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Jana Riess is a historian and editor in the publishing industry, primarily working in the areas of religion, history, popular culture, ethics, and biblical studies. From 1999 to 2008, she was the Religion Book Review Editor for Publishers Weekly, and continues to freelance reviews for Publishers Weekly as well as other publications. She holds degrees in religion from Wellesley College and Princeton Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia University. She grew up with no religious affiliation and became a Protestant in high school. While going to college to become a pastor, she converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her book, “The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church”, came about after starting a Kickstarter campaign to fund a survey to learn about Millennials in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Highlights
- 6:45 Millennials are leaving religion
- 7:30 Retention rate of 46%-62% and is trending downward
- 8:30 What is a Millennial?
- 10:00 What to say to those who say the Millennials will grow out of this phase?
- 12:30 What can the church do to retain these Millennials and solve the problem?
- 15:40 What part does conformity & obedience have in Millennials leaving the church?
- 16:40 The two main reasons Millennials leave the church
- 18:35 How do Millennials view the temple?
- 23:20 Millennials have a higher rate of ministering
- 25:00 Why church?
- 26:00 How church meetings could be better & different for Millennials
- 27:00 How do Millennials see church callings differently
- 28:30 Millennials & religious authority
- 32:55 Millennials & the word of wisdom
- 33:55 Millennials & temple recommends
- 37:15 Millennials & pornography
- 40:10 Millennials & the traditional family
- 44:00 Millennials and the Prophet and General Authorities
- 48:30 Millennials and American exceptionalism
- 50:10 What can Millennials bring to our church?
- 53:00 What’s the biggest sticking point for Millennials going forward?
- 56:00 What can leaders do?
- 58:00 How has writing this book impacted Jana’s discipleship of Jesus Christ?
Links
The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church
An LDS Leader’s Guide to Millennial Mormons
Transcript
Kurt Francom (LS): Today I have the opportunity to sit down with Jana Riess. Jana, you are the author of “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church”. So tell us as far as your personal background and how this project and book came to be?
Jana: Sure. This project basically started in 2016. I was very interested in getting solid data on what’s going on generationally with Latter-Day Saints and former Latter-Day Saints. And not just anecdotally “here’s what I’m seeing in my social media feed.” Anecdotally, it felt like more younger people were leaving the LDS faith and for possibly different reasons than older people had left, and I wanted to know if that was really valid, and if so, more about it – everything we could.
So along with the help of Benjamin Knoll, who’s a political scientist, we crafted this survey, raised money on Kickstarter in order to fund the survey because it’s very expensive to try to get valid information that’s nationally representative about such a small minority population. Mormons are only about one and a half percent of the United States population. That’s how it began.
LS: Nice. What’s your professional background that led you here?
Jana: I’m a historian, actually. I’m not a social scientist. My PhD is in the history of religion in America. And I am able because of that to put some of these trends into historical context I think, but the social science aspect of this project has been really fascinating for me to try to learn the methodology. It’s very important to have questions that are designed in a particular way – questions can influence how we answer the following question. I mean, there’s a lot of interesting research that’s been done just about how you do a survey, and then how you weight it to make sure that you have a nationally representative sample.
LS: And your personal background is you have a Latter-Day Saint background yourself?
Jana: Well, not from my childhood. I grew up in a family that showcased we were “nones” before it was cool.
LS: Oh, nice.
Jana: The N-O-N-E-S, people in the United States who have no religious affiliation is the growing segment of American religion. What’s growing in American religion is non-religion. And so, my family when I was a kid in the 70s, we didn’t go to church. We didn’t have any kind of denominational or religious affiliation. Now we would be like within 40% of the young adult population. But when I was a kid, I didn’t really know anybody else who was in that boat growing up in the town that I grew up in.
Then I became Protestant when I was in high school. Actually, I went to divinity school to learn to be a pastor, so I have a Masters of Divinity and took classes in how to be a pastor, how to break bread for communion, how to counsel people in pastoral counseling situations. Then while I was in seminary, I decided to become a Latter-Day Saint instead. So that was a little bit of a non-conventional path.
LS: Wow. I’m sure there’s a whole nother story behind that. That you didn’t wake up…
Jana: It’s not worth getting into today, but that was 25 years ago. So I’ve been a Mormon now since 1993.
LS: Oh, that’s fantastic. You mentioned that sort of what intrigued you about the study was it seemed – and I think everybody has this feeling with friends and social connections and family that seems like this generation, this millennial generation, they’re more and more seem to be leaving not just our church, but faith in general. Did the research bear that to be true?
Jana: It did. Our particular survey explains and explores a lot of behaviors and attitudes among Latter-Day Saints, but we cannot with one survey answer that question of are more people leaving now than left in the past? To do that you need longitudinal today data. So what I’ve done in the introduction of the book is to try to triangulate three different sources of data from other places, including the General Social Survey, Pew, and then the church itself. The answer is yes, more people are leaving.
According to the General Social Survey, the GSS, for millennials, we have a retention rate now 46%. Take that with a grain of salt because it’s a really small sample size. But we used to keep larger sample size of older people in the survey, we used to keep 75% of people who were raised in the religion. Now we’re down to about half. Pew has slightly higher numbers and a little bit less generational difference. So in Pew for millennials at 62%. I would say that somewhere between 46% and 62% is your answer. We’re keeping around half right now.
Unfortunately, the trend line is downward. And I would not expect that there’s going to be a rebound anytime soon based on what we’re seeing in the religious landscape more generally, [00:05:03] with other religions that do have public figures and public data that’s available about what’s happening with their younger people.
LS: You mentioned in the book that different, I don’t know, research organizations or I don’t know what you titled it, but they define millennial differently as far as the years. Like I was born in 82, and a lot of people say that 1980 point is where that cutoff is. How would you describe what a millennial is?
