那些出生在耶稣基督后期圣徒教会（Latter-day Saints Church）的人，往往会终身保持教会成员的身份。然而，这种趋势已经开始发生变化。
People born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have tended to stay members for life. But that pattern has started to shift.
摩门教徒有时会称自己为“与众不同的人”（即具有独特信仰和生活方式的群体），从统计数据来看，他们的确如此：与新教徒、天主教徒、犹太教徒和佛教徒相比，摩门教徒的出生率更高、结婚率更高，家庭规模也更大。他们的教会成员留存率也相对较高——也就是说，出生在摩门教会的人通常会终身留在教会中。但最近，这些长期存在的模式都开始发生了变化。
Mormons have sometimes called themselves a “peculiar people,” and statistically, they have been. Compared with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists, Latter-day Saints have higher birth rates, higher marriage rates, and larger families. They also have a relatively high retention rate—meaning that those who are born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to stay members for life. But recently, all of these long-held patterns have started to shift.
研究摩门教信仰的历史学家贾娜·里斯（Jana Riess）告诉我，教会目前并没有面临真正的危机，更像是一种人口结构上的变化。不过，截至2024年，只有大约一半的年轻摩门教徒会继续留在教会中（这一比例在20世纪80年代时超过了80%）。自2011年以来，摩门教徒的结婚率下降了10%；根据独立数据科学家亚历克斯·巴斯（Alex Bass）对教会记录的分析，过去40年里，每1000名摩门教徒中的年出生人数从25人减少到了5人。
The Church is not facing a crisis, exactly—more of a demographic ravine than a cliff, Jana Riess, a historian who studies the LDS faith, told me. But as of 2024, only about half of young people born into the Church stay in it—down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s. Its marriage rate has fallen 10 percent since 2011, and in the past 40 years, the number of annual recorded births per 1,000 LDS members has dropped from 25 to five, according to an analysis of Church records by the independent data scientist Alex Bass.
如果摩门教徒的“独特性”曾经体现在他们较早的结婚年龄、满载孩子的家庭以及他们对教会的忠诚上，那么这些特征似乎正在逐渐消失。
If Latter-day Saints’ peculiarity was defined in part by their early marriages, their minivans full of kids, and their loyalty to the Church, some of that peculiarity seems to be slipping away.
摩门教会的出生率下降和成员留存率下降的问题并非个例：在美国，几乎所有宗教群体的生育率都在下降，同时也有越来越多的人选择离开宗教。教会发言人道格·安德森（Doug Andersen）在电子邮件中告诉我：“官方教会记录显示，全球范围内的教会成员人数和参与度都在持续增加”，部分原因是全球有创纪录数量的信徒加入了教会。
The LDS Church’s birth-rate and retention problems are far from unique: People in the United States are having fewer babies and leaving religion pretty much across the board. Doug Andersen, a spokesperson for the Church, wrote to me in an email that “official church records show consistent worldwide increases in both membership and participation,” in part because a record number of converts are joining worldwide.
然而，人口结构上的倾斜已经足够成为一个问题，以至于教会的新领袖达林·奥克斯（Dallin Oaks）也注意到了这一点。在教会先前的先知任期内，教会每半年举行一次的年度会议中，提及家庭的内容少之又少。但今年，奥克斯在就任先知以来的首次会议讲话中发出警告：尽管教会的婚姻和出生率高于美国平均水平，但这两项数据已显著下降。
Still, the demographic tilt is enough of a problem that the Church’s new leader, Dallin Oaks, is taking notice. Under the previous Church prophet, mentions of family were fewer and farther between at the Church’s biannual conference. But this year, in his first conference address since becoming prophet, Oaks issued a warning: Although the Church’s marriage and birth rates were better than the U.S. average, they had declined significantly.
“我们是一个以家庭为核心的教会，”他说，并引用了1995年发布的《家庭宣言》中的内容——这份宣言曾悬挂在许多摩门教徒家中：“上帝命令祂的子民繁衍后代、充满地面，这一诫命依然有效。”
“We are a family Church,” he said, and quoted from the 1995 “Family Proclamation,” which once hung on the walls of many LDS homes: “God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.”
