Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you go online, you'll probably see a lot of narratives about people leaving the church at concerning rates. And the social scientist does indicate that there may be a gap between younger generations, older generations, between women and men. And so the question is, what does the social scientists actually say about retention among Latter Day Saints today? To help us answer that question, we've brought on Jennet Erickson. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: So good to be here. Thank you, Jasmine.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Today we're talking about this new report that's come out from BYU studies called Latter Day Saint Trends in the United Religiousness, well Being and Retention. And they've had some fantastic findings. And before this, we've had Justin Dyer on the show. He was one of the authors here and he spoke a lot about these findings. But I was really interested to talk to you because of your experience doing research with women's issues with maternal care and the differences that different parents contribute to a child's development. You are a professor at Brigham Young University in the Church History and Doctrine department. You've done a lot of research on women's children's care, family life, and you've been a fellow with Wheatley Institute, a columnist with the Deseret News. And so you bring a unique perspective here. So I'm really excited to dive into what the data says about retention among Latter Day Saints, but particularly some of the issues that people have questions about when it comes to women, family life, even working situations have changed a lot. And how does that contribute to people's religiousness?
So let's just start off with a couple of these stats that the report comes out with. So. So one of them is that Latter Day Saints actually have insanely good monthly religious attendance. And that kind of blew me away. I didn't realize that we had that we were such churchgoing people. I just assumed that. Well, lots of people are religious certainly, but we clearly are somewhat unique in that.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: But in addition, we've got parents praying with children and reading scriptures at higher rates than many of these other religions. We have higher rates of spiritual peace and well being than many religions. And we have the highest active retention. Can you explain what that means? What's the difference between retention and active retention?
[00:01:58] Speaker B: And it's getting at what you're saying. Latter Day Saints are very participatory in their faith. And so we have high percentages of people who say their Latter Day Saint and go to church. In fact, I think what we're finding in this report is you might have in the 1980s had somebody say, I'M Latter Day Saint, but not go very often. There was less stigma around religion itself. At a time when there's a little bit of stigma around religion, if they're not attending, they're not going to identify. They're not going to identify. And so for Latter Day Saints, being a Latter Day Saint is actively participating as a Latter Day Saint. Interesting.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yes, but we don't necessarily see that with other religions as much.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: You might, for example, have a Catholic who's raised Catholic, identifies as Catholic, doesn't go to church, or maybe it's like
[00:02:41] Speaker C: Easter and Christmas Catholic kind of thing. Right. Yeah.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: And I think some faiths are more like ethnically or identity based. And ours is clearly a participatory kind of faith.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Okay, very interesting.
And so going into like issues with women, what has the social science borne out on what gap there might be between men and women right now in religiousness?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, really, really powerful question. So for forever, women have been more active religiously than men.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Right. That's always been my assumption.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: The then. Right. That's just expected. It's how women have always been the ones to bring families, sort of connect them to church institutional connections.
And in the last five years or so, there's been a lot of media attention around the fact that we're seeing this dip and where men and women have shifted places. In a sense, that's the way the narrative is that women have decreased relative to men and are beneath men in terms of participating religiously. Now what we find out is men have largely stayed the same, but women have changed that our younger women are less likely to be retained in religious faith than they were in the past. So. And in this report, we find that our millennial generation, young women are rates significantly lower in terms of saying, I am a Latter Day Saint, I was raised a Latter Day Saint, than they're older peer women.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: So.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: So women in their 50s, 60s, 70s. Right. Have a much higher rate of retention. So you're asking why?
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Is there anything that can talk about what's going on?
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah, and we could talk a lot about this.
I think it's really interesting. Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize for her understanding of what's going on with women and work and flexibility.
And she describes, and I promise I'll pull this back to faith, but she describes this quiet revolution among women that started in the 1980s, 1990s, 1970s, where women had access to contraception, birth control, education now provided opportunities for work that women could do, service sector kind of work. We lost the need for brawn in the workforce. And there was more brain. Right. Work that women were also able to do.
And so education meant a lot in terms of her career decisions.
So what happened is this really significant shift in women delaying childbirth, delaying marriage, investing in education, pursuing careers, and really thinking very differently about their lives. Like, what is the good life?
Where for millennia, in a sense, women depended on men to provide for them. And women's value and identity and purpose and meaning was largely shaped within that relationship, a marriage relationship.
So I think this really powerful shift in how women think about their lives, their meaning, their purpose, what brings value, where their identity lies, that's all been going on.
And so I think by this time, what we have is women rethinking a lot of things.
Religious faith, marriage.
And so along with that, you have an interest in political issues in a different way for women. So we've had politics become much more social in its framing around issues different than just fiscal. You have a very social identity politics. And you have women becoming more rallied around political efforts where it's almost like men have lost a place or an interest in rallying around that. And women then seeing that as their purpose and meaning. And when it comes into conflict with. With religious faith than women oriented towards social politics and compassion, what they might think of. Right.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Are going to politics was one factor that you guys did study, right?
