...more than likely because of the "civilian" side of leaving the church.
It's one thing to give ghawd the raspberries, but telling your 'friends & family' the church is not true, that's a bit harder because sometimes you don't want to suffer the almost inevitable fall-out.
There are probably quite a few kids/young adults in rich families who don't want to lose an inheritance. Anything over $500,000 and I'd stay temple-worthy!
Lila Turler story, the daughter of best selling deseret book author and GA Hartman Rector who died recently. In Mormon Stories podcast the shit hits the fan and all eight of her bros and sisters leave (and the third generation). All this goes down in Provo, it's a big deal.
She has like 9 kids and then when she is in her 50s she decides she doesn't like being a mom and goody goody mormon republican wife and runs away. Maybe a little nuts, but it's a great story, and she's entertaining at telling it.
As long as enough people stay to keep running ($$$) LDS Inc., I don't think they care how many leave. With 100 billion and 5 billion a year in investment income (just a guess 5% a year - probably a lot more) LDS Inc., can chug along forever.
Exactly. They actually need zero butts in the pews, IMO.
The money they have can keep them doing what they do indefinitely: Investing more money and exerting influence where they can to further their investing interests and appearance.
Just my thoughts here on leaving the church, whether as an individual or as a large family.
When I was a church member, I remember that my overall visible network of people who I knew, who knew me, and of people who knows someone who I knew, was vastly larger than it is now. Your visibility in to the six degrees of separation is often more like three degrees in many cases when you are an active mormon, or at least it seemed that way sometimes. Whether or not we see it, the concept of only a few other social connections - average of six people - between each of us and literally any other individual on the planet, is very real.
The reason this is relevant to this thread is that whether it's one or six degrees, when any individual resigns their membership in the church, the damage done to the church reverberates much deeper and quicker and longer lasting than most people may realize. If we compare the church's hold on its members to that of a fishing net, the concept may be a little easier to understand. If you take a knife and cut only a few of the connecting rope ties of the net, then some of the fish will escape. If you cut out a larger section of the net, then perhaps most or many of the fish will escape. The whole I left behind in that net when I left the church is probably much larger than I may realize myself. The same holds true for anyone who resigns from the church. When a whole family leaves, the effect has to be much larger. Since you only know about who you know most of the time, the other five degrees of separation are most often invisible to us. But the damage done to the church goes all six degrees deep, through the unofficial social network. All it takes is just any one of us to speak candidly here in this forum or anywhere else, and many outsiders will see objectively what the church is doing and why we left. Whether it's a discussion about the pre-1990 temple blood oaths or how other races were treated by the mormon church until just recently, or something else, the last one to realize the damage to the church is most likely the church leaders. But these big holes in this common social network (both online and offline) exist none the less and get bigger every time another person or family leaves the church. When that network of church members gets torn-up enough, it may not be repairable.
When my wife and I left the Church our five children were 16, 15, 13, 10 and 8. They all left with us about 35 years ago. The oldest two had some struggles but the two youngest barely remember what it was like to be a Mormon.
The larger the family, the less likely they are to leave together. That's true for a couple of reasons.
First, large families include older children. I have a relative who has 13 kids. By the time the youngest was born, the oldest few were in their twenties and one had been married in a temple. Several of them left the church over time, but others were fully committed before the parents defected.
Second, larger families mean more hands-off parenting. In some cases the children parent each other, but in most cases some of the kids fall through the cracks and are no longer as responsive to parental pressure. The odds of having black sheep go up as the size of the family increases.
If you add those factors together, there is some theoretical limit on the size of a family that can be expected to leave the church simultaneously. The limit will vary by household, but in probabilistic terms you, you could describe a neat curve. I am making these figures up, but perhaps the odds of a family leaving en masse is 70% if there are three or four kids, 60% if there are six kids, 35% if there are eight kids, and nearly zero if there are ten or more.
That means posters here will probably not have seen families larger than hgc's having decamped at the same time.
My MORmON enforcement agent Male parent was having some major questions about the MORmON gospel when I was a teen. The kind of questions that qualify as doubts. My male parent's questions persisted, even after being given some major reading assignments as a testimony salvaging effort by the local ward leaders.
WHen my male parent pointed out some of his unresolved and unresolvable questions to a local ward leader, that leader challenged my male parent by asking: so, what are you going to do, quit THE church? My spineless male parent promptly imploded in reaction to that challenge. For context, that MORmON bishop's father had taught the MORmON missionary discussions to my male parent so that my male parent could get baptized ......so that my male parent could marry his little MORmON sweetheart, which would be my mom.
I am proud to say that when the time came in my own life that it was obvious to me that the Book of MORmON church had been lying, my response was: I am out of here !!!!
I am NOT so proud to think that it took me so long ....FAR TOO LONG..... to come to that realization. My decision at that point cost me my MORmON family, but my MORmON wife and her kids really were NOT worth having, just like my MORmON male parent was not worth having. I should have gotten out of the MORmON religion MUCH sooner and when I failed to, that huge mistake cost me dearly.
Years ago I read a book about communication between spouses, and the writer provided an anecdote (which may or may not have actually occurred).
A husband and wife were rabid fans of their city hockey team. They bought jerseys, followed the team performances, had season tickets, the whole thing. At a certain point, the wife revealed she didn't like hockey all that much, but kept up appearances so as not to disappoint her husband.
The husband then confessed that he had lost interest in hockey, but was pretending because rooting for the team was a major part of their courtship, and he thought she was still a die-hard fan!
The immediate point of the story was to encourage candor between spouses. I wonder if this situation (true or not) represents a factual situation in marriages on religious matters.