Introduction and Episode Overview

Ryan Cragun [00:00:00] Foreign.

John Dehlin [00:00:06] And welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast and the first Mormon Stories podcast episode of 2024. Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for for thanks for joining us today. Today we are going to be bringing back to Mormon Stories a guest who has joined us many times in the past. We've got Dr. Ryan Cragan here to talk about to sort of help answer the question, is the Mormon Church in decline in Utah? And we're also going to be just providing kind of a little bit of the background and the history of the Mormon Church, the Mormon Church's sort of growth or shrinkage over the past several years, if not decades.

John Dehlin [00:00:50] And so we really hope that you all enjoy this presentation. We are live streaming tonight, so we welcome all of our YouTube and Facebook viewers and listeners and we're wishing you all a happy new Year. So without any further ado, let's bring back Dr. Ryan Craigen to Mormon Stories Podcast. Hey, Ryan.

Ryan Cragun [00:01:11] Hey, how are we doing?

John Dehlin [00:01:12] Good. Thanks for joining us.

Ryan Cragun [00:01:13] My pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:01:14] Hey, do you want to tell us, give us a little bit of a background just so that people who aren't familiar with you kind of know a little bit about you and what you do.

Ryan Cragun [00:01:23] Sure. So I'm a college professor. Right. Got my PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2007, and since then I've worked at the University of Tampa. My PhD is in sociology. I study religion. And within that I have kind of two areas. So one is Mormonism writ large, so lots of different aspects of that. And then the other piece is basically those who are not religious. And that involves everything from like really big macro stuff, so kind of international and global trends all the way down to kind of wealth it means to be an atheist. So those are kind of my two big areas. And been at it for a while.

John Dehlin [00:01:58] And tell us some of the. You've published at least a couple books, one recently. Now go ahead and tell us your books because your books are great.

Ryan Cragun [00:02:06] I'm not going to remember all the books. That sounds awkward. Sorry. The most recent one, I'll just mention the most recent one came out in May of this year or, sorry, last year, I guess it's 2024. You said that. It's called Beyond Doubt, the Secularization of Society. It's with New York University Press, and that's one that is kind of one of those big macro ones. We're looking at secularization around the world. We look at over 100 countries and we're kind of looking at global trends to see what's going on. Maybe we'll come back to it. There's some, some really interesting stuff in there about religious decline around the world.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] I love it. And I'm going to go ahead and show your book page because there are so many books, it'd be hard to remember them all.

Ryan Cragun [00:02:46] Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] But there's the Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism. There's Organized Secularism in the United States. I don't even know that I knew about that one. How to defeat religion in 10 easy steps and one that I think we had you on to discuss on Mormon stories, what you don't know about religion, but should, Could I Vote for a Mormon for President? And, and the like. So that's, that's a lot of good work, Ryan. So again, we're really grateful to have you back on really quickly, the article that we're here to discuss today. I'm going to go ahead and put it up on the screen really quickly.

Mormons Are No Longer a Majority in Utah

John Dehlin [00:03:30] The article is entitled Mormons Are no Longer a Majority in Utah. Causes, Consequences and Implications for the Sociology of Religion. And it's, it's, you're the first author, but it's also co authored by Bethany Goel and another name that's familiar to those who are super fans of Mormon stories, Dr. Rick Phillips. So that's what we're here to discuss. Are you pretty happy with the reception around this article, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:04:01] Shocked is probably a better description.

John Dehlin [00:04:03] Really.

Ryan Cragun [00:04:04] I mean, you know, it's funny, the background on this. We didn't do the study for this piece, right. I got a grant three or four years ago to study how Mormons think about and conceptualize science. And so that's the bigger project. But I needed a big sample of members of the LDS Church. So I just said, well, let me get a representative sample of the state of Utah. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. And it was only when the data came in and I saw, you know, we have a sample of like 1,909 people that just over 800 of them identified self identified as LDS.

Ryan Cragun [00:04:37] I was like, oh, that's not the number that we hear about all the time. And that's what led to this, to writing this piece. So this was never actually the intent of the study. This is like a total tangential side piece from the main project.

John Dehlin [00:04:50] What number were you expecting in 2023?

Ryan Cragun [00:04:54] Well, I mean, that's, that's a great question. Right? So if you're going on what the Salt Lake Tribune keeps reporting over the years, it's right around 60%. And so I was thinking, oh well, it should be somewhere close to that. Now I do pay somewhat close attention to this. Rick and I, you mentioned Rick. We've published a number of things talking about what's going on in Utah. So we knew that like self identification is probably not as and the LDS church's numbers are weird and we'll probably come back to that. But I was thinking, you know, maybe 50%, but when it dropped below 50%, I was like, that's kind of interesting, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:05:25] Like no one's seen that. So maybe it's worth writing something up about this and let's see where it goes. And then if I'm a little slow tonight, I do apologize. I took a red eye overnight to get back from Utah. I was visiting family. So this whole kind of media thing of, you know, I was on two news stations out there in Utah and it was in the Salt Lake Tribune a bunch of different, you know, media outlets pick this up. I wasn't expecting any of that. I was out visiting family for the holidays and trying to go skiing and suddenly I didn't bring anything nice to wear. Right. And suddenly I'm on the news. So that was a bit surprising.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] Well, I'm happy because you guys do really good work. So I'm really happy that your work is getting much deserved attention. So before we jump into the article, you know, I'm aware that, that we do have a lot of devoted long term viewers and listeners that will kind of know the history of the Mormon Church and demographics, but we also have never Mormons who, who tune into the show. Ryan, I don't know if you know this, but our YouTube audience identifies as, as about 50% never Mormon.

Ryan Cragun [00:06:31] Oh, wow.

John Dehlin [00:06:32] Which is kind of interesting. So a lot of former members of other high demand religions, etc. Or just people curious in high demand religions or cults. So. So for those who haven't tuned into the past and don't understand why the demographics and the LDS church questions are interesting, I went ahead and just put together some slides to give a quick background. And Ryan, I don't, I'm not putting you on the spot to endorse anything that I've shown or even have an expertise on anything that I'm about to show. But I'm going to invite you to comment on any anything that I show. Is that okay?

Ryan Cragun [00:07:06] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:07:07] And then that'll be a background just to kind of hopefully bring everybody up to speed and then we'll dive into the article itself. So a little bit of background. If you go to The Mormon Church's website today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It'll say that the church was formerly organized in a small log cabin in upstate New York in 1830. It took 117 years until 1947 for the church to grow from the initial six members to 1 million. And then it just has a graph which shows this super, super impressive exponential growth curve ending at 17 million. 17 million 246. 2,460 1,000 members with 31,330 congregations. Now, I did not realize that the church had passed that 17 million mark. That's kind of newish news to me. But really quickly, any quick reactions to that slide, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:08:11] Yes, I hate to do this, but like, every time I see the numbers that they present, because of my own work, work that I did with Rick Phillips and work that I've done with Ronald Lawson, we know those numbers are just wildly inflated. Like wildly, wildly inflated. And I think we're going to come back to that. So I've got, you've got some other slides, but we're certainly going to talk about that. It's not anywhere close to 17 million people who actually identify as members of the LDS Church around the world.

How the Church Has Reported Its Growth

John Dehlin [00:08:38] Okay, so, so all right, so that's a teaser. I went through and just kind of pulled some screenshots of some interesting websites or stories in the past. One One actually comes, I think, from the Signature Books website itself where it talked about Blaine Maxfield, CIO for the Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [00:09:04] Sometime in the mid, I don't know, 2010s, he gave a presentation at the University of Utah called LDS Tech. And he made the mistake of sharing some of the internal statistics. And what you'll note is that one of the statistics that he shared was that 36 out of 100 members, I believe in the US attended sacr meeting on a weekly basis. And those of us who were paying attention at the time were really quick to go, wow, I didn't know that that 36 out of 100 members in the US actually attended. That's a pretty low activity rate. And of course, within almost no time that article was taken down, it was rewritten.

John Dehlin [00:09:49] And what you see on the right hand side is what survived. But of course, the church quickly yanked those, you know, those numbers, the 36 out of, out of 100 number. The Deseret News yanked it. And then at the bottom there's this editor's note that some of the statistics originally reported in this article have been removed because they have not been verified by the LDS Church. This information was removed at the request of the speaker, not by the church. Any reactions to that, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:10:24] Yes, this is going to be a little bit weird. I don't think any of your listeners are going to know this, but I was actually invited by the Church Research Information Division, which is a bunch of researchers kind of like me, right, People who have masters or PhDs in social science, to give a talk, a presentation to them back in October. So I was actually in the church office building in October, right before the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Conference that was in Salt Lake City.

Ryan Cragun [00:10:53] I'm not going to go into all the details. They invited me to come talk about why people are leaving religion, broadly speaking. But afterwards, I was actually, I went out to lunch with three of them and I was having this conversation and they kind of asked me. They're like, well, you know, if you could find out anything, you know, from the church, basically, what would it be like? What would you really want to know? I would love to know the actual numbers, right? Like, I really, really want to know, you know, what's the actual membership you guys have to have that. And if you don't know, like, then can you tell us how many people are actually attending religious services on a weekly basis?

Ryan Cragun [00:11:25] I'm not trying to throw anybody into the bus. I don't want to get anybody into trouble, right? So I'm not trying to do that. But the response I got from those individuals was, well, we don't actually know precisely how many people are attending services on a weekly basis because that data come from ward clerks, and they're not the best at actually counting things. So even if we were to release a number, we don't know how reliable that number would be. And I was like, really? That's kind of surprising to me. I was a word clerk at one point. I thought I did a pretty good job of just counting, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:11:57] You only have to count to like three or 400 people. I mean, it's not that hard. And then you just submit that. I mean, that's pretty straightforward. So I wonder to what extent, like, I think they know the numbers, but they hedge when I actually asked them.

John Dehlin [00:12:10] And, and for those of you who don't know, those numbers are submitted, I believe, weekly. You know, they count those intentionally and, and they collect those numbers intentionally, and they're aggregated weekly at church headquarters. And when I used to work for church headquarters, which I did, I had access to those activity rates internally. Now, this is back in the 97, 98 kind of time period. But, but back then I did the math and it was about a third worldwide who, who were active and that was back in the 98 time period. So anyway, I think they know and I, I, I think they're just, it's not a great story, so why would you want to tell it? Who wants to join a loser? Or, or, or, I don't mean a loser who wants to join a dying or a shrinking organization. It's just not a great selling point.

Guest [00:13:02] Right.

John Dehlin [00:13:02] It doesn't instill confidence. I guess in the future maybe. I'm speculating. The, the next little video clip that, that Gerardo had me put together was a talk that Elder Mormon, Senior Mormon Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, current President of the quorum of the Twelve Apostles or Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Jeffrey R. Holland gave at a YSA event in Dallas about seven years ago. So this is April 24th and I'll just play the clip and, and shout out to Jonathan Streeter of thoughts on things and stuff for capturing this clip.

Guest [00:13:46] We're in the midst of, of incredible growth, staggering growth in the church. It's the single biggest problem we have. It's the best problem we could have, but it's the biggest we, we are reeling under the implications of the growth that we have in this church. Last Thursday I've been out here this Thursday I've been with Elder and Sister Holland and been with Elder and Sister Robbins this, this week. So we, I missed the temple meeting this Thursday, but a week ago Thursday we created 15 stakes and we're doing that Masamenos, every, every week. More, more or less.