[00:06:37] Speaker B: That's right. It was a key predictor of disaffiliating.
[00:06:40] Speaker C: Do you think so? You said this is starting in the 1980s, really is when this trend kind of picks up as opposed to before.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: I think Claudia Goldin would say that's going on. Her reorientation around her life is going on in that period, in that time. Yeah, but it's been like in the 2000 teens that you've seen women rally around political causes in a very different way and men drop out in a sense.
[00:07:03] Speaker C: The only reason I ask is cause I'm thinking like generationally, is there some kind of a ripple effect happening? Because if the 80s is that generation where these women are going into more career driven, career focused, kind of lives, then they later have kids in the 90s who are now growing up right now. Right. And kind of at the forefront of this, it kind of seems like, right,
[00:07:21] Speaker B: that plays a role. I'm sure that plays a role. So this is fascinating. Christian Smith, the scholar on religiousness in the United States. And he's had an eye on the church for a long time because his initial work out of Duke University just showed Latter Day Saint youth are totally different than Other religious youth in their rate of sexual activity, in their use of substances. I mean, they were remarkable. And so he's kind of had his eye on latter saints. That's an aside from the fact that he'll say we saw this decrease in religiousness among both men and women starting in like 1991. Now why then? Right. Like what was going on then? And I think you could talk about multiple factors. One might be that we were coming out of a really dramatic increase in materialism across the 1980s. Right.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: Reaganomics, all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: A really economic oriented flourishing going on and people orienting their lives around things and the good life. And we've never lived, no one ever, any time in history has lived the way we live today. Right.
Even though you'll hear a lot of fear about the economy among our younger generations, the fact is things have just really increased in access to things. All of that is just very, very robust.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: Everyone still has an iPhone while complaining about the economy. Right. Yeah.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: No one's ever lived like we live. Right. And so that all happened across the 1980s. And I think that that shaped like our sense of dependence on God. We'd come out of World War II. Right. And, and just growth. And then you have the 1970s where there's. And I would say the other big piece is you see this breaking away from institutions inherent in that. And, and the factors that were affecting that are. Are important to discuss. But really what happened is you had a breakdown in family. A very significant transition in the way families were structured. Access to contraception and abortion. On for people to have sex outside of marriage. That really shaped dating. It shaped the trajectory toward marriage. And then you have the divorce revolution that happens across the 1970s. So these are children who've grown up with the effects of divorce, which has an impact on faith. Of course we can see that a very strong link between rupture in family and the sense of trust in anything.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: And so I. And nobody's sort of been able to identify exactly why.
[00:09:44] Speaker C: But it's all this kind of cocktail of these factors.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: I think that's right. And the individualism that's increased and of course that's shaping women's understanding of their lives. Right. An autonomy orientation that says it's a better life to just be free of the burden of taking care of somebody else. Right. Like I. And, and maybe it's not going to be a great equal marriage. And so I'm not going to, I'm not going to wrap my life around that.
And I Think there's also similar. There's similar distrust in marriage and distrust in religion among women.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Is there a correlation or connection between your marital status and religiousness?
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Yes. So people who are married are more likely to be attending church. Yeah, that's true. And I think we find. Right. When you see this breakout of those who've disaffiliated and their experiences.
So I think the power in what we found in the groups breaking out that Justin would have talked about is people aren't rejecting all faith.
You have like 10% that are saying religion's bad, faith is bad. The others are open to faith in some ways, but it's shaped by their past. It's shaped by experiences of trauma or their perceptions of that.
It's shaped by family structure. Right. It's shaped by LGBTQ questions. It's. There's. There's factors that are. That are affecting the sense of trust in institutions. Right. In faith. And so I think. I think part of that is the story of what happened with decreased religiousness in the early 90s. And women are right at the. They're at the. They're right there in the middle of that. Their lives are different than their mothers and their grandmothers. And we have an increase in.
We have a dramatic decrease in the rate of marriage. 60% over a 60 year period. And we estimate that one in three of our young adults will never marry.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Will never have children.
And so that's a very different life orientation.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: And I think faith and marriage and family are all going together in that cocktail. Right.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: You're speaking of a lot of general trends across the nation and across many religions. And I absolutely resonate with a lot of what you're saying about trust, distrust, institutions, distrust in marriage, distrust in maybe a traditional family unit and in different working situations. How does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints fare in that giant river of change?
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, this is really beautiful. The very first thing we did when we got the Pew data that came out. So Pew does this, has extensive research study on religion every seven years. So Justin gets it. He calls me into the office and he's like, we want to look at women. Like, what's going on? Women. That's my passion. Right.
And remarkably, what you see is Latter Day Saint women who are in their faith are doing incredibly well.
They're more likely to talk about deep peace in their lives. They are more likely to be very happy by a wide margin in some cases, if you're in a religious marriage with someone who's also Committed to their faith, these women are, by and large are flourishing. And our Latter Day Saint women are very benefited by their faith. That's beautifully described. And so we're hoping to do a whole book on that. Like what a Latter Day Saint woman gets from her faith.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Yes, please.
