I have seen local churches where the pastor is actually paid based on the number of members. When members leave, they don’t always get purged from the books. This tends to inflate the actual number of memberships in the overall organization, because there is churn internally.
... which simply means their membership numbers are about as useful as those reported by the Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists.
>> Roman Catholics, the largest U.S. church with a reported 69 million members, start counting baptized infants as members and often don’t remove people until they die. Most membership surveys don’t actually count who’s in the pews on Sunday.
To be disenrolled, Catholics must write a bishop to ask that their baptisms be revoked, <<
That’s very misleading. The article is mixing senses. If a person is baptized Catholic, goes many years without enrolling in a parish, attends other denominations, and then returns to Catholic church, the church will consider that the person never left the Catholic church; all that is needed to be readmitted to communion is a quick visit to the confessional, and he can even marry as a Catholic. So what the CARA researcher said is true. But I doubt the CARA researcher knew the context of how her words would be used:
Catholic dioceses conduct censuses for their statistics. It may be very possible for a former Catholic to inadverdantly “renew” their membership for census-taking purposes, but if someone is not captured in a census, they are not counted as members within a diocese.
A method of counting implied by the article’s misuse of the CARA explanation would be quite impossible, since the Catholic Church publishes dioceses’ memberships separately; any membership based on simply subtracting deaths and formal withdrawals and adding baptisms would also have to count such persons as being in the diocese they were baptised in. And any cursory look at diocesan statistics shows that’s just plain silly.
The “double-counting” of evangelical Catholics in Latin America is based on Catholics participating in certain evangelical events, but returning to a certain level of activity in their own diocese.
>> When asked about voting habits, belief in God or their feelings toward race or gender, Americans are notorious for answering what they think pollsters want to hear. Church demographers say the same rings true for church attendance. <<
A completely incorrect mis-attribution of motives, I believe. Baptized Catholics consider themselves Catholic simply because they were baptized as such; they recognize that their church doesn’t disown them if they wander away. Many “Protestants” believe that they are Christian so long as they believe in God. Read any survey of religious identification, and you will see “protestant”, “Christian”, or something like that answered by a huge portion of respondents. (Yes, non-denoms will insist that their “denomination” is Christian, but this a much larger phenomenon than the sum total of non-denoms.