Guest [00:14:26] It might not be 15, but it's the week before it was 12. Sometimes it's eight or whatever and it'll be a little uneven. But, but, but the point is, I mean we're, we're talking double digit stakes every week, every week of our lives and so be it. We're creating new missions. We created some new ones that will be in place this summer.

Guest [00:14:52] You're going to create some new stakes in the Southwest. You're doing it already? Well, you've already done it. We've been splitting stakes around here like crazy and, and, and we'll be doing that. Missionaries, temples, everything. Everything we're doing is bigger than it's ever been done in the history of the world. I'm not just talking about since October. I'm not just talking about since 1940, since Adam and Eve walked out of the garden. We've, you know, do you, do you think Alma and Amulek presided over a zone of 85,000 missionaries. Not on your life.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] Yeah, so I mean double digit state growth on a weekly basis. Is that your understanding? Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:15:44] I am always reticent to call somebody a liar. I don't know the actual numbers. They have the numbers and that's fine. But from the data I've seen 2016, they're claiming that they're having the most rapid growth they've ever had. That's patently absurd. There's no way that is true. Not even remotely true. Yeah, they're still adding some members, but they're losing a lot of members too. From everything that I've seen, the period of most rapid growth that the LDS Church has ever had, if we don't count when they were under a thousand, because those numbers are just weird when you're calculating growth statistics is the 60s, 70s and 80s, 2016, they weren't growing hardly at all. So I don't know where he's coming up with this. I don't buy it for a second. I'd really like to see the internal data, but of course they don't share that, so I'm not buying it.

John Dehlin [00:16:34] Yeah, yeah, and we'll talk about international growth and those 80s and 90s growth numbers in just a second. But, but Bill Real. This is one of the things that actually got podcaster Bill Real excommunicated because he did the, he tracked down the numbers and he ended up calling Elder Holland a liar, which I don't think is a constructive way to frame this. But, but if you look at Bill's post from several years ago, you know, it. It's basically, yes, there were 22 stakes in February of that year, but then there were seven in March and then zero in April and then six in May and then three in June and then six in July.

John Dehlin [00:17:16] So this idea of double digit, you know, new stakes every year, just, just the numbers don't bear, bear it out in any way. Now, I don't, I'm not one to think that, number one, Elder Holland is just one to just lie, bold face, lie to the members. And secondly, I think he's smart enough to know that he would get in trouble if he did this. So I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he had bad information because it just doesn't make sense that he, you know, that he would risk the embarrassment of being found out to be completely lying. But, but I think what this does show is psychologically this real need to communicate, to project a feeling of growth to the membership. Is that fair to say?

Ryan Cragun [00:18:08] Yeah, I think that is pretty fair to say. As you know, this story about our paper kind of came out. I had a number of people reach out and several people made the point that the reason why this actually was a big deal. Right. I mean, it's, it's a minor number in a kind of tangential study that I don't know that anybody would really care about. But it runs counter to the narrative. Right. So the narrative for decades in the LDS Church has been that they're growing, they're growing, they're growing. And then to find out that they're now a minority in the state of Utah just runs counter to the narrative.

Ryan Cragun [00:18:41] So I think you're right. I'm not going to call him a liar. I don't know what exactly what happened. I'd like to see the actual numbers. I don't know all the, all the information that's going on there. But what he's saying fits the narrative that has been around for a very, very long time. Right. It fits the narrative. Maybe that's part of what's going on there, but certainly it doesn't fit the facts.

John Dehlin [00:18:59] Yeah. So I'm gonna, just to provide a little bit more background in history, the first thing that I, I want to address this idea of, you know, global growth. And for me, the single most. Oh, and also growth in the 80s and 90s. For me, the single most important thing to know about the disparity between the numbers the church claims and the actual activity rates has to do with super low quality, mostly international baptisms. And for those of you who are like super fans of Mormon stories, you'll know that episode number one of Mormon stories is called Kitty Baptisms. My mission experience in Guatemala. And in that episode I talk about how we were baptizing over 700 people a month at the peak of my mission and how it was seven to 10 year old kids, 10 at 10 at a time.

Inflated Baptism Numbers and Missionary Practices

John Dehlin [00:20:05] Some companionships are baptizing 40 people in a month when there's only 30 days in a month. And it was these soccer baptisms or baseball baptisms where literally there was no lessons, no conversion. It was literally just find a bunch of poor kids running around, take him to the chapel that day, baptize them. Parents don't even know, they hadn't even gone to church, let alone, you know, received any of the discussions, let alone had an actual conversion. And that, that was my experience.

John Dehlin [00:20:39] And then when I got off my mission and I started reading Sunstone, what, what I found was a really important article by D. Michael Quinn that I think everybody should read. As if Michael Quinn didn't do enough, he wrote this amazing article called I Thou versus I It Conversions the Mormon Baseball Baptism Era. And in that he talks about Woodbury President D. Bowering, Woodbury. I'm trying to, I'm, I'm spacing on his middle name, but basically how the Mormon Church implemented a baseball league in the British Isles. Ironically, while Jeffrey R. Holland and Quentin Cook were missionaries in the British Isles. And this baseball baptism thing led to thousands and thousands of thousands of converts of all these British boys who wanted to play baseball, but they were never, you know, converts to begin with.

John Dehlin [00:21:36] Many of them didn't even know they were made members. And then the church had to do all these embarrassing excommunications because they had all these people on the rolls that had no interest in actually being members. And since that time, this sort of like fraudulent sales, sales based numerical focus on baptisms I believe has really plagued the church and is probably in my opinion the largest single contributor to this overinflated number of baptisms. But also this, this huge disparity of international, you know, statistics that the Church claims versus what shows up on the census, which we're going to talk about in just a second. And again, the 80s to 90s era was where this sort of happened in full bloom. Now, Ryan, I'm curious if you have any quick reactions just to that before we go on.

Ryan Cragun [00:22:34] I remember actually listening to that episode, so props to you, John. I actually really, really enjoyed that episode. And I think part of the reason why I liked it so much is it resonated with me. I think I'm a little bit younger than you are, right? But I'm kind of like the next wave of missionaries. And if it's okay, I'll just very quickly tell a. The short story from when I was a missionary, right? So I was a missionary in Costa Rica 96 to 98. I'm an introvert, right? Like I don't like large groups of people sending me out on a two year mission to knock on people's doors was basically two years of torture for me.

Ryan Cragun [00:23:05] I hated every second of knocking on people's doors. So I came up with a way to not have to just directly address people. And what I did is I would get the list of, you know, all the members in the ward. And in Costa Rica, they don't have precise addresses, which made it really nice to do this. So what they had is like directional Reference addresses. So it's like, like 50 yards away from this store is where this person lives. So I could use that as an excuse to knock on neighbors doors and say, hey, we're looking for so and so they're a member of our church.

Ryan Cragun [00:23:35] Of course we care a lot about our members. We're just wondering if you know where they live, if they're still around. And it was a nice way to kind of not directly say, hey, I'm a missionary and I want to convert you. It was kind of a secret way to kind of work my way around that. But I still, this is the one I want to tell. Right. We knocked on a couple of doors trying to find this person. Right. At the time I think they might have been 15 or 16 years old. So we finally knock on a couple of doors, get to the right house, we knock on the door, they answer.

Ryan Cragun [00:24:01] And when we ask for this kid, they're like, are you sure you want to talk to him? And I'm like, yeah, he's a member, right? Like it's right here, he's a member. And like, are you really sure? I'm like, yeah. And he comes to the door like with his parent and the kid's development is developmentally delayed.

Guest [00:24:20] Right.

Ryan Cragun [00:24:22] There's no way at 8, when he was baptized that he was cognitively aware enough to know what was actually happening to him. And he was a member of the church. No one else in his family was. Right. So kind of that knock on effect of those baseball baptisms, I witnessed it when I was in Costa Rica. Right. It's absolutely fascinating to see like all of these people who are just not active anymore. Were they even aware that they were being baptized? Fascinating.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And so, and so as we go through kind of a little bit more of the history, you know, we see some interesting things. Here's a Salt Lake article that says new almanac offers look at the world of Mormon membership. And in that article and then in that almanac and I, I don't know if Matt is it, what's Matt's name?

Ryan Cragun [00:25:10] Matt Martinek.

John Dehlin [00:25:11] I don't know if he was involved in this, but in that article it claimed 30% of Mormons worldwide or 4.5 million regularly attend church meetings. Is that, is that kind of a number that you're familiar with, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:25:26] Yeah, I think that's probably pretty accurate. I mean if I had to give like a solid estimate of the 17 million. Right. That they claim and it's probably close to a third of that. Right. Somewhere around A third of that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:38] That's pretty fair if you look at the Wikipedia article. And of course, Wikipedia isn't necessarily scientific, but I'm just going to read what it says because we don't have actual data from the church. It says the LDS Church does not release official statistics on church activity, but it is likely that only approximately 40% of its recorded membership in the United States and 30% worldwide regularly attend weekly Sunday worship services. So that's another data point that we have.

John Dehlin [00:26:08] I'll just read some, some headlines of some other articles that have appeared over the past five to 10 years. Here's one that says total totals of missionaries convert baptisms and the membership growth rate have become dismal data points for the LDS Church. That's, that's from 2023.

John Dehlin [00:26:29] There's this chart of total members, convert baptisms and children of record. And what it shows is kind of a steadily growing number of total members, but a declining number of convert baptisms. And what I think we'll be discussing is quite a significant decline in children of record. Now that's something you, you have, you, we will be talking about in your article, right? Yeah.

Membership Decline and Hidden Statistics

John Dehlin [00:26:55] And then, and then, you know, something that's always statistic, you know, something that's always probably on the church's mind is kind of growth rates in Utah. And here's something from the Salt Lake Tribune basically saying, you know, growth among Utah Latter Day Saints slows suddenly. So it shows, you know, around 30,000, I guess, new members added in Utah, around 30,000 every year for a good decade or so. And then all of a sudden it drops to below 10,000. And in 19, in 2019, it was 4,909. Now, I don't know if that, I think that's before COVID So I don't think that would be impacted by Covid. But what that definitely shows is a decline of new members in Utah. Is that right?

Ryan Cragun [00:27:45] For sure. And, you know, it's always tricky. I kind of want to see more information about charts. As I tell my stat students, you always have to, when you're creating a chart, make it so that it could pass the lost in a parking lot test. So if you lost the chart in the parking lot, could somebody pick it up and go, like, I understand everything. So looking at that chart, I'm wondering, when they say these are new members, does that include all infants of record? Right. Child baptisms, infant and converts. That's a little tricky. I think it does. And if that's the case, what we're seeing There is a lot of people resigning would be my guess. Right. That's a lot of resignations over that time period to offset the growth from kids. But I don't know, because I need more information from the chart.

John Dehlin [00:28:30] Yeah, yeah. And we're not trying to claim any hard data. We're just. We're just kind of trying to show the general. What information we have to at least show trends right now here. I almost didn't include this slide. Ryan, I think this slide's going to make you want to throw up. Is that correct? Yeah, because it, because it, it violates one of the cardinal rules of. Of chart graph making, which is what?

