https://unpackingambiguitycom.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/faith_crisis_report_r24b.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0JK5_QH2WZB7DFP00pq1hFdUJl741GGO3VWClP6FFSe1zkjnawRo4k0VE

It's lengthy but well done. I find it amazing that TBMs could be so immersed in working in such a sensitive area and not be affected. Except some were. Apparently John Dehlin was involved in this attempt to soften hard & nasty facts, and look where it got him.

It seems that it's well known the church needs to lie to keep itself alive and operational, and they're just trying to find how best to do it so as not to make it so easy to abandon ship.

Thank goodness there's a core of TBMs who are prepared to do down with the ship.

Fascinating. He’s a Harvard professor, so the Brethren will listen to him. I wonder if this played a role in the genesis of the history papers...

The difference between Dehlin and Christiansen was status. The one got excommunicated, the other probably received his second anointing.

Clayton Christiansen died two years ago. At the time his obituary appeared in the Desert News, I engaged in the following brief exchange in the comment section to that obituary. I find it remarkable that the Desert News Staff allowed my comments to stand without censure.

"ALifeExamined: I got to know Clayton very well while in college. I shared a house with Clayton at BYU and participated in the Oxford Branch while we were both students at Oxford University. Clayton was a remarkable person. His “innovator’s dilemma” theory is a powerful tool and the one for which he will be remembered. Nevertheless, I am puzzled Clayton never rigorously applied the theory to the religion of his birth. Clayton lived with integrity consistent with a steadfast commitment to the church. I find it interesting that same quest for integrity required me to abandon the religion of my birth.

John Pack [Response to my comment}: All the evidence is that Christensen applied to most rigorous study and effort to understanding The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He knew the Book of Mormon was true because he had studied, read and received a witness of its divinity. You too can recieve this witness if you open up your heart ot the ministerings of the Holy Ghost as can anyone else. [Original misspellings preserved.]

ALifeExamined [My response to John Pack]: Clayton's name was one of a number of names on an interesting statistical study called the "Faith Crisis Chronicles" assembled by Mormon scholars in 2013 and presented to church leaders in an attempt to understand the growing crisis in faith among church members. Clayton apparently made the suggestion to included short first-person narrative stories in the report. It was a brilliant suggestion that made the 2013 report so much more powerful. I would commend the report to your reading."

I'm not surprised that escaped the censors' wrath. The criticism is oblique, too nuanced to represent a clear threat to the church or the DN.

He apparently had his heart in it; he believed the church to be 'true' (morphing, but true) and he wanted to help overcome the unsavory nature of much of its early history!

And that early history needs a lot of overcoming! Such a list of JoJu's failings!

My favorite 'Joju Failing' is this one (also borrowed from a redditor who says he got it from Twitter; a whole lot of incestuous cross-posting going on!):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eVHA3My_wsouVwWiqhDT3jnCBtOMLnZ_/view?usp=sharing

Thank you elderolddog for this fascinating report.

It is so detailed and very well done.

Great find, like wow, how did ye find this?

That it is "proprietary confidential" suggests it was requested by HQ, which in turn suggests things had become sufficiently catastrophic to breach the protective denial bubble

Multidisciplinary but with strong business element - interesting as schools teach students how to think like a (buisiness person, lawyer, etc) and curious that no sociology, though it is a sociological study (modeling builds those graphic displays)

Circumstances appear worse than had suspected. Graphics revealing.
And the researchers suggest it is worse than it appears as most do not bother with resignation so the numbers are, if anything, an undercount.

Boiled down, seems they're saying crux of the problem is the loss of information control has resulted in people becoming un-duped.
Primary solution is to re-dupify, albeit in a more sophisticated (sneakier) way; but they don't/can't address loss of trust, which makes folks resistant to redupification

The study is essentially the Chief Engineer of R.M.S. Titanic saying "aye Capitain, wee've gotta tharee-hoondret-foot-'ole in the staahrrbord siide, and the coompaartmints arah floooding, and degraaading boooyancy is gooona sequentially overtop watertiiight boollkheeds anda serial watertight cooompartment going to floood with loss of the veeesel!"

I found it at Reddit(dot)com, on the exmo sub-reddit.

There are 191,000+ accounts registered to the exmo sub-reddit.