I really want to read that book already.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Because we can already see in. And the narrative is very different than what we see in the actual data. And that touches on body image. It touches on well being. It touches on sexual abuse or assault.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: I mean, one thing I'm told is that it doesn't matter if you feel good in the church. The reality is you are being oppressed by being in the church because it's patriarchal, by structure, by nature. And if people are talking about how much they love the church and they're a woman, it must be because they're either brainwashed or they're just talking about something to make them feel good. But it's just a coping mechanism.
[00:13:36] Speaker C: They're being gaslit by their leaders or something to.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And as someone who does love the church, like all of that, those narratives are not helpful to me and they feel harmful and offensive in some ways.
And so according to what. What you're talking about, it sounds like women within the church have a very different experience than what the narratives would have you believe.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: And women who are religious in general do. So you'll hear that not only about Latter Day Saints, but right along with all other faiths. Right. Religion is not good for women. It's an oppressive structure. Now, I don't want to dismiss some women's experiences with cultural traditions that are not consistent with our theology and our faith. Right. But when we look in general at how women are doing who are religious, it's unbelievable. I mean, just before this, we published a piece with the Desert News, just looking at religion. This is part of Wheatley findings. If you look at 13 countries,
[00:14:26] Speaker A: women
[00:14:26] Speaker B: who are active in their faith are four to five times more likely to have very strong relationships with spouse, to be. Have a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, to be happy. Like, it's incredible. Religion is very powerful in benefiting people's lives and women very much so. So part of what's happening, I think, is a recognition that these faith structures that we might question. Because I think one of the tensions for women right now, Jasmine, is they're coming into religious faith and they're saying the structures look more traditional than what I have in my workplace. Right. Like we got men and women equal on the board and this looks a little different. And so how do I reconcile these things?
And, and one of the things that I think we underestimate as valuable is what religious faith does in raising up men who are good companions to women.
And the fact is, men are more dependent on institutional framing structures than women are.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Really? In what way?
[00:15:34] Speaker B: So way back I did a review of a book that was published about religious men and how they were as spouses and fathers. Now the narrative is highly religious man. What kind of a father is he?
[00:15:47] Speaker C: Domineering, strict. Yeah.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Distant from his children, cold, austere. All of this. He's dictating his wife. He's controlling. Right. So Brad Wilcox, Bradford Wilcox, University of Virginia is just going to unpack that. It's unbelievable. It's actually the flip.
Highly religious men had the closest relationships with their children. They were the most likely for their wives to feel appreciated by them.
The wives were more likely to feel like they shared authority in the household. Companionship. They were more likely to spank. That was still true, right? To do kind of corporeal punishment.
[00:16:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: But they had strong relationships. They were the ideal feminist man, if you will. Right.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Wow. Interesting.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: The highly religious active man was the picture that we have wanted in man.
And so. And that's true in our faith. And so what religion does to men and I. And so we're going to get to your point. Right. I. What religion does to men is. It seems to. And marriage does this as well. Children does as well. It really shapes men, it domesticates men. And I don't mean to be rough in saying that, but it's, it takes, it orients them to something beyond the self and it gives them purpose and meaning that they would die to protect and bless and care for those people.
And so I think watching my son pass the sacrament as an 11 year old, like it's tearful to just look at his face and see how he feels.
The responsibility and the responsibility people depend upon me. And men, men need that. They live at a time when there's a strong sense, I think our. Right. The work on masculinity, on man, their well being. What you're seeing is men do not feel needed.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: There's the real crisis, the masculinity crisis many have talked about as Richard Reeves.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Super.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Right, clear on this.
[00:17:33] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, it goes to what you were talking about earlier, right. As women have entered the workplace, as brawn, as you said, has become less ne, you know, earning a living and supporting a family. And so women have competed with men for jobs. It's Given men a sense of purposelessness. Right. And trying to find their role. And I think it's very interesting, Right. That religion is often a place where men can still find that. And not only do they find that in their religion, but it gives them a sense of obligation and duty in the home. Right. That changes the kind of father that they are.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:08] Speaker D: Yeah. There's actually, you're talking about Brad Wilcox, and we should clarify. That's not the Latter Day Saint. Brad Wilcox. That's the social scientist, I think you said, at the University of Virginia. But S. Michael Wilcox, who is a Latter Day Saint author and educator, he actually told a story in a.
It was just like one of those talks that circulated among missionaries when I was on my mission in Virginia, actually.
But he told the story about a family that missionaries went to. And the mother was very skeptical of the religion, but they worked on the father and he joined the church. And she initially was like she was getting ready to leave her husband. It had been a very difficult marriage.
And she came to the missionaries and she said, I'm going to give you guys one year in one year.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Give this man one year under the influence of this faith. Right.
[00:19:04] Speaker D: And so they went back one year later and he, you know, he'd been active in the church and the whole tone in the family and in the home had shifted. And the kids, who had used to have a difficult relationship with this. With this father, were.
The relationship was warmer, it was softer. He came home from work and they wanted to play.