Ryan Cragun [00:28:57] Look at the way they've done the Y axis. Right. So the Y axis is dramatically inflated. And actually one of my co authors, Rick Phillips, he mentioned this. I appreciate the solid Tribune covering this, but in their story that they wrote about this, they did the exact same thing again. And Rick was just losing his mind. Rick doesn't really like talking to people in the media, but they dramatically inflated that Y axis to make it look like the drop off is really dramatic. It's not that dramatic. Right. You've got like an 8 percentage point difference on the Y axis. Really what you need to do is blow that up from 0% to 100% and then you'll see that it's actually a relatively small drop.

John Dehlin [00:29:36] Yeah. But what it shows is a decline of LDS Church membership in Salt Lake county, which those, you know, those of us who know who live in Salt Lake county, you know, we, we see that it's becoming more and more secular. Here's an article by Jana Reese that I think was probably really troubling to the church. Worldwide, only 25% of young single Mormons are active in the LDS Church. That's got to be a startling number for the church, right, that it's losing so much of its youth. Yeah.

Ryan Cragun [00:30:07] But that actually kind of aligns with what's happening in religion generally across the United States and of course, internationally and in countries that meet certain criteria. Young people are just on their way out. They've lost interest in organized religion. This is the secularization trend that we talk about generally. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Right. I've got a forthcoming book, it'll be out this year, actually, with Jesse Smith from Western Michigan University called Goodbye the Causes and Consequences of Psychoanalysis Secularization. And we talk a lot about how this trend is affecting basically every demographic now, but particularly young people.

John Dehlin [00:30:41] Yeah. Yep. So it's not necessarily just a Mormon problem, but it's just religion overall and kind of the Western developed world. Here's an interesting one. This is an article. LDS church growth is stuck at less than 1%. So for those who want to know, is the church shrinking? Is the church growing? My memory is that it's right now. Last I heard it was at 1% growth. But that was mostly a birth rate that was larger than average. It was sort of the birth rate that was keeping the church in slight growth mode. If we didn't have the birth rate, we would officially be in decline globally. Is that right?

Ryan Cragun [00:31:22] Yeah, that's correct.

John Dehlin [00:31:23] Yeah. And then of course, what does the church do in response to these sagging numbers? Six years ago, there was a Reddit post. The LDS Church no longer is announcing member statistics at General Conference and will quietly post online following the conclusion. Ryan, I don't know if you're like me, but I just remember one of my favorite parts of General Conference, even as an orthodox believing member, was hearing the Saturday, I don't know, after morning, afternoon session where they would announce the statistics. And for so many years it was so validated because It'd be like 5 million, 6 million, 7 million. It was like a kid in a candy store.

John Dehlin [00:32:05] Oh my gosh, the stone is being cut out for the Mount without hands and it's consuming all nations. And the church is going to, like Rodney Stark said, be at 200 million at some point. Like, this is amazing. But then that didn't last. Any thoughts on that, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:32:24] Yeah, it just occurs to me that every time somebody like a researcher, and I'm not necessarily saying me, right, so there are lots of people who look at these numbers, but every time a researcher is able to dig through and kind of pull something out of the black box that is the LDS Church and show that they're doing something like that's not reflective of reality, then they change, right? That's when they change. And it would be amazing if they changed in ways that were more transparent. But often what they do is just like lock down the black box even more. So it's like, oh, yeah, we've been reporting these numbers for years and years and years.

Ryan Cragun [00:33:00] And then people are like, let's check those against census data, which I think is where we're headed next. And then they're like, okay, we're not going to report these numbers anymore, right? Like, let's just, let's just hide this stuff so people can't actually verify what it is we're saying. And that to me, just, it rubs Me the wrong way. Right. Like, why not just give us more transparency?

John Dehlin [00:33:18] Yeah. Yeah. Knowing how much the church taught me to be fully honest, to be completely honest, you know, even half truths, you know, the full truth. This is the sort of indoctrination that I received. And I'm glad because I believe in. In, you know, doing your best to be fully honest. It is. It is a little bit disappointing. And if that weren't enough of a disappointment, just two years ago, another headline came out in the Salt Lake Tribune that said, LDS church withholds membership data from Utah for the first time in decades. Here's why. Now, Ryan, do you have any background on that story and what happened there?

Ryan Cragun [00:34:05] I don't know the specific one, but this is something that a bunch of people have actually asked me about since our story kind of came out or since our study was. Was mentioned in the media. And it was. It was actually a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who found that the church was claiming more members in one county in Utah than there were actually people in the county. And I think that, you know, suddenly you're like, okay, there is a major problem here with their numbers. And it's those kinds of things again. It's the egg on the face that they're like, wow, we totally messed this up. Then they're just like, okay, we're just not going to tell anybody anymore.

John Dehlin [00:34:38] Right?

Ryan Cragun [00:34:39] We're going to hide the numbers. We're not going to give them to anybody. And then everybody else is like, oh, you know, so they're just making the black box even more black and, like, hidden, so you can't get at anything because every time people are able to get into it, they. They find that the numbers don't work.

Guest [00:34:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:55] Yep. And so that's kind of some domestic numbers that are problematic in that the church is it. I mean, it's. It's hard not to just say that the church is intentionally trying to cover up its. Its shrinkage in the United States. I don't. I don't know how else to frame that. I. I think that's a fair framing, but. But it's even worse internationally. And we're gonna. We're resurrecting some slides that I think we showed in a previous episode. Gerardo put this together, but I'll just read. According to church membership statistics, Mexico holds the second largest number of members. So this chart shows 1.4 million members of record in Mexico. And then. Ryan, do you want to. Do you want to explain this next slide?

Ryan Cragun [00:35:45] I mean, it's just the Huge discrepancy. Right. So luckily there are a number of countries around the world that give us in their census when they're doing a full enumeration of everybody they ask religious affiliation. And so when we get that, when we have census data, we can contrast that with what the LDS Church is claiming. And when you contrast those two in both Brazil and Mexico, there's a gap of almost a million people. So I pretty, whenever I'm, you know, somebody says like, oh, but the LDS Church is growing, right? I say, well, yeah, you know, of those 17 million, about 2 million are people who were probably at some point baptized members of the church in Brazil and Mexico, but no longer self identify as Mormons.

Ryan Cragun [00:36:23] So you can immediately just drop 2 million off of that 17 million number and say those are people who don't even identify as members of the guild rebellious church. And that's just in those two countries where they have lots of people who are on the records. Right. On the rolls of the church. The same holds true around the world. So that's why we immediately drop the 17 million by probably 2/3 and say, yeah, it's not anywhere close to 17 million.

John Dehlin [00:36:44] And this discrepancy in countries like Chile and Brazil and Argentina and Mexico and the Philippines, the church has known this for a long time. This is not new revelation, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:36:54] No, not at all. I don't remember. I mean, I could look it up, but Rick Phillips published one of the first articles on this and it was the early 2000s, 2004, 2006, might have been 2001. It's not like they don't read the stuff that we're publishing. They, they read the same stuff that we do. So they've known about this. I'm sure they knew internally before that. But yeah, Rick published this, you know, almost two decades ago. So they know this 100%. They know this, but they continue to report those numbers.

John Dehlin [00:37:21] Yeah. So for those who are listening and can't view, basically the church claimed, you know, 1.5 million members in Mexico in 2021, but the Mexico census in 2020 claimed 337,998. So that's, that's a full 1.1 million discrepancy. Just in Mexico, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:37:44] Yep, just in Mexico.

John Dehlin [00:37:45] Yeah. And then if you go to Brazil, there's an article from the Salt Lake Tribune. This is from 8. So like 11 years ago, the, the, the Sally Tribune reported 913, 000 missing members in Brazil. So we've got the Mormon Church claiming 1.5 million members.

John Dehlin [00:38:10] Oh, wait, this is Mexico again. Oh, okay, okay, I see. So. So yeah, Brazil was missing, is missing about a million, you know, as of, as of, you know, a decade or more ago. And then what Gerardo is showing here is sort of truth telling in statistics of, of three major, I don't know, high demand religions, we'll call them. So in Mexico alone, it's showing that while the Mormon Church claims 1.5 million, the census says 337,000. And Gerardo gives a truthful number of 23% truthful, whereas the Jehovah's Witnesses, they claim 864,000, but the census actually has 1.5 million. So they're like underreporting their membership and they're 177% truthful.

John Dehlin [00:39:02] And then Seventh Day Adventist is similar. They're 102% truthful. So they're underreporting their membership. So for the church to kind of go, oh, well, everybody does this. No church, you know, no, no religions really know the total number of members. The Catholics do it too. That's not necessarily true, right, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:39:21] That's correct. One of the first articles that I published as an academic was comparing those three religions. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, on their growth around the world. And I was doing something slightly different. But a lot of my work with Ronald Lawson and with Rick Phillips is tackling why those differences exist. And Seventh Day Adventists actually clean their roles. So if people aren't showing up, they can't find them, they drop them as members. Right? They're just like, okay, these people are members. And that's why theirs tend to be as close to the actual numbers. When we compare them census data wise to what the religion is reporting, Jehovah's Witnesses, they under report because the only people they actually count as official members are the ones who are doing their publishing, which interestingly, just, you know, in the last couple of months, they dropped that requirement.

Ryan Cragun [00:40:04] So it used to be 40 hours a month. You had to do 40 hours a month to be considered, you know, doing your publishing, your pioneer to be a pioneer. So a lot of people would identify as a Jehovah's Witness, but the religion itself wouldn't count them. They'd be like, no, you don't qualify because you're not doing the work that you're supposed to be doing. So they're underreporting. And then on the other side, we have the LDS Church, which is like, yeah, we're going to keep everybody if we can't find you. And until you're 110 years old, you're still a member of the church. So no, when they say, oh, everybody does this, that's just patently false faults. That's, that's not true. Not even remotely true.

John Dehlin [00:40:35] Yeah. And again, so the church could report, it could do what you say and scrub, scrub the roles of people that it knows has died or that it's lost or to account for. I think there's some huge repository of lost members in some database in downtown Salt Lake. So they could probably do more to correct this, but I just don't think it shows. Well, so this takes us to your, your important article called Mormons Are no Longer a Majority in Utah. Causes, consequences and implications for the Sociology of Religion. And before we jump in, I'm wondering, I think at some point it makes sense to explain the 110 years sort of decision that the church makes in terms of how it cleans its roles. Is there any background you want to establish before we jump into what you found in Utah specifically for how the church counts its, its members, other than

How the LDS Church Counts Its Members

Ryan Cragun [00:41:34] what you've already said, it's actually a really important point. So we're very careful in that article to say that we, we're not saying that the LDS Church is lying, right? So we're not saying that they're being dishonest in any way in how they actually count the numbers. It's just that we're using very different methods for arriving at the number of people who identify as, as members of the LDS Church. So the way that the LDS Church works, and I'm gu, most of your listeners probably know this, of course, is you become a member by being baptized, right? Like that's the formal process of becoming a member.

Ryan Cragun [00:42:06] But what they then do, you know, they're tracking people, they know who's attending, they know all of that information. But if they lose somebody where they can't find them anymore, they keep them listed as a member until that person formally resigns. So if they formally resign, presumably they take them off the rolls, those people are out, and that's what's happening.

John Dehlin [00:42:25] Right.

