Dr Ryan Cragun made news this week when he said that Utah is no longer a majority Mormon state. How did he come to that conclusion? We’ll talk about it in our next conversation. Check it out!
Don’t miss our other conversations with Ryan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPiSAV7aMxI&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ5TNY30k0M5dZa_cM1S9bk8
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Intro to Sociology
Interview
GT 00:33 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have an amazing sociologist. Could you go ahead and tell the audience who you are and where you teach?
Ryan 00:45 I’m Ryan Cragun. I’m a professor of sociology. I like to say these days, a professor of empirical sociology, and I’m at the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida.
GT 00:55 All right. Well, you just made the news this week.
Ryan 01:00 Conveniently, yeah, that just happened.
GT 01:02 Before we get into that, though, let’s talk a little bit about your academic background. Where did you get your Bachelor’s and Master’s and Ph.D. and all of that?
Ryan 01:10 My bachelor’s degree was actually in psychology at the University of Utah, 2000.
GT 01:17 Oh, you’re a Utah man.
Ryan 01:18 I’m a Ute, yep. And then I went to the University of Cincinnati. I spent six years there. [I got a] master’s degree in sociology there and then my Ph.D. in 2007, from the University of Cincinnati, in sociology.
GT 01:31 So you’ve got two alma maters in the Big 12.
Ryan 01:35 I do and maybe your listeners will be appalled by this, a lot of people are. During my entire time at the University of Utah and University of Cincinnati, I never went to a single sporting event.
GT 01:45 Oh, my goodness. I am appalled.
Ryan 01:4 Not a single one, I get the Utes, the Bearcats, like big deal. It’s just not my jam. I’m sorry. I’ve got my head buried in a book. Right? I’m just not on the sidelines for the basketball or football teams. It’s just not my thing.
GT 01:59 Well, we’ll forgive you. I’m a huge sports fan.
Ryan 02:04 I get it, most are.
GT 02:05 My brother took a sociology class, and he loved it. But I never equated sociology with social science statistics. I mean, can you give us a definition? What is sociology?
Ryan 02:21 Sure.
GT 02:22 For people like me who never took the class.
Ryan 02:24 That’s totally fair. It is weird. Right? When people say psychology, everybody’s like, oh, you studied the brain and counseling and abnormal psych. Right? Or poli-sci or economics or any of these other disciplines, even criminology. Sociology is going to sound weird, and I’m not trying to be like, high horse here. But sociology is really the foundational discipline of most of the social sciences. Psych comes about the same time. But criminology, if you’ve heard of criminology, that’s just social science that focuses on crime. It’s literally just sociology. It’s literally the same discipline. We have sociologists who just study deviance and crime. They’re just sociologists. So, they eventually split off and said, we’re going to specialize. This is all we’re going to look at. [It’s the] same with political science. Right? [It’s the] same with public health. All of those disciplines they’re basically sociology. They just have specialized and said we’re only going to study this one aspect of society. Sociology is founded in the mid-1800s. Basically, we just study social life. We don’t go inside the head. We’re trying to understand groups of people and the influence of groups on the individual. We study groups in aggregate, effectively. We study society. That’s the big picture item. The cool thing about a degree in sociology, I’m not trying to sell my discipline…
GT 03:40 Go ahead, you can sell it. That’s fine.
Ryan 03:42 But, the cool thing about sociology is we just give you the tools to then study whatever you want. We have people who only study demography, birth, death, migration-type stuff. That’s their area. But then we also have people who can study obscure religious groups, or tribal groups, or whatever it is. You just get the tools and then you can go out and just study the social world. So, that’s what we do. I happen to specialize in religion. And then, of course, within that, I have two sub-specialties. But you can, obviously, specialize in whatever you want. My advisor in grad school did politics and religion. That was his area. So, he did those two things. There are people who study race and health and any number of social issues. But that’s broadly what we do in sociology.
GT 04:24 And so primarily is done through surveys?
