LDS are legendary for tracking membership statistics. How do other religions track membership, or do they? We’ll talk about the rise of Nones, the 2nd fastest growing religious group with Sociologist Dr Ryan Cragun. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Ryan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPiSAV7aMxI&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ5TNY30k0M5dZa_cM1S9bk8
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How Do Other Religions Track Membership?
GT 00:36 I was talking to Cristina Rosetti. Do you know Cristina?
Ryan 00:38 I have never met her, I don’t think, but I know her name.
GT 00:42 She teaches at Utah Tech. She just got engaged, by the way. She’s probably moving to Canada. Her boyfriend is in Canada. He’s an Anglican priest or something like that. I hope we don’t lose her. But I will just put in a quick plug, the Juanita Brooks conference in April. We are going to go to Short Creek. Last year, we went to Mountain Meadows. So anyway, put that on your calendar. And I don’t know if Cristina will do that again. But one of the things, when I talked with her and she says, Well, you got 16 million Mormons. I hesitated, well– and she says, “Just take it.” She says, “Nobody does that. We’ve got a billion Catholics,” she’s converted Catholic. “And nobody says, ‘Well, there’s really only 500 million.'”
Ryan 01:31 I do, but most people don’t. When I see the 17 million members of the Church or whatever, I immediately look at a paper that my buddy who’s a co-author on this, Rick Phillips wrote, where he showed using census data. Because there are a number of countries around the world where they ask your religious affiliation on the census. Brazil is one of those. And so, what he showed in his study, which was published like 2004, I think, so it’s, it’s 20 years ago, the LDS Church was reporting like 1.4, 1.3 million members in Brazil, but on the census, it was 300,000.
GT 02:06 Okay.
Ryan 02:06 So of those 17 million, 1 million are people who were baptized in Brazil, but no longer identify as Mormon. And the same, actually, is true in Mexico. It’s like 1.3, 1.4, again, and a million of them don’t even identify as Mormon. So, yeah, when they say 17 million, I just laugh at those numbers. I mean, to be honest, everybody knows those numbers are wildly inflated. They’re a joke.
GT 02:31 What about the Catholics?
Ryan 02:33 Theirs is a little trickier, because, yeah, we can compare census data. But the Catholic Church does not bet everything on their numbers. They know they’re big. They’re huge. But they don’t push this idea out there: we are growing, and therefore we’re true. And I know, the Church doesn’t emphasize that as much. But come on, growing up when we did, this was a huge part of the rhetoric. It’s like, if we weren’t God’s Church, then why would we be growing? And today, they’re not really growing. They might be offsetting the losses that they have from people leaving the Church, by the converts, and the new kids coming up. But honestly, the LDS Church is barely treading water, in my take, at this point. And if we look at Catholics, they just don’t have to do the same thing. Plus, they don’t report their actual numbers.
Ryan 03:24 So find me the report of the Catholic Church where it’s like, we have the exact number of members in this county. They just don’t do it. They don’t care as much about this. The LDS Church is very particular about their numbers. It’s the smaller groups who care a lot about this. Jehovah’s Witnesses do the same thing, but their numbers are really weird, and then Seventh Day Adventists, but they actually clean their rolls. So, of the three groups, the one that’s actually the most accurate representation of those who actually self-identify, is Seventh Day Adventists. And that’s because they do go through and say, like, hey, these people aren’t attending. We can’t find them. They’re out. They’re done. Jehovah’s Witnesses under report. So, they have more people who identify, but they don’t count them because they’re not doing their publishing. They’ve got to do a certain amount of time, which they actually just got rid of that requirement. So, they would only report the publishers, not all the people who identified. So, they’re actually on the other end. Jehovah’s Witnesses underreport. Mormons wildly over report and Seventh Day Adventists are right in the middle. And then other religions might report some numbers. But yeah, the numbers are weird when you get into the details.
GT 04:25 Okay, because that is my question. How do LDS compare to Pentecostals, Baptists and those sorts of things, but you say they just don’t report numbers.
