Greg Matsen who runs the Cwic Show YouTube channel recently did a video on declining marriage rates in the Church ("The Collapse of LDS Marriage Culture And The Loss of Taught Doctrine"). He relied heavily on an article by "Alexander" at the Send Me substack entitled "The LDS Marriage Recession Is Here." Alexander notes the following statistics within the Church (bold in original):
According to researcher Jana Riess in the Next Mormons dataset, Latter-day Saint marriage rates have dropped from 71% in 2007 to the mid-60s today, and the share of never-married LDS adults has grown from 12% in 2007 to 19%. (Salt Lake Tribune) Elder M. Russell Ballard told us in April 2021 that more than half of adult Church members today are widowed, divorced, or have never married. Half. Of us.
The
fertility numbers tell the same story. NPR reported in October 2025
that the share of Latter-day Saint women aged 18–45 with at least one
child at home dropped from 70% in 2008 to 59% in 2022
— an eleven-point fall in fourteen years. President Dallin H. Oaks
acknowledged at General Conference that LDS birth rates, while still
higher than the national average, have declined “significantly.” (NPR)
And retention. The share of childhood Latter-day Saints who remain Latter-day Saints as adults has fallen from 70% in 2007 to 64% in 2014 to 54% in 2023–24 — a generational cliff. (RNS)
Some
readers might not think that declining marriage rates (and falling
birth rates) give rise to the level of “calamity.” But the Proclamation
names the mechanism by which the calamities come — the disintegration of the family.
If we stop getting married and we stop rearing children, families don’t
simply shrink. They cease to exist. That is disintegration, in slow
motion.
Five extra years on the YSA range. CES openly
trying to teach dating. Half the adult members single. Birth rates
falling fast. Retention collapsing.
These are not five separate problems. They are one problem with five faces.
So what is the problem?
According to Alexander, it is because women and men want something different out of marriage. He cites statistics indicating that 48% of LDS women ages 18–35 (and 54% of LDS women ages 18–26) prefer an egalitarian marriage — "one in which husband and wife share decision-making, breadwinning, housework, and childcare roughly equally, rather than dividing them along traditional provider/homemaker lines"; whereas 60% of LDS men ages 18–26 still prefer the traditional arrangement where men are the primary breadwinners and preside over the household.
And the reason for that, Alexander contends, is that we--as a Church--have softened the doctrine (I would add, when was the last time you heard 1 Timothy 2:12 preached in Sunday School?). He writes:
We — the cultural Church, the wards, the parents, the institute teachers, the Sunday school adults, the LDS-coded social media voices — have spent twenty years quietly softening the doctrine of marriage to make it palatable in mixed company. We stopped saying “preside” with confidence. Some have even started apologizing for the clarity of the Proclamation. We taught equal partnership in a way that quietly erased the uniquely different roles of men and women that follow’s God’s family model. We trained our daughters to look for an “egalitarian” husband without telling them that the doctrine isn’t actually symmetrical, and we trained our sons to want to “preside” without ever showing them what that looked like at a kitchen table on a Tuesday night.
And, he adds:
I don’t think it is an accident that during the same years our
cultural Church got quieter about gender as an eternal characteristic,
the Next Mormons survey found that 94% of LDS Boomers identify as heterosexual versus only 77% of LDS Gen Z — meaning roughly 23% of Gen Z Latter-day Saints now identify as LGB+. (Religion News Service)
I am not saying that to shame anyone. I am saying that is a data point
we cannot keep pretending isn’t connected to something. When the
doctrine of eternal identity gets quieter, identity confusion gets
louder.
Pair the LGB+ figure with the 54% retention number, the dating recession, the birth rate collapse, and the egalitarian-traditional mismatch — and a single picture comes into focus.
When
we evade the doctrine culturally the youth cannot get the foundation.
They cannot find each other, cannot picture a marriage worth running
toward, and in some cases cannot even locate themselves within the plan.
That is not their failure. That is ours.
The solution, he contends, is to "say the doctrine out loud again, with confidence and joy."
I will be the first to say that I agree that softening the doctrine has not helped us, and to more strongly proclaim the family will help right the ship, so to speak, simply because it would drive the liberals out of the Church. And perhaps if women were, like the men, told that they cannot obtain exaltation without getting married--instead of the usual slop of "if you can't get married its not your fault and God will make up for it"--it might boost marriage rates a bit.
But I do not think his "solution" will actually solve the basic, underlying problem.
NPR published a piece on "The missing men of the American marriage market."
First, contrary to the wording in the title of the NPR article, the men
are not missing--it is not like we suffered a war where large number of
men were killed or went through decades where male babies were aborted
at higher rates than females. The men are there, but they just aren't
good enough for the women. From the article:
The
United States is not currently witnessing any demographic imbalances so
extreme. The ratio of men to women is pretty even. However, the
economic and educational trajectories of men and women have increasingly
diverged, with a large swath of men falling behind.
For
example, women are now more likely to graduate from college than men.
In recent years, female students have made up almost 60 percent of
undergraduate students, and outnumbered men on college campuses by more
than two million, according to one government estimate. Meanwhile, many
men who didn't get a college education have been struggling
economically, and have been much more likely to end up on drugs, in
prison, and unemployed.
A
new working paper by economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and
Joseph Winkelmann, "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in
Education and Declining Marriage Rates," looks at how this growing
educational and economic gender imbalance is affecting marriage patterns
in the United States.
The study suggests that
the struggles of many American men have created something like a game of
musical chairs for women looking to get married. College-educated women
have largely maintained high marriage rates, but they've done so by
increasingly getting hitched to men without a college education. But
they're not ending up with just any men in this demographic pool.
They're, on average, partnering up with the higher-earning ones.
Meanwhile,
this study suggests that women without a college education are left
with a shrinking pool of economically stable husbands. They're still
having kids, but their marriage rate has plummeted, and many are raising
their kids by themselves.
Scholars have
referred to the demographic imbalance in China as "missing women." One
way to interpret these findings is that America increasingly has what
you might call "missing economically stable men." It may help explain
the dramatic rise of single-mother households, and it could be one
driver of worsening inequality in America.
For all their
screaming about equity, the Left seems ambivalent when the benefactors
of a system are women and the ones being left behind are men.
But, getting back to the points raised by Matson and Alexander, the primary issue here isn't a misunderstanding of the marriage roles. It is primarily a lack of good jobs for men such that they can (i) attract a wife, and (ii) support a family. You can preach all day long that men should provide for families and women should stay home to raise the kids--something I commonly heard at church when I was younger--but it means nothing if the men cannot get jobs that allow for it. It was the growing economic need for women to get jobs outside the home that killed off the doctrine. And urging men to become better educated only gets you so far because a young man can't just go out and magically raise is IQ a couple standard deviations or have the capitalization to start a business fall from heaven like the manna of old.
I know that the there are more facets and nuances, but in the end--even if you convince a woman that the man should be the sole or primary breadwinner--the whole thing falls apart if the man, in fact, cannot win the bread.
