Given Catholics are quite close to LDS, could we possibly get a similar analysis for Catholics? I'm especially curious to see if Hispanic retention is lower or higher than the population at large and also the retention rate for people who grew up in a high rate of religious practice.
There are other features of LDS that would affect retention. The church has a few geographic clusters: Utah, parts of Idaho and Nevada. They also educate their kids who excel enough to head off to prestigious secular universities and the lucrative employment that follows, mostly outside the geographic clusters. Ryan's graphs indicated political liberal leanings as part of the exit ramp, with the university as a potential demarcation point. The Pew questions likely included some educational attainment and geographic questions. And as these kids become enmeshed as a small successful minority in new places, there is also a challenge of marriage to partners of other faiths and decision on raising children outside the locations of high LDS presence.
Observant Mormonism also puts some lifestyle restraints. Perhaps as people become more integrated to secular culture, some decide they like drinking coffee and quaffing a pint with friends in college, the military, or after work.
As a Jewish observer, we have many of the same challenges with generational transfer, but higher retention. And unlike the LDS, we have a much clearer correlation between childhood observance and adult retention. It is unclear what creates this different outcome.
I’m going to guess a big factor with Jews is that cultural Judaism is a thing while cultural Mormonism really isn’t. You can be a Jew that goes to church or an atheist Jew, but atheist Mormon really isn’t a thing
Can you envision technology adoption being a factor in the difference?
I know that Orthodox communities are careful about technology access, especially with kids but also with adults.
According to some other LDS folks I've heard that the LDS approach to technology has been "schizophrenic" with no clear guidance (and certainly no limits).
some familiarity with the ultra-orthodox limitations. These are the folks who live in a self-contained world, including their schools. The more secular modern Orthodox who have a presence at the major universities and professions would have access to the full spectrum of cyberspace. They may screen for themselves what they access.
I do not know about technology limitations in the LDS world, either as official policy or voluntary limitation.
Do you know if there's much teaching in modern Orthodox communities about self-screening? I've run across some myself, but don't know how widespread it is.
I think your retention-by-attendance graph is backwards. You should not show the distribution of attendance by retention, but should show retention rates for each part of the distribution of attendance. The effect looks like it's probably very large on that basis!
Love any analysis on less-mainstream groups. Thanks!
The elephant in the room here continues to be technology use and decision making about technology use.
I don't know if that's something that can be assessed with your data, but everything I've seen across all the high-tension groups suggests that it's probably causal.
Garrett Jones (LDS), economics prof from George Mason is who led me down the path of thinking that unregulated internet adoption is what transformed the LDS in the 90s.
I can't help but wonder if navigating the reality of today's world makes it harder to stay LDS. When what you experience in the world differs from what you find in your religion. I think a question for all religions is how does faith help you navigate the world you are a part of, instead of becoming a smaller and smaller shelter from the world. I also wondered as I was reading how the rate of retention for LDS folks varied by geography--Salt Lake City (very liberal), the rest of Utah (not so much) and other parts of the country. Great post.
I think that you're correct. But also the advent of the internet has allowed LDS members to independently research the veracity of the LDS Church's historical claims and other suppositions.
"I think a question for all religions is how does faith help you navigate the world you are a part of, instead of becoming a smaller and smaller shelter from the world."
You might have it backwards. When it comes to technology, being sheltered actually seems to be a huge factor in retention and an accelerator of growth. In conservative Anabaptist communities, for example, retention has been increasing the last couple decades.
I can't square the high retention rate of Jews that you report here with the many laments i have read about non-Orthodox Jews who grow up, marry non-Jews and leave the faith, so that the Reform and Conservative branches are dying out.
I think that you might be onto something. Reading Joe Heinrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World", he splits people into Tribal (organized by blood) and Individualistic (organized by ideas). But what if you're both? That seems like a powerful identity combination.
There are quite a lot of studies on what happens to interfaith couples with a Jewish partner. The retention rate, at least for identity, of the Jewish partner is quite high. The non-Jewish spouse is more likely to accept Judaism than the Jewish partner is to accept Christianity or an Asian religion. Christmas/Hanukkah swag is not pretty common. In a survey these people usually identify with the "Just Jewish" or unaffiliated option.
Atheism is very different. There are Jews of all backgrounds who either reject or are skeptical of God. Belief is not mandated, performance of requirements is, so they still eat kosher and belong to synagogues.