They were excited to see him. Like, it just. It completely transformed this man's relationship with his wife and kids. And she noticed that and she appreciated that. And I probably. If S. Michael Wilcox is watching, I probably butchered that story.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: My own father, I mean, he came from. From very adverse childhood circumstances and was not of our faith, but then eventually joined the church as a teenager. And he himself has talked about how the church and his marriage to my mother has helped to really just like, smooth his rough edges. And he's become such a better, more loving, more care. He's broken a lot of generational cycles because of the structure the church provided. And I know Megan Kohler, she's a columnist for the Deseret News. She's talked a lot about this and studied how she came from a. Adverse childhood circumstances with sexual abuse. And what blew her mind was coming to religion and the church where she saw that the development and formation of men was a priority and how that made such a difference in how women were treated. Yes, it was so Cool. Like, it just was a light bulb moment.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: I love Megan's insights on that. And it is so real. It is so real. And so when we think about what would a religion do to truly benefit women, it would raise up good, kind, devoted, faithful men 100%. And that's the. One of the best things we can do for women is do that. Right. So now your question was. Well, I think getting to this, when I asked the author of the study, Bradford Wilcox, I'm like, well, have we looked at women in religion? Does it do. Does it do the same thing for women? And he said, it looks different, almost like women's intuitive sense.
[00:20:57] Speaker D: Right.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Of caring for life, an outward orientation, nurturing life is innate to some degree. Right. It's less shaped by institutional structures. When we compare that to men, and by institutional structure, I mean marriage and religion. But I think what we see is that faith has a profound impact not only on her marriage and the quality of this man, but also in her personal life. That's what we're seeing. Like her connection to the divine, does what we know for ourselves, gives access to peace, gives access to strength, gives access to joy, gives clarity about relationships, orients her in a way that brings greater flourishing into her life.
So that's real.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: Could I ask you about that, something that I hear as well?
When you look at some of these numbers, I have these charts in front of me, percentage at severe risk for anxiety, for suicide, for depression.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:52] Speaker C: And pretty low on this graph, which means pretty high in percentage are atheist or agnostic or non religious who seem to be at a higher percentage for, you know, these adverse mental health outcomes and so forth.
And from our conversation, one thing I could potentially hear, perhaps a non religious person, even somebody who's cynical or critical of religion.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: They might say something like, well, yeah, the reason why religious people are, you know, less adverse to anxiety or depression is because they use religion as a crutch to not have to handle the reality of how, you know, how bad the world is or something.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: Or it's. It's a panacea they just apply when really they should be out getting professional mental health or something like that. Right. Is there a way that. Do you have a response to that kind of way of thinking about this?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Is there, is there something in the data that could answer that? Whether this is just, well, all of us religious people can't handle reality, so we go in our make believe fantasy world and so we're happier for it, or is there something actually substantive in this Data.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, just to be rough, like what is real?
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Yeah, sure, yeah. They're taking for granted the reality of
[00:22:56] Speaker B: their worldview is this Right. Tangible world. And I think when you look at what happens to people through religious faith, their convictions about what they experience with the divine, that reality is not what right. They're taken. So I'll just one example. And we see the effects, the robust effects of religious faith on mental health are incredible. So Tyler Vanderwil from the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard, he's an incredible scientist. You just see very clear findings, longitudinal research, careful data.
Religion is a very important influence on improving mental health as well as relational well being, social wellbeing, all of those things. Things. You just see it very robustly in the data. So you could say, well, that's just a mirage, it's an illusion. Right. And I just think scientists would be like, I don't think you can say that. Right. But here's one example. We have this narrative that Latter Day Saints are high in perfectionism.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: Right. And toxic perfectionism toxicity.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: So Justin and I do work with him on this. We're looking at what is really going on with the Latter Day Saints story around perfectionism. And what you find out is exactly what you see in the other mental health findings is that those who are highest in perfectionism, toxic perfectionism, are those who are without faith.
Now, as we're trying to uncover what that is, well, imagine what it means to say my identity, value and worth is grounded in a divine love that holds me.
And I think Lisa, the scholar out of Columbia University who does work on this, would say an adolescent growing up with faith, it is the pill that prevents suicide ideation that strengthens them in their sense of well being and purposefulness. And they'll say, I feel God holding me. Right. As a protection. But with perfectionism, you see, there's an inherent value that is not dependent on material things, that's not dependent on my achievements.
And imagine life without that sense.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Sure, yeah.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: You are left with purely the material right and no anchor for your own inherent value and worth.
And so I think that's why we see the mental health findings that we do. It's why we see the perfectionist findings that we do. And in fact, Latter Day Saints are one of the lowest in the likelihood of toxic professionalism.
[00:25:10] Speaker C: Well, that's encouraging to hear. I know. I think it's Jonathan Haidt, having listened and read some of his material, he says up front, I'm a Jewish atheist. Right. He has no religious dog in the fight for Religious truth claims. But even he, I've heard him recently say things like, even though I don't think religion is true, I still think it's absolutely important for social flourishing and for human flourishing. And he's as part of his bigger project of, you know, get cell phones out of classrooms and stuff, it's like let people reconnect with their religious communities. Because even he's seeing that bearing out here in the data.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: He has a whole chapter in his book.
