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Mormon church membership on the rise

http://www.iht.com
posted by circa1978 599 days ago | status: published

In 2006, membership increased by 1.74 percent, No. 2 among the 25 largest churches in the United States, according to an annual survey by the National Council of Churches.
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We definitely need accurate records. Lets hope that these hold up. We have been bashed over at On Faith just this week. In between conference today they reported on our significant move to participate at On Faith. So come on on over. We need you all! Rickety, I know you have been therez:-)
written by RTC 599 days ago
Nice article... good to see us in the IHT.

Sustain'd
written by SilusGrok 599 days ago
Ever since I read the article on LDS self-identification in Latin America in Dialogue where the rate of self-identification was around 20% of official statements I've had some serious doubt about official stats.

Opposed for lack of journalism, it's just a re-written church press release.
written by canadiancynic 599 days ago
    I'm all for opposing low-hanging fruit, but I would suggest that this has merit for its placement alone: the IHT is writing about the Church. That's rare, at least... as for it being a re-written press release... well, it's hard to tell. I saw two or three different topic areas, and imagine that it's probably several press releases combined.

    : )
    written by SilusGrok 599 days ago
    ( And would only articles critical of the Church pass muster on the "journalism" front? I would hope we had a different metric than that... )
    written by SilusGrok 599 days ago
    LOL, this gets my sustaining only on the base that some people here think that blogging is journalism :)
    written by Hhhhh 598 days ago
    Blogging is journalism my friend. Highly introspective, naval gazing... but sometimes brilliant. Take a look at FireDogLake coverage of the Scooter Libby trial...brilliant analysis, fast breaking. Heck, take a look at MediaMatters...I'm enjoying the hatchet job their doing on Michael Savage using his own words..
    written by canadiancynic 598 days ago
    Ah, this is delicious. Now link copy-n-paste + a dosis of sarcastic and snappy remarks = journalism. An account on Wordpress or Blogger (why bother with installing Apache on a server?) is equivalent to a BA in journalism.

    I don't need a PhD in Computer Science anymore, I frequent Slashdot and Digg!!

    In Soviet Russia, journalism blogs you!
    written by Hhhhh 598 days ago
    That's suitably elitist of you. In capitalist America we live by golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules (or in this case journalism)
    written by canadiancynic 597 days ago
    Yup, almost as elitist as a union! :O

    I know the "democratization of journalism" sounds all noble and what not. I just see it as this: I knew a family that, when one nof the kids had a birthday, the parents would get little gifts to all their kids and not only to the birthday kid, just so they wouldn't feel out of the loop, and so they would feel "special, too!". Blogging is to journalism as the little gifts were to the birthday kid :)
    written by Hhhhh 597 days ago
    LOL... of course the majority of bloggers are like the present to the kid. The freedom of the platform results in a lot of dross. But it also allows a lot of people to do some really important stuff. Take the case of Spocko for instance working on the wild racism and eliminationist rhetoric coming out of some California radio stations. All he did was record, post and he's caused one heck of a lot of trouble for them.
    written by canadiancynic 597 days ago
Far from it. I read GetReligion on a daily basis and one of the banes of the religious journalism world is those newspapers who simply ignore the role a good religion writer can provide and just publish official church releases. The numbers ones really burn me. There is no easy way, except through the self identification surveys to measure how many members there are in the US. The LDS church is often compared to the Seventh Day Adventists and the JW in terms of growth, however the we play fast and loose with our numbers while they publish theirs and and have much more definitive measurements of what membership entails. Using our official numbers comes up with huge discrepancies; theirs, much smaller and statistically explicable discrepancies. What ends up happening is a false comparison, in actual fact we're more in the same religious size neighbourhood as the Bahai.

Another part of the numbers push is the Baseball Baptisms that happened under Henry D. Moyle. Some of that stuff still goes on in South America, but the $^&*$ culture was still a part of my mission in the States. So, I've got a very personal, visceral response to the numbers claims.

It's a poor article, especially when there was an excellent article on Rocky Anderson in the NYT just a few weeks ago that, re-written, could have been a solid journalistic piece for the IHT.
written by canadiancynic 598 days ago
Maybe I need to raise my standard... I'll have to think about that. Thanks for pushing us to excellence.
written by SilusGrok 598 days ago
I find it interesting that pure membership numbers were newsworthy enough to interest the IHT. I don't know if you can chalk it up to a slow news day increased Church publicity through Romney, Reid, et al. Probably a little bit of both.
written by forpeterssake 598 days ago
I liked the article pretty well except for the Google Ad for Mormon Underwear. Yikes.
written by TedB 592 days ago

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