You probably know someone. Maybe it’s a cousin who grew up going to church every Sunday and quietly stopped somewhere around college. Maybe it’s a friend who still calls herself a member but hasn’t been to a service in years. Maybe you’ve driven past a chapel that used to fill its parking lot on Sunday mornings and now only fills half of it.
That feeling has a name in research now. People you grew up around, or people just like them, aren’t staying in the faith they were raised in. New data puts a real number on it. Pew Research Center has been tracking how many adults raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stay in it. The newest count shows a sharp drop. Here’s what the numbers actually say, and what they don’t.
A new number for an old feeling
On September 22, 2026, Pew Research Center published a new analysis of religious retention among people raised Latter-day Saint, commonly known as Mormon. The finding is direct. In 2007, 70 percent of adults raised in the LDS faith still identified as Latter-day Saint. By 2023-24, that share had fallen to 54 percent.
That’s a sixteen-point drop in under two decades.
Put another way: in 2007, seven out of ten people raised LDS stayed. Now it’s a little over half. You don’t need a background in religious research to feel the size of that shift. It’s the difference between “most people stay” and “nearly half leave.”
You may already have sensed this without ever seeing a number attached. That’s exactly what a peg like this is for. It takes the thing you noticed and gives it a date, a source, and a size. You no longer have to wonder if you were reading too much into one quiet Sunday.
What Pew set out to measure
“Retention” has a specific meaning in a study like this. It isn’t asking how many people currently belong to a faith. It’s asking, of everyone who was raised in that faith as a child, how many still claim it as an adult.
That distinction matters. A religion can gain members through conversion even while losing a large share of the people raised inside it. The Pew Research Center report tracks the second number. It tells you whether a tradition is holding onto its own upbringing, not just adding new members elsewhere.
For Latter-day Saints, that number moved a lot in less than twenty years. And it moved in one direction only.
Think of it this way: if you were raised in any faith, you are part of somebody’s retention statistic. You either stayed, or you didn’t. This report is simply that question, asked of thousands of people at once.
Seventy percent, then fifty-four
The comparison Pew draws is between two points in time. In 2007, 70 percent of people raised LDS were still LDS as adults. In the 2023-24 data, that figure is 54 percent, according to Pew’s September 2026 report.
Sixteen points is not a rounding difference. Researchers usually expect that kind of shift across a generation. This happened within one working lifetime.
If you were raised LDS yourself, or married into a Latter-day Saint family, or grew up down the street from one, this probably isn’t a surprise. It’s a number attached to something you’d likely already noticed at a family reunion, a ward directory, or a school reunion where fewer people than you expected still went.
You can sit with that number without deciding what it means for any one person. It’s a pattern across a population, not a verdict on your cousin, your friend, or yourself.
How Pew found this number
The figures come from Pew’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of 36,908 U.S. adults, according to the same September 22, 2026 report. That’s one of the largest religion surveys ever conducted in the United States.
A survey that size lets researchers zoom in on smaller groups. Latter-day Saints make up a modest share of the U.S. population, so a small survey couldn’t say much about them with any confidence.
You don’t get reliable numbers about a smaller group from a handful of interviews or a viral post. You get them from tens of thousands of answers, collected on the record, by an organization whose entire reputation rests on getting the math right.
That’s worth remembering the next time a much smaller, much shakier claim about “what people believe now” crosses your feed. You’re allowed to ask how many people were actually asked before you take a number seriously.
Who Pew actually talked to
Out of that larger pool, Pew’s new analysis draws specifically on 565 current Latter-day Saints. Of those, 414 have been members their whole lives, and 151 converted. The analysis also includes 316 people who used to be LDS and no longer are.
That’s a real, sizable group on both sides of the question. It isn’t just people who stayed, describing why they stayed. It’s also hundreds of people who left, answering the same set of questions.
You need both groups to measure a rate like this honestly. A survey of only current members would miss everyone who walked away. A survey of only former members would miss everyone still there.
Pew talked to both. That balance is part of why the number holds up.
The quieter statistic: leaving faith altogether
Retention only tells you whether someone kept the label they were raised with. It doesn’t say where the people who left actually went.
The Pew report answers that question too. Some people who leave the LDS church join another faith. A large share don’t go anywhere at all.
They become religiously unaffiliated.
That’s the second number worth sitting with, and it may matter to you even more than the first, depending on who in your life this describes.