And you know why they have grown so much? It's because SchrodingersCat can't talk about the Tao there, or about the people he wants to be like when he grows up.

So I go there to twirl around like Julie Andrews on a mountain top, at the beginning of The Sound of Music.

Omg, EOD. Thanks for the laughs!

    There are those who believe that anyone who appreciates my humor does so because significant derangement or detachment from reality has set in.

Don't let them catch you!!

PRIMARY FACTORS DRIVING FAITH CRISIS?
It's all lies.

“Don’t find fault. Find a remedy.”?
Quit. Best remedy there is.

I agree with that notion...

What's difficult to process is that the authors then tried to find a way around the obstacles that The Truth raised!

They've definitely thrown away the "Ve vus only following ze orders!"

Is this the same humble-bragging Clayton C discussed in this old thread? Sounds like it is; if so, he lived a tool, he died a tool…

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1975798

Wowsers! Cold Dodger nailed it there:

“The feeling is just a feeling, not a message. To interpret it as a message, you have to infer things based on the context of what you were thinking/praying when you induced this feeling.”
—-https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1975798,1975873#msg-1975873

I have seen the stories of the disaffected members before, probably here. The rest of the document is new to me. This was a serious piece of work. This wasn't knocked out on a Thursday afternoon by somebody working on deadline.

The tone was very honest, earnest and detailed. It sounded like the authors really wanted to fix what they saw as serious problems.

I noticed a graph of when the people in the survey left Mormonism (page 23 of doc) and far and away the most people left in 2004-7 and 2008-11, the last two intervals on the bar graph. The growth in disaffected members leaving was clearly exponential.

Since the data in that graph, we have had the CES letter, the legalization of same-sex marriage over LDS Inc's strenuous objections, the short-lived policy against baptizing children of same-sex couples, and the clumsy name change of the Mormon Church, and the disclosure of the $100 billion slush fund. Oh, and Trumpublican politics. I assume all of those contributed to more members leaving, and the number leaving was already shocking by 2011.

I would dearly love to know what the 2022 participation numbers are going to look like. I expect it will be mind boggling, and not in a good way for the Q15.

It is a professional, and professionally slick, presentation. It also suffers from the same "self-selection" bias as the study you rightfully criticized a few days ago.

Why that might matter is that people who left the church within the five or six years comprising the last two temporal intervals may be more intent upon expressing their motivations and anger than those who left ten or twenty or thirty years before. In short, Kentish or EOD probably couldn't be bothered to fill out the survey whereas people infuriated by Prop 8 were likely eager to vent their feelings when Christiansen asked for voluntary responses. So the acceleration in disaffection registered after 2008 probably overstates, perhaps dramatically, the actual trend.

There's another interesting element to this, one to which I alluded before. It is the coincidence of Dehlin's presentation to Holland about the wave of departures, which I believe also occurred in 2013. Dehlin was excommunicated; Christiansen was not. What's the difference? I wouldn't be surprised if the church requested, even commissioned, Christiansen's work while Dehlin's arose spontaneously. The church does not like spontaneous steadying of the ark, as it were.

And the church loves a professional, business-like format. An MBA is always preferable to an education in psychology or some other touchy-feely field.

> In short, Kentish or
> EOD probably couldn't
> bothered to fill out
> the survey ...



♪ Old Dog and ♫ Kentish ♪
Each ♫ sitting in a ♪ tree,
♪ P-i-s-s-i-n-g! ♫

I agree about the self-selection and people losing the fire-in-the-belly over time, which lowers their likelihood of responding.

Christiansen is basically Steven Covey II, so very much the sort of person a corporate church would trust and want to hear from. Plus he hits all the True Believer notes.

The Q15 didn't ask for Dehlin's input, but I suspect they were well aware of who he was. They didn't want to ask for his input, When it was offered unsolicited, they took umbrage. Or so it seems to me.

He just doesn't have the same TBM vibe. Even here on RFM he elicits a certain amount of suspicion.

In fact, Holland asked for Dehlin's input and Dehlin met him in person to deliver his presentation. He expected to be called back to present to the whole Q15 or at least a subcommittee thereof, but Holland ghosted him. I'll bet dollars to itty bitty donuts that that was when the Q15 asked Christensen, a known quantity as you note, to do his study.

