JSL 2025 | Not All In, But Not Out: Exploring the Borderlands Between Mormon Orthodoxy and Disaffiliation (feat. Jana Riess)

This bonus episode of Scholars & Saints is taken from the Eleventh Annual Joseph Smith Lecture, delivered by author and journalist Jana Riess at Newcomb Hall in Charlottesville, Va on October 24, 2025. Click here for more information about Dr. Riess and her lecture.

You can follow along with the lecture slides here.

Each fall, the University of Virginia's Mormon Studies Program sponsors the Joseph Smith Lecture Series: a public lecture on religion in public life, with particular emphasis on religious liberty and civic leadership. The Lecture is designed to honor the legacies of both Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith but is not limited to either the American or Mormon experience. If you like or learn from what you hear, we would appreciate your support of the Joseph Smith Lecture Series Endowment Fund.

Transcript

00;00;00;24 - 00;00;22;23
Speaker 1
It's such an honor to be here with you at the University of Virginia. I've been looking forward to this for months, and I'm honored by the opportunity. I'd like to thank Laurie Lee Kip for the invitation to discuss my research on liminal latter day Saints, and to Harrison Stewart for helping me with the audio visual components of what has had to be a prerecorded lecture, as I'll explain in the next slide.

00;00;22;26 - 00;00;44;20
Speaker 1
In July, I went to an ENT specialist to find out why I kept losing my voice. I was expecting to hear I had developed some kind of allergy, but I was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, which is a neurological disorder where my brain doesn't communicate reliably with my vocal cords. It's a lifelong condition and there is no cure. ASD is rare, unfortunately.

00;00;44;23 - 00;01;09;17
Speaker 1
And lucky me, I have the rarer version of it in which my vocal cords have stopped closing properly. So my voice usually comes out as a whisper. It's a lifelong condition that is hard to treat. But we're looking into possible options. There is ongoing research on spasmodic dysphonia. On Saturday, I participated in a National Walk for talk to raise awareness about this rare disorder and contribute to fundraising for additional research.

00;01;09;19 - 00;01;32;02
Speaker 1
So consider this your public service announcement that spasmodic dysphonia is a thing I have taken my voice for granted my whole life, and I'm now navigating an unwelcome reality where sometimes I can't even order for myself in a restaurant. I'm hoping that I will become a better listener as I learn to live with this disability. I'm grateful to be able to still whisper at least.

00;01;32;04 - 00;01;52;20
Speaker 1
So how is it that I am able to speak to you today? If you know me, you'll know that what you're hearing sounds a lot like my normal voice. But without saying, and like. And, you know, in August, I was able to take advantage of a rare period of remission where I went into a studio and recorded my voice for AI cloning.

00;01;52;22 - 00;02;18;05
Speaker 1
This involved reading from some scripts and tongue twisters so the voice could capture the full range of vowels, consonants, diphthongs, etc.. It also included the first six chapters of Alice in Wonderland, apparently because of all the creative things that Lewis Carroll did with the English language. In addition to that afternoon of recording, we also obtained the MP3 files of many of my previous podcast interviews and public talks.

00;02;18;07 - 00;02;41;04
Speaker 1
We uploaded all of these audio files to a company called 11 Labs in the UK, and within hours had my new robot voice. If you're like me, you may have a lot of reservations about AI and its potential uses. It's alarmingly easy to clone not just our own voices, but any ones at all. Which is why most banks no longer use speak your name as a form of identification when you call them on the phone.

00;02;41;06 - 00;03;08;17
Speaker 1
It's too easy for someone else to pretend to be you. But on the other hand, if you're a person like me who is faced with the prospect of a vocal disability foreclosing a major part of your career, AI voice cloning can feel like a lifeline. And it's what is enabling me to communicate my research to you today. As a brief overview of where we're going, part one will explain a bit about the next Mormon survey and the team of researchers who have been working on it for the last several years.

00;03;08;19 - 00;03;37;16
Speaker 1
Part two gives a snapshot of religious disaffiliation in the U.S., including data about the percentage of latter day Saints who are leaving the church. Parts three and four delve more closely into the liminal members of the church. The people this lecture title describes as not all in, but not out either. After that, we should have some time for Q&A, and I will do my best to speak and answer your questions in real time.

