Why Are LDS Youth More Religious?

My VIPs for this week are the youth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One sure-fire piece of evidence of the goodness of these young people is the announcement that the Church of Jesus Christ is opening 55 new missions. According to Stephen Cranney and Jacob Hess at The Deseret News, this news brings one statistical pattern into sharper focus. 

There may or may not be a broader religious revival among Generation Z in the United States, but “data about Latter-day Saint youth continues to tell a different story, confirming a deepening and expanding engagement with faith.” Available research shows that Latter-day Saint youth are:

1. More identified with the faith generally.

Nationally, religiosity skews toward ages, while loss of faith is disproportionately showing up more among younger ones. For instance, according to Pew, about 28% of religiously unaffiliated people in the United States are between the ages of 1825; by comparison, 15% of Americans who are religiously affiliated fall in that same age bracket.

However, the same Pew survey found that one out of four adults who identify as Latter-day Saint are in the 18-25 category. That means Latter-day Saints are about as old (and young) as the non-religious – countering the conventional wisdom that religion is an old-person’s game.

2. More likely to say faith is personally important

Additional research confirms that these young Latter-day Saints are actively participating in their faith.

Compared with 54% of non-Latter-day Saints age 18 to 25 in America who say religion is important to some degree (28% who say “very important”), 85% of Latter-day Saint young adults in the same age bracket say their faith is important (53% saying “very important”).

And while 27% of non-Latter-day Saint respondents say religion is “not at all important,” for Latter-day Saints it’s in the single digits (7%).

In another interesting result, about a third (31%) of Latter-day Saints age 18 to 25 say they have been “born again” even though that verbiage is not as central a part of the Latter-day Saint tradition (for non-Latter-day Saints, 27% say it)….

3. More likely to attend church

Attendance data from the Cooperative Election Study tells us the same story. Over six out of 10 Latter-day Saint youth age 18 to 25 attend church weekly, while for their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts only about 22% do.

This exception to national trends also stands out for high school age Latter-day Saints. Data from the Monitoring the Future survey analyzed by BYU Professor Justin Dyer found that not only do Latter-day Saint high school seniors attend church much more frequently than their non-Latter-day Saint counterparts, but millennials were just as likely and sometimes more likely than prior generations to say they go to church or that religion is an important part of their lives. For instance, Gen Z attended church as seniors more than Gen X Latter-day Saints attended when they were seniors.

4. More involved in religious education

Enrollments and applications to universities owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are hitting record numbers, with the broader Church Education System enrolling nearly one million students in its seminaries and institutes.

For the second straight year, BYU-Idaho’s incoming class shattered its mark for incoming students this fall. Every church institution engaging the youth is bursting from the seams.

But importantly, this education isn’t only happening in churches and classrooms outside of the home. The Pew Religious Landscape Survey asked American parents in 2024 “Do you pray or read scriptures with any of your children?”

According to that survey, Latter-day Saint children and youth were most likely to receive religious messages at home, with their parents most likely to read scriptures and/or pray with their minor children at 80%, followed by Evangelicals at 76%, and Muslims at 70%.

5. More engaged in sharing the gospel

Currently, 84,000 full-tie missionaries are serving among young members of the Church of Jesus Christ, which is 12,000 more than were serving in 2023 and 7,000 more than the year before.

Whether this flood of increasing missionaries will continue partly depends on the fertility shifts taking place around the country and within the Latter-day Saint faith. According to one projection, Utah is set to see a 6% decline in high school enrollment form 2023-2041 as it deals with the post-Great Recession baby bust.

Across these trends, one overarching theme is hard to overlook. Within a country where churches are often associated with gray hair, Latter-day Saints are bucking the trend – demonstrating clearly that religion is not just an old-person’s hobby, but can be  vibrant, living force among the youth….