What do YOU think is the reason members are finally walking away from the church?

I think the top leaders still blame anti-church [anti-mormon] literature, websites, social media, podcasts are woefully influencing members to leave.

Though they will never publicly acknowledge it, members are bored with the church same response to every problem.

-financial problems church says work harder- pay more tithing
-marriage woes church says to get more involved with church- give God priority (whatever that means)
-depression church says pray harder go see your bishop


Just the same lousy counsel and advice over and over

When children or spouses or friends come out as gay, the conversation changes dramatically. Then the so called leaders don't have any answers for the family except that it will all be worked out in the eternities, many are done with the church. It is happening in my own family at an increasing pace.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2022 11:42AM by gemini.

That 1950's keep smiling 12 kid family yay America! "We're Mormons and we're fun! thing is not panning out any more

Agree.

It's a giant nothing burger. All that power from God, and there is never anything of significance other than being on the wrong side of history every time. God is only about accumulating wealth.

What did they do during the pandemic to help the world? Nothing burger.

What did they do for civil rights? Nothing burger.

What do they do for the poor? Nothing but build more crap to perpetuate themselves.

Everything about church is more like a chore as well as boring. It's not rewarding enough to do a stupid ritual for dead people, sit through boring talks, and clean toilets. I get the need to have links to our dead ancestors and all, but there are plenty of people alive who matter now.

Also, I think there are people who see the harm the church has done to gay people, and is doing to women's rights. Maybe some are embarrassed to be associated with outspoken Mormons with distasteful political views. Guess which side is more apt to leave.

Lastly, people have access to information at their fingertips. You have to be willfully ignorant not to realize what church history factually does and does not prove.

Church is a club, play the game, you are part of the club.

Those looking in are figuring it out, there is no support system in the church unless you a full paying card carrying member. Then you get the calls, visits, and callings. Bishops, EQP, RSP, SP, Q15 do not support you, check on you, or care about you unless you are a card carrying member.

Many looking in one day realize that Christ would never do this to you, so they walk away looking for the real deal, if there is such a thing.

People are no longer as tolerant of institutionalized hate.

Mormonism is a one way street. It's all about church members giving everything while the church offers little in return. I think more and more members are realizing that the church is a tremendous emotional and financial drain and they're just getting nothing from it. I think that the availability of information of how the church conducts itself and the dark side of its history plays a part as well, but I honestly think that information just adds weight to a shelf that was already heavy.

No one thing. But, to sychophantically echo dagny's post----Everything!

There is way more than just one fly in the ointment.

The Mormons are at the point where they want everyone to follow the old saying, "If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all." They are like people who plead innocent even when there is full video of what they did and ten people set to testify against them.

The internet is a big part of it- and not only because of the information available. That is a big part of it. But as Marshall McLuhan pointed out long ago, the medium is the message. The internet has permitted the rise of social structures that churches used to provide- like Recovery From Mormonism. The internet supplants the old ways, and the old ways are becoming irrelevant.

Times have changed. The Mormon church is stuck in the past, and not in a good way. People don't want to listen to a bunch of elderly white geezers say the same uninspired predictable drivel twice a year in general conference.

Members realize that there's little substance but a lot of monotony in the repetition of everything church related. It was especially noticeable during the pandemic when members broke their tedious Sunday routine and realized how nice it was to stay at home. There was no turning back for many members.

The TBMs I know who are still active come from good, supportive, stalwart generational TBM families. The offspring will carry out the church tradition because of obedience and loyalty. That and the promise of forever families. They've been taught/trained well. I think it will be tougher to keep the subsequent generations engaged unless MAJOR changes are made. Even then, I think sitting in church every Sunday will just become a thing of the past for all religions.

Yeah. They still talk about necking and petting.

Yes, they do seem to be coming a "thing of the past" with their white shirts. They are locked in a 1950's business attire look. To young people, they might as well be wearing beige prairie dresses. They are looking like quaint old business men who don't know what to do but hoard money and push "father knows best" status quo.

What do YOU think is the reason members are finally walking away from the church?

It is simple. The very elect are being led astray.

Hm, I don't know why people are leaving. No one I know has left after I left.

I stopped attending or paying tithing two years before my shelf broke. First started working on Sundays to get extra money but even when I had Sundays off, it was my day OFF and church felt like so much work. Especially when they kept shoving callings at me. I was never able to do the things I was meant to do and felt like I was failing but honestly... I didn't want to help in YW. But I felt like I couldn't say no to the calling or that if I requested not to have the position anymore, I was a bad person. So, I used work and bills as an excuse to put a buffer between me and the responsibilities that made me feel nothing but shame, stress, and anxiety. After a year, I moved and quit that job and it was just easier not to go anymore.

