Mormons have sometimes called themselves a “peculiar people,” and statistically, they have been. Compared with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists, Latter-day Saints have higher birth rates, higher marriage rates, and larger families. They also have a relatively high retention rate—meaning that those who are born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to stay members for life. But recently, all of these long-held patterns have started to shift.
The Church is not facing a crisis, exactly—more of a demographic ravine than a cliff, Jana Riess, a historian who studies the LDS faith, told me. But as of 2024, only about half of young people born into the Church stay in it—down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s. Its marriage rate has fallen 10 percent since 2011, and in the past 40 years, the number of annual recorded births per 1,000 LDS members has dropped from 25 to five, according to an analysis of Church records by the independent data scientist Alex Bass. If Latter-day Saints’ peculiarity was defined in part by their early marriages, their minivans full of kids, and their loyalty to the Church, some of that peculiarity seems to be slipping away.
The LDS Church’s birth-rate and retention problems are far from unique: People in the United States are having fewer babies and leaving religion pretty much across the board. Doug Andersen, a spokesperson for the Church, wrote to me in an email that “official church records show consistent worldwide increases in both membership and participation,” in part because a record number of converts are joining worldwide.
Still, the demographic tilt is enough of a problem that the Church’s new leader, Dallin Oaks, is taking notice. Under the previous Church prophet, mentions of family were fewer and farther between at the Church’s biannual conference. But this year, in his first conference address since becoming prophet, Oaks issued a warning: Although the Church’s marriage and birth rates were better than the U.S. average, they had declined significantly. “We are a family Church,” he said, and quoted from the 1995 “Family Proclamation,” which once hung on the walls of many LDS homes: “God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.”
In some ways, what’s happening to the LDS now is what happens to any religion that grows beyond a core of strong believers. Over time, the more particular edges of a faith—the meatless Fridays of Catholicism, for instance—can get sanded down until it more closely resembles mainstream American culture and mainline Protestantism, Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, told me. (The Church now discourages use of the word “Mormon” as a nickname for members of the faith, but the term is still used in proper names, such as Bowman’s title or The Book of Mormon.) To him, the demographic shifts in the LDS indicate that “the long process of assimilation is becoming more noticeable now.”
Compared with individual Protestant denominations, such as Methodism, the LDS looks like it’s doing better at retaining its young people, Justin Dyer, a religion professor at Brigham Young University, told me. But Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that that’s not the right comparison to make, because even if someone switches from Methodist to Lutheran, they still hold pretty much the same Protestant beliefs. And Protestantism’s retention more generally, at 70 percent, far surpasses the LDS Church’s.
Lower retention may also have more ramifications for the LDS Church than it would for Methodists. Fewer young people means fewer missionaries. And fewer members means that the work of operating churches, which are volunteer-led at the local and regional levels, will fall on fewer people. In the past, the Church’s robust structure for kids (Sunday school, youth programs, regional dances, and sleepaway camps) carried young people into missionary work, which usually equated to lifelong membership, but that formula seems to be failing now, Jana Riess said. (She herself is an LDS member.) “The Church has been great at retention in the past and is doing many of the same things that used to be so successful then. So it’s understandable why leaders would be sort of wringing their hands and saying, ‘Why isn’t this enough?’”
The Church is having a particularly hard time keeping young women. In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of 18-year-old girls stayed in the faith, according to Dyer’s research. Many apostates leave because they are more liberal than the Church on issues such as same-sex marriage, but when Riess interviewed young women for her upcoming book on people who leave the faith, many of them also brought up feeling undervalued by the Church.
In LDS theology, only men can hold what is called the priesthood—the authority given by God to Joseph Smith and passed down through every generation of LDS men—which allows them to bless children and the sick, pass the sacrament, and serve in certain leadership positions. Because of this, essentially, “there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a man reports to a woman on questions of final authority, and there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a woman has final say,” Bowman said. And the 1995 Family Proclamation made clear that a wife’s role is to nurture the children. “It’s a tough position for the Church to be in,” Riess said. “It wants to remain attractive to women in a culture that has moved in a different direction, but also wants to stay pretty much on the same path of emphasizing this very particular configuration of the nuclear family.”
Many women do not mind the Church’s male priesthood, or at least accept it. “I can believe that something’s divine but also fallible at the same time,” Sophie Smith, a graduate student at BYU, told me. She believes that women already have many ways to contribute to the faith and that “whether it’s in this life or the next, it will not be a patriarchal Church.” But LDS leaders do seem to be aware of the Church’s young-women problem: Women can now direct their ward’s Sunday-school program, and recently, the Church lowered the age at which women can serve a mission from 19 to 18.
This decision has led to a record boom in missionary numbers, but it’s also “a way to keep young women in the fold and try to socialize them more deeply in the faith,” Riess said. (One refrain in LDS circles, Bowman said, is: “A missionary’s most important convert is himself or herself.”) Completing a mission at 18 also means that young women can get married sooner: They return around age 20, and “on the LDS checklist, the next check is getting married and having children,” Alyssa Beck, who leads classes for teenage girls at her ward in Los Angeles, told me.
Women who do lean into the Church’s call to motherhood may still struggle to have a big family, though. Smith has noticed those around her having fewer kids, mostly because they can’t afford more. For years, the single-family-home price in the so-called Mormon Corridor—Utah, Idaho, and Arizona—ran below the national average, but since 2020, prices have soared above that threshold, according to Bass’s analysis. “There are still people who are like, I wanna have eight kids, and that’s awesome,” Smith said. But out of necessity—because both parents need to work, and kids are expensive—many don’t.
These younger families may find less than they once did to keep them immersed in the culture of the religion. Between bazaars, choirs, plays, and road shows, congregants might have once been at their chapel four times a week; now many active members come only on Sundays, Bowman said. (And even Sunday services have been shortened from three hours to two.) As the faith has grown internationally, “the cultural apparatus that was built in Utah just wasn’t exportable,” Bowman said, and because the Church tries to keep its practices consistent across the world (whether in Kenya or Utah, every chapel uses the same teachings and Sunday-school curriculum), he believes that Church leadership pared back the social expectations of being a Latter-day Saint. That cultural loosening might be helping the Church grow internationally and simultaneously making it easier for American members to leave. (Andersen, the LDS spokesperson, said that the Church is “encouraged by increased participation of our children, youth, and young adults in the United States in the past decade.”)
For now, the Church seems to be insisting that its future is rooted in family—which will require people to heed the words of the prophet, and multiply and replenish the Earth. To do that, though, young people will need to stick around. Churches across the country, not just the LDS, are trying to figure out that particular puzzle: Recently, many younger Americans have passionately recommitted to religion, but their depth of feeling hasn’t caught on widely—at least not yet. Whether they grew up LDS, Catholic, or Baptist, many Americans seem to want churches to offer some combination of retreat from mainstream U.S. life and assimilation in it. But, as Bowman said, “that is a very, very tricky sweet spot to hit.”
