Young Women Are Leaving the Mormon Church. What’s Driving Them Out?

[00:00:04] Researchers published a survey this year showing that by age 18, fewer than 4 in 10 women raised Mormon still identified as Mormon. For older Mormon women, that number was around 6 in 10. Historically, Mormon women were more likely to stay in the church than Mormon men, but it seems to be changing with younger generations.

[00:00:24] So why are young women leaving? Researchers have been looking into that. They've studied everything from political beliefs and the church's teachings about sexuality to women's lack of authority in the church, personal religious experiences, and what happens to people who grow up in very devout Mormon families.

[00:00:43] Some have looked at how many people are leaving, some have talked to people about why they left, and others have followed young people over several years to see what might make them more likely to leave. So today, we're going to look at what they found, how the church compares with other religions when it comes to keeping members, and what Mormon women have been taught about their roles as wives, mothers, and working women.

[00:01:40] So today, we're going to look at what they found.

[00:01:50] We're going to look at what they found, and what they found, and what they found, and what they found. I'm your host, Jess. And I'm Hannah. So let's start with how many people who grow up Mormon actually stay Mormon.

[00:02:24] Ryan Burge is a political scientist who studies religion in the U.S. In August 2026, he published an article called The LDS Church Has a Retention Problem. He used data from Pew to look at how many people raised Mormon still identify as Mormon as adults. He found that about 54% stay Mormon, which means roughly 46% leave. Of those who left, almost two-thirds no longer identify with any religion, and about one in five became Protestant.

[00:02:54] So Burge looked at how these numbers have changed across generations. Mormon retention dropped by 21 percentage points between older and younger generations. So in comparison, for Catholics, it dropped by 23 points, and for Protestants, 25 points. So this is happening across American religion. But Burge points out that Mormonism already had lower retention rates than Catholicism and Protestantism, and that those rates have continued to fall.

[00:03:24] And that's his concern. The church is losing nearly half the people raised Mormon, and it has to rely on births and conversions to make up for those losses. Now, there is something worth knowing about Burge's comparison, which is that Pew groups all Protestants together, even though there are multiple denominations. So someone who grows up Methodist and then becomes Baptist still counts as Protestant.

[00:03:49] So Burge couldn't get reliable figures from the Pew data for individual denominations, and so he used the broader Protestant category that Pew used. That prompted a direct response from a BYU professor called Justin Dyer, the co-author of a major report on religious retention. In August 2026, Dyer published an article in the Deseret News titled, Don't Compare Religious Retention Figures That Are Measures Differently.

[00:04:14] Dyer challenged Burge's comparison of Mormon retention at 54% compared to Protestant retention at 71%. Dyer said the Protestant figure includes dozens of denominations, and people who move between them are still counted as Protestant. Whereas if you look at the figures for individual denominations, it breaks down that about 54% of Baptists stay Baptist, compared with 47% of Lutherans who stay Lutheran, 37% of Methodists, and 30% of Presbyterians.

[00:04:43] Dyer's argument is that when you compare Mormonism with individual Protestant denominations rather than Protestantism as a whole, Mormon retention looks considerably better. And why he needs that to be the case, you can only guess. Truth claims and all. Dyer's research found that 42% of people raised Mormon still identify as Mormon. Jesse pointed that out. But he also pointed to church attendance as evidence of their continued religiosity.

[00:05:12] 42% of people, he said, still identify as Mormon and attend church at least once a month. That was the highest rate of any religious group in the report's overall comparison. Dyer thinks that's significant. In a church news interview back in June, he talked about how well the Mormon church does at keeping people actively involved, including millennials and Gen Z. He talked about the benefits of religious involvement, like family spending time together,

[00:05:40] feeling connected to God, and better mental health. And as a believing Mormon, he sees those findings as evidence that the church is doing something right. Burge found high levels of religious participation among Mormons too. About 70% of Mormon adults said they attended church every week. His concern was how many people raised Mormon and eventually leave, including those who were very involved when they were younger. And I think this is a really excellent time to suggest that right after this,

[00:06:07] you go and listen to episode 92 that we dropped a while ago called 75% of Mormons say they attend church weekly. 15% actually do. You're right, Hannah. That is a great time to flag that one, to listen. If you just want to talk about attendance. That is a great time to say that. Yeah. Yeah. 70% of Mormon adults say they attend church weekly. 15% do. That's otherwise. Yeah. So Burge looked at how religious people were growing up.

[00:06:34] Of those who'd left the Mormon church, 72% said they'd gone to church every week as children. For those who stayed Mormon, it was 92%. He looked at three things about someone's upbringing, whether someone went to church every week, whether religion was important to them personally, and whether it was important in their family. And he found that even among people who grew up with all three of those things, only about 68% stayed Mormon.