从某些方面来看，摩门教如今所遭遇的情况，正是任何超越核心信徒群体而发展的宗教都会经历的过程。克莱尔蒙特研究生院摩门研究系主任马修·鲍曼（Matthew Bowman）告诉我，随着时间的推移，一种信仰中那些更具特色的部分——例如天主教的“无肉星期五”——会逐渐被淡化，最终使其更接近主流美国文化和主流新教传统。
In some ways, what’s happening to the LDS now is what happens to any religion that grows beyond a core of strong believers. Over time, the more particular edges of a faith—the meatless Fridays of Catholicism, for instance—can get sanded down until it more closely resembles mainstream American culture and mainline Protestantism, Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, told me. (The Church now discourages use of the word “Mormon” as a nickname for members of the faith, but the term is still used in proper names, such as Bowman’s title or The Book of Mormon.)
（如今，教会已不建议将“摩门教徒”一词用作该信仰成员的昵称，但该术语仍用于专有名词中，例如鲍曼的职位头衔或《摩门经》。）在他看来，摩门教人口结构的变化表明，“长期同化的过程如今正变得愈发明显。”布里格姆杨大学的宗教学教授贾斯汀·戴尔（Justin Dyer）告诉我，与卫斯理派等个别新教派别相比，摩门教在留住年轻信徒方面似乎表现得更出色。
To him, the demographic shifts in the LDS indicate that “the long process of assimilation is becoming more noticeable now.”Compared with individual Protestant denominations, such as Methodism, the LDS looks like it’s doing better at retaining its young people, Justin Dyer, a religion professor at Brigham Young University, told me.
但圣路易斯华盛顿大学的政治学家瑞安·伯吉（Ryan Burge）认为，这种比较并不恰当，因为即使有人从卫斯理派改信路德派，他们仍然基本持有着相同的新教信仰。而新教整体的信徒留存率高达70%，远远高于摩门教会。
But Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that that’s not the right comparison to make, because even if someone switches from Methodist to Lutheran, they still hold pretty much the same Protestant beliefs. And Protestantism’s retention more generally, at 70 percent, far surpasses the LDS Church’s.
留存率的下降对耶稣基督后期圣徒教会的影响可能比对卫理公会更为严重。年轻信徒数量减少意味着传教士人数也会减少；而教会成员数量的下降则意味着那些由当地及地区志愿者负责运营的教会事务将不得不由更少的人来承担。过去，教会为孩子们设立的各类活动——主日学校、青少年项目、地区性舞蹈活动以及夏令营——成功引导年轻人投身传教工作，进而成为终身信徒。
Lower retention may also have more ramifications for the LDS Church than it would for Methodists. Fewer young people means fewer missionaries. And fewer members means that the work of operating churches, which are volunteer-led at the local and regional levels, will fall on fewer people. In the past, the Church’s robust structure for kids (Sunday school, youth programs, regional dances, and sleepaway camps) carried young people into missionary work, which usually equated to lifelong membership, but that formula seems to be failing now, Jana Riess said. (She herself is an LDS member.)
不过，正如贾娜·里斯所言，如今这一模式似乎正在失效。（她本人也是耶稣基督后期圣徒教会的一名信徒。）“过去教会一直很擅长留住信徒，如今也仍在推行许多曾经行之有效的举措。因此，教会领袖们焦急不安、发出‘这些措施为何仍不够呢？’的疑问也就不足为奇了。”目前，教会尤其难以留住年轻女性。根据戴尔的研究，2025年时，仅有不到40%的18岁女孩仍坚守信仰。
“The Church has been great at retention in the past and is doing many of the same things that used to be so successful then. So it’s understandable why leaders would be sort of wringing their hands and saying, ‘Why isn’t this enough?’”The Church is having a particularly hard time keeping young women. In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of 18-year-old girls stayed in the faith, according to Dyer’s research.
