Faith And Fertility Are Linked In Utah
In a move consistent with its heritage, Brigham Young University in 1951 organized a College of Family Living. In 1981, it merged into the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences, one of the largest units at the flagship university of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Then, to salute the original vision, the School of Family Life was created in 1998 after the church hierarchy released this 1995 statement: “Family — A Proclamation to the World.” With 40-plus faculty members, it offers a variety of degrees, include a doctorate in Marriage, Family and Human Development.
Why bring this up? Well, this week’s “Crossroads” podcast focused on an important New York Times news feature with this dramatic double-decker headline:
Even in Utah, Land of ‘Big Love,’ Families Are Getting Smaller
Forget tradwives. When it comes to plummeting fertility rates, Utah is leading the country.
This raised, for me, a basic journalism question: While the headline referenced a racy HBO series about modern polygamy outside mainstream Mormon life — “Big Love” (2006-2011) — the story didn’t include interview material from BYU experts on the issues in the story. It did cite one or two statistics in a 2025 BYU study, “Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention.”
At one point in our discussion, host Todd Wilken asked this rather basic question: Did the Times feature include any information about the actual doctrines on marriage and family-life at the center of Latter-day Saint faith?
The answer is “yes” but mainly “no.” The feature — written by a political reporter and another that covers demographics — does mention that trends in the church are part of what is driving “Utah’s plunging birthrate.”
That’s logical, since Latter-day Saints — with varying degrees of commitment to church life — are about half of the state’s population, according to polls. Readers will not be surprised that the Times found an articulate spokeswoman for those who are embracing changes.
Savanna Sanborn grew up in the church. As a child, she threw herself into its teachings. At 10, she wrote and stored a letter to her future husband.
“I had this intense need for perfectionism,” she said. “I really thrived within the structure of the church.”
Then her life changed. Read this part carefully:
But she began questioning the culture. At 19, she admired a young pastor, who ended up running afoul of the church because he came out as gay. She married at 20, but quickly realized she did not want the life that came next: having children and running the household.
“The pressure of completing the perfect Mormon picture started to crack me open,” she said.
Now 29, she is divorced and studying for a bachelor’s degree in math, while working. … After her experience in the church, she is wary of external forces determining the direction of her life.
The wording is interesting, since Latter-day Saints do not have “pastors,” if that term is defined as ordained clergy. Instead, their local congregations, part of larger “stakes,” are led by lay ministers who maintain secular careers. What was this the role of this gay “pastor” in congregational life?
The inaccurate use of “pastor” worried me. Maybe the reporting team for this story should have included a religion-beat pro?
However, let me stress that this anecdote was totally valid, as part of a report on this topic. However, I am convinced that this voice needed to be balanced by some hard-news, factual reporting on how this trend is, or is not, linked bo how much women and men practice of the Latter-day Saint faith.
I know, from past reporting, that there are articulate specialists at the BYU School of Family Life who pay close attention to marriage-formation and parenting trends in Latter-day Saint life. Some are studying ways that local congregations help dedicated members of the church find and evaluate possible spouses.
In a 2022 “On Religion” column on marriage trends in various churches, I talked with Brian Willoughby of the BYU School of Family Life. Here is part of what he had to say, while stressing that some religious leaders still have not grasped how technology, education and economics that are affecting trends in dating, marriage and fertility.
“The key word is ‘tension,’ “ he said. Among the Latter-day Saints, these numbers are “not falling as fast” as in other groups, “but our young people are feeling tensions between the patterns they see all around them and what they hear from their parents and religious leaders.
“We are seeing the same changes – only moving slower. The average age of people getting married is rising. Fertility rates are declining. … We can no longer assume that religious young people are some kind of different species.”
Looking at these issues from the church’s point of view, it’s important to realize that many young people and young adults are caught in a “marriage paradox,” in which their beliefs about family are clashing with messages — even in churches and their families — that they keep hearing about the need to accomplish other “life goals.” Willoughby told me:
“Marriage becomes a transition in which they fear they will lose freedom or success. … They hear everyone saying: ‘You go to these schools and get these degrees. You get job one that leads to job two. Don’t let anything get in your way or get you off track.’ With this kind of head-down approach, serious relationships can be a distraction on the path to success. … The heart isn’t as important.”
The Times feature noted that Utah’s fertility numbers, while still near the top of U.S. states, are declining, even as the state’s economy booms. This decline:
… reflects the power of the broad social dynamics pushing down fertility rates: Despite hand-wringing among conservatives, women in one of the country’s most socially conservative states are now making very different choices about childbearing.
Many women interviewed for this article said they were waiting until they had finished their educations and were financially stable.
Again, this is valid, important, information. But the podcast discussion kept returning to this question: How are decisions about marriage and family linked to the level of commitment among women and men to the practice of their faith? Were statistics different for Latter-day Saints (and members of other religious traditions) who frequented pews and those who did not?
In other words, to what degree is strong religious faith a key element in this story?
Quite some time ago, as in 2010, The Weekly Standard (RIP) published a fact-driven feature that was way ahead of its time — “America’s One-Child Policy.” I have quoted it many times, especially at GetReligion.org, because it focused on the faith-factors involved in questions about marriage and fertility. Here is the thesis statement, and I added some bold italics for emphasis:
... (In) a world where childbearing has no practical benefit, people have babies because they want to, either for self-fulfillment or as a moral imperative. “Moral imperative,” of course, is a euphemism for “religious compulsion.” There are stark differences in fertility between secular and religious people. …
[T]here are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families. Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance. Among people who seldom or never go to church, 66 percent say that zero, one, or two children is the ideal family size, and only 25 percent view three-or-more children as ideal. Among those who go to church monthly, the three-or-more number edges up to 29 percent. But among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say three or more children is ideal, while only 47 percent think that a smaller family is preferable. When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they’re making a cultural and theological statement.
Obviously, the team that produced this Times feature focused on Utah because of its image as a bastion of conservative culture and, wink-wink, that whole “Mormons have lots of kids” stereotype.
At some point in the story, it would have been good to have paused long enough to ask a question or two about religious beliefs and practice. Consider the end of the story.
Utah is still the state with the largest family size in the country. But that may be changing, too: The women interviewed for this article came from families of as many as eight children, but they themselves tended to have fewer.
Chrissy Bryner grew up as one of five and always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. She was married at 19 and had her first child at 22, after graduating from Brigham Young University. Now 31, she has three children and said she and her husband might want a fourth.
But her older sister did things differently. She married after college but waited 12 years to have her first child, to establish her music career. Now, she is a thriving jazz musician who takes intense joy from parenting. She is pregnant with her second.
“I see my sister and other women I know,” Mrs. Bryner said, “and that shows me that my way is not the only way.”
Does anyone sense a “religion ghost” here?
The bottom line: If reporters are going to cover moral and religious issues in a state like Utah, at some point they need to talk to experts on the religious element that, for many people, remain at the heart of these questions.
Do a search on Google. Ask a question of two on Grok. Make some calls. Maybe even visit the Brigham Young University School of Family Life. Give it a try.