Ryan 04:28 [We use] mixed methods. We kind of have a divide: qualitative versus quantitative. So the qualitative people would do interviews. they might do focus groups. They might do historical research. They might study websites. They might study media, so they might actually be analyzing TV, or movies, things like that. It’s anything that doesn’t involve numbers, at the end of the day. Then there’s the quantitative side, which is very numbers focused. That would be a lot of surveys, but then you can also get national level data or federal data, data that’s reported to the government. There are people who study census data, or other, like birth registries, Health Registry stuff. There are lots of people who will do more quantitative stuff. I consider myself mixed methods. So I’ll do both. It just depends on the question that is of interest to me. I lean quantitative. It’s weird to say it.
GT 05:19 This is why we get along.
Ryan 05:20 Yes. Give me a dataset and I am ecstatic. Right? I will get lost in a dataset for hours. I just love it. There’s something weird about my brain. I get that. But I will literally just do a deep dive into a dataset, and I’ll just, hours will disappear. And I’m like, that was so much fun. Let me do it again. So yeah, I love data. Give me a good numbers data set. But it’s a mixed discipline, probably close to 50/50 in terms of qualitative versus quantitative.
GT 05:51 Well, very good. So, sociology, I have a master’s degree in statistics. I met you at the SSSR. Remind our listeners what that stands for.
Ryan 06:06 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. It’s an annual conference put on by that association. I was, for years, the Secretary of the association, but I’ve been attending that meeting regularly since 2001, my first year in grad school.
GT 06:2 Wow.
Ryan 06:2 Yeah.
GT 06:2 Here’s the amazing thing. Gospel Tangents, we claim to be the best source of Mormon history, science and theology. We’re usually weak on the science. But I feel like you’re a statistician.
Ryan 06:36 It depends on how knowledgeable your audience is whether I want to claim that title or not. I certainly teach statistics. I teach statistics, but in a sociological context. I’m very big into applied statistics. I love statistics. I’m very passionate about it. I am technically a mixed-methods researcher. I tend to reserve, for a knowledgeable audience, I reserve the label statistician for someone who that’s their actual training, their area of expertise. At the end of the day, I’m a sociologist. I am a sociologist. I use statistics. I don’t develop new statistical techniques. I’m not a true statistician. Do I use them all the time? Yes, absolutely. I can teach statistics, but I’m not technically a statistician.
GT 07:22 Well, I have a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Utah.
Ryan 07:26 Go Utes!
GT 07:27 And so I love talking about this. I read your paper and I was like, “Why haven’t I known about SSSR sooner?” I had a listener, in fact, he’s going to be coming up, Scott Vance. He told me that he was coming to Salt Lake City. And I met him, and I met you there. And I was like, Why didn’t I know about this conference sooner? Because luckily, it was in Utah this year. Do you know where it’s going to be next year?
GT 07:56 Pittsburgh.
Ryan 07:56 Pittsburgh, it moves around the country.
GT 07:59 So that’s near Monongahela, Pennsylvania, where the Bickertonites headquarters are. So, I’m going to have to make a trip to Pittsburgh, I guess.
Ryan 08:08 Come join us. We’re a friendly bunch.
GT 08:10 And you’re also, aren’t you the vice president of the Mormon…
Ryan 08:14 …Social Science Association. Right now, I’m just the treasurer. I was the president at one point. SSSR goes back more than 50 years. I don’t remember the exact start date, but the MSSA was started in the 1970s. Glen Vernon and Armand Mauss were two of the big names there who started it. Marie Cornwall was an early member. So, there have been a number of members. Gary and Gordon Shepard, I don’t know if they were right there at the beginning, but they’ve been around for a long time. Yes, it’s the Mormon Social Science Association, it’s been around since the 1970s. It’s basically just an association for anybody who’s interested in the social science of Mormonism. So, we don’t do theology. That’s not our jam. And we really don’t do history. There’s obviously the MHA, the Mormon History Association, they do their own thing. We’re for the social scientists. We’ve got economists. We’ve got psychologists, social scientists, anthropologists, political science, all of them are involved.
GT 09:07 As a math guy, this excites me.
Ryan 09:09 Sure.
GT 09:09 It might not excite my audience, but it excites me. I think Thomas Murphy is the new president coming in.
Ryan 09:19 He is the new President.
GT 09:19 And Jana Riess just finished her [two]-year term.
Ryan 09:22 Exactly.
GT 09:23 I don’t know why I didn’t know about this sooner.
