Survey Research Perspective: Is The Church Growing?
Looking at self-identifying Mormons over time with CES data
Introduction
Last week, I looked at some of the official numbers from the Church Audit report. Overall, we saw a decline in the rate of change of membership, but still positive growth. What do we see in the latest survey research?
Data
I’ll be saying the next few points a lot in the Mormon Metrics posts…
The biggest issue with survey research and Mormons is that its hard to get a good understanding of trends and crosscuts because the group is so small. Going off of the census and the church records as of July 2 2024, there are 336 million people and 6.8 million members which means Latter-day Saints make up about 2% of the US population. So, the group we’re working with is just a small fraction of the whole pie.
Fortunately, several public surveys’ samples have gotten much bigger recently. Large samples unlock hidden truths of these smaller subgroups that weren’t possible to detect before. But, the drawback is that we haven’t been doing these surveys for very long. In our data’s case, the time series starts in 2007. Another drawback is a lot of these large surveys are in the US, and we don’t get the world perspective we saw in the last post.
In this post, I use data from the Cooperative Election Study which has yearly samples some up to 60k respondents.
Charts
What would be sublime would be overlaying this chart with the official LDS membership numbers, but, alas, the church does not have US published membership data for this type of chart… so we’ll have to use what we have. Here are my takeaways from the above:
Our point estimates are tightly hugging the trendline and consistently trail downward over time going from around 1.8 to around 1.1 people out of 100 self identifying as Mormon. At this point, you may be thinking “Oh my a 0.7 percentage point change? big deal.“ But, look at where it started. If our point estimates are accurate, this tells us a few interesting things:
1.8 points to 1.1 points is a 38% decrease in proportional self-ID Mormon in the US from 2007 to 20231. That’s a big movement relatively!
This also might give us a hint to active vs. less active members proportions in the US. If Mormons make up 2% of the population according to church records in 2023 and 1% self-ID as Mormon in the US. The activity rate might be around 50%2.
Even with 60k samples election years, error bars are still to large to confidently detect change (or rather reject that there has been no change). Let me repeat… statistically, we cannot say there is a definitive change. However, the gold dots on the chart are our best guess of the trend which is decreasing.
Caveats and Etc.
In my previous post, I talked about how the rates of change are still positive and membership growing on church records in the world. However, I cannot compare this to survey research data as there are no surveys (that I am aware of) of the world population that I could analyze with sufficiently large samples. The church also doesn’t release a time series of membership trends in the US.
So, in other words, the survey data I have and the worldwide church statistics aren’t super comparable. The closest thing they have is a trend of the North American continent, but this would include all of Central America, Mexico, and Canada (+the Caribbean?) not just the US like I have in the survey.
Looking at the above figure (official church publication), we see the slope is starting to flatten, as discussed in my previous post.
If I were to guess, I would assume that official US membership has more or less flatlined and the growth we see in the chart above may be driven by converts in Central America or other parts of the North American continent. This would support the seeming decline of self-identifying members in the US while having the continued growing membership in the North American region. Again, it is just a guess.
In a future post, perhaps I can find a survey from another country and compare surveys with the Church’s numbers there. Still room for lots of thought and work.
Discussion
Do you think the Church is still growing inside the US? What about outside the US?
This doesn’t necessarily mean that people that were Mormon are no longer identifying as Mormon. It means that proportionally fewer people in the US identify as Mormon. This could be a result of say another group growing really fast.
Of course, this number will be skewed by children because CES doesn’t survey children and we don’t have an adult only sample from church records. I hypothesize the percent active will likely be higher than 50% because if the CES also surveyed children, Mormons would make up a bigger proportion of children since their birthrates are higher. So, maybe my best guess is 51-54% activity rate which I don’t think your local Mormon bishop would disagree with.