As American-born Mormonism sprouts in more and more countries across the globe, the societies where it grows play a crucial role in how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the region follow the faith’s practices.

That is among the conclusions Latter-day Saint data scientist Alex Bass draws from the small sample of members found in a massive Global Flourishing Study produced by Gallup.

It includes more than 200,000 survey respondents across 22 countries, Bass writes on his Mormon Metrics website, but only 1,290 Latter-day Saints in 18 of those nations.

So the Salt Lake City-based researcher grouped the members to see if there were differences in Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe and the Americas.

The study looked at “self-reported practices,” including church attendance, personal prayer and scripture reading in 2023.

Based on his analysis, Bass found that members in Africa, Asia/Oceania and the U.S. “top the list in self-reported religious practice,” while South America and Central America trail.

Those regions have long faced “higher inactivity rates,” he concludes, “so seeing them on the lower end of the threshold (especially for church attendance) is not particularly surprising.”

Europe, the numbers show, is dead last.

Another metric was “internal dimensions of religiosity,” such as the importance of religion, feeling loved by God, and seeing religion as a guide in life.

Once again, members in Africa, the U.S. and Asia/Oceania lead the way. “They feel religion is important, feel loved by God, and agree that religion guides their life,” Bass writes. In this, though, Central and South American Latter-day Saints are not far behind.

That leaves Europeans again at the bottom.

“It’s pretty clear why Europe is so low,” Bass explains. “Look at the cultural environment of Europe — religion is least prioritized there.”

Bass speculates that “as a country or region becomes more secular, it’s possible that the social cost for individuals practicing a high-demand religion starts to climb. In other words, active religious participation might increasingly be viewed by neighbors as out of touch or countercultural.”

Based on these findings, the data scientist suggests that if he were “leading the church into the next century, I would be experimenting and focusing on figuring out how to grow a successful, thriving religious environment that coexists in a deeply secular (perhaps sometimes hostile) counterculture. So essentially, I would be throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall in Europe to see what sticks.”

Other researchers have some questions about the survey and Bass’ conclusions.

‘A tiny percentage’

First of all, the sample size of Latter-day Saints is far too small to reach any reasonable conclusions, says independent researcher Matt Martinich, who has spent years studying global Latter-day Saint data for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com.

Bass “really needs to take a lot more caution in interpreting the Europe stats considering this is only 100 or so people that he’s looking at here,” Martinich says in an interview. “I would say the African statistics are painting a more rosy picture than reality and the European ones are more bleak than reality.”

And that, he says, is “the problem with a lot of these samples you see out there.”

Latter-day Saints make up “such a tiny percentage that’s being considered with these that it really doesn’t give a very good representation of what things look like,” Martinich says, “and you can get some pretty skewed results.”

Despite the low numbers, Caroline Kline, assistant director for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, offered some observations based on the European numbers.

“Europe’s low metrics for religious experience and practice suggest the church may currently be outside the sweet spot of cultural integration,” says Kline, co-editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

According to Latter-day Saint sociologist Armand Mauss' “theory of optimum tension,” she says, “a faith thrives when it is distinct without being completely alien to its host culture. Right now, European Latter-day Saints often carry a heavy social cost without enough local cultural resonance to balance it.”

She agrees with Bass that “new approaches may be called for.”

One place to start could be “making more space within congregations for local adaptation,” Kline says. “For example, empowering local members to build their services and classes around teachings and ethical considerations that resonate with them, like environmental stewardship or care for the marginalized, could increase the church’s relevance in the eyes of European members.”

Another challenge within some European congregations that may “partially explain those low metrics is cultural tensions within wards themselves,” she says. “Some European wards have seen an influx of people from other parts of the world. While this can lead to vibrancy and new energy, it can also lead to divisions and difficulties.”

‘Raises more questions’

To Laurie Maffly-Kipp, director of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia, Bass’ conclusions were not unexpected, she says, “particularly the situation in Europe.”

It also “isn’t surprising that religious experience is shaped, at least in part, by local contexts and cultural mores,” Maffly-Kipp notes. “Clearly, you can’t get away from religion in places like Ghana.”

Still, she says, the survey numbers “raise more questions than answers, to my way of thinking, and it surely calls for more investigation and disaggregation.”

For example, the continent-by-continent approach “is problematic, especially for Asia and Oceania,” the historian says. “Traditionally Oceania (think Tonga and Samoa) has had one of the highest rates of church membership, and Asia certainly has the lowest. Placing those in the same category may not tell us much.”

The types of questions asked “will also shape answers,” Maffly-Kipp says. “Feeling loved by God,” for example, “may not be a turn of phrase used as readily in Asia and Oceania to express their religious experience. I wonder what words they might choose?”

Measuring religious experience “is tricky,” she says, “and will require more than a few questions to dig deeper into the situation.”

Even so, she applauds the effort. “It’s a good start.”