There's been a lot of discussion about the slow-down in Church growth, including yesterday's OP by Dave B. about a Washington Post article connecting the LDS membership decline with eroding support for the GOP. Additionally, Latter-day Struggles podcast has been doing a series of episodes breaking down the data in an essay written by David Stewart of the University of Nevada: The End of Growth? Fading Prospects for Latter-day Saint Expansion.
When I was growing up in the Church, it was common belief, often discussed among members that the Church was the stone cut out of the mountain without hands that would roll forth until it filled the whole earth, and there was a lot of evidence of that exponential growth to back up that idea. But that growth spurt appears to have slowed to almost nil. In 1984, when I was 16, non-LDS sociologist Rodney Stark predicted that the LDS Church was on the verge of becoming "the first major faith to appear on earth" since Islam. His prediction was based on the 4% annual membership growth that was happening at that time, and he also noted that his predictions from 15 years earlier had been surpassed by a million members. His data showed that by 2020, there would be between 36.4 and 121 million LDS church members unless something drastically reduced the Church's successful conversion rates.
So what happened? The essay by David Stewart explains many factors that resulted in lower growth rates in the subsequent years.
Fertility rates. Stark's data in 1984 assumed that Mormons would continue to follow the same high birth rates, ignoring that trends in the US were declining. While Mormon families remain higher than national averages, they have followed that downward trend.
Conversion rates. In 1996, two sociologists of religion noted that "the single best predictor of the annual Mormon conversion rate is the size of the LDS missionary force." In 2013, the decision to lower the age of service to 18 for men and 19 for women resulted in a spike in missionary service, and since that date, the number of converts no longer correlates with the number of missionaries. Was this change a mistake?
Retention.[1] While Stark was looking at the numbers of baptized Church members, a more accurate picture might be found in looking at the formation of congregations. If you have more members, and those members are attending Church, you need more congregations. Since 2000, the number of members appears to rise, while the number of new congregations does not even come close to matching it. We are counting a whole lot of people who don't consider themselves active Church members. Looking at regional numbers, the picture is even more clear that despite reporting growth in conversions, congregations are closing, and the Mormon footprint is shrinking in many places: Latin America is down 1.3% and Western Europe is down 18.9%! There are some historical causes that may sound familiar:
- Baseball baptisms. Some missions, focused on impressive numbers, encouraged the baptism of children through deceptive tactics. This was particularly a problem in South America in the 80s and 90s.
- "Gathering" mentality. Converts in many non-US regions were encouraged to marry within the faith and this often meant that families would either relocate to the US or would send their kids to BYU to get an education and find a spouse. This saps local congregations of their ability to maintain a base of members.
- Importing leadership. In many areas, the tendency is to view locals as insufficiently strong in the faith (and Mormon culture) to lead their own stakes, districts, wards, and branches, and North American leaders are often brought in to ensure that the local culture does not prevail. This is a particular issue in Africa where the Church has experienced its largest growth. While this growth has been touted as worthy of celebration, it pales in comparison to the success of two other high demand conservative faiths: the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists, both of which have surpassed LDS growth exponentially. SDA Church attendance in Africa alone was 5.27 million in 2013, which was higher than the average LDS Church attendance worldwide! Locals in Africa view the LDS Church with suspicion as the "rich church" which doesn't respect local culture and customs.
- Missions. In the LDS church, missionaries are sent around the world, which is often a great experience for them, helping them to become adults and often increasing their commitment to the Church as well as their leadership skills. But as those of us who served know, you are in a ward temporarily. You teach, someone gets baptized, and you leave. This doesn't always result in the type of retention you have when the members of the local congregation are the ones engaging in missionary work. However, let's be honest, a lot of Mormons feel that once they've done their missionary service, thankfully that's over, and at least we didn't have to do it somewhere embarrassing where we might actually know people. This is unlike the methods used by the JW and SDA Church members, and both those sects have left Mormonism in the dust. Additionally, some areas of the world (India is cited) restrict foreign missionaries. Faiths that don't rely on them fare significantly better.
- Statistics. The Church meticulously counts new members added, but doesn't accurately track or report those who leave. In fact, if your name is still on the records (and most who leave do not take steps to remove their name), the Church will continue to count you as a "member" until age 110, even if you do not self-identify as Mormon, even if you barely remember joining and have never returned since. This practice hides the problem and makes it easier to delay change.
