I finally got around to calculating the Church leaving rates from the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey. The PRLS is one of the few surveys that has questions about both former and current religious affiliation with a large enough sample size that it can tell us something about Latter-day Saints.
So what do we find? According to the 2023-2024 PRLS, 54% of people who were raised Latter-day Saint still identify as such. So about half.
However, when we run the same numbers for 2014 it was 64%. And when we run the same numbers for the 2007 wave it was 70%.* So it looks like we’ve had a decent drop-off in the past twenty years. That means for every ten people who were raised LDS about three would have left in 2007 world, and five would have left in 2024 world, so two more out of ten (or 1.5 out of ten depending on how you’re rounding). This isn’t insignificant (but, to be fair, neither is it the “nobody used to leave now everybody is leaving” story that some observe). So the anecdotes and general vibes people have been getting of more people leaving the Church do have some bearing in the data.
I thought this in turn would have an effect on the composition of the Church, making it more of a Church of converts. However, in 2007, 74% of Church members were raised in the Church. In 2014 this number was 69%, and in 2024 this number was back up to 74%. So it does look like the raised-in-the-Church crowd is still the demographic ballast. In terms of a percentage, about 0.4% of the U.S. population are converts to the Church across all three waves (well, technically 4%, then 5%, and then 4% again in 2024, but at this point we might be asking too much of our sample size to really be able to say much about those trends).
So how are we still growing? As I’ve said a bajillion times elsewhere here at T&S, I think we owe a lot to population momentum (Google site:timesandseasons.org “population momentum” for my more detailed thoughts on this), or the fact that our parents had a lot of children, so as that demographic wave crests we’re still going to be seeing some Church growth from that, but it’s essentially due to reproductive decisions made long ago, so it shouldn’t be seen as indicative of anything we’re doing now.
Of course, whenever I do one of these posts people are quick to point out their own solution, but I really don’t see an easy fix to the demographic fundamentals of a secularizing society that has exponentially more lifestyle options than our parents and grandparents had (you can tell why I wasn’t Mr. Popular in my European mission’s zone conferences). The fact is the only religious groups that are growing rapidly in the developed world are ones that very intentionally shut off those other lifestyle options like the Amish and Haredi Jews. (Although the Assemblies of God is doing okay for themselves right now), so no, this would not all be different if the Brethren listened to your hot take on this or that 21st century culture war issue.
It is what it is, but again on a global level the fundamentals are strong, we’re not doing as badly as most, and we’ve been through much worse.
*Quick caveat, in 2007 they did this stupid thing where they weighted the continental US and Hawaii/Alaska differently, so the 2007 numbers are for the continental US, but at these numbers it shouldn’t matter much.
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