https://tinyurl.com/22xux52c
Rather than the church dying, the church seems to be changing. This is to be expected as religions age. John Larsen famously thought that the brain drain would leave only increasingly fundamentalist Mormons in the pews. He predicted an evaporation of the moderates and a concentration in the number of fundamentalists.Ask Latter-day Saints — even regular churchgoers — if theirs is the one true faith leading to eternal life, and there’s a decent chance they’ll say no.
That’s due to a growing number of active U.S. members holding less-than-orthodox views.
Such is the (tentative) conclusion data scientist Alex Bass reached in his recently published study, “Mormon Typology Report 2025.”
Based on data he mined from three Religious Landscape Studies from the Pew Research Center, the paper examines responses from nearly 2,000 self-identified members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormons (the surveys and Bass used both “Latter-day Saint” and “Mormon” terms). This approach meant that people who had once been members, but no longer considered themselves part of the Utah-based faith, were unlikely to appear in the results.
From their responses, collected over the past nearly 20 years, he concludes that “the people in the pews are not the same as a generation ago.”
Put simply, he explains, “What was once a faith defined by overwhelming uniformity — where the majority of members could be described as devout, orthodox and politically conservative — may have fractured into a more complex spectrum of identities.”
I think the data here are reassuring. Mormons are bending their beliefs to fit the growing evidence against traditional beliefs. The Book of Mormon doesn’t need to be historical. The law of chastity doesn’t mean covering elbows. An occasional coffee isn’t going to send you to hell.
It’s probably sad for traditionalists like DCP to realize their version of Mormonism is quickly slipping away. But as the Mormon church transforms into something more moderate and mainstream, I think the number of gay Mormon suicides will decrease. The amount of shame and guilt that masturbating missionaries felt will decrease. The culture of perfection and puritan morality will ease. And overall the mental health and wellbeing of future Mormons will improve dramatically when compared to the oppressive overbearing moralistic LDS church of the 1980s.
Add this to the anti-Hitchens file. Religion really doesn’t poison everything.
