17 Million Mormons?

Dr. Ryan Cragun has done some excellent research on the decline of religion generally (secularization). He grew up LDS in beautiful Morgan, Utah (up Ogden Canyon), served a mission to Costa Rica in the 1990s, and then left the church in 2004. His latest work turned up the fact that Utah is no longer a majority Mormon state. The LDS church via its media holdings in Utah would like you to believe that 60 percent of the state is still Mormon. They are just not allowed to utter the word "Mormon" for fear of spontaneously combusting, or at the very least going to Hell at some future date (despite the fact the founding scripture of the institution has "Mormon" in the title). Perhaps the church will rename the book, The Book of Nephi, which would be great since it was actually Nephi that appeared to Joseph Smith all those years ago.

Cragun's research indicates with a 99.9 percent confidence interval (most studies only use 90-95 percent) that 38-46 percent of the population of Utah is really LDS. That 99.9 percent number means there is a snowball's chance in the Sahara, that more than 46.1 percent of Utah is LDS. It also means that is no chance the Beehive state is as low as 37.9 percent LDS, so we have to take the good with the bad.

Ryan posits three reasons for the certainty that Utah is not populated with more Mormons than all other groups combined.

1. "In migration", where people from surrounding states get tired of paying taxes so illegal aliens can have health care, and decide to move to Utah. The overwhelming majority of these people are not LDS.Interestingly, 1 out of 13 people who now live in Utah were born in California. The percentage of Mormons in Cali is roughly 1 percent, so it would take 1,300 Golden State transplants to get even 100 Mormons in that group. 

2. LDS Fertility rates; Mormon families are having fewer children, to the tune of almost falling to meet the national average for birth rate. If the average US family has 1.9 kids, the average Utah family has 2.1, not 6.2 like the good old days of sermons about the satanic nature of birth control.

3. LDS people who can read and hold opposing ideas in their heads at the same time, decide to leave the church for its myriad of lies. Mormons are becoming non-Mormons at the highest rate since Brigham hitched his wagon to polygamy and headed west (although someone else probably did the literal hitching of the actual wagon that Brigham rode in).

Ryan puts all of these factors together into a feedback loop and states that this cycle of fewer and fewer Mormons will continue. That is truly good news. 

Finally, Ryan shares the reason for the title of this piece. In using census data from Mexico and Brazil, it is a stone cold fact that the LDS church has misrepresented membership in Mexico by 1.1 million people. The numbers in Brazil are off by 900,000 people. A total of 2 million Mormons just left the house of cards built on a sandy foundation. 

How many ghost Mormons are there in the USA?

There is nowhere near 17 million LDS members on this planet, and you can take that to the bank, just like the LDS church is taking its members hard earned donations to the bank to buy up land and build temples for locations that do not need them.

*You can find the article that set off this latest negative PR firestorm for the modern church of the devil at ryantcragun.com.