The Widening Gulf with Millennials

[moksha]

The leaders in the next couple of decades are going to be the stalwarts that look like those apostles who have been strong believers since World War 2. It will be interesting to see the shift as this Baby Boomer pool runs out and the Gen X and Millennials get ordained as High Priests (sorry, ladies, this path is not paved for you).

I imagine that General Authorities will continue to be picked because they mirror the attitudes and values of the current GAs sitting in the board room. They will represent point A, while the Millennial LDS and those who follow them will be moving way past point A. The further the gulf the higher the dropout rate for Millennials and subsequent generations of young LDS.

Just a thought.

[RubinHighlander]

The pool of possible church broke priesthood holders is obviously much smaller outside the baby boomers, but they will still have plenty to choose from. If you can get them inoculated with all the new nuanced materials, there are some who like the militaristic structure, the misogamy, the special peculiar few. Tribalism runs deeper in the genetics of some than others; logic and facts will always be trumped by emotional.

I do think the risks increase with each generation and the risk will equate to a shrinking church/religion. But this plays into their new narrative of "We the few special persecuted righteous chosen ones, because of the wickedness in the world."

[Not Buying It]

President Nelson's reign has been a curious development in the struggle to keep Millennials in the Church. He seems to recognize they are being lost, but makes the mistake of thinking he can keep them with superficial changes. So what if Church is only two hours now? It's still two tedious hours longer than not going at all. Wow, kids can get into Young Men and Young Women's earlier now - and spent even more time being bored to tears with spiritually focused activities increasingly aimed at keeping them in a Church a lot of them don't really want to be in. It's pretty obvious they know there's a problem, but don't have the first clue how to address it in a meaningful way. So they try a little of this and that hoping their little tweaks will do the trick, but without dealing with some fundamental issues they are doomed to failure.

While there will always be hard core believers in every generation, in some ways with Millennials the Church is finally getting its comeuppance. It relied on oppressive authoritarianism and control of information to keep its members in line for decades - and along comes a generation that isn't as bowed by authority claims and has almost unrestricted access to information. Let the Church continue to try and soften its approach without fundamentally changing it - those small changes aren't going to stop the flow of Millennials leaving.

[Corsair]

I imagine that General Authorities will continue to be picked because they mirror the attitudes and values of the current GAs sitting in the board room. They will represent point A, while the Millennial LDS and those who follow them will be moving way past point A. The further the gulf the higher the dropout rate for Millennials and subsequent generations of young LDS.

Just a thought.

Right. One charitable way to look at the apostles is that they are the "current" victims of the LDS advancement process. This process evolved over decades and has resulted in this deeply conservative leadership pool that values unity and stability far more than the radical prophets that founded the LDS church.

It's no secret that the LDS church tracks its leadership candidates. Any large organization would prudently do so. A man gets ordained as a ward bishop and his performance is watched. The best bishops become stake president, and the best stake presidents become Seventies, Mission Presidents, and Temple Presidents. The "very elect" are in the final pool that become apostles.

Each position a man holds (again, sorry ladies) gives him the chance to show what he is made of and his loyalty to the organization. The men who ascend to the highest quorum have demonstrated decades of loyalty and service to the institutional church. At any step, a man will simply "not be advanced" due to any embarassment or disployalty, however slight or well-meaning. It's not that this is a bad thing since there are plenty of ex-bishops who continue to serve in their wards and enjoy their church experience. But the LDS church needs men who will advance the agenda.

The other half of the problem is a defining contrast between a church and a corporation. If a publicly traded company is not doing well, they can fire their CEO and pull in some new guy to shake things up. This is sometimes a really good plan and you get some well known leaders who moved their companies through rough times. Lee Iacocca came into Chrysler in the 1980s to do just this.

But the LDS church cannot "fire their CEO" nor "hire someone from outside their organization". What would they do? Contact a Roman Catholic Cardinal or ex-Pope to come in and give them new direction? Pope Benedict XVI is still around and he's considered a religious conservative. But there is no way that this kind of infusion of new ideas would ever work in the LDS church. It's stuck in this process. The only question is whether or not we, as the members, will also be stuck with them.