The denominations have a separate history. There has been a large migration of American Jews of interfaith families away from Conservative synagogues to Reform ones. Many stay unaffiliated. The attrition of Conservative institutions is more complex with a lot of different opinions of why this happened. Reform institutions are waning in a more gradual way, but they remain a niche as a catch-all destination for people who identify as Jews who want community.
Fascinating and personally timely article as I have recently delved into a study of the decline specifically in the US of both the LDS and Roman Catholic churches. Both are struggling to grow and retain members. The difference is that the RC Church is open, transparent, and honest with its membership numbers whereas the LDS leadership, it seems to me, obfuscates and denies.
I'm curious about how dynamic the "nones" are as a group. As your article indicates, many former LDS members become non-religious -- as is true, in varying degree, with other religious groups. But how constant or dynamic are the nones? Once a none always a none?
Their membership numbers appear to be inflated; a topic that others have covered in depth elsewhere. All very fascinating. What is especially interesting are the comments of "PIMOs" -- LDS members who are "physically in but mentally out."
Relatedly, one compelling site that examines LDS membership trends and claims is fullerconsideration.com. The host seems objective and cites his sources.
The LDS Church has a centralized leadership structure which is fundamentally different from the decentralized nature of the Protestant churches with which I'm acquainted (recognizing there is much I don't know). From an anecdotal perspective, I've seen folks leave specific denominations due to misalignment with local church leadership or culture and join an unrelated church/denomination which is a better personal fit. They remain within the larger Protestant tent even though they no longer consider themselves members of their former religious home. The LDS Church’s structure doesn’t allow for that definitional flexibility. Does this contribute to how retention rates are calculated and reported?
I believe your technical note from today’s post speaks to this question from a slightly different perspective.
I’m new to your substack and will search through your posts to see if you’ve addressed this topic directly.
Justin Dyer answered my question last night in an article published in the Deseret News. The retention rates are not measured in a similar manner. When they are, the data present a different -- but no less compelling -- situation. Quoting from the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, retention rates for mainline Protestant denominations are as follows:
Baptist family = 54%
Lutheran family = 47%
Methodist family = 37%
Episcopalian family = 35%
Congregationalist family = 31%
Presbyterian family = 30%
That said, there is much insight to be gleaning from your post and I will continue to explore your research to learn about this topic.
Thanks for commenting, Mike. You are correct. Also, Justin Dyer is a professor at Brigham Young University, so another LDS connection there. That said, the data come from the Pew 2023-24 Relgious Landscape Study, so an independent source.
Dr. Burge's 70% Protestant retention rate overall is from the same source.
Disaggregating that total rate, however, provides a different insight. The Pew report states: "Among all U.S. adults who were raised Protestant, 44% still identify with the same denominational family as they did as children, while 26% identify with a different one. An additional 22% are religiously unaffiliated, 2% identify as Catholic, and 4% identify with another religion."
I'm suggesting that comparing the average 44% retention rate for denominational families provides a better grounding for comparison purposes with the 54% rate for the LDS Church.
Much ground here for further discussion and research.
thanks for this article. something that jumped out to me was the stark difference in the presentation of the "Religious Retention by Tradition" graph in your post, and the same data source shown by dyer et al: https://i.imgur.com/5HUpTlD.png
what accounts for the dramatic discrepancy between the two presentations of the Pew RLS data?
but then it seems as though the dyer data undermines the thesis that the latter-day saints have a serious retention problem when compared with most protestants, doesn't it? what's the right way to understand this?
I think there are multiple ways to measure retention.
We know that two-thirds of people who leave the LDS become nones. I think it's fair to say that these people are not retained in religion.
But using families is also tricky.
If someone is raised Episcopalian, but becomes United Methodist, is that the same as LDS --> None? I would argue that it isn't. Because that's still the same broad family.
I've got data that's a bit older from the GSS that shows evangelical retention at 69% and mainline retention at 56%.