Ryan Cragun [00:42:25] But if they can't find them, they don't want to assume that these people are no longer members. So they just keep them listed until based on the year that they were born, they would be 110 years old. And then they just kind of assume, which is a fairly safe assumption, that they're dead. And so they're going to pull them from the list of members. So that accounting Method. Right. Where they just keep everybody who's ever been baptized who hasn't formally resigned, whether they can find them or not, all the way up until they're presumably 110 years old and they can't find them. Or if they're, you know, members and they can find them and they know they died, they pull them.

Ryan Cragun [00:42:57] But, but that accounting method is why you get these numbers. Like there's six, you know, 60% of the population of Utah is LDS and that's not the way that we did it. Right. So we can talk about the way that we did it. But, but that's really what's going on and that's the discrepancy. So we, in the paper, we don't say like, oh, the LDS Church is lying. We're not saying that at all. We're just saying we're using a very different accounting method. And because of the way that we account for membership, their numbers look really wildly inflated.

John Dehlin [00:43:23] Yeah. Okay, well, that's super helpful. I hope our viewers and listeners have valued that background we just gave. Ryan, thanks for your patience because we're 43 minutes in and we haven't gotten your article, but I hope you're having as much fun as I am, so.

Ryan Cragun [00:43:38] Oh yeah, it's fascinating.

John Dehlin [00:43:39] So, Ryan, take it away with your, with your article.

Ryan Cragun [00:43:44] Sure. So I think I mentioned this. This was not actually intended. We never intended to actually write, you know, this. I got a grant to study Mormons in science. I needed a big sample of members of the LDS Church, so I did a representative sample of the state of Utah. Now I want to be very clear for all listeners so they know exactly what we're saying when we say it's a representative sample. It used to be the case, you know, 30 years ago that we would do random digit dialing. Today, everything's basically done online.

Ryan Cragun [00:44:12] So what we have is actually a quota based sample, which is kind of a standard approach. We contracted with a big survey company which is actually based in Utah, Qualtrics. They have a panel of people that they use and we were able to negotiate kind of a reasonable number. So we paid almost $10,000 for this study, but we were able to get 1,909 participants. And when we say quota samples, what that means is based on census data, we can align the sample based on age, gender and race ethnicity. So we're effectively kind of weighting the sample up front instead of weighting it after the fact.

Ryan Cragun [00:44:48] But that means that our sample actually does align with those demographics of the state. Of Utah. So that's how we gathered it. And then of course, once we got the information back. So I get my sample in, one of the first things I did is said, okay, I need to know how big of a sample I have of members of the LDS Church. The sample is 1,909. And the sample of members of the LDS Church comes back at just over 800, which, you know, basic math suggests that's below 50%. And that's when I was like, whoa, this is weird. Right? We need to take a look at this.

Ryan Cragun [00:45:15] And I'll just mention one other note. So we, we ended up calculating it comes out at like 42%, give or take a little bit. I don't remember the exact number of what 42% is what, 40% of the state of Utah. So that's, that's our estimate. Right.

John Dehlin [00:45:27] Self identified.

Ryan Cragun [00:45:28] Self identified members of the church. Yeah. And thank you.

John Dehlin [00:45:31] I'll just repeat that. 42% of the state of Utah self identifies as members of the LDS Church.

Ryan Cragun [00:45:37] Right. And that's the approach that we use, Mormon, Vatican.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] Right. Like this is the place. Right?

Ryan Cragun [00:45:44] Yeah. And it's an important distinction. Right. So I mentioned how the church does their accounting. How we did our accounting is basically how sociologists and social scientists around the world do it, which is self report. If you identify as a member of the LDS Church, I'm going to count you whether you're actually on the rolls or not. Like that. I mean, that's your issue, that's not our issue. How you identify is how we're going to count. And that's where we got the 42% number. Now to be very careful, scholars and this, maybe there are some people who care about statistics. You know, listening to this, this got misrepresented in a lot of the news outlets in Utah.

Ryan Cragun [00:46:21] So I'm going to be very careful how I describe this. Whenever you get an estimate of some, you know, number in a population, our target population is the state of Utah. The population of the state of Utah. It's really adults in the state of Utah. Us, we're not including kids on this. So that's our target population. You take a sample, the sample is the subset, and then we use the sample to talk about the population.

Guest [00:46:41] Right.

Ryan Cragun [00:46:41] This is basic statistics. Whenever you make a point estimate, to be a really good kind of honest scholar, you want to put a confidence interval around that point estimate. So you want to say, look, our estimate came back at about 42.6% or something like that, but we know that's not the exact number. This is just one sample. So what you do, and most of your listeners are probably familiar with this in polling data, when you're looking for, like, presidential candidates, if the polls come back and it says Biden's at 42%, there's always that plus or minus 3% margin. We just did the same thing. We said, well, it's probably not exactly 42%, but we can build a confidence interval around that and say we're a certain level of confident that this is the true number, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:47:22] So there's a certain number there, and that gets calculated based on the standard deviation, and in this case, not actually a standard deviation, but it gets calculated based on how many people are in your sample, a number of other things that are going on. So we did that. But what we did is we said, look, we want to be really, really careful. So we built not a 95% confidence interval around our point estimate, but a 99.9% confidence interval. And it's a little counterintuitive, but the more confident you are, the bigger the interval, right? I was explaining this, actually to my parents last night, which is kind of weird, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:47:57] Like, I said, I was in Utah last night. So over dinner last night, my mom was like, I don't really understand this. I said, well, I can be 100% confident, right, that the true population parameter, that the percentage Mormon in Utah is somewhere between 0 and 100%. But how useful is that, right? So what you're trying to do is balance precision with confidence. So we built a 99.9% confidence interval around there. And what we really wanted to do is say, okay, if our 99.9% confidence interval crosses the 50% margin, then we can't say that Mormons are a minority in Utah, right? They're no longer a majority.

Ryan Cragun [00:48:30] So we built that, and it came out at 56% on the high. Or, sorry, 46% on the high end and 38% on the low end. And once we saw that, then we said, yeah, we're actually 99.9% confident that Mormons are no longer a majority in Utah. So that's why we did it. And we were very careful. How this got reported in the media is that a lot of them were saying, like, oh, researchers are 99.9% confident that the true number is 42%. We're like, nope, nope, that's not what we said. Read the paper. We built in a confidence interval that puts it between 38 and 46%. Not that we're 99.9% confident that it's 42%.

John Dehlin [00:49:06] Got it. Thank you for that.

Ryan Cragun [00:49:08] Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:49:09] We have one listener. Rebecca writes, I am doing confidence intervals in AP stats right now. Does that mean she's a high school student?

Ryan Cragun [00:49:17] Probably. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:18] We've got high school students watching Mormon stories. That's amazing. Congratulations, Rebecca. Welcome to the show. I just thought it would be fun to google the percentage the LDS reported LDS percentage of the Utah State legislature. And according to Wikipedia, which is always true, it says that as of 2016, 88% of members of the Utah State legislature were affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. So if that statistic's true, the Mormon Church has TWICE the represent 200% the representation in the Utah State Legislature, you know, versus the the membership of its citizenry.

Ryan Cragun [00:50:05] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:50:06] Isn't that mind boggling? They like control the state legislature.

Ryan Cragun [00:50:10] They do. I had a number of reporters ask me about this, right? They're like, what are the implications? What does this mean? Are Mormons going to continue to dominate the legislature? And I was like, actually, I mean, I wish I could turn around and say like, no, they're not right. This is totally going to change everything. Radical changes are on the Horizon.

Ryan Cragun [00:50:28] There's still 40 plus percent of the population. Right. And we can come back and talk about how many of them are active. And that's a slightly different question. We have a little bit of that. But here's, here's the tricky part. When people leave and they become non religious or they're different religions, they really don't like anybody to tell them how to vote. And I'm not saying that members of the LDS Church vote in a block, but you know, they're more likely to vote for people who share their values, their norms, their beliefs. And those people tend to be LDS. So if you've got like 40% of the population voting collectively, and I'm not saying that they do universally vote collectively, but if they're going to vote generally for their candidate, that's a lot of people to overcome.

Ryan Cragun [00:51:08] If you're on the other side and you're voting for somebody who's not lds, right? So it's not like this is going to change dramatically tomorrow because you still have close to 40% of the population that are LDs, they're going to continue to outweigh the non LDs members because they're going to vote collectively for their candidates. So it's not going to change overnight. But yeah, you're right, it's a complete disproportionate representation in the state level legislature.

John Dehlin [00:51:31] All right, well, I'm going to ask you to dig into a little more of your study, but I'm just going to share a few comments from listeners because it's fun. Brian writes, I'm in Orem and the amount of people I see smoking, drinking, alcohol and other LDs forbidden things in Orem is quite surprising. Some are really mad that people are leaving the church in Utah because it means Costco is busier on Sunday and the golf course is. And the lakes in the ski resorts. Yeah, Are busier than they used to be. Huge. Thanks. We always appreciate our monthly donors and also those who share super chats here on YouTube. Marlene writes, Being a reformed Baptist, I look for and watch every Mormon Stories podcast I have. I

Ryan Cragun [00:52:21] probably learned so much.

John Dehlin [00:52:23] I have learned so much about not just Mormonism, but organized religion. Thanks to you and your entire staff, Marlene. Thanks so much for joining us and thanks so much for that super chat donation. We really appreciate that. Google user writes, I was a ward clerk. I believe the church's numbers for attending members are in the ballpark for accuracy. So former ward clerks are uniting in objecting to how they've been slandered by your contact at church hunting headquarters. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. Right? Liza Ferguson writes, the last census in Ireland showed that there were only 1,100 Mormons left, mainly the elderly. Yeah. The church is in freefall in places like Scotland and Ireland, in, in the uk, in, even in, in, in Asia, Korea and Japan. As I understand it, like the church is in a world of hurt. Is that your understanding?

Ryan Cragun [00:53:17] Yeah, absolutely. No question about that.

John Dehlin [00:53:19] I do want to, I do want to give a shout out our Gerardo Sumano. His birthday is today, so everyone please send Gerardo an email or a message and wish him a happy birthday. I'm also going to share. Spaniel, 53 writes, thanks for the super chat, Spaniel. He writes, thanks for everything you do. Mormon Stories these episodes have been instrumental in my deconstruction and continue to help as I process all my frustrations and feelings of betrayal. We're super glad that this has been helpful to you, Spaniel. Thank you. Let's see. I think that's all I've got for now in the comments and. All right, Ryan, let's continue to your wonderful article. What else? What should we say next about it?

Factors Driving Mormons Away from the Church

Ryan Cragun [00:54:09] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:54:10] In terms of what you found, the discrepancies, and then what the causes you think might be.

Ryan Cragun [00:54:15] Yeah. So that big discrepancy 60% versus 42% has to do with accounting methods. It's a sizable gap. That's 18%. How we explain this?

John Dehlin [00:54:25] 18 percentage points, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:54:26] Percentage points, yeah. So that's of the whole population of the state of Utah. 18% gap between self report and what the LDS Church is claiming. And that's mostly due to people who have left the church. Right. So they're not wrong in saying that 60% of those people are probably on the records or on the rolls at some point somewhere, but they don't self identify as members of the LDS church. We then turn around and say, okay, but the percentage LDS in Utah used to be higher. What's actually contributing to this? Why is this percentage declining over time? And that's true whether you take the LDS Church's data at face value or whether you're going off of self report.

