down 8 pts from 2011-13 but sill leading the recent Gallup Survey of church attendance, by group, in the US.

Compare to Catholics at 33% and Protestants at 44%.

Read the entire article here:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx

They had to have obtained their data from mormonism.

Because just as with any and all mormon claims, the fiction is strong in this one.

I can see how that number could be authentic.

We know that most people on the church's records don't claim themselves as Mormons if they're asked on a poll or other situation. That shows up on the census data in a number of countries that collect religious data. That discrepancy between the church's count and the countries count.

So if you get someone who will say they're lds on a poll, it's likely you've got some one who is active in the church in the first place. Meaning they attend church with some regularity. In mormonism asking a person if they're Mormon with a positive response and asking if they attend church arer just about the exact same question.

Exactly.

The Mormons never make a distinction between the member-of-record, and the person who self-identifies as Mormon. So I can't ever trust one of these reports, regardless of the source.

In my active years in Mormon Central, the average attendance was between 30 to 40 Percent per all membership records in the ward.

I know this because I sat in a Bishopric Sunday Morning meeting for two years with all the other leaders in the ward.

Plus, it also depends on how you identify "Catholic" and "Protestant." It really comes down to actives vs. inactives. My mom would have identified as a Catholic her entire life, but she was almost entirely inactive for decades.

Summer that is so true, I say I’m Lutheran. I attend church on Christmas Eve and Maundy Thursday. I skip Easter Sunday since I’m deathly allergic to Easter Lilies.

Around 25-30% of members of record attending. Maybe 115 attending sacrament out of around 440 on the rolls. This was quite a while ago.

Indoctrination is their chief tool-method, idk how the membees tolerate the endless repition.

Of course there's the embarrassing question /statement: 'I we didn't see U at church - SM last Sunday' with the implied guilt/question of WHY?

As in all surveys, this depends on how the survey questions are asked and how the sampling is done.

I don't think 67% of all of the LDS members who are officially on the ward rolls attend. No way. This is born out by how many inactive members the Church still counts as part of its worldwide membership and a lot of anecdotal reports available. But, if Gallup is first asking if someone is affiliated with a certain church, and then asks if that person attended, then perhaps 67% is believable.

Okay, yeah . . .

If the survey begins with a qualifier, "Are you a believer in your religion?" and only moves on if the answer is "Yes!" then I can see mormonism having its high scoring.

The church says there are 17,000,000 members and that it has 24,227 wards, meaning roughly 701 members in each ward.  64% of 701 is 469.67, or 470 butts in the pews in each and every ward each Sunday.

All the survey has to ask is "what religion to belong to?" We know from national censuses that ask for religious affiliation on their census (notably British Commonwealth countries) that roughly a third of the number of members the Mormon Church claims actually self-identify as Mormon on their census. The number is probably slightly higher in the US. I'd guess between 35% and 40%

So, basically, 2/3rds of 1/3rd of the people in the survey that self-identify as Mormon attend church regularly. That would be 1.78 million out of the 8 million the church claims in the US attend regularly.

Also keep in mind that it is active Mormons for the most part who are responding, which means they are lying about how often they attend. Think of Home Teaching statistics. ;)

Are your favorite stores and coffee shops becoming crowded lately?

Get to church and let me shop in peace :)

+, how are infants & younger teens counted? Were they included in that stat?

ChurchCo counts every person present regardless of age & if it was their actual choice to attend or not.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2024 12:53PM by GNPE.

Doesn't matter. gallup didn't get the numbers from the church, it got them from survey participants.

When I was the ward clerk 25+ years ago, I sat up front at the clerk's side table and took notes of who/what was said.

I also walked up and down the isles counting heads. Then I would fold a white sheet of paper in half and set it up so the congregation could see what percentage of attendance we had.

We averaged between 68% and 76%.

Eventually the bishop told me to count empty sacrament cups instead of walking the isles. Then he told me to add 15-20 to that number to account for those not taking the sacrament, nursing mothers, and foyer sitters.

That's why it is important for bishops to go on missions, so they can learn how to report ward attendance the same corrupt way they reported First Discussion's given per week.