>If someone is raised Episcopalian, but becomes United Methodist, is that the same as LDS --> None? I would argue that it isn't. Because that's still the same broad family.
i really appreciate the explanation, but this seems a bit arbitrary and a type of special pleading. is the united methodist the same church as the episcopalian church? no, it's not. if someone leaves the methodist church, their retention rate goes down no matter where the person who leaves decides to go. it seems your categorization has masked enormous retention issues across different churches, which paints a misleading picture of what's really going on.
if we are evaluating retention rates of churches, then we should be doing that - but your analysis seems to conflate things by comparing an individual church (the lds church) with 3 broad categories that each have their own complications with respect to retention. a significant number of jews aren't practicing, but they don't deny they are jewish. catholics can never step foot back in a church after their baptism and still count themselves as catholic.
calling a catholic or a jew "retained” simply because they retain the label is going to grossly overstate actual retention rates.
and with respect to protestants - they can defect from a bible based evangelical church to start going to a rainbow-flag-shout-your-abortion unitarian church, and your analysis model would show that their has been no change in retention - at which point i would ask what does retention even mean here?
you do great work, but this particular comparison seems apples-to-oranges. the lds figure itself may be perfectly valid, but comparing it directly with protestantism, judaism, and catholicism makes it difficult to conclude that the lds Church has an unusually severe retention problem without first making the categories genuinely comparable.
This whole line of inquiry is theoretically fun to discuss, but here's why it's ultimately tilting at windmills.
I will never be able to test it going forward. The two major surveys (GSS and Pew RLS) do not include fine grained denominational questions anymore because of privacy concerns.
So the question of: why can't you just compare Southern Baptist retention to LDS? Is not really about definitions anymore. It's just logistically impossible.
alright, but it sounds like you are saying "we can't get all these different kinds of apples, it's just impossible, and so we just have to be okay comparing apples to oranges."
if you are unable to do a fair and proper evaluation the answer is *not* to just go ahead and do an unfair and improper evaluation - and we're not talking about a little rounding error here, or managing approximations or generalizations to help make a narrative make sense - this is just bad science.
like i said - i think you usually nail it and are a great contributor to the field, but it seems that you botched this one, and now you are blaming it on the lack of available data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a wonderful post, Dr. Burge. Thank you.
Given Catholics are quite close to LDS, could we possibly get a similar analysis for Catholics? I'm especially curious to see if Hispanic retention is lower or higher than the population at large and also the retention rate for people who grew up in a high rate of religious practice.
I'm putting it on the list.
There are other features of LDS that would affect retention. The church has a few geographic clusters: Utah, parts of Idaho and Nevada. They also educate their kids who excel enough to head off to prestigious secular universities and the lucrative employment that follows, mostly outside the geographic clusters. Ryan's graphs indicated political liberal leanings as part of the exit ramp, with the university as a potential demarcation point. The Pew questions likely included some educational attainment and geographic questions. And as these kids become enmeshed as a small successful minority in new places, there is also a challenge of marriage to partners of other faiths and decision on raising children outside the locations of high LDS presence.
Observant Mormonism also puts some lifestyle restraints. Perhaps as people become more integrated to secular culture, some decide they like drinking coffee and quaffing a pint with friends in college, the military, or after work.
As a Jewish observer, we have many of the same challenges with generational transfer, but higher retention. And unlike the LDS, we have a much clearer correlation between childhood observance and adult retention. It is unclear what creates this different outcome.
I’m going to guess a big factor with Jews is that cultural Judaism is a thing while cultural Mormonism really isn’t. You can be a Jew that goes to church or an atheist Jew, but atheist Mormon really isn’t a thing
Can you envision technology adoption being a factor in the difference?
I know that Orthodox communities are careful about technology access, especially with kids but also with adults.
According to some other LDS folks I've heard that the LDS approach to technology has been "schizophrenic" with no clear guidance (and certainly no limits).
some familiarity with the ultra-orthodox limitations. These are the folks who live in a self-contained world, including their schools. The more secular modern Orthodox who have a presence at the major universities and professions would have access to the full spectrum of cyberspace. They may screen for themselves what they access.
I do not know about technology limitations in the LDS world, either as official policy or voluntary limitation.
Do you know if there's much teaching in modern Orthodox communities about self-screening? I've run across some myself, but don't know how widespread it is.
I think your retention-by-attendance graph is backwards. You should not show the distribution of attendance by retention, but should show retention rates for each part of the distribution of attendance. The effect looks like it's probably very large on that basis!
Love any analysis on less-mainstream groups. Thanks!
The elephant in the room here continues to be technology use and decision making about technology use.
I don't know if that's something that can be assessed with your data, but everything I've seen across all the high-tension groups suggests that it's probably causal.
Garrett Jones (LDS), economics prof from George Mason is who led me down the path of thinking that unregulated internet adoption is what transformed the LDS in the 90s.