Ryan Cragun [00:55:04] It used to be that it was a majority lds, you know, state. So we propose three factors that are really contributing to this. The first and biggest is actually migration. There are a number of people who leave the state every year, but there are more people who are moving into the state. And many of those people who are moving in are not members of the LDS Church. So as more people move in, this is actually sizable in migration.

Ryan Cragun [00:55:31] That actually dilutes the percentage LDS in the state. And as a result, that's actually done more than anything else to drive down the percentage LDS in the state is actually migration into the state from surrounding states. In particular, California is probably the biggest contributor. But a lot of other states around, there are actually, you know, people are moving to Utah. Utah's a pretty cool state. Right. Like I grew up there. I get that. But if you're outdoorsy, it's hard to beat Utah for being, you know, for a great place to live. So migration 1.

John Dehlin [00:56:00] Do we know the membership affiliation of these people who migrate to Utah?

Ryan Cragun [00:56:06] We don't, we don't actually have that information. Right.

John Dehlin [00:56:09] There's going to be a lot of people that retire in Alpine. They're Mormons. They, they, they want to sell their house in California. They want, they want to retire where their grandkids are going to BYU or whatever. They want to go to BYU football games. And so they, they do migrate to Utah, but they're LDS to begin with. With. Right?

Ryan Cragun [00:56:27] Yeah, I'm certain that that is some of it. Right. So some people who are moving back to Utah or moving to Utah, they want to move to, you know, a place where they feel pretty comfortable. I mean this is the homophily principle. We like to be around people who are like us. So a lot of people probably are doing that, but that cannot be true for the vast majority of people who are moving to the state. Right? So if we're just looking at say, the percentage of California that is LDS, it's below 1%. There's no way that if we've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of people moving from California that they're all going to be members of the church.

Ryan Cragun [00:56:59] And that's going to be true for all of the surrounding states and then from people from outside of there as well. So the vast majority of people, we think, and you know, this is a future research project, we cannot say definitively if this is true. But based on, you know, kind of just pretty simple logical reasoning, the vast majority of people who are moving to the state are not going to be members of the church and that's diluting the membership.

John Dehlin [00:57:19] And as I'm thinking about this, on the one hand, you know, if we're looking at this, this chart that you put together in the article, an influx, you know, we named this, we named this episode Is the Mormon Church in decline in Utah? An influx of non Mormons into the state. Diluting the percentage of LDS Church membership would not suggest a decline in, in church membership in Utah, only a percentage relative decline to the general population. The only thing I'll say there is.

John Dehlin [00:57:53] You know, Mark Twain once said that, that travel is fatal to prejudice. And I've, I've found it very common that one of the instigators to a faith crisis is literally just meeting super cool, thoughtful, moral, never Mormons and realizing, wow, we don't have a monopoly on goodness or truth or, or any of the like. And so I do think it's dangerous for the church to have such an influx of, of, of what's the word? Gentiles. Because it's dangerous for the exposure of thinking that we, we're, we're the good ones and that we have the monopoly on truth. Do you think there's something to that, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [00:58:38] Absolutely. I'm gonna. Another shout out to Rick Phillips. He gives this example all the time and I think he's, he's absolutely right. Right. So I love this example. He said when he was growing up in Utah, he grew up in Ogden. Right. We grew up, you know, less than 10 miles away from each other. He's a little older than I am. But when he grew up in Utah, the idea that anybody who's consuming alcohol, right. Was a good person like you could very easily write that off, be like, oh, they're all alcoholics. You know, consuming alcohol is terrible, so you just couldn't accept it, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:59:06] Anybody who drinks alcohol, that's a bad thing. And then you have your members who, your neighbors who move in from another state and they're not lds and they drink alcohol, right? But it turns out they're like really nice, good people. And maybe they invite you over, you have a little get together or something, and they have a well stocked liquor cabinet, but they're really nice people. For the kids being raised LDS to see that and to be hanging out with those kids and realize that these are good people, it, like you said, it starts to break down this, this kind of idea that only Mormons have a monopoly on being a good person.

Ryan Cragun [00:59:38] When you're like, oh, my neighbors actually drink alcohol and they're perfectly fine, right? They're not all alcoholics, they're not all dying in the gutter. Like, you know, life has not collapsed for them. They're, you know, high achieving, you know, well, to do people who are doing perfectly fine and they drink alcohol, that starts to break down these barriers that we have, right?

Ryan Cragun [00:59:56] To use kind of sociological terms, these are sacred canopies and plausibility structures. That's Berger's term for this. Right. So we all have sacred canopies that we hold that help us understand the world. And the plausibility structures are the different parts that help hold those up. And as soon as you start to kind of introduce threats to those plausibility structures, the sacred canopies collapse. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that's a big factor going on here.

John Dehlin [01:00:21] All right, well, let's go ahead. I've got a lot of good comments and questions coming in. Let's go ahead and go to the second factor you want to list.

Ryan Cragun [01:00:31] Yeah, so biggest factor is migration. The second biggest factor is actually secularization. And secularization, generally speaking, just means that modernization causes problems for religion. We can go into a lot of the details if you want. My new book. I mean, it's largely about secularization, so it goes into a lot of detail about that. But the basic idea is that people are just not interested in religion anymore. And we certainly see this with young people. So younger people are more likely to be non religious, but this, you know, you keep showing this kind of feedback loop in Utah, but that's the second biggest factor. And that's actually just people leaving the church.

Ryan Cragun [01:01:05] Right? So we know we've talked about this a number of times in this podcast already. Lots of people are Leaving the church, particularly young people, there are a variety of reasons for why they might be leaving. That's my new book with Jesse Smith. We talk about the factors that might be contributing to this.

John Dehlin [01:01:19] Do you mind sharing five of those factors?

Ryan Cragun [01:01:23] Yeah. So I can give you kind of a little preview of the book. Basically, how we frame these.

John Dehlin [01:01:30] We'll have you back on.

Ryan Cragun [01:01:31] Please do. Right. We'll promote that book because it's actually a really good book.

John Dehlin [01:01:34] We sell books. Yeah.

Ryan Cragun [01:01:36] I appreciate it. How we frame this. Maybe some of your listeners will be familiar with this. When you're talking about migration, right? Migration. And demographers who study migration always talk about this in terms of push factors and pull factors. So when somebody is leaving a country, there are some factors that are pushing them out of that. Maybe it's a lack of jobs, maybe it's war. Whatever it is, there are push factors that push people out, and then there are pull factors that bring them to specific countries. So maybe the economy's better there. There are better paying jobs. Maybe there's a better social safety net, but there are push and pull factors.

Ryan Cragun [01:02:06] Factors. When we're thinking about people leaving religion, we frame it the same way. We say religions are doing some pushing, they're pushing some people out, and then non religion is actually pulling some people out of religion as well. So just broadly speaking, how we think about this, one of the big push factors is what we call value misalignment, right? So if you're a young person today, you've grown up with friends who are LGBTQ and you see it in the media all the time, and you're like, yeah, there's nothing wrong with being a member of this community, being a sexual or gender minority. There's nothing wrong with that.

Ryan Cragun [01:02:41] And then you adhere to a church where they're like, yeah, actually, they can't be full members. And transgender people, like, we don't even think they exist, Right? Like, as soon as you go down that path, you've got value misalignment. And that is a push factor, Right. That's going to push people out of the religion because they're like, I just don't believe this. Right? Like, this does not align with what I actually believe. So there's that one. Then there are also some, like, really obvious ones, which. It sounds weird to say it because it's partly. It's tricky because you can't necessarily argue causality. We don't have good causal data on this.

Ryan Cragun [01:03:09] But people who just don't believe, right? So somebody who's like, you know what? I just don't believe the Book of Mormon is true. That's a push factor, right? It's going to push them out because they're like, I don't believe this. And this is what the church teaches. So we have push factors, but on the other side we have pull factors, right? And one of the big pull factors, which can seem scary a little bit to the people who are still in religion, is once you leave, you get to construct your own worldview or life stance or identity, right? You get to construct this. And that means you can have your own values, you can structure your own network and relationships.

Ryan Cragun [01:03:41] You can decide what is good and what is bad, right? You can make your own ethical decisions. And that's actually really empowering. It's a modern value, right? So one of our modern values is autonomy. We get to make our own decisions and we don't have to subject ourselves to kind of the dictates of novogenarian white men who are saying, no, you have to do this. You can only have one ear piercing. You can only do no tattoos, right? Once you leave, you're like, I can do whatever I want. I can literally do whatever I want. And that's actually very appealing. So you've got push factors, they're pushing people out and you've got the pull factors of like, now I have my own decisions, I can make my own decisions.

Ryan Cragun [01:04:15] So we kind of frame it that way. We go through a lot of other things. I'm not going to go into all the details. You'll just have to buy the book out in October, New York University Press. But yeah, that's kind of the general framing there.

John Dehlin [01:04:25] I love it. Okay, so thanks for, thanks for sharing some of that. So we've got secularization. I'm going to just say I'm. I'm sure that the Internet has played a significant role. Obviously, LGBTQ issues are a big, are a big deal. I think a lot of the young people, especially young women, are frustrated with being second class citizens in the church. Those are some of the things that are. That are pretty obvious. Obvious, but I just thought I'd throw them out there. Okay, what's next?

Fertility Trends and the Demographic Feedback Loop

Ryan Cragun [01:04:53] So we have one last one that we address, and that's fertility. Members of the LDS Church for years, for decades have been known for having large families. We go back to the 1980s. They were averaging more than one child, more than the average non Mormon family in the United States. So they were having much bigger families. Now the tricky part there, of course, is if you have Lots of kids, you have to retain them. So if you retain them and you're having lots of kids, then the religion is going to grow. So that's like basic math, right? It's pretty simple. If you have lots of kids and you don't retain them, then that's not going to do a whole lot.

Ryan Cragun [01:05:28] But what's happened over the last 30 to 40 years is Mormon fertility has actually been declining and is now not quite, but almost on par with non Mormon fertility in the United States. Utah is no longer the most fertile state in the US for decades it was, right? Everybody knew that like youngest population, age structure and they had the most kids. Today they're like number four behind the Dakotas. We can go into the details of why that is the case. It's a little bit weird, but it has to do with demography. But Mormons just aren't having as many kids and they're not retaining all their kids.

Ryan Cragun [01:06:02] In the paper, we estimate that they're retaining maybe two thirds. Right. That's probably a high end estimate, but that's what finding. So if you're having fewer kids and you're retaining fewer of them, then inevitably what's going to happen is your percentage of the population in the state of Utah is actually going to decline in part because of those other factors, migration and secularization.

John Dehlin [01:06:22] Okay, so that's, that's fertility rates, right? So my migration, non member migration into the state, fertility rates and secularization, those are the three.

Ryan Cragun [01:06:36] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:06:37] Factors. Okay, I've got a bunch of questions and comments from viewers and listeners. Should we jump to those or do you have any other points you want to add about the article? Before we jump into kind of the Q and A?

Ryan Cragun [01:06:49] Let me, let me add one, maybe two real quick. Right, so you keep showing kind of our, our kind of diagram there. We argue that this is a bit of a feedback loop, right? So as you get more people in the state who are not members of the LDS Church, it actually becomes even easier for members of the church to leave. So that's why we put it in a loop. Right. We've said that this is basically a loop. Now we're not trying to explain the migration that kind of falls outside of what we're trying to explain, but as people secularize, it makes it easier. And I mean, some of the work that you do in this podcast even help contribute to this.

