Disaffiliation

The central organizing theme of The Next Mormons — Jana Riess’s term for leaving the LDS Church, and the dependent variable her Next Mormons Survey (NMS) data is built to explain. Riess’s headline finding is that disaffiliation is mostly not about the church’s own choices: while antigay rhetoric, the treatment of women, and aging leadership do factor in, “a major explanation for disaffiliation is the changing religious landscape in America. Mormonism is not an island.” The book repeatedly insists that the demographic markers it surfaces are correlations, not causes — “a person’s having one or more of these does not cause a person to leave Mormonism.”

Those correlated factors recur across the highlights: leaving Mormonism “is often correlated with being male, politically liberal, less educated, never married, from a divorced family, and/or LGBT.” The median age of defection in the NMS was nineteen. Education cuts an unexpected way — college degrees raise retention overall, but women who pursue academic graduate degrees (MA/PhD) are actually more likely to leave, a pattern absent for professional degrees and for men. Riess also documents a strong link between progressive views on sexuality and disaffiliation, and finds that many former Mormons “already had significant cracks in their testimony during adolescence.” A recurring qualitative thread is the sting of feeling judged — stories of public shaming over modesty or behavior that those who left “did not forget.”

Context: The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Jana Riess, 2019) draws on the Next Mormons Survey to study generational change in Mormonism. Religious “disaffiliation” — formally disengaging from or leaving a faith tradition — is part of the broader American rise of the religiously unaffiliated (“nones”), the demographic backdrop Riess places Mormon attrition within.

Where this appears

• The Next Mormons — the book’s central dependent variable; Riess maps the demographic correlates of leaving Mormonism (gender, politics, education, marriage, family structure, sexuality) while stressing correlation is not causation