And we wonder why there is so much fraud in Utah. It's run by a religion where lying is a foundational practice.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That's why it is important for bishops to go on
> missions, so they can learn how to report ward
> attendance the same corrupt way they reported
> First Discussion's given per week.
>
> And we wonder why there is so much fraud in Utah.
> It's run by a religion where lying is a
> foundational practice.

You got me laughing pretty good.

It's ironic that in the LDS "Church" ward clerks are often instructed to lie in their reports about sacrament meeting attendance.

Yes I was ward membership clerk many years ago. The actual numbers I reported got inflated by someone (Bishop) by a substantial percentage.

NFW! How did they collect this data? in many place only about 25% of members on the books are even partially active.

Not true. I was a RS Sec for many years when we kept rolls. Quarterly RS attendance for any meeting was between 48%--50%.
If just a homemaking meeting was attended they were active.

This was northern Utah.

That explains it!

Meanwhile survey takers found 7 of the top 3 things that people are concerned about!

Wasn't there a Pew report a few years ago that put the number at a little above 29% active?

I think that's more accurate world wide.

I estimate it was 10% or under of our recorded ward membership.

Does 'ward membership' end at 105 yrs now?

GNPE Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Does 'ward membership' end at 105 yrs now?

I thought it was 112? Which is a good lifespan for anyone.

Let's assume (simplistically) that formal membership in the Church basically includes four types of people:

1. Believer Active (BA)
2. Believer Inactive (BI)
3. Non-believer Active (NA)
3. Non-believer Inactive (NI)

Let's also assume:

(a) Formal institutional Church membership of roughly 17,000,000;

(b) Only BA and BI (believers) self-identify as (ideological) Mormons; and

(c) At most, only 40% of the institutional membership self-identify as Mormons (From BoJ, giving the Church the benefit of the doubt.)

Then:

First, there are 10,200,000 Mormons that are NA or NI but remain institutional members, whether they attend or not.

Regarding the survey, the "self-identifying" Mormon criteria as the inclusive, but restrictive, data set (BA and BI) grossly eschews the attendance statistic because it leaves out the NA and NI groups who are institutionally part of the Mormon population. As such, it is essentially worthless with regard to any meaningful interpretation. (e.g. as a sign of religious commitment)

The Church logically has a choice, either use the membership institutional total as the starting point for its church-attendance statistic, and live with the relatively low percentage of attendance, or use self-identifying polling (like the Gallop poll) and point to how wonderfully active (and thus committed) the members are compared to other Churches. The fact that there are (presumably) a significant number of NA and NI (Non-believing active and inactive) in the Church makes attendance a very weak indicator of Mormon religious commitment when essentially viewed from the standpoint of believers only.

Hypothetically, what would happen if the 10.2M NI and NA resigned? In the first place it would make the attendance numbers more meaningful across the Board. It would decrease the total membership, of course, but also make the attendance percentage higher. Notwithstanding, the smaller the starting criterion of 'membership,' the less significant attendance is as a measure of commitment. After all, the Church could make membership conditional on attendance, and thereby get a 100 percent attendance rating. That would be like bragging that 100% of Mormons have been baptized and using that statistic as a sign of commitment.

"Let's assume (simplistically) that formal membership in the Church basically includes four types of people:

1. Believer Active (BA)
2. Believer Inactive (BI)
3. Non-believer Active (NA)
3. Non-believer Inactive (NI)"

I would include other categories:
* Attends because family do.
* Semi-active, i.e. turns up occasionally especially to social events. Belief status varies.
* Half-in, half-out.
* Attends but refuses callings, TRs etc. May only come to sacrament meeting.

78.3 % of published statistics were determined at random.

https://religionnews.com/2024/02/16/how-many-mormons-are-actually-in-church-every-week-in-the-us/

"Scholars who study religion have long understood that the number of people who say they’re in church on a given Sunday is higher than the number who are actually there. For example, one famous 1990s study found that fully half of the Christians who called themselves weekly attenders were likely not.

That study relied on churches’ own attendance data to get at the truth, and the researchers even counted cars in parking lots. Now a scholar has come up with a far more sophisticated — and comprehensive — way of measuring people’s self-reported attendance against their actual behavior.

