Part of the issue is Mormons consider a lot more activities to be required than nearly any other religion does. We’re definitely a high demand religion – far more so than others where people often rarely attend services.

Still going by Pew (which I admit I have some concerns with) 82% say religion is very important in their lives, 95% say very or somewhat important, 83% pray daily, and 77% attend church weekly. 80% believe Joseph saw God. 69% put their religious commitment as high, 28% as medium. That’s ridiculously higher than any other group.

Probably the key statistic relevant to Mormon self-identification as a strong Mormon is temple recommend. Pew has 65% holding a recommend (with 85% for college graduates). When you realize that included all people 18 or over, that would include a lot of people not yet with their endowments taken out. So that’s extremely high.

So retention if it’s self-identified retention still tends to be tied with very high belief. For instance of those self-identified 94% believe the President of the Church is a prophet of God, 94% believe Jesus and the Father are separate beings, and 95% believe in eternal marriage in the temple. 77% believe wholeheartedly in all teachings. (Which is pretty remarkable when you stop to think about it – even if people are probably exaggerating a little in their replies)

I must confess that a 65% rate for people on the rolls considering themselves Mormon seems quite high for me given how many converts fall away within a few months of baptism. (In my opinion most aren’t really converted with a testimony, although of course a new member typically has a weak testimony and many wards don’t do a good job nurturing them)

OK, suppose ARIS’ 1.4% is right that is about 2/3 of members on the rolls self identifying as Mormon (I really doubt that 80% of people on our rolls self identify as Mormon), I may be shooting low on self-ID. So accounting for that, more than 20% chance of a 2% report off a base of under 1% (a Maine statistical glitch).

I’ve also noted that there are some reasons to be questioning of Pew data. I think some of their statistics just seem dubious such as their rate of tithing paying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_membership_statistics#United_States

and PEW says 1.6 or 1.7 percent this time and last time

http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/#religions

so your “1/3 to 2/3” estimate seems low for the PEW survey. Maybe 4/5 or 5/6 is more like it. And it looks like the 2% was already after PEW’s rounding (so there could have been only 5 Mormons in the sample).

By the way, if you look at state by state numbers, you’ll find a number of states where the PEW survey reports a higher percentage of Mormons than the official church statistics, including Maine, Virginia and West Virginia. Nothing very statistically surprising though.

http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/mormon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_membership_statistics_(United_States)

If there are 10k members in Maine according to Kaimi’s link, I would guess only a 1/3 to 2/3 would self identify as Mormon. So that puts Maine at under 0.5% in a poll of self identified Mormons. If that is the true probability, what is the chance you draw six or more Mormons from a random sample of 300 Maine residents? According to this calculator, plug in 0.005 for the probability of a hit and 303 trials and you get about 0.4% chance of this happening by random chance. Which is quite unlikely. But there are 50 states, so you get about 50 chances for a weirdo thing. Waving my hands around for this bit, 0.4%* 50 is 20% so there is about a 20% chance that at least one state would end up looking this odd. So it’s weird, but not super weird. If I am low on Maine self identification rates then it would be even less weird (or vice versa).

If they do the survey again in five years and it happens again then either their survey method is off or Maine has an inexplicable Mormon boomlet.

According to the official stats from the LDS newsroom, there are about 10,000 church members in Maine. (http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics/country/united-states/state/maine ) This is out of a population of about 1.3 million (per Wikipedia). That comes out to slightly under 1 percent.

I went to the Community of Christ website to see how large their current presence in Maine is, and they list 10 meetinghouses, plus a mission center. LDS maps lists around 30 meetinghouses in Maine, so 10 additional meetinghouses is a significant number, although I don’t know how large the average Maine CoC congregation is (or how it compares in size with Maine LDS wards and branches).

Others have made good points above about sample sizes and cutoff points, so the CoC presence may simply be one of several factors that nudged the responses above 2%. (Of course this also presupposes that CoC members would self-identify as “Mormon”; I don’t know enough about that community to gauge how likely that would be.)