The 2024 PRLS just dropped. Taken every 8 or so years, the PRLS is one of the primary sources of religious beliefs and practices of Americans. While there are other, larger and more consistent surveys that either have a larger sample size (the CES) or a larger range of questions (the GSS), the PRLS is unique in that it has a large number of specifically religious questions and a large enough sample size that we can get a significant number of Latter-day Saints. 

I am slammed with work, so I don’t have time for more than a few cursory, drive-by-observations for now (but they’ve also released the microdata, so I’ll be chewing on this over the next year or so).

• The big story is, of course, that the decline of religion has levelled off. This confirms findings from the CES, so we now have two different large surveys telling us the same story.  

 

• This survey also confirms the finding in other surveys that the gender gap in religion is closing, with women about as religious as men now according to some surveys, whereas historically women have been more religious. It appears that according to the PRLS women are maintaining a slight religious attendance edge. Some background on this, for years a myth has been very popular that women are leaving religion (or, in some variations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in particular) in droves because patriarchy. However, the inconvenient truth is that in Christian societies women have been more religious than men for quite some time. Now that we’re seeing the gap close or even possibly reverse in some surveys I suspect the old narrative will rear its head, but keep in mind that you have to really squint to see any kind of a gender difference in favor of men, so no, we’re not living in the Handmaid’s Tale.

 

• We’re still holding at 2% of the population in terms of self-identification. However, in terms of year-to-year changes in percent LDS, the CES is probably superior since it has a larger sample size and more years. 

 

Where the PRLS really shines is comparing our beliefs and activities to others. For this the PRLS has already generated a really handy tool that allows you to compare us against the average American. The results are about what you would expect, and there are some fun gems. I’ll leave the link here for interested readers to try it out.

 

• If anybody wants to give us guff about not taking the bible seriously, 80% of Latter-day Saints think it’s important versus 44% of Americans. 

 

• There are about as many anti-evolutionist Latter-day Saints as there are in the general population (about 17% believe “Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”)

 

• 90% of Latter-day Saints believe “God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, including the plants and animals.” This is much higher than the national average (but I don’t know offhand how much of the difference is due to differences in belief in God).

 

• 56% of Latter-day Saints “feel the presence of something from beyond this world” at least once a week. For the US it’s 33%.