Are Latter-day Saints exceptional, or just well covered

You have read the claim in some form. Bloomberg Businessweek put it this way in June 2011: a group that makes up 2 percent of the population has held top jobs at Marriott International, American Express, American Motors, Dell, Lufthansa, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Madison Square Garden and Stanley Black and Decker. The list is accurate. Every name on it can be tied to a real executive. The trouble is the method, which is to start with the executives and work backwards, and a method like that will prove anything about any group of six million people.

Here is the sample the claim is drawn from. Pew's Religious Landscape Study, run in 2007, 2014 and 2023-24 with more than 35,000 respondents each time, puts self-identified Latter-day Saints at 2 percent of American adults, a share that has held roughly steady since 2007. The Church's own count is larger and global: 17,887,212 members at the end of December 2025 in 32,046 congregations, with more of them outside the United States than inside. Wikipedia's figure for US membership on the Church's books is 6,868,793. Estimates of how many attend regularly run from 30 to 40 percent in the United States, and a 2024 study using phone location data put weekly attendance at 14 to 15 percent of those on the rolls.

So the denominator is somewhere between two million active adults and seven million names, depending on what you count. Any story about executives has to say which one it means, and none of them do.

Pew ran a dedicated survey of 1,019 self-identified members between October 25 and November 16, 2011, with a margin of error of 4.5 points. Its findings, and the education figure from the later Landscape Study, are the closest thing to a baseline that exists.

Nothing in that table says "business elite". The education number is the one that matters most, and it puts the group tied for sixteenth among 31 religious traditions, level with the Presbyterian Church in America and far behind Hindus at 77 percent and Jews at 59 percent. The marriage figure and the in-group marriage figure describe a tight network, and tight networks do help in hiring. But a network of people with an average of one year more schooling than the country is not a machine for producing chief executives.

The second body of evidence is Utah, and here the numbers are strong as long as you remember what they measure. U.S. News and World Report ranked Utah the best state in the country in 2024 for the third year running, with the economy in third place (down from first, on slower job growth in tech and finance under higher interest rates), education second, infrastructure third and natural environment 46th. The 2026 edition kept Utah first overall for a fourth year and placed its economy second behind Texas. Median household income was $93,400 in 2023, eighth highest, and income inequality was the lowest of any state. Gross state product was $300.9 billion in 2024, 28th largest.

Now the awkward part. About half of Utahns belong to the Church; a 2024 estimate says 50 percent, with 34 percent claiming no religion. The share was three-quarters in 1990 and has fallen every decade since even as the count of members rose to 2,206,370 in 2025. So the state's best-ranked years coincide with its least Latter-day Saint population in a century. Utah also runs a flat 5 percent income tax and a 4.65 percent base sales tax, and the Rich States Poor States index has scored its economic outlook first in the nation for 19 consecutive years to 2026. CNBC's own business ranking, which weights workforce and cost of doing business, put Utah first in 2016 and sixteenth in 2026. The 2026 report praised the workforce and the 4.55 percent corporate tax rate and then failed the state on quality of life: 513 childcare centres for 3.5 million people, a $7.25 minimum wage, 47th for primary care providers.

A state can rank first for business reasons that have nothing to do with the religion of its residents. Utah does.

The direct test is the one a Deseret News columnist, Lane Williams, ran on May 21, 2012, a fortnight after The Economist had published its piece on the group's supposed passion for business, and it is worth walking through because the arithmetic is so plain. If members are 2 percent of Americans, then by simple averages ten of the 500 chief executives on the Fortune list should be members. Williams looked and found one, Nolan Archibald of Black and Decker, who had held the job since March 1986 and would hand it over at the Stanley merger in 2010 as the second-longest-serving chief executive of any large non-family American company. One out of 500 is 0.2 percent, a tenth of the expected share, and Williams called the popular story a stereotype. The only serious quantitative counter-claim is old: a 1968 article in Dialogue cited a consulting study showing that Utah produced one president of the 471 largest American companies for every 62,000 residents against one for every 205,000 nationally, and named a New Jersey congregation with 45 executives in it. That is a striking figure from the era of DeWitt Paul at Beneficial Finance and Lee Bickmore at Nabisco, but it measured Utah-born presidents, not members, in a decade when Utah was three-quarters Latter-day Saint, and nobody has repeated it since. Between 1968 and 2012 the only rigorous test anyone published found under-representation. The anecdotes that filled the gap are real: Kevin Rollins ran Dell from 2004 to 2007 on $45.4 billion of revenue; Gary Crittenden was chief financial officer at American Express and then Citigroup, where he cut 75,000 jobs and $500 billion of assets during the crash; David Neeleman, who served his mission in Brazil at 19, founded five airlines and sold Morris Air to Southwest for $130 million in 1993; Mitt Romney co-founded Bain Capital in 1984 with $37 million and had $4 billion under management by 1999. Put those four in a room and you have an impressive dinner party. Put them against 500 chairs and you have a rounding error. A Reuters report in March 2012 gave a hint of what is going on: Goldman Sachs had 1,300 staff in Salt Lake City, its fourth-largest office in the world, having doubled the headcount in two years, and the state's pitch to the bank was language skills and a young workforce. That is a story about a labour pool and a tax deal in 2009, and it produces analysts and accountants, not names on the Fortune list.

Three parts of the picture cannot be settled with what is public, and it is better to say so than to fill them in. First, income. Pew's 2014 study did publish household income by religion, and the headline groups were Jews (44 percent above $100,000), Hindus (36 percent) and Episcopalians (35 percent); the Latter-day Saint line did not make the headline in any summary I could read, which suggests it sat near the national figure, but I could not confirm the number and will not print one.

Second, the mission's effect on earnings. The Christian Science Monitor reported in May 2012 that 80 percent of members surveyed called the mission useful career preparation, and the Marriott School says nearly 75 percent of its students are bilingual because of it. But only 27 percent of members have served at all, so any mission effect applies to a quarter of the group, and the people who go were not chosen at random.

Third, the trend. Utah's total fertility rate fell from 2.60 in 2008, seventh highest, to 1.80 in 2024, close to the national 1.60; converts per missionary fell from 8.03 in 1989 to 4.67 in 2005; and the Church's share of Utah's population is down from three-quarters to half. Whatever advantage large families and thick networks gave a generation ago is shrinking in the data.

One chief executive in five hundred is a rounding error, not a phenomenon.

• A count of religion among the Fortune 500 or S&P 500 chief executives, done for more than one year, against a 2 percent baseline.
• Earnings of returned missionaries against members who did not serve, with the same age and education.
• Utah's rankings split by county, so that Utah County (72 percent members, median age 25.9) can be compared with Salt Lake County.
• A published income line for the group from Pew's 2023-24 Landscape Study, which exists in the 393-page report and which I could not access.

Until someone does that work, the fair summary is short. Latter-day Saints are a little better educated than the average American, far more likely to be married, and concentrated in a state that would rank near the top of most business tables under any religion. They produce a steady supply of bilingual, disciplined mid-career managers and a handful of famous founders. On the only hard test anyone has run, they are under-represented at the very top. Which raises the question the magazines never asked: if the culture is so good at making salesmen, why does it make so few chairmen?