Salt Lake Tribune data columnist Andy Larsen looks at the last 40 years of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership data to see trends in growth rates in Utah and the United States.
21 states have fewer Latter-day Saints than they did two years ago. And while Utah’s numbers are climbing, the LDS share of its population is falling.
So to find out, I looked at the past 40 years of state-by-state official church membership figures — reports starting in 1983, then every two years from 1987 to 1999, then every year from 2000 to 2021 with a break in 2020 due to the pandemic. Those have been archived at the research siteLet’s get started with the basic membership statistics given by the church. Here’s a chart with every report since 1983 for the entire United States.
You see those 8% annualized growth numbers between 1983 and 1987, and, I have to be honest, it’s a little suspicious from a data-integrity point of view: It’s such an outlier over the years that come later. But after about 1997, you do see a more consistent decline in growth rates over the past 25 years, from about 2% a year annually to about 0.5% annually now.
Maybe it’s just my political brain, but I also noticed a trend in that list: The top 12 states in terms of Latter-day Saint growth in the past two years are “red” ones that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Eight of the bottom 10 are “blue” and voted for Joe Biden. For the nation overall, we see similar trends: The percentage of church members grew more substantially during the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s before turning a bit flat in the 2010s.
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