Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses: Using Census Data to Test the Reliability of Membership Data
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Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses: Using Census Data to Test the Reliability of Membership Data and Accounting for the Disparate Patterns Found Ronald Lawson1 · G. Kenneth Xydias2 Received: 18 November 2019 / Accepted: 10 April 2020 © Religious Research Association, Inc. 2020
Abstract This article compares the growth of three religious groups, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. All originated in America during the nineteenth century and have since globalized. It begins by using their official membership data to contrast their aggregate growth over time. It then questions the reliability of those official statistics. Noting that each group employs different criteria in selecting who it counts, it employs census data from 54 countries in all regions of the world and five surveys of US adult religious affiliation with adjustments for children as a proxy for an American census to provide a common basis for comparison. It finds consistent patterns, where membership data greatly overstate the number of Mormons, understate the number of Adventists, and also understate the number of Witnesses to an even greater extent. The article then calculates a weighted ratio between official and census data for each group and uses those ratios to estimate their aggregate adherents. This method results in a dramatic reordering of their sizes. Finally, the article accounts for the variations found between the three groups. Keywords Growth · Decline · LDS · LDS Church · Seventh-day Adventists · Mormon · Jehovah’s Witnesses · Witnesses · Census · Projections · Adventists · Distributions · Membership rolls · Baptisms · Trajectories
* Ronald Lawson [email protected] 1
Professor Emeritus, Queens College, CUNY, Flushing, NY, USA
2
Independent Scholar, Steele, AL, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Review of Religious Research
Introduction The growth and global expansion of American-born Christian sects has been used as the basis for influential thinking in the sociology of religion. This study compares the growth dynamics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Seventh-day Adventists (Adventists), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Witnesses), all of which were formed in the nineteenth century. Conklin includes them among the most significant “American Originals,” noting that these three are distinctive in their international appeal (1997: ix). These “upstart sects” (Finke and Stark 1992) emerged from what Nathan Hatch called “the democratization of American Christianity”, a resurgence of religion in the early republic epitomized by the Second Great Awakening (1989). Stark and Iannaccone used their studies of the growth of Mormons and Witnesses as the basis for general theories of church growth (Stark 1984, 1996a; Stark and Iannaccone 1997). Oddly, however, they neglected the growth of Adventists, which became the largest of the three groups when its global membership overtook the Mormons during the 1990s, and has since surged ahead.
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