Jana: Well, the best way to describe it is roughly people born in the 1980s and 1990s. And it’s squishy on either end. So in some surveys, including ours, you would be counted as a millennial, you would be the vanguard of the millennial generation. Yeah, you, you’re right at the cutting edge. And we cut us off in 1998. Pew actually has chosen to do it in 1996, which is a little surprising. And so their Generation Z starts in 1997. Our starts in 1999. So it’s a little bit different but very similar.
LS: And then you referenced the Generation Z is the teenagers now, that sort of generally, right?
Jana: Right. I think that when people started naming generations, why did they start with X? Because there’s really no way to go. You have X and Y, which is the millennial generation. And now we have Generation Z. And I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen alphabetically after that.
LS: And then obviously, the boomer generation. I think most people are familiar with, especially the older people because they are Boomer, right?
Jana: Right. Boomer is pretty classically late toward 1944, 1945, up to about 1964. So that’s pretty typical.
LS: Perfect. we’ve done a few interviews and discussions about the millennial generation and we know the typical stigmas they get is maybe they’re lazy or they’re addicted to technology, and they don’t like to date or socialize. A lot of boomers can look at millennials and say, “Well, they are just like we were when we were young as hippies and we grew out of it.” And so you go through some research saying, like, “No, there’s some differences here.” But what would you say to those that feel like, “No, this generation will just grow out of this phase just like we did as younger generation”?
Jana: I appreciate the optimism. I love the optimism of that, but there’s not a lot of data to confirm that view. That would be a life cycle effect, meaning that wherever you are at your stage of life influences maybe how you respond in a survey question or whether you’re going to stay in organized religion, and that that will change over time. That’s fine. Life cycle effect is a real thing.
But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here with this pretty massive change that we’re seeing in American religion, because we have enough longitudinal data that we can measure what 18 to 29-year-olds were doing 40 years ago, and what they’re doing now. What we see from some of those studies is that we have triple the rate disaffiliation in this young adult group than we did then and on many different measures. Basically, everything is depressed from what it used to be.
So I love the optimism of that idea that this is just a phase that they’re going through. It’s not just a phase. And also I would add to that, that what I often hear is people will come back to church when they get married, and they have children. And there is some good sociological data behind that because people who are married and people, particularly who have children are more likely to be religiously active. That’s very clear. But we are facing a generation that is getting married later, sometimes not at all and having fewer children. So if you’re using that as your metric for when they’re going to come back to church, you could be waiting a long time.
LS: Wow, it’s interesting. Lots of the book, and we’re going to touch on many of these things, everything from the temple to missionary work to church attendance, that you really dug into and looked at the data there and surveyed, oftentimes, as I’ve listened to other interviews, the question comes is like, well, what should the church do differently? What tactics or adjustment should be made in the church?
Obviously, the secular world is changing, and it could be changing in a negative way, but it’s hard to define the secular world as an organization that can make changes. So it seems like the church is always the one being looked towards to make the changes. Any thoughts to that? Because, in general, religion is becoming more and more irrelevant to that millennial generation, so we can’t suddenly just take away all the tough parts of religion. Any thoughts come to mind with that dynamic?
Jana: A lot of thoughts are coming to mind. I hope that they’re not too scattered. But I would think that, for one thing, when we’re thinking about organizationally, [00:10:01] this is a generation in general that has a different relationship to institutions, not just religious institutions. We also see disaffection from other traditional institutions, including political parties. For example, there’s a higher rate of millennials who are declaring themselves to be politically independent, because they’re kind of fed up with the more traditional system. And many other things as well. So you know, corporations, a lot of trust gap there. It’s not just about religion.
But the bad news of that is that if you’re trying to solve a problem institutionally with a generation that doesn’t want to listen to institutions, how do you solve that problem? Actually, I think a part of the answer is in what you’re doing right now – what is happening at the grassroots level within the church? Because in our data, we have many different measures of millennial Latter-Day Saints who have a more distant relationship with authority than I would have expected.
They’re not watching General Conference, the majority. They are more evenly split in their view of whether you should just obey the priesthood or obey your personal conscience than other generations. Older Mormons are like, “Oh, yeah, you obey the priesthood even if you have personal misgivings,” whereas millennials are basically half and half. But on the local level, what we found in the data and also in personal interviews was very strong relationships with bishops, and strong home and visiting teaching response rates, things like that. So this is what I call relational authority. And I think that that is a good way in as we’re thinking about reaching this generation.
LS: I find that so encouraging that we can look on the surface like, “Oh, no, this millennial generation isn’t watching General Conference. They’re more skeptical of the prophets and Quorum of the Twelve, and those things.” But we can make up the difference or we can really come from a positive sign on the local level. Local bishops, Release Society presidents, those individuals really have a good opportunity here to how to make a difference.
Jana: Right. I think that that came through very clearly in the data in a way that I found very heartening. That it’s not just an absence of trust, it’s a different kind of trust. It’s more horizontal than it is vertical.
LS: And instead of coming up then – and we’ll talk about this in more detail – instead of coming up to people with the message of follow the prophet, come to them with just building a relationship and connecting. And that’s going to do more than just that one statement, even though that is part of our tenets and doctrine?
Jana: It would seem so.
LS: Cool. Chapters 8 and 9 of the book really stuck out to me. And maybe we’ll just hit just briefly some of these topics, and others, maybe we’ll expand on them. The first one being obedience. It seems like the boomer generation holds that up with more esteem than the millennial generation. So what part as far as conformity and obedience plays a role on maybe millennials leaving the church? Does that that create a lot of friction?