[00:25:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: This is devoted to religion. A person who doesn't have faith.
[00:25:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: Is like, you can't deny that this has. It is second only to family in its influence on well being.
There's nothing more influential.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Well, one of those anchors to your sense of self. Harvard just barely came out with this recently about different religions and how likely you are to feel loved by both a mother and a father. And according to this at least Latter Day Saints perform exceptionally well. For Latter Day Saints are most likely to say that they felt both loved by both parents in childhood. And I know you've done a ton of work on what mothers and fathers contribute differently to a childhood's, a child's development. So from what, from your knowledge, what do you think mothers and fathers contribute religiously to a child?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a really important question. So if I was just quick to say how fathers and mothers contribute differently. You have mothers grounding sense of identity through that powerful attachment relationship that begins. That child who emerges from the womb is looking for her. They are scanning to find her eyes. They lock eyes with her. And the right brain goes through a rapid period of development that grounds them in a sense of well being. And she is regulating their emotions and their identity development before they can possibly do it for that first year and a half.
And then you see fathers come in mattering in that relationship. We see dads hold a child like a football. Dads tend to have that child get the view of the outside world that they have much more likely than women. And they have a strong impact on how that child understands how to relate to the outside world.
So fatherlessness is a strong predictor of incarceration rates. Right. You've heard that nine times. More likely to be incarcerated, not having a relationship with father. And so it's like dads are giving that child this sense of this is the boundary. This is where it holds. He's less likely to correct a child than a mother is. Mothers are more likely to intervene and correct and guide that way. But when he does, the line holds and that child learns there is A boundary I cannot cross. And it provides safety for me, and it also gives me direction in how to navigate my life outside of this.
And of course, then fathers providing. I mean, marriage.
The link between marriage and poverty for children is incredible. The likelihood of being in poverty for a child is 45% if you have unmarried parents. It's like 7% if you have married parents. Wow. Wow. So it is the predictor of the likelihood of being impoverished is not having that father married to that mother assisting with the providing work.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Well, I will just say, reading your paper, BYU Studies, It Takes Two, was kind of a game changer for me in my own motherhood, because all of a sudden, I just, like, conceptualized how we parented differently as a good thing, instead of like, well, why won't he do it my way, Jasmine?
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Which is so important, right? Like, the Pruitts who first write about this are like, stop fighting the fact that he's tossing that child up in the air. That mother, every part of you is like, you have that baby on the ground, hold them close. And that oxytocin that's flooding him is actually eliciting that kind of behavior because that child needs a stimulatory openness to the outside world.
All these ways that fathers are contributing that we have almost not ever talked about. I think we have this sense that women are important. We're like, we don't know what dads do. I mean, he brings home money, but his way of relating to that child, his way of disciplining, his way of holding the stimulatory. It's child who's going to go to dad to play.
Right? Dads are more likely to tease. Dads are the primary predictor of graduation from college. Like, nothing compares to that in the data. And he's providing not only monetary, monetary, but his way of asking authority and pushing exhibition of knowledge without being too intense about it, encouraging independence. While I will catch you right where Mom's like, get on the ground. Don't do that. And he's saying, you can do it. Right? And that's. That's not like man's man. That's just men in general tend toward those kind of ways of relating.
So I love thinking about how beautiful the complementarity is between women and men. And I think it's. We have the tip of the iceberg of that, and it should help us understand why in the church, this working beside one another, as in family life, and why the ultimate ordinance, the ultimate structure in heaven, is an equal partnership between a man and A woman endowed with priesthood power, sealed by the Lord Jesus Christ. Right. That's why it is.
So your question is more specifically. Well, what about faith? Right.
So we know that women tend to do more didactic teaching. They're more likely to be the ones to explain and write, talk and that kind of thing, typically.
And so I think when President Eyring says, we learn from Eve that it is women who are the primary gospel instructor in the home, there's reality to that. Like her teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ with that father beside her, also teaching. But providing the structure for that child to feel safe and to behave well so that she can teach is really important.
But what we see in the data is so interesting is Father's. His faith is the primary predictor of that child maintaining faith.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Really.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: So.
So fathers matter so much for children's faith.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: And do you think that's because, like, you know, they do represent some sense of authority. And so if the authority, like, doesn't buy into the faith anymore, it, like, weakens that?
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: I mean, I'm just guessing, and I
[00:31:06] Speaker B: think we all are all guessing. Right. I don't know if it's the fact that a father tends to be less. Children go to mother for comfort and emotional communication, all of that from the time they're an infant.
And so for a father to emotionally connect with the divine and be open about his feelings and his faith, I think is a very unique force in that child's life.
This is a person who doesn't talk that way to me normally, and he's talking to me about his relationship with God and his devotion to God and his experience of God. And I think that that has an impact on children.
