SALT LAKE CITY — Among religions, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints puts a unique emphasis on the importance of growth, dispatching tens of thousands of missionaries each year in pursuit of a prophecy that says the church will one day fill the entire globe.

But recently, despite record missionary service, growth in the 16-million-member church has hit a 100-year low in the United States.

While the church reported a slight uptick in the number of conversions in 2019 during its General Conference in April, that growth was offset by rapidly declining birthrates, which continue to fall despite the church’s emphasis on traditional family values. As a result, growth is sitting at just over 1.5% annually, significantly less than the 3-4% annual growth rates the church enjoyed in the 1970s and 80s.

In the LDS stronghold Utah, where more than half the population is raised LDS, protests and mass resignations tied to controversial church policies have made the news in recent years—from the news Religion Unplugged reported that the church has amassed a $100 billion stockpile using member tithes in the last 22 years, to the now-revoked 2015 policy banning the baptism of children with gay parents.

Is controversy driving members away from the church? The reality, scholars say, is complicated. Teasing apart exactly what is happening with respect to LDS membership can be difficult, because of multiple, often conflicting, narratives. But there is general agreement that falling birthrates bear a good portion of the blame. Larger societal trends play a key role in this dynamic, but so too does the number of young members who leave the church before their childbearing years due, experts believe, to the demanding nature of church culture.

Yet there remains a bright spot, as highlighted by this year’s statistical announcements: conversions to the church, particularly outside the U.S., are enjoying an upward trend, adding nearly a quarter million new members in 2019. Brazil, which accounted for more than 14% of the church’s growth in 2019, nearly eclipsed the U.S. with respect to new memberships. Had the South American nation added 4,000 more converts, last year would have marked the first time in church history that a nation outside the U.S. added more new members than the U.S. itself.

This, perhaps, offers an important glimpse into the future, one that some experts believe has been foreshadowed by recent reforms within the LDS Church: The future of this American-born faith lies elsewhere.

Why are LDS birthrates falling?

With respect to absolute numbers, most agree the church is still growing. But over the last 25 years, growth rates have declined significantly, particularly in countries where Mormonism has historically seen the greatest success: the United States, Mexico, the Philippines, and others, according to Matt Martinich, who studies LDS membership and growth trends at the Cumorah Foundation.

Some of this is due to a decrease in the efficacy of LDS missionaries, who in 1989 each baptized an average of 8 converts on their missions, compared to an average of 3.5 in 2017, according to the Cumorah Foundation. But the bigger factor affecting growth, according to Martinich, is falling birthrates. Members of the church recorded just 94,266 births in 2019, and President Dallin Oaks, the second highest ranking official in the church, noted in an October 2018 speech that the average LDS woman now marries two years later than in the recent past.

Historically, two-thirds to three-fourths of children born into the church would remain active into adulthood. In 1981, that wasn’t a problem, because the average LDS woman would have 3.3 children (1.8 was the national average at the time). By the 2016 The Next Mormons survey, 57% of LDS families had fewer than three children— too few to maintain the church’s membership per historical data, Martinich notes.

Other nuances don’t surface in official reports, says Patrick Mason, the Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. Unlike other religions, the LDS Church retains every baptized member on its roles until death, unless the member is excommunicated or removes their records via legal proceeding. Only a fraction of members reported by the LDS Church, he says, have set foot in a church recently or consider themselves “Mormon.”

Although it’s difficult to obtain good data on this front, scholars believe the number of LDS members who no longer attend is growing. Among those who leave, a growing number affiliate with an “ex-Mormon” community that regards the church not only as false, but as actively harmful to society, making the LDS Church an organization both uniquely loved, and hated, by those brought up in it. And though it may seem the attrition is driven by controversy, other factors—such as the all-encompassing nature of the church’s teachings—likely play a role in driving both defections and devotion.

All-in or exiting: why there aren’t many mediocre Mormons

The LDS Church remains, among Christian sects, uniquely effective at retaining its young members. “When their children grow up, they’re among the highest of all religious groups of youth staying in the church,” says Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. And this isn’t the only front where the LDS Church is bucking U.S. and international trends toward secularization. The LDS youth who stay in the church, Smith says, are far more devoted to the faith than young members of other traditions.

There is, however, a flip side to this trend: a sizeable and growing portion of young Mormons are leaving the mainline church. According to the General Social Survey, the LDS Church retained 62.5% of youth born from 1965-1980. Since 1981, retention has fallen to 46 percent.

