Are Mormons compared to the general population composed more of the original English/Anglo-Saxon stock? Because Utah is the state with the largest reported number of those with an English ancestry beating such WASP strongholds as Maine or New Hampshire. In addition this question is in a more sarcastic vein but are Mormons on the whole more attractive compared to the general population?
Are you talking about American Mormons or worldwide Mormons?
Most Mormons are not descended from the original ‘pioneers.’ More American Mormons live outside of Utah than inside it, and more Mormons live outside the US than inside.
Pioneer stock tended to be largely from New England, England/Wales, and Scandinavia. Nowadays in the US it’s pretty mixed and a congregation probably looks a lot like whatever city it’s in, though I suppose nearly all congregations would have some Utah folks too.
Worldwide, the LDS Church is biggest in Latin America and Polynesia, with a much smaller presence in Europe and Asia, and a small but fast-growing population in Africa.
I guess I don’t see why Mormons would be better- or worse-looking than anyone else.
Just look at all the brown faces!
and No; they look like pudgy white suburbanites.
That link above is to a video of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Until someone comes up with a cheap and quick method to commute worldwide, there won’t be that many people in that choir who are not living in or near Salt Lake City, Utah.
A more informative site about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir would be its official website, from which one would glean some actual facts about the organization, such as there are 360 members and that prospective members must live within 100 miles of Temple Square. You can also search the choir’s historical register to see who is and was a member. One current member is Alex Boyé. He’s a bit darker than brown, wouldn’t you say? A close examination of the choir will show you that there are a few other members of African descent, some of Asian heritage, and even some of Polynesian descent.
So, your snarky comment failed.
Addendum:
I should say apparent descent as one cannot reliably determine a person’s race from that person’s appearance. Also, the LDS church does not track the race its members.
I’m not even Mormon and I’m descended from pioneer LDS stock.
Within the US (and especially in the Mountain West) the church is overwhelmingly white.
And world wide the leadership is white and overwhelmingly American.
The First Presidency is all white with two Americans and one German.
The Twelve Apostles are all white and American.
The First Bishopric is all white and American
The Presidents of the Seventy are all white with five Americans and two Latin Americans.
I’m not going to be that precise with the rest because I’m lazy.
The First Quorum of the Seventy has about 50-60 members of which maybe 5-6 are Asian, 5-6 are Latin American and one (Joseph W. Sitati) is black.
The Second Quorum of the Seventy is much the same, but without a token black guy. But there have been other black members of the Second Quorum in the past. Unlike most of the above the Second Quorum is not a lifetime appointment.
And of the 15 members of the various axillary presidencies (Relief Society, Young Women, Primary, Sunday School, & Young Men) all are white, and all but two are American.
And while dangermom and Monty are correct that, according to church counts, most members are outside the US, these “members” tend not be active or participating members of the church. For most US congregations there will be around 200 members on the rolls for a 100-150 active member ward. Outside the US, especially in Latin America, it is very common for there to be 750-1000 members on the rolls for a 75-100 member ward. If you count only that portion of the membership that actually attends meetings on a weekly basis, it returns to being a predominantly US church.
Monty, I think you are overstating your case. Yes, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has non-white members. But I think we can agree that it is overwhelmingly white. And while, “one cannot reliably determine a person’s race from that person’s appearance,” may be true for individuals, it is less true in larger populations. I think it is safe to say that very few the individuals pictured above have significant African or Asian ancestry.
Hey, no offense, but I went to Salt Lake City for the first time a few months ago. I was there four days and walked all around the city, went to the public library, etc - saw exactly ONE black person. at all. And the big Mormon convention was in town, so I felt we had an even broader picture than normal.
Most of the Mormons I know are Polynesians, even though I live in Florida. If you want to see a wide variety of Mormons do a Google image search on the Polynesian Cultural Center.
As I recall a large number of the park employees are actually students at BYU-Hawaii, although I don’t know if that is still the case.
We visited the PCC last spring, and that’s what we were told, as well.
I don’t know–pretty much, I guess, but I’m from California and probably see more racial diversity than average. Lots of Asians and Hispanics, and considering where I live (Whiteyville), a decent number of black people. We have a fairly large Hmong group here, and when I lived in Oakland there were black members and branches for the Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians. Most cities, even mine, have a Spanish branch. (A branch is small and can’t usually provide enough people to fill all the jobs, so some spots are filled from outside. You want a branch to grow into a ward.)