My shelf broke because it was prompted by anti material, however, the church did not provide a sufficient safety net to save my testimony. Like, I looked on their site for answers to my burning questions and I found admission that they had lied to me for years. All the lessons I had been taught on how things happened, how they were done, the church sources told me, "you were confused about the information we gave you/we allowed teachers to be put in a position to influence you with incorrect facts while leading you to believe they were safe and inspired." Which is it? You were either lying to me then or you're lying to me now.

So...yeah, anti material had a hand in it...but the church shot itself in the head with the Gospel Topics essays.

I haven't seen anyone be me go either other than one brother and a couple of nephews. I haven't considered myself a member for almost 20 years.

What is Mormonism anyway? It has been watered down it is just some version of mainstream Evangelical Xianity now. Except more lame music and less activities.

Even the Churches of Christ can have a Latte and wine with the sacrament.

Any of the unique or interesting teachings or doctrines have been shelved, what is leftover is just a worse version of things that are already out there.

There are plenty of churches out there that are homophobic, nationalistic, semi-racist generic prosperity gospel evangelical.

Mormonism doesn't contribute to their well-being; it reduces happiness.

So many good reasons.
One more: Members can only sit through so many boring sacrament meetings listening to the speaker read an assigned conference talk without realizing there's no spirit in the meeting.

And then to be told that if that don't feel the spirit it's their fault.

Converts have been walking away since at least the 1970s when church growth really took off, unfortunately taking off with people with little or no commitment to Mormonism.

A substantial majority of the people that LDS Inc claims as members have no real connection to Mormonism.

I do agree that the pace has been picking up in recent years.

Reasons to leave:

Racism, homophobia in all its flavors, and misogyny. These are particularly problematic for younger members.

"You have $100B, and you *need* my money? WTF"

Hearing the same lesson for the 4,000th time

Another temple? Seriously?

I spent 2 years trying to sell your product, and learned that nobody wants it.

Reasons to stay:

Landing or keeping a good job at an LDS (or TBM)-controlled company.

Your family, nuclear and/or extended will have a complete fit if you leave.

Mmmm - I got nothing else.

Because church leaders won't listen. Lots of people whose shelves collapse have ideas on how to fix the church because they have deliberated long and hard. They want a viable institution.

Instead, they have Statler and Waldorf running the Muppet Show.

So is Rusty Statler or Waldorf? I gots to know. (with apologies to EOD for cultural appropriation)

You worry needlessly. It is literally impossible to appropriate culture from EOD.

What!!

I gotz culture!

I gotz culture up the wahzoo! Way up the Wahzoo!!

I was merely noting that your culture is so secure that no one could possibly appropriate it.

But given your sensitivity, perhaps I'm wrong. , ,

I saw an article that is a closely related topic, about the rapid collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The Catholic Church once ruled the Republic of Ireland with an iron fist, and it is the basic reason for the existence of the Irish Republic.

Yes, there were sex abuse scandals, and Magdalen Laundries, and all that, but the recent and profound collapse is about more than that. I remember seeing the same thing in Quebec in the 1970s, when I lived in the NE US. Quebec went from devout Catholicism, and being the province with the highest birthrate and most conservative, to having the lowest birthrate, and being the most liberal. It was Quebec that was the principal provincial driving force for marriage equality. Who in the 1950s would have seen that coming?

Anyway - Ireland. It is a moderately long article, but I found it interesting. I don't think there is a substantial overlap with the reasons that LDS Inc is struggling, but I do hope that at some point LDS Inc has a sudden collapse the way the Catholic Church has had in Quebec and Ireland, from massive dominance to near-irrelevance.

https://onlysky.media/hturpin/collapse-inside-irelands-stunning-rebuke-of-catholicism/

I was struck by the following portion of a paragraph from the article BOJ supplied:

"Rejecting Catholic affiliation is thus very often a response to two perceived layers of hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of the Church of course, but also the
hypocrisy of those who are perceived as blithely supporting its ongoing influence even though they have little or no interest in Catholicism as a religion
and do not adhere to its conservative social standpoints. This means that the interaction between the Church’s moral collapse, its lingering institutional
influence, and the default position of disengaged cultural Catholicism has created a distinctive way of ‘not being a religious person’ in the Irish context.
It results from the pressure between two moral stances. The better established of these stances prioritizes ‘harmony’ and is quite comfortable with ambiguity
or contradiction if this facilitates smooth social relations. Its swiftly growing competitor prioritizes ‘authenticity’ and demands consonance between
private beliefs and public identification. The act of disaffiliation is thus frequently experienced and portrayed as a kind of awakening from zombified
unconscious conformity."

