Are LDS Leadership Representative By World Region?
Do the leaders represent world LDS members by birthplace?
Introduction
With the announcement of the new first presidency this past week, and the soon future calling for another person to be an apostle, I thought it would be fun to look into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ leadership and if they are representative of the church population.
I am going to take a few posts to explore different aspects of this question starting with regional representation. Do the birthplaces of the current church leadership reflect the general membership?
Let’s take a look!
Data
Today, I compare the proportion of individuals on church records in each region by the birthplaces of full-time members of clergy. I did not include area general authorities since they are not full-time and are released after a few years, but all the general authority seventy, general officers, and the first presidency and apostles are included. According to my data, there are 152 people who meet this description. All of the data in this post is directly from the church website here and here.
Chart
I was actually quite surprised by this chart.
Over-representation of North America and Europe didn’t surprise me, but did you know that the African full-time clergy representation is actually aligned with the actual membership of Africans? This is obviously not the case with the First Presidency and Apostles, but with the broader general authority leadership it is.
This is also true for the Caribbean, Oceania, and Asia.
The place where we see the membership/leadership disparity is in Central and Southern America. In these regions, members make up twice the proportion in numbers compared to representation in leadership.
I can already hear the comments section saying “Central and South America have a lower activity rate” to which I would respond I’d love to see a resource that says Central and South America have a lower activity rate than Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. Honestly, it could very well be true, but do we have any definitive sources?
Is the data in this what you expected? Any thoughts or observations you want to point out?
Let me know what you think and see you next week!
I’ll release the dataset and code when I have completed the series. After the series is complete, I’ll go back and add it in to this.
I would love to see the breakout of Mexico.
It would also be interesting to see this with Area 70s included.
Another data point would be by country, when was the first stake created? It takes decades before a country is seasoned enough to produce general leaders, because most of those senior leaders are needed for local leadership like stake presidencies and area 70s.
I know I already commented, but I wonder how much English Proficiency would affect this? Perhaps there are many otherwise qualified and prepared individuals in underrepresented areas but who don't speak English well enough? I'm not aware of a Church requirement that general authorities must speak English, but it wouldn't surprise me if it existed.