LDS youth still leave the church later in life than other young believers — in their mid-20s, rather than their late teens. And when they leave, they are less inclined to go quietly. “In a lot of other traditions, the children tend to move toward a middle range of religiousness,” Smith says. “They move away from the intensity… They don’t become total atheists, totally disconnected from the church. If the categories are extremely religious, very religious and none, they move toward the middle category. They’re somewhat religious; they somewhat believe. That’s a Catholic pattern in particular.”

By contrast, Smith says LDS youth tend to go to the extremes. “They either stay involved, they’re totally committed, or they just go to the far side and completely bail,” he said. “There are not a lot of somewhat Mormon people.”

Many have sought to attribute the church’s attrition to controversial issues such as the church’s stances on women’s rights, same-sex attraction, how it handles trickier aspects of its own history, and even how it manages its finances. But Smith and other scholars believe the lack of middle ground in the LDS Church is directly tied to its teachings: a volunteer-intensive organization with an almost entirely lay clergy — local religious leaders are unpaid — means the LDS faith is more than a religion. It’s a demanding, almost all-encompassing, way of life.

Mormonism, Smith says, “has mechanisms that prevent you from being a mediocre Mormon.” Members meet annually with church leaders to determine if they have maintained their faith and continued in religious behaviors, such as wearing special clothing and giving 10 percent of their income to the church. They spend more time in church than other faiths, meet together more often during the week, and are expected to devote more of their personal time to religious study than other faiths. All teens are expected to attend LDS seminary; each adult member has a volunteer position within the church they are expected to perform.

On top of this, Smith says, Mormonism remains an unusual faith, with unique teachings not found in other Christian sects—for example, the belief that all other churches abandoned the true teachings of Christ in a “great apostasy.” These beliefs have, in some cases, led more mainstream Christian churches to actively shun Mormonism—which can isolate adherents and make it more difficult for youth to find friends outside the LDS faith community. That, in turn, raises the stakes for those who plan to leave—leaving may mean walking away from your entire social circle.

Then there’s the church’s history of persecution, which Smith said has led to a “heel-digging” mindset in which individuals are either with the church, or against it. The LDS Church teaches that its president is the literal mouthpiece of God, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for negotiation if you happen to disagree with church teachings.

“To me, the history, identity, structure and doctrine of the LDS Church lends itself to a love it or leave it approach,” Smith says. “Mormonism has a set of things that raise the bar and you either jump over it, or you say forget it.” Those who do leave often feel greater anger and resentment toward the church than adherents who leave other faiths. Because Mormonism had a greater effect on their lives, they’re more likely to feel as though something has been taken from them.

Generational faith slide

These dynamics have existed not only in Mormonism, but across many religions for decades says Jana Riess, a journalist and academic who studies and writes about the LDS Church (of which she is a member). Her book The Next Mormons examines how Millennials are changing the LDS church.

Riess conducted The Next Mormons Survey in 2016 and notes that youth defections are on the rise, but what’s really changed is that they aren’t coming back. Historically, Riess says, American youth left the LDS church of their childhood between 17-23, only to return later in life when they married and began to have children of their own. But across the board, as the Millennial generation has entered their 30s and 40s, people are returning to church at lower rates than they used to.

Riess believes that this is a cultural phenomenon, not a trend unique to the LDS Church. Not having a religion, she says, is by far America’s fastest growing religion. What has changed for Mormonism, she says, is that leaving has become easier, and those who defect have become more vocal. Online communities and even conventions for individuals who identify as ex-Mormon have sprung up and gained followings through social media such as Facebook and Reddit, giving those who leave an instant connection—and platform—that simply didn’t exist in the past.

“For people who have left recently, there is a built-in community waiting to receive them, and that’s just not the case for people who left decades ago,” Riess says. She says many who leave never affiliate with the ex-Mormon community, and never take the steps necessary to remove their names from church rolls. Most, Riess says, just stop showing up and quietly distance themselves from the faith.

This dynamic is especially strong in some areas of Utah where the church is most insular, Martinich says. Those who leave the church elsewhere are much more likely to join another faith; those who leave in Utah are more likely to become atheist and affiliate with ex-Mormon communities.  According to a 2019 University of Utah Survey, 61.5% of students who grew up LDS left the church while attending school, with the majority becoming agnostic, atheist, “spiritual but not religious,” or “nothing in particular.”

Mason believes the resignations are significant, because people rarely resign alone. “They take their whole family with them,” he says, “and a lot of people resigning are in their child-bearing years, and they have children who are then never counted on the rolls of the church.” He said the actual exit strategy, people severing ties and taking their names off the records of the church, is a trend “that has become distinctive over the last couple of decades.”

One of the main parties to this phenomenon, the online legal service QuitMormon, has processed over 30,000 resignations for former members of the church. The site, run by Mark Naugle and Ryan Sorensen, enables members of the church to retain legal counsel that represents them in the proceedings required to remove one’s name from official church records.

