No matter how "holy hip" the LDS Church's sappy and silly spinners try to make Mormon youth appear ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJIw0DP7eVo ) the truth they cannot hide: Mormon young people continue to slide.

A few days ago in Salt Lake City, I was visiting with a group of ex-Mo/lapsed-Mo friends and their acquaintances--where I met a former Young Women's president who shared with me the stark realities of youth inactivity rates in the Mormon Church which you won't heard publicly confessed from the priesthooded pulpit.

She said that when she was a Young Women's president, she attended a Salt Lake City-wide conference for area youth leaders. There they were shown pie charts displaying an alarming rate of youth inactivity throughout the LDS Church. She said that at the time, among the 850,000 Mormon youth in the United States, there was a whopping 75% inactivity rate, with inactivity defined as three months of non-attendance at sacrament meeting.

Not a pretty picture--and one that provides a candid view of the irrelevancy of Mormonism in the lives of today's youth.

Yo, Youth of Zion: Rock on to your non-gospel song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06jF1EG8o-Q



Edited 10 time(s). Last edit at 08/17/2014 05:18AM by steve benson.

That is going to be quite a reduction in financial revenue in the future.

I do not think the claims of huge growth in developing countries will be able to make up for this financial disaster.

One must wonder if the senior executive LDS management will jump like rats from a sinking ship.

Nah, the Mormon leaders are emotional manipulators, and PR hypers. They really don't care that much about the members. Otherwise, they wouldn't coerce them into cleaning all the bathrooms, and they would make the Mormon experience more palatable. They would give the youth something uplifting and fun.

No, The True Work will proceed, which is the acquisition and maintenance of real estate properties tax-free. The GS's will stick around to glean the profits from their cattle, sugar, petroleum, broadcasting, mortgage, and other businesses, which comprise the One True Church of--money! Members be damned.

This is true... A kind of diversification of income sources. Investments in other areas will compensate for a reduction in tithing.

To be fair, though, this has always been the case. I don't have the statistics at hand, but many people between 14 and 30 will go through a period of inactivity.

Most people who become active again, do so when they start their own family.

What would be interesting to know is whether the number of people who return to activity and raise their kids in the church is dropping. Organic growth is the church's main source for new members so a drop in this number would really hurt them.

. . . and the Mormon Church doesn't want to openly admit it.

Another fact: If you lose members while they are in their youth, you've most likely lost them for good.

My TBM mother realized that fact. When I decided to bolt the Cult and take my children with me, she confided at a family get-together at Brigham Young's Lion House in downtown SLC, that she didn't worry too much about me because she insisted that I had a deep enough testimony in Moism to eventually return to the corral of faith. (Ha). However, she expressed fear that once I took my kids out of the Mormon Church, they were hasta la pasta forever.

At least she got it half right--and I still love her despite our significant religious differences.



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 08/17/2014 10:52PM by steve benson.

The question begs to be asked.

How many of the 25% that aren't inactive, are being forced to be there by their parents? The minute they're out from under the thumbs of parents they too will be awol.

What 18 year old is excited about a future of bathroom cleaning and all the rest of their free time going to meetings to discuss how to try and coerce people back in?

That number is probably not too far off of the adult inactivity rate -- what would that be, about two thirds of the official membership?

I was thinking the same. Few kids are active if their parents aren't either.

This generation is informed like no other in history. It is also interacting and communicating internally like no other society in history.

This is the worst possible news for Mormonism. The church no longer controls information. The church no longer controls member interaction and conversation. The past institutional "gate keeping" is gone forever. The truth is making us free.

It only takes one generation - one link - to break a chain!

. . . when I met privately with him and fellow Dope for Christ, Dallin Oaks. Maxwell warned me that if I took my kids out of Mormonism, it would result--in a single generation--in their loss of faith in the Cult, thus dooming the family lines of my children to a generational future of non-activity for not only them, but for their own children, and on down the line.

I regarded that as very positive news.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/17/2014 04:52PM by steve benson.

One can ONLY Hope!

And this is a bad thing?

It only takes one CES letter to go viral.

Part of the "problem", IMO, is tht the church leadership at all levels persists in seeing "The Youth" as a monolithic bloc. I first noticed this in the 1960's, although the mindset is very old. They see The Youth as a single entity, who regularly get together and decide on what they are going to believe, what slang terms to use for that week, what clothing styles everybody must wear, and on and on. I never did follow the fads of my generation, and I think the church leaders (locals included) could never quite figure out what to do with me. I know I am not the only one.

They will get much more traction if they stop it, and start seeing young people as people, individuals who are individually trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into life. Peer acceptance is certainly important to teenagers, but so is the need to be valued as individuals. Perhaps the church leaders are so steeped in GroupThink that they cannot conceive of anybody not defined in it.