Ryan 09:25 We’re a much smaller organization than the MHA and that’s fine. There aren’t a ton of social scientists out there who have interest in Mormonism or are Mormon. You don’t have to be Mormon, just if you’ve got an interest, we’d love to have you.
GT 09:34 It was super fun, a lot of statistics. It’s right up my jam.
Ryan 09:47 That’s what we do.
GT 09:48 I’m hoping to get a lot more of you guys on there. I know Nancy Ross, formerly of Dixie State, now Utah Tech. She’s in the presidency or something isn’t she?
Ryan 09:58 She’s a board member.
GT 10:00 A board member.
Ryan 10:00 She’s a board member right now, I’d have to double check. I hope I’m not getting that wrong.
GT 10:05 There’s a lot of cool people. There is a little bit of overlap with MHA, like, Quin Monson.
Ryan 10:14 He has attended some of our meetings.
GT 10:16 Yeah, he presented. I need to get him on. He did a really interesting presentation. And I think you presented three or four papers, didn’t you?
Ryan 10:24 I was on a lot of papers at SSSR. I try not to do that anymore. But I had two students who I was presenting with, and then I had three different co-authors who were all presenting. I had everything worked out perfectly. I would have been on six papers and presented none of them, because they were all co-authored. But my one student couldn’t make it in the last minute. And so, I ended up presenting that one paper. Otherwise, I was literally on six–well, one was an author meets critic on my new book. So, obviously, I had to participate in that one. But otherwise, I wasn’t going to give any presentations, even though it was on a bunch.
GT 10:57 You’ve got your fingers in a lot of pies.
Ryan 11:01 I do. I keep busy. Yeah.
Why Utah is No Longer Majority Mormon
GT 11:05 Well, you made the news this week. The headline was ‘Utah is no longer a Mormon majority state.’[1] And your numbers are quite different than the Church’s numbers.
Ryan 11:20 Indeed.
GT 11:21 We need to dig into why is that?
Ryan 11:24 I mean, it’s actually pretty simple. I think your listeners will get this pretty quickly. The way that the LDS Church tracks its membership is anybody who has been baptized, they basically stay on the rolls, until those individuals formally resign. So, they can leave and they’ll pull them. Or if they are tracking them, they know who they are, and they die, they’ll pull them. But if they lose track of somebody, they keep them on the rolls, until they’re 110 years old, and then they pull them. So, the LDS Church is saying, “Oh, yeah, Utah is like 60% LDS.” Well, we’re not saying that they’re wrong in the sense that it’s possible 60% of the people in the state were, at one point, baptized members of the Church. But that’s not how many self-identify. As social scientists, when we do surveys, the only thing we can use is how people identify. Right? So, if you identify as being a member of the Church, great, we count you as a member of the Church. But if you don’t, we’re not going to count you as a member of the Church. So, our data is self-identification, and it’s a representative survey of the state of Utah, and it came in at 42%. So, we’ve got a gap of about 18%.
Ryan 12:32 And as I’ve been telling a lot of reporters this week, that 18% gap reflects the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the state of Utah, who at one point were members of the Church and don’t identify that way anymore. So, it’s pretty big gap.
GT 12:45 A huge gap.
Ryan 12:46 Yeah, it’s big gap.
GT 12:49 Because we go from majority to minority. Right?
Ryan 12:52 Yes, 60% all the way to—part of what I think is really interesting about what’s happened in the state. We cite in the paper, a number of studies, a number of news articles, basically. Back in 2001, the Salt Lake Tribune said that Utah was like 62.5% LDS. Then at 2010, it dropped down to like, 60.6%, right, I’m not going to get those numbers exactly right. And then in 2001, [2021] it was still sitting at 60%, right? That makes no sense. I mean, just let’s be honest, over a 20-year window, there’s a slight decline of maybe 2% LDS in this state. You live here, Rick. You live in Lehi. Are all of your neighbors, people from this state at this point?
GT 13:41 People from this state? Well, let me just tell you.
Ryan 13:45 I know that weird.
GT 13:46 But I live in a very, very Mormon community. In the 30 or so houses around me. I think there’s two people that are not Mormon.
Ryan 14:01 Right.
GT 14:03 Two families, I guess I should say.
Ryan 14:06 So, this isn’t the perfect place to ask this question.
GT 14:09 This isn’t the perfect place, because it’s like 95% Mormon in my community. Now, I do know, I have a few neighbors that have maybe fallen away. They may not identify as Mormon, which I think is an interesting thing to talk about.
Ryan 14:28 Yes.
GT 14:31 But they don’t attend church anymore. But they used to. When I first moved here 10 years ago, like, everybody was Mormon. There’s a person that lives here that flies an Auburn flag. I talked to him one time. They’re from Alabama, not Mormon. They’re the one family and I think there was another one that was not Mormon. But every other one of them, even though they might not come to church, and I would estimate–and I know I live in Mormonville.
Ryan 15:03 You do. It doesn’t get much more Mormon than Mormonville here. Lehi is pretty Mormon.
GT 15:08 It’s like, I want to say, I mean since COVID, not as many people [attend church.] But I would say we’re 80 to 90% active.
Ryan 15:18 I would be surprised by that, but it’s probably higher [than most communities.]
GT 15:22 Because I could drive you around and I’d be like, active, active, active, like, I know. And I know I’m in a Mormon bubble.
Ryan 15:30 You’re in a Mormon enclave.
GT 15:31 And I know, it’s not like that in Salt Lake County.
Ryan 15:34 Right. All you have to do is drive to Sandy or Murray or any of these other small communities right outside of Salt Lake, or even Salt Lake City, it’s a radically different place. And even my hometown, so, I grew up in Morgan, Utah. So for our listeners…
GT 15:47 Oh, you’re a Trojan.
Ryan 15:48 I am a Trojan. Good for you. He knows the Trojans. My hometown, and I remember seeing these numbers, again, Church data, so how reliable it is, I don’t know. But when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, it was 90 plus percent LDS.
GT 16:02 Right.
Ryan 16:03 I can guarantee it is not that anymore. My brother is a real estate agent up there. Almost all the people moving in are moving in from out of state. And, of course, lots of people are leaving the Church, too. But there are a lot of people moving in from out of state. One in 13 people in Utah, were born in California.
GT 16:22 That doesn’t surprise me.
Ryan 16:23 Yeah, the numbers are just huge. And so, the biggest contributor to this decline in the percentage isn’t actually secularization, people leaving the Church. It’s actually in-migration to the state from people who are not LDS. That’s done more than actually people leaving the Church. The big discrepancy is people leaving the church. Right?
GT 16:40 Yes.
Ryan 16:40 But the decline of the percentage, Mormon in Utah is actually in-migration. [That] is the biggest contributor.
GT 16:46 In-migration more than—and I hate to use the word apostasy. But you kind of used it in your article.
Ryan 16:52 We would say exiting, religious exiting. I don’t like the term apostate, because it’s a loaded political term. It means people have turned against the religion. The vast majority of people who leave religions just are indifferent. They don’t care. They don’t want to do anything with it.
GT 17:04 Well, and it is interesting. Because of my podcast, I didn’t know as many people as what I would call a dual citizen. I have a friend—well, I have two friends. Let’s talk about the one first.
Ryan 17:24 Sure.
GT 17:25 He got baptized in the Episcopal Church. I attended his baptism in Salt Lake City. He’s still on the LDS rolls. He even told me, because I just talked to him this week, that his bishop and stake president are aware that he’s attending the Episcopal Church, but they don’t care because he’s not proselytizing or anything like that. Another friend is a leader in a polygamous group. He told me that his records are still on the LDS Church. And I guess that does bring up a question. Because he jokes. I’m still a Mormon, even though you’re an ex-Mormon. So, he would claim Mormon, even though he’s what we would say a fundamentalist Mormon. Do you take into account someone like that?
Ryan 18:17 Yes, the way we worded the question, I think would make it pretty clear. If I’m not mistaken, I’d have to go back and look at the data. We had 1909 respondents in that survey.
GT 18:30 Which is a big sample.
Ryan 18:31 It’s a good sample. We wanted a nice big sample, so I could say, like, we can speak pretty definitively about this. We worded it, taking into consideration what the most common responses were going to be. So, at the very top was LDS or Mormon. So that was the response option that could choose. Now could a fundamentalist Mormon have picked that? That’s possible. Right? But I think the number one was LDS Mormon, then we have non-religious, then Catholic and then we had a couple of others. And then we had an other option and going through those ‘others’ because I want to recode everybody into the right categories, we had one person who said FLDS. So, of all 1909, one person said FLDS. So, they were aware enough, at least, to mark themselves out, and they did not get coded back in as Mormon. So, we did keep them separate in there. They would have just been coded as other.