[00:31:45] Speaker D: This is not something that I can back up with any kind of data, but if you remember, like, a number of years ago, the church, for, like, a Father's Day thing, put out a video about, like, Father on Earth, Father in heaven, where a guy is talking about, like, here's all the things I do for my kids, and that. That's how I understand my father. And it's just something that, like, I feel like I've kind of anecdotally noticed for a lot of people is, like, people's perception of God and their relationship with God is. Is often. Can often be predicted by how they relate to their Father.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:32:16] Speaker D: And a big part of that is because we traditionally, you know, God is our heavenly Father. Right. That's explicit in our faith and in most other faiths, God is Also traditionally perceived as like earthly father is that model.
And so, yeah, our earthly father tends to be kind of the proxy for that relationship.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:32:32] Speaker D: And so I think that may. Again, no data. No data. This is just me pontificating here, but that may be a factor in why like the religiosity of a father has such a high prediction rate of whether kids will continue on in faith or not.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:49] Speaker C: Do you have any insider thought? I've seen some splashy headlines recently how millennial fathers are like way more involved with their kids life than like, you know, Gen X or Boomer or silent era fathers were with their kids. Right. So like millennial dads are changing diapers a lot more and they're, you know, getting the kids cereal and getting them off to school and playing with them when they come home.
Do we see anything with how that maps on with the Latter Day Saint male millennial father experience? Our Latter Day Saints is part of that cohort of more active in their kids lives as fathers.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yes, of course. Right. That I think we track. Right. With those national shifts in the way people think about what it means to be a father and engagement. And I think we have to appreciate the cultural forces going on in all of this. So you have my great grandparents working on a farm. She's doing a lot of work beside her children. He's also working beside those children. But it's a pretty divided work because his work is very brawn heavy and hers is productive, enabling that family to survive, but they're together. And then you have industrialization that takes men outside the home. And there's a big divide between the work and the home.
And the narrative I think at the time was women are preserving the hearth and the heart from the selfishness and the greed of the outer world. And so she's creating a haven in a heartless world. And so women in a sense were very elevated in their position of passing on, protecting Republican ideals. Right. All of that and he's coming home, he's reading the newspaper. Right. She's managing the hearth of the that family. And then I think what happens over time is as we get more service sector work, we're less dependent on that brawn heavy work. And women are seeing the confinement, maybe the distortion around she is only identified in this sphere, seeing that as problematic. Then women are entering that sphere more that outside sphere. They're participating, they're getting educated, they're working, they're identifying around that career. And, and so of course that's going to shift. Now. Does it mean the men of the past were bad ignorant, right?
[00:35:08] Speaker C: No. Yeah.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: I think we just have to recognize all of these social and cultural forces that are then shaping how we think about equality. Did they think they were equal partners back then? I think they did for sure. Right. And yet today, if you saw a guy just sitting off on his phone, which we have, right. Like among our working class men, I think we have a real issue of women are doing the work and he's at home playing games and they're cohabiting and there's no like sense of responsibility. Right. And that's a problem. But I think if we saw that in an educated family, we'd be like, that's not gonna go anywhere.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: And we have a clear understanding that is not equal partnership. And so he's very much more engaged. So we see men doing caregiving, carrying babies, doing all of that. And I think that's really good.
[00:35:50] Speaker A: One of the shifts that we've been seeing is the arrangement of working in the United States. I mean, we've gone away in many ways from the post war stay at home wife versus working father. Now there's a lot more diversity in how family arrangements work to provide for the family. A lot of women are now more achieving educationally than men and a lot of men feel disenfranchised. Or you've got working, you've got two incomes in the household, or you've got the women being the main breadwinner and the dad being a stay at home dad. You've just got so much more of that.
How does that play into this religiousness? Do we see any connection between changing working dynamics and how it plays out in faith?
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I've been thinking about this a lot.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: It's a hard question because it's come up a lot recently, I think on social media. A while ago there was a post that went kind of viral about like, should women work or should they stay home? And for many years there was a somewhat of an understanding that like, it is important for women to be the nurturers and that equated to being at home and men to be the providers and that equated to being in the workplace. But we've also seen, you know, in different parts of the world, that's just not even a reality anyway. And so the church has, has. I don't know if we've like really changed our rhetoric, but like there's just a broader understanding that like there's going to be a diversity of different arrangements.
So. But do we see any effects of that, right. I mean, I, I am someone who, I was brought up in a Latter Day Saint home and taught that, yes, your most important role is to be a mother. And I looked forward to that. But then also being a product of the 90s and the 2000s, I very much absorbed a lot of the invest in your education, invest in your career, do that. And then now me and my husband do both work full time right now, and we do have a child as well. But then as soon as, like, I had that child, I'm like, why did I wait so long? I think I had been so influenced by society of invest in your career, invest in your education, that motherhood was something you could do later, when the reality is that it's a precious time to be able to be a mother. And so I'm constantly thinking of these questions, am I doing the right thing for my child? How do I make sure that I am? Like, investing in their faith, investing in their development, investing in their flourishing, and doing what's best for our family at the same time. How does, it's a big question, but how does this all play out?
