I just reconnected with some friends from my YSA days and was shocked by how many people are out and the extremely low birth rate.

Here are the stats if anyone is interested. I've had to make some educated guesses, but I've erred on the conservative side in my judgements. A lot more people may be mentally out...

Out of 26 friends:

21 are RM's
7 are out

-AND-

There are only 10 children.

Good luck to the Morg if they're banking on a booming birthdate to bouy things up.

PS All of us are late 20's early 30's, so times a ticking... it's not like we're spring chickens in terms of fertility (at least by LDS standards).

My ExMo Millennial in unmarried, with no children.

That's not a very big sample size, and thus probably not indicative of any greater trends. I only "know" a few TBMs but they're all married with at least two kids: one old friend from middle school who is an RM and married with four kids, and I know he's still deep into it because he posts Mormon shit all the time on Facebook. I've got one cousin with seven (!) kids, another with five, another with three, another with two -- all TBM. Obviously I can't say if they're "mentally out" but when I see them every year at the family Christmas party they still look and act very Mormon.

Only one of my cousins "left the faith" but he only has two kids, one of whom I think went back to it. My uncle is also an ExMo but he chose not to get married or have any children. And I don't want any children myself. That's the depressing thing about religious 'nones:' we tend to have way fewer children than the gung-ho believers, on average. I used to know a lot of Mormons who took the whole "multiply and replenish the earth" thing way too literally, with as many as ten kids in one family.

A quick view from across the pond, in my area the church has a horrible retention rate among the YSA age group. Probably less than 30%. I have two kids in that age group who were raised in the church, mostly in Arizona so they had a large group of church friends and influence. They continued with church stuff when we got to Europe, but as soon as they turned 18 and moved out of the house, they completely stopped doing anything church wise. In fact in my time here, I can only think of three people who kept doing church stuff once they reached 18. Two of them are in the same family, and the third made it through a mission before abandoning the church at 22.

My wife has six children about your age from her previous marriage. All six simply wandered away from the church once they moved out, and only one has returned now that she has two kids of her own. However, she had married a Catholic and they split their time between Mormon and Catholic services.

Their current plan is to leave it up to the kids to decide which faith they will pursue as adults. I don't think that plan is going to last long, nor will it sit well with her Catholic MIL once the kids are old enough to be baptized as Mormons.

As has been reported in various threads, those who remain are disproportionately female, which has resulted in a mate-and-marriage crisis for young LDS women. If I were LDS male, I just might consider doing a mission, for the simple reason that I would have the cream-of-the-crop of women in the marriage mart. Cynical, I know, but also realistic.

The downside being that you may be sealed to a Molly Mormon who will not allow you to backslide because you are her one and only ticket to the promised celestial kingdom.

I get enough of that kind of grief from my less-active Mormon wife who is already sealed to her RM ex-husband, and who had been told repeatedly before we were married that I would never convert.

(Edited to change my wife's status from "inactive" to "less-active"...she still insists that she has a testimony and hopes that life settles down enough for her to be more active. Just when I start thinking that she has finally left the church, she rolls over in bed after "sleeping in" and says, "Let's go to church! We've got just enough time to get ready.")



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2018 11:18AM by GregS.

When I left the church and my wife didn't, I mentioned to her that our children had really never had freedom of choice when it came to religion even though they were teenagers and well past the "age-of-accountability." I stated that now that I was out of the church and never going back it was time we stopped the forced march to Sacrament Meeting. My wife agreed -- thinking that her kids were already well entrenched in the church and they would never leave.

We have 4 boys and 1 girl.

The results (now that they are all 30ish):

4 boys gave up church basically as fast as they could and never went back.

My daughter is still TBM and married a BYU TBM RM.

The day my kids were given their freedom my wife was SHOCKED at their choices -- but, of course, she couldn't say to much, as she knew we were REALLY giving them "freedom of choice" in the matter.

increase the birth rate than any threat by Rusty Ol' Nelson from the bully pulpit.

Good info. What's the 'now' average age of these YSA friends? I'm trying to gauge the only 10 kids part.

I'm 31, so everybody is about 2-3 years younger or older than me.

One RM just married a 36 year old though, so even if my cohort started mating like bunnies they're never going to have huge, traditional Mormon families.

Also, most of my friends are done having kids. One or two couples may have one more.

In Utah, Idaho, Las Vegas, parts of Arizona there is more social and even economic pressure to stay in and conform to pressures of early marriage and mass baby-making; elsewhere not so much.