Do we have any kind of reliable estimates of active and engaged members? I get that by the raw membership numbers, those of us in the USA are outnumbered by those without, but my impression is that congregations outside the US are, on average, much less active which makes me think that the church is still very much a “US church.” However, I don’t have any kind of numbers (wild guesses or reliable estimates) to back up this impression.

Apologies for the threadjack, but my curiosity overcame my internet etiquette.

Most Mormons are conservative, but I’m liberal:
I’m liberal, but I like being surrounded by conservatives in my church. It’s good to have a challenge.

Most Mormons are against same-sex marriage, but not me:
I’m for same-sex marriage but I like belonging to a church that reminds me how important family is.

Most Mormons believe the General Authorities are practically perfect, but I don’t.
I don’t think our leaders are perfect, but I admire the respect and reverence our church members give to our leaders.

Most Mormons believe the Bible and Book of Mormon is historically literal, but I don’t.
I don’t think many of the scriptures are historically literal, but I admire the great faith in our church, a faith that wouldn’t be possible without literal belief.

OK, now that I’ve tried that exercise, I can see the point: We should give the church and its membership a little more respect, admiration, and credit, even if we don’t believe everything Most Mormons believe.

But there’s another direction to come at this. I have found myself saying “I am a Mormon but they would probably disagree if they really knew me”. For “they” one can read “the church” or “the cultural norm of Mormon society” or even “most Mormons”.

I know I’m not alone in feeling that way. I suspect it’s pretty common. One response is the big tent approach. Tell me I’m wrong, that in fact I do belong and my feelings are invalid. But right or wrong, the feeling is real and I’m looking for the politically correct way to express that feeling.

As some of the comments point out, ‘Most Mormons’ is a term sometimes used to discuss or critique cultural issues of the Mormon-dense regions of the western U.S. One thing that changed between 2007 and when I revised the post this week was that I had a chance to live in Rexburg. Can I claim to have experienced life as a feminist in Rexburg? Probably not. I fit some definitions (agreeing with the “radical notion that women are people”), but don’t fit enough others that I shouldn’t attempt to claim that category, certainly not just to I can tell Kristine A that I have so been a feminist in Rexburg. I’ve been a Democrat and an Obama voter in Rexburg, which is not the same thing but as close as I can get. One thing I gained from the experience was seeing that life in a predominantly Mormon area was in fact noticeably different from other places I’d lived, both inside and outside the U.S. There are some useful and interesting things that could be written about it, and I’d like to read them – but most invocations of Most Mormons, Utah Mormons, or their cousins that I come across online (and I’m talking almost exclusively about online discourse here) are not engaged in careful analysis but in rhetorical sleights of hand at best.

Take, for example, “Most Mormons don’t understand the New Testament.” It accomplishes a couple pernicious things. First, it suggests a comparison in which Mormons are lacking: Mormons are woefully inadequate compared to _______ – except the blank is never filled in. Also, “Most Mormons don’t understand the NT” treats ‘understanding the NT’ as if it were a single, well-defined object. What does it actually mean, though? It’s probably accurate to say that members of the church have a reasonable grasp on the most important points of the LDS interpretive tradition concerning the NT; “Most Mormons don’t understand the NT” thus manages a third pernicious accomplishment in creating a gap between the LDS interpretive tradition and whatever ‘understanding the NT’ is supposed to mean. One could say that the LDS interpretive tradition does not take particular note of contemporary NT scholarship; this might be true (and perhaps even in some respects deplorable), although it’s not nearly as provocative a comment.

So I’m not making a point about generalization or even overgeneralization here. Just because there are exceptions to a rule, doesn’t make it illegitimate to state what is generally the case. But ‘Most Mormons’ seems to be attached too often to bad generalizations based on a few cases or one person’s experience rather than a reasonable attempt to seek out a representative sample, and to be used in some dubious rhetoric. Thus my mistrust of “Most Mormons.”

“It’s better for your own credibility to embrace your religion rather than to flee from it”

That really, really depends on the context.