Ryan Cragun [01:07:23] Right. When I left the LDS Church in 2001, there wasn't the huge support network in Utah. And granted I was not in Utah anymore, but there Wasn't the same support, support network as there is today. Today, if you leave the church in Utah, you can pretty quickly, a couple, you know, Google searches, you can find a very supportive social network where people will totally understand what you're going through and they can help you work your way out. That wasn't the case even 20 years ago. So the more people who are out, the easier it becomes to leave Again. Shout out to my buddy Rick Phillips.

Ryan Cragun [01:07:55] He argues, like, if you're, you know, 18, considering going on a mission, it's now so much easier to find people who are like, yeah, I wouldn't go on a mission, right, in Utah because you may have friends who are just not lds. So it becomes this feedback loop as more people are not members of the church, the social policing, the peer pressure that kept people members is declining. And now it's much easier to actually leave. Right? So I wanted to mention that the feedback loop is actually really important and it's kind of, it's basically means this cycle is going to continue and it's going to be easier, even easier for people to leave in the future.

Ryan Cragun [01:08:28] The last point that I want to make is we do end this article by saying, why does this matter? Right? Why do we care about this? This is, you know, again, ivory tower, egghead academics. We're ultimately saying, look, you can accept that the LDS Church has their numbers, and that's perfectly fine. Those numbers are just not useful for social scientists. So we're not saying they're wrong, we're just saying they're not useful. And they don't align. They don't help us understand what's actually happening with religion either in Utah or generally around the world. Because when you don't have an accurate reflection of what's actually going on, it gets really hard to explain what's going on.

Ryan Cragun [01:09:02] So in order to be able to explain it, we really do need accurate information and accurate numbers. And that's why our study is actually really useful. So those are my last two points. And then happy to look at some of the comments and questions.

John Dehlin [01:09:12] I love this feedback loop idea. I think it's so legitimate and I can think of a couple things. One is that, you know, the church teaches this idea of the eternal family. And so there's this idea of empty chairs where if people leave the church, then there's empty chairs at the celestial family's table, so to speak, because the whole family doesn't reach the celestial kingdom intact. And the more empty chairs that every family has on average, the more that whole Narrative just starts to become what we call sad heaven, right? Where, oh, you're going to be in heaven. You're going to be the celestial kingdom reigning and ruling over earths and principalities, but your own kids aren't going to be with you. Is that heaven? You know what I mean?

Ryan Cragun [01:09:58] Yes. No, that makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:09:59] I think that's part of that feedback loop, you know, and also there's. You could just think about it as like the truth virus. When people start learning troubling things about the church, they tend to want to share it. And then the more people that leave, the more people that share the troubling things and, and the more disaffection you're likely to have. So, anyway, yeah, I think that's. Any thoughts on that?

Ryan Cragun [01:10:26] I'll mention something real quick. My mom does not listen to this podcast. Trust me, she doesn't. But it was actually interesting. You know, I was out there staying with her for the last kind of week and a half over the holidays, and we occasionally have conversation. She doesn't read most of the stuff that I publish, and that's fine. Like, you know, it doesn't fit with her worldview and that's perfectly fine. But in my forthcoming book with Jesse Smith. Right. Goodbye Religion. We talk about the causes and consequences and stuff like that. And one of the points that I made is, you know, religion doesn't make people good.

Ryan Cragun [01:10:56] Non religion doesn't make people good either. There's really not a huge difference there. And when I said that to her, so, you know, I was just kind of describing this new book and I said, you know, just because you're religious doesn't mean you're a good person.

Ryan Cragun [01:11:07] She actually agreed with me and I was like, oh my gosh, like, we have totally kind of crossed this important, you know, hurdle in thinking about the world where my very, very devout LDS mother is like, you know what? That's true. I know some members of the church who are not good people, and I know lots of non members of the church who are also good people. And as soon as you can cross that, right? I mean, this is getting at this feedback loop when you know lots of people who are not members of the church and they're good people. It's much harder to hold those really expensive, exclusive beliefs of like, you must be a member of the church.

Ryan Cragun [01:11:41] It just, it's radically changed things. And I don't, I don't want to say, like, I did that. Yeah, I left, you know, the church 20 years ago. My life hasn't collapsed Right. I'm in a full professor at a university doing perfectly fine. Like everything's fine. I think it's those people, people like me, who I'm not out of proselytizing. I'm not trying to convince everybody to leave the LDS Church. I'm just living my life. And because my life hasn't collapsed and fallen apart, it actually works fairly well to convince people like, oh, you can leave the church and you'll be fine.

Temple Construction and Changing Member Requirements

John Dehlin [01:12:09] All right, well, let's jump into some of the Q and A. Some of it I, I put together myself. Ryan, do you have any comments on the massive temple construction announcements that have been associated with particularly Mormon prophet President Russell M. Nelson's administration? Any thoughts on that?

Ryan Cragun [01:12:30] You know, I don't have lots of comments. I have lots of, of questions, to be honest. Right.

John Dehlin [01:12:35] So an audible sigh, by the way,

Ryan Cragun [01:12:37] from an audible sigh, it's because I genuinely don't understand this, right. When you've got a religion that's probably not really growing, okay, it's, it's genuinely not growing, it's maybe holding steady. And certainly in other parts of the world, right. Like we talked about Europe and in parts of Asia, it's declining. Like there's demonstrable decline of the religion. But now they're saying like, oh, we're going to build a temple here, we're going to build a temple here. Like, why? Why are you doing this? So I genuinely don't understand that. And then I go in really cynical paths and I don't know if you want to talk about the cynical ways to think about this. I try to not be super cynical about the LDS Church. I want to follow the data, but I start going down cynical paths of like, this just doesn't make any sense to me. So I don't know if you want to.

John Dehlin [01:13:22] Let's just stipulate that we're just speculating because that's the best we can do when the church isn't fully transparent. So it's okay if you've got a couple thoughts.

Ryan Cragun [01:13:33] The church has a lot of money, right? So this is pure speculation. I don't know that this is actually what's going on, but what are they going to use their money for? So they're buying up property and they're building these big nice buildings, right? And that's great.

Ryan Cragun [01:13:45] Those buildings, you know, a lot of those temples are going to sit empty most of the time. We drove past one in Utah while we were there, right? So a brand new temple and my wife's like, there Isn't there another temple, like, two miles down the road? And I was like, yeah. She's like, but they sit empty the vast majority of the time. And I was like, I don't know why they're building them. I genuinely don't, other than they just have gobs of money and they don't know what to do with it. That's the cynical part of me, and I don't know that that's true.

Ryan Cragun [01:14:09] Right. Maybe they think at some level that by building temples, this is somehow going to, like, advertise the church or affirm people's beliefs that, like, you've been good, devout members, so we're going to reward you with a temple. There could be any number of factors going on there, but in my mind, it's like, like, yeah, we have a lot of money. We got to spend it on something. Let's build temples.

John Dehlin [01:14:30] Yeah, Well, I mean, that's as good of a guess as. As. As any. Right. Did you notice that just in the past few weeks, the church announced that it's lowering the bar for number of active members required for, like, branches, wards, stakes, missions and districts globally? Did you notice that?

Ryan Cragun [01:14:52] I just caught that just in the last couple of days. Right. So I hadn't been paying close attention to that specific thing, but yeah, they certainly have changed that. Right. What exactly that means, I don't know. I need to give it a little bit more thought. Rick and I will probably have a good conversation about that the next time we get together to figure out, like, why exactly are they doing this.

John Dehlin [01:15:12] My. My quick take, and maybe I haven't thought this fully through. There's kind of this shell game that, that I think has been happening where, where they talk about growth of membership. But if you look at members per unit, members per branch, members per ward, members per stake, you've got. You've got growing and growing and growing, you know, numbers of members per ward and stake. And that right there shows a significant decline in activity. And so what you want to do is you want to have, if possible. You certainly don't want what. What the trend I've seen in the past few years, which is the closing and the collapse of missions war. Well, at least of wards and stakes, like here, here just in the Salt Lake Valley, I think I've seen 10 stakes close in the past couple years.

Ryan Cragun [01:16:10] Wow.

John Dehlin [01:16:10] Like, it's crazy. And you don't. You don't want this. You don't want this problem of egregiously numbers of members per. Per ward or stake, because people Will know. So I think you want to make it easier and easier to create wards and stakes to kind of counterbalance that ratio. Now that's. I'm just totally making that up.

Ryan Cragun [01:16:32] Yeah, that could be true. Right. In. In my book that just came out, we talk about the fact that in the US every year, somewhere between six and 10,000 churches. Okay. And we don't mean like LDS Church, we mean specific, you know, buildings shut down every year. Now, some open to offset a little bit of that, but not enough to offset, you know, the total number that are closing. Those buildings are getting repurposed into all sorts of things. Right.

Ryan Cragun [01:16:58] My wife actually went to a pub in Pittsburgh that was in an old church that, you know, there are lots of different ways to repurpose these buildings, but they're really big. They're big buildings. And I don't know the answer to this. Rick might, because he, he pays very close attention to what's going on in Utah. Right. Like, this is really his pet. Like, he loves studying Mormonism in Utah. Are there churches that are actually being like the buildings that are being shut down and repurposed in Utah and I don't know the answer to that. Right. I haven't been following it closely enough. I know other churches, you know, not LDS ones, have been shut down in certain places in Utah. I saw a couple of these. But do you have some insight on that, John?

John Dehlin [01:17:32] No, I'm just on buildings being shut down.

Ryan Cragun [01:17:36] Yeah. Like literal buildings, like war buildings are just like time.

John Dehlin [01:17:40] All the time. You drive by buildings that are being shut down. We tried to buy one and they wouldn't let us buy it. We were going to turn it into a, a church for secular ex Mormons in Utah. And they literally have a clause in their selling clause that we won't. We. We have to approve who these buildings are sold to because we were going to raise a, a rainbow flag and, and sort of commandeer of a former stake, stake or, or war chapel. But. But yeah, I've seen, I've seen Mormon chapels turned into Airbnbs, you know.

Guest [01:18:12] Yeah.

Ryan Cragun [01:18:13] They break them up and put them into condos. We've got one. I mean, it's less than a mile from my house. It's not lds, Right. But it's like a former Baptist church that they've split it into units and now it's basically condos and people buy. And I mean, I don't know how I would feel about that.

Guest [01:18:26] Right.

Ryan Cragun [01:18:26] But one of those rooms has a beautiful stained glass window in it that's Pretty cool, right?

Guest [01:18:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:31] Yeah, that's cool. Super cool. All right, let's. Let's. I'm going to encourage everyone. So, Ryan, you know, you mentioned that you had a bunch of downloads of your article. Where. Where should people go to download the article so that it registers? Because I want to, like, double your downloads. Sure. Is the Link on. On RyanCragan.com is that. Is that link gonna.

Ryan Cragun [01:18:56] Yeah, they can get it there.

John Dehlin [01:18:57] Trackable. All right, so I want everybody within the sound of my voice to go download Ryan's article. I want to show Ryan that we'll sell his books and double his Reach Through Mormon Stories podcast.