Given some of the comments I've read on this Board as well as comments from cultural Mormons I've read elsewhere, I think the same thing could be happening inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints right now.

It is funny that the 15 cannot get it right to play to either faction of the base. They could go hard 'conservative' or 'progressive' and play to some factions of the membership. Instead they blunder for both wings of their club.


To be honest though, Bednar almost reeled me back in a few conferences ago with the idea that we need to have faith "not to be healed". Maybe the world is just not ready for that kind of marketing genius-ness though. I mean, who would not want to throw 10% of their income at an ideology that says pay us everything because we cannot heal you anyway. Maybe if JS had finished his translation of the Bible, some of the stories would have been about Romans having the faith not to be healed, or Peter would have had faith not to walk on water? Or maybe members just see that their life experience is enough to call BS on the Big 15?

I always had the faith to not wear a condom…


It’s like I was born to not wear a condom. Think of all the money I saved!

It is like carrying a pistol and having faith to not have the safety on.

In terms of the money you saved...was it fifties of cents?

They finally realize and admit that it isn't working for them, and if it isn't working for them, why stay committed to it?

Lies and more Lies about MONEY in the church coffers and how the church is so clever in hiding it. Church Co. has always claimed to be just barely making it.

I can think of many families that lived just above the poverty level in order to pay tithing. They canned fruit in order to eat during the winter. They bought rice and beans in bulk. The only one benefit to family church poverty was that kids had to get weekend jobs as soon as possible. Sunday became a work day. Less church. Then NO church.

So boo-hoo Mormon church your injuries are self inflicted. Now most people will feed their families before they give it to you to invest in tax-exempt properties and stocks and bonds. And people would rather go to a food pantry than put up with your condescending snottiness.

I wonder how many BYU MBA's are employed to think of ways to squeeze a few more pennies from the members and bleed the federal government. The COB must have at least ten floors of men working on this.

That deep betrayal doesn't come without consequences. Many of those children---now adults--- have walked away. Their families were unable to build any kind of wealth for a "Trust Fund". There was no college money. Thank heavens for social security and Medicare. I see that as a way to keep the churches hands off of money the elderly will need to live.

When they learn the church is filthy rich and your family ate beans and struggled for every meal it is a punch in the gut. The betrayal is felt lifelong.

The next money making scam is the Second Anointing.

Think there'll be a 2nd Annoying good-mood ring handed out?

Thats a good idea. What kind of Stone could be used? Moonstone? Opal, or that one that changes color--Tanzanite? or an agate?

I think we have some winners. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1162663281/vintage-sterling-silver-lake-superior?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=lake+superior+agate+rough&ref=sc_gallery-1-10&frs=1&plkey=e8a018191931464419ee38506e190dc8b61952b7%3A1162663281

I think it is because the church has nothing to offer people anymore. All of the things that made the church enjoyable are gone. All that is left is the drudgery. When all you get is the same repetitive lessons, the same repetitive sacrament meeting talks, the same repetitive temple trips, the same repetitive church duties, the repetitive church cleaning assignments people will have no excitement about attending.

Then came Covid and people got to spend Sunday at home. Some realized then how much better their lives were without church and left then. Others dutifully went back to church when it resumed and glumly sat there clock watching wishing they were someplace else. And then eventually decided it wasn't worth it anymore and left.

The doctrinal and historical issues are easy to ignore if you are enjoying your time in church. They weigh much heavier on you when you are bored and dissatisfied. People then start looking more deeply into those issues, which coupled with the lack of interest, convinces them that mormonism is no longer worth the time and effort it demands.

Mormonism was once a culture, a community and an identity.

It now just a religion and a poor excuse of one.

Each generation is less connected to the church and has less investment in the church. Easy to walk away when there's no skin in the game.

My sister and her husband are very devout, both have served high leadership positions at the regional level. They have two adult daughters and many sons who all served missions. As far as I can tell all of the sons appear to be out of the church or extremely inactive and not keeping the W of W etc. The daughters follow their mom and keep faithful. The son of one of the daughters served a mission, and he is really out of of the Church, and recently married a girl who is also very out of the church.