[RubinHighlander]

But the LDS church cannot "fire their CEO" nor "hire someone from outside their organization". What would they do? Contact a Roman Catholic Cardinal or ex-Pope to come in and give them new direction? Pope Benedict XVI is still around and he's considered a religious conservative. But there is no way that this kind of infusion of new ideas would ever work in the LDS church. It's stuck in this process. The only question is whether or not we, as the members, will also be stuck with them.

And the epitome of this is RSM! It's costing the COB millions in rebranding because of this stupid name thing he's been obsessed with all these years that he finally get's to do something about now that he's CEO. It's like Nike's new CEO changing their name to Cool Shoe Company and throwing away all the work that went into Nike - Just Do It! Not a very brilliant decision when the rest of the 14 curmudgeons probably would have preferred more big pharma stocks in their portfolios.

[Red Ryder]

Slight diversion from the leadership gap...

We have a few friends who just recently escorted their daughters through the temple for their endowments. One went through before the recent changes, the other after the changes. Both were freaked out and distraught over the experience. Tears, confusion, and questions resulted leaving their parents to shore up their broken expectations.

It seems the younger kids today are having connection issues with the church. They just don't connect to the same experiences we all had. Yeah it was weird, but we just accepted it.

[Hagoth]

Yeah it was weird, but we just accepted it.

We didn't know we had options besides either accepting it or being a despised outcast. Kids now know there's plenty of good company out there in the world. "Where will you go" would have been a lot more poignant in my generation than it is in my kids'.

[alas]

Yeah it was weird, but we just accepted it.

We didn't know we had options besides either accepting it or being a despised outcast. Kids now know there's plenty of good company out there in the world. "Where will you go" would have been a lot more poignant in my generation than it is in my kids'.

This. My niece recently went through the temple. It bothered her and she talked with her bishop, who of course could not explain why a loving God loves his sons but treats his daughters like step children that he doesn’t like much. So, after asking around for several weeks, she was out. She knew she didn’t have to put up with crap.

This in contrast to my mother, firmly a depression/WWII generation who hated her temple experience, read “No Man Knows My History in 1951, and never could bring herself to fully leave the church or even stop wearing the garments she despised.

Can’t leave 50 or more years after no longer believing, compared to a few weeks processing and out.

I think it is more than the internet generation. I think the church listened to Pooh Baw Packer who hated “fun” and they got rid of any and everything that was fun. Well, sitting in church a few hours a week does not have the community and TRIBE building power of 4 or 5 meetings a week, YM/YW being fun, primary being fun, and then Junior Sunday School being what they have now, Relief Society being designed BY WOMEN for women, rather than being the same lessons the men get theat are all about men, road shows, monthly or more often socials, working together as a ward community to build a church building. What the church is now isn’t enough to bind people to a tribe like it was when us old farts were kids. It is easy peasy to walk away from a group that has never formed a community.

[RubinHighlander]

What the church is now isn’t enough to bind people to a tribe like it was when us old farts were kids. It is easy peasy to walk away from a group that has never formed a community.

That's a great point! I had not thought about how community in general has changed the last 100 years to now. Social structures and behaviors in the technology age are much different. Parenting has changed, much of it not for the better. The general public buys into the fear driven nationalistic narrative now more then ever, even though there is less crime and more peace across the globe. Paranoia over where kids are and what risk they might be in is worse than ever. With cell phones we know their locations and where they are every minute of the day vs. when I grew up we just had to be back in time for dinner. There's so much other stuff vying for our time now that doing church things feels like a big sacrifice for many. The church doesn't seem to fill much of a need anymore, especially for the younger folks. I noticed this attitude with our kids, it was just no big deal for them to stop believing it and move on with their lives.

[Hagoth]

She knew she didn’t have to put up with crap.

Yes, that's a big change. I ran into my bishop's 19-year old post-Mo-leaning son at the Sam Young march. I asked him how difficult it is for him living in a very strict Mormon home. He said, "I don't take crap from anybody." Good for him.