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Richelle Wilson is a PhD student in Scandinavian studies and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a talk producer at community radio station WORT 89.9 FM and a member of Dialogue’s editorial staff.

When I first heard Jana Riess was undertaking research about Millennial Mormons, I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait for this book to be released. Given the heightened sense of generational divide in America right now, thanks in no small part to deepening political polarization and an ongoing series of culture wars run amok, research like this is vital for the health of our communities.

The Next Mormons doesn’t disappoint. Riess writes in a clear, engaging style that is approachable to non-specialists and folks who don’t know much about Mormonism. In spite of its seemingly niche topic, I hope this book receives a wider audience since Riess’s findings are important and have broader implications for religion in 21st-century America.

The research in the book is based on the Next Mormons Survey, a Qualtrics questionnaire administered to 1,696 current and former Mormons, along with personal interviews conducted with 63 additional Mormons (not respondents of the survey). [1] Riess details in the final section of the book how they secured a fairly representative sample (and corrected for imbalances with a method called poststratification, p. 242), and she is quick to note throughout the book when a given sample size is too small to generalize or draw definitive conclusions from the results. While reading, I was impressed with how forthright she is in explaining her methodology, discussing how the findings compared with previous research undertaken by Pew and others, and pointing out any limitations or areas that could use further analysis.

Throughout the book, Riess is most interested in illuminating the experience of Millennials by comparing survey results across generations (Boomer/Silent, Gen X, and Millennial). She also does a lot of current Mormon/former Mormon juxtapositions, and given that the final chapter is “Exodus: Millennial Former Mormons,” it’s clear that another prevailing concern for her is disaffiliation. This is central to any discussion of younger Mormons because Millennials are leaving the church in greater numbers than previous generations, so issues of faith crisis and disaffiliation are key to understanding their experience. Even for those who stay, they are much more likely than their parents to have Mormon spouses, siblings, and friends who leave. This is one of the many reasons I think all Mormons, especially leadership, should spend some time with this book.

Many of the findings in The Next Mormons may seem intuitive and, therefore, unsurprising. However, I think it’s important to have supporting evidence for folk wisdom that circulates (and there’s a lot of that in Mormonism). But in other cases, prevailing “common sense” beliefs are debunked by survey results. For example, though church leaders have long worried about the corrupting influence of college campuses, it turns out that more education correlates with greater church retention and even orthodoxy. (The one exception cited is women with an advanced academic degree, who are actually more likely to leave, see pp. 106–107.) Another striking finding is that Millennial children of stay-at-home mothers were more likely to leave the church as adults than those with working mothers (pp. 107–108). Of course, the point here isn’t to shame anyone for their choices, but it’s interesting to note that the fears surrounding mothers entering the workforce in the latter half of the 20th century turned out to be unfounded.

Other findings presented in the book are what you might expect, though often with a little twist. Even the headline issue—that Millennial Mormons are leaving the church in greater numbers—is paired with the finding that Millennials who do stay are both remarkably devout and more likely to express doubt than their elders (see pp. 20, 30–32). The key is not to misinterpret that doubt as necessarily signaling a lack of faith or commitment; rather, doubt is simply a feature of Millennials’ religious lives. Riess does a masterful job of describing such generational characteristics (some of which may immediately sound the alarms for many older Mormons) without resorting to clichés, offering the reader a path to sympathy and understanding for the reported beliefs and behaviors that may deviate from expectation.

Speaking of which, the most surprising thing for me while reading was how much uncertainty in LDS teachings was expressed in the overall survey results across all generations. Even foundational Christian belief statements like “God is real” had lower reported levels of absolute certainty than I would have expected: 86% of Boomer/Silents, 76% of GenXers, 68% of Millennials (p. 17). I’m not a social scientist, so I don’t know the best practices for extrapolating these statistics, but I think this means it’s possible that up to 30 out of 100 members of a given ward or stake aren’t 100% sure God is real. That’s huge. That matters. I’d say it requires a different approach to testifying and ministering than the current status quo.

The reported uncertainty is even higher for LDS-specific teachings. For example, the statement “The LDS First Presidency members and apostles are God’s prophets on the earth today” has full confidence from 67% of Boomer/Silents, 55% of GenXers, and 53% of Millennials (p. 19). Those numbers seem low to me, even as someone who knows a lot of Mormons with varied beliefs, but it’s unsurprising that many would normally keep quiet about these doubts because of enormous pressure to perform faith and belief in a certain way, especially depending on one’s family, friends, and job/education (for example, being at a church-owned school).

This particular faith tenet—the authority of church leadership—is a recurring theme of The Next Mormons, as issues of authority and obedience appear to be at the root of Mormon doubt and disaffiliation, especially for Millennials. Even among LGBT former Mormons, who could readily cite LGBT issues as their primary reason for leaving, top concerns also included “the church’s lack of financial transparency; emphasis on conformity and obedience; strong culture of political conservatism; and excommunications of feminists, intellectuals, and activities” (142). “In other words,” Riess writes, “for LGBT Mormons, leaving the church is never ‘just’ about LGBT issues per se. It’s that those issues strike at the very heart of Mormon ideas of authority” (142).

