Catholic Schools And Weekly Mass Aren’t Solving The Retention Crisis
(ANALYSIS) A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the retention crisis facing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The headline finding is pretty straightforward: nearly half the kids who are raised as LDS no longer identify that way as adults.
There was a bit of controversy about the best way to compare LDS retention rates to those of other groups like Protestants or Jews, but no one has been able to dispute the simplest conclusion of the data from Pew — 46% of the LDS are not retained.
In the comments for that post, one of my paid subscribers noted that they would like to see me do a more in-depth analysis of retention among American Catholics. And I immediately jotted that down as a note to follow up. Now, I’ve managed to flesh out a full post on this topic.
The Association of Religion Data Archives is awesome for a project like this because I can quickly find the datasets that I need to answer this question from multiple angles. I am going to use two different sources — the General Social Survey, which allows me to trace the contours of American religion all the way back to the early 1970s, and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, which permits me to do a really deep dive on the state of Catholic retention in the last couple of years.
My biggest impression through looking at all the data is that American Catholicism does seem to be hemorrhaging members at a pretty alarming rate. The Pew RLS found that just 58% of Catholics were being retained into adulthood.
But how did we get here? The GSS makes it pretty simple to trace the trajectory of Catholic retention over time.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.