Births are not Well in Zion

It was about 15 years ago Elder Oaks presided my stake’s conference, and he told of another stake he had visited. From memory: “There were 100 children in the Primary. That’s for the whole stake: 100 children. Do you know what that means? That stake’s in liquidation.”

What is wrong with our members? I keep expressing my theory, that we have been steeped in the philosophies of men (without any mingling of scriptures) in Satan’s indoctrination centers, aka Public Schools. One result is that people are scared to bring children into this horrible world, and further the degradation of the natural world, and risk any more climate change. Another is the worship of youth and the physical body, and not wanting to endure any disfigurement from pregnancy and childbirth comes into play too. Another is that couples want to “get to know each other and have some time alone, play and travel, before settling down, only to find that by the time they think they are ready, the opportunity is gone (I have my own theories about that, but I’ll keep them private). Motherhood and homemaking are looked down on, and men have come to expect that their wife will work to help support the lifestyle they desire. Lots of reasons and excuses, they probably won’t pass muster when we stand before the Lord to give an accounting of our life.
But what do I know. I’m just an old homemaker who never graduated from college and never had a career.

The Amish are destined to rule the Earth. Provided they stay their course, God bless them and keep them.

@Rozy,

I would say ‘may your tribe increase,’ but you have already taken care of that.

I wish we had more of you and yours.

@Kristor, Amish births have also been dropping . . . may God bless them and keep them.

The situation would be even worse – more ominous – if recent immigrants were separated from the native-born Mormons.

This *ought to* lead to a very fundamental re-appraisal of the CJCLDS. This is Not a case for doubling-down – for trying-harder at what used-to work.

What the CJCLDS has-been-doing – overall – does not work, will not suffice.

I used to be amazed that Mormonism (before the millennium, although the trends have been adverse for longer than that) was (uniquely!) able to remain active in the world, that its members were above-averagely ‘successful’ in this-worldly terms; while maintaining above-replacement fertility, and with average fertility increasing with increasing wealth.

But This World has overcome the CJCLDS, and the situation is worsening – as is also evident from ever-more convergences with mainstream secular-left values.

This is terribly sad, because the CJCLDS held-out longer than any other major Christian church. But the reality must be acknowledged, IF effective action is to be taken to reverse strongly adverse trends.

If not, the CJCLDS will go the way of all other major Christian denominations – that future Will happen… unless fundamental change happens first: change to dissociate church values from the mainstream-secular.

What’s going on with Latter-Day Saint fertility is that feminism has collapsed gender roles. The problem is upstream of marriage, because most singles in the church are not successfully achieving that, even with the church’s *many* resources to help them. All my friends who are successfully marrying are doing so on Mutual (an e-dating site for saints)

Bruce: I don’t think its a problem with the church, necessarily, or at least the majority of it is not. The common complaint I hear (and I have this discussion with many, many singles) is that the boys are all failing to “grow up”. It is modernity that has crushed them, by law, not culture. If boys feel their dreams are unattainable, be it financially in this economy, romantically with no fault divorce, or emotionally or otherwise, then they just drop out, and that’s what’s happening by and large. We can’t escape from that no matter how good our spiritual culture is. And then women look around and find their dating pool consists entirely of children- and they say “guess I have to be the man” and go be careerists, failing to be available for dating. It is a vicious loop occurring worldwide.

I do think we will be able to reverse this, however. Because our prophets are aware of the problem, and will be able to introduce single-point solutions repeatedly until something works (even if you don’t believe they’re divinely inspired). Other cultures and religions don’t have this advantage, I don’t think the problem is really even on most of their radars, and the ones that it is don’t have a centralized prophet, their pastors maximum network range tends to be sub-100.

It is definitely going to get rough, though.

Bruce C.,
thanks for your excellent comment.

“The situation would be even worse – more ominous – if recent immigrants were separated from the native-born Mormons.
This *ought to* lead to a very fundamental re-appraisal of the CJCLDS. This is Not a case for doubling-down – for trying-harder at what used-to work.”
I’m not so sure that your first sentence is accurate. It doesn’t fit with my experience. It’s true of the US as a whole, of course, and the West generally, but I would not be surprised if it were not true of active Latter-day Saints. The big families are usually the remnant weirdos like us. That being the case, I am also not so sure that some aspect of doubling down on what used to work wouldn’t be advised, though likely you are correct.

I believe in restoration christianity and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but I understand where you are coming from. There is every reason to see births and marriages as a basic fundamental thing.

Bobdaduck,
I see that, but I also see the opposite case. Good marriage potential guys are are also struggling because a number of women are either physically obese or spiritually feminist or imbued with contrary-to-reality relationship models. We continue to have remarkable experiences with sister missionaries where we will say something bland like, ‘of course, while getting an education at college does matter a lot, your number one priority should be happy marriage and everything else should be subordinated to making that happen” and it hits like a thunderclap. They know family and marriage are important, they have been taught that all their lives, but no one they know has actually connected the dots to say ‘and therefore you should try to make it happen.’ We then give them Dating 101 techniques, stuff like ‘ask the guy questions and show interest in the answers” and they act like we are imparting secret wisdom. I am happy to say that our marriage rate for our former sister missionaries is very high.

I think social media and atomization is crippling people.

” our prophets are aware of the problem, and will be able to introduce single-point solutions repeatedly until something works”

:pray:

I recently perused the biographical blurbs for Area Seventies on the church’s website. I was a bit surprised to discover that most of them had 4 children or fewer. The only ones with families as large as mine (8 children) were from the western U.S. Those from the rest of the world, including Latin America and Africa, where I expected to see large families, had around 3 kids a piece.

I think I will share this graphic with my children…

Missionary numbers up

https://www.deseret.com/faith/2023/6/28/23774517/number-of-lds-missionaries-going-up