Church Growth by State

I updated some statistics on membership by state in the United States.  The statistics are divided into two types: stocks and flows.  A stock variable is measured at a point in time.  Membership is a stock, so is membership density (membership expressed as a percentage of the population of a political unit such as the United States, Utah, or Georgia).   A flow variable measures change over a period of time such as the change in membership for the past year.  The change in members is the sum of births and conversions less deaths and excommunications.  The flow variable explains how the stock variable changed.  The statistics demonstrate two trends.  First, the church is growing.  Second, a process something like osmosis is happening.  Members tend to move from states with high membership density to states with lower density.  Distance from early LDS population centers, represented by Utah, also appears to play a role in the distribution of membership, the further from Utah, the slower the accumulation of new members.  The process of osmosis is sped by economic growth which draws workers to the geographic location of growth.  States with high density and high growth will lose density more rapidly than other states and states with high growth and low density will gain density more rapidly.  It is also sped by the effectiveness of missionary programs, proximity of temples, etc. but I will ignore these variables for now.  In the remainder of this post, I use maps and tables to elaborate on these ideas.

Membership by State: 2011

In 2011, church membership in the United States was 6,226,788.  The table blow the post provides exact numbers and the first map, “Membership by State 2011” visually represents those numbers.  The map is color coded: the darker the red, the greater the membership in a state, the brighter the yellow, the lower the membership.  The five states with the largest number of members are Utah, California, Idaho, Arizona and Texas.  The five states with the smallest number of members are Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, North Dakota, and New Hampshire.  Idaho and Arizona both border Utah.   California and Texas are the two largest states in the union and are both relatively close to Utah.  With the exception of North Dakota, the four remaining states with the smallest membership are distant from Utah and have relatively small populations. 

Membership Density by State: 2011

The map “Membership Density by State: 2011” is similar to the map of membership it corrects the impression that members are more common in large states like Texas.  Texas has 305 thousand members while Kansas has only 35 thousand, yet their membership densities are 1.19% and 1.21%.  You are slightly more likely to run into a member in Kansas than Texas. Most members recognize the importance of density.  It is nice when there are enough local members to form wards and stakes that are compact.  Travel time is lowered.  Church friends will be close.  Our youth will have other members with whom to socialize and date

As most people know, the distribution of members in Utah and surrounding states is not an accident.  The Saints were thrown out of Illinois and settled in Utah, a desolate area that nobody else seemed to want.  Brigham Young directed members to establish communities in states bordering Utah. Eventually, hostility toward the church subsided and members were free to consider economic opportunities outside of traditional LDS communities.  My theory of membership osmosis suggests that members respond to economic incentives just like everybody else.  The decision to leave is based on weighing costs and benefits.  The cost almost certainly includes distance from family, friends and church.  Most members will be less likely to move into areas where the church does not have the benefits of sufficient density.  Other things equal, a good opportunity in California would be considered more favorably than the same opportunity in New York.  Of course, people moving to Utah would be motivated by the same factors, but when six of ten people leaving Utah are LDS and two of one hundred entering are LDS, it is easy to see how over time, membership density would decrease in Utah and increase elsewhere. 

Change in Membership Density by State: 2011

The map “Change in Membership Density by State: 2011” adds further visual support for the hypothesis of membership osmosis.  The states with high density should lose density and those with low density should gain it.  Economic growth represented by the proxy variable, population growth, should also influence membership movement.  The map, “Change in Membership Density by State: 2011” shows changes in membership density.  Utah, being the brightest yellow lost the most density.  Idaho, Delaware, Nevada and Alaska were the other states that lost density and all, with the exception of Vermont, had density of more than two times the membership density of the nation as a whole.  The states that gained the most density were Wyoming, North Dakota, Hawaii, and New Mexico.  Three of these states, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico are densely populated with LDS but have much lower densities than Utah and all share a border with Utah.  Texas and North Dakota had the first and second highest percentage growths in population, fitting the part of the theory that emphasis that economic opportunity draws members, both grew in density, .  Utah has the second highest percentage growth.  This also fits the theory and suggests that the net flow of people into Utah was less densely populated with members than Utah as a whole.  

In the future, I hope to empirically test the theory of membership osmosis. My next step will to regress the change in density against the distance (the miles from a state’s most populous city to Salt Lake City) and population growth to see if the relationships between the variables have empirical validity.