For the forthcoming journal article “Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data,” economist Devin Pope of the University of Chicago tracked the cellphones of 2.1 million Americans over nearly a year (from April 2019 to the pre-pandemic month of February 2020)."

"Now, he is mining this source to study religion. His findings measure the religious attendance of many different religious groups, from Protestants and Catholics to Muslims, Jews and Buddhists. But for this article, we’re going to focus on what he learned about Latter-day Saints. It’s a group he is particularly interested in, since he is an active member of the LDS Church himself.

On the one hand, far fewer Latter-day Saints attend church weekly than say they attend. And Pope adopted a generous definition of “weekly” attendance, giving people latitude for illness, travel and other circumstances that might keep them home from church. “If you went at least 36 weeks of the year, I call you a weekly attender,” he said.

Even with that extra leeway, there are only about a third as many LDS weekly attenders (.29% of the U.S. population) as the number who claim to be LDS weekly attenders in surveys (.87% of the US population)"

“I think almost surely we’re seeing some social desirability bias, where people want to claim that they are weekly attenders and they’re just not,” Pope said. “But it feels good to answer yes to that (survey) question. LDS individuals show that same bias in terms of overclaiming attendance.”

LOL. Exactly what I suspected.

The same thing happens when people self-report what they eat. People who are overweight tend to under-report how much they eat, and people who are underweight tend to over-report what they eat. Everybody thinks they eat "a normal amount, more or less."

The only reliable way around that is to write down every single thing you eat the moment you eat it. Most people won't do that.


But yeah, Mormons reporting church attendance - that's a gold-plated case of "ignore what they say, watch what they do."

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

I was unable to find any actual published study by Devin Pope supporting the linked article. Specifically, I was curious (and skeptical) as to the reliability of the methodology used. (Sometimes, the enthusiasm of the social sciences for a given idea or technology outrun its credible application.)

In the present case, I did find a similar study by Pope that identifies his general smart phone tracking methods:

http://devingpope.com/assets/files/Racial_Disparities_in_Voting_Wait_Times.pdf

Note the following very basic description of the process, which presumably is similar to the study identified in your link:

"The three primary datasets that we use in our paper include: (1) SafeGraph cell phone location records, (2) Polling locations, and (3) Census demographics. We use anonymized location data for more than 10 million U.S. smartphones provided by SafeGraph, a rm that aggregates location data across a number of smartphone applications (Chen and Rohla 2018)."

"Pings are recorded anytime an application on a phone requests information about the phones location. Depending on the application, this can happen when the application (e.g. a navigation or weather app) is being used, or can occur at regular intervals when the application is in the background. The modal time between pings in our sample for a given device is 5 minutes."

Note also the admitted limitations:

"However, it also has its limitations. One key limitation is that the sample is an imperfect representation of the overall U.S. population. Given the nature of the data, our sample can by construction only be representative of the population of approximately 77% of U.S. adults who owned a smartphone in 2016. Additionally, we will be restricting our sample to phones that receive regular pings and thus will disproportionately remove individuals who turn off their phones for extended periods of time, do not allow location-tracking services on their phone, or live in areas with poor cell phone coverage."

Applying these limitations to the current study, it would appear that the accuracy of the cell phone tracking would importantly depend upon (1) Whether the church attenders had smart phones; (2) Whether they took their phones with them to Church; (3) Whether their smart phones were actually on; (4) Whether their smart phones were set to geographical tracking; and (5) Whether the location of the Church was sufficiently urban to allow such effective tracking.

Intuitively, it seems that these limitations were seriously undermine any study of Church attendance, which may be why the study was apparently never published. Although the vast majority of the population now have smart phones, one can assume that the anti-hacking, and anti-tracking sophistication of smart phones has also increased, perhaps making statistical tracking more difficult as well.

Moreover, one is probably more likely to leave their smart phone home, or turn it off in a Church setting (as compared to voting). Also, since Church attendance involves a substantial number of older persons not smart phone literate (even if they have one), it just seems like a reach that any meaningful data could be collected by this method in this context.

In any event, I am not sure that this methodology is any better than the old-fashioned survey method, as weak as that method is.