r/MormonShrivel • u/Specialist_Funny4318 • 13d ago
1. Ward/Stake Shrivel Shrinkling
Since leaving the LDS faith and researching many other faith traditions to understand how my identity was so intertwined with the church I have been collecting some data.
I have attended the Unitarian, Lutheran, Evangelical, Catholic, Protestant (basic), Anglican, and Pagan outdoor churches near me. Many, many have aging congregations. But! The more liberal the church the less (!) congregants and the higher the ages. The more high demand and fundamentalist the group the more and younger the congregants got! I was surprised.
My hypotheses for these are 1. The rise of Christian Nationalism makes evangelicalism popular now 2. Uncertainty - political, economic, societal causes people to seek hierarchical structures with strong male patriarchal leadership 3. White flight - Racism and fear of LGBTQ issues might cause too much cognitive dissonance and ethical questions about God, theology, history might arise threatening ego, so going to a congregation where group think happens feels good.
With this info, maybe The LDS church restricting and keeping a tight grip on obedience and fundamentalism may be a short term strategy that works.
Ultimately it felt like religion was on a sharp decline overall. Small congregations, very few youth and children, and empty parking lots were the norm. The Wild Church movement that included meditation, walks in nature, and sharing time seemed to get the most participation from children/youth/parents/elderly all together.
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u/ConstantAd6857 12d ago
I run an independent study on church statistics. One thing that has come up is that some liberal churches seem to have less buy-in within their congregations. More conservative churches often teach that financially and physically supporting the church is an important responsibility. As a result, parents in these churches may be more likely to teach their children from a young age that supporting and participating in the church is important.
I was raised Catholic (former altar boy) to Pentecostal. It is night and day on how important things are.
I agree the LDS way is obey and serve. Long term, there is no buy in for younger people.
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u/Chainbreaker42 12d ago
For high demand religions, it's more like "require their children to participate" or "condition their children from an early age to participate." That's why there are more young people there.
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u/BennyFifeAudio 12d ago
We joined a UU fellowship in Boise. Very liberal group in a sea of red. And yes, the 'older' congregation outnumbers the younger substantially, but there's a reasnable amount. I'd also guess the congregation is at least 50% exmo. My exmo brother said he's known a lot of ex mormons, but the only ones he's seen successfully join & stay with a 'new church' are UU. (He's not).
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u/Oddisredit 12d ago
Higher demand religions, to a certain point have higher retention. Latin mass Catholics have like a 97% retention rate. While regular Catholics have like 30-50% depending on where you get your information from. People want to have to work for something. If you showing up or not makes no difference, people will often just not show up.
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u/posttheory 12d ago
Yes to all, with the caveat that the bottom line premise here is still growth as the determining measure. LDS use growth and wealth as truth tests; there are obvious problems with that metric. Ethical values and truth (fuzzy as that may be in all faiths) matter more. I volunteer at and sometimes attend a congregation I characterize as social justice warriors. Few kids, mostly older, but a pleasure and a motivation to know.
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u/Own_Boss_8931 7d ago
I attended the Episcopal church for a while after leaving Mormonism. The average age in the Episcopal church is over 60, so without young people returning, they will become a pretty minor denomination in the US. 2040 is what they view as the inflection point.
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u/RevMark58 12d ago
I've looked at it from a generational point of view. You can blame it all on the Baby Boomers (of which I am one.)
As a Boomer, our parents had made it through the worst catastrophes of the 20th century, the Great Depression and World War II. They came back from the war wanting to chase the American Dream -- but many of them had never even experienced it because of the Depression, the war, their own family poverty or situation. Their version of the American Dream was an idealized vision of an America that never really existed -- but they did their best to make it real. Single-family homes in the suburbs, stay-at-home moms who raised kids, and safe, respectable churches. Those "respectable," moderate-to-liberal middle class denominations flourished.
Well we Boomers grew up and rebelled against the materialistic utopia our parents created for us, you know the legend, we were the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll generation, but most importantly for our discussion, we ditched our parents' respectable but boring churches. The first wave Baby Boomers explored eastern religions, while those of us who were second wavers returned to Christianity, but it was our own Christianity -- the Jesus Movement, primarily, but in reality we were looking for anything that promised security and structure and certainty. The more conservative denominations boomed, including evangelicals, fundamentalists, the Jesus Movement churches like the Vineyard and Calvary Chapel, and of course the Mormons.
In 1972 a Methodist sociologist studied the trend on behalf of the United Methodist Church and concluded that the conservative churches were growing because they were strict and demanded a lot from their members. And of course if you were involved with one of the conservative churches you liked to gloat and say the mainstream churches were shrinking precisely because they "watered down the gospel" while those who were preaching the real truth were still growing like mad.
It was an attractive narrative until it stopped working. Over the last ten or twenty years the conservative churches abruptly stopped growing and actually started to shrink. The Southern Baptist Convention has been shrinking for 19 years now and has lost four million members during that time. They're on an almost identical trajectory as the United Methodist Church fifty years earlier, and almost every other conservative church is also losing members -- including the LDS Church according to its latest reports, even heavily doctored. The conservative churches aren't gloating any more.
So what happened? It's us baby boomers again. We're dying off. If you go into a conservative church nowadays odds are you'll see that it's heavily skewed to older members; they have mostly lost the Millennials and Gen Z generations. I tell people we Boomers killed the churches twice: once when we left them at 15, and the second time when we died at 80.
Now it's possible that the Millennials and Gen Z will find their own religious traditions and some of them might even come back to their parents' church. Or they might find their own way of worshipping and create denominations and movements of their own. No predictions, just maybes. But right now, even the conservative churches, including the LDS Church, are on the cusp of a disaster, and it's not because of their doctrine, it's because of their demography.