6 thoughts on “Map of US Mormon Distribution”

  1. I’m not sure the legend of the map makes complete sense to me: It says it’s taking the population reported by the Church in each county, and expressing it as a percentage of the county’s total population as reported in the 2000 census. But there’s a large number of counties that show “none reported.” In fact, there are far, far too many counties with “none reported” to be accurate. There’s no way the Church counts zero members in all of those counties.

    Is there just a cutoff point where a small enough percentage becomes “none”?

  3. I don’t know how the membership statistics are broken down, but I know that every ward and every stake has geographic boundaries, and that virtually all Church membership records are assigned to wards and stakes (or branches, districts and missions, which, for this administrative purpose, are identical). So it shouldn’t be too hard for the Church to report its population geographically.

    But of course, the boundaries of wards, stakes, missions and so forth often don’t correspond with county or state boundaries. A good example was the Canada Montreal Mission, which, when I served in it, included two counties of New York.

    Maybe the ZIP codes (or postal codes) in member addresses are used.

  4. I guess the map does show a cutoff of 0.1 percent. They must be counting anything less than that as “none reported.” I think it would have been better to say, “Less than 0.1 percent.”

  5. There really are some extraordinary anomalies I’d like to know more about: A county is the Florida panhandle with more than 10%, a county in southern Iowa with more than 10%, and one in the middle of Nebraska with more than 25%!

  6. Someone above posted that the map-makers figured out “the population reported by the Church in each county, and expressing it as a percentage of the county’s total population as reported in the 2000 census.” That’s not entirely accurate. What they did was take the local LDS congregation’s population and then factored that into the county where that congregation’s meetinghouse is located. For example, many probably noticed that the LDS population in Blaine County, Nebraska seems a little over-represented, considering its surroundings. That portion of Nebraska is very sparsely populated. All the members of the LDS Church in that county and the nearby counties congregate in the meetinghouse in Blaine County. So Blaine County looks *very* LDS, while the surrounding counties look entirely devoid of Mormons. In more populous regions, the map provides a more accurate reflection.

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