The twin issues of authority and obedience were also relevant in the discussion of evolving gender roles. See chapter 5 for more on this. For now, I’ll just leave you with the money quote about the importance of having women in church leadership:

“Why does women’s religious leadership matter? … [W]omen who attend congregations in which women make up at least half of the religious leadership have higher levels of religious belief, identity, and ‘efficacy’ (confidence that their opinions matter in their congregations) than other women. This effect is not limited to how women feel and behave religiously, but extends to other areas of their lives. For example, the presence of women as religious leaders in female respondents’ childhoods contributed to better educational and socioeconomic outcomes for those women as adults, even after controlling for other factors. The positive results were particularly marked for women with more liberal theological and political views—the very ones who may be, in Mormonism at least, more likely to simply leave the church than to continue to chafe at restrictions they feel within it.” (100)

Other major themes treated include missionary experience, the temple, race, religious practice, and social and political views. Each of these deserves a full-length review of its own. I was especially interested in the chapter on single Mormons (ch 4) because I’ve been swimming in those waters for a long time. [2] It’s a major site of resistance for young Mormons because of how never-married “singles” (who make up about 20% of the adult church) are treated and counseled by both membership and leadership, at the local level all the way to the top. The pervasive church message that single adults are “just biding our time until we get married, and that’s when our ‘real’ lives will begin” (78) is devastating to unmarried Mormons in their 20s, 30s, and beyond as they spend precious years and even decades in this “waiting” phase, wondering what their purpose is and making major life decisions (career, education, travel, geographic relocation) based on an anxious calculus of what is most likely to lead to marriage. Many single women in the church move to Utah or stay there long after their college education because they believe, or are told, that the dating pool is better there. Consider, though, that while there are more never-married Mormon men than women nationally, “[i]n Utah, never-married women who were active in the church outnumbered their male counterparts by more than two to one” (77), challenging conventional wisdom for single women to flock to Utah for marriage prospects within the faith.

In terms of marital status and disaffiliation: “Statistically, single people are more likely to leave Mormonism or become inactive than married people” (81). Both research and personal experience suggest that single people leave because they don’t feel like they have a place in Mormonism. This goes beyond any general social sense of feeling different or marginalized, damaging as that is in itself. It even goes beyond the insulting infantilization of young single adults (see p. 88). Single members are made to feel that they genuinely don’t matter as much in the church and, further, that their entire lives are inferior—an unhappy prelude to a more joyous, realized life with spouse and children, which we’re told in the church is our raison d’être. As one woman shared in her interview, “I was facing a life of not ever having love or companionship or sex or children. … I just knew that I couldn’t stay [in the church]. I did not agree with the expectation that if I was single, I had missed the boat” (78). There is so much more I could say about this topic, but I’ll leave it at this for now: This chapter is SO IMPORTANT for all Mormons to read and discuss. It’s not just about asking a few single people to “be patient” or “wait for eternal blessings”; Riess’s research indicates that this is a big enough phenomenon that Mormonism needs to seriously reconsider how we talk about families and what it means to live a happy, full life if we’re to make room at the table for the rising generation.

And honestly, that’s kind of the takeaway of the entire book. The famed “The Family” is getting in the way of, you know, actual families. We’re facing big changes in how Americans (including American Mormons) approach family life. Think, for example, of the shrinking size of Mormon families (which is both reported in this book and highlighted in a recent Religion News Service post by Riess). Neither Riess nor I would characterize this as a “decline” in American family values or a sign of national moral failing (at least not for the reasons lamented by traditionalists), but a basic social and economic reality having to do with deferred marriage timelines, changing notions of work and career expectations, stagnant wages, decreased access to homeownership, the list goes on. All of this is paired with a more capacious definition of what “family” is to Millennials (especially unmarried ones), including extended family, church congregants, colleagues, neighbors, and friends—and we want to invite all these people to our weddings, by the way (see p. 57).

Instead of clinging to its post-WWII branding and commitment to the “ideal” nuclear family, the church has an opportunity to do what it did back then and respond to the cultural realities of its members at this crucial time in American and religious history. I suggest reading The Next Mormons regardless of your family situation or views, as it offers valuable insight for members, leaders, and researchers of the LDS faith community looking to the future.

Jana Riess. The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 328 pp. Hardcover: $29.95.

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[1] The survey was available from September 8 to November 1, 2016, with the majority of responses collected in September (p. 238). Given that this was prior to the results of the 2016 presidential election, I would wager that some of the generational differences Riess observes have only widened in the intervening two-and-a-half years.

[2] It was brought to my attention by my wonderful mother that it’s unclear in this section if “singles” includes widows/widowers and those who have divorced. A great deal of the research presented in Next Mormons seems to be about never-married Mormons, and that’s the group I’m primarily talking about in these paragraphs. But yes, we need much more research, analysis, and insight about and from other currently-unmarried/single Mormons as well because they are so important to the community and to this discussion.