00;03;37;18 - 00;04;02;17
Speaker 1
So let's get to that research. I'd like to give a very brief background about the next Mormon Survey two, and the team of researchers that I've been working with over the last several years. First, I would like you to meet my research partner, Benjamin Noel, who has been instrumental in doing the quantitative data collection and analysis for this whole project.

00;04;02;19 - 00;04;30;10
Speaker 1
He was also the quantitative brains behind the original Next Mormon survey in 2016. That initial research from the NMS one was published as the book The Next Mormons How Millennials Are Changing the LDS church. And then, like Crazy people, we decided why not do it again? But this time focused primarily on people who have left the church or had a faith transition.

00;04;30;12 - 00;04;56;09
Speaker 1
We started this research for the NMS to back in 2020, and only just turned in the manuscript to Oxford this week. Finally, Ben and I did not do this work alone. Here we show the team of people who have helped Laura Kwon Jensen and Christian Andersen were both BYU graduate students with fantastic data skills in statistics. They helped us analyze the next Mormons two data.

00;04;56;12 - 00;05;23;14
Speaker 1
Stephanie Griswold was instrumental in helping me with the qualitative part of the research, finding people to interview about their experiences and helping me with all of the release forms and interview appointments to make the qualitative research happen. And then finally, Alix. Basis of Mormon metrics. If you're not already subscribing to his Substack Mormon Metrics, and you are interested in data about latter day Saints, I encourage you to do that.

00;05;23;16 - 00;05;59;18
Speaker 1
His work is available for free and he always has interesting things to say. Alex helped us contextualize our NMS research with other data sets, which you'll see in the next part of this presentation, including data from Pew, the General Social Survey, the Cooperative Election Study, Gallup and the Public Religion Research Institute. Just as a brief overview of the methodology for the next Mormons survey, too, we had 1420 respondents to the survey who identified as current members of the church.

00;05;59;21 - 00;06;29;00
Speaker 1
Unfortunately, we only had 178 people who identified as former members. That's not so relevant for the talk tonight, because we'll be looking at the liminal subgroup within current members primarily. But the margins of error for former members are high, which was disappointing to us. As another part of the research I conducted more than 100 qualitative interviews. If there are any UVA students out there who are embarking on qualitative work, that's terrific.

00;06;29;02 - 00;06;52;07
Speaker 1
It adds so much. But as my public service announcement for the evening, I would not recommend doing 100 qualitative interviews. It's too much to keep track of, and that's part of the reason why this project has taken more than five years. But I found people's stories to be so fascinating. All of this work is thanks to donations from very generous individuals.

00;06;52;10 - 00;07;17;16
Speaker 1
With their help, we raised more than $40,000 on Kickstarter to conduct the survey. Surveys are expensive, particularly when you're trying to reach a very niche population. None of this would have been possible without the generosity of so many donors, including some people here in this room. And finally, the book will be out in early 2027 from Oxford University Press.

00;07;17;19 - 00;07;42;28
Speaker 1
Part two gives background about religion in the United States. We could spend all night just doing this, but our understanding of latter day Saints, and particularly the liminal latter day Saints in the middle, will make a lot more sense if we can understand the backdrop. So here we'll look at disaffiliation in the United States as the macro context in which all of the change among Mormons is occurring.

00;07;43;00 - 00;08;09;25
Speaker 1
So you might have seen a lot of headlines about religious decline in the United States. For many years, the U.S. was regarded as the exception to the theory of secularization around the world. The theory was that nations that were highly industrialized, wealthy, Western, and primarily Christian were all secular rising. But the persistent outlier was the United States, and that has changed pretty suddenly within the last few decades in the United States.

00;08;09;28 - 00;08;42;06
Speaker 1
You may have seen some of these headlines about organized religion declining in the U.S., while the religiously unaffiliated population is growing. That's the nuns, or anonymous people who say they have no religious affiliation. The rise of the nuns has affected almost all religious groups, including Roman Catholics, Protestants. And as we will see, latter day Saints. But it may be leveling off the most recent data, data from several different sources seems to suggest that the trend of the rapid rise of the nuns may have plateaued.

00;08;42;09 - 00;09;09;02
Speaker 1
You can see here the growing share of U.S. adults who identify as nuns. The orange represents the General Social Survey. The GSS has a smaller sample size, but has the advantage that it has been collected almost every year since the early 1970s. And they also ask a number of questions about religion. So the GSS has provided a wealth of data about American religion over time.

