Mormonism Explained recently published a response to Jeff Strong’s 2026 book Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn From Them. (affiliate link) The response argues that Strong’s description of Latter-day Saint “spiritual starvation” should show up in measurable outcomes if it is true. It points to ten studies involving religious attendance, happiness, parental love, longevity, education, and meaning in life, then concludes that the data show the opposite of Strong’s diagnosis.[1]
Many of the underlying findings are real. Pew does find unusually high attendance among people who currently identify as Latter-day Saints. A University of Chicago study using smartphone location data finds unusually frequent attendance among people observed visiting Latter-day Saint meetinghouses. A long-running California study found very low mortality among highly active Latter-day Saints.[2][5][6]
But those findings do not answer the same question as religious disaffiliation. Most measure people who still identify as Latter-day Saints or who are already showing up at Latter-day Saint buildings. Strong’s argument concerns people who lose trust, disengage, or leave. If leaving also means disappearing from the group being measured, high scores among those who remain can coexist with substantial disaffiliation.
Mormonism Explained eventually acknowledges this problem itself. It calls survivorship bias “the single most serious challenge” to its case and says a direct comparison of current members, former members, and the general population is still being prepared.[1] That admission does not make the studies bad. It does mean the site’s broad conclusion runs ahead of the evidence it currently has.
Pew’s 76% is not a retention rate
The most prominent graphic in the response answers the claim that young people are losing trust by pointing out that 76% of Latter-day Saint Millennials and Gen Z attend religious services at least monthly.[1] The number is supported by the 2023–24 Pew Religious Landscape Study and by a 2026 BYU Studies analysis of Pew’s data.[2][3]
That is a measure of attendance among people who currently identify as Latter-day Saints. It is not the percentage of people raised Latter-day Saint who remain in the faith.
The distinction becomes clear in the BYU Studies report. Using Pew’s 2024 data, the authors estimate that 49.4% of people who were Latter-day Saint as teenagers still identify as Latter-day Saint as adults. They also find that relatively few people raised Latter-day Saint remain nominally affiliated while rarely attending. Only 12% of those raised in the faith still identify as Latter-day Saint while attending less than monthly. The authors explicitly say that frequent attendance has become an important feature of continuing to identify as Latter-day Saint.[4]
For Millennials and Gen Z, the same report finds that 39% of people raised Latter-day Saint both retain the identity and attend at least monthly.[4] There is no contradiction between that figure and Pew’s 76% attendance rate among current young Latter-day Saints. They use different denominators.
A religion can lose a large share of the people raised in it while the people who remain are intensely active. In fact, if inactive people are increasingly likely to stop calling themselves Latter-day Saints, the attendance percentage among current identifiers can stay very high even as retention falls.
Attendance also is not a direct measure of trust. It can be a useful indicator of religious commitment, but showing that current young Latter-day Saints attend frequently does not test whether trust has declined among the larger population that was raised in the Church or among people in the process of leaving.
The attendance graphic has a separate problem
The weekly-attendance graphic also appears to misstate or mix the Pew figures. Mormonism Explained labels its bars as “Weekly religious attendance” and gives Latter-day Saints 65% and evangelicals 59%.[1] Pew’s published all-adult table reports 69% of Latter-day Saints and 50% of evangelical Protestants attending weekly or more often.[2]
The 59% figure does appear in the BYU Studies report, but there it refers to monthly attendance among Millennial+ evangelicals, not weekly attendance among all evangelicals.[3] The broad conclusion that current Latter-day Saints attend more frequently than most other U.S. religious groups remains well supported. The graphic itself should still be corrected because its label and numbers do not match the Pew table it cites.
The cellphone study cannot identify an inactive Mormon
Mormonism Explained then turns to Devin Pope’s University of Chicago study of anonymized smartphone location data, presenting it as a check on inflated self-reported attendance. That is a useful use of the study, up to a point. Pope followed location data from more than two million smartphones in 2019 and found that only about 5% of Americans were observed attending worship weekly, far below the roughly 22% who reported weekly attendance in surveys.[5]
But the study cannot identify someone’s religion independently of where that person goes. Pope explains that a phone with no religious-worship visits is categorized as a “non-attender.” If a phone makes one or more visits, the person is assigned to the religion whose worship locations they visited most often. He also states plainly that the movement data cannot reveal a person’s stated religious affiliation.[5]
That makes the limitation especially relevant here. An inactive person who still considers himself Latter-day Saint but never enters a meetinghouse cannot be counted by the cellphone study as an inactive Latter-day Saint. A person raised Latter-day Saint who has left the Church cannot be identified as a former Latter-day Saint at all.
The study is strong evidence that people who actually visit Latter-day Saint meetinghouses tend to do so with unusual regularity. It is not an independent census of everyone who is Latter-day Saint, everyone on Church records, or everyone raised in the faith. Using it to answer a claim about disaffiliation changes the population being measured before the comparison even begins.
