Category: Social Sciences and Economics
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A Lot More People are Leaving the Church Now
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?…
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What Would an “Open Borders” American Church Look Like? Affirmative Action, Munch N Mingles, and Polyglot Patriarchs
I am for open borders (more or less, with some exceptions we needn’t go into here). I was even quoted in a conservative newspaper’s article headlined “Illegal immigrants have a friend in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” based on a Deseret News article I wrote (although it didn’t exactly help my thesis…
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Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II
Years ago I discussed the highly plausible possibility that Latter-day Saints are disproportionately gay (at least for males), because our large family sizes mean we have a higher chance of having older brothers, and older brothers, or the “fraternal birth order effect” has been shown to have a significant influence on male homosexuality. At the…
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Corruption and the Future of the Church
Note: It looks like we’ve missed our monthly “cutting-edge research” installment, but I haven’t forgotten…there was just no peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the Church this month! Hopefully to be continued next month. One of the more interesting studies in political science was the famous diplomat parking paper. In New York City and Washington DC…
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What do Latter-day Saints Believe? Insights from the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey
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…
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Hate Crimes Against Latter-day Saints
Every year the FBI publishes statistics on hate crimes against different racial/ethnic, sexual orientation, religious, and disability groups, including us. (As an aside, you know the FBI is peak woke [in the original, un-ironic sense] when they actually refer to us by the term requested by the Church [“Church of Jesus Christ”].) So how do…
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The Church, Cohort Turnover, and “Change Happening One Funeral at a Time”
The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether: After an initial period of young people…
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Amish and Haredi Family Sizes
I’ve written about the implications of highly fertile, highly religious groups such as the Amish and Haredi Jewish community before. While Latter-day Saint fertility is higher than average, it’s not even close to those levels, and probably won’t ever be unless we revert back to Haredi-levels of communal insularity (or reinstate polygamy), which is a…
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Don’t Mess With The Amish: Demography, Religion, and Block Voting
Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers. In general this election…
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Are Most Members Really Unmarried? Part II With Newer Data
A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking…
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The Black Menaces, The Election, and Demographic Morality Plays
A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes. I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and…
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A Shrinking Church in a Shrinking World
Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment. Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while…
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Latter-day Saint Book Discussion, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast
A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of…
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Is the Church Replacing Itself? Part II
Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better…
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Grinding the Faces of the Poor Through the Lottery
I do not have the brain chemistry for gambling. If I bet my house on a coin flip and won, I would be a sleepless wreck for weeks anxiously wondering about what would have happened had I lost. (Like tobacco, this is one of those Latter-day Saint rules I would keep even if I left…
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Churches with Sound Fundamentals Are Very Robust
Imagine President Nelson and the First Presidency came out with a revelation prophesying that the Second Coming would happen on a specific year (yes, that would never happen in the Church for a great number of reasons, but suspend disbelief for a second). This message was trumpeted from the General Conference pulpit on multiple occasions…
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The Demographic and Financial Future of the Community of Christ
A fun personal anecdote. When I was doing my postdoc at Baylor I was made aware that there was a dataset at the Kirtland Visitor’s Center that had information on early converts that would be useful. After back-and-forthing it with the missionaries there it became clear that it would be much more feasible for me…
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The Doomsday Equation and the Second Coming
The Book of Zachariah has a prophecy about the Lord splitting the Mount of Olives in two in the last days to save Israel at the last battle. I don’t know if that is how it is going to go down, but I like the symbolism of Christ as the second Moses dividing the land…
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The Future of Religion and Partnered Sexual Satisfaction
Midjourney’s interpretation of “Married Mormon couple.” It’s uncanny how well it visually taps into stereotype. Deseret News published another piece of mine, this time about evidence that shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, religious people report more satisfying sex lives. So now for my post-game, more casual, more speculative blogosphere analysis. First off. Yes, I…
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Latter-day Saint College Students Are Very Republican
I think I have mentioned before that I am a huge Ryan Burge fan. Ryan Burge is an Associate Professor of something or another at some college or another, but the point is that he is the preeminent go-to for journalists on data visualizations and insights into the sociology of religion in the United States.…
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Some of my Best Friends Are…, or Representation in our Wards
I thought it would be interesting to run some basic numbers on how many people from different groups we could expect in our wards and other associations if they were representative. There are a number of takeaways here. First, if there aren’t this many people in your ward, Elder’s Quorum, or what have you, then…
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Do People “Follow the Prophet” When it Goes Against Their Ideology? A Quantitative Analysis of Vaccines in Utah
I’ve had a sense for a while now that people tend to exaggerate the influence of the Church on Latter-day Saint and Utah politics. Its influence is important to be sure, but some have this image that half of Utah is ready to jump when 50 North Temple Street says jump, and I’ve always thought…
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Early Utah Was Relatively Egalitarian
In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of…
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About That Washington Post Article
The recent Washington Post article talking about the decline of the Church has been making the rounds. I don’t have a ton of time to go into everything, but I just wanted to make a few points. I wrote an earlier post using the same CES data where I wrote that “if what we see…
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How Many Black People and Asians Were in Pioneer Utah?
In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of the census…
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An Ode to Large Families
Preface: Why It’s Okay to Talk About Family Size Family size is one of those hyper-sensitive issues that people gingerly tip toe around in the Church, and with good reason. First, it abuts with the kind of cultural touchstone gender role issues that the Church has kind of soft preferences around but has generally avoided…
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The Decline in Latter-day Saint Fertility Over the Past Decade
While members of the Church are known for our large families, anecdotally it has seemed that Latter-day Saint childbearing has been cratering and that we’ve been losing a lot of our fertility advantage. The problem is, getting robust, current childbearing metrics requires a fairly large sample size because it requires capturing enough women who have…
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Scams in Zion, Part III: Utah is Indeed the Ponzi Scheme Capital of the US
It’s been a long time coming, but this is part III of a series on “Scams in Zion,” with part I (showing that Latter-day Saint-heavy counties have less fraud) here, and part II discussing our multilevel marketing problem here. Here I’m directly addressing a particular kind of affinity fraud we’re known for: Ponzi schemes.…
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“Oh God, Where Art Thou? (!)” On Anger at God
I had a season in my life when I was angry at God and it was more than a passing blip that was quickly buried under fear of getting struck by lightning. Anger at God is in some ways the summun malum of sin. Having moments of weakness that lead to poor decisions is one…
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Is There Less Crime Around the Manhattan Temple?
The New York Police Department has very fine-grained data on crime frequency, with latitude and longitude coordinates for reported crimes. Of course, I’m sure a cop isn’t walking around with a GPS device to get it exact, and if you look at the data it tends to be laid out on a grid, suggesting that…