00;09;09;05 - 00;09;51;29
Speaker 1
In the green, you have the pew Research Center and in the purple, the Public Religion Research Institute. All three of these organizations make their data sets publicly available as part of their mission for education. So yay! A hearty thank you to all of them for their ongoing, excellent work to help us understand religion in America. As you can see, for both the green which is pew, and the orange which is the GFS, the last couple of years seem to show a slight decrease in the percentage of Americans who say that they are not affiliating with religion, whereas PRI looks like it is still increasing, but at a slower rate than in the past.

00;09;52;01 - 00;10;28;18
Speaker 1
Given that larger context of religious disaffiliation in the US, it should not surprise us that more latter day Saints are also disaffiliation. This slide draws on Pew's religious landscape studies from 2007 2014, and the most recent one, which was fielded in 2023 and 24 and just released earlier this year. Essentially, what we're seeing here is that in the 2007 study, 70% of people who had been raised LDS in the United States said they were still LDS as adults.

00;10;28;20 - 00;11;06;29
Speaker 1
In 2014, that was down to 64%. So not a huge loss, but a decline. In the most recent survey, it was 54%, indicating that the church is keeping about half of its childhood members in the US. What's interesting to me is that in 2007, that 70% retention rate was one of the highest of any religious group. In 2014, the 64% retention rate was right in the middle, and in 2020 for that, 54% retention was actually the second worst.

00;11;07;01 - 00;11;34;18
Speaker 1
That's an interesting change comparatively, because I think latter day Saints are accustomed to excelling at everything religiously. And actually they do still excel, even in this same recent Pew study that shows more people leaving the church. The church members who still claim the identity are some of the most religious people in the United States. They pray more, attend services more often, and are more certain about their belief in God.

00;11;34;20 - 00;11;58;25
Speaker 1
So in all of those ways, the people who stay LDS are exceptionally religious. That continues to be true. However, it's also true that more people are leaving the church now than in the past, at least in this country. Just to see another data source about how many are leaving. Let's look at the GFS where we can see trends over the last half century.

00;11;58;27 - 00;12;28;23
Speaker 1
Again, the GFS has a smaller sample size, but is still very useful because of the long time frame. In the 1970s through the 1990s, the U.S. LDS church was keeping about three quarters of people who were raised LDS in the 2002 thousand and tens. We see that dip to 58% and 54%. Then it drops more precipitously in the 2020s to just 38%.

00;12;28;26 - 00;12;57;16
Speaker 1
So Pew says the church is keeping 54%. Just over half of childhood members in the U.S.. The GFS, which has a smaller sample size, says it's only 38%. The two sources agree that retention has worsened over time, as a growing number of people leave the church. Another thing we can look at is the percentage of Americans who claim on a survey that they are latter day Saints.

00;12;57;19 - 00;13;21;03
Speaker 1
This is from a different data source called the Cooperative Election Study. This is the largest of any we've looked at, and it's useful for the sheer sample size. There are more than 9000 latter day Saints in this survey from 2007 to last year. The blue line at the top represents the very stable statistic that the church itself has published.

00;13;21;09 - 00;13;50;18
Speaker 1
Of the number of latter day Saints who are officially listed on the church's membership rolls in the U.S., this includes anyone who has been baptized but has not resigned their membership. Been excommunicated or reached the age of 110. The church's official membership has consistently been 1.9% to 2% of the population, which is keeping pace with U.S. population growth.

00;13;50;21 - 00;14;18;00
Speaker 1
But the cooperative election study tells a different story, which is that the percentage of adults who say on a survey that they are latter day Saints Saints has declined over time in the early years of the C.S. The range was about 1.7% to 1.9% of the population, very close to the church's numbers in the middle years of the 2013 to 2018 period.

00;14;18;02 - 00;14;42;25
Speaker 1
It was between 1.4% to 1.6%, and for the last six years it's been from 1.1% to 1.3%. You can see that the gap between who is on the membership records and who actually claims an LDS identity is widening over time. I want to point out that other data sources don't have quite such a low percentage of LDS population share.

00;14;42;28 - 00;15;14;26
Speaker 1
So with Gallup, it goes from 1.7% in the early years to 1.4% in the most recent years. For Pew, it's a very small dip from 1.7% to 1.5%, and PRI goes from 1.9% to 1.5%. So all four sources are showing that there's decline in LDS population share. This is different from the church's own records, which show complete stability, but the difference is one of degree.