The sons all got married soon after their missions, and all but one are now divorced, so the dream of families are forever just doesn't seem to hold. All of the kids seem to be great people but broken marriages, and military service have messed up a couple of them quite a bit, the Church has been no place for them to find help.

At one point the one of my siblings who did not go on a mission ran into trouble with the local church leadership. S/he kept demanding that they do what was right, and the rest of us insisted that s/he could not possibly succeed with those leaders unless s/he stopped expecting them to live according to the gospel and recognized that they were motivated by the same factors as any other middle manager.

What we were saying was essentially that missions had taught us not to expect anything "moral" from church leaders. Missions had made us cynics when it came to the LDS hierarchy, and it was that cynicism that made continued membership in the church possible. Sadly our relatively faithful sibling did not join us on the dark side and consequently suffered harm extending well beyond the Mormon community.

Perhaps we cynical siblings were not sufficiently realist, for we were all quietly and independently chagrined at the denouement and one by one left the religion. It seems that at some level we still harbored some hope that LDS leaders would prove more ethical than the local used car salesman and were finally disabused of that illusion by what happened to our sibling.

In that sense perhaps our missions were not quite bad enough to enable us to stay in the church.

It’s easier to walk away if you see others doing it. Also life is harder than it used to be. Especially if you are young trying to make a living. The church just becomes an extra burden on your finances and time and people don’t see any benefit you get from the church is worth the costs.

As I look around at churches in my area I see a decline in most denomination centered churches where the add on and separating theological trapping have in many cases usurped the simplicity of the Christian Gospel. At the same time I see the arrival of new unaffiliated churches that are growing rapidly. Time will tell if they can maintain their more simplistic approach. I think the Mormon church suffers from a similar problem except that leaving it does not allow so much for the creation of simpler way under the exclusive "one true church" claim.

The 15 are arrogant and can’t comprehend that it’s the churches fault for a mass apostasy. Flimsy half measure to try to engage members, more emphasis on Christ and less on JS, but the truth is they don’t think they are the ones at fault. They think Mormons are sinners who need to shape up and do better, despite the fact that Mormons haven’t been fundamentally different for a few decades now. Maybe in 60 years when there’s like 750,000 members but still billions, they settle for that with a much newer cadre of leadership. Maybe they’ll do something really inspired like start to actually give the money away charitably instead of the headline grabbing donations the church puts forth that’s a pittance of what it’s worth. The want the money to buy land, temples, chapels, and probably more space for real estate and farm development I assume. Or maybe They just want it’s interest to compound for years and years until it’s worth even more.

The ones in church now are just so bad. Oaks, Nelson, Bednar, Holland, Ballard. All self-righteous pricks with their own pet projects and idiosyncrasies to project on church members in the guise of ‘doctrine’ and live long, long past the point of usefulness *cough* Nelson. It’s unbelievable the health he appears to have at his age. Made all the worse with his enormous ego and inability to relate to pretty much any church member, his inflationary stats about temple building, and his pet project about how evil it is for members to refer to each other as Mormons.

No one’s worse than Bednar though. Cold, unapologetic, ruthless, arrogant, and just an all around piece of shit, unfortunately unless he develops an early illness we will suffer a few years of his leadership. And he will be responsible for thousands leaving.

True. Maybe they figure that just saying "God said go to church" should be enough for everyone to obey. Now maybe they have to step up and use more gimmicks and perks to make it more fun and interesting.

They don't have pointy hats and dank old cathedrals. They don't have zippy praise-style choirs. They don't have coffee get togethers downstairs after the services. They don't have meaningful charity that isn't about the church itself. They don't have charismatic preachers with big hair and shiny suits. Mormonism is plain boring and tedious.

(Note to lurking Mormon leadership: You're welcome for the tips from your RfM focus group of disgruntled customers.)

dagny Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> They don't have coffee get togethers
===============================

maybe they should
https://neurosciencenews.com/coffee-longevity-21524/

Mormon Leaders: "The biggest problem is growth, people are not leaving."

Also Mormon Leaders: "Don't leave! Please don't leave! Please, please PLEASE don't leave!"

IMHO, most Mormons leave quietly, no resignation, just glad to be gone. Most Mormons know its BS but their life is so tied up in the social fabric, they don't know what to do but comply.

Spiritual awakening!

