why me wrote:This kind of thread is so predictable. First the numbers are growing. But the critic box just can not accept that the lds church is growing. It is the same on postmo. All are predicting the mass exodus from the lds church and yet, the numbers do not confirm such a trend.
If we are to ask whether 'the numbers are growing' or not, let us start with some reliable numbers from an impartial source, shall we? And let's just concentrate on the US, where the data are likely to be of rather higher quality than (say) mission reports from Ghana. Follow me on this, and see if there is a flaw ...
The survey referred to in the linked thread (American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS 2008) - first noticed by Cinepro on this board) surveyed a large sample of people in the US by asking them what religion, if any, they belonged to. Now that is a pretty generous way of estimating religious affiliation: it would catch many Catholics who haven't been to church since the last wedding in their family, and many LDS who haven't been to sacrament meeting, let alone the temple, since their parents last took them as kids. The only people who are excluded are those who don't even want to call themselves LDS any more, whatever the Church Records Office may say. Fair enough, isn't it?
Counting that way, we can find the following as the best estimates of self-identified LDS in two years:
1990: 2,487,000
2008: 3,158,000
Wonderful - numbers are growing!!
BUT WAIT: for a start, in those two years US population was:
1990: 175,440,000
2008: 228,182,000
[This increase is partly natural population growth, partly immigration - there were close to 19,000,000
legal immigrants alone in this period - see
here for government data]
Do the math: as percentages of the US population, the self-identifying LDS in each year were:
1990: 100*(2,487,000)/(175,440,000)% = 1.4% to two figures
2008: 100*(3,158,000)/(228,182,000)% = 1.4% to two figures
So it looks as if the CoJCoLDS is just about growing fast enough to keep its share of the US population, but no more. Awesome, no? Well, better than some religions, like the Methodists and Lutherans, who are losing share.
BUT WAIT (AGAIN):
the numbers of ANY religion where the members are not vowed to celibacy are bound to increase if more people are born into families of that religion than die in such families.
Fortunately, (see above) it is known that in Utah (a pretty representative place from the LDS family point of view), the natural population growth rate (births minus deaths) in 2006 was 13.8 per 10,000, or 1.38% per year (By contrast, the average US births minus deaths rate was 0.56% per year). If I was to try to estimate the actual Utah LDS natural population growth rate (birth rate - death rate), then if only 70% of the Utah population is LDS and the other 30% are assumed to have the overall US nattural growth rate, we may write this equation, the LDS growth rate being M:
0.7*M + 0.3*5.6/1000 = 13.8/1000
-> 0.7*M = (13.8 - 0.3*5.6)/1000
-> 0.7*M = 12.12/1000
-> M = 17.31/1000, say 17.3/1000 to two figures
So for LDS, to get from one year to the next we should multiply population by 1.0173.
Let's apply that to the figures above: if we start with 2,487,000 self-identified LDS in 1990, and let it grow at the LDS population growth rate for 18 years, that predicts the following number of people in 2008 who should self-identify as LDS:
2,487,000 * (101.73)*(101.73) and so on 18 times, or more shortly 2,487,000*(1.0173)^18
That gives us 3,387,000 to the nearest thousand.
(if we had been more conservative and used 1.017, we would have got 3,369,000)
BUT WAIT - in fact the 2008 survey only found 3,158,000 self-identifying LDS, which is 229,000 LESS than simple family growth should have produced. (211,000 using the conservative growth figure).
So in fact the CoJCoLDS in 2008 had many thousands fewer people in it than one would have expected if no-one joined the LDS church from outside, and we relied on family growth alone. Something is canceling out the effect of big LDS families, and it can only be the number of people who leave the church to the extent that they cease to identify themselves as LDS. In the period in question (1990-2008), it looks as if about 229,000 to 211,000 left the CoJCoLDS in that sense.
BUT WAIT ... that is the figure we get if we ignore the fact that some people every year join the CoJCoLDS by conversion (they do, don't they?) ... so in reality MORE than 229,000 to 211,000 must have left, if that is the number after conversions have partially topped up the loss.
Conclusions:
1. The only reason that the CoJCoLDS has maintained its position (not increased it) as a proportion of the US population is that its members currently have a lot more babies than most other US families, and those babies tend to get fed into the church. Once the baby tap stops gushing, then what?
2. It seems that more US adults choose to leave the church than choose to join it.Hard evidence-based discussion of what
world LDS numbers may or may not mean will have to wait until we have similar data to the ARIS survey on a world scale. But for the heartland, the picture seems clear, doesn't it?