Many reach out to QuitMormon out of desperation, Sorensen says. Some who tried to leave by way of quiet inactivity find it’s hard to get the church to leave them alone, Sorensen says. “Between missionaries stopping by and members of the bishopric, you’re basically a project. If you’re inactive, there is a list and people are told you need to be activated.”

But for others, resigning is an act of symbolic protest “because they know their names are being reported, and don’t want to be counted and don’t want to be part of this,” Sorensen says.

LDS Methods for Retention

While it may seem that reconsidering its stance on social issues is one method to retain more young people, Mason and other scholars say this probably isn’t the answer. “Some people say the best thing to do is to accommodate modern culture—accept gays, ordain women. I don’t think it’s that simple,” Mason says. “We see this with the liberal Protestant church, and they’re still experiencing steep declines in membership. But by holding the line, you become a museum piece at a certain point. So there has to be this dynamic tension.”

What will really make the church successful, Mason posits, is whether it will identify and emphasize that which has made it most successful—the strength of its local congregations, called wards. These local units not only meet together for Sunday services, but often multiple times per week for gatherings that are not overtly religious: campouts and picnics, sporting events, community service. At the ward level, the church takes a “village” approach to not only religion and childrearing, but, as is the LDS way, all aspects of life—a given ward may appoint someone to help others find employment, pursue education, or improve physical health, according to the needs of the locals. And it is within these local units, Mason says, that Mormons bridge divides and help one another in times of need.

“It is the level of the local ward where there are tremendous acts of goodwill, where the content of what you believe is subsumed in a general culture of service and compassion,” he says. “This is what Mormonism has going for it that other communities have lost: it still has very strong local communities that I think are overshadowing the tensions and fracture that we see online.”

Mason doesn’t believe church leadership wants to revert to a congregational model. Yet promoting healthy local communities, he says, is “the number one thing the church can do to maintain itself, because there are fewer and fewer places in the world where people find authentic communities. If they can find that, it will compensate for a host of other issues.”

Martinich agrees. Though growth may have declined in recent years, congregational retention is on the rise. That is, when the church opens a new local unit, it’s less likely to close within a few years, as was the trend, particularly in Latin America, in the past. And some of the most secular, western nations, including the U.S., are seeing the greatest growth in new congregations. The church added 400 new congregations in 2019—the highest number in over a decade—and half of those units were located in the U.S.

“The church doesn’t create congregations for the fun of it, and based on the survey data I collect, the size of congregations has not changed,” Martinich says. “That indicates that activity levels might be increasing, which I have some data to indicate.”

The church may be strongest at the local level, but some say Mormonism remains dedicated to the centralization of authority, holding to the idea of a global prophet and maintaining a special division of the church designed to ensure LDS teachings and practices are standardized around the globe—an increasingly difficult feat, given the increasingly diverse nature of the church.

Matthew Bowman, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, suspects this is the real reason for most of the church’s recent reforms. For example, when the church announced in May 2018 that it planned to end its long-running practice of sponsoring Boy Scouts of America Troops within its congregations, many speculated that it was on account of growing differences on social issues like gender. But Bowman believes it’s because the Boy Scouts program was untenable on an international scale.

Similarly, Bowman views the 2018 announcement that church services would be cut back to two hours instead of the customary three-hour service as an effort to reduce the strain on local resources. During the same time period, the church also “restructured” the organization of its highest-ranking priesthood. Once divided into “high priests” and “elders,” the high priests group and elders quorums were combined at the local level, reducing the number of volunteer leaders required to maintain each group. Yet local leaders were also given direction to divide men’s church services into more than one group as required by local activity levels. Congregational leaders were also directed to delegate more responsibilities to other volunteer leaders to allow the ward bishop — essentially the priest or pastor of an LDS Ward—to spend more time with local youth.

A few months later, the church also announced that it would do away with its standardized hymnbook in favor of regional hymnals designed to reflect local languages and musical customs.

“There is a slow, slow move toward decentralization in decision-making on issues like how worship services function that is designed to foster a more active membership outside the U.S.,” Bowman says. “Church leadership is seeing this global church that is not able to sustain the sort of intense, demanding community that Mormons who grew up in Utah in the middle of the 20th century took for granted.”

The real question the LDS Church faces, Bowman says, is not whether to adopt more progressive social stances. It’s whether the church is willing to adopt more diverse cultural perspectives, or whether “they want to hold to this 100-year-old idea of what Mormonism is. If they choose the latter, it will remain small.”

Emma Penrod is a journalist based in Salt Lake City, Utah who covers science, technology, business and environmental health. She tweets about the latest science and industry news @EmaPen.