00;15;14;28 - 00;15;39;14
Speaker 1
The question also is to what extent is the declining LDS population share is the result of people leaving the church and dis affiliating? Or is it due to other factors? For example, lower fertility can take a real hit on a religion's population share, even though LDS fertility has been considerably higher than U.S. fertility, it is not as high as it used to be for Mormons.

00;15;39;16 - 00;16;14;23
Speaker 1
So that's a factor. Also, what role does reduced immigration play in this decline? One final slide for this section to understand how the trend of religious disaffiliation has affected LDS families. We asked a number of survey questions about the church activity of family members. A key takeaway point is that more than four out of five current members, loyalists and liberals combined, say they have at least one immediate family member who has become inactive or left the faith.

00;16;14;26 - 00;16;38;29
Speaker 1
Only 17% of current members answered none. We've looked at the growing tide of LDS disaffiliation as people leave the faith, but plenty of people continue to identify as LDS, even if they are not off the charts religious. I think these people in the middle are an understudied group and should be studied in their own right, researching why they choose to stay.

00;16;39;00 - 00;17;17;09
Speaker 1
Also sheds light on why some people leave in classifying Seminoles versus loyalists among current members. We took a cue from the church's own guidelines in 2024. The church reduced its membership requirements for creating new wards and stakes in the U.S.. The lower threshold requires new states to have 20 total members, down from 3500 of whom must be participating adults in participating adult must meet at least one of three criteria be full or partial tithe payers.

00;17;17;12 - 00;17;45;23
Speaker 1
Have a current temple. Recommend or have a church calling. We took all three of those criteria and applied them to our data. We coded for full tithe payers recommend holders and those who considered themselves very active in the church. The textbook definition of liminality is occupying a position on a boundary, a threshold. Liminality means being outside of the center.

00;17;45;26 - 00;18;13;20
Speaker 1
Liminality also relates to a transitional state, as people shift from one state of being to another. In the NMS two research, some of the people that I interviewed or are in our data are people who are on their way out of the church. Some of the people are dealing with their faith transition very slowly. One thing that we have learned in our research is that for most people, leaving the church can take months or even years.

00;18;13;22 - 00;18;37;15
Speaker 1
It is very rarely a snap decision. My fear in choosing the term liminal for describing some latter day Saints who aren't quite as extraordinarily religious as loyalists has been that they might be offended by the term. Being liminal is not a judgment on them as being less righteous. I am a liminal myself, rather, in the study of religion.

00;18;37;18 - 00;19;07;26
Speaker 1
Liminal spaces are spaces of tremendous power and also danger. For that reason, to be liminal is to be testing the boundaries of existing structures, whether those are institutions or rituals. And frankly, the future of the LDS church in the United States is in the hands of the criminals who are the movable middle. The data is clear that the overwhelming majority of people who leave the church in the United States aren't coming back, but liminal are less entrenched.

00;19;07;26 - 00;19;37;27
Speaker 1
One way or the other. So who are the liminal? Over these next few slides? I'm going to hit some highlights showing where liminal are similar to leavers, which they often are demographically, and one area where they are more similar to loyalist members of the church. In these graphs, red represents leavers. Gray represents liminal and blue is loyalists. We'll start with sexual orientation in this slide.

00;19;37;27 - 00;20;06;13
Speaker 1
If you look to the left, this shows the percentage of each group who are heterosexual or straight for loyalists. In the blue, 98% of loyalists are heterosexual, which is astonishing, 86% of liminal and 80% of leavers say they are heterosexual. This means that only 2% of the staunchest temple recommend holding members of the church are lesbian, gay, bisexual or other.

00;20;06;16 - 00;20;35;18
Speaker 1
That's 1 in 50 people, but it's 1 in 5 for people who leave the church, and about one inch six for criminals. If we look comparatively at statistics about sexual identity among the US population as a whole, in 2025, Gallup found that 9.3% of the United States identified as LGBTQ plus. So for our liminal and leavers, there is overrepresentation of sexual minorities.

00;20;35;20 - 00;21;06;28
Speaker 1
Remember, for criminals it's 14%, and for leavers it's 20%. Those are high compared to the national figure and for loyalists at just 2%. There is profound underrepresentation that tells us something about who is more likely to leave the church. Let's look at race, where the differences between groups are small. Latter day Saints are predominantly white loyalists, and leavers are essentially 9 in 10 white and liberals 8 in 10.

