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Purpose: To better inform the public - mormons and non-mormons alike - of mormon ideas, trends, and demographic movements backed with the best data available. Generally, I utilize quality survey datasets such as GSS, NationScape, and the CES. At times, I will also scrape data from public sources to find insights.
I try to analyze and describe not persuade and prescribe.
This information is disseminated in a weekly blog out on Friday mornings usually with a new data figure to talk about.
Contact & Feedback: Reach me at alex@bassempirical.com. Hire me if you like! Also, I love hearing feedback from readers. Happy to hear your ideas of good future Mormon Metrics posts / data sources or anything else on your mind. If you want to write your own piece, I welcome contributors. Pitch it to me and if it's aligned with the platform, the stage is yours!
About me: I am an applied social scientist and data scientist. I have an undergraduate degree in political science and a masters in data science. I have worked at two political polling firms and, more recently, as a contracted data scientist for Meta.
Mormon Metrics has been cited by the Salt Lake Tribune, Religion News Service, the Deseret News, and KUER.
Terminology: Some latter-day saints may be concerned because my title isn’t the correct name of the church. However, this blog is about the entirety of the Mormon sect including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Community of Christ, and others. So, in reference to the name of the sect, I use the name “Mormon” in my blog and hence the title “Mormon Metrics.”
More content: If you are looking for more Mormon Metrics content, I post weekly video shorts on Instagram, charts on X/Twitter, and the occasional Youtube upload.
A Note on AI: Mormon Metrics is a one-person operation. I work full-time at Meta and run this publication in the margins of my day — early mornings, weekends, and stolen hours between meetings. AI tools have become a genuine part of how I work, and I want to be transparent about that.
I use AI to help me move faster: drafting prose, structuring analysis, checking logic, and turning data outputs into readable narratives. It’s been especially useful in the technical side of the work — writing and debugging code, building data visualizations, and accelerating the kind of pipeline work that would otherwise eat hours. What used to take a full weekend can now happen in an evening.
What AI doesn’t do is supply the facts. Every number, trend, and claim on this site comes from primary sources — church records, survey data, government datasets — that I access, evaluate, and verify myself. I am responsible for the accuracy of everything published here. If something is wrong, that’s on me, not a model.
The goal of Mormon Metrics has always been to bring rigorous, data-driven analysis to questions about LDS demographics and American religious life. AI helps me do that more efficiently. It doesn’t change what I’m trying to do or who is accountable for doing it well.
