Lowering missionary age was to encourage more young marriages says Oaks

[Dr. Shades]

Haven't you chosen to allow it to ruin your life?

No.

[I Have Questions]

I read an article by Jana Riess that may shed even more light on the recent decision to lower the age at which females can serve a mission.

Disaffiliation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has increased, and that increase is driven primarily by young adults.

In that column, I promised a follow-up piece on the young adults who choose to stay identified with the church. Are they as religious as their elders are? And are they as religious as other adult Latter-day Saints used to be when they were young?

Here, the data is more mixed, and it’s harder to draw a single conclusion. Let’s just say that Generation Z Latter-day Saints are complicated.

For example, researcher Alex Bass of Mormon Metrics has done a great job recently analyzing Pew findings and Cooperative Election Study data. He’s found that Latter-day Saints overall (not just Gen Z) are less religiously devout than they used to be if we’re measuring the percentage who attend church each week, pray several times daily and say religion is very important in their lives.

His analysis of CES data shows that U.S. church members who hit all of those behaviors were a majority (52%) during the 2008-2012 time period and are now a minority (39%). They’re still more religious than just about all other religious groups of Americans, but the drop in Latter-day Saint religiosity is real.

The sharpest decline is among the 18-to-30 crowd. After adding additional demographic controls into his analysis, Bass found that 57% of people in that age group hit all three metrics of religious devotion in the 2008-2012 period, and now just 37% do. Millennials showed a similar decline, from 55% to 38%, while older members have shown more consistency over the past two decades.

I want to make it clear that this decline for young adults is not merely a “life cycle effect.” In other words, we can’t dismiss this data by saying, “All young people go through a period where they look less religious, and then they come back to religion when they’re older. It’s just a phase they’ll outgrow.”

The reason we can’t dismiss it is that in the CES, which has the largest sample of Latter-day Saints in a publicly available survey dataset (more than 9,000 over the past two decades), today’s young adult members are noticeably less religious than previous generations were when they were that same age.

This drive to turn Missions into an extended period of speed dating is an effort to plug another gap where young people might start thinking for themselves. Get them on missions the moment they are classed as "adults" and then get them married as soon as they get home from their missions - and then retention rates might improve.

[Marcus]

I read an article by Jana Riess that may shed even more light on the recent decision to lower the age at which females can serve a mission.

Disaffiliation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has increased, and that increase is driven primarily by young adults.

In that column, I promised a follow-up piece on the young adults who choose to stay identified with the church. Are they as religious as their elders are? And are they as religious as other adult Latter-day Saints used to be when they were young?

Here, the data is more mixed, and it’s harder to draw a single conclusion. Let’s just say that Generation Z Latter-day Saints are complicated.

For example, researcher Alex Bass of Mormon Metrics has done a great job recently analyzing Pew findings and Cooperative Election Study data. He’s found that Latter-day Saints overall (not just Gen Z) are less religiously devout than they used to be if we’re measuring the percentage who attend church each week, pray several times daily and say religion is very important in their lives.

His analysis of CES data shows that U.S. church members who hit all of those behaviors were a majority (52%) during the 2008-2012 time period and are now a minority (39%). They’re still more religious than just about all other religious groups of Americans, but the drop in Latter-day Saint religiosity is real.

The sharpest decline is among the 18-to-30 crowd. After adding additional demographic controls into his analysis, Bass found that 57% of people in that age group hit all three metrics of religious devotion in the 2008-2012 period, and now just 37% do. Millennials showed a similar decline, from 55% to 38%, while older members have shown more consistency over the past two decades.

I want to make it clear that this decline for young adults is not merely a “life cycle effect.” In other words, we can’t dismiss this data by saying, “All young people go through a period where they look less religious, and then they come back to religion when they’re older. It’s just a phase they’ll outgrow.”

The reason we can’t dismiss it is that in the CES, which has the largest sample of Latter-day Saints in a publicly available survey dataset (more than 9,000 over the past two decades), today’s young adult members are noticeably less religious than previous generations were when they were that same age.

This drive to turn Missions into an extended period of speed dating is an effort to plug another gap where young people might start thinking for themselves. Get them on missions the moment they are classed as "adults" and then get them married as soon as they get home from their missions - and then retention rates might improve.

Excellent point. It's a throwback to older times, but they've figured out how to weaponize the female missionaries. When I was in, the women who went on missions were the 21 year-olds who hadn't married yet. Or, as was frequently commented, "hadn't been able to find a husband." At 21.

In the early summer after my freshman year, when I was still a month or two shy of 19, a nice older lady in my ward asked if I had been dating, because, "you don't want to wait too long and risk becoming a spinster, dearie!"

Now they get both a larger male and female missionary pool, and the marriage potential. Hopefully these young people won't fall for it.