I find Jana's work on getting to the truth of the membership figures very interesting to follow. Jana has published another
article on the subject and another book is coming.
A minority of people who leave take the formal step of removing their names from the church’s rolls. According to our Next Mormons Survey 2 — which was conducted in 2022 and 2023 and surveyed 1,420 current and 178 former members — only 18% of former Latter-day Saints have done this. And the most common answer to this question was that their names were still on the rolls, though they no longer personally identified as members (46%).
(2022–23 Next Mormons Survey 2, Benjamin Knoll and Jana Riess)
Our finding about how few resign may be on the low side, and you should keep in mind that our sample size was small. Although there is little comparative research on how many former members officially remove their names, two other studies (one in 1989 and another in 2023) both found that a third of former Latter-day Saints in the U.S. had done so. All three studies agree, however, that only a minority formally resigned. Depending on the study, between 66% and 82% of former Latter-day Saints did not resign.
What this means for Latter-day Saint statistics is that the church’s official membership of nearly 7 million U.S. members contains many people who never darken the door of the meetinghouse and no longer consider themselves believers. If members do not remove their membership, die or have their membership withdrawn, their names remain on the rolls until they are 110 years old and are presumed deceased.
In short, most of the people who leave the Church are still counted by the Church as members.
If they don’t want to remove their names, does that mean they’re leaving the door open to return to full, active membership in the church?
Not really. Most don’t seem interested in returning, with 71% of NMS2 respondents declaring they will never return or expressing doubt that such an outcome is possible. Some put themselves in the middle of the spectrum, suggesting that they don’t anticipate returning but aren’t completely ruling it out.
Only 15% of former members in the NMS2 marked a return to church activity as either likely or definite. In other research, the 2023 B. H. Roberts survey, which had a much larger sample size of former members, found an even lower percentage of former members expressing an interest in returning to the church (8%).
(2022–23 Next Mormons Survey 2, Benjamin Knoll and Jana Riess)
The conclusion here seems evident: Most people who’ve left the church intend that break to be permanent. This is typical of people who leave other religions in the U.S. today; post-Latter-day Saints aren’t all that different.
The Church's grandiose statements every April about how many members it has, and how well it is growing, are empty invalid rhetoric.
Keep in mind this is just the baseline rate of belonging or not belonging to a religion. The percentage of those who are religiously active is even lower: Fewer than a fifth of former Latter-day Saints report attending religious services at least once a month (19% in the NMS2 data and 16% in Pew’s).
Most don’t see this as a loss, and some report being happier without religion. I was interested to find that some people I interviewed who grew up Latter-day Saint and struggled with depression and anxiety told me those issues are much better for them now that they’re out of the church. Even though much research shows that religious people have a mental health edge over the nonreligious, that’s not true for everyone even if it’s true for the majority. That’s especially the case when people don’t fit into their religion’s prescribed boxes for gender roles, sexual orientation or what it considers the right family configuration.
The phrase “once burned, twice shy” describes many people I interviewed who now steer clear of organized religion. They lost trust in religious institutions, and some also lost trust in themselves. As former Latter-day Saint missionary Amy, age 53, put it, “It’s a traumatic thing to be so completely blindsided. And it made me wonder what else I had taken completely at face value when I should have investigated. I consider myself an intelligent person. How could I have been just so wrong?”
Rather than trusting another religion, Amy is rebuilding her trust in herself. She’s gone back to school and says she is a “more even-keeled person” than she was as a Latter-day Saint, when she never felt like she measured up. She enjoys speaking her mind more now rather than feeling “like I need to keep my head down and my mouth shut.”
The gender inequality within Mormonism is a gap the Church has tried to paper over. Those meagre efforts at spin, instead of real change, are specifically costing the Church female members. Yes, their names are on the rolls, but their hearts and minds are never coming back.
