PRRI 2022 Census of American Religion

[Jeffret]

The PRRI has released their 2022 update to their Census of American Religion and it has a few interesting tidbits relevant to Mormonism. Mostly, though, it just shows that Mormonism is pretty irrelevant to most of the country.

The PRRI graphs show that the percentage of Mormons in the country has gone up since 2020. In 2020, 1% of the country was Mormon, but in 2021 and 2022 the number of respondents claiming Mormonism climbed 50% to 1.5%. What this really means is the number of Mormons in most of the country is so small that it collides with the degree of error within a survey like this. I doubt the number of Mormons has actually changed in any meaningful way over these years.

I do find interesting, though, how low this number is. The variations suggest that the actual number is somewhere around 1.0 to 1.5%. I've reviewed various surveys like this for many years. The numbers for Mormons have long held steady about 1.8 to 2%, while the numbers for all of the other White American religions have been dropping dramatically. The PRRI results are the first times I've seen these percentages drop lower. While there are still a lot of questions about margin of error in Mormon percentages, this suggests the Mormon church is losing ground in the country.

On the other hand, the numbers for Unaffiliated (aka, Nones, or None of the Above), have continued rising dramatically. It was 23% in 2020, 25.1% in 2021, and 26.8% in 2022. That's big growth in 3 years. Of more long-term significance, the number of the younger generation, 18-29 years old, has risen to 38%. That a two percentage point rise in just two years. But, while the other generations lag, they're also heading the same direction. The next age bracket, 30 - 49 years old, has risen to 32%, from 25% in 2020. Even the older category, ages 65+, have climbed to 17, up 3 points since 2020.

[Jeffret]

Younger generations seem to be abandoning church in ever increasing amounts. But then, the churches seem to also be abandoning the younger generation in significant ways. One of the assistant scoutmasters in my troop, in his upper twenties, was talking with me a couple of months ago about how many churches have dropped their youth programs. And he still is involved in a church.

When he was a scout in this same troop, the Catholic parish that has long hosted us had us meeting in a comfortable space set up for multi-use by youth groups. Some years back they moved us to a more austere classroom and converted that space into ... something. No one is really quite sure what. The parish used to host American Heritage Girls and some other knock-off of Boy Scouts. We haven't seen them come back after the pandemic. And now they've decided they're no longer interested in hosting us. Support for youth activity groups has dwindled to nothing in this church as far as I can see.

The church that this younger man attended when he was a teen is right across the street from the major university in our town. He related to me that this Presbyterian church hasn't had a youth program in years and also gave up on their college outreach program.

We see many other examples of how youth or young adult outreach programs are dwindling, where they even remain at all.

And then if we look at doctrine and preaching, the churches are paying no attention to the interests and preferences of the younger generation. Instead they're actively fighting against them. The churches are skewing continually older and even losing many of them. Very few of them show any real interest in investing in their future.

[deacon blues]

The PRRI has released their 2022 update to their Census of American Religion and it has a few interesting tidbits relevant to Mormonism. Mostly, though, it just shows that Mormonism is pretty irrelevant to most of the country.

The PRRI graphs show that the percentage of Mormons in the country has gone up since 2020. In 2020, 1% of the country was Mormon, but in 2021 and 2022 the number of respondents claiming Mormonism climbed 50% to 1.5%. What this really means is the number of Mormons in most of the country is so small that it collides with the degree of error within a survey like this. I doubt the number of Mormons has actually changed in any meaningful way over these years.

I do find interesting, though, how low this number is. The variations suggest that the actual number is somewhere around 1.0 to 1.5%. I've reviewed various surveys like this for many years. The numbers for Mormons have long held steady about 1.8 to 2%, while the numbers for all of the other White American religions have been dropping dramatically. The PRRI results are the first times I've seen these percentages drop lower. While there are still a lot of questions about margin of error in Mormon percentages, this suggests the Mormon church is losing ground in the country.

