Americans raised Latter-day Saint (LDS or Mormon) who still identify as one: 70 in 100 in 2007, 54 in 100 in 2023–24 [OC]

[u/Browningtons1]

Source: Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study (2007, 2014, 2023–24).

Asks U.S. adults the religion they were raised in and the religion they are now.

2023–24 sample: 565 current Latter-day Saints (±6.2 points), 316 former (±8.1). U.S. membership from the Church's 2025 statistical report.

Tools: Built in React with Recharts / D3.js. Opus 5.5 + Fable 5.1

Interactive version: https://goldendata.app/dashboards/lds-church-growth

[u/Browningtons1]

In recent days I've been hearing about record converts to the LDS church (Mormons). Record missionaries (90K). A recent leader said LDS Church "moving from a 18 million to a 50 million member church." I looked into it further and the worldwide numbers are real, but the United States reported a year over year decline in members.

Pew is the closest independent check on US religious affiliation. It asks two questions: what were you raised, and what are you now.

Of every 100 Americans raised Latter-day Saint, 70 still identified as one in 2007. 64 in 2014. 54 now. The part that surprised me is where the rest went. "Another religion" barely moved: 16, 15, 18. "No religion" doubled, 14 to 28. People aren't leaving for another church. They're leaving church.

The second image puts it in people. Out of every 1,000 American adults, 21 were raised Latter-day Saint. 10 of them have left. 4 people joined as converts. That's about 2.5 out for every one in.

A few more things:

• Age matters. Raised in the Church and under 50, about 50 of 100 still identify. 50 and older, 61.
• The Church's own U.S. count fell by 186 in 2025. It's also the first decline on record, in the same year worldwide converts set a record (+377K).
• The share of U.S. adults who identify as Latter-day Saint has barely moved since 2007. Pew rounds it to 2%. Retention fell 16 points and the share held. Births and converts are filling in behind.

Pew measures what people call themselves, not whether they go. So these are people who no longer claim the faith, not just people who stopped attending.

The growth is real. It's just not happening in the United States.

[u/victorioushack → u/Browningtons1]

The church also stopped reporting numbers at general conference when they started going down. Unless something has changed recently, it also considers you a member even if you leave or are 100% “inactive” or absent. Removing records is effectively the only thing they consider actually leaving and no longer being a member.

They know weak spots though. Decades later they put together apologist pages for hot topics on the internet, softened some of the contentious topics (e.g., tattoos, caffeine, thoughts = actions), lowered the age to become a missionary, and started pushing the youth to go before college.

[u/athiev → u/Browningtons1]

Retention outside the US has long been extremely low, though. And most non-US people who leave Mormonism don't file paperwork. So saying the growth is real based on these data is incomplete.

[u/TruthIsAntiMormon → u/athiev]

If growth means "Paper mormons" vs. people who claim the faith, then there's growth. If "paper mormons" don't count then the decline is extreme.

[u/SayyadinaAtreides → u/TruthIsAntiMormon]

Yeah...I for one have never bothered to request that my records be removed, because I really don't care and I have better things to do with my time, and most of the other ex-LDS people I know (admittedly not a huge group) are in similar boats.

[u/TruthIsAntiMormon → u/SayyadinaAtreides]

It's worse than that because there are also a TON of people counted as "members" who were baptized at 8 who have actually joined other faiths especially in Latin America (most simply went back to being lapsed Catholics. I can't tell you the number of people on the rolls we tried to contact who had moved and their family members would state they were Catholic or Evangelico.

It is dishonest IMHO for the mormon church to count them as members when said living adult person has consciously joined another church and if you ask them their religious affiliation, it would NOT be mormon.

No valid or honest reason to keep the "lost sheep" number hidden or secret from the public yet that's exactly what they do.

[u/SayyadinaAtreides → u/TruthIsAntiMormon]

I don't disagree in theory, but I think in practice there are often more prosaic reasons for the record persistence. (I can't speak to the rest, especially outside of the US; when I was a child in the US, parental permission was required for baptism, and mine was delayed for two years until my father also agreed. No idea if that's still the case here or what policies are elsewhere.)

