75% Of Millennials Are Leaving The Church

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Millennials are defined as people born in the early 1980's to the early 2000's. Watch this 30 second video from Hannah Stoddard on Ward Radio: https://packaged-media.redd.it/6ng2q53i ... 2da04d28bb

Things are even worse than I imagined for the Church. The Church continues to fail its members.

[drumdude]

Related:

Natalie Brown: I feel lonely in our LDS chapel, but here’s how we can win back — or at least retain — members

By Natalie Brown | Special to The Tribune
| Dec. 29, 2024, 7:00 a.m.

On a recent Sunday, I asked my child how he had enjoyed Primary. He replied that the class had played hangman since he was the only student. Such moments have become more frequent.

Our ward, or congregation, was reorganized recently, and the result is that my children now go to church with even fewer peers than they did before. The Primary is small. Far too small. I’ve moved on from discussions about demographics and the ward’s future. That future is here, and I am mourning that our congregation has lost too many families to recover a critical mass. I leave each sacrament meeting grieving for the community that could have been, cognizant that my future in the faith is likely to be more lonely — puzzled by how it came to pass that I now identify less with Nephi than Moroni. But I am no prophet. I can no longer envision a future. My son asks where the kids have gone.

Had you asked me in my 20s what would break my heart about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I would never have imagined that my sorrow would be parenting nearly alone in a ward that once had a robust community. I was mostly concerned that the church only valued women who were mothers. Yet now that I am a mother of Primary-age children, I find that I am the exception rather than the rule in my congregation. There are not enough families left to sustain the kinds of youth programs I grew up with. In fact, there aren’t even enough similarly situated members left to understand why I feel this circumstance is so dire. The emotional gulf between me and the older members to whose opportunities I can no longer aspire is what feels most isolating.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2024/12 ... -innovate/

[Moksha]

How is Gen-Z doing? They mostly get their news from TikTok, right?

[Chap]

I am a Nevermo, and given what I have read on this board and elsewhere I have no particular wish to see Mormonism flourish and expand.

But do you know what? The article quoted by Drumdude makes me feel sad, and I hate the idea of other people going through that experience of loss of something that has been an important element in their picture of what a normal life should be like.

[Dr Exiled]

It's too bad, but it gets a lot better once one leaves the false narrative. Perhaps community needs to form around stuff that matters, instead of fake authority/religionists. I think she could find the group/community benefits getting involved with local causes or perhaps national causes.

[drumdude]

It's too bad, but it gets a lot better once one leaves the false narrative. Perhaps community needs to form around stuff that matters, instead of fake authority/religionists. I think she could find the group/community benefits getting involved with local causes or perhaps national causes.

It’s so easy to just walk into a Mormon chapel and have a ready-to-go community. I don’t blame the PIMO Mormons for staying in. Some of them can stomach paying 10 percent to a trillion dollar corporation, and can pretend to believe Hebrews sailed to America in submarines, and all the other blithering nonsense.

[Equality]

Millennials are defined as people born in the early 1980's to the early 2000's. Watch this 30 second video from Hannah Stoddard on Ward Radio: https://packaged-media.redd.it/6ng2q53i ... 2da04d28bb

Things are even worse than I imagined for the Church. The Church continues to fail its members.

Early 2000s are Gen Z. Millennial ends in '97.

[Physics Guy]

If you read Brown's article, she seems to argue that economic hardship has caused the membership decline—or maybe more precisely, lowered economic expectations. It's not that people are going hungry or can't afford shoes, the way hardship was accounted a hundred years ago. Instead it's that people can't afford to live in big houses in nice neighborhoods on single incomes any more, the way they apparently could a few decades ago.

One hears that other religious denominations are losing adherents, but I don't recall seeing the general decline in religiosity being connected to economic decline in particular. Is it, though, and I just haven't heard? I'm a bit surprised that a lifestyle drop would pull people out of a church. I'm used to thinking of wealth doing that. Religion is the opiate of the poor, and so on. If people are feeling their lives more precarious, I'd have expected them to hunker down in church communities for the support. So is leaving church because you can't get a big house a particularly Mormon thing?

Mormonism does seem pretty worldly and materialistic, to me, for a Christian sect. Mormonism seems to emphasize priesthood power and promised blessings, and personal covenants with God that are two-way deals under which you can check the behavioral boxes to make the Almighty deliver. So maybe falling economic expectations would discourage Mormons more than say, traditional Catholics who are just hoping to struggle through this vale of tears.

[Shulem]

Hebrews sailed to America in submarines

They didn't sail via a sail. They were blown by the wind and waves.

[Shulem]

The incredible shrinking Mormon Church!