LDS Discussions — A Faithful Response

Faith Crisis in the Mormon Church Report: A Scholarly Response

A rigorous analysis of the claims made by LDS Discussions regarding the 2013 Personal Faith Crisis Report — examining methodology, statistical context, and the broader evidence for the vitality of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Overview

The LDS Discussions website publishes a blog post titled “Looking at the 2013 Report: LDS Personal Faith Crisis,” presenting a 2013 internal research document as a damning indictment of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The post argues that the report exposes systematic institutional dishonesty, that the Church is hemorrhaging its “best and brightest,” and that members who investigate history will inevitably conclude the Church is false. The author frames this document as one of the most “eye-opening” and “telling” texts in Mormon critical literature.

This response examines those claims across four dimensions: (1) the methodological integrity of the 2013 survey itself; (2) the broader statistical context the post systematically omits; (3) the mischaracterization of the Church’s historical transparency; and (4) the substantive scholarly responses to the specific doctrinal and historical issues raised. When all four lenses are applied, the LDS Discussions narrative collapses under the weight of its own evidentiary failures.

This is not a dismissal of the genuine pain many individuals experience when navigating questions about Church history. That pain is real and deserves pastoral sensitivity. But pain is not evidence. Anecdote is not data. And a self-selected survey of disaffected members is not a representative picture of the Church or its 17.5 million members.

I. The 2013 Report: What It Actually Is — and What It Is Not

The Survey Was Self-Selected, Not Representative

The foundational methodological flaw of the 2013 Personal Faith Crisis Report is one the LDS Discussions post quietly acknowledges and then immediately discards: the survey consisted of self-selected participants recruited via social media. The report gathered 3,086 responses from individuals who had already concluded the Church was not true and who were actively engaged in online ex-Mormon communities. This is not a random sample of Latter-day Saints experiencing doubts. It is a convenience sample of people who had already disaffiliated.

In the discipline of survey research, this is one of the most severe forms of self-selection bias. The Sage Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods defines self-selection bias as the systematic distortion that occurs when participants choose whether to participate based on characteristics related to the research outcome itself. A survey about why people leave the Church, distributed exclusively to people who have already left and are discussing their exit on public platforms, will produce findings that reflect the views of vocal disaffiliates — nothing more.

Key Methodological Limitations

  • Self-selected sample — Distributed via social media to already-disaffected communities; no random sampling procedure
  • Survivorship bias — Cannot capture the far larger population of members who encountered the same historical questions and retained or strengthened their faith
  • Geographic concentration — 91% of respondents from the United States, making global extrapolation impossible
  • Not Church-commissioned — Produced by an unpaid volunteer group without official Church authorization or institutional oversight
  • No control group — No parallel survey of members who encountered the same issues and remained faithful was conducted

The LDS Discussions author himself notes twice in his post that the report “was not directly commissioned by the church” and that “we do not know exactly who was in the group.” He flags this in the interest of “fairness” — and then proceeds to treat the document as authoritative institutional evidence. That is not fair treatment of a source. It is selective sourcing.

The 3,086 respondents represent approximately 0.018% of the Church’s global membership at the time the survey was conducted. To derive sweeping conclusions about the spiritual and institutional health of a 15-million-member organization from this sample is statistically indefensible.

The Gold Standard Critique: What John Gee Found in the Broader Research

The methodological problems endemic to the 2013 report are not unique to it. They infect the entire ecosystem of Mormon faith crisis research upon which LDS Discussions draws. Dr. John Gee of BYU (PhD, Yale University) published a detailed peer-reviewed critique of Jana Riess’s The Next Mormons survey — the most widely cited academic study of LDS generational retention — in the Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. His findings are devastating to the broader methodology.

Gee’s Core Findings (Interpreter Foundation)

  • Chain referral sampling — The survey used snowball sampling that “is not representative” of the broader LDS population
  • Opinion homogeneity — Because “friends tend to have similarity of opinion, especially with regard to religion,” network effects mean nearly half the survey opinions reflect the views of the researcher’s own community
  • Distorted sample composition — The sample contained “twice as many cohabiting Latter-day Saints as expected, half as many widows,” proving the sample was not representative
  • Social desirability bias — 43% of self-identified “very active” Millennial respondents had not attended church within the prior month, indicating dishonest responses

If the most rigorously designed academic study of Mormon retention (with its Qualtrics panel-matching methodology) cannot escape these fundamental methodological failures, an unpaid volunteer survey distributed via Facebook to disaffected members has no claim to evidentiary weight whatsoever.

II. The Statistical Context LDS Discussions Omits Entirely

Record Global Growth in 2024–2025

A narrative of mass exodus requires the reader to ignore the actual statistical trajectory of the Church. The LDS Discussions post was written in 2018; we now have considerably more data. The 2024 and 2025 Annual General Conference statistical reports tell a dramatically different story than the one LDS Discussions presents.

