Part 1: Demographic Profile Of Those Who Grew Up Mormon But Left

Data breakdown on Active, Less-active, and Disaffiliated Mormons from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

Introduction

Most people have a loved one who has left the church. This is article 1 in a 4 part series exploring people who grow up in the church, but leave. Stay tuned the next few weeks where I discuss a statistical model I built predicting mormon leavers and my findings. Very excited to share what I’ve learned!

Today, I wanted to take a look at a specific subgroup… those who were raised as “Mormon”, but chose to leave at some point in their life and now identify with a different religion or no religion.

To answer this question, a survey must qualify in at least 3 ways:

1. It must have a question about one’s current religious affiliation

2. It must have a question about the religious affiliation in which one was raised

3. It must have a large enough sample size to study the small group of Mormons in the US.

Unfortunately, not very many surveys meet all three of these specifications. Fortunately, the Pew Religious Landscape survey does, but the last time this study was run was now a decade ago. This will have to suffice for now.

For those interested, I emailed Pew not long ago asking about a 3rd Pew Religious Landscape Study, and they said that they have considered this, but cannot give any more details… So, hopefully that means it will be forthcoming eventually.

Charts

Demographic Breakdown

For our first chart, I decided to make a table showing a demographic profile of three groups… Active members, Less active members, and Disaffiliated members. I define each of these groups in the caption of the table.

A few things I’ll point out…

1. There is very clearly a HUGE party gap! Among active members, 82% identify as or lean Republican to 13% as Democrats; however with the disaffiliated, only 39% identify as or lean Republican to 55% as Democrat.

2. We also see marital status differences between these groups. Active Mormons are the most likely to be married and Less-Active and Disaffiliated Mormons are more likely to be everything else (Single-Never Married, Divorced, Widowed, Living with Partner, and Separated)

3. As others have noted, Ex-mormons (and in our case Disaffiliated Mormons¹) tend to be younger than Active Mormons (55% under age 45 vs. 44%).

4. An interesting nuance breaks out from this chart that i never realized before. I previously wrote that US Mormons on average are modestly less wealthy and less educated than the US population. This data doesn’t refute those claims, but suggests that if you were to filter only to active members the story is a bit different. I plan on diving into this further in future posts…

5. One last difference I’ll point out is that the Less-Active and Disaffiliated Mormon groups are less white than the Active Mormon group.

Which religions do Disaffiliated Mormons join?

When those raised Mormon leave, typically they join no other religion. If they do, the are most likely to join a christian religion such as Evangelical, Mainline, or Catholic.

Do Disaffiliated Mormons believe in God?

Even though a majority of the disaffiliated join no religion, more than three quarters report believing in God. Though not as many are convinced of other things like whether heaven and hell exists and fewer still believe the Bible is the word of God.

See you next week!

1. The way I define disaffiliated Mormons is growing up in the church but leaving. Whereas generally an ex-mormon may be defined as anyone who was a part of the Church at any point in their life, but no longer identify as such. Essentially, my definition doesn’t include disaffiliated converts (who joined the church when older but were not “raised” in it).