The Pew Research Center recently released the raw data from its 2014 Religious Landscape Survey for public consumption and analysis. Here are a few interesting tidbits that may be of interest to Rational Faiths readers:
The 2014 RLS puts self-identified Mormons at 1.6% of the total U.S. population. Those who say that they were raised Mormon as a child but no longer identify as Mormon constitute 0.6% of the U.S. population. (To compare: the 2007 RLS survey put self-identified Mormons at 1.7% of the U.S. population and former-Mormons at 0.5%.) In other words, for every 3 self-identified Mormons in the U.S., there is about 1 self-identified former-Mormon.
Of the 1.6% of U.S. residents who currently identify as Mormon, 69% say they were born and raised in the church and the other 31% say that their childhood religion was something else.
MORMON CONVERTS
Those who currently identify as Mormon were also asked what their childhood faith was. Here is the breakdown for those who said that their childhood faith was something other than Mormonism:
| Evangelical Protestant | 19.7% |
| Mainline Protestant | 21.4% |
| Historically Black Protestant | 0.9% |
| Catholic | 29.6% |
| Orthodox Christian | 0.8% |
| Jehovah’s Witness | 1.3% |
| Other Faiths | 1.8% |
| Unaffiliated (religious “nones”) | 24.5% |
It seems that Mormonism is drawing most of its converts from Catholicism and from the religiously unaffiliated.
Other demographic and political information about Mormon converts:
- 42% of Mormon converts are male and 58% of Mormon converts are female.
- 17% are Millennials, 28.6% are GenXers, 35.6% are Baby Boomers, and 17.9% are Silent Generation or older.
- 37.7% have a high school education or less, 34.6% have some college, 17.5% have college degrees, and 10.2% have some kind of post-graduate training or degree.
- Politically, 55.9% identify as Republican or independent-lean-Republican, 28.5% identify as Democrats or independent-lean-Democrat, and 15.6% identify as pure Independents.
FORMER MORMONS
Those who currently do not identify as Mormon but indicated Mormonism as their childhood faith constitute 0.6% of the U.S. population, according to the 2014 RLS survey. Here is what they describe as their current faith tradition:
| Evangelical Protestant | 17.9% |
| Mainline Protestant | 9.8% |
| Historically Black Protestant | 1.7% |
| Catholic | 4.8% |
| Other Christian | 0 |
| Jewish | 0.5% |
| Muslim | 0.7% |
| Buddhist | 2.1% |
| Hindu | 0.1% |
| Other World Religions | 0.3% |
| Other Faiths | 3.1% |
| Unaffiliated (religious “nones”) | 59.1% |
The vast majority of former-Mormons currently identify as religiously unaffiliated.
Other demographic and political information about Mormon converts:
- 55.3% of former-Mormons are male and 44.7% of former-Mormons are female.
- 40.1% are Millennials, 32% are GenXers, 22.1% are Baby Boomers, and 5.4% are Silent Generation or older.
- 36.4% have a high school education or less, 42.2% have some college, 13.2% have college degrees, and 7.8% have some kind of post-graduate training or degree.
- Politically, 34% identify as Republican or independent-lean-Republican, 48.8% identify as Democrats or independent-lean-Democrat, and 17.2% identify as pure Independents.
This is only the very tippity-tippy-top of the iceberg of the data that the 2014 RLS survey has available. I am eager for researchers and other analysts to dig in and see what’s in there.
Note: due to small sample size, the margin of error for the Mormon converts and former-Mormon estimates are +/- 7%. So treat each figure as a general ballpark instead of a precise estimate.
Benjamin Knoll
Benjamin Knoll was an active PermaBlogger at Rational Faiths from 2015-2020. At the time, he was a political science professor at a liberal arts college in central Kentucky. He's since changed careers and now works in the private sector, running business survey research projects. Born and raised a seventh-generation Mormon (on his mother's side), he is now an active Episcopalian who earned a Diploma in Anglican Studies from Bexley-Seabury Seminary in 2022. Indeed, we may say that he follows that admonition of Joseph Smith—that we should "embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same."
All posts by Benjamin Knoll
I’m kind of surprised that the percentage of converts with college and graduate degrees is marginally higher than the percentage of former Mormons with college and graduate degrees. I think a lot of us assumed there was a brain drain happening.
Otherwise, encouraged to see the 12 percentage points increase in Mormons who feel homosexuality should be accepted. Also found the slight shift in favor of not taking scriptures literally to be interesting.
What’s most interesting to me is the percentage of new converts with college degrees: 17.5. In 2014, 38% of the adult U.S. population had a college degree, so our converts, at least in the U.S., are being drawn disproportionately from those without any higher education.
Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me. But I’d be curious to see how the 17.5% figure compares to prior years. In all events, I suspect that it will continue to decline since many Millennials—especially those who are well educated and keep abreast of current affairs—seem disenchanted with both organized religion in general and the church’s policies and practices regarding women and the LBGT community in particular.
If the corporate church were smart they would start using data driven missionary work And start focusing on intersectional identities that have high probability of conversion lulz, it might work
So for every 4.5 self-identified members, there is someone out there who no longer identifies with the Church but has not found a new spiritual home. In other words, more than half of the 2 million Americans who have left the Church still don’t have a good answer to M. Russell Ballard’s question, “Where will you go? What will you do?” This sounds like a tremendous opportunity for the communities like this one to fill a void and provide a transition path for disaffected and questioning members.