Official Church Statistics: 2024–2025

  • Total membership (end of 2024) — 17,509,781
  • Total membership (end of 2025) — 17,887,212 (up 377,431, approximately 2.2%)
  • Convert baptisms (2024) — 308,682, the highest in 25 years
  • Convert baptisms (2025) — 385,490, an all-time record in 195 years of Church history
  • Missionaries — 80,000 (all-time high)
  • Congregations — 31,670 (all-time high)
  • Temples — 382 (all-time high)
  • Seminary enrollment — 427,642 students (all-time high)
  • Growth since 2000 — Membership has increased more than 66% over 25 years

The 12-month period ending June 30, 2025 recorded more convert baptisms than any other 12-month period in the Church’s 195-year history. Every region of the world saw at least a 20% increase in convert baptisms in the first quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Sub-Saharan Africa — the fastest-growing region — saw some countries record 200% growth in congregations. This is not the statistical profile of an institution in crisis.

The tithing-revenue “loss” figure the 2013 report cites — $281 million over ten years — must be set against an institution that expended $1.45 billion in humanitarian aid in 2024 alone, assisting people in 192 countries through 3,836 humanitarian projects. Whatever institutional challenges the Church faces in U.S. retention, its global missionary reach, financial resources, and infrastructure capacity have never been larger.

U.S. Retention: The Nuanced Picture

The Pew Research Center’s 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study does show declining U.S. retention rates: approximately 54% of Americans raised Latter-day Saint continue to identify as such in adulthood, down from 64% in 2014 and 70% in 2007. This is a real trend that deserves serious pastoral attention. The Church does not dispute it.

But several critical facts put these figures in perspective:

Contextualizing U.S. Retention Data

  • Margin of error — Pew’s margin of error for LDS respondents was ±6.2 percentage points, meaning the 54% figure could range from 47.8% to 60.2%
  • National trend — Declining religious affiliation is documented across virtually all American denominations; LDS decline mirrors broader societal secularization, not uniquely LDS institutional failures
  • Global compensation — The U.S. population represents under 4% of global LDS membership; surging African and Latin American growth more than compensates for North American attrition
  • Depth of religiosity — BYU Foundations of Faith studies document substantially higher retention among members with strong doctrinal grounding and temple attendance, demonstrating that engagement depth — not historical exposure — is the primary retention variable

The secularization of American religious life is well-documented across evangelical Protestantism, mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism alike. To attribute LDS retention trends exclusively to historical knowledge problems, as LDS Discussions does, is to select one explanation for a phenomenon that researchers universally attribute to broader cultural forces.

III. The Transparency Mischaracterization

The Gospel Topics Essays: A Genuine Act of Institutional Transparency

The LDS Discussions post argues that the Church has systematically hidden historical information from members and that “the only reason they are now looking to teach history factually is because they got caught.” This characterization collapses under examination.

Beginning in 2013 — the same year the faith crisis report was drafted — the Church published a series of Gospel Topics Essays addressing the most historically complex and sensitive aspects of Church history: plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, the Book of Abraham, the First Vision accounts, DNA and the Book of Mormon, race and the priesthood, and more. These essays were approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. They are published on the Church’s official website at ChurchofJesusChrist.org and are fully indexed by search engines.

These essays address directly the major topics the faith crisis report identifies as causes of disaffection: polygamy, the Book of Abraham, First Vision accounts, DNA evidence, and the priesthood ban on Black members. They do so with scholarly citations, historical nuance, and frank acknowledgment of historical complexity. The Church also produced the multi-volume Saints narrative history and the Joseph Smith Papers project — arguably the most extensive, transparent, primary-source-centered historical publication project in American religious history, comprising more than 27 published volumes of primary source documentation.

The Joseph Smith Papers Project

“The Joseph Smith Papers project has produced more than 27 published volumes of primary source documentation — letters, revelations, histories, legal records, and financial records — making Joseph Smith’s life and ministry the most extensively documented of any American religious figure. An institution committed to concealment does not publish its founder’s private correspondence, legal troubles, and doctrinal evolution in meticulous scholarly editions approved by its senior leadership.”

The claim that the Church operates through systematic suppression cannot be reconciled with the Joseph Smith Papers, the Gospel Topics Essays, or the Saints narrative history. One may disagree with how the Church interprets historical material — that is entirely legitimate scholarly terrain — but the claim of deliberate institutional concealment does not survive contact with the evidence.