Yep, the Church leadership is overwhelmingly white and American, though there are some South Americans and Europeans in the mix. This makes more sense if you know how the leadership operates; it’s very important to them to make sure that local spots are filled first, and international spots with ‘surplus’ (so to speak). If you get an apostle from Africa at this point in time, that’s a bishop or mission president or whatever spot that you’ll have to fill with someone from outside–probably a white American, since that’s where the largest surplus is. It’s felt that local leadership is the priority. So the leadership demographics lag about 20 years behind the membership demographics, because it takes a long time to establish a solid base in any area.
Purely anectodal, of course, but in my west side of Salt Lake City ward, the young men who passed the sacrament (communion) yesterday included 2 or 3 basic white guys, a Navajo, 2 Tongans, and 2 black Africans (Sudanese, I believe). I do live in a much more diverse area than is the Salt Lake norm.
I myself am an as-white-as-you-can-get stereotypical Mormon, except for not being a republican.
Also purely anecdotal, of course. I grew up as a Mormon in Louisiana. We had exactly one black family in the ward. No one sat by them or talked to them.
I moved to Utah as a teeneager. In the various wards I attended as a teeneager and young single adult, I never met a Mormon who wasn’t “white and delightsome” (the Book of Mormon’s euphemism for God’s chosen people).
I was a missionary in Polynesia. There weren’t many white people. The temple president and area president were white. Some of the stake presidents were white. The mission president was Polynesian while I was there, but most presidents before and after him were white.
Then I got married and moved to a Hispanic neighborhood in SLC. The ward was about 95% white non-Hispanic, and maybe 5% white Hispanic.
Then I moved to the Utah suburbs. There was an Asian LDS family that owned a good portion of the neighborhood. A guy felt he had to prepare everyone for the shock of his Kenyan daughter-in-law moving into the ward by announcing that although she was black, she looked more like Halle Berry than like a typical black woman. Whew, we sure dodged a bullet there.
My last ward was in a very diverse area near Houston. The active LDS are 100% non-Hispanic white (although there are probably some Hispanics who travel farther to attend the Spanish branch). Occasionally a black family joins, but they are never seen again after baptism.
FYI:
I’m in a suburb of Houston, and the local LDS have apparently been attempting to recruit heavily among the local Vietnamese population (they represent a fairly large group among the ethnic minorities in the Houston area), and my suburb, in particular, has a large Asian population.
We had a couple LDS boys going door to door trying to figure out which people were Vietnamese and which weren’t and telling everybody they were actively recruiting among them.
So, at least among some congregations (is this the right word for it?), there’s an active push to get more diversity at least at the local level. Granted, for all that, most of the active LDS people around here are very white.
That’s disgusting.
I think there’s a Vietnamese LDS branch around here where people can attend church in their own language. And each missionary is assigned a language. Both of my brothers went on Spanish missions in the US, and I know a guy who had a Mandarin mission in Australia.
I agree. I shared a duplex with the guy and was his landlord, so I knew him well. I don’t understand why an otherwise moral, intelligent person was apparently apologizing for his son’s miscegenation.
I live in a not-hugely-ethnically-diverse part of CA and the Mormon membership reflects that. Not many black or Asian people in this city, though lots of Hispanics, and in my ward (maybe 100 to 150 people who bother to show up) 2 Asians (one of them me), one Indian, one half-black kid, and several Hispanics. So whites are disproportionate relative to Hispanics, but not to the other minorities.
I agree that white Mormons tend to be more attractive (though I know lots of counterexamples) than the average white person. There’s a particular blond cheerful wholesome good-looking combo that my sister and I point out as “Bet that girl/guy is a Utah Mormon!” all the time. I suspect a combination of pioneer inbreeding and the women who deviate from the good-looking wholesome norm being less likely to marry in the Church (due to the large man/woman inequality).
Very odd, indeed.
It’s almost like there is something deeply ingrained and entrenched into the Mormon culture (even if it is no longer taught as official doctrine) that holds other races besides Caucasian as morally, aesthetically and spiritually inferior…
Nah, that couldn’t be it, could it?
It could, of course; but to be fair, there is something deeply ingrained and entrenched into the general American culture (even if it’s no longer officially taught) that holds other races besides Caucasian as morally, aesthetically and spiritually inferior, too.
It’s rather hard to distinguish precisely between the cultural impact of traditional American Mormon institutional racism and that of traditional American non-Mormon institutional racism.