00;21;07;00 - 00;21;31;29
Speaker 1
We need to keep in mind that very small sample size for leavers that I mentioned at the beginning. So all of those figures that you're seeing for leavers have a higher margin of error than the figures you're seeing for either loyalists or liminal. But still, this gives us an interesting picture. If you look at lymph nodes, they are the most racially diverse group of either current or former latter day Saints.

00;21;32;02 - 00;21;56;07
Speaker 1
Another minor difference appears with convert status. Lymph nodes are the most likely to be converts. Although the differences are within the margin of error here, but 64%, almost two thirds of loyalist members say they were born into the church. For both leavers and lymph nodes, it's a little less than that 58% for leavers and 56% for lymph nodes.

00;21;56;09 - 00;22;24;08
Speaker 1
So lymph nodes are a bit more likely to be converts, whether they joined with their families before age 18 or they joined as adults on their own. So we've seen small differences in racial identity and whether people converted to the church. Marital status, though, is a massive difference. If you look to the left, that dark blue loyalist trend, 68% of loyalist adult members of the church are married to their first spouse.

00;22;24;10 - 00;22;48;03
Speaker 1
That's astonishing. It is almost twice as high as the rate for either leavers or lymph nodes. So what we see are leavers and lymph holes scattered in the other categories, such as cohabitation, which has 12% for both leavers and lymph nodes and only 2% for loyalists. 4% of all groups report being widowed, and it's 4% for loyalists being divorced.

00;22;48;06 - 00;23;15;07
Speaker 1
But the divorce rate is three times that for leavers and for lymph nodes at 12% and 11%, respectively. The category of being single, never married is essentially a quarter of both lymph nodes and leavers 24%, but only 13% of loyalist members. There's an age effect here in that our loyalist latter day Saint respondents skew older than liberals and leavers.

00;23;15;10 - 00;23;39;12
Speaker 1
Finally, we see the percentages of people who have been divorced or bereaved and then remarried, which is about 1 in 10 for both liberals and loyalists and a little bit higher for former members. But the big takeaway of this slide is that 68%, the idea that more than two thirds of the loyalist adult members of the church are still married to their first spouse.

00;23;39;14 - 00;24;09;22
Speaker 1
That is a major difference. That's well outside any margins of error. Education is another pretty big difference, and this confirms other research that has shown a college education to correlate with higher levels of religiosity in the United States. Here we have 52% of loyalists who have a four year college degree or more, which is more than twice as much as it is for criminals who are 23% and a little bit less than twice as much as it is for leavers.

00;24;09;23 - 00;24;33;07
Speaker 1
At 28%, the national figure is around 35%, depending on the survey. So we see that loyalist members of the church are more educated and liminal, and leavers a little bit less politically. Here we're seeing for the first time that lymph nodes look a little bit more like loyalists in the blue on their left than they do, like leavers on their right.

00;24;33;09 - 00;25;02;01
Speaker 1
This slide shows the percentage who identify as Democrats politically. 29% of lymph nodes are Democrats, which is only ten points different than loyalists who are just 19%. Leavers are the outlier here at 55%. More than half of leavers say they are Democrats, given political science. Current research that suggests that political identity is a highly salient factor driving religious identity.

00;25;02;03 - 00;25;44;18
Speaker 1
The fact that lymph nodes are nearly as Republican as loyalists is suggestive that politics may be a causative factor that is driving some leavers out of the church. That is indeed what we found in the MS2 data with multivariate regression analysis. To sum up these six categories. Who is most comfortable in the church? If we look at the characteristics shared by loyalists, this is a church where people are going to feel more comfortable and see themselves represented if they are married to their first spouse, if they have a college education, if they are white, if they are heterosexual, if they're born in the church, rather than being a convert, and if they are Republicans right

00;25;44;18 - 00;26;12;07
Speaker 1
now in the US, LDS church, these are the groups who are going to feel most at home in this particular subculture. We've seen that liberals look like leavers in several demographic categories, including sexual orientation, education, marital status, and the percentage who converted rather than being born into the faith. So what separates them from leavers? What keeps them in the church?

00;26;12;09 - 00;26;37;13
Speaker 1
In this last section, we'll touch on two key differences that mark liminal as different from leavers. Their high levels of religious belief and their emphasis on community. It won't surprise you to hear that loyalists are a great deal more confident that they'll remain members of the church for the rest of their lives. For loyalists, the church is ten out of ten stars.