Ryan Cragun [01:19:11] So that's great. De Gruyter might not love that because I am giving it away for free. And I'm sure they want Everybody to pay $35 for this, but I get. Really. They can pay it. Honestly, I try and give that away. I wrote it. Right. Like, this is my work. I mean, me and Bethany and Rick. It kind of bugs me that publishers are going to make tons and tons of money off this. So I make it available for free. If de Gruyter comes after me, so be it. That's my problem. It's not theirs. But, yeah, certainly go to the website. It's right there. It's available for free. Download it, share it, Share it widely. That'd be wonderful.

John Dehlin [01:19:41] And for those listening to this episode in the future, will you name the book that's about to come out? Because I'm going to tell everyone to buy it. Everyone in the future to buy the book when they're listening. What's the name of the book again?

Ryan Cragun [01:19:53] So the book that's coming out in October is Goodbye Religion, the Causes and Consequences of Secularization. That's with Jesse Smith. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:01] So if you're in October later of 2024 and you're listening to this episode, pause the episode, go to Amazon or wherever, buy the book, and then come back and finish listening. All right. I love to sell people's books. Jessica writes, follow the data. I'm in a happily mixed faith marriage with an actuary statistician. That breed is so slow to anger and assume. It's maddening. I think that's what's cool about academics. What do you think, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [01:20:28] That's hilarious. No, I love it. I don't think they're poking fun. That's actually like a compliment. It's totally true. It's weird when you finally kind of really come to grasp statistics and start thinking statistically. It's hard for people to do right Most people don't think statistically.

Ryan Cragun [01:20:47] But I'll give just one really weird example that, like, people struggle with this, right. Kids, young people, right, are safer at school than they are in their own homes. They're more likely to be abused in their own homes than they are at school. Yet that's not the narrative that you see in the media, right? So you don't really see a lot of that. So for me, I've always been like, oh, yeah, of course I'm going to send my son to school, right? I have no problem sending him to school. He's actually safer there than he is in my own home. He's actually more likely to die from gun violence in his own home than he is at school.

Ryan Cragun [01:21:21] Now, we don't have a gun, Right. But a lot of people in the US have guns. So just thinking statistically changes the way that you kind of function in the world. And it makes me very skeptical. Right. So whenever I see statistics coming through, I'm like, whoa, whoa, let's dig into these numbers. Let's see what's actually going on. Yeah, that comment's actually delightful. I appreciate the comments. Comment, I love it. Right. For those of us who really get into statistics, that's exactly how we think about the world.

John Dehlin [01:21:48] All right, let's keep going. I'll try and jam through these. Emily writes, as someone who grew up a never Mormon in Utah, it feels so weird hearing that LDS is or might be a minority in Utah. Well, welcome to 2024, Emily. And also, Emily, thanks for the super chat. Your donations mean a lot. Katina Leone writes, my cousin moved to Italy and he became stake president in like a month of being there because there were very few members in that city. And they just built a freaking temple in Rome. Right. Like, the church is in decline in Italy and they're building a temple there. Yeah, yeah. Kind of. Kind of interesting. Nikki writes, Since 2010, looks like statewide birth rates are declining and death rates have ticked up. Does that sound right to you? Right.

Ryan Cragun [01:22:39] Yeah. We have an aging population, Right. So we've actually seen this. There's a magic number. We'll just do a little kind of demography education. There's a magic number in demography, 2.1 as a total fertility rate. That's the number of kids that women have to have to replace the existing population. So that's 2.1. Some of those kids are going to die before they reach the age at which they can have their own kids. But that's kind of the magic number that we think about in demography, when we're talking about, like, how do you replace an existing population? If the TFR total fertility rate is above 2.1, you're going to have growing populations.

Ryan Cragun [01:23:12] If it's below 2.1, you're going to have declining populations. A lot of people don't realize this, but the TFR for people who currently live in the United States is now below 2.1. It's like 1.8, 1.7. The reason why the US population continues to grow is not actually because of our fertility. It's because of migration. And first generation migrants tend to have higher fertility rates. So as populations kind of have been around for a longer time, fertility rates tend to decline, particularly as countries modernize. We could go into a lot of details here, but basically the US Is hitting a point where if it wasn't for migration and first generation migrants having slightly more kids, we would be declining as a population.

Ryan Cragun [01:23:52] What that also means is we're having fewer kids. Our aging, our age structure is getting older and older and older. So fertility rates are going down. That means death rates are going to go up because we have more people who are in the older age brackets. More of them are dying. We still have that kind of big population boom from the baby boomers. They're now reaching the age at which many of them are going to start to pass on. So that's going to increase death rates. All makes sense. Yeah. It's all kind of basic demographic stuff.

John Dehlin [01:24:18] All right, that's helpful. Ryan, you won't care about this comment, but VP writes Salt Lake City could have an NFL team in the future, and the arena would be packed on Sunday. So that's, that's in the future.

Ryan Cragun [01:24:33] I know you. You said I wouldn't care. I actually wrote a paper about how the NFL competes with churches. Right. Kind of a strange side story. So a really good friend of mine, she works at my university, she goes to a, you know, very progressive Methodist church. And they needed somebody who did statistics to help them with a question.

Ryan Cragun [01:24:56] So they. So she kind of connected me with the pastor and a couple of people there to do some statistical analyses. And I said, you know, I'm happy to do this. That's fine. Like, I don't really care. It's fine. You know, I have the skill set. I'm happy to use it. But then when they gave me their attendance data, I was like, do you guys care if I take a look at this and see if something's happening? And what we did is we found out when home Day home game days were for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And then we looked at attendance at the church to see if people were less likely to attend on home days, and it turns out that they absolutely are.

Church Growth in Africa and Global Trends

Ryan Cragun [01:25:28] Right. So the NFL and churches do compete, and this is part of the reason why the NFL doesn't start broadcasting games until early in the afternoon, because they don't want to compete with religions, but they absolutely do, and particularly with tailgating. Right. So if you're in a city where you can tailgate, that tailgating starts three to five hours before the game, which means it runs right into, you know, Sunday church time. So the NFL is actually contributing to the decline of religion in the US Which I think is hilarious. And I did publish that paper in the Review of Religion Research. That's where that was published.

John Dehlin [01:25:57] Well, the only reason I said that is because I was watching your interview with Rick on Gospel Tangents, and you mentioned not caring a lot about. I guess it was college sports.

Ryan Cragun [01:26:06] You said, well, I don't care about most sports, to be. To be honest. Right. That was just kind of a side tangent that I was like, there's a little connection. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

John Dehlin [01:26:16] All right, so Leland writes, but the church is growing in Africa. I'm so glad these starving people are giving up 10% of their income. You know, let's just talk about that for a second because I. Is it fair to say that. That the Africans are kind of saving the. The Mormon Church's statistical story right now, that the overwhelming percentage of. Of growth and of unit growth and of membership growth is coming out of Africa and probably will for the foreseeable future? Or do you even know those. Those data?

Ryan Cragun [01:26:51] Yeah, no, that. That makes perfect sense. Again, you can find this article on my website, but one of the first articles that I published was looking at what factors predict the growth of those three religions, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists. And I won't go into all the details, but basically, as countries modernize, so I'm just going to focus on Mormons, not the other two. But as countries modernize, as they become kind of more literate, have better education, they live longer. Right. As all of those things happen in countries, you see a very specific pattern when the LDS Church grows. Okay.

Ryan Cragun [01:27:26] When they're really low on that development scale, so they're like, just struggling to survive. The LDS Church doesn't grow at all in those countries. That's actually where the Seventh Day Adventists grow because they go in with schools. And hospitals. But as they start to modernize. So they're modernizing, they're growing, they're developing. That's actually when the LDS Church seems to grow. But there's an inflection point. Once you hit a certain level of modernization. I was using the Human Development Index, so I give a very specific number in there.

Ryan Cragun [01:27:53] But once you hit that inflection point, religion just stops. Right. Like, people lose interest in that specific. In religion generally. So that's the inflection point. It's about a 0.85 on the HDI, the Human Development Index. So that actually helps us understand why the LDS Church is growing in Africa. Is a lot of those countries are below that.

Ryan Cragun [01:28:16] And that's also why they're not growing in, say, developed parts of Europe, which is most of Europe. They're already past this. Sometimes we refer to this as existential security. So that's kind of the existential security hypothesis. But this is why the LDS Church is going to continue to grow in Africa until they reach a certain level of development. Development. So once those countries in Africa cross that threshold, assuming they. They will eventually, that growth's going to stop. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:41] Okay. Thanks for that explanation. Latter Day Digest writes, everyone mash the like button. Yes, please do like this episode and please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We want to continue our growth because it helps the algorithm and it helps us reach more people. So please do subscribe and please do like and Latter Day Digest. Thanks for calling that out. Alicia asked, does the church use baptism for the dead numbers to inflate its membership statistic numbers as well? Ryan, you're saying no, no, no.

Ryan Cragun [01:29:14] They wouldn't count them as active living members of the church. So their numbers only refer to the living members. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:21] Yeah. You've already touched on this. Chris writes, the church hurting in numbers might be why they're investing in real estate to counter that and continue to bring in more money. That's. That's someone speculating.

Ryan Cragun [01:29:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:37] This is interesting. Darina writes, Early 2000s in Russia, we had weekly baptisms of three to 12 people just in my tiny branch. A lot of those people had mental disabilities. They weren't issued temple recommends, though it was no bueno. She said, says, I think the church is shrinking in Russia. Is that right? That's my understanding.

Ryan Cragun [01:29:58] I. I would be shocked if they're growing. Right. So things get really complicated in Russia right now, in part because you effectively have a dictatorship. And he has. Putin has aligned the government with the Russian Orthodox Church. We talk a lot about this in My book that came out in May, Beyond Doubt, we have like a sizable segment of that book, one of the last chapters talking about exceptions. And we talk about Russia extensively. But aligning his government with the Russian Orthodox Church, it's pretty common for authoritarian regimes to actually do that. And that has meant a substantial amount of privilege and favoritism for the Russian Orthodox Church and a cracking down on, on other religions. So I would be shocked if the LDS Church is growing at all in Russia right now. They're probably declining pretty dramatically.

John Dehlin [01:30:43] Yeah, we got a lot of people reporting what's going on statistically where they live. COCO B. Rights My neighborhood In Idaho is 47 homes. About 1/2 are from California and 0 are LDS. We had another person ask, and I don't know if you know this, Eugene writes, is the LDS decline in Idaho or is it just in Utah? Do you even have any idea?

Ryan Cragun [01:31:09] I mean, it would be speculative because I don't have specific statistics on that. But what we, what I can say say, right, is religious decline generally. So I can't talk specific about the LDS Church, but religious decline generally is happening in every state across the United States that we do know. So when we talk about the secularization factor in particular, people are leaving religions and that is not specific to like Washington State or Oregon. Right. Or Maine. For a long time we talked about the coastal regions as being the hotbeds of secularization. That's just not true anymore anymore. It's actually happening across the entire country and that would include Idaho. So Idaho is becoming less religious, you know, as we speak. And certainly some of those people are going to be people leaving the LDS Church.

John Dehlin [01:31:54] Okay, that's helpful. Al Arno writes, my son is a ward clerk in south Davis County, Utah. Activity rate is around 38% in his ward. Heard. So I've also heard surprisingly low activity rates in places like Riverton and, and even, even Utah County. So that's interesting. I've also heard about very low numbers of low percentages of young men choosing to serve missions in Utah and a very high early return rate amongst missionaries currently. Have you heard about any of that, Ryan?