I think this was clearly a decision to take matters out of a dilettante's hands and put it in Christensen's. Then, of course, Dehlin had to be shut up because he knew too much. And Holland showed his character by throwing his erstwhile ally to the wolves.

Can one muse what might have been had Holland clasped Dehlin to his bosom?

That was interesting. What is more interesting is that this was 8 years ago and since then, they have done next to nothing.

Didn't they hire Kakookie, that Black kid, and all-around excellent mormon apologist from Provo to go on YouTube and explain it all, and, you know, smooth things over?

You mean Quackers? Yeah. That was an amazing decision. I wonder if it was a revelation directly to Rusty's space pen?

September 2014 was when the church announced its history/doctrine essays. I suspect that was a direct result of this study.

But the essays were a rearguard action, to be used only on people who were struggling--sort of a retrospective inoculation, saying it's the member's fault for not knowing what the church has always taught. The authors did not actually state the truth either about the essay topics or the church's history of obfuscation and deception.

The problem, and this is something apologists like Dehlin and Christiansen either don't recognize or cannot bring themselves to confront, is that the facts are implacably hostile to Mormonism. The church cannot afford to admit the truth without losing its credibility. To go farther would probably have been a serious mistake.

SO they are reduced to arguing about the shade of the pig's lipstick.

The church released the first essays in 2013. For example, see

https://www.ksl.com/article/27969298/lds-church-releases-race-and-the-priesthood-study-topic (dated 12/10/2013)

or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_in_the_21st_century
(September 2013 entry

Either that or Susan I/S is a prophet - see sticky from 2/21/14.

Yes, the September 2014 date was when the church alerted all leaders to the existence of the essays and urged them to send doubting members to them.

"On September 9, 2014 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent a letter to all Priesthood leaders. The letter instructed Priesthood leaders to send doubting or inquisitive members to a series of essays recently published in the Gospel Topics section of LDS.org."

https://mormonessays.com/

Yes, they initially made the essays hard to find. Then told local leaders to direct doubting members there. They didn't want most members reading them.

That being said, the presentation from EOD's link was dated April 2013, so it is still likely that the essays resulted from it.

Yes. My thought is that the essays had been percolating in Q15's minds for a few years. In 2013 that conviction probably solidified. I'm reminded of a management consulting reality: often insiders know the answer to a problem but they are divided over whether to implement it. So the reformers commission a consultancy not to come up with new ideas but to tip the balance in favor of the reformers' plans, and the losers go off to lick their wounds.

The format of the Christiansen document screams "consultant" to the reader, which suggests to me that someone in the Q15 requested it. I'm confident Dehlin's work contributed to the decision, too. But he couldn't be acknowledged publicly because he was a no-name, self-appointed expert whose efforts were semi-public.

Which raises a possibility that I don't think we should overlook. It could be that when the Q15 decided to go forward, the conservatives demanded a political sacrifice and Dehlin was the obvious target. Holland and other reformers (I think that is likely) would have agreed to excommunicate him as the price for moving forward with Christiansen's recommendations.

Interesting idea - Dehlin an acceptable sacrifice to appease the opponents when deciding to move forward on the essays.

And yes, the doc screams consultant. Experienced and well-paid consultant. Clayton may have done it at cost or even as a freebie, but he did not stint on effort. It was way above my pay grade.

Note also the rich use of photos of the internet, as if the presentation were designed for people who don't own laptops.

I think a significant factor in the decision to use someone other than Dehlin is that this falls under the purview of TSCC as money laundering entity. The spoils go to insiders, not boat-rocking interlopers.

That's not really how the church works. The church turns to its insider friends, the ones with the 2A and such, and instructs them to donate their resources. I bet they just called Christiansen and "asked" him to do the project.

He does allude to a scarcity of funds...

That’s probably true. This sort of work isn’t like building or remodeling a temple is it?

In fact, it's the sort of project that the church may at some point want to disavow.

true

The things Ive been through are that common, and the church knows this but im just a number on part of a flowchart presentation in a corporate board meeting about how to mitigate the damage this is doing in their bottom line.

Got it.

Cook joined the Q12 in 2007, so he would have been part of the audience and knew all of the issues.

p. 7 of the presentation makes this important point:

"Measuring the severity of Faith Crisis by simply tracking numbers of resignations creates a false impression there is no formidable challenge and causes many to deny the severity of the issue. It will not serve us well if we have 'Faith Crisis deniers' in the same way we now have climate change deniers."

