The LDS Church Has A Retention Problem
(ANALYSIS) I often think of religious traditions as a styrofoam cup. Each of them has a different level of water in them at any given time. However, that volume of water never stays fixed for long, because religious groups operate in a volatile environment with constant pressure to rise or fall.
The most unavoidable pressure is generational replacement. People will die and new people will be born every single day. The new births add a bit of water to the cup, while those funerals poke a little hole in the side of the styrofoam and allow water to leak out.
Congregations that are poised to grow usually have a lot of young couples whose new babies add to the community and not so many people are being lost through death. In other words, the water flowing in the top will more than offset that small hole that is forming through death.
But there are other ways to change the water level of the cup in either direction. One way to add volume is to convert new people into the tradition. Many religious groups including evangelicals and Latter-day Saints put a tremendous amount of emphasis on sharing their faith with outsiders. But conversion is incredibly hard. Very few door knocks produce converts.
The most often overlooked part of this experiment is the way that the largest holes form in the cup: lack of retention. While a young couple who has a new baby and brings them to church adds some liquid to the styrofoam vessel, what happens if that child grows into a teenager or young adult who stops attending entirely? To stick with the metaphor, this forms a little hole where water begins to flow outwards.
Most congregations can’t really do much about the holes created through death, but they can have a more direct impact on the losses that occur through retention.
So which traditions are doing the best on this metric, and which are hemorrhaging water? Well, the Pew Religious Landscape Survey (hosted at the ARDA) makes it really easy to do a simple calculation to sort this out.
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.