Jana: Well, I think it creates some. I don’t have direct data about obedience being a push factor in people leaving the church. We can kind of get it that indirectly through several of the different questions, but there’s no obvious one on one correspondence there that I can get to.
LS: And then just as far as the…because we talked about that trust is really important to millennials, and if they can’t trust the institution like you mentioned, that’s difficult. Obedience is obviously a huge doctrine in our gospel – the first law of heaven as they call it. So as a local leader, or I know as a mission president…when I was on a mission, the mission president would always harp on the hundred percent obedience. You know, that’s what success is. But that message is maybe not resonating as much because they’re looking for trust rather than conformity or obedience. Is that?
Jana: Well, that’s a good point. For millennials who had left the church when we were looking at reasons why people left, for the millennial generation, what tied for first place were two things. One was I felt judged or misunderstood. And the other was, I did not trust the church leadership to tell the truth about controversial or historical issues. So that trust issue that you just mentioned, more of an institutional trust, the General Conference type trust, the prophet type trust, that played a role. And also this issue of feeling judged.
So an emphasis on 100% obedience, I would not think is going to be the very best way to reach this generation. In the interviews for this book, I talked to a number of millennials who felt if they were having testimony questions, if they had doubled down to try to answer those questions, to pray more, to go to the temple more, to just do everything better so that God would take their questions away, or God would answer these questions. And when that didn’t happen as promised, then that’s when the real rupture happened. [00:15:01] So I think as a church if we can find better ways to frame that, it would be a lot healthier. Who is 100% obedient? I have not met this person.
LS: One thing I always remind myself that you didn’t write this book to make it full of answers, but you can make it full of data. So oftentimes, you bring this data forward it’s not that you have the answer to that, right. But it’s something to think on and sit with as local leadership, right?
Jana: Every time I talked to people about the data, I’m learning something new as they’ll point out a possible interpretation that I hadn’t thought of, or it’s just very much in process. So the book is one step of the process, but it’s not definitive. Neither is the data definitive. I think this is great data, and it’s important that we have great data, but it is a snapshot in time, it’s not longitudinal. And until we can build that body of research, we are still only making provisional conclusions.
LS: Let’s talk about the temple. I think often with boomers and older generations, generally, they love the temple and they are obviously very orthodox members of the temple. But when a millennial goes first time, maybe they’re not having a similar experience. What would be important for local leaders to understand about how millennials are viewing the temple?
Jana: Well, that’s a great question, and it’s complicated would be my answer. It’s complicated. If that were the Facebook relationship status, it would be “it’s complicated.” We had a question about positivity: How did you feel about your endowment experience? How did you feel about your initiatory experience? And really overwhelmingly, in the current Mormon sample, people had positive experiences. And that did not very much by generation.
Actually, millennials had more positive experiences than older Mormons, which I found very interesting, because we also had another question about temple preparation, and it was clear that older Mormons felt less prepared. More than a quarter of the older Mormons that we surveyed, had the response that they were not at all prepared for what they found in the temple. It was very few millennials.
In thinking about the [regency?] of the temple preparation class, I mean, millennials have always been adults in a situation where a temple prep class was available to them. But that has only been available since the 1970s. So boomers and silent generation members maybe went into the temple a lot more blind than people are today. And I think it makes a difference that we’re seeing in the positivity response that when you have more information, you’re more likely to have a good experience in the temple.
LS: So is there more preparation going on, do you feel like? I mean, the traditional template prep experience sometimes is more vague than helpful?
Jana: Well, and this is a great point. Because as a historian I can tell you that temple preparation is so much more detailed, so much better than it used to be for earlier generations when it wasn’t discussed at all. So the fact that it is discussed that there as a temple preparation class even if it primarily focuses on the theological reasons, we have temples rather than this is what you’re going to do in the temple, it’s still something.
The church in 2014, for example, released that video that shows the temple clothing. That was huge. Giving people more of a sense of how to be prepared for the temple, that’s great. And I think that we have some reliable data now that shows that it actually does help people have a more positive first experience.
The complicated part of your question is their relationship to the temple now. Because what we found is that even though most millennials say they had a positive first experience, a lot of them have not gone back to the temple. So that was a little bit of a divergence that I was not expecting. So if you had this good experience, why aren’t you attending more often?
LS: So that was sort of a gap you found but you didn’t have the specific questions that addressed that dynamic?
Jana: We had an open-ended fox, where people could talk about their temple experiences. They call that qualitative data. So those are the individual responses versus quantitative data. The qualitative data has barely been mined from this project. So we still have a lot of work to do on going through those. But just in preliminary look through some of that has been very interesting to see, especially older Mormons saying, “I found the template really confusing when I first went” or “nobody told me anything.” So I think things are getting better actually.
LS: That’d be something for a local leader to be aware of especially a YSA leader that they’re generally having a positive experience the first time. As far as making it a routine or a habit, that’s may not happen.
Jana: Well, and this is a question too because this is a methodological question with surveying. People on surveys want to emphasize positive behavior. It’s called the desirability bias. So if we in our culture are encouraging people to have one kind of answer, which was, “Oh, I love to the temple,” they are more likely to say, “Oh, I loved to the temple.” [00:20:02] Which may be true, maybe they do. But then you also need to measure behavior and to try to see, is there any kind of divergence between what they’re saying and what they’re doing? And there does seem to be some divergence there.
LS: So people are saying, “I love the temple,” but their habits don’t match up to that?
Jana: Maybe.
LS: Okay.
Jana: Which it couldn’t be due to a lot of different factors. I mean, millennials also are exceptionally busy. They’re completing their education, they’re starting their careers, they’re starting their families. It’s a very busy time of life. So people in Mormonism who are older tend to go to the temple more frequently, partly because of the life stage that they are in they might have more time to do that. So proximity to a temple. You know, there are a lot of different factors that could be playing a part.
