Rodney Stark

In The Next Mormons, Rodney Stark is the sociologist whose 1980s projection the book engages directly: he predicted Mormonism would be the “next world faith,” reaching as many as a quarter-billion adherents by 2080. Stark chronicled Mormonism’s astonishing growth over its first century and a half, then forecast continued growth of 30–50 percent per decade, driven by vigorous missionary activity, high fertility, and the religion’s appeal as an alternative in secularizing nations. Mormonism “obliged him for a decade” — Stark even published a follow-up titled “So Far So Good” — but growth has since slowed noticeably, and the book judges his membership projections to “now seem impossible.”

The book credits Stark’s work as a critical contribution in getting scholars to take Mormonism seriously as an emerging religion, while pairing his optimism with Thomas O’Dea’s earlier pessimism to make a methodological point: “present conditions are no guarantee of future results.” It positions Armand Mauss’s The Angel and the Beehive — with its model of Mormons in perpetual tension between assimilation and peculiarity — as a better explanatory frame than either Stark’s optimism or O’Dea’s gloom. The slowdown ties into the wiki’s Conversion note via the retention-vs-conversion math behind the fading “next world faith” trajectory.

Context: Rodney Stark (1934–2022) was an American sociologist of religion best known for rational-choice theories of religious behavior and for works including The Rise of Christianity. His 1984 projection of Mormon growth is among his most cited — and most contested — empirical claims.

Where this appears

• The Next Mormons — central interlocutor: his “next world faith” projection of a quarter-billion Mormons by 2080 is chronicled, then shown to have stalled; used to argue that growth trajectories are not guaranteed.