许多脱离教会的人是因为在同性婚姻等问题上持有比教会更为开明的观点；但在为即将出版的关于“脱离教会者”的书籍进行访谈时，许多年轻女性也提到自己感觉在教会中得不到重视。
Many apostates leave because they are more liberal than the Church on issues such as same-sex marriage, but when Riess interviewed young women for her upcoming book on people who leave the faith, many of them also brought up feeling undervalued by the Church.
在LDS神学中，只有男人才能持有所谓的神职人员--上帝赋予约瑟夫·史密斯并通过每一代LDS男人传递的权威--这使他们能够祝福儿童和病人，传递圣礼，并担任某些领导职位。正因为如此，从本质上来说，“在LDS教会中没有任何地方让男性向女性报告最终权力问题，在LDS教会中也没有任何地方让女性拥有最终决定权，”鲍曼说。
In LDS theology, only men can hold what is called the priesthood—the authority given by God to Joseph Smith and passed down through every generation of LDS men—which allows them to bless children and the sick, pass the sacrament, and serve in certain leadership positions. Because of this, essentially, “there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a man reports to a woman on questions of final authority, and there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a woman has final say,” Bowman said.
1995年的《家庭宣言》明确规定，妻子的角色是养育孩子。“这对教会来说是一个艰难的境地，”里斯说。“它希望在一个朝着不同方向发展的文化中对女性保持吸引力，但也希望保持在强调核心家庭这种非常特殊的配置的同一条道路上。”许多女性并不介意教会的男性神职，或者至少接受它。杨百翰大学研究生索菲·史密斯告诉我：“我可以相信有些东西是神圣的，但同时也会犯错。”
And the 1995 Family Proclamation made clear that a wife’s role is to nurture the children. “It’s a tough position for the Church to be in,” Riess said. “It wants to remain attractive to women in a culture that has moved in a different direction, but also wants to stay pretty much on the same path of emphasizing this very particular configuration of the nuclear family.”Many women do not mind the Church’s male priesthood, or at least accept it. “I can believe that something’s divine but also fallible at the same time,” Sophie Smith, a graduate student at BYU, told me.
她相信女性已经有很多方式为信仰做出贡献，并且“无论是今生还是来世，它都不会是一个父权制的教会。”但LDS领导人似乎确实意识到教会的女性问题：女性现在可以指导他们选区的周日学校计划，最近，教会将女性执行传教任务的年龄从19岁降低到了18岁。
She believes that women already have many ways to contribute to the faith and that “whether it’s in this life or the next, it will not be a patriarchal Church.”But LDS leaders do seem to be aware of the Church’s young-women problem: Women can now direct their ward’s Sunday-school program, and recently, the Church lowered the age at which women can serve a mission from 19 to 18.
这一决定促使传教士人数创下历史新高，但里斯指出，这同时也是“一种让年轻女性留在教会阵营内、并帮助她们更深入地接受信仰的方式”。鲍曼称，在摩门教圈子里常流传着这样一句话：“传教士最重要的‘皈依者’就是他自己或她自己。”18岁完成传教任务还意味着年轻女性能更早结婚：她们大约在20岁左右返回家乡，“在摩门教的‘人生清单’上，接下来的任务就是结婚生子，”洛杉矶某教区负责青少年女孩课程的艾丽莎·贝克对我说道。
This decision has led to a record boom in missionary numbers, but it’s also “a way to keep young women in the fold and try to socialize them more deeply in the faith,” Riess said. (One refrain in LDS circles, Bowman said, is: “A missionary’s most important convert is himself or herself.”) Completing a mission at 18 also means that young women can get married sooner: They return around age 20, and “on the LDS checklist, the next check is getting married and having children,” Alyssa Beck, who leads classes for teenage girls at her ward in Los Angeles, told me.
