At a time when more people are stepping away from faith in the United States, the best available data on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shows the faith has “the highest active retention rate of any religion in the country,” according to new report released Friday by Brigham Young University.
The 54-page report, compiled by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, brings together the highest-quality available U.S. data on Latter-day Saint faith and well-being, while considering different ways of measuring retention.
The report estimates that 50% of Latter-day Saints continue to identify with the faith as adults. Although significantly lower than previous decades (82% in the 1980s, 76% in 1990s, 58% in the 2000s), this identity-specific retention rate is still higher than other Christian denominations, except Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who are slightly higher.
This new report comes at a time when The Church of Jesus Christ has seen record increases in convert baptisms, congregational units, temples, and Church Educational System enrollment, including in the United States.
Yet throughout the report, the BYU researchers — Justin Dyer, Jenet Erickson, Sam Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner and David Dollahite — do not minimize the continued toll taken by the faith within a secularizing broader culture.
“With more and more individuals disengaging with institutions across the board, religious institutions have not been spared,” the authors note. “Yet data show Latter-day Saints have relatively high levels of religiousness, well-being, and retention even as the United States has experienced a general decline in religious activity.”
Seeking an accurate understanding of the U.S. religious landscape
“In a time of upheaval in nearly every aspect of society, it should not be surprising that religious institutions are also facing significant challenges,” the authors write in the report.
That’s what makes it so important to get an accurate picture of what’s taking place by taking into account all the best data sources, they say.
Justin Dyer, lead author and editor-in-chief of BYU Studies, told the Deseret News he is concerned that incomplete, cynical narratives of faith disaffection “detach people” from faith and “lead them to believe that something that’s good for them is no longer good.”
By contrast, “having good data makes all the difference in how we see Latter-day Saints,” Dyer said. “When the data are poor, our vision is poor.”
The report examines four nationally representative data sources (the 1997-2022 General Social Survey, the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, the 2025 Spiritual Seismology Survey, and the 2006-2024 Cooperative Election Survey), along with the longitudinal Family Foundations of Youth Development Study that followed 2,000 Latter-day Saint youth from 2016 to 2024.
Here are four additional takeaways from the report:
1. Within a secularizing culture, Latter-day Saints continue to demonstrate uniquely high religiosity and well-being
Regardless of how comparative faith data is sliced up, the report’s authors note Latter-day Saints are “at or near the top” of both religiousness and overall well-being. Datapoints on both worship at church and home stand out:
- According to the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, they say Latter-day Saints have the “highest rate of church attendance of any major religious group.” Among Latter-day Saint Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (1997-2012), 76% attend church at least monthly — more than any other major U.S. religion.
- Pew also found Latter-day Saints with the highest rates of personal scripture reading. And an estimated 80% of Latter-day Saint parents pray and/or read scripture with their children — the highest rate compared with other faiths.
- Latter-day Saints are also among the highest in the percentage of those who feel “religion is very important in their lives,” including 69% of Millennials/Gen Z and 77% of older generations.
In terms of well-being:
- Latter-day Saints are among the highest in their overall sense of well-being, reflected in high levels of feeling “a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being” and being “very happy with life.”
- Latter-day Saints are also among those most likely to say their family lives are “very good” or “excellent.”
Jenet Erickson, associate professor of church history and doctrine at BYU, said the report counters messaging that people are leaving the Church of Jesus Christ because of a “toxic culture.”
“Even in the midst of a really secularizing environment, the gospel of Jesus Christ really works,” Erickson told Deseret News. “It’s why people stay with it.”
2. Retention numbers need to be placed in a broader context to be understood accurately
The BYU team was interested not only in “whether an adult continues to identify with their childhood religion” but also “whether he or she is, to some extent, engaged in that religion as an adult.” That explains the “active retention rate” of 42% of Latter-day Saint adults who continue to attend services at least monthly, which was the highest among U.S. faith groups.
When it comes to growing de-identification across decades, the BYU team pointed to changing cultural willingness to do so, reflected in a noticeable drop over time in the percentage of those attending infrequently and being willing to identify with the faith. As Erickson explained, “It might have been in the past that a Latter-day Saint wasn’t really attending church, but when they were asked as an adult … they’d say, ‘I’m Latter-day Saint.’ And that’s different today. So if you’re not attending church, you’re less likely to say you are a Latter-day Saint.”
She argued this may have to do with higher stigma associated with being religious, with the report suggesting the “costs of continuing to identify with a religion may have increased” while “the costs of not identifying have decreased.”