00;26;37;16 - 00;27;04;23
Speaker 1
Would recommend 78% of loyalist members ranked themselves a ten out of possible ten. On the scale of whether they expected to stay active in the church for liminal, the rate was less than half that. Only a third of liberals were that completely sure they'd stay members, though a lot were in the 6 to 9 range. And in fact, it's possible that more women are leaving now than in the past.

00;27;04;26 - 00;27;34;07
Speaker 1
In the ms1 liminal, where 68% of current members and in the NMS two, that had decreased a bit to 62%, it's possible that this is just noise in the data. It's also possible that there's a slight hollowing out of the middle. What we can tell you is that women in the NMS one were more likely to be loyalists than men were by six points, and now it's the other way around by ten points.

00;27;34;10 - 00;28;00;23
Speaker 1
Women became noticeably less orthodox between surveys, so among current members, liminal are younger and more female than loyalists. The generational part of that didn't surprise us at all, but the gender switch really did. In this slide, we see the percentages of all three groups who chose the first, most certain of six possible options to describe their belief in God.

00;28;00;25 - 00;28;32;06
Speaker 1
You can see here that more than 6 in 10 lymph nodes chose that option, saying they know God really exists and have no doubts about it. That's not as high as loyalists at 82%, but it's considerably higher than the 36% of leavers who reported having no doubts about God. It's also more than ten points higher than the national figure, which is 50% of Americans who say they believe in God without doubts.

00;28;32;09 - 00;29;00;21
Speaker 1
Compared to both LDS leavers and the general population, then LDS are strong believers. This slide shows lymph nodes and loyalists differing levels of beliefs on some of the NME's two testimony questions. These percentages only reflect the people who chose the most certain option of the five possible choices. Loyalists on the left side have a supermajority who say they are confident and know that God is real.

00;29;00;24 - 00;29;28;09
Speaker 1
Jesus was resurrected. There is life after death and God has a plan for my life. Basically, for them, it's four out of five people saying they're certain of those core Christian teachings. Lymph nodes have a majority on all of those measures, too, even if it's not as high as loyalists compared to leavers. They are very religious. On some measures they are 25 or 30 percentage points higher than LDS leavers.

00;29;28;11 - 00;30;09;03
Speaker 1
For example, 56% of LDS nodes are confident and know there is life after death, compared to 27% of leavers. Here, let's look at specific latter day Saint teachings. Like Joseph, Smith was a prophet. The Book of Mormon is historically true. The LDS church is the only true church, and the church's leaders are God's prophets on the earth. Today, loyalists shown on the left side are nearly as certain about LDS specific beliefs 77% average as they were in the last slide about widespread Christian ones, 84% average.

00;30;09;06 - 00;30;32;22
Speaker 1
They're remarkably consistent in checking that top box, no matter what the testimony question might be. Lymph nodes on the right side are noticeably less confident about the LDS specific beliefs than they are about general Christian tenets. On average, only 4 in 10 lymph nodes chose the most confident option for the LDS beliefs, while 6 in 10 did so for the core Christian beliefs.

00;30;32;24 - 00;31;03;19
Speaker 1
This means that when we compare the two groups, loyalists are sometimes twice as likely as lymph nodes to be confident about LDS specific beliefs. That's a major divide. The divergence feels particularly sharp when we consider that many of the LDS specific questions are not only about religious beliefs, they are asking about the authority of the church itself. Does it have an exclusive ability to grant people, eternal families, or exaltation in the highest level of heaven?

00;31;03;21 - 00;31;27;24
Speaker 1
Roughly three fourths of loyalists seem sure that it does, but barely a third of liberals are sure. Most starkly, more than 40 percentage points separate the two groups. On the question of whether the church's leaders are God's prophets on the earth today, this is something that most Lemonheads believe, since only 11% chose either of the bottom two options of.

00;31;28;00 - 00;32;01;09
Speaker 1
I believe this is probably not true, or I am confident. And no, this is not true, but only 39% say they are certain of leader's authority compared to 81% of loyalists. To sum up this argument, lemons are strong believers in Christian tenets, though not quite as strong in latter day Saint ones. In their behavior, they are far more likely than other non LDS Americans to attend church each week, pray and feel the presence of God.

