Posted by:
Amyjo
(
)
Date: October 14, 2017 02:22PM
Intriguing study shows that more Mormon men are leaving the "fold" than their female counterparts.
And they're not coming back. What's more alarming to church head counters is that more Mormon men are leaving in Utah than other parts of the nation. That's got to concern lay leaders and church leaders alike.
(Progress, not perfection.)
"Conservative denominations in the United States tend to have more women than men, so the sex ratio imbalance in Mormonism is not particularly surprising, even if it is rather severe. What is surprising is the regional concentration of this imbalance.
We began to investigate sex ratios in the church when we compared data from two large censuses of religious bodies, one conducted in 1990 and the other in 2008. The data show that between these two censuses, the proportion of self-identified Latter-day Saints that were female increased rather dramatically … but only in Utah. Outside Utah and Mormon strongholds in the Intermountain West, sex ratios within the church remained stable, and were closer to parity than in Utah.
The “shortage of Mormon men” we’ve heard so much about lately is far worse in Utah than it is in the rest of the nation.
There has been a general secularizing trend in the United States for the past 25 years. People are abandoning organized religion in large numbers, and those with no denominational affiliation now constitute about 20% of the population. Mormonism is not immune from this trend, and defections from Mormonism are more common than they have been in the past. In the 1970s and 80s, surveys showed that the church retained about 90 percent of its cradle members. But in the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey, 36% of respondents raised LDS have abandoned their faith. Just as women outnumber men in conservative denominations, men substantially outnumber women among those abandoning religion. This is true for Mormons as well.
Also, this trend in religious disaffiliation is most pronounced among young people in their late teens and early 20s, which is a datum that is important to remember.
So, one explanation for what’s going on is that we are seeing how a general pattern in American religious demography is manifesting itself in a Mormon context."
http://religionnews.com/2015/09/16/more-mormon-men-are-leaving-the-lds-church-say-researchers-but-especially-in-utah/Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2017 02:27PM by Amyjo.