Mormonism and Race - Black Membership

Black Membership

The church has never kept official records on the race of its membership, so exact numbers are unknown. Black people have been members of Mormon congregations since its foundation, but in 1964 its black membership was small, with about 300 to 400 black members worldwide. In 1997, there were approximately 500,000 black members of the church (about 5% of the total membership), mostly in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. Since then, black membership has grown, especially in West Africa, where two temples have been built, doubling to about 1 million black members worldwide.

Regarding the LDS church in Africa, professor Philip Jenkins noted that LDS growth has been slower than that of other churches, citing a variety of factors, including the fact that some European churches benefited from a long-standing colonial presence in Africa; the hesitance of the LDS church to expand missionary efforts into black Africa during the priesthood ban, resulting in "missions with white faces"; the observation that the other churches largely made their original converts from native non-Christian populations, whereas Mormons often draw their converts from existing Christian communities; and special difficulties accommodating African cultural practices and worship styles, particularly polygamy, which has been renounced categorically by the LDS Church, but is still widely practiced in Africa. Commenting that other denominations have largely abandoned trying to regulate the conduct of worship services in black African churches, Philips wrote that the LDS Church "is one of the very last churches of Western origin that still enforces Euro-American norms so strictly and that refuses to make any accommodation to local customs."

In the United States, researchers Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith, in their book Black and Mormon, wrote that since the 1980s: "the number of African American Latter-day Saints does not appear to have grown significantly. Worse still, among those blacks who have joined, the average attrition rate appears to be extremely high." They cite a survey showing that the attrition rate among African American Mormons in two towns is estimated to be between 60 and 90%. There are about 180,000 self-identified black members in the U.S., or 3% of the overall U.S. membership, with 9% of LDS converts in the US being black, while almost no lifelong Mormons are black.