The longevity study starts with highly active members
The longevity evidence has a similar selection issue. Mormonism Explained cites a 25-year UCLA cohort and says its life-expectancy results show that “whatever the culture is doing, its members live measurably longer under it.”[1]
The study itself is narrower. Researchers followed 9,815 “religiously active California Mormon adults.” The original questionnaire was sent to about 12,000 California high-priest households, and the respondents were 5,223 high priests and 4,592 wives.[6] This was not a representative sample of everyone who identified as Latter-day Saint, much less everyone who had been raised in the Church.
The longest life expectancies, about 84 years for men and 86 for women from age 25, came from an “optimum” subgroup defined as married never-smokers who attended church weekly and had at least twelve years of education. The authors also found that the mortality advantage was largely replicated among similarly defined people of all religions in the National Health Interview Survey.[6]
That is good evidence that a cluster of behaviors common among active Latter-day Saints, especially avoiding tobacco, stable marriage, education, and regular religious participation, is associated with lower mortality. It does not show that every feature of Latter-day Saint culture is beneficial or that the culture cannot contribute to some members leaving.
Flourishing among those who stay can still be genuine
The same caution applies to the response’s claims about meaning, happiness, depression, and belonging. Positive results among current Latter-day Saints should not simply be dismissed. They may reflect real benefits of close congregations, family networks, religious practice, and a strong sense of purpose. If Torn were claiming that most current Latter-day Saints are miserable or that the culture produces nothing but harm, those findings would be strong counterevidence.
But that is different from showing that cultural pressures do not contribute to disaffiliation. A community can work very well for many people and poorly for a smaller group. If the people for whom it works poorly are also more likely to leave and stop identifying with the group, surveys of current members will naturally give more weight to those for whom the system works.
Mormonism Explained recognizes this. After presenting its positive findings, it concedes that people who were “starved” may have left the sample and says this is a real survivorship-bias problem. It offers reasons for thinking the bias does not explain everything, then makes an unusually candid admission: “we do not think so” is not evidence.[1] The site says it is preregistering a Global Flourishing Study analysis that will compare current members, former members, and the general population directly.[1]
That planned analysis is much closer to the test required by the claim being debated. It can ask whether people who leave differ from those who remain and whether those differences existed before departure, emerged during disaffiliation, or changed afterward. Even then, correlation alone will not establish that Church culture caused the differences, but at least the people who left will be in the denominator.
What the studies actually show
None of this requires denying the unusually high religious activity of current Latter-day Saints. That finding is one of the most consistent results in the available data. The BYU Studies report itself describes Latter-day Saints as having the highest active-retention rate among the religious groups it examined, even while reporting that overall retention has fallen substantially over time.[4] Those two findings can be true together.
The same is true of health and well-being. Active Latter-day Saints can benefit from low smoking rates, strong social networks, regular participation, family stability, or a sense of purpose while other people experience distrust, exclusion, historical concerns, social conflict, or other pressures that contribute to leaving. Population averages among current members cannot decide every one of those questions.
This does not prove Strong’s explanation of disaffiliation. Torn’s own claims about causes, prevalence, and the role of Church culture should be tested with the same care. A survey of former members can have its own sampling problems, and a correlation between an experience and leaving does not by itself prove causation.
But a fair response has to test the claim with the right population. Pew’s 76% tells us that young adults who still call themselves Latter-day Saints are unusually likely to attend church. Pope’s cellphone data tells us that people who visit Latter-day Saint meetinghouses tend to return frequently. The UCLA cohort tells us that a highly active, health-conscious group of California Latter-day Saints lived a long time.[2][5][6]
None of those findings, by themselves, tells us how many people raised in the Church have lost trust, why they left, or what their lives looked like before and after leaving.
A church can have one of the most committed cores in America and still lose a large share of the people it raised. The data cited by Mormonism Explained do a good job documenting the first half of that sentence. They do not erase the second.
Sources
[1] Todd Noall, “Is Mormon Culture Starving Its Members? What Studies Show,” Mormonism Explained, August 2026.
[2] Pew Research Center, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings from the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study,” February 26, 2025, especially 165.
[3] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite, “Religiousness,” in Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention, BYU Studies, 2026.
[4] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite, “Religious Retention,” in Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention, BYU Studies, 2026.
[5] Devin G. Pope, “Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data,” Becker Friedman Institute Working Paper No. 2024-58, University of Chicago, April 2024, 15–16.
[6] James E. Enstrom and Lester Breslow, “Lifestyle and Reduced Mortality among Active California Mormons, 1980–2004,” Preventive Medicine 46, no. 2 (February 2008): 133–136.
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