https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/24/mormon-land-all-about-lds-growth/

“ ‘Mormon Land’: All about LDS growth — where it’s up, down and how many are actually ‘active’
For starters, Africa is soaring, Russia is tanking and Utah is slumping.”

Wonder why?
Could it be access to the internet?

How’ll growth be after Starlink provides internet to the entire planet and those Africans find out the abusive CULT has been robbing their widowed grandmas and Moms of their life savings by lying to them and hiding hundreds of billions in the bank?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/2023 06:04PM by schrodingerscat.

I wish I had hundreds of trillions in the bank...

But I bet I'd have to carry around my passbook, so when people thought I was exaggerating, I could show them!

"Hundreds of trillions" in the bank would be quite an accomplishment for the church since world GDP is presently only about one hundred trillion. But hey, maybe the Q15 have already purchased Mars and have a call option on Venus.

All done in cooperation with Space Karen, perhaps?

This is why watching the TV science fiction series, "The Expanse," is so entertaining. You get to see just how the Mormon church's dreams of expansion into the universe don't go *quite* according to plan. ;)

Anything is possible with God. Duh.

Oh ye of little faith. Pfft.

You're assuming US dollars.

Zimbabwe inflation eas so bad they had 100 Trillion Zimbabwe Dollar denominations.

I think blaming Mormon growth problems on the internet is too glib. LDS Inc struggled in Europe for all of the 20th century, with the possible exception of the UK. It’s probably struggling more because of the internet, but that was not the root cause of the problem.

The internet is widely available in Africa. A great deal of business and low level banking is done over smartphones. If they wanted to find out about Mormon skeletons in the closet, they could.

US President GW Bush is extremely popular in Africa because of his substantial support in fighting AIDS. All the US missionary-oriented churches are doing very well in Africa right now. They are in part cashing the good will check that Bush wrote.

Mormonism is doing well in African countries, and it is still doing moderately well in Catholic countries that are former colonies, like Brazil and the Philippines, not Italy or Poland.

I think LDS Inc’s success or failure has more to do with how the US and religion in general is perceived in the local culture. In places where Mormonism is struggling, the internet has certainly affected that struggle, I would say especially in Utah itself.

If by ‘widely available’ you mean <40%, then sure.
Otherwise, not so much.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users

There are also two possible attendant issues:

1)  For many, the Internet is only a source of shared entertainment and friend/familial connection,

and

2)  In terms of learning/education, most people don't have the time, inclination, or intellectual foundation for using it thusly.


And then we have to mention that Harvard University could only ESTIMATE! that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 language spoken in Africa, while Google Search can only be used in 133 languages.  I couldn't find a breakdown of how many of these 133 languages are used in Africa.

Nigeria, where the bulk of church growth is happening, internet access is at 63%, and I would think that Mormon converts in Nigeria, and in Africa in general, are better educated than average, and speak the primary language of their nation, or even English.

When I was in Brazil 50-some years ago, that’s what our typical investigators were like. They were often joining for the chance to rub shoulders with Americans, on the chance that some sort of opportunity would arise from the association.

English IS the primary language of Nigeria, and all citizens speak it at home, and in all schools from kindergarten to post-graduate studies. If their English seems foreign to you, it is only because their received pronunciation is different from your received pronunciation. They also speak Standard English, which often seems foreign and confusing to Americans. However, almost all people are also raised with at one (or even multiple) indigenous language. Any Sub-Saharan African I know is a polyglot, often speaking four languages with native fluency, something that should boost the respect of anyone from the developed world.

There are places in Africa that hardly have any access to the Internet at all. We lived in Kinshasa, DRC, for 2 1/2 years, totally without Internet. I was able to have Internet at work, and in go in on Saturday to write letters. There were some Internet cafes where Congolese could go and attempt to get on the Internet, but the cafes had dodgy connections. You had to pay in advance, with absolutely no guarantee of successfully getting on. It also took money, something few people had. On Sundays, the Kasavubu Ward was packed, with every outlet in the building used to charge the members' mobile phones (the country has no postal services or land-line telephones, just mobile services provided by foreign carriers, which also provide little to no data coverage): most people live with no guarantee of electricity, either, may one or two hours a day, normally in the small hours of the night, while the Mormons have backup generators chugging away during services. Consequently, members had little to no opportunity to learn about the real LDS church. The senior missionaries also verified to me that they "protect" the members, whom they always described as "children" or "child-like," from being exposed to anything that could possibly be seen as negative. These things included, of course, the church's racist past. The negative things also included polygamy, but ostensibly for pragmatic purposes, since Congolese often practise polygamy; they didn't want the members to feel that they had an excuse to practise it. The whole idea of treating them as children is horribly racist in itself, but the blinded goody-two- shoes Mormons don't see that.