Ryan Cragun [01:32:36] You know, I haven't heard on those specifics. I mean, there was a fair amount of speculation. We don't know this for certain. Right. But it's the most logical, I think, explanation for why they just changed the ages. And not just, but this is in the last 10 years they changed the ages at which young men and women can serve missions and that's to prevent them from leaving the church. Right. You get a young man or woman who goes to college for a year, the odds of them then deciding like, hey, you know, I want to stay. And I don't mean this to suggest like college is the great secularizer.

Ryan Cragun [01:33:05] It is. There's research to suggest that it does actually contribute to secularization. But just getting them out of a highly regulated environment where they may not be living at home or, you know, they may have chances to kind of meet other people, that dramatically increases the odds that they're just going to leave, they're not going to remain members of the church and they're not going to serve missions. So dropping the age at which men serve a mission from 19 to 18, I think that was a direct response to that. Same with drop in the age for women. It's a direct response to just young people leaving. You can continue them in that pipeline so they don't have a chance to actually get out and think for themselves.

John Dehlin [01:33:38] Okay, a couple other just anecdotal things. Coco B. Rights I lived in Okinawa with two local stakes and one military stake. Now there is one local military stake. So that's a massive decline according to Kokobee in Japan. Some compliments coming in. Connie Mae writes, Fascinating guest. I agree. Here's. Here's a good one. Ryan Nicole writes, this has been my favorite episode so far. You know, we've got like 1900 episodes. Ryan Cragan well, this has been Nicole's favorite episode so far. She's learning so much and she's going to support your work. Thank you.

Ryan Cragun [01:34:20] Thank you. Nicole.

COVID's Impact and the Rise of the Unaffiliated

John Dehlin [01:34:22] This is an interesting Jessica speculates that Covid had an impact on people leaving. Do you have any information about COVID and how it affected membership?

Ryan Cragun [01:34:34] Not specific. For the LDS Church. I haven't seen that study. The studies that have looked at Covid and Covid's effects on religion in the US Are just starting to come out. So they're starting to get published. I've seen a bunch of conferences, so I go to conferences where we talk about this, but there are a few that have just come out in the last year or so, and they're suggesting that Covid contributed to secularization. A lot of people couldn't attend churches, you know, they couldn't attend services.

Ryan Cragun [01:35:00] And you know, for that time period, maybe they tried online for a little while, but they pretty quickly realized. And this is one of those pull factors, right? So we talked about the push and pull factors. This is one of those pull factors is getting to sleep in on Sunday. Right? Like I get to sleep in on Sunday, I can repurpose my Sunday. Or, you know, if you've got a different, you know, day of the week that you worship, maybe it's Friday or Saturday. But just that shift of like, you know what? I don't really want to get up. I want to spend my Sunday how I want to spend it.

Ryan Cragun [01:35:26] And it seems like Covid, probably for mostly marginal members, right? So people who are already like, yeah, I don't know if I love this anymore. It made it much easier. Just be like, okay, I don't have to go now. You know, I'm going to stop, stop attending because of COVID And then when it's time, like, you can go back, they're just like, actually, I don't want to go back anymore. And they're done. So the research is suggesting that Covid has contributed to the decline of religion in the US in particular.

John Dehlin [01:35:52] Here's a question that I think is interesting. First, I'll just say at least one person. Slay writes, finding friends outside the church was definitely a factor in her leaving. That's found validating a point we made previously. Wisdom Worker writes San Diego Steak. We lost an entire ward in six months after Covid, me included. People now know that's what, that's an anecdotal report from San Diego. Debbie writes something interesting. Then I have a question. Debbie writes, in Idaho, they leave to become preppers and talk to Nephi, Chad Daybell style, or go more fundamental. In all seriousness, Ryan, you're laughing in all seriousness, like, the church is getting it from the right, from the left in terms of secularization, but aren't they also getting it from the right in terms of fundamentalism? And do you have any thoughts on that?

Ryan Cragun [01:36:43] Yeah, they're always going to get it from both sides. This is, it's, it's a tricky issue. I mentioned earlier in the podcast that I gave a presentation at church headquarters and what I said there, and this is going to sound really weird, right? As someone who left the church, I'm, I'm not trying to destroy the LDS Church. Right. I just want to make that clear. I'm not trying to destroy it. Right. Yeah, I, I donned my, like, I took off my ex Mormon hat when I went to give that presentation. I donned my, like, eggheaded, you know, ivory tower academic hat where it's like, okay, let's just apply the research that I know and have read, you know, for the last 20 years.

Ryan Cragun [01:37:21] How can the LDS Church continue to do, okay, they're not going to stop secularization. I told them that, right? So I said it straight to their faces, like, people are going to leave. You can't stop it. There's nothing you can do to stop this. You can try and move the deck chairs around on the Titanic, but it's shrinking, right. It's going to run into issues. But one of the things I did tell them that I think we kind of now know is that conservative religions are doing the best.

Ryan Cragun [01:37:46] And the reason why this is kind of weird to think about is they're not aligned with modern values. And that's actually a good thing for the religion. I'm not saying it's a good thing generally, Right. So. But. But if we're just thinking about religion surviving, if a religion is perfectly aligned with modern values that you might see through, you know, media, through TV shows and movies, what's the benefit of staying in the religion? You might get some community. And that's great. And I'm not trying to dismiss that. Right. But. But the values, you're not getting any reinforcement for any values you have because you get them outside, elsewhere.

Ryan Cragun [01:38:19] But it's the people who don't have modern values who actually find support in religion. So let's say you're, you know, in a. We'll use a heterosexual family, right? But you're a wife or a husband in that family, and you think the wife should actually stay home and raise the kids. Where are you going to get validation for that in modern society? You're going to get that in conservative churches, right? Maybe you still have issues with lesbian, gay or bisexual people. Where are you going to get validation for those views? You're going to get it in the conservative churches, right? So when you hold these more conservative views, you get validation for those views in conservative churches.

Ryan Cragun [01:38:53] And this is why I said the LDS Church cannot afford to rapidly modernize. If they suddenly jettison all of their controversial views, they become a very progressive religion. What is their. What. What's the benefit of staying? Right. There's not a whole lot of utility in staying in the religion because it doesn't validate anything that you can't get from outside the religion. So the LDS Church actually has to. And Armand Moss is the one who really kind of proposed this back in the 1990s. The LDS Church has to walk this fine line of slowly modernizing, right.

Ryan Cragun [01:39:24] Without trying to alienate the maximum number of people. They're always. By modernizing, they're going to alienate the conservatives. Right? But they have to. But not modernizing fast enough, they're going to Alienate the progressives. So they're constantly in this like slow progression towards the future, but never too fast. And they always have to stay behind the times. Right. Otherwise what's the utility of the religion? It's a weird way to think about it, but I described that to him and I was like, this is where you have to stay if you want to stay relevant to your members.

John Dehlin [01:39:56] Yeah, yeah. Timothy asks something I'm sure you might not know. Are there any stats that show that LDS fundamentalism has increased? I'll just say I don't know how much you have followed, like the Tim Ballard stuff, the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell stuff, even the Jody Hildebrandt Nate passenger stuff. But this whole visions of glory, near death experience, Mormon prepper thing is just erupting in, in violent news story after violent news story and it does. And, and plus with the growth of sort of right wing politics or, or sort of Trump, I don't know, MAGA sort of politics in Utah along with a lot of orthodox Mormons frustrated at the profit for recommending that the members wear masks and even get a vaccine there, there, there are rumblings that fundamentalism is on the rise, but I'm guessing you wouldn't have a way to really know that.

Ryan Cragun [01:41:01] Not really. Right. So I'm just going to be kind of frank with the numbers. The LDS Church is big enough in the US that it registers in most large surveys. So they make up somewhere between 1 and 2% of the population of the United States. Somewhere in that range. Okay.

Ryan Cragun [01:41:18] And they're claiming, you know, four plus million members in the United States. So they're, we're able to capture them. Right. They're like 1% of the population. Now try capturing fundamentalist members of the, you know, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints or even the AUB or you know, the Kingston Group or you know, any, any one of them. Those, if they're registering in the tens of thousands of members, they're virtually impossible to catch in large surveys. Right.

Ryan Cragun [01:41:44] I was involved in the ARIS, the 2008 eras where we had a sample size of over 30,000 people. Okay. That gave us a sizable number of members of the LDS Church. I bet we may have had a handful, you know, two to four who are fundamentalist Mormons. And that's true for all the Pew studies. So Pew uses a big panel now and they aggregate over time. Even with their tens of thousands of participants, their just not going to register. This, this is the same thing that you get With Wicca. With Scientologists. Right. Scientology. They claim, you know, millions and millions of members. No, they're in the hundreds of Thousands in the U.S.

Ryan Cragun [01:42:16] right. They don't even register in the surveys. So if you're. If they're so small, it's really hard unless you can get, you know, insider data somehow to actually track what's going on with them. It's just really, really hard.

Closing Thoughts and Farewell

John Dehlin [01:42:28] All right. All right. Well, Ryan, you've been really generous with your time. This has been super, super fascinating. The article is Mormons are no longer a majority in Utah. Causes, consequences, and implications for the Sociology of Religion. Please download it, please buy it if you can. Big thanks to Dr. Ryan Cragan, Bethany Goal, and Rick Phillips, our friend, for co authoring this article. And. And yeah, Ryan, we're excited for your book coming out. Any other final things you want to plug plug before we end today's episode?

Ryan Cragun [01:43:02] No, I mean, like I said, you can get almost all of my articles on my website, ryantcragan.com, that's my professional website. I try and make them all available. If you struggle to find something, email me. I can probably get it for you. But thanks for having me on, John. This is always fun. It's always fun to chat about this.

John Dehlin [01:43:17] Well, thank you. Thanks for all the good work you do and to all your colleagues at the Mormon. What? Social Science Association.

Ryan Cragun [01:43:24] Yes, mssa.

John Dehlin [01:43:25] Yeah, I've attended that once or twice, and. But it's. It's good people. All right, Ryan, thanks for everything. Sad or Rick. Tell Rick he needs to come back.

Ryan Cragun [01:43:33] Will do.

John Dehlin [01:43:34] All right. All right. And reach out anytime if we can help you with anything.

Ryan Cragun [01:43:37] Appreciate it, John.

John Dehlin [01:43:38] Thanks, Ryan. Take care.

Ryan Cragun [01:43:39] Yeah. Bye. Bye.

John Dehlin [01:43:40] And thanks, everyone, for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Happy New Year. Happy birthday to Gerardo. Send Gerardo a DM and wish him a happy birthday. Tell him how grateful you are for all he does for us. Huge thanks to Julia for time codes and show notes and shorts. Maven for post production and moderating. Moderating the comments.

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John Dehlin [01:44:38] Be kind to each other. Oh wow. We just got another super chat from Andrew Tibbets. Thanks, Andrew, for your support. Thanks to everyone. Also, Mormonism Live, if those of you joining us live right now, Mormonism Live, I think is about to start in 30 minutes or so. Check out Mormonism Live with Bill Ruhl and Radio Free Mormon. They do great work.

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