Even so, Erickson was still struck by how much faith is being retained “in the face of a larger culture that has become so much less connected to institutions.” The report, for instance, adds:
- The Church of Jesus Christ is “one of the least likely religious groups to lose millennial members” — with the faith retaining these 30- to 45-year-old members at a “higher rate than all other Christian denominations except Adventists.”
- And the longitudinal data found 75% of youth who indicated they were a Latter-day Saint in 2016 in their early teens still reporting they were active in their faith eight years later in their early twenties.
The report emphasized that a relatively small percentage of people are rejecting the faith altogether and that these data sets “do not provide insights into individuals who may have returned to religious faith later in life.” Of those who de-identify from the Church of Jesus Christ, they point out that 54% still see spirituality or religion as important, and about 2 in 3 “leave open the possibility of returning.”
3. Young Latter-day Saints generally show higher levels of faith, with fresh challenges apparent among young women
Hardy, a BYU psychology professor, remarked on how this challenges popular perceptions of younger people as de facto less religious. For instance:
- Longitudinal data also show that Latter-day Saint youth (12-18) “have the higher rates of religious service attendance, daily prayer, and daily scripture reading than their peers of other faiths.”
- Erickson said their team was surprised by how robust the faith participation was among Gen Z members (aged 14 to 29) who also had the highest rate of church attendance and personal worship of any major religious group.
- These younger generations of Latter-day Saints are also among the highest in overall well-being compared to other religious youth in terms of feeling “deep spiritual peace” and being “very happy with life.”
Past perceptions of faith among men and women are also being challenged. For instance, younger Latter-day Saint women appear to have a “much lower retention rate” compared with older women (20 percentage points lower).
“Women seem to be less sure about institutions today, the institution of marriage, the institution of religion,” Erickson said, citing growing numbers of young women who perceive marriage to be a “transition of loss — a transition of loss of autonomy, a transition of losing identity.”
But that narrative is not, in fact, true, Erickson said. “We see in the data that those who have families and those who are connected to religion are much more likely to be happy.”
“The data is pretty clear that marriage benefits women as much as it benefits men — and married mothers with children are our happiest women in America,” she said. “The gospel still works in women’s lives, but there’s a cultural messaging that is making them suspicious and less sure of it.”
4. Long-term research confirms three predictors of de-identifying
After tracking Latter-day Saints from their early teen years across over the subsequent decade (2016—24), BYU’s Family Foundations of Youth Development study found the following “most significant predictors of de-identifying” from faith when they were older:
- Those young people who reported feeling God’s presence every day were six times less likely to eventually de-identify with the faith.
- They were also more likely to de-identify if they perceived a disconnect between their social or political views and those of the church. That included concern with the church’s stance on same-sex marriage.
- For young people, more social media use led to an increase in disaffiliation, and owning a smartphone tripled the likelihood of de-identifying. More screen time generally was also linked with diminished religious commitment, in almost a dose-response relationship:
- 8% of those reporting no video watching at an early age later de-identified.
- 12% of those who watched one hour a day de-identified.
- 16% of those who watched two hours a day de-identified.
- 22% of those who watched three hours a day de-identified.
Digital media may increase “dissonance between youth and their religion’s positions on social issues by negatively portraying such positions,” the report noted. Gardner, a professor of church history and doctrine at BYU, has described how many are “soaking” in this pervasive cultural “zeitgeist” without realizing.
For instance, she said, once a person takes for granted that “no person or institution can claim to possess ultimate truth” or that “it is better to maintain one’s autonomy at all costs” or that “authentic selves are continually at risk of being denied or oppressed,” then it shouldn’t be hard to see why it may be difficult for that person to stay committed to a faith tradition that declares eternal truth, invites sacrifice and believes in a “mighty change” through Christ.
The most significant variable
The power of people ”having meaningful, regular encounters with God” was a main takeaway from the report for Dollahite, a professor in the School of Family Life at BYU. He reflected on his own conversion at the age of 18 because of a “profound” and “transcendent” spiritual experience after reading the Book of Mormon through the night.
“Everything in my life changed and remains changed,” he said 50 years later, “because I felt God’s love and God’s transforming power in my soul and I knew it wasn’t me. I knew it wasn’t any human or earthly power that could possibly have done what I experienced inside.”
“For me, that’s the bottom line. Everything else … politics, policies, personal issues, all that stuff, in my experience, when people feel the presence of God in their life on a regular basis, they’re more likely to stay faithful and deal with the questions, the personal offenses, that come along.”