Part 4: Two Looming Problems For The Church In The Next Century
Two Hurdles Mormons Will Face In The Coming Years
Introduction
Most people have a loved one who has left the church. This is article 4 in a 4 part series exploring people who leave the church. Stay tuned where I discuss findings from a statistical model I built predicting mormon leavers. If you are curious about this topic, look back through my previous 3 posts!
📢📢 This past Wednesday the new Pew Religious Landscape Survey just dropped with 2024 data! I of course did not know this when I began writing this 4 part series. I have planned to add a part 5 giving preliminary data updates with the new data📢📢
But anyways let's continue with part 4.
As people and demographics change, its natural for the institutions created in a previous time to adapt. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has adapted to change allowing technology to revolutionize scripture study, missionary work, and many other things. In previous times, it has also evolved with the creation of the Doctrine & Covenants (adapting to the changing needs of the early saints), creating the state of Utah, and other policy changes more apt for a modern age. The church will continue to adapt as time continues.
As I did this analysis, I noticed at least two pressure points that the church in the US may need to confront in the future. These aren't problems for this year or next year, but sometime likely in the next 20 to 50 years these pressure points will grow.
There are caveats to my analysis. Please read them in part 2 for more information. For now, let’s proceed.
Charts
Problem 1: Non-whites
This is a chart I shared previously showing one possible projection of what race and the church could look like in the US 40 years from now becoming majority non-white which would be 20 years after the US is projected to become majority non-white.
But, among those who grew up in the church, what is the probability of a non-white person leaving compared to a white person?
One problem the church must confront is how to better appeal and keep non-white members. As you can see in the figure above, Non-white members are twice as likely to leave than white members. Remember the figure above is only among those who claimed to grow up in the church. I imagine the retention rate of non-white US converts could be worse than this!
As the church in the US becomes majority non-white, the church will have to work to better understand and support non-white members to stay in the church. If not, the number of active members will suffer increasingly over time!
Problem 2: Non-marrieds
It shouldn’t be too hard to spot the trend… the number of married Mormons is dropping. This is likely driven by at least two things: 1)People, including Mormons, are waiting longer to get married which makes snapshots like these above where we just have more single people in the population 2) More people are staying permanently single. Fewer people in society are getting married. People are dating less and people have fewer friends.
One additional thing I’ll note with the chart above is that even though married Mormons are decreasing, divorced Mormons are not. Divorced Mormons are still the same proportion (if not a bigger proportion) than 15 years ago. This could suggest that the Mormon divorce rate is rising.
So, what is the problem?
The problem is that divorced and single people are more likely to leave the church. And as singles and divorced people increase in the Mormon population, so likely will the percentage of leavers. Married individuals are a stronghold group for the church!
I showed what happened the past 15-20 years with Mormons and their marital status, but what does the next 20 years look like? What about the next 50? Will the % married keep decreasing or will it hit a stopping point? I’m not sure, but one thing is clear the marriage institution is weakening in our society and Mormons are being affected by it. If the church continues to be affected by it and their probability of leaving remains constant, the church will have a growing problem of the “unmarrieds/exmarrieds” leaving.
So, in summary, the church in the US has a hard time keeping in two groups: non-marrieds and non-whites. And the issue is that these two groups are growing quickly! So, any thinking about how to better include these groups in the next 50 years is a worthwhile endeavor.
Thanks for joining me on this 4 part series. I really learned a lot and hopefully you learned a thing or two as well.
I am excited to hear feedback. What did you think about this 4-part series? Should I do more series like this or should I stick to one off posts? Leave a comment with your thoughts on this or anything I talked about in these posts! What are you interested in learning in future posts?
Code for the 4-part series is available here. Dataset is available here.
Both the series and the one-offs are fun!