According to the official LDS church statistics for 2011 there are now over 6 million Mormons living in the United States. That’s 2% of the population. The church has lately been described as of the fastest-growing faiths in the country. Between 1990 and 2008 the LDS church claims to have grown by 30%, which is an astonishing rate – over twice the growth of the population in general. Independent research shows that the total number is closer to 4.4 million, and that growth rate is around half of what the church reports, closer to 16%.
According to an article by Joanna Brooks at Religion Dispatches, the data released by the Mormon Church can be deceiving. In this way, the Mormon church is not unlike Southern Baptists, who count anyone who has ever been baptized as part of the church. I’d love to see these same numbers with SBC churches. Researchers have compiled a different set of numbers for LDS totals and growth rates based on those who self-identify as Mormons. This gives us a bit of a different picture.
“Those are the parameters for the landmark Trinity College American Religious Identification Survey: a two-decade project that has produced the largest and most accurate database of self-reported religious identification ever compiled, with 100,000 randomly sampled participants. According to Rick Phillips and Ryan Cragun, the authors of a study of Mormons based on ARIS data, self-identified adult Mormons make up not 2% but rather 1.4% of the adult USpopulation—that’s about 4.4 million LDS adults.”
Is it possible these numbers could help Mitt Romney’s candidacy, as the Mormon church will seem like less of a threat to evangelical voters who usually vote R?
Research actually shows that low retention of young people has a lot to do with the differences in numbers. It makes me wonder if Mormons are going to experience the same issues with retention of young people who will then return to the church after they have children? I wrote an article for Immerse Journal discussing this phenomenon – it will be out soon. Here’s a blog post that summarizes some of what I’m thinking.
There’s some other interesting research – you can read Joanna Brooks’s whole article here.
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