On March 12, 2025, Church educator and BYU professor Jared Halverson released an Instagram short where he stated: “One of the statistics that has worried me the most of late, comes from a survey that was done in 2023 and it’s suggesting that for the first time that I can think of, more women are leaving religion than men are.” Is this true? Why are more women leaving Mormonism than men are? Join us today as we gather with Katie Rich (author of Fifty Years of Exponent II), Amy McPhie Allebest (of the Breaking Down Patriarchy YouTube channel), and Abby Maxwell Hansen (who was threatened with excommunication for her profile on Ordain Women in 2013 and an Exponent II blogger since 2019), as well as writer and columnist Jana Riess to discuss this growing phenomenon.
Jared Halverson is an associate professor of Ancient Scriptures and served for over 20 years in the Church Education System. Halverson earned his BA in History and MA in Religious Education. He has been a featured speaker in devotionals as well as in academic settings. He is the host of the YouTube channel and podcast titled “Unshaken.”
One Response
As a Ph.D. historian, I am greatly surprised to find Jared discussing women in the Church without actually having read the basics such as Mormon Enigma (which he clearly hadn’t, at least before any of this went down). Like him, I didn’t specialize in Mormon history, but as someone who _did_ specialize in American religious history (I checked his CV), he’s a lot closer than me (primary area: Tudor-Stuart England; secondary, premodern China). Yet as someone teaching at a place where lots of Mormons attend, I felt I had a professional responsibility to get at least a passing knowledge of the major works of scholarship–No Man Knows My History, In Sacred Loneliness, Rough Stone Rolling, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi, Stegner’s Gathering of Zion, Arrington’s Brigham Young, etc. Sure, Jared sounds like a nice guy, but I have to say that his ignorance of these fundamental scholarly works bespeaks a dereliction of professional duty that borders on the unethical. The folks in the actual History Department at BYU do know that stuff–guess that’s the difference between Religious Studies and History proper, but I’d have thought Jared’s doctoral training would have been enough to prompt him in the right direction no matter what department he ended up in. (Sorry for not putting my full name; prefer to remain anonymous for work purposes.)