不过，那些积极响应教会号召、立志成为母亲的女性或许仍难以生育多个孩子。史密斯注意到身边的女性生育数量越来越少，主要原因就是负担不起更多孩子的养育费用。根据巴斯的分析，多年来，犹他州、爱达荷州和亚利桑那州这些所谓“摩门教走廊”地区的独栋住宅价格一直低于全国平均水平，但自2020年起便大幅上涨并超过了这一水平。
Women who do lean into the Church’s call to motherhood may still struggle to have a big family, though. Smith has noticed those around her having fewer kids, mostly because they can’t afford more. For years, the single-family-home price in the so-called Mormon Corridor—Utah, Idaho, and Arizona—ran below the national average, but since 2020, prices have soared above that threshold, according to Bass’s analysis.
“依然有人会说‘我想生八个孩子’，这真的很棒，”史密斯说道。然而出于现实需要——父母双方都必须工作，而养育孩子的成本又极高——很多人最终没能如愿。
“There are still people who are like, I wanna have eight kids, and that’s awesome,” Smith said. But out of necessity—because both parents need to work, and kids are expensive—many don’t.
这些年轻家庭可能会发现，如今让他们沉浸于宗教文化中的活动比以往减少了。鲍曼表示，过去，通过集市、合唱团、戏剧和巡回演出等活动，信徒们可能每周要去礼拜堂四次；而现在，许多活跃成员只在周日前来。（甚至周日礼拜的时间也从三小时缩短到了两小时。）随着该信仰在国际上的扩展，鲍曼说，“在犹他州建立起来的文化体系根本无法向外输出”，而且由于教会努力保持其在全球范围内的实践一致性（无论是在肯尼亚还是犹他州，每座礼拜堂都使用相同的教学内容和主日学校课程），他认为教会领导层削减了对后期圣徒的社会期望。
These younger families may find less than they once did to keep them immersed in the culture of the religion. Between bazaars, choirs, plays, and road shows, congregants might have once been at their chapel four times a week; now many active members come only on Sundays, Bowman said. (And even Sunday services have been shortened from three hours to two.) As the faith has grown internationally, “the cultural apparatus that was built in Utah just wasn’t exportable,” Bowman said, and because the Church tries to keep its practices consistent across the world (whether in Kenya or Utah, every chapel uses the same teachings and Sunday-school curriculum), he believes that Church leadership pared back the social expectations of being a Latter-day Saint.
这种文化上的宽松可能有助于教会在国际上的增长，同时也让美国成员更容易离开。（摩门教发言人安德森表示，教会“对美国过去十年中儿童、青少年和年轻成年人参与度提高感到鼓舞”。）目前，教会似乎坚持认为其未来植根于家庭——这需要人们听从先知的教诲，生养众多，遍满地面。然而，要做到这一点，年轻人需要留下来。
That cultural loosening might be helping the Church grow internationally and simultaneously making it easier for American members to leave. (Andersen, the LDS spokesperson, said that the Church is “encouraged by increased participation of our children, youth, and young adults in the United States in the past decade.”) For now, the Church seems to be insisting that its future is rooted in family—which will require people to heed the words of the prophet, and multiply and replenish the Earth. To do that, though, young people will need to stick around.
全国各地的教堂，而不仅仅是摩门教，都在努力解决这个特定的难题：最近，许多年轻的美国人热情地重新致力于宗教，但他们情感的深度尚未被广泛接受——至少目前还没有。无论他们是摩门教、天主教还是浸信会出身，许多美国人似乎都希望教堂能提供某种组合：既要从美国主流生活中抽离出来，又要融入其中。但正如鲍曼所说，“这是一个非常、非常难以把握的微妙平衡点。”
Churches across the country, not just the LDS, are trying to figure out that particular puzzle: Recently, many younger Americans have passionately recommitted to religion, but their depth of feeling hasn’t caught on widely—at least not yet. Whether they grew up LDS, Catholic, or Baptist, many Americans seem to want churches to offer some combination of retreat from mainstream U.S. life and assimilation in it. But, as Bowman said, “that is a very, very tricky sweet spot to hit.”