"Love any analysis on less-mainstream groups. " Ditto! Waiting for an article about The Salvation Army.
If someone can point me to data, I would love to use it.
If you send me a PM I can get you some.
I can't help but wonder if navigating the reality of today's world makes it harder to stay LDS. When what you experience in the world differs from what you find in your religion. I think a question for all religions is how does faith help you navigate the world you are a part of, instead of becoming a smaller and smaller shelter from the world. I also wondered as I was reading how the rate of retention for LDS folks varied by geography--Salt Lake City (very liberal), the rest of Utah (not so much) and other parts of the country. Great post.
I think that you're correct. But also the advent of the internet has allowed LDS members to independently research the veracity of the LDS Church's historical claims and other suppositions.
"I think a question for all religions is how does faith help you navigate the world you are a part of, instead of becoming a smaller and smaller shelter from the world."
You might have it backwards. When it comes to technology, being sheltered actually seems to be a huge factor in retention and an accelerator of growth. In conservative Anabaptist communities, for example, retention has been increasing the last couple decades.
I can't square the high retention rate of Jews that you report here with the many laments i have read about non-Orthodox Jews who grow up, marry non-Jews and leave the faith, so that the Reform and Conservative branches are dying out.
I think it's because Judaism is both culture and religion. Lots of atheists Jews out there. Not a lot of atheist LDS.
I think that you might be onto something. Reading Joe Heinrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World", he splits people into Tribal (organized by blood) and Individualistic (organized by ideas). But what if you're both? That seems like a powerful identity combination.
There are quite a lot of studies on what happens to interfaith couples with a Jewish partner. The retention rate, at least for identity, of the Jewish partner is quite high. The non-Jewish spouse is more likely to accept Judaism than the Jewish partner is to accept Christianity or an Asian religion. Christmas/Hanukkah swag is not pretty common. In a survey these people usually identify with the "Just Jewish" or unaffiliated option.
Atheism is very different. There are Jews of all backgrounds who either reject or are skeptical of God. Belief is not mandated, performance of requirements is, so they still eat kosher and belong to synagogues.
The denominations have a separate history. There has been a large migration of American Jews of interfaith families away from Conservative synagogues to Reform ones. Many stay unaffiliated. The attrition of Conservative institutions is more complex with a lot of different opinions of why this happened. Reform institutions are waning in a more gradual way, but they remain a niche as a catch-all destination for people who identify as Jews who want community.
Fascinating and personally timely article as I have recently delved into a study of the decline specifically in the US of both the LDS and Roman Catholic churches. Both are struggling to grow and retain members. The difference is that the RC Church is open, transparent, and honest with its membership numbers whereas the LDS leadership, it seems to me, obfuscates and denies.
I'm curious about how dynamic the "nones" are as a group. As your article indicates, many former LDS members become non-religious -- as is true, in varying degree, with other religious groups. But how constant or dynamic are the nones? Once a none always a none?
Thanks for your always interesting analyses.
In Burge's other work on the Nones, he's shown that they're a relatively dynamic group who can be "recaptured" if they can be motivated.
What to you mean when you say that LDS leadership obfuscates and denies information about its membership numbers?
Their membership numbers appear to be inflated; a topic that others have covered in depth elsewhere. All very fascinating. What is especially interesting are the comments of "PIMOs" -- LDS members who are "physically in but mentally out."
Relatedly, one compelling site that examines LDS membership trends and claims is fullerconsideration.com. The host seems objective and cites his sources.
It's interesting. PIMO sounds like the inverse of a secular Jew, who might be a POMI.
The LDS Church has a centralized leadership structure which is fundamentally different from the decentralized nature of the Protestant churches with which I'm acquainted (recognizing there is much I don't know). From an anecdotal perspective, I've seen folks leave specific denominations due to misalignment with local church leadership or culture and join an unrelated church/denomination which is a better personal fit. They remain within the larger Protestant tent even though they no longer consider themselves members of their former religious home. The LDS Church’s structure doesn’t allow for that definitional flexibility. Does this contribute to how retention rates are calculated and reported?
I believe your technical note from today’s post speaks to this question from a slightly different perspective.
I’m new to your substack and will search through your posts to see if you’ve addressed this topic directly.