[00:07:02] So nearly one in three still left. For people who were missing even one of those three things, the retention rate dropped to about 25%. And about two-thirds of the people raised Mormon in his sample actually met all three criteria. So we're talking about a lot of people who grew up going to church every Sunday, whose families took Mormonism seriously, and who took it seriously themselves. And a significant number of them still ended up leaving.

[00:07:32] Yep. I would have been one of those who met all three criteria. Mm-hmm. Same. What about you, Jess? Okay, you mentioned here that the context is the US. So when we're talking about politics, think US political parties, essentially. So Burge found some pretty big political differences between people who stayed Mormon and people who left.

[00:07:59] Among the people who stayed, 57% described themselves as conservative or very conservative, and fewer than 10% described themselves as liberal. Of the people who left, 36% described themselves as liberal. Another 12% described themselves as very liberal. So did people's political views change before they left the church or afterwards? Burge couldn't say. He doesn't have access to that data. He just knows that the difference between those who stay and those who leave is substantial.

[00:08:28] So what's happening with young Mormon women specifically? The 2025 Spiritual Seismology Survey, Ryan Burge's survey, of more than 100,000 American adults, found that only 37.5% of women raised Mormon still identified as Mormon at age 18. For older Mormon women, it was closer to 60%. Okay, so for 18-year-old Mormon men, retention was just under 60%.

[00:08:55] So we are seeing a much bigger drop in retention among young women than young men. Jana Rees is a journalist and a researcher who spent years studying Mormonism, and we often cite her articles. So Rees looked at Pew's religious survey findings too. Among Mormons 50 and older, 66% of women were still Mormon, compared with 57% of men. But among adults aged 18 to 49, those numbers had flipped.

[00:09:23] Only 49% of women were still Mormon, compared with 54% of men. And as I mentioned at the tippy top of the episode historically, Mormon women have been more likely to stay in the church than men. But now it looks like younger women are leaving at similar rates, well, probably higher rates than younger men. The BYU researchers found that the difference in retention between younger and older Mormon women was one of the largest that they looked at.

[00:09:51] But when they compared young Mormon women with young women in other religions, the retention rates were pretty similar. And that's something Justin Dyer emphasized when people started suggesting that Mormonism was doing an unusually bad job of keeping young women in the church. So we know that a lot of young Mormon women are leaving, and that younger women are leaving at much higher rates than older women. We know that young women in other religions are leaving too.

[00:10:18] But those numbers don't tell us why they're leaving. So Rees and Benjamin Knoll are finishing a book on why people leave Mormonism, and it's built on their Next Mormons surveys and interviews with former members. In August, Rees boiled down what she's seeing into three Ps, politics, purity culture, and powerlessness. So first, politics. She points out that younger women are becoming more politically liberal,

[00:10:47] which puts them increasingly at odds with the church's positions on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and women's equality. And these are issues that directly affect people's relationships, bodies, and families. Next is purity culture. A tally of three church magazines, The Ensign, New Era, and Friend, found that modesty messages aimed at teenage girls was climbing after the year 2000.

[00:11:13] By the early 2000s, girls were hearing them about six times as often as boys. Rees says the women she's interviewed describe what that did to them. Nicole, who's 23, told her she learned to avoid feeling sexual as a teenager. Two years after leaving Mormonism, she was still uncomfortable with her own sexuality. And the third explanation that Rees has is powerlessness.

[00:11:39] A young woman can go to university, build a career, manage people, and make really important decisions in her daily work. But in the Mormon church, priesthood authority is reserved for men. And so are many, nearly all of the decisions about how the church is run. So Rees wonders whether younger women are becoming less willing to accept that difference. And she thinks that these issues might be part of why young women are leaving the church.

[00:12:08] Dyer and his fellow researchers followed teenagers, boys and girls together, from 2020 to 2024, to see which ones stayed Mormon and which ones left. They didn't break the results out by gender though. In 2020, there were 709 people in their study who identified themselves as Mormon. Four years later, by 2024, 92 of them had left. The researchers found three things that were particularly associated with leaving. How often someone felt God's presence in their life,

[00:12:37] what they thought about the church's position on same-sex marriage, and how troubled they were by the church's positions on social and political issues. Of those who said they felt God's presence every day, only 4% had left by 2024. But among those who said they never or almost never felt God's presence, 24% had left. When it came to same-sex marriage, only 5% of people who were strongly opposed to the church fully accepting it had left. Kind of a double negative there.

[00:13:06] They did not want the church to accept it. But among people who strongly supported the church accepting same-sex marriage, 28% had left. And finally, of those who weren't bothered by the church's positions on social and political issues, only 5% left. But among those who were very troubled by these positions, 22% had left. So teenagers who rarely felt God's presence, who wanted the church to accept same-sex marriage, or who were troubled by its positions on social and political issues, were the most likely to leave, unsurprisingly.