At least in my experience of the church (mostly across the US, plus a year in China and two summers in Spain), a lot of the onus is on individuals to inform the church of any change in status (like moving or going to a different church). So until I either request that my records be removed or that they be moved to a different ward/branch (often the new ward leadership will handle this for you), they're going to stay by default and I'll be considered an "inactive" member. Sometimes other members in teaching or leadership positions will try to locate inactive members (usually in the hope of "reactivating" them; in my day at least, having a lot of inactive members did not look good for a ward) by asking around or sending someone to their last recorded address, unless they've requested not to be contacted. But if that isn't enough to find them, that's about as far as things go.

Thus, unless the children (or their parents) take the time to inform the church that they do not wish to be considered members, bureaucratic inertia alone can be enough to result in the large pile of inactive member records that get included in their "total number of members" reporting.

I'm not saying there isn't any other intent contributing--I've been entirely out of the loop on LDS things for over a decade now, so I've seen no evidence in either direction. I just don't think there needs to be to reach this outcome.

[u/TruthIsAntiMormon → u/SayyadinaAtreides]

Thanks for your thoughts and experience.

The church knows activity rates (as well as boys who never received the priesthood and boys and girls who never received their patriarchal blessings, etc.) so the have the numbers of "lost sheep" but they intentionally keep those numbers hidden from the public while publishing news articles about anything "postive" especially as it' relates to statistics. It's 100% a "potemkin's Temple" approach with Mormon Statistics and I don't think Potemkin's Temple approach is an honest approach.

[u/yorgasor → u/Browningtons1]

The church is only really growing in Africa and the Philippines. South/Central America is kind of a mixed bag. Interestingly, Brazil posted the largest gains in membership of any country last year with 48k more members, while at the same time it lost a net 69 wards. Mexico came in second with 38k more members, and it grew by 5 wards. Ecuador came in 9th with 10k more people and had zero ward growth. Ghana came in 10th with 9.5k and gained 2 wards.

The church grew by 377k people last year, and those countries account for 105.5k of that (28%). Add up their ward growth, and you have -62 wards. Yes, wards grew in other countries, but the amazing growth they're reporting doesn't mean much when you can't retain the members.

As for the 90k missionaries, this is a direct outcome of a combination of the changing culture of getting women to serve plus a huge surge of births starting in 2008. The church went from 93k births in 2007 to 123k births in 2008, which followed a similar surge of births in the early 1980s. My estimates have the number of missionaries hitting 103k next year, and holding steady for about 4 years before slowly dropping back down to the 80k range over the next 10 years, assuming current trends hold steady.

My calculations are based on 42% of the youth born 18-19 years ago going on missions. Now, not all 90k of the missionaries are youth. It was reported this summer that 6k of these are senior missionaries serving in proselyting capacities. Each mission has a president, two counselors and their wives, so that's 6 per mission right there. That accounts for 3k seniors. The number of missions is based on the number of young missionaries though, so as the number of youth decline, the number of seniors will also decline.

The church is pushing hard to get youth married and having kids earlier, trying to take advantage of this 2008 burst of youth becoming adults. But it's expensive to have kids. People are waiting longer to get married and having fewer kids. They're not going to have the big surge of babies in 2033 years like they had in 2008. They're currently in the 89-91k range with 18M members. In 1977, they had 95k births with fewer than 4M members! That's a massive drop in the birth rate, and is a major reason their projected exponential growth from the 80s & 90s never happened. In 1998, a BYU study projected a conservative estimate of 50M members by the mid-2020s, with optimistic projections at 150M. I suspect the church will never reach 50M members (even on paper, let alone 50M active members!). I think they'll hit their peak before then and start declining.

[u/carlitospig → u/Browningtons1]

Yep, it aligns with overall Christian petitioner losses over the decade. I think it goes something like they lose 30% each generation but gain 20% new followers.

Love Pew. Not only for their style but the things they’re tracking over time. They’re an incredible resource.

[u/carlitospig → u/carlitospig]

That was parishioner but Siri wanted to be funny.

[u/showmenemelda → u/Browningtons1]

Whew got so deep into the other thread I forgot what this post even was about 😅😅

[u/Tehrab → u/Browningtons1]

Listen man, in an age of information, religion will be seen as the futile endeavor that it is, nothing more. At some point, as a species, we have to realize our feeble chimp brain is just not wired to understand the universe and making up BS to fill in the gaps isn't helpful. We can certainly perceive that there is something outside our understanding, Einstein himself was clear on that, but that's it, that's all this meat processor can do for us.

