Utah is no longer majority Mormon, new research says
By: Jonathon Sharp - Posted:
Updated:
SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Since Utah became a state in the late 1800s, most of its residents have been members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But according to a new study, Utah isn’t majority Mormon anymore.
A paper published this month in the Journal of Religion and Demography estimates that the percentage of Utahns who identify as members of the LDS church, otherwise known as Mormons, is about 42%.
That’s markedly lower than previous media reports citing the church’s numbers, which put the percentage of Mormons in Utah at around 60% as recently as 2020.
The Method
To get their numbers, Cragun and his fellow researchers contracted a survey of roughly 1,900 Utahns, with quotas for age, sex and ethnicity aligning with official census data for Utah. This method is called “quota sampling.”
Michael Wood, assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, who was not connected to the study, said quota sampling is commonly used in the field with accepted limitations, which he noted that Cragun and his co-authors acknowledged.
“It is a provocative study with compelling arguments,” Wood told ABC4 in an email, adding that “further research with a more robust sampling method is needed to confirm the findings.”
In the survey, which was conducted in the summer of 2022, the nearly 2,000 participants were asked a variety of questions, and among them was how they identified on religious grounds.
Initially, Cragun and his fellow researchers weren’t interested in religious self identification but rather how Uthans thought about science. But when the researchers got the results on religious self identification, they were surprised.
“This seemed like a newsworthy little finding for us, because we actually have data to show the state is not actually majority Mormon anymore,” Cragun said.
The Church’s Numbers
According to the paper, the figures released by the LDS church are not reliable for the purposes of determining the percentage of Utahns who actively identify as Mormon.
This is because, so the researchers say, the church basically counts members as anyone who’s been baptized.
“Aside from a few who are excommunicated or formally ask to have their name removed, members remain on church rolls until they die, or until their 110th birthday if their whereabouts are unknown,” the paper states.
ABC4 reached out to the church for comment on this story, but they declined.
