Is it me or does there seem to be a new person nearly every day that reveals to you that they don't really believe?

When I opened up on FB and decided that I wasn't going to just slink away in the darkness but instead speak out regarding the lies that are being perpetrated I didn't expect to 'de-convert' anyone. I was just doing what I felt was right and moral, revealing all the facts to allow for an informed decision. Personally I felt that I hadn't been given that opportunity. Once I discovered true historical facts and the discord with what I learned in primary I needed to tell others.

So spending time watching the threads here and on FB. I have seen what looks to me like an accelerating curve of understanding sweeping through the membership. just a few months ago I met maybe one new person that whole month that had gone through what I had. now it is averaging twice a week. about 1/2 the time people are becoming open about it and about 1/2 the time they are staying silent (so as to not offend family or risk a job etc) but they let me know that they are more inclined to see the falsities that I have as well.

What this all means is the biggest thing that kept people from leaving after learning the truth was/is fear. fear of family judgement fear of being alone and without social support fear of losing their support group. but now with social media allowing connections all over the planet these small clusters abate that fear. It helps a person to know that there is another out there like them that sees the situation the way they do.

It emboldens them to speak up and that in turn lets others know they are not alone. The church is facing an apostasy like it has never seen. relatively small right now, but the growth rates are comparable to the early church beginnings. if there are say 1000 truth seekers on this board and each of you know of 100 people every year that question in secret or leave outright, that is 100,000 per year. that kind of loss rate is going to be obvious with in 5 years or so no matter how hard you try to fudge the numbers, there is going to be real attrition.

I personally think we are going to see dramatic efforts to retain the membership, changes in policy that will trip up stalwart members (ie gay marriage or women priesthood for example) thing is the amount of time that in the past could be allowed to go by for the next generation to adjust just won't work anymore, information moves to fast now. So personally I think the policy changes will back fire over and over again. We have already seen this happen in just the last few years.

Prop 8 is an example.

releasing the charitable contribution stats is another example. the put out the info to say 'see how charitable we are!' then people do the math and go 'what?' then the church pulls the info all embarrassed.

FB is a huge tipping point driver IMHO. thats because the whole concept is a natural magnet for the type of people that are believers.

other drivers are the fact that there are groups as a whole now organizing to get the real truth out there, that drives people to look at places like FAIR and see the illogic for themselves.

Looking at it from a fairly informal, anecdotal viewpoint I think the tipping point of losing more members than it gains is just around the corner, less than 5 years out.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2013 03:29AM by sparkyguru.

Another thing i've noticed lately is that it's not just one person, it's couples, and sometimes kids.

Entire families add up. Give it some time, and that multiplies into big numbers. People are losing their fear, and gaining support and information.

Our ward lost three whole families in the past year that I know of. In our stake, probably hundreds, if our ward lost 14. Not only is social media facilitating that movement, it's also allowing the feminists to have a voice. It's amazing to watch.

I've been tempted to peek in some sunday to see if anyone is there.

Plus people are leaving often as families, as has been pointed out. In industrialized countries, very few families are joining. It is mostly partial families or singles. Compared to the families leaving, the new converts are going to be high maintenance, and it will be at least a generation before they can contribute to the strength of the organization the same way those that left could and did contribute, in time, knowledge of how the Mormon social system worked, and money.

I agree with sparkyguru on everything except the timing. I think we are already at the tipping point, if not past it. Number of congregations is going up only 1% a year, which is less than either world population growth, or the LDS birth rate itself.

Plus, a "congregation" is a pretty elastic measure for the size of church membership, but it is the only honest number we get from LDS Inc. It is entirely possible that that 1% growth in congregations is really just scraping a sliver of members from existing wards, to create new wards, and all the wards are a tad smaller. When a brand new ward pops up in a new subdivision, those are not new members. They are move-ins.

Anyway, I think real growth is zero or below right now.

There is also one major problem (from the LDS Inc perspective) with members who attend, but don't really believe. They are less likely to make large sacrifices for the church. They decide they no longer want to give away 15% or so of their net income. They don't want to quit their job to be a mission president. They burn out from church callings. When they move, they decide that would be an excellent time to drop out of the Mo rat race.

And when they see other people dropping out, people they know and respect and thought were as TBM as they are, if not more so, the wheels start to turn.

I agree, zero growth is here. Utah babies may keep the cult going for a while, but they can't replace the numbers lost.

Sometimes just saying it opens up the opportunity for others to see it's okay to have doubts.

I have a couple brothers who "quit" when I said that the church wasn't what it claimed to be. It was that easy; they weren't ready to be the first to say it.

I have noticed a drop in SM attendance to about 25% of the ward membership

My TBM brother has 5 kids. Being retired, he and his wife rotate visits all over the country with an emphasis on those kids that don't have other relatives nearby.

3 of the kids announced they are moving out of the country: Austrailia, Buenos Aires and Spain.

The parents can't afford those visits.

Hmmmm

The 'tipping point' is more important than the actual decrease in numbers.

As the LDS organization declines from political powerhouse to quaint cult, followers will have less fallout from leaving.

I think LDS Inc is on the edge of a free fall abyss. Google is going to kill them.

When I dig back in history, the church went through a couple of major retractions, one was during the kirkland safety society banking fraud.

Bushman quotes a member saying there wasn't a dozen people that believed JS was a prophet after that. the church picked up and moved to get away from the bad press of the area,(can't do that now.)

the other hit was the reformation period in 1856, 57 where they were killing the apostates. IMO that formed the underground in UT where things like say 'Ogden' came from :) all joking aside that caused some general apostasy, but it was all 'underground' people didn't talk about it, they just didn't believe. Again the lack of easy information flow helped keep the lid on things after word. That just can't happen anymore, free information tears apart tyrannies. all of them, social, governmental and even religious ones.