[00:13:36] Unsurprisingly, yeah. The researchers also tested whether supporting women's ordination predicted leaving. In a sample of boys and girls together, it didn't. So the researchers looked at social media use, too. And at first, they found that having a smartphone and spending more time watching videos were linked to leaving the church. But when they factored in people's religious experiences and their views on social and political issues,

[00:14:03] those smartphone connections were no longer statistically significant. So they looked at people who'd already left Mormonism, too, and found that their attitudes toward religion varied quite a bit. They divided former Mormons into four groups. The groups were called Faith Staying, Faith Bordering, Faith Distancing, and Faith Leaving. About 22% were in the Faith Staying group, 32% in the Faith Bordering group, 36% in the Faith Distancing,

[00:14:32] and just 10% in the last group, the Faith Leaving group. So that last group had the most negative attitudes toward Mormonism and organized religion in general. And Dyer brought this up in his Church News interview. He suggested that the people with the strongest negative feelings about religion tend to be especially noticeable on social media. But the research found quite a range of religious attitudes among people who had left the church.

[00:14:59] In August 2026, two other writers weighed in on this question about why young women are leaving the Mormon Church. Stephen Cranny, a demographer who studies religion and fertility, and Megan Kohler, a Mormon writer, published an article in the Deseret News looking at whether allowing women to be ordained makes a difference to religious participation. They used data from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study to compare churches that ordain women with churches that don't.

[00:15:27] And they found that churches that ordain women don't necessarily have a higher percentage of female members. So Cranny and Kohler argued that allowing women to be ordained probably wouldn't reverse the decline in religious participation. But there's something worth pointing out about their research. They looked at how many women currently belong to different churches. They didn't look at how many girls raised in those churches stayed as adults. So their findings don't tell us whether allowing women to be ordained

[00:15:56] makes women more likely to stay. They argued that discussions about why women leave religion might focus too heavily on women who are active online, while overlooking women who face other challenges like poverty, raising children alone, or simply not having enough time. They did acknowledge that gender inequity might contribute to women leaving, but argued that the broader decline in religion involves more than that.

[00:16:24] Now, Cranny and Kohler point to women stretched by money, by time, by raising children alone. Mormon women have heard for decades how the church wanted them to deal with those realities. Like and subscribe. Your bishop doesn't need to know. Yes, take a wife's paycheck. In 1987, Ezra Taft Benson gave a talk called To the Mothers in Zion, where he quoted Spencer W. Kimball from a fireside

[00:16:53] he'd given 10 years earlier in 1977. Kimball had said, quote, The husband is expected to support his family, and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment. Her place is in the home, to build the home into a heaven of delight. And Benson quoted this from Kimball too. Quote, I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family. Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing.

[00:17:22] Come home from the factory, the cafe. End quote. He didn't say come home from the courtroom, or the hospital. Exactly. None of those things. So he relegated wives and women to these very gender stereotyped roles. Benson didn't just quote Kimball. He fully endorsed his thinking here. He called himself a second witness to Kimball's words and told families to make whatever sacrifices

[00:17:52] were necessary to keep mothers at home. The church included Benson's talk in one of its official teaching manuals. So this was church teachings widespread. Whatever sacrifices were necessary to keep mothers at home, including the mother's mental health. The following year, Levina Fielding Anderson wrote in dialogue about how women responded to Benson's talk. She said some women welcomed what he said. That would be my mom.

[00:18:20] While others felt angry, upset, or guilty. That would be my mom too. Same. She documented cases of women leaving their jobs because of the talk and the effect those decisions had on their families. The message from the president of the church was clear. Married women should only work outside the home if it was absolutely necessary. But then we move forward a little bit. In 2024, Camille Johnson,

[00:18:48] who was the church's Relief Society general president at the time, spoke at BYU Women's Conference about her experience as a working mother. She talked about going to law school, getting married, raising three sons, and continuing to work as a lawyer. She said she and her husband supported each other and she spoke very positively about that experience. But she was equally clear that motherhood was her highest priority. She emphasized the commandment to have children

[00:19:18] and encouraged women to seek God's guidance rather than put off having children for career or financial reasons. So she was celebrating her career while still teaching that motherhood should come first. Now, a writer named Carolyn responded to Johnson's speech in Exponent 2. She was pleased to see the church celebrating a woman who'd managed to have both a career and a family. But she had some questions. How had Johnson reconciled her decision to work as a lawyer

[00:19:47] with what the prophets were telling women at the time? And why was the church now celebrating choices that previous generations of women had been explicitly discouraged from making without acknowledging those earlier teachings? We did a Mormon Monday episode on this back in the spring. It's episode 34 about the church posting a story on social media about a husband supporting his wife's career as a pediatric neurologist. And he had said, and the church was, yay, feminism.