Ryan 04:37 Pentecostalism is impossible. So, that one is only going to be self-report, because they’re a completely kind of distributed entity. There isn’t a top-down hierarchical organization. The Catholic Church, you could probably get at some of those numbers. They might have some of them, but it’s really tricky, because they’re not as meticulous at tracking people down. I mean, you can be Catholic and go up to any Catholic Church on any given Sunday, and no one’s going to care. They don’t use the same very clear geographic system to track people. They’re just like, hey, go to church. We’d love for you to go to church. Wherever you are, go to church. But Pentecostalism is non-hierarchical. Who do they report their numbers to? They don’t have to report their numbers to anybody. Rick tomorrow, you could say, I am a Pentecostal pastor and set up a church right down the street, and no Pentecostal is going to challenge you. That’s just the nature of the religion.
GT 05:28 Are you sure?
Ryan 05:28 A hundred percent, Rick, because the nature of the religion is if you feel called, you’re a pastor. There’s no training. There’s no [requirements.] You don’t have to go to get a degree in divinity or something like that to set up as a Pentecostal pastor. You can do that tomorrow.
GT 05:43 Well, it’s funny. I mentioned Steve Pynakker. I don’t know if you know him.
Ryan 05:47 I subscribe to something on Facebook, where he has, I don’t know, he’s got something on Facebook.
GT 05:52 So, Steve came out to Utah about three weeks ago for a Bickertonite baptism. And the Bickertonites, I guess I should give a brief history. Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young excommunicated each other. Sidney started a new church in Pittsburgh, basically. It fell apart. A guy by the name of William Bickerton picked up the pieces. They think Joseph Smith was the first prophet, Sidney Rigdon was second, William Bickerton was third. So, they’re very Pentecostal. They just had their first baptism in Utah in December. Steve came out here, because they believe in the Book of Mormon. they do not believe in the Doctrine and Covenants. And so Steve got all kinds of crap, because Steve claims to be an evangelical. And all these evangelicals came out of the woodwork [and] were like, Steve, you’re not an Evangelical. You support a Book of Mormon church. They’re a cult. They’re terrible. They’re devil worshipers. They just let them have it, like you don’t meet the evangelical cred. Steve was funny, because he was like, how should I respond? And I’m like, we’ve been fighting this for 200 years. We don’t have any good answers.
Ryan 07:18 I’ve had these debates a number of times. From a sociologist standpoint, if I was doing survey collection, and Steve, if we called him or we asked him online, what is your religious affiliation? If he said, “Evangelical,” he’s Evangelical. It’s all self-report. You can get into these arguments. And people have been doing it for centuries, millennia, of who are the true evangelicals? Effectively, they’re just playing a big game of the No True Scotsman Fallacy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that fallacy.
GT 07:48 Go ahead and say it.
Ryan 07:48 Yeah. So the basic idea is that it’s moving the goalposts fallacy, that you’re basically saying, “Oh, well, only true evangelicals believe this.” You may say you’re evangelical. But you’re not actually evangelical. Because only the true ones do this. And, of course, you can move that all the time. I remember the first time this came up in one of my classes, we were talking about religion-inspired terrorism. Of course, teaching in the US, I didn’t have any Muslim students in my class. So, I point out the very obvious ones, some Muslim-inspired terrorism. Everyone, is like, oh, yeah, sure. And I say, oh, and then there was that bombing during the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, or whatever. And that was a Christian. They’re like, well, he wasn’t a true Christian. I was like, of course, he’s a true Christian. You don’t get to rule somebody out because they’re a bad member of your faith. That’s just not how this works. “Well, I get to determine…” No! You don’t determine who the Christians are. You don’t determine to the Mormons are, the evangelicals. That’s the No True Scotsman Fallacy: Only the people who I like get to be part of my religion, everybody else gets ruled out. Sorry. That’s not the way it works. So it sounds very much like that’s the situation he’s in: Oh, true evangelicals do this.
GT 09:00 Yeah, they hate Mormons. If you’re a true evangelical, you hate Mormons. {Laughing}
Ryan 09:06 It’s not how it works. Sorry evangelicals. It’s not how it works.
GT 09:13 Do you have any sense, going back to Cristina, because I think, what is the number? Isn’t it 1.3 billion Catholics in the world? Do you have any sense for how many are really Catholics, self-identified Catholics, sociological point of view?
