Tooele County bucking statewide trend of declining percentage of Mormons

While the percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah has reached an historic low, the percentage of Mormons in Tooele County has stayed fairly steady over the past decade, and has even increased slightly each of the past four years, according to statistics from the LDS Church and the Utah Population Estimates Committee.

In the second quarter of 2007, there were 33,422 Mormons in Tooele County — making up 59.1 percent of the county's population. That number is up 4 percent from the second quarter of 2006, when there were 32,132 members reported in Tooele County. There have been similar increases over the past 10 years.

While officials with the church declined to comment on membership trends in Tooele County, Grantsville West Stake President Glen Orgill said he suspects the main reason for the declining percentage in church membership in Utah, and the increasing percentage in Tooele County, is people relocating.

"I believe a lot of Salt Lake County people are moving to Tooele County, and a lot of people moving are LDS," Orgill said, adding while the growth in his stake hasn't been as pronounced as others in the valley, it is still growing.

Pam Perlich is a senior research economist at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah, and has worked on the Utah Population Estimates Committee. She said the increasing LDS population trend in Tooele County while the state percentage declines means that people who are moving to Tooele County are more heavily LDS than people moving into the state.

"There's something about Tooele County that is particularly more attractive to LDS members than maybe places elsewhere in the state," she said.

What people are attracted to can be attributed to a variety of things, Perlich said.

"People are moving to Tooele County out of choice, and part of that would be the affordability of housing, the homogeneity of smaller communities and the comfort level people have living in a more homogenous sort of community," Perlich said.

She added that larger LDS families could also be driving the percentage increase.

"Larger families need bigger houses, and those bigger houses are less expensive in places like Tooele," Perlich said. Despite Tooele County's recent gains in LDS Church members and the state's decline, the county remains slightly less LDS than the state as a whole. According to Juliette Tennert, manager of Demographic and Economic Analysis in the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget, state numbers show there are 1,637,160 members of the LDS faith in Utah, making up 60.7 percent of the population — an all-time low in percentage terms. In 1996, 67.8 percent of the state was LDS.

Over the past 10 years, Tooele County has remained between 58 to 60 percent Mormon.

Perlich said Tooele County has been historically less LDS than the state as a whole mainly because of the military presence in the county, but also because of the native population in the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, and the Hispanic population in Wendover, which is mainly Catholic.

While the percentage of Mormons in Utah is declining, there are actually more Mormons in Utah in terms of numbers, according to Rob Howell, spokesman for the LDS Church.

"With the continued influx of people pushing the state's population totals to ever-higher levels, the percentage of Latter-day Saints in the overall population naturally and slowly decreases," Howell said.

Perlich said with so many jobs being created in Utah, the people coming into the state to fill those jobs aren't necessarily LDS.

"The faster the state grows and the more migration coming into the state at record levels, the less likely people are to be LDS," she said.

Orgill said he welcomes the fact that more and more Utahns aren't LDS.

"I think it's wonderful to have diversification, and it just gives us the opportunity to get to know other people and for them to get to know us," he said.

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com