If so, that's terrifying.

What are other growing religions, and which ones are dwindling?

And what about Metropolitan Community Churches? I've heard they're growing rapidly.

With about a billion catholics and a billion muslims I'm sure that in birthrate alone each of them are outpacing the couple million Mormons.
If you're talking about percentage growth then any newly formed religion has an infinite growth the first year.
No matter which method you use, total growth or percentage, I don't see how the LDS claim can be true.

What does it really mean?

If a car is popular, do you feel like you have to go out and buy it? Why? Do you need it? Does it work for you? Did you want it before someone told you that you SHOULD want it because it's popular?

If what is popular to others drives all of your decisions, do you think that is mentally healthy? Is it practical?

It's marketing bulls#it, designed to bypass your critical thinking processes.

I believe it is a marketing ploy, those numbers you spout off so that other people will just blindly follow along because they don't want to feel left out. "Millions of people can't be wrong, I might as well get in line too" Reminds me of a cheesy movie I saw when I was younger. Joe versus the volcano. The female character said something that stuck with me and that was most of humanity goes through life sleeping, they never really wake up enough to see the world around them. If they did I am sure most religions would see a mass exodus.

Fastest growing in the US, outside of US, or in the world?

Over what period of time, per year? per decade?

Fastest growing denominations? or religions? If religions, Pentacostalism would clearly take the cake in both US and world.

Good stats at religioustolerance.com adherents.com and pewresearch.com

I've heard Islam is the fastest growing religion worldwide.

I would think that Mormons would resent having their faith shown as "the fastest-growing religion". They don't have a religion of their own, or so they say, they're CHRISTIAN!

HAH.

In anyway, I think Christianity is the fastest-growing religion when it comes to converts and Islam when it comes to births.

Buddhism is getting a stronghold in India once again. Many millions convert to Buddhism to avoid the caste issues that Hinduism brings, the clan stuff Islamic culture brings (but not the religion).

Today, one percent of India's population is Buddhism (some 9 million people i think). Only two hundred years ago there were hardly no Buddhists in what is now India: only a few dispersed tribes practised it.

In China, the Falun Gong was established in 1992. So in 1991, there were no followers of Falun Gong. In 1998, the Chinese government estimated that there were, in China alone, seventy million followers.

According to the "Claims to be the fastest growing religion" article on Wikipedia, Hinduism may be considered one. Having a birthrate of 10-20%, Hinduism grows, in India alone, by 2 % annually.

The same article discusses Wicca in the US where in 1990, the religion had eight thousand followers. In 2001, it had over 134000 followers!

The article also quotes from the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a table. According to the table, Christianity is the fastest growing religion in terms of number with 25,210,195 new adherents every year (of which 2,501,396 are conversions). Growth rate for Christianity is 1.36% annually.

The religions having the biggest growth rate according to the table are Zoroastrianism (2.65 %) and Bahá'í Faith (2.28 %). The least growing of the cited religions is Shinto, shrinking 1 % every year.

Personally I feel that irreligion (non-religion) is the fastest growing religion worldwide. It includes agnosticism, personal religion (what the self believes is true for the personal self), atheis and deists among other characterizations. I am sure that the Mormon church would consider this the growth of devil-worship.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_be_the_fastest-growing_religion

I'll drink to that.

The converts come in, the converts disappear. That's one reason there's a ±75% inactivity rate.

Statistically, it makes zero sense that Mormon's could be the fastest growing religion. Hell, they're not even on the number radar with there itty bitty 12.2 million members compared to all of religions worth wide.

all over the place. Is this the real culture war, the "clash of civilizations"?

I'd like to know which religions have the fastest turnover rates from baptism to disaffection. Apply all the corporate analysis methods to it...they are built on a corporate model, after all.

The interesting thing in this Trib story is that the number of converts in is almost equal to the number of defections out, thereby rendering growth at a statistical zero!

Though I don't have numbers to back this up but my opinion has been that this is true and has been since at least the 1980's. I base that assumption on my anecdotal experiences. In my thirty years of membership in two different wards, the membership hardly changed at all. And the 35% attendance quoted in the story actually seems a bit high but not unrealistically so.

In any case, the claim to be "fastest growing" is completely false.

Scientology also makes that claim.

I don't remember where I heard it, but I heard Islam is the fastest growing religion.

Those being United Methodists, Episcopal, Lutheran, etc. I find that interesting in that mainstream christian churches seem to be the least reactionary and extreme. I particularly find the Episcopal church to be quite fascinating.

Its also interesting that it seems to be the more dogmatic and right wing christian churches that find growth.

The Catholic church, with 1.1 billion, replicates itself by sheer numbers alone.

Although many Catholics are often quite inactive, most will not change from the religion their parents gave them.

Mormonism claims 14 million, which is a joke.
They have only a 30% activity rate in the U.S. and even less in other countries.
The morg also counts all inactive members until age 110.

Mormonism has lost Europe.
Growth is is African countries - until the internet arrives there.

One of them finds Mormons are 1.6% of the US - and they were exactly 1.6% in 1980 too.

They are barely hanging on to their market share. Given their higher birth rate and targeting of Hispanic immigrants, they are not doing very well.
http://religions.pewforum.org/
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/ARIS/ARIS-PDF-version.pdf?ext=.pdf

LOL they target Latin immigrants because they expect them to breed faster for the cult.
Of course, most of them won't do that.
The birth rate is falling everywhere, which is baaaad news for the morg.

They now target African nations because many people living there cannot evaluate what Mormons are, due to their lack of education and information. Of course, that will change too.

Try as they may, Mormonism will never become a universal religion.

When you are a small to medium cult and claimed increase in numbers will appear as a LARGE increase when viewed as a percentage.

Is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints really the fastest growing religion...? Or do the evangelicals really outnumber and outpace them...? Before answering that, consider: Evangelicalism is not a cohesive movement. It consists of hundreds of individual sects without any sort of central control or authority. Millions of adherents..? Quite likely. However, the LDS faith has a central authority and organization, which even goes so far as to precisely and specifically define all doctrine, teaching material, and ritual, year after year.

The difference is that more than 14,500,000 LDS members follow prescribed programs, while evangelicals basically just do what they want, where they want, and when they want--with no central authority of any kind, per se. The only Christian faith with any organization even remotely similar to the LDS...? The Roman Catholics...