LS: Awesome. You also talked about home teaching, visiting teaching, and then obviously, moving in, I’m sure most surveys were done before the change to the ministry. That millennials are better at that social connection or ministering type of dynamic. Is that accurate?
Jana: Well, it’s all self-reported. We always have to remember that these are people who are describing their own behaviors. But yes, millennials had a higher rate of home and visiting teaching. So that was very fascinating to me, especially considering that there may be an intergenerational dynamic where it’s harder for someone in her 20s to go and visit someone in her 60s who’s been in the church all her life. But apparently, according to what they say about their own behavior, millennials are doing great with home and visiting teaching.
I think that that’s something we should take seriously because it is focusing on that more horizontal relationship and building community which does seem to be important to millennials.
LS: And you even emphasize this word of relationality, right? It’s not one I use most days. But why did you emphasize this word of millennials and relationality?
Jana: Well, I think that relationships are key in understanding millennials and reaching millennials. They ought to be key for all of us. Right?
LS: Sure.
Jana: In that way, I think there’s a lot that we can learn from millennials.
LS: To me, just from my non-scientific perspective, it seems like the older generation, there was much more emphasis on the truth claims, the obedience, the conformity, that type thing that they sound had a lot of value. And now, millennials are having a hard time seeing the relationships in that type of approach. Does there need to be a shift there?
Jana: Yeah. I haven’t seen this talk, but apparently, historian Phil Barlow gave a talk at BYU a few days ago where one of the things that he said was with the rising generation, the question is not which church is true, but why church? We need to keep that in mind. It’s not this idea of focusing on propositional truth or having the one true church and being right and being lonely and our rightness. It’s about what does this have to offer? How does it make the world better? How is it beautiful?
LS: Wow. So almost means, like on a typical fastened testimony meaning, it’s more important that the individual sitting next to someone they like than it is if they go up to the lectern and say, “I know.” I mean, that’s something to consider. And this kind of transitions into the church attendance in Sabbath day observance topic, that they find that church is uninspiring, right. And I don’t know if millennials would be the only ones that say that but…
Jana: Actually, most Mormons said that they found sacrament meeting uplifting. It was a little bit lower for millennials. But it wasn’t huge.
LS: Nice. And then there were three – and we might need to look them up – as far as how they wish Sacrament meeting was different, there were three things. Do you remember them off the top of your head?
Jana: Well, we had actually a number of them. Only a few of them I mentioned in the book. But there were a whole list of suggestions of ways that the church experience could be different. What if we had guest speakers from the community? What if we had all of the children under the age of eight go to nursery during sacrament meeting so that they’re not there for it? Just kind of wild things. What if we made sacrament meeting 45 minutes long? So you have to remember that this was before the change. This was in 2016. And also musical suggestions. There were a couple of those.
Of how we make sacrament meeting better, the only one that had any traction was making sacrament meeting shorter, which actually has happened. So yeah, that’s great. I guess people got their wish. But that in itself is interesting that they say sacrament meeting is uplifting, but they really don’t want it to be there that long.
LS: Interesting. Basically, for local leadership to consider is maybe what are some out of the box approaches that we could take to make it more inspiring? I mean, the handbook gives you a lot of wiggle room. [00:25:01] I mean, there’s some, obviously, outlines and things that you need to follow, but there’s some different things a leader could try to hopefully make it more inspiring. What about church callings? How do millennials see church callings differently?
Jana: Well, they are more likely to think it’s okay to say no to a church calling than an older Mormon would. So generationally, boomer silent Mormons are the ones who are going to say, “Well, I don’t know why I’m getting this calling, but I’m going to say yes because I need to be obedient. I need to trust that this calling is coming from the Lord,” and not just because we moved into this world and they didn’t have a nursery leader or whatever it is.
A millennial is not necessarily going to just default to the answer yes. And that’s a very interesting difference to me. They would like to entertain that there are possibilities that for example, if the calling is not at a stage of life, when they’re raising their kids, and they feel they don’t have enough time, or even if they just don’t think the calling is a good fit, that was one of them, the survey options we gave them, they might say no to it just for that reason. So generationally, I think that that would be a little bit different from some of the older Latter-Day Saints and how they view callings.
LS: And I can see that if a bishop is a baby boomer and is extended a calling uses phrases like “we’ve prayed and received inspiration that this is your calling.” And then that the millennial says, “No.” It’s easy for that boomer to think, “There faith isn’t as strong or they’re less obedient,” when in reality they just see callings as playing a different role than maybe those boomers did. Is that a good way to look at it?
Jana: Well, this gets to the authority issue. Millennials are not just in the LDS church, but research on religion for millennials more generally, they look to be privileging the relationship that they have with God, the personal relationship over institutional authority many times. For Mormons, it’s actually less so. Mormons have still a very healthy respect, institutional authority, even millennials.
But when you put it in that context, things are different. I was thinking about an experience that I had in the church a couple of years ago. I was in Australia at Christmas time, and I got a text message from my Bishop because I hadn’t gone to tithing settlement. And so I’m standing there waiting for a tram in Melbourne, Australia, and I’m texting with my Bishop about whether I’m a full tithe payer. And that was it. That was my tithing settlement via text message all the way across the world.
And just a few weeks later, I got a new calling, and one of the counselors in the Bishopric, dressed up in a suit, came to my house to formally extend this calling. And I was thinking, “This is so generational.” Because he’s older, he’s retired which means he could come in the middle of the day to extend this calling to me, but what he said was, he wanted to do it right. In his mind, there was a particular way that you would extend a calling. Whereas my Bishop who’s a Gen Xer, much less formal about a lot of things, for him, it’s totally fine. We need to get the job done, get tithing settlement done. It doesn’t matter that we’re doing it via text message. Do you see what I’m saying?