Even while knowing this, Cook subsequently (and infamously) said in April 2015 GC, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never been stronger. The number of members removing their names from the records of the Church has always been very small and is significantly less in recent years than in the past."

Color me cynical, but I think Cook was either lying outright, or applying a prodigious amount of spin to resignation statistics. He knows there is no way for us to hold him to account on his claims.

He's a pretty junior apostle, so he has to toe the party line. Need a lie told? Make the new guy do it.

Ah, just watching Murder Among the Mormons and it appears to me that lying is as natural as breathing among the leadership. No one seems to find it difficult or odious. Perhaps lying among the junior apostles is just an exercise in brown nosing.

There's a great deal of speculation in this thread about the genesis of the LDS Faith Crisis Report. The impetus behind the report is explained in detail at the following link including a listing of 37 individuals who contributed to the project:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mormon/comments/ba5jer/major_contextual_update_to_the_2013_faith_crisis/

Thanks very much for sharing this.

I found myself feeling slightly pleased that it was apparently Uchtdorf who pushed through the preparation and publishing of the GD essays.

Is this the reason, or part of the reason, that he has been removed from the spotlight?

An example from the report:

"ANONYMOUS FEMALE: AGE 50 - 64
household income: $200,000+
education level: College Graduate
member type: Life-long member
prior to crisis: Full Tithe Payer, Regular Attendance at
Sacrament Service, Temple Recommend
Holder, Adherence to the Word of Wisdom"

The top item is the income level! Money is clearly a priority to the corporation. Why mention income at all if the goal is saving souls? All people should be considered equal. I fail to see the relevance of income in the story list unless loss of tithing is of prime concern.

Money is important to the Church of Joseph Smith of Latter-day Saints!

Was there anything, or anyone, Joe wouldn't do for money?

I think losing members and their tithing revenue was a bigger concern under the Monson-Uchtdorf leadership than the current Rusty show.

They realize that there's still a core of members who will jump off any cliff if they ask.

answers the question do they understand what the problem is and how big it is.

It has surprised me that the church never seems to take the missing 70% of the flock as a serious problem. They continue to count everyone, including those who do not even identify as Mormon. In some countries where the church says they "enjoy great success" are actually miserable failures. I think that Chile is one of these, with something like only 8% of members of record self-identifying as Mormon. Their desire is to ever push the numbers around to put a more positive spin on their failures. I've heard that of the magical 16 million number, only about 4.5 million are actually considered "active" (attendance at sacrament meeting at least once per month), and far lower for those who are observant enough to pay tithing and hold temple recommends.

I'm told the percentage who are full tithe payers is 10-15%, so by that standard there are around 2m active members.

What, then, would you say is the population of the children of this 2m number? Could there be 4m butts in the pews on a good, non-Covid-19 Sunday?

I don't really know. It would depend on whether children are considered full tithers.

The most recent detailed bottom-up analysis of church membership (2019) points to 4.57M active mormon earthlings, including children.

https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=7206285C99C2C561!9304&ithint=file%2cxlsx&authkey=!AG5FQtRwVAda040

("2019 World Activity" tab, cell S3)

Considering that mormons still have more kids than average, it's reasonable to think that there are fewer than 1M active mormon households worldwide.

> Considering that mormons still
> have more kids than average,
> it's reasonable to think that
> there are fewer than 1M active
> mormon households worldwide.


Wowsers! Thank ghawd for the singles wards!

The average household size in the US for 2019 was 2.61. Average in Utah was 3.08. True, that includes a lot of nonMormons, but the average Mo household is still likely well below 4.75.

I think out in the “the mission field”, the household size is even smaller than along the Wasatch Front.

I think it is safe to say there are fewer than two million LDS households in the world, but fewer than one million is probably a stretch (shrink?)

I don't think that:

LDS aka ChurchCo has bothered to determine a crucial threshold of a core size or cohort of believers / TBMs / Butts in the pews

because if they did, ? What would they do if that # was attained (or closing on)?

Lots of PPL moving to Utah & the IMW; from my perspective, they'll circle the wagons around catering to that group, they're more docile and more subject to ChurchCo influence.

they won't 'abandon' others, but perhaps the distinction will be more noticeable...

just my .02