A colossal new study on religion in the United States suggests at least a temporary slowdown in Christianity’s decline and flatlining in the once rocketing growth of the religiously unaffiliated.
Also this: When it comes to performing many of the daily and weekly reps of religious devotion, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are practically peerless.
Take worship service attendance. According to the Pew Research Center’s newly released Religious Landscape Survey of nearly 37,000 Americans, including 565 self-identified Latter-day Saints, members of the Utah-based faith are far and away number one.
Reading scripture outside of church? Also tops.
Same goes for attending a regular scripture study or prayer group, praying daily and instructing their children in the faith tradition.
In many cases, the competition wasn’t even close, with Latter-day Saints coming in sometimes 10 or more percentage points higher than the next faith group (typically evangelicals followed by Black Protestants).
What’s more, all that hard work appears to be paying off. According to the same study, Latter-day Saints also report the highest rates of spiritual peace and experiences with forces from beyond this world.
Before Latter-day Saints start patting themselves on the back, though, it’s good to remember, said religion scholar Laurie Maffly-Kipp, that “religious practice takes different forms in various Christian groups.”
For example, explained the director of the University of Virginia’s Mormon studies program, “Mormons place a lot of emphasis on feeling the prompting of the spirit and scripture reading.”
(Laurie Maffly-Kipp) Laurie Maffly-Kipp is head of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia and the author of "Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier." All in all, she said, the Pew study's findings on Latter-day Saints didn't "really surprise me.”
It makes sense, then, that this would be reflected in the data. She also noted that, in some cases, the difference was only a percentage point or two.
Equally noteworthy is the fact that the study relied on individuals self-identifying as a Latter-day Saint, practically ensuring findings most reflective of the faith’s more observant — as opposed to the legions found in the church’s rolls but not in its pews.
“Overall,” Maffly-Kipp concluded, “these findings don’t really surprise me.”
Church attendance a ‘standout’
Maffly-Kipp did spy a couple of statistical “standouts,” however, including rates of church attendance, a practice also stressed by faith leaders.
Of those Latter-day Saints polled, a sky-high 76% reported attending services in person at least monthly. Perhaps even more impressive was the 69% who said they found themselves in the pews weekly or more.
Their closest competitor, evangelicals, clocked in at 60% and 50%, respectively. Zoom out to the national average and those numbers sink to 33% and 25%.
The Pew study isn’t the first to suggest that Latter-day Saints are super-attenders. A 2024 Gallup report put the percentage of weekly or almost weekly attendees at 67%. This finding matched up neatly with a second study published last year, this one by the B.H. Roberts Foundation, which logged weekly attendance at 71% for those living in the “Mormon Corridor” and 65% for those without.
Of course, how often people say they attend worship services and how often they actually do are two different things.
Sure enough, yet another 2024 report — one based not on self-reporting but cellphone data harvested from millions of Americans just before the pandemic — stated the true percentage of Latter-day Saints who attend regularly may be closer to 15%.
Notably, however, this was still three times what that study produced for the overall worship service activity rate of U.S. adults, a mere 5% — compared to the 30% Gallup measured for 2021 to 2023.
In other words, no matter the real number, Latter-day Saints appear to smoke the competition in terms of turnout.
Scripture study — ‘a routine part of religious life’
The other finding that caught Maffly-Kipp’s eye was the especially high rate of personal scripture study Latter-day Saints reported in the Pew study when compared to other religious groups.
Nearly 60% of church members said they read their scriptures outside of religious services at least weekly, compared to 51% of evangelicals (once again the next highest group) and 22% of all those polled. Add in other devotional materials those numbers jump even higher, to 76% for Latter-day Saints and 66% for evangelicals (as well as Black Protestants).
Then again, this is yet another behavior that Latter-day Saint leaders stress, whereas, she noted, “not all Christians emphasize scripture reading as crucial to their faith.”
Jon Bialecki, an anthropologist who has studied Mormonism, hypothesized that part of the reason for Latter-day Saints’ adherence to this practice (or at least their self-reported adherence), is the result of “institutional design.”
Seminary (a scripture study program for teens), institute (designed for college-age members), the training missionaries receive, and “Come, Follow Me,” a churchwide scripture study curriculum, work to “condition members to view scripture study as an expected and routine part of religious life,” Bialecki suggested.
Moreover, Latter-day Saint rank and file, not professional clergy, are the ones responsible for producing weekly sermons and lessons. It’s an approach, he said, that “necessitates deeper personal engagement with scripture in order to teach and lead.”
Encounters with the divine
Assuming the new study’s numbers are more or less reflective of real life, Latter-day Saints are reaping the rewards of a rigorous spiritual practice.
The report found that, on average, 64% of members feel a deep sense of spiritual peace weekly or more often. Evangelicals were, yet again, next up, at 60%. The national average was 40%.
The percentages for feeling the presence of something from beyond this world weekly or more often were similar, with Latter-day Saints registering at 56%, evangelicals at 52% and the average U.S. adult at 33%.
Bialecki posed a few explanations for this.
First, Latter-day Saints have, he said, “a well-established vocabulary” to describe encounters with the divine (“burning in the bosom,” “still, small voice” and “promptings,” to name a few favorites). This doesn’t just make talking about these events easier; it also “normalizes and reinforces them within the community.”
Second, Latter-day Saints are taught to view a range of experiences, including subtle feelings, as spiritual occurrences, compared to traditions that reserve this label for the more “ecstatic” encounters.
“This is not to say that Mormons do not have profound or intense religious experiences, nor does it imply that Mormon spirituality is in any way superficial,” Bialecki clarified. “Rather, Mormon religious life is structured around frequent, small affirmations of faith — a series of minor but consistent reassurances that collectively serve to confirm spiritual conviction.”
About the study
Conducted in English and Spanish from July 17, 2023, to March 4, 2024, Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey included a nationally representative sample of 36,908 respondents, who were given the option of completing the questionnaire online, over the phone or on paper.
The overall margin of error is plus or minus 0.8 percentage point. For Latter-day Saints, that number is 6.2 percentage points.