Interesting post! So far, the reaction from above has been to clamp down and become even more conservative rather than loosen up. I wonder if they'll continue in the same vein until they lose most of their members.

Some might call it "refining". Only the most fanatical will be left. Oh what a lovely church that will be.

Agreed. A church filled with the hard core would be really something to behold! I wonder at that point if they might just as well take up polygamy again!

Even if membership remained stable in the United States, the members that replace the high quality families leaving are, by and large, the bad news bears. Mainly individuals and struggling families looking for community support. The church will grow in Africa and S. America but those members represent more of a liability than an asset.

I do agree though, membership decline is about to accelerate rapidly. Information is burning through the membership like a wildfire and it is fun to watch.

Refining it may be, I am glad it's not the refining of 1856,57! at least this time around it is a bit more measured and not so lawless.

the 18 yo missionaries are an example of an effort to indoctrinate before they get a chance to learn for themselves. IMO that is going to back fire hard in 2-3 years when this influx comes back and the brainwashing wears off enough that they can take time to research the very questions that they were asked on their mission without the MP and his minions watching every move. Then they will discover all the deceit and deception.

by that point the ex mormon community will be a whole notch above where it is now. So I think you will see a mass exodus at that time that will make the current drain pale by comparison. This rising generation knows how to sort through information and figure out truth. they were raised with the ability to go to google and figure something out. Once the scare of looking starts to wear off it will simply happen, very organically and you will have a generation of critical thinkers that realize they were duped.

the church will vacillate between the idea that only the elect few will still believe and that is why people are going and the desire to stem the very real loss of money by being more open and accepting.

Ironically I think of a scripture paraphrase to sum it all up. 'Eventually the truth will prevail...'

people that feel duped fight back

All of my children resigned with me.

Our Salt Lake stake house used to house four wards, but now it has only one ward in it. It is also one stake. This is the case for four other ward houses in our area, that I know about. One stake house, one ward, one stake. That way, there are the same number of stakes as before, and TSCC keeps the prime residential view lot tax-free and maintained for free.

Even so, they have had to combine primaries and Ym/Yw with other stakes. The Mormons say it is because there are no new families moving into the neighborhood. Hm-m-m, 6 new families all with children on our block alone, all originating from Salt Lake, none of them Mormons!

yep the numbers are being hidden as best they can, but I don't think they can do it for more than another year or 2. like you see where you are it is just obvious. eventually it will be one ward per stake...everywhere.

this is going to have a ripple effect as well, causing the money making enterprises of the church to lose support as well. less enrollment at byu for example, less seminary enrollment in highschool.

that means less teachers on the payroll, and less of that means more well read historians with out a stake in the game on the loose.

BC is right, the storm is brewing you can see the clouds rolling in if you know where to look.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2013 09:53AM by sparkyguru.

I can't believe that this is true, and definitely not in Utah. The stake I grew up in had something like 12 wards before they split it into two stakes. And this was in California!

Lots of Latino Catholics on the west side, anglo equity refugees from California on the east side.

My mom's town in Northern CA went from 2 wards to 3 wards to 4 wards back down to 3 wards and now they are talking about combining back into 2 wards. As it is, all the wards have YM/YW and Scouts together and there are barely enough kids to do that. My mom had 4 kids in her Primary, before a family moved in with 4 kids a year or so ago and doubled the size of the Primary. Mom also puts it down to people moving away because there are more jobs in the Bay Area or Sacramento, but that has always been true and 25 years ago, the church was growing.

The fear of searching for information will wear off the same way homophobia, racism, and other unfounded fears did...through popular opinion.

I know a lot of LDS families and they are all happy campers, very chipper, nice people, and all of their 18 year old kids are so excited to go on missions. I do not see any declines but I do not see them getting any high quality families to join.

I think they will probably wait to long to make the kind of changes that are necessary. They should probably give women the priesthood right away. That is the change that really doesn't conflict with Mormon doctrine and there wouldn't be as much fallout. They can claim it is just a policy change. A lot of people would be really excited about it the conservative members would be upset but not enough to leave. They would just sustain the church leaders. Gay marriage is more difficult because it just doesn't fit with Mormon doctrine. I think having women in leadership roles might change the culture quite a bit though and maybe in 5-10 years they could make that change as well, just in time before it becomes completely unacceptable in our society to not accept gay people.

They had a lot of success in the latter part of the twentieth century due to greater access to a friendly media and their stand against the revolutions of the 1960s. But that's old news now. There is no organization that I can think of that is going to thrive in this day and age on selling such strong expectations of personal discipline and conformity. There is too much individual freedom and individual choice. There is too much acceptance of other people's differences. There is simply no need left for The Book of Mormon, or any of the rest of it. Everybody outside the church will soon find out that they are never going to find the descendants of the Lamanites. Everyone can watch the silly endowment ceremony online for free. Things just aren't the way they used to be, and the church has been far removed from making any serious impact on a rapidly changing culture. I'm actually looking forward to what it's all going to look like 10 years from now.

organized religion in general is facing a similar tipping point IMHO, the next few decades are going to be interesting to watch

I believe the advent of quantum computing will revolutionize the artificial intelligence field of research, forcing us to question our ethical interpretations of life and values. Advances in health and stem cell research will continue to push that envelope. The church will be forced to confront and take positions on new and unusual political issues that will further weaken its claim to eternal truth in relation to the zeitgeists of the upcoming generations.

Best of luck, LDS Inc.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2013 06:09PM by greekgod.

boy I hope that stem cell research creates the chance for rejuvenation and longer life. I have a son that wants to go into research in this area, I told him I'd be is first test case :)

just made contact with another closet unbeliever from high school. thats three new contacts this week. for me that would be 150 a year... how many do you make contact with?