findings showed a positive correlation between church involvement and academic achievement. More than half the loyalists had a four-year college degree or more versus 23% for liminals and 28% for leavers.
Finally, loyalists were, at 68%, far more likely to be married to their first spouse, compared to 38% of liminals and 33% of leavers.
Areas of lesser impact
Perhaps just as telling were the factors that didn’t translate into much of a statistical difference among the groups — the types of communities they live in, for instance.
Loyalists were slightly more likely to live in the suburbs and leavers in rural areas. Besides that, researchers found little variation in respondents’ urban/suburban/town/rural composition, punching a hole in the narrative of cities as places where faith in God goes to die.
Race, too, had only a small impact, with 2 in 10 liminals identifying as part of a minority group, as opposed to 1 in 10 of loyalists and leavers.
What others are saying
Sociologist Ryan Cragun, co-author of the book “Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization,” said these findings are in line with other research, including his own showing that sexual minorities are nearly twice as likely to leave religion as their straight counterparts.
The result indicating that around half the loyalists have a four-year college degree or more was “a little higher than I would expect,” Cragun said, but nonetheless supported an argument he and fellow researcher Rick Phillips have been making for a few years now. And that is that the church “is effectively a white-collar religion.”
“What leaders are expected to do for their [church] assignments,” Cragun said, “aligns closely with what is taught in college and would be expected in white-collar or professional jobs.”
Quin Monson, a political scientist at church-owned Brigham Young University, had less to say about any particular finding than he did with the overall project — one, he said, that is likely to drum up “substantial interest.”
Creating a representative sample of respondents is challenging, Monson stressed, particularly when one is starting with the already limited pool of a minority religion. Given this, he cautioned against focusing too much on any single percentage and to instead look for what trends the researchers uncover in their forthcoming book.
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