I think that there is just a different relationship with some of what Boyd K. Packer called the Unwritten Order Of Things. That talk is problematic for a lot of millennials. So that approach is problematic for a lot of younger people.
LS: I just wrote an article about that in a newsletter that that talk is often heard. It’s sort of like the tram card and religious leadership meetings say, “Well, that’s just the unwritten order of things. That’s how it’s supposed to be done.” But nobody’s really read the talk and knows what it says or what the unwritten order of things are. Plus, BYU doesn’t even list it in their index of BYU speeches.
Jana: Is that right?
LS: Like if you have to Google it, and then it takes you to the strange side website. So BYU isn’t…not that they’re not endorsing it, but it’s just sort of not a talk that…I don’t know. But it is to sort of craft in our culture. So the older generation, this is interesting dynamic that they want to do it right, when in reality even when some things aren’t listed in the handbook, I mean, that this is the right way to do it. They make assumptions that there’s a right way to do it.
Jana: Whereas in both of those examples of my Gen X Bishop and my baby boomer counselor, they were both right. They both got the job done. We had tithing settlement. They extend the calling. Everything got done in a way that I thought was pretty cool.
LS: I read your article you wrote a few weeks about your temple experience – I don’t know if you want to go there – but there was this feeling of like there was a slight adjustment you’d made in the temple that some thought like, “Well, this isn’t the right way to do it.” I don’t know if this invalidates your intentions.
Jana: Well, right. It was about my veil. The veil in the temple. Apparently, I had it on crooked. I mean, you put it on, you can’t see yourself. I have no idea what it looks like. It probably looked awful. But the fact that this woman was very concerned about whether I had invalidated the ordinance itself, [00:30:04] because my veil was askew, I found that to be…
I mean, first of all, I was irritated, but then mostly I just got sad. Like that is to her this operative faith that if I have to do all of these things exactly right, then God will pay attention to you. That’s not how most millennials would feel I think generationally about having a relationship with God. Your clothing is not the most important thing, even if you’re in the temple.
LS: It’s interesting just as leaders listening out there that maybe be more aware of just some of the things that you’re trying to do right and ask yourself, “Why am I doing this way?” And every leader is going to have their style. I mean, some people just the style dress up in a suit makes me feel like an official capacity, whatever, but just know that some millennials may look at you and say, “Why do we do that way and why do we need to continue to do it that way.” So interesting dynamic, for sure.
You found some interesting data as it relates to the word of wisdom how different millennials are. Even myself I’m probably more Gen X than the millennial, but drinking coffees is a big deal, but a lot of millennials more of them are drinking coffee.
Jana: That was very surprising. Millennials and Gen Xers actually found four out of ten of the current Mormon sample. I mean, for former Mormons, the rates of coffee consumption were very similar to the general population and there was almost no difference. But for current Mormons, we were expecting it to be far lower because it’s very active in the church sample. You know, 86% say that they’re active in the church, and more than half hold the current temple recommend. So to see that was very interesting.
But generationally, when you cross-tabulate the results of the word of wisdom with who is claiming that they’re active in the church, for baby boomers and silent generation members, it’s exactly the same. So the ones who have a temple recommend are not doing anything wrong in the word of wisdom. But for millennials, it’s sometimes the same people who have a temple recommend or say they’re very active in the church, and they have had coffee in the last six months or and they have had alcohol.
LS: And this is tricky because I think some leaders would hear that and think, “Okay, I need to maybe ask a follow-up question during the temple recommend, but in the temple command, says, “Don’t add additional questions.” Sometimes you just have to ask millennial, do you keep the word of wisdom? And they may say, yes, even though you disagree with it, if you really know how they were keeping the word of wisdom, right?
Jana: That’s beyond my pay grade. I cannot answer that question. It’s been interesting in personal conversations, and the oral history interviews with millennials. I could ask follow up questions because I don’t have any kind of restriction on or I’m not doing a temple recommend interview. But a couple of people who had said, “Yes, I drink coffee or had other infractions, and I would say, “How do you handle the temple recommend interview?”
For example, a woman who had stopped wearing her garments, most of the time still wanted to go to the temple. But I said, “What do you do? I mean, how do you reconcile that?” And she just said, in her mind, no one had the right to ask her questions about her underwear. And so she said, “I’m going to tell them what they want to hear so that I can be at my children’s weddings when one day that happens.” She was too young for that. “But someday, when that happens, I want to be there, and I don’t think that they have the right to tell me what to do.” That’s interesting too because you wouldn’t have heard that 50 years ago from people who were still active in the church to the same degree.
LS: So sort of bouncing back to the temple context, as far as that temple recommend experience of coming into a formal office, being asked formal questions, I mean, that rings true with a lot of the obedience and compliance mentality that the boomers came from. Did you learn anything more as far as the temple recommend experience for millennials that would be worth mentioning?
Jana: Not in the survey itself. In the interview, somewhat. You know, how do you feel about this? I had one young man tell me that he felt that…he had come to feel. He hadn’t felt this in his early 20s, but he kind of gradually came to this idea that he felt that the whole temple recommend idea was coercive, and that he shouldn’t have to go through this experience in order to have access to sacred ordinances. That’s just his opinion. And I don’t actually think that that’s a majority opinion, but…
LS: I think the point being is that it wouldn’t be surprising to find that millennials are seeing that temple recommend experience much different than maybe the bishop on the other side of the desk.
Jana: Yeah, maybe?
LS: And what to do that I don’t know. [00:35:02]
Jana: We’re now coming into a situation where older millennials, like yourself…you said you’re born in 82?
