https://www.deseret.com/faith/2025/02/28/utah-religious-makeup/

- Half of Utah adults identify as Latter-day Saints, while just 2% of U.S. adults overall claim the label, according to the report.

The share of Latter-day Saints in Utah is down slightly from 2007, when Pew released its first Religious Landscape Study.

In 2007, 58% of Utah adults identified as Latter-day Saints. In 2014, when Pew fielded its second RLS, 55% did.

- The survey, which was fielded in 2023 and 2024, showed that more than one-third of adult Utahns (34%) are religious “nones,” compared to 29% of U.S. adults overall.

- Around half of Utah adults (51%) pray at least daily. That figure has dropped 16 percentage points since 2007.

- More than 8 in 10 Utah adults (84%) believe in God or a universal spirit, compared to 83% of all U.S. adults.

Half is not a bad number and is maybe quite predictable for Utah.

83/84% belief in God is a pretty good number for the religious side, whether LDS or other.


So I looked up the same info for my country, Canada.

https://www.ulethbridge.ca/unews/article/god-still-doing-reasonably-well-polls

Excerpts from the Dec 2020 survey above:

“A majority of Canadians continue to believe in God, according to the most recent national survey by University of Lethbridge sociologist Dr. Reginald Bibby.


“Bibby has been charting the God numbers through national surveys from the mid-1970s to December of this year.


“God is not faring all that badly in the polls,” says Bibby.
“Some 60 per cent of Canadians continue to believe in God and only 15 per cent say they definitely don’t. Those numbers represent a decline in clear-cut believers since the mid-1970s, but show that belief in God is still widespread in Canada.”


“Over the years, the surveys have provided interesting insights about Canadians’ spiritual beliefs. His first Project Canada survey in 1975 found that only two per cent of Canadians said they didn’t believe in God. That figure has now increased to 16 per cent. In 1975, agnostics comprised six per cent of survey respondents; in 2020, agnostics comprise 13 per cent.”

After so many thousands of years I am surprised belief has not dwindled more than that.

I believe that belief can be very dangerous. Or monotonous. Especially inherited belief. Is it instilled or installed?

Once my mom read an article that adding lemon to any dish makes it better. Soon all our food tasted like lemon. The other ingredients were stomped on not highlighted. Well, it worked very well in the Lemon Merengue pie actually but other foods felt compromised, lost their unique flavors.

I've been more about keeping flavors pure ever since. I want my rhubarb cobbler to taste like rhubarb. I want my life to feel like MY life.

Well said.

At one time everything in my life was lemon church influenced. It took a long time to be able to taste anything else.

I like somewhere between zero to very little dressing on my salad. I don't like it when the wonderful flavors of spinach, arugula, tomato, cucumber, carrot, etc. are all muted to taste like honey mustard.

When one adopts a strong dogma or doctrine, they've put too much dressing on their salad.

While I wasn't able to make the Utah figures break down on the Pew website, I was struck by the following national figures:

23% of respondents viewed themselves as Evangelical (presumably white) Christians;
19% of respondents viewed themselves as Catholic (presumably Roman);
11% of respondents viewed themselves as mainline Protestants.

In other words, less than half of the Protestant respondents viewed themselves as being mainline, a trend that Kevin Phillips wrote about back in the early 2000s (and which I've posted here several times in the past). The continuing movement among Protestants towards evangelical Protestantism has broad implications, especially political implications, that are affecting us right now!

I don't think that most of the mainline Protestants that leave are moving towards the Evangelicals. If anything, most of them are becoming a part of the "nones."

It may be that Phillips and blindguy are not talking as much about migration from mainstream Protestantism (MP) to Evangelical Protestantism (EP) as about a shifting definition of Protestantism.

It is possible, for instance, that MP is losing adherents more rapidly than EP, thereby pushing up the percentage of the latter. Alternatively, EP may be better at proselytizing and/or have a higher fertility rate. In all these cases the "average" Protestant would have moved to the religious and political right.

As Phillips observed two decades ago, that process was already firmly established at the turn of the century.

It doesn't matter if half of Utah is Mormon. LD$ Inc. owns the state government.

But that is precisely the reason LDS Inc owns the state government, and will continue to do so for years to come.

They don't need 51% of the electorate to be Mormon to make it near impossible for a nonMo to get elected. All they need is enough Mormons in one party to guarantee that a Mo will get the nomination, and then enough of a voting bloc in the general election to sway the outcome. In most elections, 15% or less of the general population belonging to that bloc would be enough to sway an election.

The SLTrib had some interesting stats in their writeup of the survey. They also had some excellent graphics (tables) but I assume they are paywalled. If you have a sub---
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2025/02/26/pew-study-latter-day-saints-among/

I pointed out in another recent thread that people should be careful about claiming what people believe, when what is actually being determined in most surveys is what they *say* they believe. This is often not the same thing.

From the article:
>Of those Latter-day Saints polled, a sky-high 76% reported attending services in person at least monthly. Perhaps even more impressive was the 69% who said they found themselves in the pews weekly or more.

>Their closest competitor, evangelicals, clocked in at 60% and 50%, respectively. Zoom out to the national average and those numbers sink to 33% and 25%.

>The Pew study isn’t the first to suggest that Latter-day Saints are super-attenders. A 2024 Gallup report put the percentage of weekly or almost weekly attendees at 67%. This finding matched up neatly with a second study published last year, this one by the B.H. Roberts Foundation, which logged weekly attendance at 71% for those living in the “Mormon Corridor” and 65% for those without.

>Of course, how often people say they attend worship services and how often they actually do are two different things.

>Sure enough, yet another 2024 report — one based not on self-reporting but cellphone data harvested from millions of Americans just before the pandemic — stated the true percentage of Latter-day Saints who attend regularly may be closer to 15%.
====================

I think there is likely an apples/oranges problem here. The Pew survey took only self-identified Mormons in their survey. I think the cell phone data study would include everyone the church counts as Mormon, so they would be collecting cellphone data on everyone that shows up in the church parking lot on Sunday, and comparing it to how many names are on the ward membership list. That should give you a dramatically lower attendance ratio compared to the Pew study, which was mostly or totally active Mormons.

Still, 76% self-identified attenders dropping down to 15% when cell phone data is used to determine who attends is pretty damn dramatic.

People tend to lie and give socially acceptable answers rather than honest ones to survey questions. "Do you believe in God?" Hmmm. Everyone seems to hate atheists, and my family/friends/parents/boss would have a cow if they knew I didn't believe, so yeah, I believe. I even believe I believe. I just don't much act like it.

Mormons are heavily encouraged to read scripture at home, and pray daily and attend church. They do all those things in larger numbers than the general population, but still, they obviously overreport because they know they are supposed to be doing them, even if they really don't live up to the image they think they should have (or want others to have of them).