On the other hand, the numbers for Unaffiliated (aka, Nones, or None of the Above), have continued rising dramatically. It was 23% in 2020, 25.1% in 2021, and 26.8% in 2022. That's big growth in 3 years. Of more long-term significance, the number of the younger generation, 18-29 years old, has risen to 38%. That a two percentage point rise in just two years. But, while the other generations lag, they're also heading the same direction. The next age bracket, 30 - 49 years old, has risen to 32%, from 25% in 2020. Even the older category, ages 65+, have climbed to 17, up 3 points since 2020.

The slight Mormon bounce from 1% to 1.5% could be explained by other religions losing members faster, or Mormons living longer.

[Angel]

In other polls:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/20 ... catholics/

No one likes Mormons

[Jeffret]

The slight Mormon bounce from 1% to 1.5% could be explained by other religions losing members faster, or Mormons living longer.

It's possible, though I doubt it.

The Church counts members they have lost track of until they would have been 110 years old, which clearly skews their numbers beyond reality. By the Church's own numbers, Mormon membership increases have roughly tracked U.S. population growth. We can take the Church's numbers as an unrealistic upper bound. The Church's number show no similar jump. Self-reported counts, as in the PRRI survey, are generally considered more reliable, but there are no supporting data.

The 1% is an outlier. I don't know of another study that corroborates it. Even the PRRI updates suggests it is not reliable.

My conclusion is the most likely explanation is simple margin of error. Though the PRRI survey is substantial, the Mormon count of 1-2% likely falls within the margin of error. (I haven't read the whole study to see the claimed margin of error, but even for large surveys they're likely within this range.

What catches my attention most, still, is that PRRI's survey has repeatedly found the Mormon percentage closer to 1.5%, than 2%, which is a reduction from pretty much all of the studies I've seen before (which bother to count Mormon's as a separate category).

[moksha]

Maybe lost Mormons have been found.

[Jeffret]

Maybe lost Mormons have been found.

The lost 10 tribes?

[moksha]

Maybe lost Mormons have been found.

The lost 10 tribes?

Mormons hidden under ice caps or at the center of the earth; members who wandered into the Lost Dream Mine during the last century and have just recently been discovered.

[alas]

Depending on if the survey is done by telephone or some other method, it could skew badly toward older people because younger ones are better at blocking unknown callers or spam. Skewing toward an older population would get more who identify as Mormon, because more of the older generation still believe or still identify as Mormon even after stopping belief.

[Jeffret]

Depending on if the survey is done by telephone or some other method, it could skew badly toward older people because younger ones are better at blocking unknown callers or spam. Skewing toward an older population would get more who identify as Mormon, because more of the older generation still believe or still identify as Mormon even after stopping belief.

It's an interesting idea and certainly a very big potential issue in surveys these days. Unless they had changed the methodology between years, though, I wouldn't expect that to account for such a large jump. This is a longitudinal study, attempting to measure the same thing over multiple years. It's a 50% jump from 2020 to 2021, (1.0% to 1.5%), but while the percentage increase sounds significant, the actual increase in percentage points is only 0.5.

I finally got around to looking it up and the study states, "The margin of error for the national survey is +/- 0.7 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence." As I had surmised, the change in Mormon respondents is easily within the margin of error. Still, I find it interesting that several iterations of a highly regarded study has found the percentage of Mormons in America to be in the 1.0 - 1.5% range. That's less than the 2% I have so commonly seen over many years, though not really outside the margin of error. The total number of Mormons in the country are barely outside the margin of error.

They do describe their methodology in their report at the link I shared originally. It's not based on phone responses, so that's not a factor. They outline the selection and weighting criteria they use, including

To reduce the effects of any non-response bias, a post-stratification adjustment was applied based on demographic distributions from the most recent American Community Survey (ACS). The post-stratification weight rebalanced the sample based on the following benchmarks: age, race and ethnicity, gender, Census division, metro area, education, and income. The sample weighting was accomplished using an iterative proportional fitting (IFP) process that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables.