About 54% of Americans raised Latter-day Saint still identify as LDS as adults. But identity, church attendance, and personal belief are not quite the same thing.
If someone still calls themselves Latter-day Saint but rarely attends church, have they “stayed”?
What about someone who attends regularly but is struggling with belief?
These questions matter because one of the most striking statistics about Latter-day Saint retention is also easy to misunderstand.
According to Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 54% of Americans who were raised Latter-day Saint still identify as Latter-day Saints as adults.
In simple terms, about half still say, “I’m LDS.”
But that does not necessarily tell us how involved they are in the faith.
Identity and participation are not the same thing
That 54% does not mean everyone counted attends sacrament meeting every Sunday. It does not tell us whether someone has a calling, holds a temple recommend, or how certain they feel about their beliefs.
It simply tells us whether someone raised Latter-day Saint still identifies that way as an adult.
Is 54% unusually low?
Not necessarily — although it is not especially high either.
Pew found that about 57% of Americans raised Catholic remain Catholic, while about 70% of those raised Protestant still identify as Protestant.
Protestantism, however, is a very broad category containing many different denominations.
Other traditions, including Islam, Judaism and Hinduism, have higher identity-retention rates.
So LDS identity retention is not an extreme outlier in modern American religion.
Religious switching has become common far beyond the Latter-day Saint community.
But the comparison changes when we add another question: Are people still participating?
What changes when attendance is included?
BYU researchers analyzed Pew data to measure the share of people raised in each tradition who still identify with it and attend religious services at least once a month.
For Latter-day Saints, that figure was 42% — the highest reported active-retention rate among the religious groups included in the comparison.
Nondenominational Christians were at about 28%, the next-highest figure among the Christian groups examined.
Muslims, at about 38%, were the closest group overall.
For each tradition, the percentage is calculated out of everyone raised in it, including those who later left.
That is what makes the 42% figure significant.
LDS identity retention by itself is not especially high. But when retention is combined with monthly attendance, Latter-day Saints stand out much more clearly.
Monthly attendance is simply the researchers’ threshold for this comparison. Individual members may define being “active” differently.
And neither identity nor attendance tells us how strongly someone believes.
Compared with the past, something has changed
BYU’s analysis of General Social Survey data estimated that roughly eight in ten Americans raised Latter-day Saint still identified as LDS in the 1980s.
Today, estimates are much closer to half.
By the Church’s own historical standard, that is a significant change.
So comparison with other religions does not erase the retention challenge.
Fewer people raised Latter-day Saint retain that religious identity today than several decades ago.
But these figures are also snapshots.
They can tell us how people identify at the time of a survey. They cannot tell us whether someone who steps away today may return years later, or how that person’s relationship with faith may change over time.
Maybe “staying” is harder to measure than it sounds
Statistics can tell us whether someone still checks “Latter-day Saint” on a survey.
They can tell us whether that person attends church at least monthly.
They have a harder time capturing everything in between.
Someone may remain culturally connected to the Church while no longer identifying as LDS.
Another person may still identify strongly with the faith while going through a period of low attendance.
That is why “half leave the Church” is too simple.
Fewer Americans raised LDS retain that identity than in past decades.
Yet compared with the other Christian groups in BYU’s analysis, a larger share of those raised LDS both retain their childhood religious identity and attend services at least monthly.
Both findings matter when we ask what it means to “stay.”
And they leave a question that statistics cannot answer for us:
What does “staying LDS” mean to you — identity, church attendance, belief, or something else?