LDS Church pledges tens of millions more for women and children as young Mormon women leave in record numbers

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a fresh multimillion-dollar pledge to support women and children in Africa and Asia — and almost simultaneously, new research landed showing that a majority of young adult women raised in the faith have walked away from it. The juxtaposition, covered this week by The Salt Lake Tribune, captures a church navigating very different crises on opposite sides of the world.

According to the Tribune, the three-year commitment builds on a prior initiative that the church says has already reached tens of millions of people. The funding flows through partnerships with humanitarian organizations, targeting education, health, and food assistance across the developing world. It is one of the largest single humanitarian pledges the Utah-based church has made in recent memory.

But back home, the picture is more complicated. Columnist Jana Riess, writing for Religion News Service and published by the Tribune on August 7, reported on research finding that a majority of young adult women raised LDS have left the church. The reasons cited include reactions to the church's political alignments, what researchers describe as purity culture, and concerns about power dynamics within the institution.

The departure of young women is a particularly pointed data point for a faith tradition that has long emphasized family, motherhood, and women's roles as central to its identity. Retention of young members — especially women — has been a visible pressure point for LDS leadership for more than a decade, as broader American trends of religious disaffiliation have intersected with church-specific grievances.

Those two stories alone would be enough to define a busy news week for the church, but the Tribune's religion desk had more. An Arizona Supreme Court ruling, reported August 5, addressed LDS leaders and mandatory reporting requirements for certain abuse disclosures made in confession — a decision that aligns Arizona with clergy-penitent privilege laws in many states but has drawn criticism from abuse survivors and advocates.

The week also brought a deeply personal story: a reconciliation account from the gay son of a prominent LDS composer, described by the Tribune as moving from 'Mormon land into gay land' — and eventually finding a path back to his family. The piece, published August 8, reflects a genre of narrative the Tribune has developed over years: the human cost and occasional grace notes of navigating LGBTQ identity within a faith that does not affirm same-sex relationships.

And the Tribune reported the death of Carol Lynn Pearson, described as an influential LDS writer whose work on LGBTQ Latter-day Saints helped shape how many members — and former members — understood that intersection. Her passing, noted July 31, closes a chapter in Mormon letters.

On a more local note, an Osmond family music venue project in Provo Canyon is hitting hurdles, according to an August 10 Tribune report — a reminder that even the most famous names in Utah's cultural landscape face the ordinary friction of permits, planning, and community pushback.

What comes next for the LDS Church on the retention question is the harder story to watch. The humanitarian pledge is a concrete, measurable commitment with a three-year horizon and partner organizations that will report outcomes. The question of why young women are leaving — and whether anything the church does will slow that trend — is far less tractable. Researchers and church observers have noted that the factors driving disaffiliation are structural and cultural, not easily addressed by policy announcements. Whether LDS leadership responds publicly to the retention data, and how, will be a signal worth watching in the months ahead.

Why it matters — The LDS Church's simultaneous push for global humanitarian impact and struggle to retain young women at home illustrates the central tension facing one of America's largest and fastest-growing homegrown religions — and the Arizona clergy-privilege ruling sets a legal precedent with direct consequences for abuse survivors in that state.

Reported by sltrib.com, theguardian.com