[00:20:17] He had said, supporting her doesn't shrink my purpose. It expands it. And I think I mentioned at the time because I'm such a cynic, it expands his bank account too. Well, yes. I mean, I really like the paycheck that comes with her. So Jana Rees had written an article about the reactions to that post. Some people weren't happy about the church celebrating and platforming a working mother. One commentator asked, how is this woman supposed to have children if she's busy being a doctor all day?

[00:20:46] Another accused the church's public relations department of estrogen poisoning. Other people defended the post and some people in the comments, according to Rees, had argued that the church has always supported women getting an education and having a career. What Mormon church are they part of? Not one I'm familiar with. The church, exactly. I have no idea. Yeah. Rees looked at those claims and compared them with what church leaders had actually taught women in the past.

[00:21:16] I mean, not to mention, what's this, Scotchmas is our lived experience? Nothing. It's like, no, millions of women around the world can tell you exactly what we were taught. Obviously, how the church as a whole feels in terms of those comments that Rees focused on, we don't want to over-extrapolate from the handful of comments that she highlighted. I have not been to the post and looked through the comments myself, so I don't know how common those opinions were. Yeah. Well, but I will say, I did look through the post

[00:21:45] and through the comments until I got sick to my stomach reading about that so many people were lambasting the post and saying things about where women belonged and that it wasn't there. Okay, so they're not lambasting the post because it's like, wow, look at the church, virtue signaling, pretending that they've always supported women's careers, pretending, no, it was lambasting it for, okay. You're sending the wrong message. Right. Okay, got it. Yeah, I understand.

[00:22:14] There's no good answer to any of this. No. So let's compare what the church was saying at different times in history. In 1987, Benson was telling married women to come home from work and quoting Kimball to back himself up. In 2024, the Relief Society general president was openly talking about her career as a lawyer while raising three children. And just two years later, in 2026, the church was celebrating a husband

[00:22:44] who supported his wife's career as a doctor. So there's been a pretty clear change in how the church talks about working mothers, although Camille Johnson was still teaching that motherhood should come first, which leaves us where we started. Nobody knows why young women are leaving. Politics, purity culture, powerlessness, whether a teenager feels God's presence, we just don't know. Any of them could be part of it. And more than one of those reasons probably is. Yeah.

[00:23:13] And whatever the answer or answers, the church has a lot riding on those answers. It leans on births and conversions to make up for the people it loses. So it matters where the young women stay. So we looked at what church leaders said at the most recent October general conference. Just one talk was addressed to young women.

[00:23:42] Sister Andrea Munoz-Spanaus in the Young Women General Presidency offered seven suggestions for young women. Take the sacrament, repent daily, study the scriptures, learn about ministering angels, go to bed early, limit your cell phone use, and find friends who are trying to follow the Lord. Actually, I really like two of those points. Sleep. Just two. Limit your cell phone. President Oaks spoke to members whose faith is fading. He called them

[00:24:12] a major source of concern for church leaders, said God is quote, relentless in his loving pursuit, close quote, of them. Sounds criminal. And said questions or doubts are overcome by getting closer to Jesus Christ. Elder Rasband spoke about loved ones who've left. He told listeners to turn their despair over to Jesus Christ because members can't change those hearts, but he can. And Bishop Sean Douglas in a talk about missions described service

[00:24:41] as a responsibility for young men and a powerful but optional opportunity for young women. The rest of the counsel to young women, well, and all members, was about obedience. President Oaks asked members with fading faith to keep the commandments and be true to their covenants. Sister Spinaus told young women to remain faithful to their baptismal covenants. Elder Rasben described what he and his wife have tried with their own children who left, preaching,

[00:25:11] arguing, demanding, lecturing, sending them links to conference talks. Asking why they left? Not on the list. Wee says young women are reacting to the church's politics, the church's purity teachings, and the church's refusal to give women authority. The church's answer is that they should sleep more and use their phones less. Yeah. Here's what I think. The church isn't interested in why they're leaving. It just wants the young women to come back and it wants them obedient. As always, there is plenty

[00:25:40] more to discuss here. What women were taught growing up, what young women are saying about their experiences. Yeah, I think next time we might dive into some of Jana Rees' previous research and the results of that study. But that's what we have for you today. So please be sure to subscribe or follow so you don't miss the next one. Yeah. Thank you for listening, liking, sharing, commenting, and following. If you'd like to support the show, leaving a review

[00:26:10] helps other people find this. And we'll see you tomorrow for an episode of Mormon Monday. And Hannah, before we go, I'm sorry for what I said when I was Mormon. I'm sorry for what I said when I was Mormon too. I'm sorry for what I said I'm sorry for what I said I'm sorry for what I said