LS: Yeah.
Jana: Right. So some people your age are becoming bishops. They are Relief Society presidents. And so the question now is, are they going to try to work within the system completely as it is or are they going to innovate in whatever ways they can to reach younger people?
LS: And I think it’s just a good practice to always look for that. Sometimes [inaudible 00:35:27] the tradition or the right way to do things and written order things, but always step back and find there’s a lot of wiggle room in a lot of these practices we do and traditions that would appeal to millennials if we did them a bit differently?
Pornography. You said that we’re misguided to as far as putting so much emphasis about avoiding pornography with just the men. But what did the statistics show as far as men and women have related to pornography?
Jana: Well, it is much higher for men. And that’s true in the general population as well. But I think that many more orthodox and older Mormon readers would be surprised to see how pornography is also a factor for young women. So that’s something to consider. When you’re making a statement about pornography, you don’t need to only direct it to the ironic priesthood.
LS: And then maybe take some time in young woman’s as well to make sure that same lesson or message is getting across as well. Then you talked about the pornography really – and I don’t know if this was just in the Mormon sample – but pornography may not be as big of an issue as maybe we sometimes make it out to be. I mean, sometimes it’s like 80% or…
Jana: The numbers were still very low, certainly low compared to the general population. In the church, I think that sometimes we have this rhetoric that if you’ve seen pornography one time you are an addict. The language of addiction has become very pervasive. We didn’t see that pattern in the data to support that kind of hyper response. That’s not to say that I think this is something that needs to be minimized and dismissed as unimportant, but it’s a far jump to this addiction language. I don’t quite understand how we got there.
LS: From a research standpoint, is it easy to avoid the stigma of asking someone in the survey – I don’t know how you ask it – do you regularly view pornography or have you? I mean, are some people avoiding answering yes, when they answer maybe yes because of the stigma?
Jana: Well, we talked about that desirability bias. That is operative in questions about sexuality. There’s no question that that becomes important. In fact, I showed the research on sexuality and sexual behavior – we asked a lot of questions about behaviors that people had engaged in before marriage or not – and I showed that to a researcher who focuses on sexuality within the LDS family. And she basically laughed and she said, “People aren’t always telling the truth.”
Methodological, when you were asking these questions anonymously in an internet survey, your chances of getting an honest answer are higher. Our respondents were assured many times this is an anonymous survey; your responses will not be traced back to you. When people are doing a survey with a live interviewer either in person or on the telephone, the tendency toward the desirability bias is probably a little bit higher.
LS: Got you. Interesting. Well, this is your job and not mine This is why I failed statistics once.
Jana: You did?
LS: I did. I had to take it twice.
Jana: What were the chances?
LS: Right. Traditional family, this is one that I think for a lot of orthodox member of the church this would be concerning them that traditional families have taken a pretty dramatic drop as far as the importance of traditional family. Any thoughts come to mind with that?
Jana: I’m going to pull up the table from the book.
LS: Sure.
Jana: All right. This is in chapter nine of the book asking people, in this list of 15 possible things that you think are the most important issues facing the United States today, broken down generationally, for baby boomers and silent generations moral or religious decline, ranked as the number one issue, and changing views on the traditional family was number five of fifteen. So two things in their top five, really deal with that issue.
For millennials, the number one issue was actually poverty, which was fascinating. So poverty, hunger, homelessness ranks, number one. For them, religious decline is third. And then you have to go all the way down to number ten to get to changing views on the traditional family. So for them, this idea of the traditional family is under attack, that’s going to have a lot less resonance than thinking about society in general, and what can we do to help the poor and what can we do to build community. [00:40:00]
Also, I think that that data is reinforced when you look at the former Mormon data, and why people left the church. For millennials, LGBT issues, for example, was number three. So the third most commonly cited reason for leaving was LGBT issues.
LS: Interesting. Again, not that we have the answer how to adjust, but when a leader maybe references the proclamation of the world, or stands up and gives a lesson about traditional family, they may do it passionately and feel like they’re getting a message across. But millennials maybe shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t get what the big deal is.” Is that generally fair to say?
Jana: I think that is very fair to say. And I think we are becoming more sensitive to this in the church. But we also need to be mindful of demographic changes in the United States. So if you are getting up and giving a sermon on the proclamation on the family, you have to recognize, oh, one in five more men, adults, are single and have never been married. We also have proportion of people who’ve been divorced people who have been widowed. All of those people need to be included if you’re going to be giving a statement about what family is. And we don’t always think about that. We have the ideal in mind, and then all of the people who don’t, in some way measure up to that ideal feel marginalized.
LS: And it gets tricky when it’s not just a message or a general structure of society we believe in, but there’s doctrine and ordinances connected to the traditional family. And so it’s not like a leader say, “Well, I guess I’ll talk about less or no, that’s in our doctrine. Like it’s part of our message.” You know, it’s tricky that way, for sure.
Jana: It is hard. In particular, when you look historically since World War II, the family became a topic in General Conference, basically, after World War II, and it starts entering the lexicon, more and more cited. And so this is how we have defined ourselves really against American culture now for 70 years. You can’t historically stop on a dime. Even if you didn’t have the doctrinal entanglements that you’re talking about, historically, this is how we have measured ourselves against the host culture. Where’s that going to go? How do we then redefine ourselves as a peculiar people, a distinctive people, if we don’t have that?
LS: And really, we want to keep growing and make our message appealing. That shift is complicated, right?
Jana: Right, right.
LS: We’ve touched on this a little bit, but as far as the dynamic of prophets as opposed to local leaders, and you’ve touched on a little bit as far as how millennials see general leaders like prophets and apostles. You had a list that they rank fifth out of as far as where they see personal…
Jana: Source of authority.