Overall activity rates in the US have been in the 40% to 50% range in recent years. I personally think that has been trending downward, but activity is somewhere in that ballpark.

If youth activity is at 25%, and presumably also trending downward! then the next 40 years are going to be very rough sledding for LDS Inc. Growth is easier to manage than shrinkage, and much more fun.

See, this is what baffles me about what's-his-faces hate speech at the recent BYU graduation ceremony. It's like the old guys are actually trying to drive the youth (at least the internet-informed kids) out.

Jerry:

I have lived in 6 states, in the midwest, south, southwest and pacific northwest. Over the last thirty years, I don't think I was ever in a ward with 50% or more regular attendance. I am beginning to think that the Morridor activity statisitics somehow skew the totals towards a much rosier picture than is actually there.

Comments?





Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Overall activity rates in the US have been in the
> 40% to 50% range in recent years. I personally
> think that has been trending downward, but
> activity is somewhere in that ballpark.
>
> If youth activity is at 25%, and presumably also
> trending downward! then the next 40 years are
> going to be very rough sledding for LDS Inc.
> Growth is easier to manage than shrinkage, and
> much more fun.

Here is a good indication of this issue.

The chapel where I take my wife to attend SM holds approximately 300 people.

Seldom do I see more than 115 in attendance at SM.

Usually there are three or four adults that assist in the passing of the sacrament.

Adults are frequently called on to bless the sacrament.

They usually falter through the prayers.

Most times the Bish. just lets it slide.

Last week I rough counted 95

The other part of this data that should be considered is the rate in which people are leaving.

My guess, and I of course do not have numbers to back anything, is that the trend line is rising exponentially.

I do think that when a family has a person reject the faith, it makes it much, much easier for others in the same family to do likewise.

For example, the infamous CES letter floating around the interwebz does less damage to the organization than does the conversations about the letter happening at dinner tables of pioneer stock families.

When a couple of family members leave the LDS organization, it forces the conversation that has been ignored since the beginning.

The next generation is criticized for some of their actions. But we must always remember that it is really the first generation reared with open access to information, and an upbringing built on needing to separate the bullshit from the reality with evidence and collaborating evidence.

LDS Inc is speeding towards a cliff and without profound and dynamic change will become extinct.

A recent survey said that 80% of the population under 30 approve of same sex marriage! That figure is now demographically balanced by the aging baby boomers who tend to be more conservative.

In ten to fifteen years, however, that balance will be shifting radically. That's an unavoidable trend that the church can't ignore. It's possible that the church is draining as much money as possible from current devout members because it anticipates a bleak financial future. The younger generation is a world apart from traditional Mormonism.

Same sex marriage is one of the big indicators of that radically changing population.

Ryan Cragun, and exmo sociologist contributed to a study on Mormon demographics for Trinity College a few years ago, and he confirmed what we've long suspected, and what Mr. Benson notes here: All is not well in Zion.

He specifically compared numbers from a 1990 study and one in 2008. The loss of active young males is staggering over this time period. In 1990 the church in Utah was comprised of 52.5% females. By 2008, that number surged to 60% female membership in Utah.

He surmises that the increasing pluralism in Utah may be granting young men a bit more license to drift from the church. And this out of kilter ratio will have an impact for generations to come. The lack of "worthy" males is driving increasing numbers of LDS women into the arms of non members, further diluting the strength of the faith. It's on a definite downward trajectory.

You can read Dr. Cragun's entire report at this link: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2011/12/Mormons2008.pdf

And his work is largely based upon a distillation of data from the ARIS survey. More info on that and other LDS related writings are at this link: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/

Is there any real question about why the church lowered the age requirement for missionaries?

How is the church keeping members? Guilt, fear and shame? When people realize this and decide they don't need it in their lives, the church's authority is broken. Worst, when people leave, they often become the church's harshest critics.

a Voodoo doll. When people realize the "threat" of the pin is meaningless, they laugh.

All 3 of my uncles sons left the church. 2 Rm's, 1 temple married.

Talking about this with my TBM mom today. She is sure the lower number of youth in the church has to do with Mormons having smaller families - four children instead of the eight that were common when I was young. What her theory doesn't take into account is the percentage of children that HAVE been born to Mormon families that are leaving. There are three wards in the small Northern CA town where she lives and they have to combine YM/YW because there aren't enough active youth in any ward. But of course that is because the cost of living where she resides is high so young families can no longer afford to live there yaddah yaddah yaddah...

Well the answer to her argument is "I don't think the word 'percent' means what you think it means."

last time I was on the London temple grounds, I noticed that there were a lot of young women ie late teens early twenties, all dressed to the nines. I counted exactly three young men in the same age group. At a guess there were well over 20 women of the same age.

Does this mean that Jesus can't return now? Because the "rising generation" have failed in their mission to be good Mormons and prepare the earth for the second coming?