Cover image via Gospel Media Library.
The following is excerpted from By Common Consent. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
I recently had my students read through the 2023–2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study. My students’ prompt was pretty easy– they just had to find a couple interesting statistics and do a write-up. As I prepared for class, and did my own skimming, I unsurprisingly gravitated towards information on us Mormons. Eventually, I got sucked in and did a “control/f” search of the 393 page document looking over every mention of us.
This is not by any means a full summary of the data. Rather, following my students and their prompt, this is a quick write-up on some statistics that I personally found interesting:
Unmatched Religious Commitment
Latter-day Saints consistently rank at or near the top in measures of religious devotion.
73% of Latter-day Saints pray daily (compared to 44% nationally).
Additionally, 18% pray at least weekly, leaving only 7% who “seldom/never” pray. This is compared to 32% of all US adults who “seldom/never” pray.
80% of Latter-day Saints report praying or reading scripture with their children, compared to 58% of Christians nationally.
88% of Latter-day Saints say they attend church at least once a month, compared with 68% of all US adults and 78% of US adults who were raised Christian.
In short, when compared to other religious groups we’re, like, really religious.
We Don’t Marry Outside the Faith
This may not seem very interesting to most of our readers, but as a Mormon married to someone outside our faith, it caught my eye. We are the least likely of any religious group to marry outside the faith. The reasons for this seem rather intuitive- our temple marriage ritual is not open to outsiders, and we do place a great emphasis on marrying in the temple. I was a little shocked (wrongfully so, it would appear) that we beat out both Catholics and Jews on this statistic, two groups that at least stereotypically value marrying within their respective traditions.
On a personal level, I confess I was also a little saddened by this statistic as it reinforces the loneliness I sometimes feel as a “part-member family” and reiterates the reality that Mormons don’t often know what to do with us. My wife, while not a member of the church, still considers herself a member of the community (the ward members are our neighbors after all) and will occasionally come to church. In some ways, we have had to forge our own ground with this arrangement as there are not a lot of models to follow, as shown in the data.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
