Over at the Gospel Coalition, David French offers some interesting statistics on why Mormons are beating evangelicals in church growth.
“As a Calvinist member of the Presbyterian Church in America,” he says, “I’ve got my theological differences with the LDS church. But if we evangelicals don’t believe we have anything to learn from our Mormon friends, then we’re foolish.”
Some examples:
While regular church-going evangelicals divorce less often than secular couples, Mormon-marrying Mormons have the lowest divorce rate of any major religious group. Families that stay together are more likely to pray together.
To some evangelical critics, you’d think we [evangelicals] lose members because we’re so demanding. But compared to the Mormon experience, evangelical churches are a carnival ride of short services, low accountability, and rare church discipline. If you’re a faithful Mormon, you’re not living a 95 percent secular life like so many evangelicals. At least in this regard, Mormons are truly countercultural.
August 17th, 2012 | 12:19 pm
Mr. French introduced the factor of “regular church-going” – whatever that may mean, but if we were to look at merely evangelicals, his claims that they divorce less often than secular couples (whatever that means) would not be correct.
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/baptist_divorce.html
Should I be surprised that evangelicals have such high divorce rates, when the Bible they claim to take literally calls them adulterers for it?
August 17th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
Evangelicals stand firm against homosexual ‘marriage’ but, instead of Sola Scriptura, they are always seeking to invent a new program to deal with the divorce disgrace. We have forgotten the basics which we have tainted with worldly notions.
Book review:http://thedeterminedchristian.com/?p=367
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Prayer-Forgiveness-Basics-Heresies/dp/159467664X/ref=pd_rhf_dp_p_t_4
August 17th, 2012 | 3:38 pm
Amish are growing fast too.
August 17th, 2012 | 3:53 pm
I don’t understand the statistical claims being made about rates of divorce among Mormons.
Here’s where the link sends you:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/lds_divo.htm
There you will find the claim that overall, Mormons have a divorce rate no different from average Americans.
But also it cites to another study claiming that Mormons who marry other Mormons have a very low divorce rate.
Which must mean that most Mormons do not marry fellow-Mormons (hence the overall Mormon divorce rate is average), and that the divorce rate for Mormons who marry outside their faith is even higher than average?
I have never been good with numbers, so perhaps I am missing something.
August 17th, 2012 | 8:14 pm
Well, as a Mormon, I will explain. Mormons have two different types of marriages. The regular kind that the rest of society has, and a forever kind of marriage. The forever marriages are done only by members who have made covenants with God on a personal basis inside a Temple(this is different than a Sunday meetinghouse), but when married to another person who has made covenants with God in the Temple, it is called a Temple Sealing…you are sealed together forever.
Now, I don’t have the study off hand, but if I remember correctly, the regular Mormon marriages have about the same likelyhood of divorce than any other marriage. But the Temple sealed marriages have a higher likelyhood of staying together by more than 70 percent. It is not that exciting, but an extra 20 percent chance of staying together until death(if you believe marriages end at death) is a bet I would be willing to take….even if a Mormon like myself finds out after death that you guys were right and we were wrong…at least I kept a promise to God that I would stay with my wife through the good times and the bad just because I put an eternal perspective on marriage, because it is forever, not til death.
August 17th, 2012 | 11:06 pm
Katherine, thank you for recognizing a couple of positive things about our church. While most of those who have posted comments have questioned the accuracy of the divorce statistices, I like your point about the strictness of our religion. Our tenets require us to abstain from alchohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, and sex outside of marriage. Sometimes, I think it is a miracle in this society that we get any converts.
August 18th, 2012 | 8:55 am
Brad, you confuse correlation with causation. You don’t actually believe that simply entering a temple lowers your chance of divorce by 20 percentage points? Rather, I think that Mormons who go to your temple, for related reasons, have a lower chance of divorce.
I have to say, as a militant atheist, I do prefer the Mormon understanding of marriage to the Christian one – forever vs. til death.
August 18th, 2012 | 9:15 am
As a Latter-day Saint, I can explain the confusion in divorce rates. Mormons who marry non Mormons are those who are really not strongly adherent to the faith and their divorce rates would be comparable to other secular people regardless of denomination or lack thereof. Those who marry within the Church obviously have one less source of conflict (which religion will the children be raised in, etc.). Divorce rates are slightly lower than the national average. But those who are married in the Temple are the creme de la creme. They are fully active, tithe-paying members… observant in every way. Probably, if you took the very best Evangelicals, or Catholics, or Sikhs or whatever, you would have quite low divorce rates. I will also note our very strong emphasis on family as another reason for extremely low divorce rates among Temple-married LDS.
August 18th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
[...] http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/08/17/are-the-mormons-on-to-something/ [...]
August 18th, 2012 | 12:59 pm
Mormonism places greater emphasis on productive accomplishment than evangelicals, RC’s, or Baptists. Mitt Romney and the founder of Jet Blue are examples of this. The Mormons I’ve met personally strike me as being more intelligent than those of the other religious groups mentioned above.
One thing I’ve noticed about the Mormons is that they seem to genuinely enjoy doing the family thing. They seem to be truly happy people.
Another factor that is often not mentioned in these kinds of discussion is that Mormonism has a strong influence of the pioneering spirit, which is utterly lacking in RC, Baptist, or evangelicalism. This characteristic alone make Mormonism far more authentically “American” than any of these other religious groups.
America, especially the western part, was founded explicitly on pioneering. Robert Zubrin has written about this in his book on population. It seems to me that a religion that shares this pioneering spirit is more appropriate for America than one that does not.
August 18th, 2012 | 9:54 pm
Christianity, GK Chesterton said, does not lack for adherents because it has been tried and found wanting but because it has been found difficult and left untried (loose paraphrase).
Mormons are wonderful neighbors, friends, co-laborers in political and family oriented causes. I respect them greatly. But the comparison here is a bit wrong-headed.
It has never been difficult for performance based religions to gain adherents. Islam has an astounding number of converts. Mormons are also doing well – they present a well-regulated, attractive lifestyle that can be particularly appealing to people in a number of situations.
Evangelical Protestant Christianity does not fail to attract converts because its lifestyle demands are too high – or because they are not high enough. Rather, we see in Scripture a God who saves us not because of any good we do and then calls us to walk worthy of the calling we’ve received in Christ. In Christianity, only God can make a convert. We are called to bear witness to the light, but not a single evangelical can make someone else an evangelical.
August 19th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
EM, you approvingly quote Chesterton, but your quote contradicts the first sentence of your last paragraph.
August 19th, 2012 | 8:09 pm
I didn’t elaborate far enough, Maximilian. The most difficult thing about evangelical Christianity is not the moral codes – most any religion has some of those – or high standards in external behavior – again, those can be found elsewhere. It’s this – if you are familiar with Chesterton – you’ll know immediately what I’m talking about here: white is a color. It isn’t just the absence of other colors but something positive and something – to extend his analogy – that we don’t have on our own.
In other words, the most difficult thing about Christianity is humility. The humility to come broken to God and confess that we can’t earn a thing from him, that we need divine redemption to change us from the inside out. That is difficult indeed. But the one who comes to him, he will never cast away.
August 22nd, 2012 | 10:17 pm
[...] Wednesday, August 22, 2012, 10:17 PM Katherine Infantine Last Friday, in my blog post Are the Mormons on to Something? I linked to a Gospel Coalition article on why Mormons are beating evangelicals in church [...]
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