{"id":48280,"date":"2024-11-11T03:01:57","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T10:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=48280"},"modified":"2025-05-28T21:14:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T03:14:17","slug":"are-most-members-really-unmarried-part-ii-with-newer-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/11\/are-most-members-really-unmarried-part-ii-with-newer-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Most Members Really Unmarried? Part II With Newer Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago I wrote a post<\/a> 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 at the Church’s raw records, which, as anybody who has systematically gone through a non-Utah ward list can tell you, is primarily populated by people who were baptized earlier in life but now have virtually nothing to do with the Church.<\/p>\n

I went ahead and updated this analysis with numbers from the Cooperative Election Survey, and basically found the same thing: the majority of Church members in the US are indeed married.(At the outset it is worth noting that here I am only considering the US Church; I don’t have any data to make any kind of judgment on the demographics of the international Church).<\/p>\n

However, we have an interesting new wrinkle, the trend is clearly in the direction of most members not fitting the archetype of the married member. Specifically, while in the late 2000s about 70% of Church members were married, that number dropped a little over 10 percentage points over the next 15 years. In 2023 54% of members in the CES were married; however that was with a sample size of 259 members, 2022 with 62% married had a sample size of 706, so given the larger sample size I’m inclined to think the true rate is somewhere in the high 50s.<\/p>\n

What else does the data show? First, self-identified members in domestic partnerships, while negligible in the late 2000s (below 1%), are becoming more apparent, but obviously their numbers are still low (about 2-3% in recent years).<\/p>\n

Second, it appears that the decline in marrieds is coming at least in large part from the increase in never-marrieds, although it’s hard to know about the time trend for divorced and widowed for sure because the sample sizes are so tiny at that point and their proportions jump around.<\/p>\n

So to summarize: yes, the soundbite is still wrong; most self-identified adult Church members in the US are married, but it very well might not be that way in the future.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 at the Church’s raw records, which, as anybody who has systematically gone through a non-Utah ward list can tell you, is primarily populated by people who were baptized earlier in life but now have virtually nothing to do with the Church. I went ahead and updated this analysis with numbers from the Cooperative Election Survey, and basically found the same thing: the majority of Church members in the US are indeed married.(At the outset it is worth noting that here I am only considering the US Church; I don’t have any data to make any kind of judgment on the demographics of the international Church). However, we have an interesting new wrinkle, the trend is clearly in the direction of most members not fitting the archetype of the married member. Specifically, while in the late 2000s about 70% of Church members were married, that number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/LDS_Marital.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48280"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50290,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48280\/revisions\/50290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}