00;32;01;11 - 00;32;21;12
Speaker 1
If we were comparing lemons to just about any group other than LDS loyalists, they would come across as noticeably more faithful than the culture at large. So one part of the reason they stay in the church, compared to leavers, is that they believe many of its teachings. This isn't an earth shattering finding, because most of us would have intuited that.

00;32;21;15 - 00;32;49;12
Speaker 1
So we've just seen that lemons are very religious people, and that is a major reason why they stay here. Let's look at the second key point about what lemons value. And that is community. For the NMS to one of our donors suggested we ask all current members, what keeps you going to church? In response, we added a simple binary question that had one of two possible options.

00;32;49;14 - 00;33;21;21
Speaker 1
Although of course it's never that simple. Whether members were engaged and connected to the church primarily for its teachings and doctrine, or for the value they receive from participation, regardless of whether its teachings are true. This graph demonstrates that loyalists on the right side are all about the church's religious truth, claims. More than 4 in 5 loyalists stay engaged with the church because they believe its teachings, doctrines and ordinances.

00;33;21;24 - 00;33;53;05
Speaker 1
Any other benefits they may receive are gravy, but check out the lymph nodes on the left. They're more balanced as a group. A slight majority of 55% agree with the loyalists that they stay involved, primarily for the church's teachings and ordinances. The other 45%, however, stay because of the value I receive from my involvement. What that value means was not specified in the question and was therefore up to them.

00;33;53;08 - 00;34;23;00
Speaker 1
But the second half of the sentence makes it clear that this perceived value overrides doctrinal truth or the church's religious ordinances. In these liminal minds, they are staying connected for something other than doctrine. So why are they staying connected? Here's a question where we asked all current members to choose three items from a list of ten possible things that were their favorite aspects of being LDS for both Seminoles and Loyalists.

00;34;23;01 - 00;34;49;19
Speaker 1
The top two choices are the same. The church's emphasis on the Savior and the idea of eternal families. But after that, Lemons and Loyalists exhibit different favorite things for loyalists the comfort of having a living prophet ranks third, while for lemons, it's down in seventh place. Twice as many loyalists as lemons chose having a prophet as one of their favorite parts of being Mormon.

00;34;49;21 - 00;35;32;02
Speaker 1
But twice as many liberals as loyalists said they loved the strong community the church provides. Nearly 4 in 10 Seminoles identified community as a favorite part of Mormonism, ranking it fourth for loyalists. It came in seventh place. Interestingly, lemons emphasis on community as a primary reason for being involved in church seems to have been a long standing preference, which we can assess by comparing their answers about LDS Seminary in high school, a seminary question we added to the NMS to asked anyone who had attended seminary what they valued most about it, with six options of various things that might occur in seminary.

00;35;32;04 - 00;36;00;12
Speaker 1
As you can see here, Loyalists and Seminoles differed in their number one picks. Loyalists chose learning about the scriptures and church doctrine, while liberals said it was the socializing with friends from church, at least retrospectively. Then Seminoles report being interested in community building even in high school, not to the exclusion of doctrinal interests or religious activities, but alongside them.

00;36;00;14 - 00;36;30;04
Speaker 1
I'm going to close with a final observation that came up in my oral history interviews a fairly common remark limit report getting from loyalists if they ever expressed disagreement with any aspect of the church's current trajectory, is why don't you just leave? This comment can be hurtful to lemons who assume from it, often rightly, that their interlocutor thinks the church would be a purer place without lemons muddying its waters.

00;36;30;06 - 00;37;11;19
Speaker 1
But the why don't you just leave? Question itself reveals a fundamental difference between liberals and loyalists. For loyalists, an absence of total doctrinal agreement may well be a deal breaker. It's hard for them to imagine staying in a church they don't believe is 100% led by God in every particular. For many lemons, this is an anemic view. They see their nuanced ability to keep the best and leave the rest as an asset, allowing them to find riches within their religious tradition while either quietly ignoring or openly protesting any parts they find unhelpful.

00;37;11;22 - 00;37;35;08
Speaker 1
They have a broad commitment to Mormon community, to a holistic concept of Zion that cannot be unmade by a facile. Why don't you just leave mentality to them? That question reveals a shallow understanding of what community means. Their Mormonism is not a mere checklist of doctrinal or cultural points of agreement. It is religion. It is love. It is family.

00;37;35;08 - 00;37;41;29
Speaker 1
It is identity. Which are not things to be discarded lightly. And that is why many choose to stay.