U.S. adults who identify with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remain among the country's most religious groups, but a smaller share of people raised in the faith now stay with it into adulthood, according to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday. Pew found that 54% of adults raised as Latter-day Saints still identify with the church, down from 70% in 2007.
The findings come from a national survey conducted from July 2023 through March 2024, not a new poll taken this year. It included 565 current Latter-day Saints and 316 former members within a broader sample of 36,908 adults. Researchers compared those results with earlier Pew surveys, while cautioning that changes in survey methods complicate some comparisons.
About 28% of adults raised as Latter-day Saints now identify with no religion, twice the share found in 2007. Pew also found that about a quarter of current members are converts, a proportion that has remained fairly steady.
The study covers religious practice, political views, family life and community ties across the United States. It does not provide a New York-specific estimate, and the results should not be read as a measure of religious change in the Finger Lakes.
Religious practice remains high, with differences among members
About 73% of Latter-day Saint adults said they pray daily, roughly the same share as evangelical Protestants and members of historically Black Protestant churches. Nearly seven in 10 said they attend in-person religious services at least weekly, compared with 29% of Catholics and 23% of mainline Protestants.
Nearly half of Latter-day Saints said they had become more religious over their lifetimes, while 12% said they had become less religious. A majority also said they had grown more spiritual. Still, compared with 2007, members were less likely to say they pray daily, regard religion as very important or believe in God or a universal spirit with absolute certainty.
Pew said it cannot determine from its available data whether that longer-term decline has stabilized among Latter-day Saints in recent years. The group makes up roughly 2% of U.S. adults, too small a share for most of Pew's annual surveys to report separately.
Religious practice varies within the church. In the Mountain region, which includes Utah and seven other states, 79% of members reported praying daily, compared with 66% elsewhere. College graduates were more likely than less-educated members to report weekly worship attendance, 85% to 59%, a pattern Pew said differs from the general public.
Membership changes and a more diverse population
Among current members, 72% identified as White in the 2023-24 survey, down from 85% in 2007. The Hispanic share rose from 6% to 12%, and the Black share from 2% to 6%. Pew said converts are more racially and ethnically diverse than lifelong members.
The median age of adult members increased from 41 to 44 since 2007. The share raising a child younger than 18 at home declined from 49% to 37%, broadly in line with a national decline in adults living with minor children. Latter-day Saint women also became more likely to hold a bachelor's degree, rising from 25% to 40% over that period.
Among people raised in the church, those now 50 or older were somewhat more likely than younger adults to remain members, 61% to 50%. Pew warned that findings broken down by both age and gender are less precise because fewer people fall into each subgroup.
Lifelong members were more likely than former members to be married, to describe their childhood religion as very important and to pray daily. About 72% of lifelong members said they pray every day, versus 27% of former members. Converts and lifelong members, however, reported similar levels of daily prayer on some measures. Pew said estimates for converts carry substantial uncertainty because that subgroup's effective sample size was 60.
Politics, family life and community ties
About 73% of current Latter-day Saints identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while 23% identified with or leaned toward Democrats. Pew cautioned that party-identification figures from the current survey cannot be directly compared with earlier surveys because of methodological differences.
The study found that 46% of Latter-day Saints said homosexuality should be accepted by society, up from 24% in 2007. Among Latter-day Saint Republicans, 75% said racial and ethnic diversity strengthens the country, compared with 60% of Republicans nationally. At the same time, Latter-day Saint Republicans were less likely than Republicans overall to support legal abortion in all or most cases. Pew did not report views of Latter-day Saint Democrats on those issues because of small sample sizes.
About seven in 10 members rated their family life excellent or very good. Roughly two-thirds said they were married, and 87% of married members said their spouse shared their faith. Members were more likely than Americans overall to favor a parent staying home with children; 61% viewed more women in the workforce as a change for the better, compared with 73% of U.S. adults. The 61% figure was up from 49% in 2014.
Community participation was another point of difference. About 72% of Latter-day Saints said they volunteered in the previous year, compared with 41% of U.S. adults overall. Roughly half said most people can be trusted, putting them among the more trusting religious groups Pew measured.
Pew based the report primarily on its 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, conducted in English and Spanish by NORC at the University of Chicago. Earlier surveys were conducted by telephone, while the latest was mainly completed online or on paper. Pew said it used an additional telephone study to check which long-term comparisons remained reliable. It also noted that some respondents identifying as “Mormon” in its affiliation question could belong to smaller related traditions rather than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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