Ryan 09:29 It’s tricky. Now, Pew probably has the best data on that. They spent a lot of time trying to estimate this. I think their current number is close to a billion, somewhere around there. That would probably be pretty close to self-identification. Now, of course, if you dig into attendance stuff, so how engaged they are, how important it is, how closely they adhere to the orthodoxy, that’s going to drop pretty precipitously. So yeah, I mean, it’s not hard for people to say yeah, I’m Catholic. And when was last time you went to church? Well, 30 years ago.
Ryan 10:00 I still remember I was in a cab in Buenos Aires. I was doing some research down there on atheists in Argentina. I got in a cab, and I do speak enough Spanish, I served my mission in Costa Rica. But we were having a conversation. And he’s like, “Oh, you study religion.” I was like, “Yes.” He says, “I’m Catholic.” I was like, “Oh, that’s great.” He says, “But I haven’t been to church in 40 years.” And I was like, why do you still identify as Catholic?
GT 10:23 Right.
Ryan 10:24 It’s just a cultural thing. We still see the same thing in Scandinavia. So, there are a lot of people in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, it depends on how you want to count Scandinavia, where they say “Oh, yeah, I’m part of the state church,” which a lot of them are separating the state church out. It’s like, okay, but do you believe in God? “No, why would I believe in God? I’m Norwegian, therefore, I’m Lutheran.” They link those two together as though that is part of their identity, but they don’t incorporate any of the beliefs or the behaviors. So, for many of them, they’re like, “Oh, Norwegians are Lutheran.” That is what it means to be Norwegian. So, they just link them. But they don’t believe any of the things. So, the same is true, like, I was raised Catholic. So I’m Catholic. Do you believe in any of it? No, no. I mean, we know this.
Ryan 11:10 So some of the numbers are fascinating. More than 70%, more than 60%, I’ll hedge my bets here, of Americans think that Catholic priests should be allowed to get married. They also, it’s close to 70% who think…
GT 11:21 I even told Cristina that. {both chuckling}
Ryan 11:22 Isn’t that amazing? Something like 70% think that women should be allowed to use birth control. Both of those run absolutely counter to what the Catholic Church teaches. Our current President, Joe Biden, not in favor of abortion, but in favor of birth control and abortion access. This is why a lot of the Catholic bishops are like, he should be excommunicated. And I’m like, come on. What does it mean to be Catholic? And that’s actually a tricky one, because the Catholic Church has much looser criteria for how you can remain a member of the church than say, Mormons. Though the LDS Church, I think has backed off quite a bit in excommunicating people, because the bad PR that comes with that, just it’s really dangerous these days. So, they’re willing to let more people stay until it becomes a real problem. And when you get a Kate Kelly or a John Dehlin, who are making waves, then it’s time to go in and kick them out. But if Joe Blow down the street is like, “I don’t believe that,” they’re like, whatever. As long as he’s not influencing a lot of people, they don’t care anymore. It’s all PR.
Ryan 11:25 Well, that was the question I wanted to ask you next, because you talked about, the “Well, I’m Catholic, or I’m Lutheran,” but I don’t ever go. Do we see the same phenomena in the LDS Church?
Ryan 12:37 Yeah, but not to the same degree, which is interesting. So, members of the LDS Church are more likely to be engaged, than a lot of other religions. So, certainly with Catholics, I mean, the vast majority of Catholics are Christmas/Easter Catholics, they rarely go. They don’t go a lot. For people who still identify as members of the Church, they’re particularly like, I mean, we’ve had these numbers for quite a while. They’re more likely to attend. So there are some who clearly don’t, but still identify. As a percentage, they give more money to their religion than any other religious group in the US. There might be two exceptions that are close. Hindus and Jews actually are pretty close. But otherwise, I mean, they give way more. On average it’s about 7%, so not all Mormons are good tithe payers, but it’s about 7% of their money that they’re giving, which is actually pretty surprising. When most people say I’m a member of the Church, they actually mean that they hold a lot of the beliefs. They do attend. They do a lot of it. It’s not all of them, but quite a few. So they’re higher than say Episcopalians, a lot of other groups.
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