Response to Mormons Are No Longer a Majority in Utah: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for the Sociology of Religion

Introduction

Published online on December 19th, 2023, the article Mormons Are No Longer a Majority in Utah: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for the Sociology of Religion by Ryan T. Cragun, Bethany Gull, and Rick Phillips reports a recent study conducted to ascertain the percentage of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the population of Utah. This is a significant study that highlights the discrepancy between Church-reported membership and the actual numbers of self-identified Latter-day Saints. Declining fertility in the Church, higher numbers of non-Latter-day Saints moving to Utah, and secularization were identified as factors that have contributed to the declining percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah in recent decades.

It is important to note that the article does not focus on the member activity rates of Latter-day Saints in Utah, but instead focuses on self-affiliation among Latter-day Saints in Utah. Thus, there are individuals who may not self-affiliate as a Latter-day Saint who are reported on Church records as members. Furthermore, some self-affiliated Latter-day Saints are inactive (i.e., do not attend church). Nevertheless, self-affiliation is a useful metric to ascertain member activity rates. Similarly, member activity rates can also provide useful and accurate information regarding self-affiliation. However, these terms are not interchangable.

Self-Affiliation and Member Activity

The Cragun, Bull, and Phillips study concluded that 42% of the population of the State of Utah in 2022 self-identified as a Latter-day Saint. Member activity rates in Utah have generally averaged approximately 50% with significant variability depending on county and region in the state. For example, the Utah South Area had the highest sacrament meeting attendance in the worldwide Church in the year 2000 of more than 54% of total membership. Some stakes and wards in Utah today have member activity rates of 80-90% of total membership, whereas others may be as low as 20-30% of total membership. Overall, approximately 40% of Church-reported membership in the United States is active which I am defining as attending church on a regular basis (this activity rate estimate is based on thousands of surveys completed in the past 10 years from local members/leaders and returned missionaries). Assuming 50% of Church-reported membership in Utah is active (as member activity rates in Utah are higher than most states outside of Utah), then 32.1% of the population in the State of Utah would be active members. The Cragun, Bull, and Phillips study reported that 42% of the state population self-affiliate as Latter-days Saints. Therefore, Church-reported members who are inactive and who still self-affiliate as a Latter-day Saint would be approximately 10% of the state population, or 338,080 people. Therefore, three-quarters of self-affiliated Latter-day Saints would be estimated to be considered active, whereas one-quarter of self-affiliated Latter-day Saints would be estimated to be inactive. These data also indicate that 22% of the state population are on Church records as members but who are inactive and do not self-affiliate as Latter-day Saints. Therefore, approximately one-third of the population of the State of Utah are active Latter-day Saints, one-third of the state population are inactive Latter-day Saints (of whom approximately one-third still self-affiliate as a Latter-day Saint), and one-third of the state population are not Church members at all. 

Trends on Growth

The population of the State of Utah increased from 1.72 million in 1990 to 3.38 million in 2022 per US census bureau statistics and estimates. Utah's population grew by 29.6% in the 1990s, 23.8% in the 2000s, and 18.4% in the 2010s. Church membership in Utah increased from 1.31 million as of year-end 1989 to 2.17 million as of year-end 2022. Therefore, the population of the State of Utah grew by 96.2% (1.66 million) between 1990 and 2022, whereas Church-reported membership for the State of Utah grew by 66.6% (868,560 members) between year-end 1989 and year-end 2022. In other words, for everyone one Latter-day Saint added in Utah there were approximately two non-Latter-day Saints added in Utah. Annual membership growth rates in Utah generally averaged around 2% for most of the 1990s, 1.5-2.0% in the 2000s, 1-5% in the 2010s, and less than 1% in the 2020s. By decade, Church membership in Utah grew by 23.0% in the 1990s, 17.4% in the 2000s, and 12.8% in the 2010s. It is important to note that the rate of growth for both Church membership and the state population has decelerated during the past three decades.

The number of congregations in Utah has increased every year since the Church began to publish the number of congregations in Utah in 1987 (except for 2011 when there was a significant realignment of young single adult [YSA] wards and student wards with the advent of YSA stakes). The rates for congregational growth have closely mirrored membership growth rates during the past 20 years. Consequently, the average number of Latter-day Saints per ward or branch in Utah has remained stable for the past 20 years at approximately 400 members. The number of stakes in Utah has also consistently increased year-over-year for the past several consecutive decades, indicating increasing numbers of active members, as both stakes and congregations require certain numbers of active members to operate and to create new congregations. Since 2000, the Church in Utah has reported a net increase of 7-8 stakes on average per year, with one year reporting a net increase of as few as 2 stakes (2012) whereas other years reporting a net increase of as many as 13 stakes (2000). In 2023, there have been seven stakes discontinued and 11 new stakes organized in Utah based on the most recent updates I have received on stake creations and consolidations for the year.

Have Latter-day Saints Ever Been a Majority in Utah?

I argue that active Latter-day Saints have been a minority in Utah for the entire past 100 years. If using a member activity rate of 50% since 1920, there has never been a year when active Latter-day Saints have constituted a majority of the population in the State of Utah (the highest year would have been 1987 when 39% of the population appeared to be active Latter-day Saints). If we were to assume that the rates of self-affiliation among all Church-reported members (which would be 66.6%) have been stable during the past 40 years, then the only years when this number was over 50% were from 1987-1993, with the highest percentage being in 1987 at 51.3%. However, it is probable that the rates of self-affiliation among inactive Latter-day Saints has decreased in recent decades, especially given rates of self-affiliation reported by other students cited in the Cragun, Bull, and Phillips article. For example, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) estimated that 53% of population of the State of Utah were Mormon in 2001. The Cragun, Bull, and Phillips study assumes a linear decrease between 2001 and 2022, and this would therefore indicate that the percentage of self-affiliated Latter-day Saints in the Utah population fell below 50% in 2007.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any studies that have exclusively assessed self-affiliation of Latter-day Saints with an appreciable sample size in the thousands of participants. Thus, the Cragun, Bull, and Phillips study provides a major contribution to ascertaining self-affiliation in Latter-day Saints through original research (we have generally had to rely upon government censuses for data on self-affiliation). It is a clear finding that the percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah has steadily decreased. Per official Church records, the percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah declined from 77.7% in 1987 (an all-time high for the percentage of Latter-day Saints in the past century) to 64.2% as of year-end 2022. Non-church sources have also reported a decline in the percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah. Given increasing numbers of non-Latter-day Saints and inactive members, the Church has appeared to place a greater emphasis on missionary work in Utah through the assignment of larger numbers of full-time missionaries and the creation of new missions. In 1987, there were only two missions in Utah, whereas there were only five missions in Utah between 1999 and 2009. However, there have been 10 missions in Utah since 2015, with plans to organize three more missions in 2024. Thus, the Church has begun to treat Utah much more like any other state in the United States in regard to missionary efforts, albeit that Utah now stands out as having a disproportionate number of missions for its comparatively tiny population. For example, 13 of the Church's 120 missions in the United States that are anticipated to be operating by July 2024 will be in Utah (10.8%) even though the population of Utah constitutes a mere 1.0% of the population of the United States. In contrast, California is the most populous state in the United States with 39 million inhabitants (11.7% of the national population), and 13.3% (16) of the Church's 120 missions will be based in California. These efforts to concentrate a disproportionate amount of mission resources to Utah appears geared toward the reactivation of inactive members who appear to number more than one million and proselyte the more than one million people who are not on the records of the Church.