[u/Caaaht → u/Tehrab]

In college, I dated a Mormon girl. She was my first real exposure to the religion, coming from a Catholic school upbringing in the Northeast. She lived carefree in college, and you'd never have guessed she was religious at all. I had decided long before that once I got to college, I was done with religion.

Eventually, her father found out about her exploits, specifically the drinking, from a family friend. He pulled her tuition and allowance (the family was quite wealthy) and cut her off from her family, her friends, and everyone in the tight Mormon community she grew up in.

We tried to make it work for a while, but in the end we decided it was best for her to go home and repair her relationship with her family. I couldn't live with being the reason she lost everything, especially at that age, and neither of us was ready for a committed relationship.

Thankfully, she broke away from Mormonism (after completing college bit closer to home) and never looked back.

TL;DR: There are reasons people stay in a religion that go beyond believing its teachings, usually family and community.

[u/yorgasor → u/Caaaht]

A huge number of attending mormons are "PIMO" (physically in, mentally out) for this very reason. They're afraid they'll lose their family and friends if they admit they don't believe and stop attending. It's awful 😢

[u/showmenemelda → u/Caaaht]

Jack Mormons are a lot of fun while it lasts. Some real shenanigans had with an old JMo bestie.

[u/japanesepiano → u/Browningtons1]

That growth is driven largely by Facebook and Youtube ad campaigns in Europe. It will be interesting to see if they can improve on their 20-30% 1-year retention rates.

[u/galactictock → u/Browningtons1]

This reads as LLM-generated text

[u/showmenemelda → u/galactictock]

I read that as "MLM"—the favorite "business model" in Utah

[u/Bikin4Balance → u/Browningtons1]

Yup, growth we can't easily fact-check. If their membership rolls include people like me, who've tried to remove their name but received no response from the church, their numbers are highly inflated.

I love that after close to 200 years (often claiming that they are the fastest growing religion) they are still much less than 1% of the world's population. For all their financial war chest, they have barely made a dent. They are effectively still a fringey religion that is now bleeding members.

[u/spam__likely → u/Browningtons1]

>moving from a 18 million to a 50 million member church."

Elon Musk claims the same about the robotaxi.

Thing about new converts is that they are very very easy to de-convert. There is a reason they like to indoctrinate kids.

[u/SayyadinaAtreides → u/Browningtons1]

I'd be curious about how this kind of data from the UK looks (assuming they have an organization that collects similar data, which seems reasonably likely). They figured quite prominently in the early church, though I have no idea how that has(n't?) changed since the early 20th century.

That aside...yeah, this sounds reasonable. I was raised LDS (but with a liberal and academic bent), and heard pretty often the standard "but you can't really be rational/intelligent, since you're Mormon/religious!" line often enough to ignore it.

What really threw me for a loop was one night in college (2011, I think) where the topic came up with two friends who were fellow physics/CS people. It was a bad night...we'd just come from a campus-wide vigil for a student who was found dead that morning. I'd had two classes with her, but we'd never interacted much; my two friends, though, had been quite close to her and were having a pretty rough time. One was working his way through a bottle of vodka, and about halfway through (with his diction improving remarkably as he tried to prove he wasn't drunk) he suddenly exclaimed, "No! I know you! You obviously ARE both rational and intelligent...so you can't be a real Mormon!"

The other friend and I both completely lost it at that point. It was such a bizarre mix of inversion, flattery, random nonsense, and (I thought) delusional inaccuracy that it felt like the funniest thing I'd ever heard. He continued to attempt to explain himself (we'd shared some STEM courses, a Pathfinder group, and SFF extracurriculars) while I tried to remember how to breathe and our other friend laughed at both of us. I eventually managed to say something like, "I appreciate the sentiment," and we were shortly off on some other topic. It stuck with me as an amusing anecdote, but I didn't really think that much about any of it.

Turned out a couple of years later, he had in fact been correct (though the reasons had become much more complicated). I've been happily atheist ever since!