[00:37:58] Speaker B: So let's unpack it. Maybe a few different pieces. One is this narrative out there for women that having a baby, getting married will deprive you of your autonomy, your identity, your meaning. And I think that's very real. So we have single women saying they assume that married women are less happy than they are. And yet in the data, so this is data I did with Wheatley and the Institute for Family Studies just last summer, we looked at, we were trying to is this real? Is this true? Or how are married mothers doing? How are mothers with young children doing? What's their well being and happiness like?
And they were actually, our married women with children were twice as likely to say they were very happy. And the most vulnerable group of the women were our single, childless women in terms of meaning, purpose, loneliness, connection to their community, all of that. And so I think we need to tell the truth about the goodness that it brings into a woman's life to have children and to be in a marriage.
And at the same time, what's happened is our women are more educated than they were in the past. We have the highest rate of educated mothers who are married we've ever had.
So, and you said, right, men are slipping beneath women. There's a growing gap that's been growing actually since the early 80s. Really, men have less likelihood of getting a bachelor's degree, master's degree than women are. And it's just growing and so I think what's happened, of course, as you described for yourself, is women are orienting their lives around career decisions and investing in education with the anticipation that they'll invest in careers.
So to tell them, right, this is your identity. You are at your understanding of your gifts, talents and how you're going to use them in the professional world and just take a 180 and don't even think about that is not going to happen. Right. Like, we've oriented our lives around thinking through ourselves in terms of that engagement professionally. And I think we just have to recognize that. And so now at the same time, have we lost track of the gift of motherhood as you, as you were describing? Right. Like, why did I wait so long?
[00:40:04] Speaker A: It was night and day. Once I crossed that threshold, I'm like, this is the best thing to ever happen to me. Why? Why did society let me believe that I would be unhappy?
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Yes. And I think that's a very powerful narrative out there. And so just rekindling the fact that we are designed for love like human beings are designed for close connection. We are designed for love. And a world that would tell us that the happy life is the autonomous pleasure seeking life untethered to relationships is completely a lie.
And so we have to restore the truth that we are meant for deep, loving, connected relationships. And that relationship with a baby, to build a life out of your own body, to literally carry the cells of that infant for the rest of your life to be their whole world.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Like, who gets that?
That's an unspeakable privilege.
It is, hands down, the greatest power in the world.
[00:41:04] Speaker A: It's Godlike.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: It's godlike, Right. And so we have got to restore, I mean, couldn't that there could be no greater lie in the world than that that is diminishing to a woman, Right. To be able to do that greatest powerful thing. And so we've got to restore the truth about that, even as we recognize lives are going to look different today because women and men are navigating a different world. And she will be engaged professionally, probably in ways that are meaningful to her and contribute to herself as a mother and a woman. And he will be important in that process too, engaged with children and also as a key provider for that family. His providing matters because he enables her to make the right decisions about what she wants to do in relating to her time investment with those children. Right. She does not. Women in general do not want to be the main provider.
It, it's not, it doesn't tend to Be a happier, the happiest dynamic for men and women.
Does she want to contribute? Yes.
In ways that are meaningful. Yes. And his being that primary provider is very important, enabling her to navigate those questions in the right way for her.
So you're right that the church actually the language is a little bit different.
And so just last summer we got the Gospel topics essay about women.
It said very clearly that men and women, God's beautiful plan of salvation is about deep loving relationships and family life. That's what it is.
And then it recognized in the 1980s, 1990s, when we're undergoing a massive transformation in family, the counsel given as children are literally experiencing the divorce revolution. All of this fracturing, fragmentation.
The council that I think is profoundly wise was guiding women to pay deep attention to those children and their well being in her unique and powerful ways.
And that has shifted.
Right. And so now it just added the church no longer teaches that. Right. Women, the emphasis is on family. That has never changed. But that may include other kinds of activities that men and women as a couple feel guided to do.
[00:43:23] Speaker C: I do find it interesting that in the family proclamation there's a line about this.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:28] Speaker C: I don't want to call it an escape clause or an exemption clause or something, but it does say after, you know, fathers will preside, mothers primarily responsible to nurture their children.
It then says disability, death or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: And I think that's wise and inspired to have that. And they're just to acknowledge that that ideal that the Gospel teaches is not accessible to all families. So I'm grateful the church is taking a more sort of pragmatic acknowledgement of that reality, especially in this increasingly complex world, social world we live in, where that in many cases is now what we see.
[00:44:05] Speaker D: And I do actually think other circumstances is kind of a catch all term. Like the first two, death and death and disability. Disability are more like, okay, circumstances, very concrete.
