Let's Look at Latter-day Saints by State

Some are obvious, but there are a few surprises in the mix

Photo by Domino Studio on Unsplash

Introduction

Many of my friends remember being taught about the Mormon Trail in school. The Mormon Trail had a huge influence on where Latter-day Saints live today with settling Salt Lake City and other places in the Mountain West. Today, I want to look at a few charts about where Mormons are living today in the United State using the most recent data.

Data

I scraped data from the statistics part of the Church website. It has the current membership count broken down by each country, region, and, for the US, each state. I have all of this data and the code I used saved here if anyone else is interested in using it.

Charts

The first chart is very loooooong, but has every state sorted by number of Latter-day Saints. This is all data from 2023.

Utah is unsurprisingly at the top. But, did you expect California to be above both Idaho and Arizona? That’s right. There are almost twice as many members in California than either Idaho or Arizona.

The states at the bottom of the list are unsurprising. After all, they have some of the lowest state population, so it tracks that they would also have the lowest Mormon population by state.

This next chart controls for state population to provide a different perspective. So, below shows the percent Mormon out of total state population.

Even though only 2% of California’s population is Mormon that makes up the second biggest group!

Did you know nearly 2 in 3 Utahns have church records? That’s even higher than I expected. 1 in 4 Idahoans. 1 in 7 Wyomingites. Wyoming has a higher percentage of Latter-day Saints than Arizona and Nevada. Alaska was surprising to me. 1 in 20 Alaskans are Latter-day Saint (as well as Montanans and Hawaiians).

Note how sparse it is on the east coast and especially the Northeast. Ironically, less than half a percent of the population in the religion’s founding state of New York are Latter-day Saints.

We’ll look at one more chart. This one is the same as the first, but on a map and in proportion out of the total Latter-day Saint population instead of state population.

Even though 1% of Texans are Latter-day Saints, it has 6% of the US population of Latter-day Saints. A sleeper state for me was Florida. There are so few Latter-day Saints on the East coast yet Florida actually has 3% of the US Latter-day Saint population even though it is surrounded by states that have 0%s and 1%s. The same size as Nevada. More than Colorado or Oregon’s Latter-day Saint population. Before you say, its just because Florida’s large population… New York state has a similar population, yet there are ~50% fewer Latter-day Saints there.

Discussion

Were there any sleeper Latter-day Saint states from your perspective on any of these graphs?