Media attention around the Republican crop of presidential candidates, as well as a new ad campaign with the tagline “I am a Mormon,” have popularized discussion about the Church of Latter-day Saints. In Utah, however, new data shows Mormonism isn’t as prominent as it once was, especially among men. A report written by sociologists Rick Phillips (University of North Florida) and Ryan Cragun (University of Tampa) and released by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut found that Utah’s Mormon majority is shrinking. It’s now down to 57 percent, and men account for only 40 percent of those Utah Mormons (down from 47.5 percent two decades ago).
In their paper, the Salt Lake Tribune reports, Phillips and Cragun suggest the reason for this widening gender gap might be that Utah’s men are abandoning their faith at higher rates than women. In the past, Mormon men remained tied to the church rather than lose their social standing in the community, argue Phillips and Cragun, both on the board of the Mormon Social Science Association. “However, declining Mormon majorities [in Utah] may have weakened that link, and Mormon men who lack a strong subjective religious commitment to the church are now free to apostatize without incurring sanctions in other social settings.”
Other scholars in the field, disagree with Phillips and Cragun’s interpretation of the data. David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, points out to the Salt Lake Tribune this shift isn’t necessarily due to men leaving the church, but could also be a result of more women joining. And Marie Cornwall, sociologist at Brigham Young University and editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, has her own criticism of Phillips and Cragun’s conclusions:
They have no way of knowing whether the growing gap reflects migration patterns—professional men and women leave the state to look for jobs and, given the lower rates of professional women, that may mean that men are leaving the state as much as it means that they are leaving the [LDS] Church.
As in so many other cases, the numbers can’t tell the whole story of why the population of Utah’s male Mormons seems to be shrinking.
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Letta Page — December 16, 2011
Doug gathers up some more of the pieces on religion topping off the week at TheSocietyPages in an Eds' Desk post here: http://thesocietypages.org/editors/2011/12/16/atheists-and-mormons-and-muslims-oh-my/
Of course, yours is included!
Atheists and Mormons and Muslims, Oh My » The Editors' Desk — December 17, 2011
[...] it dawned on me that, just this morning, our own wunderkind Alex Casey had just put up a Citings & Sightings post on an in-depth Salt Lake Tribune article about new research on the gender gap among Utah’s [...]