You might know this shape from your own family without knowing it had a name. Someone stops going, then stops calling themselves a member of anything, and neither move gets announced. It just happens, quietly, over a few years you weren’t tracking closely.
Twenty-eight percent, twice what it was in 2007
According to Pew Research Center’s September 22, 2026 report, 28 percent of adults who were raised Latter-day Saint are now religiously unaffiliated. That means they describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” That’s double the rate Pew measured in 2007.
So the drop in retention isn’t mostly people trading one congregation for another down the street. A growing share is leaving organized religion altogether, full stop.
You can hold both numbers at once. Fewer than six in ten people raised LDS still call themselves LDS. More than a quarter have moved into no religious affiliation at all. Neither number cancels the other out.
If you’ve watched someone you love go from active membership to no religious identity in the space of a few years, this is the trend line their story sits inside.
What this number does not tell you
It doesn’t tell you why any individual person left. Pew’s report is a demographic snapshot, not a set of personal interviews explaining motive.
It doesn’t tell you whether the trend will continue, level off, or reverse. Fourteen years of measured change point in a direction. They don’t guarantee a future.
And it doesn’t single out Latter-day Saints as uniquely affected. Religious switching is something Pew has documented across many American faith groups for years. Leaving the tradition you were raised in is not a story about one church alone.
You should read this number for what it measures, not for what it’s silent on.
What this number does tell you
It tells you that Pew Research Center measured a specific, real change, on a specific date, using a large sample. That’s a documented fact, not a rumor passed along secondhand.
It tells you the shift is not small. A sixteen-point drop in retention and a doubled unaffiliation rate are both large by ordinary survey standards. You don’t need a statistics background to see that these are bigger swings than a typical year-to-year wobble.
It also tells you something about timing. This isn’t a decades-old finding being recycled. Pew put it out this week, which means the conversation you may be about to have about it is, for once, actually current.
And it tells you that whatever you’ve personally noticed has a documented pattern sitting behind it, dated this week. An emptier pew. A friend who quietly stopped attending. A relative who now says she isn’t religious anymore. You weren’t making that up.
You were noticing something real before it had a citation attached.
What this number asks of you
Not much, honestly. It doesn’t ask you to defend a church, or to criticize one. It doesn’t ask you to explain your cousin’s choices, and it doesn’t ask you to justify your own.
What it asks is smaller. Notice the people in your own life this describes. Let the number be information rather than an argument you need to win.
If someone you love is one of the 54 percent who stayed, they’re in this report. If someone you love is one of the 28 percent who left, they’re in this report too. Neither of them is the story’s villain, and this piece isn’t here to cast one.
You get to just know the number. That’s allowed. You don’t owe anyone a take on it, and you don’t need one ready the next time it comes up.
What a changing pew means for the rest of us
Zoom out, and the finding is simple. A major American faith tradition just had a large, measured shift, documented by Pew this week, in how many of its own children stay. That’s worth knowing regardless of what you personally believe about the Latter-day Saint church, another church, or no church at all.
It also isn’t really a story about one religion by itself. It’s a story about how many Americans, across many different upbringings, keep or don’t keep the faith they were handed as kids. Pew happened to measure this particular tradition first, in detail, this month.
You don’t have to have a personal stake in Latter-day Saint life for that to be worth ten minutes of your attention. Community life, family structure, and how a neighborhood’s Sunday mornings look are all downstream of numbers like this one, whether or not you ever set foot in the building yourself.
You’ll likely see this number again, in a conversation you didn’t expect to have it in. A family gathering. A group text. A quiet moment with a friend who brings up her own faith, unprompted. When that happens, here’s what’s worth carrying with you.
1) The headline number is real and specific. Retention among adults raised Latter-day Saint fell from 70 percent in 2007 to 54 percent in 2023-24, according to Pew Research Center’s September 22, 2026 report.
2) The unaffiliated share doubled. Twenty-eight percent of adults raised LDS are now religiously unaffiliated, twice the rate Pew measured in 2007.
3) The sample behind it is large. The analysis draws on 565 current Latter-day Saints and 316 former Latter-day Saints, inside a broader survey of 36,908 U.S. adults.
4) None of this is a verdict. A retention number describes a pattern across thousands of people. It doesn’t explain any one person’s reasons, and it isn’t this piece’s job to guess at them.
You don’t need to be Latter-day Saint, formerly Latter-day Saint, or religious at all, to find that worth knowing. It’s simply what the numbers, published this week, actually say — and now, if it comes up, you’ll know exactly where they came from.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.