If we kept our TFR of 3, we would need to retain 70% of our children to tread water.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAs an aside, this is one of several reasons why I\u2019m empirically skeptical that liberalizing is the key to more robust growth. All theology and ethics aside, I simply doubt that the balancing equation of higher youth retention from liberalizing (which I don’t think is a thing anyway, but another post for another day), is greater than or equal to the loss of children born that comes with moving farther along the liberal side of the liberal\/conservative continuum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOf course, as noted in my post above, because of population momentum we won\u2019t see the effects of such changes for a while, but they\u2019re essentially baked into tomorrow\u2019s membership population pyramid regardless of what we do today.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFinally, none of this should be seen as doom-and-gloom. As I have said elsewhere, the fundamentals of Church growth are strong (it\u2019s growing in places that are growing, and declining in places that are declining), and there are obviously more moving pieces that make up the final number read out in conference. But to summarize, it appears that if the United States Church had no converts coming in, it would be losing enough members from generation to generation to be in a state of slow, steady (steady since fertility rates rarely go up) decline. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the \u201cgrowth\u201d we\u2019re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn\u2019t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we\u2019re doing a lot better than most\/almost all).\u00a0 Now that I\u2019ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity, we are treading water in terms of membership in the United States.\u00a0 Of course, this is still very much back-of-the-envelope, but I think I\u2019m in the ballpark.\u00a0 For any group in the developed world to replace itself they need to have 2.1 children. According to the last solid estimate, we retain about 64% of our children in the faith.\u00a0 Therefore, in order to have enough children to offset the children lost to religious switching, we would need to have an average of 3.28 children.\u00a0 Latter-day Saints in the US have about three children on average.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/8229e4d1-2996-4997-b6bc-7cd3c746eb67.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47877"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50277,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47877\/revisions\/50277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/span><\/p>\n