Conventional wisdom states that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are particularly prone to perfectionism. They are, after all, told the end goal of one’s eternal existence is nothing less than becoming like God.
But what does the data say?
The latest installment of the BYU Studies journal seeks to provide an answer in a series of essays — all dedicated to defining, understanding and measuring perfectionism.
Informing their efforts is a one-of-its-kind database on adolescent church members that Brigham Young University researchers have been cultivating for nearly a decade.
Called the Family Foundations of Youth Development, the project is populated with surveys conducted in 2016, 2018 and 2020 of teens, in and out of the church, living in Utah, Arizona and Southern California. During each wave, the researchers followed up with previous respondents, while simultaneously adding to their pool survey takers, for a total of 2,069 respondents.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) BYU researchers have spent nearly a decade collecting, organizing and analyzing data on the mental health of Latter-day Saint youth and their peers through surveys conducted in Utah, Arizona and Southern California.
Parsing through this data, which also included responses from the teenagers’ parents, religious education professor Justin Dyer and his colleagues came to a surprising conclusion: Latter-day Saints, and religious teens as a whole, were, they determined, half as likely to struggle with high rates of perfectionism than those who had disaffiliated from the religion in which they were raised.
“It was clear,” Dyer, a statistician, writes in the journal’s introduction, “the narrative we commonly hear was missing something important.”
Defining perfectionism
Not all forms of perfectionism are necessarily harmful, Dyer and others argue in the latest BYU Studies journal.
“Healthy perfectionism is when an individual sets high goals and strives for rewards,” the essay “Understanding Perfectionism” reads, “yet they are flexible and understanding if they do not reach all their set expectations.”
The paper’s authors — BYU psychology professor Kawika Allen, undergraduate Jacelin Clayton, psychology researcher Emma Moore and psychologist Debra Theobald McClendon — describe this positive iteration of the trait as one with the potential to “motivate and promote growth.”
In contrast, damaging versions of perfectionism can, they explain, drive individuals to set impossibly lofty goals and berate themselves when they inevitably fall short. These individuals feel disappointment in even their best efforts or believe they are worthy of love and respect only after they’ve achieved perfection.
The more toxic varieties, the authors write, often include “an all-or-nothing mindset — viewing a performance as either a total success or a total failure — with no in-between.”
Notably, BYU religious education professor Michael Goodman writes in a separate essay that while perfectionism shares traits with obsessive-compulsive disorder and its faith-based younger sibling, religious scrupulosity, they are not the same.
“OCD is considered a diagnosable mental health disorder, but scrupulosity is not,” Goodman explains. “That does not mean scrupulosity does not impact mental health. Just as toxic perfectionism impacts mental health in negative ways, scrupulosity can likewise have a profound impact on mental health. … While OCD is generally not related to unhealthy efforts to achieve, toxic perfection results from striving for a flawless performance and feeling worthless when mistakes are made.”
Past research
The Family Foundations dataset doesn’t include research on healthy perfectionism. A 2014 study, however, uncovered high rates among Latter-day Saints.
Meanwhile, a 1999 study did not detect any meaningful difference in the prevalence of perfectionism between Protestant and Latter-day Saint women. The author, clinical psychologist Marleen Williams, who was teaching at BYU when she wrote the report, concluded that perfectionism may be “more related to individual personality style or other factors than to religious denomination.”
More recently, a 2017 study found that active Latter-day Saints were more likely to be intrinsically than extrinsically motivated in their religious practice, meaning motivated less by others’ expectations and more by their own desired outcomes, and that such an orientation was associated with healthy rather than toxic perfectionism.
Then, in 2023, researchers published their findings based on surveys of Latter-day Saints indicating a positive correlation between scrupulosity and toxic perfectionism, with both resulting in feeling anxiety about one’s relationship with God.
What current research shows
Parsing through answers from more than 1,600 respondents cataloged in the Family Foundations data, researchers found that Latter-day Saints were, at 12%, just about even with their peers of other faiths when it came to the percentage of its population who struggled with high rates of toxic perfectionism.
Zoom in on former Latter-day Saints, and that number more than doubles. Neither are former members of the Utah-based faith alone in this corresponding jump. According to the study, nearly 1 in 4 of those who had disaffiliated from other faiths struggled with high levels of toxic perfectionism.
Agnostics and atheists, meanwhile, landed in the middle of the mix with 20%.
Flip the focus to the percentage from each group who register low levels of unhealthy forms of perfectionism and a similar story emerges. Latter-day Saints and counterparts from other faiths all fall near the 30% mark, whereas just 12% of those who have left the church rank low on the perfectionism scale, followed by 18% of those who left other religious groups.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Notably, the number of individuals in each of these subgroups was nowhere near equal. Latter-day Saints, at 41%, comprised the lion’s share of the respondents, followed by other Christians at 28% and those with no religion, atheists and former Latter-day Saints at 8% each. Just 4% fell into the category of “other religion” and 3% into the group of those who had disaffiliated from a religious group other than the Latter-day Saint faith.
Nonetheless, Goodman concludes, “Contrary to what some may assume, religion overall is associated with lower levels of toxic perfectionism.”
Contributing factors
That the dataset tracked many of the same people over time allowed researchers to look backward for possible contributing factors for these trends. What they found was telling.
“Most results suggested that [toxic] perfectionism,” Goodman writes, “led to poorer connections with one’s church and one’s relationship with God.”
The poorer those connections, the less likely they were in their later teen years to stick around. Put another way, those who struggled with toxic perfectionism were more likely to self-select out of their religious group — whatever that group might be.
Protecting against perfectionism in faith
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) By emphasizing God's abundant, unearned grace, religious scholars say, parents and others can help foster a healthy and productive version of faith in youth that is more likely to sustain lifelong membership.
Parents and leaders looking to help adolescents avoid the path of disaffiliation are not helpless.
According to the same research, by focusing on intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons for religious practices (leaning into the benefits of a personal relationship with God, for instance, rather than the need to keep up appearances at church), adults can support healthier, more resilient faith in young people.
So, too, can stressing a grace-oriented approach to faith, in which God’s love is freely given, rather than a “legalistic” one, defined by a need to earn God’s blessing through exacting obedience.
Relatedly, the researchers warn, adults should be on the lookout for negative religious coping mechanisms, including guilt and a perceived distance from divinity and one’s faith community, and seek to replace these with a more collaborative approach to faith centered on seeking support for life’s challenges from God and one’s religious group.
“Understanding these issues,” Goodman writes, “provides parents and church leaders with important information that will hopefully help them in their attempts to help the adolescents within their influence thrive both emotionally and spiritually.”