LS: Source of authority. Do you remember the other four?
Jana: Not at the top of my head. But that’s why I brought the book. That’s why I have a copy of it right here.
LS: I think the first one was that their self right. That they see themselves as the source of authority or something.
Jana: Well, interestingly, not to the same degree that older Mormons do. You would expect that if millennials are somehow abandoning traditional sources of authority, that they would be relying upon themselves, their own conscience, their own promptings of the Spirit. But actually, that wasn’t necessarily the case – what was the case was family members that came out stronger for millennials than for older Mormons. And in part that is lifecycle effect. They’re younger, they are more likely to still be relying on parents or siblings, or even a spouse.
But own conscience even though it was the number one reason for them – it was the number one for every generation – but it’s lower than it is for older Mormons. So is it that trusting in your own conscience is something that a person grows into that over time you begin to trust yourself more as you learn how to discern the Spirit? I don’t know. Is that a lifecycle effect or is this really a generational difference?
LS: But in general, it’s safe to say that the message of follow the prophet, follow the brother is not as strong as it was before. Right?
Jana: I think it’s safe to say…this is the chart on page 195 of the book if anyone wants to look at it. But the LDS general authorities was fifth overall in top sources of authority after own conscience promptings from the spirit, family members and scriptures. But for the boomer silent Mormons, you can see that it’s actually third. So LDS general authorities is a higher ranking for them than it is for younger Mormons.
LS: And you talk about how, obviously, I think it was published that we have the oldest first presidency. I mean, president Monson sort of skews the scale a little bit. [00:45:00] But nonetheless, on average you have the oldest first. And so I’m talking about it’s harder maybe for millennials to relate to that generation. I’m the same age as present Monson was when he was called to the Quorum of the Twelve. 2. I’m not applying or anything. But if there was a 35-year-old, 36-year-old that was called as an apostle, would that help? Again, not the word petitioning that, but is it that big of an issue that they can’t relate to that generation, that much older generation?
Jana: That is a complicated question. You mentioned President Monson, and I think that’s a great example. He was made an apostle at the age of 36. That hasn’t happened in a very, very long time in the church. We tend to promote from within.
So the model now is that men with leadership will be 70 for a while, perhaps they’ve served as a mission president at least once, and they will rise to the ranks of the 70, maybe get to the First Presidency of the 70. And then when they’re that magical age of in their early 60s or mid-60s, they might get that call. So they’re already two generations removed from adult Mormons who are in this millennial generation. And then it gets even more of a generational difference as they age.
So it is a problem. I don’t have a solution for that. And it’s like I said, above my pay grade. But I can say that there are things that we could do as a people to make something like General Conference…I mean, General Conference historically did not only have prophets and apostles speaking only have people from the general officers of the church speaking. So there are precedents there that we could draw upon to have more diversity even among who is up there at that podium that would not violate either precedent or our doctrine.
LS: And obviously, it’s not our prerogative to influence those decisions, but I think the saving grace there is that if a millennial can’t relate as much to those older general authorities, they can still establish a strong relationship with a bishop or an Elders Quorum president locally. And that’s where we can really make a difference, right?
Jana: Absolutely.
LS: Yeah, that’s powerful. I don’t think you went into this a lot, but as far as you measured how much the American exceptionalism was important to millennials, and that has dropped quite a bit as far as American exceptionalism. And it made me wonder, is that related to the same as far as being the one true church, that there’s almost like an exceptionalism message in that? Is that may be connected, do you think?
Jana: I do think it’s connected? And that’s a good example. First, let’s define what we mean by American exceptionalism. Basically, there’s a question in our survey that has been done many times with other populations about different kinds of patriotism. So patriotism would be “I love my country.” American exceptionalism would be I love my country and think it’s the best country in the world. That there is this idea that it is the one true country.
So with American exceptionalism, we saw clear generational drop in millennials who identify with that kind of patriotism, that exceptionalist view of America’s role in the world. One millennial I thought this was very interesting. When asked this question “is America the greatest country in the world? said, “Greatest at what?” That’s a good question. Are you talking about greatest at the Olympics, are you talking about greatest in how we treat our people who are living in poverty or are you talking about greatest in terms of socioeconomic attainment? In that latter category, yes, we’re number one.
LS: Interesting.
Jana: So it’s a good question. Greatest at what?
LS: And maybe millennials are looking at the church and they think, “What are we true at?” If we are the one true church, true in what? Maybe some of them looked at. What comes to mind as far as what are some positives does millennials bring to the future of our church that maybe the past generations were up to contribute?
Jana: I am so glad you asked that question because I feel sometimes when I’m talking about this research, people are focusing on the negative things. People are focusing on millennials not having this relationship with authority that’s been helpful for the church and the bulwark of the church for so long. Spin that into a positive. Not everything that we have done in the church has always been good for everybody. And millennials are better at recognizing those people on the margins.
Millennials they’ve been brought up in a world where people who are disabled, for example, people who are somehow different, those people are actually celebrated in a way that for older Americans that was not the case. Maybe that was something that you would hide. That’s something that older members of the church could learn from millennials.
They also have a tremendous amount of energy, [00:50:00] which I think is fantastic. I don’t have that kind of energy, at least not anymore. If they are tapped for different leadership positions. That’s something that we haven’t discussed, but millennials have so much to give. Particularly singles in the church, the statistics of singles, who are given leadership opportunities in non-singles ward, not the dedicated singles ward, but singles who are in a family ward, not enough of those people have callings that would require them to be at Ward Council. That is a massively untapped group of people that could help the church. Not all of them are millennials, but a lot of them are.