I suppose the church thinks of Africa as a long-term investment. But it's going to be a money sink for a long, long time. If I were an African Mormon, I would milk the church for everything I could get.

    Summer, it's my impression that all the native Elders and Sister missionaries called to serve in many 2nd & 3rd world countries are being paid for their service.

    I've mentioned in the past about reading a P-day blog from a sister missionary in Cambodia about tracting out a young lady who responded to their, "Hi, we're mormon missionaries, would you like to know more?" with the riposte, "Yeah, I'm mormon, but inactive now, and I served a mission and it was the best job I ever had or will likely ever have..."

    I am curious as to how much of the marvelous, wonderous growth of the church in Africa and SE Asia is due to cash on the barrel head.

    I'd ask you to find out for me, but I just posed this question on Reddit.  So you lucked out...this time.

EOD, I've read the same thing as well, that missionary work is an excellent source of income in a 3rd world country. I completely support those missionaries getting paid. Good for them.

The real payoff will be if they can get the Mormon church to finance their educations. Get what they need from the Mormons, and get out.

      "...while serving in Lisbon South mission, which included Cape Verde in Africa, we had many of the Native missionaries simply take the money and sent the majority of it home to their families, or they saved it all and ran away at the end of the mission never to be seen again.

      "As a Branch president in Africa, I had to tell a mother that her missionary son was not coming home because he went A-W-O-L In Lisbon.  Instead of going to the mission home for his final transfer home back to Africa, the elder decided to leave and become a drug dealer.  We only found this out after he was arrested in Portugal on drug charges.  He used his one phone call to call the mission home.  (He chose poorly)"

Damn. I wish I'd been called to Lisbon.

The African-born Sub-Saharan missionaries serving locally are made to sign a binding contract stating that the monthly pay ends at the end of the mission. It also states that any missionaries who marry during their missions will be sacked, and receive no more money. Many young missionaries want to get married because, for the first time ever, they are receiving a regular stipend. They often get married, anyway, under the protection of fellow sympathetic missionaries.

It's both a long-term investment and a short-term one.

In the short run, the church's legitimacy depends on growth. Without it, all of the prophesies are proved false. Without at least some parts of the mission field yielding a harvest, members would realize the church is in terminal decline.

So while hoping that Africa may eventually produce significant tithes, the Q15 realizes that growth there is necessary to keep the money flowing in from the rich world as well. In short, the church needs any plausible claim to growth.

"I suppose the church thinks of Africa as a long-term investment. But it's going to be a money sink for a long long time"

China is investing heavily in Africa and BRICS is fast becoming the global hegemony. I expect the standard of living to rise rapidly. Doubling GDP every decade has a big impact over several decades.

Africa without Western colonialism will not be a money sink. As much as I hate the church, Africa will forgive a lot of past white supremacy in the face of such economic gains.

China is much more rapacious than Western countries are. Africa and Latin America are already learning that.

What better place to be buying land for future investments! Hello Africa! Can I interest you in religion for 10% of your earnings?

They should be giving copies of the Poisenwood Bible instead of the BoM. Oh wait...it's probably banned.

> They should be giving copies of the Poisenwood
> Bible instead of the BoM. Oh wait...it's probably
> banned.

Now, now, dagny. Africa isn't Florida.

Russia never took off. The Russians just went back to the Russian Orthodox religion. The church didn’t make much of an impact in post Soviet Russia.

Christian church’s in general are seeing growth in Subsaharan Africa. The LDS are just being raised by the same tide.

Mobile phones and internet have surprising penetration into Africa. Not all the African stereotypes you've been told are true.

You know, you're right. It looks like about half of the total African population has a cell phone, though it tends to be a plain cell phone as opposed to a smart phone. One Pew Research article states that cell phones are mainly used for texting there.

Nonsense.
Africa has by far the least amount of access to the internet of any other continent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users

Where there are cell phones, smart phones will follow. It may not be tomorrow, but they will come.

It’s possible to have relatively low internet access and still have more access than most people think you have.

I assume cell phone and texting access does not technically count as internet access, but that is kind of a first cousin of internet access.

I also assume that an internet access point shared by an entire village only counts as a single access point.

A lot of assumptions for somebody who has never stepped foot in Africa.
Show me the stats.

Two assumptions are a lot?  Should he have stopped at one?

Would it have been okay if he'd made a separate post for each assumption?

Are there ever any good assumptions?  I mean, besides the ones you may or may not have made?

Do assumptions have cheeks?


Finally, if BoJ HAD set foot in Africa, as you have, would his assumptions have been free and clear of being considered inappropriate?

Mr. The Cat, have you ever stepped foot in sub-Saharan Africa? Because all you've told us about is a brief holiday in the Maghreb a couple of decades ago.

Is there more? Have you spent time in Nigeria or Zaire like other board members?

Is your information better than theirs?