Counting Mormons: study says LDS numbers inflated

THE MORMON CHURCH claims to have some 5.7 million members in the United States, which would make the Utah-based denomination the fourth largest church body in the nation after the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church. Often cited as one of the fastest-growing churches, with a clean-cut image and a focus on family values, the Mormon Church would seem poised to rival within a decade the size of the UMC, which has suffered declines in recent years and now has just below 8 million members.

But many researchers say that the official figures for Mormon membership in the U.S.--as well as the church's claims of having 13 million members worldwide--are greatly inflated or overstated. At fault, studies say, is the church's policy of counting as members nearly all baptized Mormons, including those who are lapsed in membership or who cannot be located.

If more customary church tallies and membership estimates were used, scholars say, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of the church) would have to cut its publicly announced figure nearly in half to just a little over 3 million. For the sake of comparison, that would put Mormon membership on a par with that of the 3.1-million-member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The landmark American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 provided an eye-opener. Researchers at City University of New York projected from its random sampling of 50,000 households that there were 2,787,000 Mormons. In contrast, the LDS Church claimed 5.3 million members in 2001--nearly twice the number of self-identified Mormons that year in the ARIS survey. To make another comparison, that survey puts the Mormons at the same rank as Episcopalians in the United States. About 3 million Americans call themselves Episcopalians in polls (though membership figures for the Episcopal Church, compiled for the 2007 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, lists the denomination as having 2.2 million members--15th place in membership rankings).

Virtually that same 2-to-1 ratio was noted in a detailed study reported in October at a national meeting of sociologists of religion by Kirk Hadaway, research director for the Episcopal Church, and Penny Long Marler of Samford University. "The LDS data are highly inflated according to the standards used by most other religious bodies," Hadaway said in an interview this year.

Episeopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians and other Protestants tend to trim their congregational rolls periodically to eliminate people who have not maintained their connection to the church. "Being baptized is a serious issue in the LDS Church, so they do not think it is appropriate to remove inactive baptized members," said Hadaway, who is also currently president of the Religious Research Association, which fosters social research for church leaders.

The Roman Catholic Church also tends to include many inactive members in parish and diocese totals, but its current figure of 69 million members roughly matches the number of self-identified Catholics reported in national polls. "For the LDS Church the situation is even worse in that they count many more people than they can even identify," said Hadaway.

Officials of the LDS Church admit that there are plenty of nonpracticing Mormons, but they do not want to give up on them. Two years ago in Utah, one-tenth of the state's onetime Mormons--equivalent to the population of Salt Lake City--were listed in the church's "address unknown file," according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The church recruits volunteers to try to find lost Mormons in the U.S. and Canada who may have moved, changed their last name or joined another faith. But everyone who has been baptized Mormon--usually at age eight--is included in official membership totals, which undoubtedly include some who have died.

A disaffected Mormon may formally request removal from the LDS Church, and the church may remove someone from the rolls for reasons of apostasy. But any unaffiliated Mormons who cannot be located are still counted as members until they would have reached the age of 110. Only then is their membership dropped because they are presumed dead.

The ARIS survey concluded that the Mormon Church was baptizing converts about as fast as it was losing members. That ratio was also confirmed by the study last year by Hadaway and Marler, who were given access to "proprietary" data by the church. One graph from that study (see chart) shows that from 1999 to 2004 conversions roughly equaled "defections and apostasy." As a result, more than three quarters of Mormon growth in the U.S. was due to the high Mormon birthrate, which outpaces the rate of deaths.

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THE QUESTION OF whether the LDS Church uses social statistics to promote itself in public was posed in January on the Web site of the Mormon Social Science Association, whose ranks include Mormons, ex-Mormons and non-Mormons. The unnamed questioner asked whether the church usually reports social statistics "in a comprehensive and honest way, showing both achievements and shortcomings, or just for occasional propaganda?"