Kudos to the Salt Lake Tribune's Peggy Fletcher Stack for smelling something fishy in the new decennial numbers showing Mormonism to be the country's fastest growing religion and determining what it is. The LDS Church didn't actually add two million members between 2000 and 2010, as the latest Religious Congregations and Membership Study indicates. Rather, they've changed the way they count their members to include not just those on congregational membership lists. As LDS spokesman Scott Trotter told Stack, "Total (LDS) Church membership numbers are derived from those individuals who have been baptized or born into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
The fact is, however, that this actually exacerbates an already existing LDS tendency to overestimate their numbers. Let me explain. There are two ways to determine the number of religious adherents in the U.S. You can ask the religious bodies for their numbers or you can ask individuals for their religious identity. And in most cases, the number of adherents given by the religious bodies will be fewer than the self-identified adherents of those traditions. The reason for this is simple: More Americans consider themselves as belonging to a particular faith tradition than actually belong to a congregation.
Thus, in the Religion by Region project we conducted at the Greenberg Center in the last decade, 12.3 percent of the population belonged to mainline Protestant churches, but 17.5 percent considered themselves as adherents of one or another brand of mainline Protestantism. Membership in Baptist churches totaled 11.4 percent of the population but 16.3 percent of Americans said they were Baptist. The Catholic Church reported membership at 22 percent, but 24.5 percent said they were Catholic. And so on.
Yet that's not how it worked for Mormons. Whereas Mormon denominations reported a membership of 1.5 percent of the population, self-identified Mormons added up to only 1.3 percent. In other words, in contrast to most other religious groups, in 2000 fewer Americans considered themselves Mormon than Mormon denominations counted as members. And that's because a significant proportion of Mormons remained on the congregation lists after they ceased considering themselves Mormon. Now that the LDS Church is basing its count on birth records rather than congregational lists, the discrepancy only becomes greater.
What's going on here? I guess one can consider the question in terms of this world and the other one. In thisworldly terms, we get to have a debate over the size and growth rate of Mormonism relative to other religious traditions. And no doubt, some in the Mormon community are happy to assert the bragging rights that the bigger numbers afford. On the other hand, however, we're dealing with a church that is eager to allow as many folks as possible access to the best the next world has to offer. Why else do they set about performing proxy baptisms of the deceased?
So I'm not unsympathetic to the Mormon tendency to inflate their numbers. It just doesn't make for very good thisworldly religious demography.
Jana Riess | May 5, 2012 | 1:01pm
Excellent post. Thanks to you and Peggy Fletcher Stack for helping readers to understand this.
coltakashi | May 7, 2012 | 10:42am
I am a 62 year old Mormon and membership has always, within my recollection, counted both the baptized members ages eight and up, and the children of members who have not yet reached the age if accountability at eight when they yave a basic undersyanding of right and wrong and can make that covenant. That is not a change, certainly not in the last decade after 2000. Ms Stack is highlybreliable, so her misunderstanding on this point is a rare occurrence. The Church issues annual membership numbers and you will see no discontinuity in the 21st Century reflecting a changed counting method. The children under eight are a vast part of the Mormon Primary program, and are served by it. The notion they should not be counted is bizarre. Generally at birth, each child is blessed by its father and enrolled in church records as a “child of record”. They become part of the watchcare responsibility of each congregation.
coltakashi | May 7, 2012 | 10:54am
Incidentally, the LDS Church does NOT include people in breakaway sects, persons deceased.who are baptized vicariously, or groups of persons who have become convinced if the truth claims of Mormonism but nor yet baptized, such as the thousands of people in Nigeria who formed “Mormon” congregations before missionaries entered that nation in 1978. And anyone wanting to have their names removed from membership only needs to communicate that in writing and orally confirm it to the local bishop. In my own experience, most baptized persons who no longer actively attend are still reluctant to take that final step. Mormon membership numbers reflect not conjecture or estimates but real individual decisions by hundreds of thousands of people each year. I checked the results repirted by the national survey and they apprar.to be consistent with my personal knowledge of attendance at meetings and the number if congregations. I first came to Richland, WA 15 years ago. Since then the original congregation we lived in (Mormon wards have defined geographical boundaries) has split due to growth some four times, most recently a year ago. The LDS Church is the second largest denomination in our county after the Catholics. That is fully consistent with my direct observation.
michaelames | May 7, 2012 | 1:21pm
This article emphasizes the change in reporting calculus in a way that may lead readers to believe there was something more nefarious going on than was. See Peggy Flack’s original article (available on RN) for a little more balance, including:
1) The Church immediately issued a clarifying statement through a spokesman, correcting the growth percentages that were reported by the researchers.
2) At least one researcher from the project indicates that the LDS Church’s new reporting approach is, if anything, more in line with the majority of Protestant churches.
3) As the numbers were out of line with the Church’s own published almanac, this is very unlikely to have been an intentional attempt to “inflate their numbers.”
At worst, the Church is guilty of not making absolutely sure that researchers understood the change in counting approach, just as the researchers are guilty of not asking. This kind of lapse—failing to consider the methodology of the previous measurement—is not surprising in a study that takes place once every 10 years.