The LDS Discussions post acknowledges the Gospel Topics Essays but dismisses them as inadequate. One is entitled to find them unpersuasive. But to characterize their publication as evidence of institutional dishonesty rather than institutional transparency inverts the logic of what publishing them actually represents. The Church did not have to publish them. It chose to. That choice is evidence of transparency, not concealment.

IV. The Substantive Historical Issues: A Scholarly Assessment

The Book of Abraham: The Debate Is Far From Settled

The 2013 report identifies the Book of Abraham as the top factor leading to faith crisis among its respondents. LDS Discussions presents the Egyptological case against the Book of Abraham as if it were settled science with no credible scholarly response. This is a misrepresentation of the actual state of the scholarly debate.

Dr. John Gee (PhD, Yale, Egyptology) and Dr. Kerry Muhlestein (PhD, UCLA, Egyptology) are credentialed Egyptologists — not amateur apologists — who have published peer-reviewed scholarship arguing:

Scholarly Defenses of the Book of Abraham

  • The missing scroll hypothesis — Eyewitness descriptions of the original papyri describe a document considerably longer than the surviving fragments; the extant Hor Book of Breathings is almost certainly not the source text Joseph translated
  • Ritual sacrifice in Egypt — Muhlestein has documented that ritual killing did occur in ancient Egypt as religious punishment, providing genuine contextual background for Facsimile 1
  • Ancient Abrahamic traditions — Multiple scholars have identified convergences between the Book of Abraham text and ancient Jewish and Near Eastern traditions about Abraham that were not available to Joseph Smith in 1835
  • Cosmological parallels — The Book of Abraham’s astronomical and cosmological framework has striking parallels with ancient Abrahamic astronomical texts discovered after Joseph Smith’s death

This does not make these defenses definitive. The debate is genuine, ongoing, and unresolved. But LDS Discussions presents the anti-Book of Abraham case as if the scholarly defense does not exist among credentialed experts. A person of faith who encounters this material has access to serious peer-reviewed responses that deserve engagement, not dismissal.

The “Either True or False” Framing: An Honest Claim, Not a Trap

The 2013 report — and the LDS Discussions post quoting it — uses statements from Gordon B. Hinckley and Joseph Fielding Smith emphasizing the binary nature of Joseph Smith’s claims to argue that cognitive dissonance is an inevitable consequence of faith crisis. But the binary framing (“either true or false”) is not a psychological trap. It is an honest statement of the nature of Joseph Smith’s first-person historical truth claims.

Joseph Smith either saw God and Jesus Christ in a grove in 1820, or he did not. The gold plates either existed as multiple witnesses attested, or they did not. These are historical claims, and historical claims can in principle be investigated. The rhetorical move of treating the “either/or” framing as problematic actually inverts its meaning: it is a statement of accountability to truth, not a barrier to inquiry.

The LDS Discussions analysis presupposes that investigation inevitably leads to disaffiliation — a presupposition that thousands of scholars, historians, and intellectuals who have deeply investigated Church history and remained committed members directly refute.

Polygamy: Complexity Is Not Disqualification

Early LDS polygamy is the second-most-cited factor in the faith crisis survey. It is historically complex, morally challenging to modern sensibilities, and deserves serious engagement. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays on plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo and in Utah address the topic with more historical candor than any previous official Church publication. They acknowledge polyandry, the ages of some wives, and Joseph Smith’s own conflicted statements about the practice.

The critical question is whether historical complexity equals doctrinal falsification. It does not. Virtually every significant religious figure in the Hebrew scriptures — Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon — practiced polygamy. The historical record of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam contains practices that modern practitioners find morally difficult. The presence of morally challenging history does not, by itself, disprove divine authorization of a religious movement.

Moreover, the Church discontinued polygamy in 1890 and has excommunicated members who practice it since. An institution that claims divine authority to introduce a practice also claims divine authority to discontinue it. LDS theology has never claimed that any particular institutional practice is permanently fixed — only that the living prophet holds the keys to direct the Church in each dispensation.

V. The Argumentative Structure of LDS Discussions: A Logical Assessment

The Unfalsifiability Problem

A striking feature of the LDS Discussions framework is that it is constructed to be unfalsifiable. Every possible piece of evidence is interpreted as confirmation of its predetermined conclusion:

The Closed Loop of LDS Discussions Arguments

  • If you remain faithful after research — You are in cognitive dissonance, suppressing uncomfortable truths
  • If you leave the Church — You are an exemplar of intellectual integrity
  • If the Church publishes historical essays — They only did so because they “got caught” and they are still dishonest
  • If scholarly defenses are offered — They are “implausible” and designed to keep members from thinking
  • If the Church grows globally — Growth statistics are unreferenced or dismissed

A framework that interprets every possible piece of evidence as confirmation of its conclusion — even contradictory evidence — is not an argument. It is a closed ideological system. Genuine scholarly inquiry holds its conclusions provisionally, entertains counter-evidence seriously, and acknowledges when questions are genuinely unresolved. The LDS Discussions post does none of these things.

