LDS Retention Pt 1

Posted on February 18, 2012
Filed Under Religion | 11 Comments

I’ve been meaning to respond to a post by Joanna Brooks from a few weeks back. It’s about how Mormonism isn’t the fastest growing religion anymore. I wanted to focus on one paragraph dealing with our growth rate.

Phillips and Cragun also place LDS growth rates not at 30% but at 16%—a rate on par with general US population growth. “Despite a large missionary force and a persistent emphasis on growth,” Phillips and Cragun write, “Mormons are actually treading water with respect to their per capita presence in the U.S.” In fact, additional studies by Cragun and Phillips show that retention rates of young people (young men especially) raised Mormon have dropped substantially in the last decade: from 92.6% in the 1970s–2000s to 64.4% from 2000–2010. Rising rates of disaffiliation go a long way towards explaining the gap between LDS Church records and the ARIS population estimates.

Now first I’ve not looked at statistics going too terribly far back. But I’m pretty sure the Assemblies of God has been growing faster than the LDS Church in terms of self-identification for at least 20 years. According to the ARIS report on self-identification between 1990 – 2008 the Assemblies of God grew at 31.2% while LDS grew at 27.0%. Of course the fastest growing group are the Nones: agnostics and atheists. They grew at an astounding 138.4% rate over the same period. I should note that the Church itself has carefully distanced itself from claims to be the fastest growing for some time.

According to the National Council of Churches, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the second-fastest-growing church in the United States. However, despite its increasing numbers, the Church cautions against overemphasis on growth statistics. The Church makes no statistical comparisons with other churches and makes no claim to be the fastest-growing Christian denomination despite frequent news media comments to that effect. Such comparisons rarely take account of a multiplicity of complex factors, including activity rates and death rates, the methodology used in registering or counting members and what factors constitute membership. Growth rates also vary significantly across the world. Additionally, many other factors contribute to the strength of the Church, most especially the devotion and commitment of its members.

Of course individual members haven’t always been so cautious.

Still it is undeniable that the Church’s growth rate has not been great. Further there has been a big decrease in retention of the young (from 92.6% to 64.4% the last decade). The big question then becomes why. Joanna’s answer to that question is

Today, after decades of institutional emphasis on orthodox belief and behavior, it may be difficult for some in the highly observant Mormon core to imagine a cultural Mormonism that enfranchises the less observant. But as the 2012 presidential contest brings increased scrutiny and self-awareness of Mormonism as a culture (complete with its own foodways), perhaps the time is right for Mormons to explore how to nourish and strengthen Mormon identity, even if our twenty-first century numbers don’t live up to the projections.

By less observant I assume she means people with unorthodox beliefs (by which I mean out of the LDS mainstream such as her own political views) or people not following the social norms on drinking, drugs, or sexuality. I’m far from convinced that’s the issue though. For one the faiths that are growing faster than we are tend to offer a more restrictive set of social norms. For instance the Assemblies of God typically denounces dancing. On most social issues the faster growing forms of Christianity are more restrictive on most things than Mormons and typically far more to the right politically. Quite the opposite of what Joanna seems to suggest. The faiths that do tend to embrace what I think Joanna is advocating tend to have significantly slower growth. For instance “Mainline Christianity” (meaning Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalian and United Church of Christ) decreased in population by 10.4%.

What accounts for our recent lack of retention though?

The book American Grace by Putnam and Campbel has the overall Mormon retention rate as 60%. That figure is when your parents were Mormon you remain Mormon. It’s important to be careful here as many studies use similar terms but have different criteria. It’s dangerous to compare statistics from different studies because of this.

I’ll have some thoughts on why our retention rate dropped in a followup post.

 

Related posts:

  1. LDS Growth Rates
  2. LDS Retention Pt 2
  3. Mormon Divorce
  4. Pew Mormon Study
  5. Education in Utah and America
  6. Why are Religious Happier?

Comments

11 Responses to “LDS Retention Pt 1”

A few comments. Going by Pew

1) I think the Mormon retention rate is higher than 60%. For a child raised Mormon:
70% stay Mormon
15% become non religious
14% convert to one of the other groups (mostly Protestant).

These BTW are much higher than you see for evangelicals.

2) The real drop for Mormons is intermarriage. When they marry out, they convert out. On the other hand Mormons have the 2nd highest rate of homogeneous marriages of all faith subgroups in the USA.

Joanne Brook’s comments about Jews are spot on. Mormons in the 2010s look a like Jews in the 1950s. Marry in you stay in, marry out you convert out. Not handling intermarriage well is the huge bleed for the LDS church, Where she’s wrong is that the Jewish culture of the 1950s already had in place a liberal wing, they didn’t create it to deal with these problems. Judaism never effectively handled the intermarriage problem, however so the Jewish road is not one the LDS wants to stay on.

