Ryan Burge’s 2025 Spiritual Seismology Survey, with an overall sample size of 100,741 U.S. adults, including 1,177 who were raised as Latter-day Saints. It found that about 4 in 10 Generation Z women who grew up as Latter-day Saints are still in the church. For the very youngest 18-year-old Latter-day Saint women, the retention rate was 37.5%.
Gen Z women lead all demographic groups in wanting full equality for LGBTQ+ people under the law, whereas the church mounted a massive political effort to defeat same-sex marriage when these women were kids.
Gen Z women want equal rights for women, whereas the church publicly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment not only in the 1970s but as recently as 2019-2020.
They want legal access to abortion, which the church opposes except in relatively rare instances.
Young women are reacting against the extreme “purity culture” of the early 2000s
For the life of me I can’t imagine why young women might have been turned off by being forced into worthiness interviews with their Bishop in a youth ward, like DCP served in, and forced to discuss their sexual lives behind closed doors one on one with a 50-70 year old man. A man who probably votes against their reproductive rights, wants to hear details about their sexual sins, and volunteered his free time fighting against the right of LGBT people to marry.
Or maybe they loved that aspect of their religion and are leaving for an entirely different reason.
The younger generations are also constantly online - no judgement on my part, everyone is online a lot. They read and see what men are telling other men what they want to do to them. It's not an outlier opinion amongst young Mormon and Christian men that want women back in the home, pregnant, and with no say over their lives because the man should be responsible for them. No votes. Few, if any rights. Under the growing fascist architecture that's shaping up, they see that men are actively conspiring against their own interests.
Now. Take that information and try attending a church that tells you to be this thing in word and deed. I'd leave, too. There's no place in the church for women who want equal rights with men. It's insanity to stay because the men fearmonger you into staying.
As an aside, on my wife's side, she's had some nieces serve a Mormon mission, have generally positive experiences (I guess), but come home and fool around with their boyfriends. I only know this because my wife up and shared this with me, and we found it perplexing. I don't know if young people these days feel less guilty about sex, but it seems to me the barriers that once worked before are coming undone due to their exposure of sexuality through the Internet. In the article there was a girl who explained the church taught her to shut her sexuality down, and she's been carrying this issue with her. I'm not sure many young people feel good about feeling bad.
Hiring a part-time news entertainment anchor as SecDef, what could go wrong?
Doc Cam wrote: It's not an outlier opinion amongst young Mormon and Christian men that want women back in the home, pregnant, and with no say over their lives because the man should be responsible for them.
This is the messaging but how would this line up with reality? Gen Z men are doing less school and working less, and Gen Z women are on the rise. As you point out, video games and relative wealth of their parents is a big issue, oh and higher percentage of 1-child. I have some but not a lot of personal experience here, but my gut is telling me these young men are punishing women, rhetorically, for not falling into their laps. My impression is that the moms of Gen Z men have taken way too good of care of their little boys and most of the kids responsible for circulating the messaging wouldn't have any idea how to be a trad husband. I'm thinking what they really want is the exact opposite. They want a high earner wife to take the place of their moms plus be their sex slaves. The politics is "punishing" them for that not happening.
"if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person then it's probably, you got a problem." -- Lindsey Graham
