In The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church, historian and journalist Jana Riess takes her readers into the singles congregations, dating culture, and young families of Latter-day Saint millennials. In addition to bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to a wider audience, Riess argues that because so many of them are either leaving the Mormon fold or redefining what it means to be an active member, young adults with no formal institutional authority are nevertheless changing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the ground up. Her impressive study reveals that while the LDS Church has historically been an insular organization, it “is not able to wholly resist the larger forces at work in American religion” (7).
To figure out why young adults have been defecting from the LDS Church at unprecedented rates over the past decade and a half, and more importantly, to obtain a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what Mormonism looks like to the majority of millennials who stay, Riess and political scientist Benjamin Knoll created an online poll in 2016 called the Next Mormons Survey (NMS). Despite a few built-in limitations including its exclusive focus on American Mormons and its inability to track change over time, the NMS constitutes the most ambitious attempt to date to employ social science techniques to uncover the beliefs, practices, and lifestyles of Latter-day Saints. Working with the Seattle and Provo-based firm Qualtrics, Riess and Knoll polled 1,156 current Latter-day Saints and 540 former Latter-day Saints and then grouped their responses into three age cohorts: members of the so-called Silent Generation alongside Baby Boomers; GenXers; and Millennials. Riess then conducted sixty-three telephone and in-person interviews with Latter-day Saint young adults who did not take part in the survey.
Riess's most important insight is that millennials who stay in the church occupy a kind of middle ground between their generally more secular non-LDS peers and older Latter-day Saints who, upon learning the results of her survey, might be tempted to brand the younger generation as heretics. Although most of them continue to believe in a personal God who plays an active role in their daily lives, Mormon millennials are also more likely than their older coreligionists to drink an occasional cup of coffee, indulge in R-rated movies, periodically skip church, turn down assignments in their local congregations, and yet still consider themselves “active.” LDS young adults still marry at much higher rates than the national average, yet they are also having fewer children than their parents or grandparents, and the number of Mormons who have never tied the knot continues to grow. And while it should dispel any illusions that the average Mormon millennial is critical of the LDS hierarchy, the NMS does suggest that younger Latter-day Saints often struggle to support the church's positions on social and especially political issues. In contrast to what many of them perceive as the pharisaical, letter-of-the-law religiosity of their parents and grandparents, Riess shows that Latter-day Saint young adults crave “a spirituality that is deep, authentic, and demanding,” one that emphasizes missionary work, service, and an experiential relationship with God as the basis of religious authority in their lives (168).
As for the growing number of millennials who have left the LDS Church, Riess observes, “The picture of former Mormons that emerges from our survey is complex” (212). Millennial former Mormons are more likely to believe in God than older generations that have exited the church, but like most former Latter-day Saints, young adults are unlikely to continue believing in Mormonism's most distinct teachings. Many of them expressed frustration that prior to their disaffiliation, their sincere questions about the church's historical and doctrinal claims were either casually dismissed, or worse, provoked the judgment and wrath of their fellow church members. Ultimately, however, “personal and social reasons outweighed any specific doctrinal or historical concerns,” Riess writes (223). Somewhere along the way, these individuals decided they could no longer reconcile their beliefs and way of life with Mormonism as they understood it.
Even the most comprehensive survey can never address every important question, and the NMS is no exception. At times Riess uses her interviews to fill in the invariable gaps in the data. For example, at one point she cites a small handful of interviews to suggest that a major reason why millennials exhibit less enthusiasm for temple worship than their elders is because they view the temple as a place of exclusion and gender inequality. But as she frankly acknowledges, her interviewees come far short of forming a representative sample. When she relies too much on what they have to say, Riess runs the risk of neglecting other possible reasons for some of the results in the NMS. For example, what about the possibility that for LDS young adults who are finishing school, starting careers, and raising small children, the three to four hours needed to attend even a nearby temple are viewed as a luxury they can rarely enjoy?
Paradoxically, by bringing personality, emotion, and humor to otherwise cold data, the interviews also constitute one of the book's great strengths. More importantly, they inspire empathy for the sometimes marginalized and overlooked outliers in LDS culture, from individuals struggling to reconcile their love for the church with their homosexual identity, to those facing the prospect of being single in a predominantly married church. Told in Riess's accessible and funny prose, the stories of these thoughtful LDS young adults help to make The Next Mormons that rare work from an academic press that will appeal every bit as much to lay readers as it will to scholars.