State	2011 Membership	Change In Membership	2011 Density	Change In Density
Alabama	35,167	442	.73	.01
Alaska	32,464	294	4.49	-.01
Arizona	395,296	7,346	6.10	.05
Arkansas	28,092	533	.96	.01
California	768,344	4,974	2.04	-.01
Colorado	144,904	2,431	2.83	.01
Connecticut	15,255	265	.43	.01
Delaware	4,982	-202	.55	-.03
Florida	139,089	2,540	.73	.01
Georgia	79,403	1,455	.81	.01
Hawaii	71,041	1,169	5.17	.04
Idaho	417,002	2,820	26.31	-.05
Illinois	55,855	105	.43	.00
Indiana	41,621	331	.64	.00
Iowa	25,381	767	.83	.02
Kansas	34,796	606	1.21	.02
Kentucky	32,496	235	.74	.00
Louisiana	28,933	366	.63	.00
Maine	10,718	34	.81	.00
Maryland	42,229	1,375	.72	.02
Massachusetts	25,386	421	.39	.00
Michigan	42,696	377	.43	.00
Minnesota	30,860	257	.58	.00
Mississippi	21,492	275	.72	.01
Missouri	66,695	624	1.11	.01
Montana	47,103	619	4.72	.03
Nebraska	23,243	110	1.26	.00
Nevada	176,307	1,158	6.47	.00
New Hampshire	8,263	32	.63	.00
New jersey	32,228	555	.37	.01
New Mexico	68,660	1,023	3.30	.02
New York	78,829	798	.40	.00
North Carolina	78,419	1,554	.81	.01
North Dakota	7,899	969	1.15	.13
Ohio	58,757	321	.51	.00
Oklahoma	43,905	872	1.16	.01
Oregon	149,089	1,124	3.85	.00
Pennsylvania	50,591	848	.40	.01
Rhode Island	3,890	57	.37	.01
South Carolina	37,687	740	.81	.01
South Dakota	10,089	277	1.22	.02
Tennessee	46,755	1,181	.73	.01
Texas	305,510	9,369	1.19	.02
Utah	1,936,074	16,731	68.72	-.43
Vermont	4,388	4	.70	.00
Virginia	90,738	1,441	1.12	.01
Washington	271,625	3,698	3.98	.00
West Virginia	16,902	192	.91	.01
Wisconsin	25,203	707	.44	.01
Wyoming	64,437	1,368	11.34	.17
USA	6,226,788	75,588	2.00	.01

 

Culture vs. Political and Economic Institutions

Culture is often the culprit named when members discuss reasons for low levels of convert retention, lack of dedication to church callings or myriad problems church leaders encounter in building testimonies.  Merriam Webster defines culture as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”  As a missionary in the Argentina, Cordoba Mission, I loved elements of culture related to music, dance and food.  People were open and friendly.  It was easy to find people to teach, much harder find those who learned, and harder still to turn converts into serving members.  We often blamed the passivity of Argentines toward religious observance on their Catholic heritage.  Paid clergy performed rites, conducted services and interpreted scriptures for their congregations.  There was little left for these Catholics to do and they did not know how to act in a church that asked for and ran on member participation. 
 
Just as many members fault culture for slow church growth, many economists blame culture for slow economic growth.  The theory that culture affects economic growth has little if any empirical support and has rapidly been displaced by a theory advanced by Acemoglu and Robinson who demonstrate that political and economic institutions hold the key to economic development and that culture is largely unimportant.  Those of us interested in the growth of the church should learn from the economic debate and pay more attention to economic institutions.  

Examples of political institutions affecting church growth abound.  South Korea has 85,000 members, North Korea none.  The culture of both countries was very similar when missionaries entered South Korea in 1954, but the political institutions were distinct.  As WWII ended, the iron curtain separated Austria and Hungary, countries with similar history and culture.  As best I can tell with the data I have, Austria has experienced consistent but rather slow growth since the war.  Communist Hungary did not recognize the church until 1988; church growth languished.  As an aside, today, both countries have similar populations and church memberships but Hungary had a net membership growth of (membership growth rate minus population growth rate) of 3.26% and Austria, 1.74%.  Is the rapid growth in Hungary compared to Austria since the fall of the iron curtain due to political institutions or cultural influence?  For more than a decade, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador participated in a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union who funded the wars.  Afghanistan, Angola, Korea, and Vietnam, countries with no cultural similarities to Latin America also engaged in proxy wars.  These wars affected church growth and they were caused by political institutions, not culture.  

Several ideas come to mind as initial attempts to measure the impact of political and economic institutions on church growth.  Indexes of political and economic freedom could be regressed against variables related to church growth such as net membership growth or membership density (percent of membership to total population).  Similarly, cultural variables such as language, or religious concentration could also be measured against these same church growth variables. Even religious concentration must be interpreted carefully.  Is a high concentration of one religion due to a political decision such as the establishment of a state church?  I will attempt to gather data to test political and economic institutions versus culture in future blog posts.

The Nones

“Nones” is researcher slang for adults who have no religious affiliation.  They currently represent 20 percent of the adult population, up five percent from 2007.  Thirty percent are atheists or agnostics, but 68 percent consider themselves religious or spiritual in some way.  Most are young.  A third of adults under 30 do not have a religious affiliation.  They are socially liberal.  Seventy-two percent support legal abortion and 73%, same-sex marriage (The PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Nones on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation”).

In “American Grace,” Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell note that religious freedom in the United States has made it possible for those unhappy with one religion to find one that suits not only their religious beliefs, but their social and political beliefs as well.

A fluid religious environment enables people seeking something different to leave one religion for another, to find religion for the first time, or to leave religion altogether.  This churn means that people gradually, but continually, sort themselves into like-minded clusters—their commonality defined not only by religion, but also by the social and political beliefs that go along with their religion. 

As a Latter-day Saint, this worries me.  I want to see the Church grow.  Missionaries teach only the gospel, and the Spirit beareth witness but will that witness be heard with political noise in the background?  The Church’s position of political neutrality is more than legal expediency, it is an inspired doctrine to keep our focus on what is truly important.