The church’s leaders and its missionaries are, slowly, becoming more geographically diverse
Mormonism is a distinctly American religion. Its early leaders travelled—and were chased—from upstate New York to the church’s current spiritual and cultural capital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Yet in recent decades the Christian sect has also spread beyond America’s borders. The church estimates that there are 16.6m Mormons around the world, a 50% increase since 2000.
Brazil has the third-largest Mormon population in the world, after the United States and Mexico. Church rolls suggest there were 1.1m Mormons in Brazil in 2010, but only about 227,000 Brazilians identified as Mormon in the census the same year. “Latin America has always been the problematic case,” says Patrick Mason of Utah State University. “On the one hand, it’s the poster-child for Mormon growth outside the United States. But it’s also the poster-child for low retention rates.
Third, some suggest that Mormons might reform their missionary practices in order to retain members better. About 55,000 missionaries are serving worldwide; 20,000 or so were prepped at a training centre that resembles a small college campus in Provo. When your correspondent visited just before Christmas, all the missionaries bound for Brazil had been recently dispatched. But Portuguese could still be heard in the halls.
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