States & Territories
Utah
West
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Brigham Young led the first company of Latter day Saint pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, declaring it the place after seventeen years of persecution and displacement across Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints has been headquartered there ever since. Temple Square in Salt Lake City, anchored by the granite temple completed in 1893 after forty years of construction, remains the church's global center. Utah's population is still majority Latter day Saint, giving the state a religious homogeneity unmatched elsewhere in the country.
Facts
Law and State
Establishment StatusUtah's 1896 constitution, adopted on statehood, explicitly bars any union of church and state or any religious establishment, a provision written amid national scrutiny of the territory's Latter-day Saint majority. Identity
Jurisdiction Status Religion
Leading Religious AffiliationLatter-day Saint (Mormon) 2 Utah: Latter-day Saint is 50% of adults. Margin of error plus or minus 7.3 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/utah/ Geography
Census Region Origins
Origin of the NameFrom the Ute people, whose own name's original meaning in the Ute language is not firmly established. 1 Learn More
Fifty Percent and the History Behind the Number
Utah is the one state in the country where a single religious tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, makes up half the adult population outright, fifty percent in Pew's 2023-24 measurement, a concentration no other state approaches. That number is the end point of a specific and well documented history rather than a demographic accident. Brigham Young's pioneer company reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 after seventeen years of displacement from New York, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, and the settlers who followed him organized the provisional state of Deseret within three years, well before Utah territory was formally recognized by Congress in 1850 at a fraction of the boundaries Young had proposed.
Statehood itself was withheld for nearly half a century over a single religious practice. Congress refused Utah admission repeatedly while the church sanctioned plural marriage, and the impasse only broke after church president Wilford Woodruff issued the 1890 Manifesto formally ending the practice as official doctrine, clearing the way for statehood in 1896. Temple Square in Salt Lake City, anchored by the granite temple finished in 1893 after forty years of construction, predates statehood itself and remains the church's global headquarters. The fifty percent figure is what a religious community that built its own territory, waited out a federal standoff over doctrine, and never left the valley it settled looks like eight generations later.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Utah directly: "Saints, taken circa 1865 by the Utah photographer Charles William Carter, showing Young's head and shoulders facing left."
This source names Utah directly: "Latter day Saints were established in Utah in 1847, and two years before the St."
This source names Utah directly: "George Utah Temple documents its 1871 to 1877 construction, its dedication in stages on 1 January 1877 and its formal dedication on 6 April 1877, and its standing as the first temple completed after..."
This source names Global directly: "of construction, remains the church's global center."
This source names Utah directly: "published 27 October 2006, on a Utah 3rd District Court judge's order reforming the United Effort Plan Trust, describing it as a 110 million dollar trust at the time of the reform."
This source names Utah directly: "consolidation in territorial Utah."
This source names Utah directly: "Latter day Saints were established in Utah by Brigham Young's 1847 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, already recorded here, and roughly a decade before federal pressure over plural marriage began..."
This source names Utah directly: "'Fundamentalists' Counted in and Near Utah," Deseret News, published 2007-08-11 and read 2026-08-16, reporting a census of Mormon fundamentalist groups compiled by fundamentalist historian Anne Wilde."
Principal Tradition Of
Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey, the atlas's only state where the Latter-day Saint movement leads.
Sources
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