{"id":49211,"date":"2025-02-27T03:00:20","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=49211"},"modified":"2025-05-29T05:21:30","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T11:21:30","slug":"what-do-latter-day-saints-believe-insights-from-the-2024-pew-religious-landscape-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/02\/what-do-latter-day-saints-believe-insights-from-the-2024-pew-religious-landscape-survey\/","title":{"rendered":"What do Latter-day Saints Believe? Insights from the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-49212\" src=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Screenshot-2025-02-26-at-9.32.33?AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-49213\" src=\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/X3-5.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"652\" height=\"100\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I am slammed with work, so I don\u2019t have time for more than a few cursory, drive-by-observations for now (but they\u2019ve also released the microdata, so I\u2019ll be chewing on this over the next year or so).<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The big story is, of course, that<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/02\/26\/us\/christianity-us-religious-study-pew.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the decline of religion has levelled off<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. This confirms findings from the CES, so we now have two different large surveys telling us the same story.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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. <\/span>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\u2019re 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\u2019re not living in the Handmaid&#8217;s Tale.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ll leave the link <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/religious-landscape-study\/religious-tradition\/latter-day-saint-mormon\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">here<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for interested readers to try it out.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If anybody wants to give us guff about not taking the bible seriously, 80% of Latter-day Saints think it\u2019s important versus 44% of Americans.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are about as many anti-evolutionist Latter-day Saints as there are in the general population (about 17% believe &#8220;Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>90% of Latter-day Saints believe &#8220;God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, including the plants and animals.&#8221; This is much higher than the national average (but I don&#8217;t know offhand how much of the difference is due to differences in belief in God).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>56% of Latter-day Saints &#8220;feel the presence of something from beyond this world&#8221; at least once a week. For the US it&#8217;s 33%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.\u00a0 I am slammed with work, so I don\u2019t have time for more than a few cursory, drive-by-observations for now (but they\u2019ve also released the microdata, so I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0\u00a0 &nbsp; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":49213,"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-49211","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\/2025\/02\/X3-5.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49211","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=49211"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49223,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49211\/revisions\/49223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}