Never really in

This site is mostly about people who believed, deeply and for a long time, and then stopped. The 2011 survey screened for exactly that population, and its findings do not describe anyone else. But the 2014 comprehensive list opens with a different group, and calls it probably the largest single one: people who were never really converted or integrated in the first place.

Every estimate of Church activity points the same way. The Church reports over seventeen million members of record. Independent researchers, working from census self-identification, sacrament meeting attendance, and the Church's own unit counts, put the number who actually attend at somewhere between a quarter and a third of that, and lower in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where most baptisms now happen. The gap is made of people who joined and left without a crisis of faith: converts baptized after a few lessons who found no community waiting, children of record whose families drifted, and members in countries where the Church built few chapels and trained few local leaders.

The reason to mention them here is honesty. Believing members sometimes point to this group to explain all departures: they were never really converted. The survey shows that explanation does not fit the people it is usually applied to, the returned missionaries and bishops and Relief Society presidents who left after decades. But the group is real, it is large, and it says something of its own about how the Church grows.