The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is on track to grow in a way that will change the religious complexion of the United States, social scientist and LDS convert Mark Koltko-Rivera says.

This so-called “Mormon moment” in U.S. culture — when everything from the presidential race to Broadway’s award-winning musical features Mormons — is about “to morph into the Saints’ century,” Koltko-Rivera predicts.

He says Mormonism will be America’s first- or second-largest religion by 2106.

So far it’s grown from six members in 1830 to 14 million members worldwide — allowing contemporary social scientists to witness the birth of a world religion, albeit one with only 0.2 percent of the global religious.

If missionary applications are an indicator of conversions to come, Koltko-Rivera might have a point about future growth.

The church reported a 471 percent increase in applications two weeks after an Oct. 6 announcement by LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson that the age requirement for missionaries had been lowered.

The median annual growth of Mormons between 2001 and 2011 was 2.38 percent, according to the Deseret News 2012 Church Almanac.

The church is growing much faster than Protestantism, 1.62 percent, and Catholicism, 0.94 percent, according to the Annual Megacensus of the Encyclopedia Britannica Books of the Year.

Using a “low growth” model of 2 percent per year for the next century, Koltko-Rivera calculates that Mormons will number more than 21 million worldwide by 2030 and more than 125 million by 2120.

Yet Koltko-Rivera argues that the “high growth” model of sustained annual growth of 5.5 percent

is more likely, putting the global Mormon population at more than 24 million by 2030 and 2.6 billion by 2120.

Even many LDS faithful have trouble swallowing that figure.

His projections were made before the church decided to allow young men to go on missions at 18 instead of 19. Young women, who make up a little more than half the new applications, can now go at age 19, rather than waiting until they’re 21. Women previously had made of only a fifth of the 58,000-strong missionary force across the world.

Koltko-Rivera, evacuated from his New York home because of its proximity to the hurricane-damaged dangling construction crane, was camped out Wednesday in the living room of his Mormon bishop.

As a result of the church’s action, he told the Post, “You’re going to see that 2.6 billion membership 10, if not 20 years earlier — a generation earlier.”

He says he speaks for himself, as a rank and file member, not a church authority.

LDS Church spokesman Eric Hawkins said the church continues to grow at a steady rate, as indicated by the need to build more chapels and temples to accommodate membership.

“We do not compare our growth to other faiths or make claims to be the fastest-growing Christian faith,” Hawkins said. “Our interest is not in numbers, but in individuals.”

Matt Martinich who analyzes LDS growth trends of the past 30 years, has said each missionary on average has baptized six converts. Most new Mormons are converts rather than born into LDS families, but they have high marriage and healthy birth rates, too.

Utah, where the faith is based, has the highest birth rate in the country — 19.4 births per 1,000, compared with the national rate of 13.5, per the The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics Reports for 2009.

Utah also has one of the lowest abortion rates, out-of-wedlock birth rates and relatively low divorce rate.

“This notion the Mormons will grow, grow, grow is not new,” said Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

Rodney Stark, co-director for Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, used the LDS growth rate from 1940 to 1980 — 50 percent — to estimate Mormons could number 265 million members by 2080.

Koltko-Rivera’s book “The Rise of the Mormons: Latter-day Saint Growth in the 21st Century,” released in October, suggests “a more Mormon” country would be healthier, better educated, have more stable families and more concern for the poor and needy.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” recently wrote that a visit to Utah reveals all the Mormon virtues and its “communitarian idealism,” as evidenced in its church-run welfare centers. It’s also “a worldlier, more business-friendly religion than traditional Christianity,” he said.

Yet, Douthat said, a trip to Utah also reminds one of the secrecy of temple rituals (that no non-Mormon can view), the defensiveness around issues of polygamy and race, the fine line between “a healthy solidarity and an unhealthy conformism,” and a Book of Mormon counterhistory of the Americas that is unsupported by archaeological science.

Koltko-Rivera believes Mormon beliefs and values are becoming increasingly appealing to the general populace, including central tenets such as “exaltation,” or becoming godlike.

“God the Father was once a mortal human on some other world, and ultimately received the gift of eternal life, which he now wishes to make available to us, on condition of our worthiness, that is, our obedience to Him,” he wrote.

Also appealing, he said, is the belief that families are forever. “God the Father is eternally married to our Heavenly Mother.”

Faithful couples can be sealed for eternity in temple rituals.

“But Mormons aren’t keeping their youth the way they used to,” said Shipps, who is considered a leading non-Mormon scholar on Mormons. “If a Mormon youth has a question now, he or she goes to the Internet, where they’re just as likely to get an anti-Mormon answer as a Mormon answer. We just don’t know about their retention and that of converts.”

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey released in 2008 found that only 70 percent of Mormon children stay Mormon. The retention rate for Catholics is only 68 percent. While only 57 percent of Protestants remain in the denomination they were raised in, most, 80 percent, stay Protestant, joining another denomination or the ranks of the evangelicals.

The rate of conversion to Mormonism slowed in the 1990s, from 5 percent to 3 percent, which Koltko-Rivera attributes to the church shifting its missionary focus to more difficult fields of labor, such as Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, and to its stricter adherence to religious rules by missionaries — abstention before missions from pornography, tobacco, alcohol and any illegal drugs, as well a solid understanding of The Book of Mormon.

The church has been building its networks and increasing missionary numbers, Koltko-Rivera said, and the slowing of LDS growth is about to end.

Other experts note Pentacostal churches are outpacing Mormonism. The Assemblies of God (Pentacostal denomination) has experienced recent annual growth rates of almost 4 percent. Koltko-Rivera counters that is an atypical spike looking back over decades of data.

