When I began teaching at BYU over a decade ago, students often brought questions like this to me: “Are Latter-day Saints losing members in droves? Do Latter-day Saints have problems with mental health?”
The same questions often arose in my own mind, but I never really explored them directly. The information I had at the time was from my own limited experiences, whatever I’d seen posted online and general chatter about Latter-day Saints — which tended toward the negative.
Once my students started asking questions, however, I felt the need to give the best-informed answers I could. Yet as I began digging, what I found was surprising: Despite all the discussion about Latter-day Saints, there was remarkably little high-quality, public research on members of the faith.
That’s when a few colleagues and I began a concerted effort to study how Latter-day Saints are doing today. The aim wasn’t to find that Latter-day Saints were doing particularly well or poorly, but to describe, as accurately as possible, what was going on.
After gathering the best data sets collected by the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the Pew Research Center and others, we’ve produced a BYU Studies report to share a more complete picture of Latter-day Saint faith, well-being and retention. We put the report through double-blind peer review, a critical check in a high-quality scholarly process.
Taking account of the full picture
While the report details all the findings, something I experienced throughout the process of creating it was a constant perspective shift. When we found that only about half of those raised as Latter-day Saints identified as a Latter-day Saint as an adult, the thought came, “We must be doing something wrong.” But when we found that this was a higher rate than most other denominations, the thought came, “We must be doing something right!”
In fact, Latter-day Saints have the highest rate of adults who still identify with their childhood religion and who also attend religious services. As for the youngest generations of Latter-day Saints, they are more likely to attend religious services monthly (76%) than those of any other faith.
All this certainly speaks to strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ. At the same time, realizing that about a quarter of the young generation are not attending regularly speaks to their additional needs.
In the report, we also looked at the well-being of Latter-day Saints and found that Latter-day Saint college students have the lowest rates of depressive symptoms — again speaking to a protective aspect of church involvement. Still, about 7% — almost 1 in 10 — are at severe risk for depression. This speaks to the need for substantial support for our young people.
Younger generations of Latter-day Saints are the highest in rating their lives as “very happy,” at 42%, yet that’s still over half that do not see their lives as very happy.
Of course, that Latter-day Saints appear to have comparatively good mental health does not mean many don’t still struggle (or that they are doing something wrong if they do struggle).
Yet the larger point is that much of the discussion about Latter-day Saints and poor mental health is not driven by data but by a negative narrative that has emerged. While all experiences are important to understand, the representative data helps widen our view.
‘There must be something wrong’
My students’ questions about retention and mental health problems were primarily from what I refer to as the “Latter-day Saint deficit perspective” — that is, if we’re not 100% in retention or happiness, we are deficient and there must be something wrong with the church.
It’s understandable they would come at it from this angle, given that the Latter-day Saint deficit perspective seems to dominate much of social media. It’s also understandable given the natural human tendency to focus attention on the negative rather than the positive.
Yet a serious problem with this perspective is that it can obscure the great good of the church. In this way, when we only look at the church with a deficit perspective, we may also be led away from the great benefits of the church.
From deficit-oriented to data-driven
In contrast to the Latter-day Saint deficit perspective is the Latter-day Saint data-driven perspective. This perspective helps us zoom out to see both the great benefits of the Church as well as the improvements still needed. This holistic view also helps us see and understand those who have different (whether positive or negative) experiences from ourselves.
Yet that data must be high-quality. Poor data clouds rather than clarifies. With high-quality data, a data-driven perspective also helps us see how religion benefits our friends of other faiths. While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is unique in many ways, the BYU Studies report also finds those engaging in other faiths experiencing the many benefits of religion.
The purpose of religious comparisons, then, is not to be competitive but rather to be descriptive. With all the social media, news coverage, and assorted claims about Latter-day Saints, it’s important to have good comparative data to work from.
Often the Latter-day Saint deficit perspective emerges from data including only Latter-day Saints, with any deficiencies being attributed to a general weakness within the Church. With the full religious landscape outlined, we can better see where we are and where we need to go.
My students were not wrong in viewing difficulties for Latter-day Saints. But this report helps us see the incompleteness of that picture.
That Latter-day Saints come out quite positively was not the purpose of the report, nor part of our design behind the project. That’s what emerged from the data.
With this report, what’s become clear to me is that we can do better in our larger public discourse about Latter-day Saints. We can do better at recognizing the full range of individual experiences and take seriously what the data show about where being a Latter-day Saint leaves people — which, for most, is a place of remarkable strength.