I don’t find the Pew study trustworthy. Too many of their stats are just completely out of line with all other studies. For instance most studies I’ve seen of self-identification have at least half not regularly attending church whereas Pew has 77% attending weekly! That’s completely unbelievable. For other reasons to distrust that Pew study see this post from a few weeks back.

Intermarriage is a big drop as you note. Part of that is because Mormonism is a “costly” religion and a non-Mormon spouse is not likely to want to get involved in those costs. It’s quite different from say a Catholic and a Baptist where there are some differences but honestly from the big picture not many. Even non-Christian and Christians groups don’t compare unless one of them is as costly as Mormonism. Ironically Judaism is probably the best parallel – meaning one of the forms where more traditional forms are followed. Probably one of the Germanic groups like Hutterites or Amish is an even stronger example – although the costs for those groups are well beyond Mormonism. (Probably an Orthodox Jew would be too – but then there we have problems due to laws about gentiles that complicate things. So the best parallel would be someone stricter than a liberal reform Jew without being an orthodox Jew)

Hi Clark.

In the broader studies I think you want to use longitudinal data. I agree that 77% for weekly attending for self identified seems awful high.

As far as intermarriage and the Jewish analogy. I’d agree. To successfully convert to Judaism requires a substantial change in lifestyle and intensive instruction. Even for the liberal sects something like a 200 hr education commitment. Further having undergone that commitment there is a real tendency towards practice.

As for costly, if the religion were generically costly you would expect to see a low level of intergenerational retention like you do with many cults. So I’d argue that it appears the religion is more costly is especially costly to potential converts.

4 John Mansfield on February 29th, 2012 6:38 am

The idea in the Phillips and Cragun study that only 4.4 million Americans claim to be Mormon compared with 6.1 million counted by the LDS Church seems reasonable enough, but I wonder if they are overestimating Mormon identification in the past, and thereby underestimating growth. Brooks wrote, “In fact, additional studies by Cragun and Phillips show that retention rates of young people (young men especially) raised Mormon have dropped substantially in the last decade: from 92.6% in the 1970s–2000s to 64.4% from 2000–2010.” That 92.6% figure is hard for me to believe, the idea that only one in thirteen LDS youth from the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s ceased to identify as Mormon as an adult.

See my pt 3. They used gss data which has a very small sample size and may not be trustworthy. Honestly the only one I give much reliance to is the ARIS.

I find the 92.6% figure hard to believe as well. I graduated from HS in 1972 and grew up in a suburban southern Ca ward that was typical for my area at that time. We had large numbers of young men (we had to have 2 deacons quorums) and I’d say that not much more than 50% of the guys I grew up with are still active LDS.

To be honest the 70% figure is still a pretty high figure considering how much is demanded of LDS as compared to Catholic or Evangelicals (who both have similar figures).

I think the 70% figure isn’t the worry spot for the church.

We have 14 Million Members, but 64% of them are first generation, as of 2006.

That means ~5M are not converts and ~9M are converts.

Pew says this ratio for active members is 1 in 4 being first generation and 65-70% retention among those who are not first generation.

So, doing the math, that leaves about ~3M of those born in the the church, and only ~1M of those first generation members as active.

Overall, that’s ~30% retention, 65% for born in the church, but ~10% for converts.

I’m not completely sure those stats are right for the US though. Note I’ve only been dealing with US figures. The issues with worldwide figures are quite different with very different issues. I think the main issue with the worldwide Church is in not accommodating to the social differences of other countries.

Pew I just don’t trust with regards to their Mormon stats. There are too many obviously wrong figures.

All that said I’d think 10% – 20% retention for converts would be about expected. If anything it’s probably a bit high. (At least based upon my mission) It depends upon the time frame in question but most converts come for a few weeks and then stop. Elder Oaks says 80% of inactivity occurs within two months. That was back in March 2003. I think the difference is that I think things were worse from the 60′s through the 80′s.

You hear various GA statements and I think most people assume the Church is running their own studies. I’m not sure that’s correct though as a lot of what I hear seems based off the same well known (and in some cases problematic) studies. On the other hand given Pres Hinkley’s focus on improving convert retention even given decreases in conversion it might make sense they have stats on this from studies they’ve conducted. I can but say that while I think national social changes account for a lot of the decrease in successful conversion since the 80′s I also suspect some of the changes made by the Church in the 90′s also hurt despite the best of intentions.

One extra thing, the 2009 Pew Study on Mormons had the number of converts in the US making up 26%. Now some of the figures might be different as neither Pew nor ARIS count people under 18 in their figures. (Thus ARIS’ national percent for Mormon as 1.4% is probably a touch low) But notice how different that figure is from what Elder Pieper quotes. These statistics are really all over the place. (Admittedly Pieper is probably quoting international figures but I’d lay really good odds he’s not quoting self-identification figures)

[...] blog on LDS retention. I’ll not go over my main analysis again. (You can read it at my blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) What I wanted to go into is just how hard it is to figure out how well [...]

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