Note: recently there’s been a lot of hullabaloo in various fora about the results of a BYU Studies study that discussed youth retention rates. For what it’s worth, I wrote this post before all that dropped; even though it’s relevant to that theme, this isn’t some kind of a direct response to that back-and-forth. 

I had the privilege of teaching seminary a few years back to 2-3 students (they really cut up those seminary teaching districts finely), one of which was one of those high schoolers whose ambition knows no bounds who’s going to get a triple PhD/MBA/MD/JD/MFA degree or whatever, so it was great to hear that she had been accepted into Yale. A few years later I ran into her again at a ward function and yes, she was still at Yale and was excited about having just put in her mission papers.  

From one perspective, that isn’t supposed to happen. It’s an old canard in some circles that the Church needs to fundamentally change or it will lose its best and the brightest. This idea actually has an old pedigree. Hugh Nibley recounts an episode where O.C. Tanner bemoaned that the Book of Mormon is “driving the best minds out of the Church.” And then famously Thomas Jefferson prophesied all the youth of his generation would die Unitarians.

In the more modern iteration seminary students who leave and are exposed to university learning and ideals are supposed to question everything about their cisheteronormative patriarchal colonial upbringing and become activists. (Although the university-to-activist pipeline has had a pretty rough go the past couple of years, for myriad orthogonal reasons we don’t need to go into here). 

The thing is, I just don’t see it. Of course, it happens, a lot of people leave, including the youth, including some who are accepted to elite universities, but as a widespread phenomena the idea that the smart people leave, so only the dummies who don’t have a sophisticated take on higher criticism or whatever are left doesn’t seem to pan out. It is probably true that people with more of a social activist-y bent tend to leave, but that’s not synonymous with sophistication, education, or just plain having their stuff (Times and Seasons is PG) together. Anecdotally, in my extended family the ones that have their life course ducks in a row tend to be the more church-y ones (Sorry nephew(s) so and so, we love you and I doubt you’re reading this, but you could get off your butt and stop playing video games all day.) Less anecdotally, My BYU Studies article on this shows that stayers are actually more educated and wealthier, and Alex Bass’ analysis of more recent data has shown the same. More educated, higher paying careers, higher chance of marriage, more children. That doesn’t make the Church’s truth claims valid, of course, or even necessarily establish causality, but trying to blackmail the Church into changing or else the best and the brightest will leave is a self-serving fantasy more than anything.

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*One caveat, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were niches within academia or particular demographics where the education gradient was reversed–the data is old but David Knowlton found some evidence for this, showing that members who received higher education in humanities, for example, were more likely to leave. So yes, if you’re going to graduate school in queer theory I’m assuming your staying an orthodox member is pretty close to nil. I’ve run into more than my fair share of super smart types from my high school and college years that are in their umpteenth year of humanities/social science graduate school and are very much not church-y. However, those fields are not the totality of what it means to be a sophisticated human being, and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt up in seminars on postcolonial readings. That’s not to bag on those fields, just that they don’t count for sophistication or capital W wisdom points any more than, say, an accounting degree or physics PhD.