The Economist January 8th 2022 United States 25Latter-daySaintsGoing forth and striving to multiply
O
neisasmallcityoffewerthan120,000
people. The other is home to more resi
dents than New York City and Chicago
combined. Yet one thing binds Provo,
Utah, and São Paulo, Brazil: both boast
white temples with a single spire that
reaches towards the heavens. One is sur
rounded by mountains and the other by
palm trees, but the simple architecture of
Mormon churches mean they resemble
each other. This sameness is a hallmark of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday
Saints, as Mormonism is formally known.
Cristiane Fernandes, who worships at the
temple in São Paulo, says the church is
“like McDonald’s”, in that “the whole world
is having the same lesson today”.
Mormonism is a distinctly American
religion. Its early leaders travelled—and
were chased—from upstate New York to
the church’s current spiritual and cultural
capital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Yet in recent
decades the Christian sect has also spread
beyond America’s borders. The church es
timates that there are 16.6m Mormons
around the world, a 50% increase since2000. Matt Martinich, an independent de
mographer who runs a blog devoted to the
church’s growth, estimates that baptisms
of American converts may now account for
only 20% of worldwide baptisms.
That looks like muscular, global growth
for a religion that claims less than 2% of
Americans as believers. But accounting
quirks embellish the true picture. “The dir
ty little secret that everybody who has gone
on a mission knows is that a lot of this
growthisonpaperonly,” says Rick Phillips,
a sociologist at the University of North
Florida. Anyone ever baptised or born into
the faith is counted as a member, even if
they are no longer active in the church. Mr
Martinich reckons that only about 40% of
American Mormons are active.
Brazil has the thirdlargest Mormon
population in the world, after the United
States and Mexico. Church rolls suggest
there were 1.1m Mormons in Brazil in 2010,
but only about 227,000 Brazilians identi
fied as Mormon in the census the same
year. “Latin America has always been the
problematic case,” says Patrick Mason of
Utah State University. “On the one hand,
it’s the posterchild for Mormon growth
outside the United States. But it’s also the
posterchild for low retention rates.”The McDonald’s model
Scholars who study Latterday Saints point
to three main reasons why Mormonism
may struggle to retain converts abroad.
The first is the centralised nature of the
church. The church’s wealth, leadership
and theological teachings still emanate
from Salt Lake City. Ms Fernandes’s quip
that, like McDonald’s, Mormon churches
around the world are similar has long been
a point of pride. “The corporate mentality
in postwar America was that you would
have one corporate culture for your com
pany—whether that was geor ibm—and
then wherever you went around the world,
that would be the culture of your busi
ness,” says Jana Riess, author of “The NextMormons: How Millennials are Changing
the lds Church”. “The church succeeded
with that model for a long time.”
But can a onesizefitsall religion
thrive on a global scale? The sameness that
makes a Mormon church in São Paulo feel
like a church in Provo may be comforting
to some, but it prevents the religion from
adapting to different cultures. More decen
tralised Christian sects, such as Pentecos
tals, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s
Witnesses, have grown more quickly in
many countries.
Second, the congregation a Mormon
joins is based on where they live. “If I’m a
Pentecostal, and...I want a pastor who is a
little more strict, or one who’s a little more
liberal, I can find my theological niche,”
says Mr Phillips. Not so for Mormons.
Third, some suggest that Mormons
might reform their missionary practices in
order to retain members better. About
55,000 missionaries are serving world
wide; 20,000 or so were prepped at a train
ing centre that resembles a small college
campus in Provo. When your correspon
dent visited just before Christmas, all the
missionaries bound for Brazil had been re
cently dispatched. But Portuguese could
still be heard in the halls. One group des
tined variously for Lisbon, Cape Verde and
New York began their language class by
singing “Noite Feliz” (“Silent Night”).
Much emphasis is placed on baptising
new members; missionaries knock on
doors and use social media to reach poten
tial converts. But church leaders and aca
demics agree that this alone is insufficient.
Employing missionaries who grew up in
places where the church is growing rela
tively quickly, such as the Philippines and
west Africa, to proselytise to their own
countrymen may also prove more effective
than sending Americans.
Some things are starting to change. Ms
Riess points out that the handbook of in
structions that church leaders use was re
cently revised to allow for more musical
styles and instruments in worship. The
church’s leaders and its missionaries are,
slowly, becoming more geographically di
verse. In recent decades, missionaries have
also been allowed much more contact with
their families. Part of that is the result of
better technology. But it may also be a clev
er way to boost retention rates: the more
Mormon parents hear about their mission
ary’s experience, the more connected to
the church they may feel.
At the training centre in Provo, existen
tial questions about the future of the
church feel very far away. Soontobe mis
sionaries parade around with name tags
announcing where they will serve. Tearful
parents drop off their children for training
much as others drop theirteenagers off for
college. Here, at least, fervourfor the global
church is alive and well.nP ROVO AND SÃO PAULO
Can Mormonism thrive as a global religion while retaining
its distinctive culture?