I graduated high school with 296 other students. I was the only Mormon kid.
1 mormon kid / 297 students = 0.34%
There's roughly 7.103 billion people in this world right now. About 14.7 million of these people are listed on the membership rolls for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Do the math. About 1 in every 583 people on the planet are "Mormon," or were at least Mormon long enough to be baptized and get their name on the roll.
1 in 583.
0.17% That makes me pretty rare.
On top of that, I live in the Southeast, right smack in the middle of the Bible Belt. I shall specify the Southeast as: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina. On average, just 0.77% of the southeast population is a member of the Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compared to Utah's 68%. The culture is VERY different. Take a Utah Mormon and drop them smack in the middle of the Bible Belt and see if they survive.
446,962 Mormons are on the rolls in the southeastern states. The combined populations of those states is 57,976,501. This means I culturally/religiously identified with 0.77% of people in the southeast and just 3% of Mormons in the world. Divide the number of Mormons in the southeast by the world's population, and that makes me fall under a very small percentage of the world.
0.0063% I am pretty darn rare.
On top of that, over 300 households are listed on my old congregation's directory. One household can consist of a couple and their kids or just be a young single adult gal like myself. I bet there are 500+ people named as members on that roll, but a rock-solid Sunday attendance consisted of a maximum of 150 people. Therefore, the percentage of members that are "active" is low. There are polls that try to determine the percentage of active mormons, what percentage of mormons participate in temple worship, etc. However, they're hard for me to trust as poll validity and reliability can be difficult to prove. I'll be generous and estimate based on my own experience that one third of the people in the south are active. One third of southeastern Mormons makes me identify with a very tiny percentage of the world.
0.0021% I am PRETTY DAMN RARE, PEOPLE. Pretty. damn. rare.
--Lady Jae
Sources:
Wikipedia: The Church of Jesus Christ Membership Statistics (The stats listed here are sourced to the CIA World Factbook and the United States Census Bureau)
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