[00:44:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:16] Speaker D: But like this other circumstances is very broad category that I think can include like just living in a time and place where it is impractical. Right. And I think you talked about like there are some parts of the world where like if women aren't working children, the children don't eat. Right. And increasingly in the United States, right. Where two income households, two income households are becoming more and more common. Right. Keeping up, like being able to provide is a two parent responsibility to a certain extent. And maybe women aren't necessarily want to be or aren't the primary provider, but having them contribute to the Family income and the household income is kind of like it's just part of the deal now. Right. And that's. Those are other circumstances that we're now in, in the world in 2026. Right, right.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: I think it's interesting, the proclamation, and I don't mean to be parsing words too much, but I think it is interesting that it says men are responsible to provide, presidency and protect. And it uses to as the preposition, and it says women are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.
And part of me feels like that nurture is a huge thing. I mean, that's the soil. Right. And men are participating in that, of course, as equal partners.
But she's also depending on bishops and young women leaders and all the people that will be part of that child's nurturing.
And ultimately she is responsible. Right. For that nurturing process. But it's a whole world.
Yes.
[00:45:47] Speaker C: Well, in addition to that, when it says extended families should lend support when needed, that of course can mean. And should mean biological families. I think it can also mean covenant families.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:45:57] Speaker C: Ward families. And in fact, how do we measure
[00:45:59] Speaker B: the impact of those young women.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:01] Speaker C: In Relief Society and Elders Quorum all chipping in to help ward families.
Again, from my understanding, from my layman's read of some of this data, is again, one of the other huge benefits to religious communities. And religious participation is more a communal safety net.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: Right. If you have a congregation you're attending, you're not atomized, locked away in your little apartment in a big city or whatever. Right. Like you have people around you that they can step in to provide assistance when needed. So another kind of material benefit to human well being and flourishing is a religious participation that can lend in that additional support when needed.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: That's right. There are fathers and mothers all around. Right. Who are helping that child understand what it means to be loved, cared for and to live a good life. Yeah. So beautiful. So, Jasmine, your question, I think was like, how has that impacted your faith?
[00:46:51] Speaker A: Yes. Is there a work parent arrangement that can affect a child's religiousness or do we not have the data for that?
[00:46:57] Speaker B: So I. So this is interesting. When President Oaks. Right. He's President Nelson, has passed away. He's not yet been sustained as the prophet of God. And his message is about family. And I'm listening to it. And he's talking about how in this consumerist society, we have outsourced family life to everything else, to coaches, to teachers, to iPads. To iPads. Yeah. Thank you.
[00:47:21] Speaker C: Right.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: To Television to all of that. Right. He's saying.
And he's speaking about something very powerful. And I think it cut me not. It just. It was a wake up call to me in my busy professorial life. And my children are at a good school and Mike is.
We're working, we're doing devotional and prayer and all those things. But am I their primary gospel teacher?
Am I teaching them? Am I outsourcing that?
Because it's a different thing. It's interesting when we, when we learn about language development, that there's something different about language development when it's your mother speaking to you and your father speaking to you. Children, babies hear that language differently. They hear a mother or father reading to them differently than they do a recorded voice. Right.
They hear the gospel of Jesus Christ differently when it comes from the voice of their mother and their father and these other people that come to mean so much, so that just simply can't be outsourced and do our work lives or our sports lives or whatever kind of things are fragmenting that President Oaks is speaking to that be careful, be careful not to lose what your irreplaceable influence is and outsource it or allow it to be taken over by something else. And I think all of us have to be so much on guard about that, whether it's because of work, professional things, or the host of other things that are part of that.
[00:48:47] Speaker A: This has been a very helpful wake up call for myself this whole conversation. Is there something from your research that you wish that every Latter Day Saint knew?
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Well, I think we've talked about all these beautiful things and I just have to end with. I don't think any of us can say it better than President Oaks saying Jesus Christ is the way.
And the reason I say that is I often teach. Right, here's the things we should do. This is what research shows. It's better for children. You manage these structures, you do these, you know, this kind of family structure protects this.
But the truth is there's a lot in our lives, inherent immortality that is not in our control.
There's so much that acts on us in ways that leave us in places that are very vulnerable and feel broken and very unideal.
And I think I want to talk about the ideal and I want to protect that, you know, pursuing that and also recognize by divine design, mortality is designed to break us so that we are open to the love and redemption of our Savior.
We wouldn't care about his love if we didn't know wounds. We would have no need for his redeeming power in our lives.
And so I think sometimes we can talk so much about what should be and try to create that and hold up this perfect picture when by design we're meant to be in deep need, our children, ourselves of the Redeemer. And he is the way and he will be there.
I can't mother perfectly. I'm immortal. Who does not love perfectly?
Our structures. Sometimes we end up in divorce situations or we can't be what we want to be or our children experience trauma in some way that's and I think we shouldn't feel like anything's outside anything that is not a broken pathway.
It just helps us know better the fullness and richness of his love that is beyond mortality. It is redeeming. That's why Alma says it's redeeming love. That's what it is.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: Thank you so much for sharing your research and also your testimony with us. For those who want to dive more into the data on religiousness retention and well being for Latter Day Saints, check out this new issue of BYU Studies and we'll also link to some of Jennet's other research on family life and women in the description below. So remember, you can study deeply and believe boldly and we'll see you next time.
[00:51:18] Speaker B: Sam.
