86% of Mormons with bachelor’s or higher go to church weekly. That didn't surprise this reporter

LAUREN GILGER: You might assume a college education means you’re less likely to go to church every Sunday. Conventional wisdom says you go to college and lose your faith — it’s where you learn the error of religious ways or are freed from a childhood of dogmatic beliefs.

But, new data out from Pew Research Center shows that’s not always the case. In fact, for some Americans, there’s a pretty strong correlation between higher education and church attendance. And that trend is very stark among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Pew reports in a national survey gathered in 2023 and 2024, 86% of Mormons with a bachelor’s degree or higher go to church every week. That’s compared to 59% of those who didn’t go to college, a whopping 27% gap. That gap is just 7% among Christians overall.

Tamarra Kemsley wrote about why for the Salt Lake Tribune and told me this trend did not surprise her.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: If you look at data going back at least to 2008, hundreds of studies all show the same thing. Far and away, those with a college degree or higher, so four years or more, are multiple times more likely to stay in church. And I think a lot of Latter-day Saints see that just on the ground in their personal experience.

I think if you talk to a lot of members of the church in the United States and said, like, “Do most of the people in your congregation, do they have a college degree?” I think a lot of them would say, “Yeah, actually, yes.”

So then the question is, why? And I spoke with experts, a couple of different ideas kind of percolated to the top. And one is definitely culture. It is a buttoned-down environment. You go into a Latter-day Saint worship service and it is a man in a suit conducting, different people go up, they have different speakers, everyone sort of takes a turn, we don’t have paid pastors, and they share their message, but there’s no clapping, there’s no call-and-response. It’s very buttoned-down. The hymns are very traditional. There’s no guitar, it’s just like organ music.

And I think that, plus the fact that the leadership itself is usually educated. So if you have a college degree or more, you are more likely to be assigned to the volunteer role of bishop. And if you’re a bishop, you and your family are more likely to stay active, right? You are deeply entrenched now into the culture, into the community, so it creates this feedback loop.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So the ministry in the LDS Church sort of depends on or is enhanced by the level of education you might have.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Yes. So if you talk again to members of the church and say, “Who are your local clergy?” it’s probably going to be someone who’s like a dentist or has an MBA or is a lawyer. It’s very much the case that there is this sort of elevation of people with education.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. The church, the LDS Church, right, also runs a bunch of universities, right? That has to have something to do with this.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Like a lot of universities! Everyone thinks of BYU, it doesn’t stop with BYU. There’s BYU-Idaho, there’s BYU-Hawaii, there’s what’s called Ensign College, it’s kind of a community college-esque environment in Salt Lake City. It has so many institutions, and these are all just — they are just churning out graduates. I think there’s something like — it’s over 10,000 graduates easily a year, maybe twice as many.

So if you’re going to school in an environment where you’re required to study the Book of Mormon, where you’re required to talk about how LDS theology around the family is important to sociology, let’s say you’re studying sociology, right? It’s infused throughout, both through these classes that are strictly religion classes, and then professors are expected to integrate theology into their classroom settings, whether you’re a physicist or someone working in the humanities.

And so I think there’s an argument possibly to be made there that if this is an effort by the church to really engrain a sense of LDS identity and belief into those students, that it’s working.

LAUREN GILGER: So I mean, it sounds like in a way, the LDS Church just values education, higher education in particular, and that’s sort of creating this culture.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: That, I think, is part of it. There have always been pro-education messages, explicit, not just the implicit that we were talking about before. There’s this both implicit and then explicit where they say that learning and knowledge is part of growing and becoming the person that God wants you to be. There’s also that pro-family message, which requires often, you know, a certain level of education if you’re going to have three-, four-, five-, six-plus kids.

LAUREN GILGER: So I wonder, though, what about all of those people who have not, you know, participated as actively, who do not have college degrees, who are not going to church every week in this way? Are they left behind, left out of this?

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: I think culturally there can be a disparity there. And I think it depends in part where you are, where you’re located, who your leader is. But I think that there’s also a sense that one of the things that I uncovered is that a lot of the people who aren’t going to church as frequently are converts. And converts are also less likely to have a college degree. So I think there’s something going on there. And so part of this just has to do with were you raised in the church or not.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK. So let me ask you, though, what did church officials have to say about this trend? Is this something that they’re happy about, you know, concerned about, both?

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Yeah. So I think the church is just happy to see that there are people who are going to school, getting educated and staying. That creates a great workforce to draw from, of course. It didn’t say as much in any of the comments or statements that I received.

One of the things that they have talked about is — there is this flourishing taking place, that across the globe, quote, “The church is experiencing a season of spiritual vitality and growth.” So not speaking directly to this connection between education or its long-standing impact on attendance. However, they did try to frame it within this larger sort of revival, which I think if, depending on which statistics you choose to look like, either is or isn’t happening.

It’s absolutely true that the LDS Church has more missionaries out than ever. I think it’s 90,000 right now. And these are full-time missionaries. Not all of them are the young men and young women you see with badges, some of them are senior missionaries, but that’s full-time across the globe. That’s huge.

The schools that we just talked about are constantly expanding. Its other programs for youth and part of their church education system, programs called Institute, which is kind of these sort of extracurricular classes, religion classes for college-age students, regardless if they go to an LDS institution, those, they’re growing. And so there are these indications.

On the other hand, we do see falling retention. We also saw, for the first time, we’re seeing across the United States some stagnation in overall growth as well, just in terms of raw numbers. So, some headwinds there.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So interesting the way you look at the numbers here seems to matter. All right. Tamarra Kemsley, religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, joining us to talk more about this data. Tamarra, thank you so much for coming back on The Show. Appreciate it very much.

TAMARRA KEMSLEY: Yeah, thanks Lauren.