GT 19:20 Because there are, I mean, I’ve talked to Lindsay Hansen Park, and there are an amazing number of fundamentalists still on the LDS rolls, maybe even attend the LDS Church, in some cases, in some cases, not. Even with President Nelson saying, ‘Don’t use the word Mormon anymore.’ They’re like, Well, I’m still a Mormon. And I don’t know, in a sample of 2000, it might be hard to tease that out. But I guess I was surprised what was the second highest option in your survey?
Ryan 20:06 Oh, the non-religious.
GT 20:07 Right.
Ryan 20:08 Yeah. I mean, that’s not [a surprise.] For those of us who are studying trends in religion across the nation, in particular, and my most recent book is about around the world, I like to give a specific set of numbers, just to put this in context. In 1990, in the US, 7% of adults said they had no religious affiliation. By 2001, that had jumped up to 14%. So, it had doubled. As of today, we’re hovering around 30% of adults in the US [who] say they have no religious affiliation. So, it’s weird to say it, but it’s the fastest growing “religious group” in the US is those who have no religious affiliation. And that’s not just some phenomenon that’s affecting people in, Washington State, or Portland, or California or San Francisco. It’s across the entire nation, this is happening. So, I was not at all surprised. I mean, we’ve been watching these numbers just grow over the last 20 to 30 years. People are leaving religion in droves in the US, just massive exodus out of churches. The only religions, and I use that term very carefully, that are growing in the US right now, are actually nondenominational mega churches. All the others, as a percentage of the population, at a minimum, are losing members. Then you have some, like Southern Baptists, that over the last 15 years lost over 6 million members. I mean, the decline of religion in the US is the biggest story of religion over the last 30 years. There’s just no question. The decline of religion has been dramatic in the US, and it’s affecting the LDS Church, too. They’re losing members left and right.
GT 21:48 When I read that, I had to text one of my relatives who used to be active and is no longer active. And I said, “Would you identify, if you got this survey, would you identify as Mormon, none, or something else?” And she said, “None.” I was I was pretty surprised to hear that. Because you said in your article that you think the majority of the nones are former LDS.
Ryan 22:19 In Utah, for sure.
GT 22:19 Yeah.
Ryan 22:19 Yeah, for sure. Well, this was about Utah. And so do you have any sense of–or you said it was 30%. Is that right?
Ryan 22:33 In the state of Utah, I mean, it’s going to be close to that. It’s right around there, yes.
GT 22:37 Do you have a sense of that? 30%, how many of them are former LDS versus never LDS?
Ryan 22:45 Probably close to two thirds are former LDS, probably something like that.
GT 22:50 Okay, and so, would that push those numbers up to 60%?
Ryan 22:55 It’d get really close. Yes, it would get really close.
GT 22:59 So, we can account for that 60% as LDS and nones.
Ryan 23:05 Yes, pretty much. Right. It is interesting. Several people have asked me, because there was a Salt Lake Tribune reporter a couple of years ago, maybe even last year, who was the one who found out that when they were reporting those numbers, 60% of the state is still LDS. They went county by county using the Church’s data, and they found one county where the Church was reporting more members than there were people in the county. So, a lot of people were like, was that you? And I’m like, no, that was actually reported for the Salt Lake Tribune, which I thought was hilarious. Because we’ve kind of known this for a long time, we just finally have the data to say definitively like, there you go. The numbers the Church is reporting reflect their very odd accounting method. And that’s fine. I’m not saying that it’s wrong. It’s just not very useful for actually understanding what’s going on with religion in Utah.
Ryan 23:25 Okay, so it’s a very different way to think about it. And that’s the big takeaway in our paper is their numbers are their numbers. They’re just not useful numbers for us.
[1] Ryan’s paper can be found at https://www.ryantcragun.com/mormons-are-no-longer-a-majority-in-utah-causes-consequences-and-implications-for-the-sociology-of-religion/
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