I'm always skeptical of data. I worked with statistics my whole career and I perfectly know statistics are only as good as the sampling and it's extremely hard to do sampling right and statistics are purposefully skewed due to prejudices and agendas.

We had a joke in investment banking that all government data were lies. Ha! Ha! So the Mormon church isn't alone in their padding of statistics.

I'm not really buying the data that people are leaving Christianity in the levels claimed. I think people are seeking a different kind of church structure. The traditional churches are being replaced by more liberal structured churches and I know many Christians who prefer not to belong to a church at all.

Then there is the group that use religion as the scape goat they blame everything on. Religion can be political. Putin uses the Russian Orthodox Church to unify his country. He's gone back to the old Czarist formula. State religions were forced on people to control them.

There is a divide between the religion haters and people who have no problem with religion. In certain parts of the west openly hating religion is more acceptable than it used to be but is it becoming the all encompassing thing?

Nope.

All of my college friends and acquaintances (from the 1970s) were raised in a church, and almost none of them have gone to church or raised their own families in a church in adulthood. My own family has fallen away entirely. When I was growing up, going to church (or at least a nominal church membership) was normal and expected, and those few who didn't go were regarded as outliers. Now for my circle, the situation is reversed.

I think that being unchurched is more normal and accepted now. To what degree people have fallen away, I don't know. But they have fallen away in significant numbers from my observation.

For those who remain, I see a trend towards independent churches.

If I were a Mutual age teen going to church today, I would quit after a year…maybe less. The only thing that got me there (my family was inactive) were the activities (Roadshows, Hay Rides, Spook Alleys, BIG Dance and Music Festivals, etc.). What do they have now? Anything fun? Maybe they do…I’ve been out for a long time.

Nope.

Google.
22yrs into the Google Age, ignorance is no excuse.

“Since 1985, Latter-day Saint Charities and its affiliates have provided over US$2.5 billion worth of assistance in 199 countries and territories. This amount does not include the value of volunteer labor, worth many millions of dollars.”

https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/latter-day-saint-charities-boosts-global-efforts-2020

But knowing that they have a 100 billion dollar rainy day fund the 2.5 billion number is not that impressive anymore.

Even if the church was true I was at a point in 2013 where I had to resign. The church callings and expectations were all too much for me. I felt like a single mom, my husband was always gone between going to work, getting his masters degree and church. Church took so much time away from our family it was brutal. He was a scoutmaster and went camping once a month and every Wednesday he was gone too. People moving in and out of the ward they called him to help with the move. Husband felt he could not say no and did gave all he could for the church. I saw some men with no callings and I saw other men like my husband getting totally used. The bishop made my husband go camping when our baby was only 3 days old and I had a cesarean birth! Hmm yes I had my parents home to help me but how I wished that some of the Scouts dad could have gone camping instead of my husband. He was called to be a Scoutmaster when our oldest was 4 months old. We finally resigned together after he had been a Scoutmaster for 5 years. So in my opinion callings can be a huge strain on the family and marriage. Same with paying tithing. Church was not uplifting for me for at least 1-2 years prior my resignation. Church felt like enduring to the end. Having Sunday’s without church has been wonderful. No church callings. Since leaving Mormonism I have felt lighter.

That $2.5 billion in assistance is not even half of one year's interest on the trust fund. It's an insignificant amount in the scheme of things.

I'm sorry that the church took away your family time, but glad that you were later able to regain it.

That 2.5 billion did not come from the LDS church. It came from LDS Charities. That is a wholly separate entity that lets the church look amazing. LDS Charities is a bunch of rich Mormons who are in the Second Anointing club. They donate and the press then dutifully portray the largesse as coming from the COB.

Jesus needs 100 billion for non charitable purposes. Doesn't sound like the bible Jesus but then it isn't translated correctly.

people had enough of giving money to a corporation that lies to them. also mental abuse. yes, it's a cult. people are waking up to the sound of freedom

Everytime that I see thread topics like this it reminds me of two realities regarding the church and members who stay and those who don’t:

Leaving members are those who, for many reason already mentioned above, just can no longer abide the church and it’s inauthenticity.

Staying members are those who are typified by the Carl Saga observation:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

A large number of the stayers love the power they get.

They want to masturbate.

Elder Berry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> They want to masturbate...
...guilt free.

When 'the Mormon formula' works for people, especially families, ChurchCo gets the credit.

When the formula doesn't work, ChurchCo blames the members for not following the formula.

Simple, 'eh?