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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over\u2013all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We\u2019re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that\u2019s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care for their aged old people without living children to care for them will literally be dying in the streets).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When I was going to graduate school the five-alarm fire, \u201clowest low\u201d fertility was around 1.3 children per woman. For a while we thought we had seen the worst of it when some of that fertility decline was shown to be the result of \u201ctempo effects,\u201d or women bearing children later, but then the world said \u201chold my beer,\u201d and fertility rates took a nose dive, with no signs of letting up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n South Korea<\/span> is now .78<\/span><\/a>. I\u2019ve seen back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest that this means that in 100 years South Korea will have <\/span>5%<\/span><\/i> of the population it currently has. For me to do an accurate population projection for South Korea I would need to age bracket-mortality rates and fertility rates and more time than I have to take into account the effect of the current population pyramid (\u201cpopulation momentum\u201d), but that 5% figure seems reasonable on the face of it. For example, if replacement is 2.1, then with a TFR of .78 every generation is 37% of the previous one. If you take the mean length of a generation of 25 years, then a simple Excel calculation will show that out of 1000 South Koreans in one generation, three generations later there will be only 51 left in the final cohort, adding 25 years to help flush out the previous generations in the population pyramid puts the 5% figure in the right ballpark.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0(UN projections are often not helpful because they often include these weird assumptions built into the model that fertility will naturally increase closer to replacement because\u2014magic).<\/span><\/p>\n To put that into Church context, let\u2019s say, for the sake of a thought experiment, the Church declines at the same rate as society writ large in South Korea. Right now in South Korea <\/span>there are 60 wards<\/span><\/a>, that means in 100 years there will only be 3 in the whole country. If the Church shrinks slower than this through a combination of proselytizing and members having more children (fun fact, a member of South Korea\u2019s Supreme Court is <\/span>a Latter-day Saint who has four children<\/span><\/a>) then it will be in the interesting situation of decreasing numerically while actually expanding in influence.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I picked South Korea because it\u2019s one of the worst cases, but a lot of countries are headed that way, so some version of this will play out throughout the world since lower fertility is not just limited to East Asia and Europe anymore (e.g. Thailand\u2019s is 1.3). While some may complain that 100 years is an awful long time to be extrapolating, the fact is that more than marginal increases in TFR for developed countries is virtually unheard of, so until the Amish take over there\u2019s very little theoretical reason to see massive inertia of population decline somehow getting turned around even in 100 years. “As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream,” as to reverse the population crash through government sponsored paid leave (not that I’m against government sponsored paid leave, every little bit helps).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes people think immigration can solve this problem. It can help, but it’s not nearly enough. To get political for a moment, when you run the numbers on how many young people are needed to plug the gap in our caving-in population pyramids, it would require importing young migrants on numbers far beyond Democrats\u2019 wildest dreams, plus the source countries for young workers (with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa) will also be drying up, so even if we were to somehow get around the political barriers to mass migration on a scale rarely ever seen in history that would be a temporary solution anyway. Indeed, it looks like after we work through the population momentum of previous years\u2019 higher births, populations will be declining everywhere and with it, potentially, the Church, which could still paradoxically be “growing.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment.\u00a0 Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over\u2013all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population.\u00a0 How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change.\u00a0 The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We\u2019re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that\u2019s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48033,"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-48032","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\/10\/5be7a4eb-0d18-4063-972f-d841c5cb7afb.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48032","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=48032"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50283,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48032\/revisions\/50283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}