Justin Dyer answered my question last night in an article published in the Deseret News. The retention rates are not measured in a similar manner. When they are, the data present a different -- but no less compelling -- situation. Quoting from the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, retention rates for mainline Protestant denominations are as follows:
Baptist family = 54%
Lutheran family = 47%
Methodist family = 37%
Episcopalian family = 35%
Congregationalist family = 31%
Presbyterian family = 30%
That said, there is much insight to be gleaning from your post and I will continue to explore your research to learn about this topic.
"Justin Dyer answered my question last night in an article published in the Deseret News."
The Deseret News is owned by the LDS Church. Objectivity might be an issue.
Thanks for commenting, Mike. You are correct. Also, Justin Dyer is a professor at Brigham Young University, so another LDS connection there. That said, the data come from the Pew 2023-24 Relgious Landscape Study, so an independent source.
Dr. Burge's 70% Protestant retention rate overall is from the same source.
Disaggregating that total rate, however, provides a different insight. The Pew report states: "Among all U.S. adults who were raised Protestant, 44% still identify with the same denominational family as they did as children, while 26% identify with a different one. An additional 22% are religiously unaffiliated, 2% identify as Catholic, and 4% identify with another religion."
I'm suggesting that comparing the average 44% retention rate for denominational families provides a better grounding for comparison purposes with the 54% rate for the LDS Church.
Much ground here for further discussion and research.
thanks for this article. something that jumped out to me was the stark difference in the presentation of the "Religious Retention by Tradition" graph in your post, and the same data source shown by dyer et al: https://i.imgur.com/5HUpTlD.png
what accounts for the dramatic discrepancy between the two presentations of the Pew RLS data?
They are using the protected use file which has a lot more options for childhood religion.
ah okay. that makes sense.
but then it seems as though the dyer data undermines the thesis that the latter-day saints have a serious retention problem when compared with most protestants, doesn't it? what's the right way to understand this?
I think there are multiple ways to measure retention.
We know that two-thirds of people who leave the LDS become nones. I think it's fair to say that these people are not retained in religion.
But using families is also tricky.
If someone is raised Episcopalian, but becomes United Methodist, is that the same as LDS --> None? I would argue that it isn't. Because that's still the same broad family.
I've got data that's a bit older from the GSS that shows evangelical retention at 69% and mainline retention at 56%.
>If someone is raised Episcopalian, but becomes United Methodist, is that the same as LDS --> None? I would argue that it isn't. Because that's still the same broad family.
i really appreciate the explanation, but this seems a bit arbitrary and a type of special pleading. is the united methodist the same church as the episcopalian church? no, it's not. if someone leaves the methodist church, their retention rate goes down no matter where the person who leaves decides to go. it seems your categorization has masked enormous retention issues across different churches, which paints a misleading picture of what's really going on.
if we are evaluating retention rates of churches, then we should be doing that - but your analysis seems to conflate things by comparing an individual church (the lds church) with 3 broad categories that each have their own complications with respect to retention. a significant number of jews aren't practicing, but they don't deny they are jewish. catholics can never step foot back in a church after their baptism and still count themselves as catholic.
calling a catholic or a jew "retained” simply because they retain the label is going to grossly overstate actual retention rates.
and with respect to protestants - they can defect from a bible based evangelical church to start going to a rainbow-flag-shout-your-abortion unitarian church, and your analysis model would show that their has been no change in retention - at which point i would ask what does retention even mean here?
you do great work, but this particular comparison seems apples-to-oranges. the lds figure itself may be perfectly valid, but comparing it directly with protestantism, judaism, and catholicism makes it difficult to conclude that the lds Church has an unusually severe retention problem without first making the categories genuinely comparable.
This whole line of inquiry is theoretically fun to discuss, but here's why it's ultimately tilting at windmills.
I will never be able to test it going forward. The two major surveys (GSS and Pew RLS) do not include fine grained denominational questions anymore because of privacy concerns.
So the question of: why can't you just compare Southern Baptist retention to LDS? Is not really about definitions anymore. It's just logistically impossible.
alright, but it sounds like you are saying "we can't get all these different kinds of apples, it's just impossible, and so we just have to be okay comparing apples to oranges."
if you are unable to do a fair and proper evaluation the answer is *not* to just go ahead and do an unfair and improper evaluation - and we're not talking about a little rounding error here, or managing approximations or generalizations to help make a narrative make sense - this is just bad science.
like i said - i think you usually nail it and are a great contributor to the field, but it seems that you botched this one, and now you are blaming it on the lack of available data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