LS: Speaking from my own experience, as a millennial, I was called as a bishop at 28. So I was one of the first Bishop millennials. And now at 36, I am much better of a member because I’ve had an experience at a younger age, and I will be through the remainder of my life because I had it so young. And so I’ve always thought if I’m ever in a position where a bishop or state president where I’m calling people to callings, I would be more likely to look to the younger generation and put them in there because of the blessing it was to me.
I think that’s one area that local leaders can really consider is sometimes we need a new Bishop in the ward, we’ll look at the High Council, we’ll look at the Older Young Men’s president. But looking at some of those late 20s, or around that age to say, “What would that look like?” maybe you’d be surprised the inspiration that would come and how it would bless the church long term getting younger leaders. I guess it goes back to we can’t vote for a certain apostle of the younger age to be called next. But we could start that influence of maybe considering younger leaders on a local level.
Jana: Yeah.
LS: That’s fascinating. Not to go negative, what’s the biggest sticking point as far as the church and our culture in general, that if we don’t start considering change that whether it’s on a general local letter level, maybe the biggest sticking point for millennials going forward? Any thoughts come to mind?
Jana: Well, I think it’s politics. There’s a lot of interesting research now about how politics is driving religious behavior. In political science, it’s long been understood that your religious affiliation and religious experiences drive your political behavior. So that if you’re an evangelical Christian, you might vote against abortion, you’re going to support candidates who are going to maybe want prayer in schools. So your religious belief drives your political behavior.
But now, the current research is actually looking at that as a two-way street. That your political behavior is driving whether you are going to church or not. That’s very interesting. Political affiliation is happening earlier in our life cycle now than it used to. So people are being polarized into camps when they’re still teenagers. That has an effect on whether they feel comfortable staying in the religion of their childhood. Are you following?
LS: Yeah.
Jana: This is kind of complicated.
LS: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Jana: But if you are a 12 or 13-year-old and you are choosing your political identification, well, what if that political identification doesn’t jive with what religious setting you’ve been brought up in? That’s going to be a source of tremendous conflict. In our data, we see that for former Mormons, they are less republican by 20 points. It’s not in any way statistically insignificant that’s major.
Like I said, LGBT issues is one of the driving factors for younger people in leaving the church. So this is all by way of saying, be really, really careful about what you say about politics and church. Do not assume that everyone sitting around you feels the same way. There are things that you could learn.
I mean, when I saw the data about how millennials feel about poverty being the number one issue, I felt ashamed of myself. I used to be that idealistic. I used to be a lot more committed to certain ideals than I perhaps am. Now I’m a little more jaded, but I could learn from them. And I hope that that’s something that we can take as we think about relating to millennials a little bit better, what can we learn from them? How can we better listen to them?
LS: As we wrap up here, again, you brought us the data and the research and your…
Jana: It’s a lot, isn’t it?
LS: It’s a lot.
Jana: I’m sorry to have this data dump for you.
LS: But it’s important. I’m so glad that you did that research and took that upon yourself. Then the question is like, what are we supposed to do about it? Maybe that’s a whole nother book may be written by somebody else. I don’t know. But if you’re standing in front of room full of Bishops or Release Society presidents, stake presidents, and they just said, “What do we do?” [00:55:01] what guidance or best practices come to mind that you would relate to them?
Jana: Oh, my gosh. Well, we’ve talked about a few of them already. Be very careful about making assumptions about how other people feel, or about their sexual orientation, or their political behavior and ideology. And think very carefully about whether those things are necessary for members of the church. We in American Mormonism in the last half-century, particularly have codified a certain ideal standard for what it looks like to be a Latter-Day Saint. And millennials may be showing us that there’s a wider tent than we suspected, which I think is probably a very good thing.
And if we are interested in at least stemming the tide of disaffiliation from the church, we need to think about widening that tent so that people who are on the margins feel comfortable enough that they can still stay and have a part, even if it’s not to the same degree that your parents were orthodox, or you were orthodox. Maybe they are redefining that, but they’re still part of this community, they are still Latter-Day Saints.
LS: That’s powerful. I think it’s very helpful to just sit back and be more aware of these things, and listen, and so forth. Obviously, we want to let people know where they can get the book if they’re interested in really diving into the data. And it is interesting I failed statistics once, but I made it through the whole book, and it wasn’t torturous by any means.
I appreciate the various anecdotes of your interviews and you tell real-life stories of how this is impacting individuals. But where would you send people to find more information about you and the book?
Jana: Well, you can buy the book at bookstores. For readers who are people who are in Utah, you can go to Benchmark Books or Written Vision. I’m giving to book signings this week at those two stores. But of course, Amazon is the behemoth of bookselling. It’s available at Amazon.
LS: Awesome. Last question I have for you is, as you’ve gone through this research, obviously a labor of love, I mean, a lot of probably late nights and early mornings going through this and really making sure you get it right in the book, how has this impacted your discipleship of Jesus Christ? Have you become a better disciple?
Jana: Can I just say you’re the first interviewer who has asked that question. How has this impacted my discipleship of Jesus Christ? I want to be a better listener. And I think that this has persuaded me that I’m not as good a listener as I had hoped that I was. So there’s that.
I also have done some soul searching about this question of orthodox behavior. Because sociologically, we need the people who are the pillars of the church, we need the hyper-orthodox and the ones who would never think of so much as putting vanilla in a batch of cookies because it has alcohol. We need those people sociologically because they run religion. And without those people, you can’t have vibrant, really robust religion.
But we also need compassion, we need less judgmentalism within the church. I had one professor, he teaches at BYU, and he said, that the operative scripture for his students now is judge not lest ye yourself be judged. That that is the paradigmatic scripture of this generation. And I think there’s a lot to that. Judge not lest ye yourself be judged. If I’m thinking about discipleship, that’s a pretty good place to start.