Lawson and Xydias (2020) found that Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses tend to undercount members, whereas the LDS Church overcounts international adherents by a wide margin. They documented from national censuses and sociological surveys a correlation between self-reported LDS Church membership and self-identified religious preference of 90% in the United States, but only 28% internationally. A substantial proportion of members claimed by the LDS Church, including approximately 10% in Utah and 37% in Chile, cannot be located (Canham 2005, Stack 2006). Unless found, their records are maintained in the "Address Unknown File" until age 110 (Phillips 2006), some thirty-eight years longer than the median worldwide life expectancy in 2016 (WHO 2020).
David Stewart's essay
Gerontocracy. Actions like the 2015 Exclusion Policy may have felt like a good idea to elderly leaders, steeped in the homophobic prejudice of their era, but it alienated many younger Church members, and resignations followed as well as reduced commitment. Additionally, there has at times been a "power vacuum" at the top as pointed out by Greg Prince, that doesn't exist in other Church's where the President is always competent and vigorous, responsive to the needs of members. These times of incapacity (such as experienced during Benson's and Monson's years) slows responsiveness to trends as others at the top seek to bring forward their vision, but with deference to an ailing or incapacitated leader.
Utah-centricity. This was an interesting one, but it's a root cause of the type of missionary service our Church follows; by having a centralized structure in one state, Church members who live elsewhere experience different cultures and needs than a Utah-based Church member would. The first time I heard the term "mission field" used by a Utahn to describe where I lived, I was confused. I had lived there; I wasn't a missionary there. It's hard to export Utah culture to other places; culture is full of blind spots and biases that don't translate well. Additionally, sub-Saharan Africa is just never going to be like the Wasatch front, nor should it be. There is a huge lack of respect for local cultures that I experienced in my own western European mission and my home ward (one of my first blog posts, actually). This lack of buy-in hurts both conversion and retention.
A "Greedy" Church. This description by Van Beek (quoted in the essay) refers to the high demands of lay members in the Church that have contributed to burnout, feelings of inadequacy, and attrition, particularly among international members. It parallels some of the online discussions I've seen in which former members decry the Church's huge nest egg yet relatively little humanitarian efforts, instead assigning a financial value to volunteer hours also provided by the tithe-payers and claiming that dollar value as a contribution to make the Church sound like it gave more money than it did while retaining its amassed wealth.
I'll stop here. The essay is longer, and concludes with several factors that will likely continue to cause declines. If you haven't read the essay, it's worth a read. One final note toward the end is that because of the Church's approach to missionary work, the cost per convert is exponentially higher than in the two primary competing faiths mentioned (Jehovah's Witness and Seventh-day Adventist). Since the Church has huge coffers, it can get away with that for a long time, but it won't yield actual growth without some substantial changes.
- Were any of these findings surprising to you?
- If you had the Church's resources at your disposal, in light of this data, what would you do to reverse the downward trends in growth? How would you increase new members and reduce attrition?
- What do you think Church leaders will do to address these issues, assuming they agree they are a concern?
Discuss.
[1] The essay goes into great detail about the evolution of the teaching materials missionaries use, concluding;
The LDS Church's missionary program reforms have rearranged the furniture without remedying core pathologies. After more than a fifty-year retention crisis resulting in the loss of millions of converts and multiple iterations of missionary program "reform," the LDS Church today presents just four lessons that can be taught in as little as three to five minutes. That this is viewed as satisfying teaching requirements for prospective converts bodes poorly for the faith's future.
David Stewart
By contrast, my parents, who were baptized in the 1950s, underwent 52 weekly lessons. That's completely unlike my experience as a missionary. We were taught that the rule that investigators needed to attend at least one Church meeting prior to baptism (perhaps to combat "baseball baptisms" in which the investigator didn't even know where the Church was) included them going to Church and being immediately baptized after the service.
Stewart also points out that leaders have "downplayed institutional culpability," referring to Elder Ballard stating in 2019 that "Church leaders don't know where these practices began," but then showing that the practices were present in the manuals given to missionaries.
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