Jana Riess: Younger Latter-day Saints are highly devout in some ways but less in others

Last month, I published a column arguing young adult Latter-day Saints in the United States are leaving the church in higher numbers than in the past, according to several nationally representative studies.

The data on that question is clear: Disaffiliation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has increased, and that increase is driven primarily by young adults.

In that column, I promised a follow-up piece on the young adults who choose to stay identified with the church. Are they as religious as their elders are? And are they as religious as other adult Latter-day Saints used to be when they were young?

Here, the data is more mixed, and it’s harder to draw a single conclusion. Let’s just say that Generation Z Latter-day Saints are complicated.

For example, researcher Alex Bass of Mormon Metrics has done a great job recently analyzing Pew findings and Cooperative Election Study data. He’s found that Latter-day Saints overall (not just Gen Z) are less religiously devout than they used to be if we’re measuring the percentage who attend church each week, pray several times daily and say religion is very important in their lives.

His analysis of CES data shows that U.S. church members who hit all of those behaviors were a majority (52%) during the 2008-2012 time period and are now a minority (39%). They’re still more religious than just about all other religious groups of Americans, but the drop in Latter-day Saint religiosity is real.

The sharpest decline is among the 18-to-30 crowd. After adding additional demographic controls into his analysis, Bass found that 57% of people in that age group hit all three metrics of religious devotion in the 2008-2012 period, and now just 37% do. Millennials showed a similar decline, from 55% to 38%, while older members have shown more consistency over the past two decades.

I want to make it clear that this decline for young adults is not merely a “life cycle effect.” In other words, we can’t dismiss this data by saying, “All young people go through a period where they look less religious, and then they come back to religion when they’re older. It’s just a phase they’ll outgrow.”

The reason we can’t dismiss it is that in the CES, which has the largest sample of Latter-day Saints in a publicly available survey dataset (more than 9,000 over the past two decades), today’s young adult members are noticeably less religious than previous generations were when they were that same age.

Benjamin Knoll and I have just finished writing a book called “Leaving Mormonism” that primarily looks at people who’ve exited the church but also includes Next Mormons 2 data about those who stay. We’re especially interested in chronicling changes that have occurred since we fielded the NMS1 back in 2016.

One overall change from the new NMS2 research concerned gender. Among current members, women used to be the most stalwart members. In fact, Ben and I published a research article several years ago arguing that on multiple measures of belief and behavior, women were on average 9 points more religious than men in the 2016 NMS1.

In the NMS2, however, that gender advantage has been largely erased. Today’s Latter-day Saint women look more like Latter-day Saint men than different from them in terms of their religiosity. This is a major shift and a surprise to us as researchers.

Another shift was that generationally, younger members in the NMS2 were sometimes quite religious, depending on what we were measuring.

This was another surprise, given the rising tide of young adult disaffiliation discussed above. But maybe it shouldn’t have surprised us: As more young adults leave the church, it becomes that much more of a conscious commitment for those who want to stay. (Incidentally, some orthodox Latter-day Saints have called this kind of sorting “the wheat and the tares.” This is an offensive and problematic way to regard human beings, as I’ve written before. Can we agree that referring to other people as discardable weeds is uncool?)

Consider Ben’s graph below showing generational continuity on outward measures of religiosity. Among those U.S. Gen Zers who still identify as Latter-day Saints when so many of their peers have left, 68% say they’re in the pews attending church every week. More than two-thirds! That’s on par with the oldest members in the study.

On holding a temple recommend, they’re right in line with millennials and Gen Xers. This might even increase as they age and fulfill the milestones to qualify.

They’re also on par with Gen Xers and boomers/Silents when it comes to serving a mission. Interestingly, it’s millennials who stand out here, with a little over half having served a mission.

In all, on these three measures of outward devotion, Gen Z U.S. members look very strong.

On other measures, there’s a clearer generational decline. Here are three measures of what we might call private or internal devotion — the kind of religiosity other people may not know about or witness.

On these questions, a different picture emerges of Gen Z. One in 5 say they do daily scripture reading, a clear drop from older Latter-day Saints.

We also see stark declines when it comes to daily prayer and garment wearing, although in both cases, the drop happened between the boomer/Silent generations and the Gen Xers.* On those two measures of devotion, everyone but the oldest group is less compliant.

It’s not just “these kids today,” but “these middle-aged members today.”

Findings like this make me less sanguine about people who claim there is some groundswell of religious revival happening among Gen Z Latter-day Saints (or among Gen Z more broadly, on which Ryan Burge’s research is also skeptical).

Let’s look at a couple other measures of religiosity. We saw above that more than two-thirds of Gen Zers say they attend church each week, which is remarkable. But how do they experience it? To find out, the NMS2 asked all current members how they feel about sacrament meeting.

Looking at the boomer/Silent generation on the right of the graph, two-thirds gave sacrament meeting the highest possible rating. They find it uplifting, interesting and something from which they learn.

That top response declines further for each generation after that, where it’s hovering around half for Gen Xers and millennials but then dips down to just 31% for Gen Z. It’s not that they hate sacrament meeting — 1 in 10 try to avoid it. Instead, nearly half of Gen Zers give sacrament meeting the survey equivalent of a shrug emoji. It’s just meh.

This isn’t quite a picture of fully engaged, all-in young adult members. They seem to be picking and choosing. On testimony questions, they have high rates of belief, but not the certainty of older Mormons. For example, 42% are “confident and know” that the church’s First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are God’s prophets on the earth today, nearly a 30-point drop from the boomer/Silent members who say they know this is true (71%).

Nearly 6 in 10 Gen Z members say they pay tithes to the church, but 26% of them give their 10% from gross income (before taxes), compared with 55% of boomer/Silent members who tithe from gross income.

In today’s difficult climate for organized religion, generational slippage is to be expected. We should expect to see young adults leaving the church, just as young adults are more likely than older Americans to leave other religions. We should also expect that among those who stay, they will be devoted in some areas and more relaxed in others.

* The question about garments went only to people who’d received their endowment in the temple, so the Gen Z sample for that question is fewer than 100 people. Let’s take the exact percentages, then, with a grain of salt and just focus on the bigger issue: that there’s a clear drop in garment wearing between the boomer/Silent oldsters and everybody else.

Note to readers • The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.