Do Mormon Missions Work?
What does the data say?
Introduction
The two year voluntary church mission is a Latter-day Saints tradition and duty (for men). I shared some fun missionary numbers early on in this blog (e.g. where are missionaries likely to get called? Where are missionaries under-represented/over-represented compared to the world population?)
But today I want to talk about how serving a mission may or may not affect the missionary’s personal level of devotion. This could be one aspect of a mission “working” — if the missionary finishes their mission more devoted than they started. There are other aspects of missions “working” like baptisms, but perhaps that may be a data story for another day.
So, do missions increase devotion for the individual who serves? How does US LDS level of devotion compare to US Christians generally in the US? Do we see a missionary devotion bump for young LDS?
Let’s take a look!
Charts
First, we are looking at US Christians across age. We can see a steady relationship between age and devotion which is defined as saying religion is very important, attending church weekly, and praying several times a day. Note this graph shows 370k respondents.
Now let’s look at the LDS numbers…
Let me point out a few things…
Here we visualize 9,189 LDS across age and we can clearly see the missionary devotion bump which sharply increases til about age 30ish! We can’t definitively say this of course, but since so many missionaries leave and come back during this age range, i think its reasonable to conclude that this effect is from missionary service!
As with US Christians, devotion for LDS seems to increase with age. The bump stabilizes to (perhaps) where it would be without missionary service at age 50 then increases from there.
At every age, Latter-day Saint devotion is higher than US christians. For young LDS people (likely because of the missionary bump), they are more than twice as likely to be devout than other young US christians their same age.
So Do Mormon Missions Work?
If missions “working” is increasing missionary personal devotion, then yes, i think this data provides a solid argument that it does. (← my so-what sentence)
To further explore this, it would be ideal if we could see a break by age of those who served and those who didn’t by their level of devotion. The CES does not ask if you go on a mormon mission unfortunately. But given the ubiquity of the mission call, many young LDS go on missions during the LDS devotion bump, and I can’t think of another good reason we would see it in young LDS, but not in young US Christians overall.
What do you think? Let me know below and see you next week!
The CES captures a single time point, not longitudinal, correct? I assume the sharp LDS increase during the 20’s is at least partly due to disaffiliation of people who are less devout. And the positive correlation with age also surely reflects broader generational cultural differences. Any thoughts on how to directly test the effect on *individuals*?
The real question is whether missions increase devotion, or whether they merely filter out those with low devotion. For example, would a mission still increase devotion if you compared mission-goers with people who wanted to go but couldn't for health reasons?