How Many Mormons Are Actually Active?

Here's my best guess with some math and strong assumptions

Photo by Kyler Nixon on Unsplash

TLDR;

Unfortunately in this post, its a bit more dense that my typical ones. After a lot of assumptions and some math, I arrive at 37% of the church worldwide is active from all Church records. I really try to keep these easily digestable, but in this post, I want to explain my thoughts clearly at the expense of denser text.

Introduction

Because of limited data the church releases, it is difficult to find the true activity rate of its members. And, to be fair, activity can be defined in different ways. The weekly attenders and never attenders easily fit into this definition. But, what about the others? There are people that come once a month, only on holidays, and some that come every once in a long while. How should these people be categorized?

The real problem is that many people who have left the church and will likely never return are counted as members. So, the goal of this post is to get a sense of number of never attenders vs. the seldom, sometimes, and active members.

In other posts, I guess at % active mormons number using self-identifying Mormons in survey data and look at some data by congregation (certain number of men must exist in each congregation), but I wanted to take a fresh approach today.

My Discovery

In my last post, I talked about Mormon birthrates. While I was looking through the data, I realized something that may have been obvious to others, but not to me.

The church releases data on birthrates, but only children of record - meaning those children which have been blessed as a baby. I suppose some inactive members could want their children blessed, but I assume that the less likely someone is to attend church, the less likely they would be to bless their baby. Thus, this is close to the distinction I wanted - never attenders vs. the seldom, sometimes, and active members¹. If we knew the birthrate of active members, we could use the children of record number and get the number of people who are active like in the formula below:

Well, we don’t know the crude birthrate of active members. But, from national surveys, we have an idea of fertility/birthrates of Mormons vs. national numbers. And, according to an analysis by Ryan Burge with data from 2020², he estimates that there are about 2.1 children per family and for Mormons 2.8 which is about 33% higher³.

We do know the US crude birth rate in 2022 is 11. If we took (yet another) liberty, and assumed that the Mormon crude birth rate is also 33% higher, the crude Mormon birthrate is 14.6⁴. So, moving a few things around, we can plug our numbers in below:

Now, in the wake of arithmetic and strong assumptions, we can get our final number of active members in 2023… 6,410,548. And, if we divide this by the total number of members on the records, 17,255,394, we get 37% of mormon members are active worldwide in 2023 as my best guess.

Thanks for making it this far into the post. Please read through the assumptions at work which I tried to include in the footnotes. Hopefully, given the data limitations, this provided a useful guess for you. See you next week!

Discussion

Would love to hear thoughts if you have thoughts about how my guess could be improved, or if its even worth trying! Given the data that is available, what do you think is the best way to find the mormon activity rate?

1. Whether someone gets their baby blessed or not is not a perfect measure of activity in the church, but I use it here.

2. The numbers from Ryan Burge are from the US, whereas I use the world wide numbers from the church. The birth rates inside and outside the US are likely different, but I assume they are the same here. I would have used the US CoR numbers only, but they don’t release that data!

3. I am aware that this is looking at the average number of children 35-45 year olds have. So, it may make more sense to look back in time at numbers 30-40 years ago. But, we’re taking lots of liberties and guesstimating in this post if you couldn’t tell, so lets keep rolling.

4. I guess at the crude birthrate of Mormons assuming that the proportional relationship between Mormons and US in general survey-based fertility is equivalent to the proportional relationship between Mormons and US with the crude birth rate. I imagine these are correlated, but I doubt they are proportionally equivalent.