Updated LDS Church Membership Statistics

2010 LDS Church Almanac

The 2011 Church Almanac has arrived. See this post for the latest statistics.

Today I purchased the Deseret News 2010 Church Almanac. I like to browse through the membership statistics country by country. Sometimes I come across a country I have never heard of like Benin (east of Nigeria), Mayotte (NW of Madagascar), Palau (east of the Philippines). They sound like Disney characters to me. I don’t look at much else in the Almanac except maybe the occasional temple trivia.

All these membership numbers are all very fine but they would be a lot more useful if they were in tabular form. It’s the comparison that is really useful — well maybe not useful but entertaining. So I put the world’s LDS membership in a sortable table. I added the change in membership from 1 January 2008 to 1 January 2009. By sorting on the “Change” column I found that 16 countries out of 166 had a decrease in membership. The three biggest increases came from the United States (100,633), Brazil (41,403), and Mexico (36,343). Canada had the biggest loss with -502.

The largest LDS populations by percentage are in Tonga (45%), Samoa (31%), and American Samoa (22.5%). The United States comes in at 13th with 2%, tied with Palau — there’s that Disney character again.

The countries with the most members are the United States (5,974,041), Mexico (1,158,236), and Brazil (1,060,556). The Falkland Islands has the least members (5) of any country that has members. The most temples are in the United States (72), Mexico (12), and Canada (7).

There are many more permutations to be found. Try it.