The “Correlated vs. Factual History” False Dichotomy

The post repeatedly invokes the distinction between “correlated” Church history and “factual” history, treating these as opposites. This is a rhetorical conflation that serious historians do not accept. All narratives — including the narratives presented by LDS Discussions — involve selection, framing, emphasis, and interpretation.

The critical narrative also involves selection: it systematically excludes the scholarly defenses, the convergences between LDS teaching and ancient texts, the testimony of thousands of credentialed intellectuals who have deeply investigated these issues and remained faithful, and the documented record of global vitality. The claim to be presenting “factual history” is itself a rhetorical move, not an epistemological achievement.

VI. What the 2013 Report Actually Demonstrates

The most significant thing the 2013 Personal Faith Crisis Report demonstrates is not what LDS Discussions claims. It demonstrates that the Church, as early as 2013, was actively studying member disaffection, soliciting scholarly analysis, and preparing to address historical complexity more openly — which it subsequently did through the Gospel Topics Essays. An institution committed to suppression and denial does not commission (or receive and file) research identifying its own historical gaps and recommending greater transparency.

The recommendations within the report — train leaders to respond with empathy, close the gap between correlated and historical narratives, openly publish position papers on difficult topics — are largely what the Church proceeded to do over the following decade. The Gospel Topics Essays, the Joseph Smith Papers project, the Saints narrative history, and the revised Come, Follow Me curriculum all reflect the institutional self-correction the 2013 report called for.

LDS Discussions wants readers to see the 2013 report as evidence of a corrupt institution that knows its own claims are false. The more defensible reading is that it evidences an institution wrestling honestly with the challenges of the information age, taking member experience seriously, and moving toward greater historical transparency. These are not the behaviors of an institution that believes it is perpetuating a fraud.

Conclusion: The Weight of Evidence

The LDS Discussions treatment of the 2013 Faith Crisis Report fails on its own evidential terms. The survey it presents as authoritative is methodologically indefensible: self-selected, geographically limited, without a control group, not Church-commissioned, and representing 0.018% of global membership. The broader statistical context it omits — record global growth, all-time-high convert baptisms, $1.45 billion in annual humanitarian aid, 17.8 million members — directly contradicts the narrative of institutional collapse. The claims of systematic concealment cannot survive examination of the Joseph Smith Papers project, the Gospel Topics Essays, and the Saints history. The scholarly dismissal of Book of Abraham defenses ignores credentialed Egyptologists publishing peer-reviewed scholarship in the field.

The genuine questions the post raises — about polygamy, the Book of Abraham, the translation of the Book of Mormon, the First Vision accounts — are real historical questions that deserve serious engagement. They have received serious scholarly engagement, and the questions remain genuinely open in ways that permit faithful membership alongside intellectual integrity.

Those who have experienced genuine pain in their faith transitions deserve compassion, not dismissal. But compassion for persons does not require accepting the methodological framework they use to interpret their experience. The LDS Discussions post is not scholarship. It is a grief narrative dressed in the language of historical analysis, using a fatally flawed self-selected survey to generalize about an institution of 17.8 million people — and doing so while systematically omitting every category of evidence that contradicts its predetermined conclusion.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not in crisis. It is growing faster than at almost any point in its 195-year history. Its historical transparency has never been greater. Its scholars are publishing serious, credentialed defenses of its doctrinal and historical claims. And the 17.8 million members who have investigated these same questions and remained — many of them deeply scholarly and historically literate — are the most important counter-evidence to the LDS Discussions narrative that exists.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Statistical Sources

  • Church of Jesus Christ Newsroom — “A Year Unlike Any Other: The Church Reports Record Global Growth” (2025)
  • Deseret News — “Latter-day Saint Growth Tops 66% Since 2000, After 2025 Shattered Old Record for Convert Baptisms” (April 2026)
  • Pew Research Center — U.S. Religious Landscape Study 2023–2024
  • Church News — “Church Spends $1.45 Billion to Care for Those in Need During 2024” (March 2025)

Scholarly Sources

  • Gee, John — “Conclusions in Search of Evidence,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship
  • Muhlestein, Kerry — “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,” FAIR Latter-day Saints (2013); multiple peer-reviewed Egyptology publications
  • Sage Publications — “Self-Selection Bias,” Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods
  • Church of Jesus Christ — Gospel Topics Essays (ChurchofJesusChrist.org, 2013–present)
  • The Joseph Smith Papers — 27-volume primary source series (Church Historian’s Press, 2008–present)