Many LDS credit Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, former missionary and bishop, for focusing a national spotlight on Mormons.

J.W. Marriott Jr., son of the founder of the hotel chain, told his Wolfeboro, N.H., Mormon congregation in September that the Romneys were helping lead the church out of obscurity and into the mainstream, The New York Times reported.

Romney contributed more than $4.3 million to the Mormon church between 2003 and 2009, according to the Deseret News.

The church’s official position is that it doesn’t endorse candidates, political parties or platforms. In fact, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is also a Mormon.

While evangelical Christians, an important Republican-leaning voting bloc, were initially wary, even hostile, toward a Romney candidacy, any objections based on the logical concerns, such as polytheism and the identity of Jesus, melted away in the heat of their opposition toward President Barack Obama, as shown by many polls. For one, evangelicals and conservative Catholics share many of the same social values as Mormons, such as opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Of late, it is a secularist group, American Atheists, calling on the electorate to examine what a Mormon presidency might mean to non-Mormons, especially in terms of civil rights.

“We need to know if Mr. Romney supports these and other discriminatory actions of his church, for which he evangelized when it was still overtly racist (blacks were prohibited from holding the priesthood until 1978), and to which he continues to donate millions of dollars,” the group’s president, Dave Silverman said in a recent statement.

Shipps said that the Mormon intellectual community is concerned about one person — a politician — being the leading representative of the faith.

“Some church leaders may be a little nervous about it, too,” she said.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or twitter.com/electadraper

Primer on church of jesus christ of latter-day saints theology and history:

Saints, better known as Mormons, profess to be the restoration of an ancient Christianity corrupted by the Roman Catholic Church and other subsequent denominations .

In 1827, Mormons believe, an angel named Moroni gave New Yorker Joseph Smith a record of ancient prophets descended from people who came from Jerusalem to the Americas around 600 B.C. Joseph translated golden plates into the Book of Mormon, named for one of these ancient prophets, then published it in 1830 and formally organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While much of the world calls members of the church Mormons, the members calls themselves Saints.

Smith received the revelation calling for plural marriage and also prophesized that year that the righteous would gather in Jackson County, Mo., to welcome the second coming of Jesus Christ, which early Mormons believed was imminent.

Smith ran for the presidency in 1844 as an independent, a commander in chief of “an army of God” to establish a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Smith viewed attaining the presidency to be a mission of the church. He preached that the Mormons, the chosen people, would usher in the second coming coming of Christ and set up the Kingdom of God in Washington, D.C.

Smith was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob in mid-1844. The mantle of leadership passed to Brigham Young, who led Mormons to settle in Salt Lake City and Utah, still church headquarters. Mormons practiced polygamy until 1890.

One of Mormonism’s most distinctive central doctrines is that of “exaltation.” Through obedience to church authorities and tenets of the faith, humans can become gods.

People who marry in LDS temples and then go on to keep the convenants for righteous living will go on in the afterlife, founder and prophet Joseph Smith taught, to “pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things. … Then they shall be gods.”

People who died without being baptized under proper LDS priestly authority can be saved through proxy baptisms on earth in LDS temples. Men can be sealed to more than one wife in the afterlife.

Mormons are prohibited from using alcohol, tobacco or coffee.

Mormons have an entirely lay clergy. All Mormon men are ordained as members of the priesthood with authority to preach the gospel, bestow blessings, experience prophecy, perform healings and baptisms. The president of the church is considered a living prophet who receives divine revelations for the church.

At age 12 boys become members of the Aaronic, or lesser priesthood, and at 19 become eligible for the Melchizedek, or higher priesthood. Women are excluded from the priesthood.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

History

Saints, better known as Mormons, profess to be the restoration of an ancient Christianity corrupted after the time of Jesus’ original apostles.

In 1827, Mormons believe, an angel named Moroni gave New Yorker Joseph Smith a record of ancient prophets descended from people who came from Jerusalem to the Americas around 600 B.C. Joseph translated golden plates into the Book of Mormon, named for one of these ancient prophets, then published it in 1830 and formally organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While much of the world calls members of the church Mormons, members call themselves Saints.

Smith received the revelation calling for plural marriage and also prophesied that year that the righteous would gather in Jackson County, Mo., to welcome the second coming of Jesus Christ, which early Mormons believed was imminent.

Smith ran for the presidency in 1844 as an independent, a commander in chief of “an army of God” to establish a Mormon-ruled theocracy.

Smith was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob in mid-1844. The mantle of leadership passed to Brigham Young, who led Mormons to settle in Salt Lake City and Utah, still church headquarters. Mormons practiced polygamy until 1890.

Theology

One of Mormonism’s most distinctive central doctrines is that of “exaltation.” Through obedience to church authorities and tenets of the faith, humans can become gods.

People who marry in LDS temples and then go on to keep the convenants for righteous living will go on in the afterlife, founder and prophet Joseph Smith taught, to “pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things. … Then they shall be gods.”

People who died without being baptized under proper LDS priestly authority can be saved through proxy baptisms on Earth in LDS temples. Men can be sealed to more than one wife in the afterlife.

Mormons are prohibited from using alcohol, tobacco or caffeine.

Mormons have an entirely lay clergy. All Mormon men are ordained as members of the priesthood with authority to preach the gospel, bestow blessings, experience prophecy and perform healings and baptisms. The president of the church is considered a living prophet who receives divine revelations for the church.

At age 12, boys become members of the Aaronic, or lesser priesthood; at 19, they become eligible for the Melchizedek, or higher priesthood. Black men were excluded from the priesthood until 1978. Women are excluded from the priesthood.