Just How Bad is Our Birthrate?

Agree that this is terrifying.

Pres. Oaks’s talk to YSA in May was interesting in this regard.

A few weeks ago someone pointed out that we should be teaching our children what we want them to be doing in three years.

My oldest, a duaghter, I just turned 16. She has a firm grasp on true principles and is not swayed by the false philosophies of the age. But she takes after her parents with respect to appearance.(We need to lose weight. Working on it. Honestly.) And she has a a bit socially awkward. (Again, probably a bit like her parents.) Home-centered teaching suggests that we should take responsibility for helping her learn how to form and maintain relationships, including, eventually one all-important eternal relationship.

Any resources you would suggest for parents who never much thought about Dating and 101, but now wish to be good instructors in the subject?

I am more than willing to raise 181,000 children, if I can find a righteous wife

All of them named []

Our daughter (34 yo) wants to marry and have a family–how can she meet a righteous man?

My guess is the number of active, or active enough, members is on the lower side of your estimates. There are 31,330 congregations in the church, of which perhaps 5,000 are branches, at a conservative guess (based on the number of branches in the biggest countries by membership). Generalizing from my experience and what I’ve heard, 150 is a generous estimate of the average ward size globally, in terms of people who actually come. For branches, maybe 60 on average. That gives us an estimate of 4,249,500 active members, which works out to 21 births per 1000, putting us just short of the “vibrant” 24 births per 1000, and putting our TFR in the 2.6-2.7 neighborhood globally.

I wrote a twitter thread on this once- my off-the-cuff intuition is that progressive capture of BYU and similar youth programs and institutions did far more damage than we can comprehend, and additionally the apostles very much stopped hammering the “date and stay married” drum. Both easy fixes and reason to be optimistic, especially because the church leaders seem to be turning their eye onto the issue.

As for what’s broken, this is a problem that has been driving me for a while now, and there are so many factors at play. Broadly speaking, an exponentially growing margin of young men are encountering catastrophic motivation failure. Some of it is justified- inflation has made all the hills boys must climb much, much steeper, but basically they don’t ask. Increasingly likely somebody will have to do it for them, but dating apps are not up to the task, and even if such succeeds, the boy won’t be practiced at putting himself into action, and the marriage will be in peril.

And for girls, it seems their reasonable, just, and normal standards from a decade ago are now way, way too high. And its no recipe to help them to say “just marry a bum”. Increasingly, it seems, women will have to teach potential mates both how to date them, and how to be men. I don’t know how women will do this- They will have to identify a young man’s capacity to grow up from a much longer distance than past generations did, and they will have to understand what it means to be a man to orders of magnitude more than they currently do. But obviously the men are not asking the women out, and equally obviously women will not succeed by “taking things into their own hands” in a feminist headstrong sort of way.

Rozy, perhaps your daughter should say to a man: “Ask me out?”

Birth control is bad.

Little known history is that the Church condemned birth control until the late 70s, early 80s, when it became clear that the Saints were largely ignoring the stricture. At that point the Church removed the formal injunction and stated that the morality of it would be left to the couple’s conscience and their diligent seeking after revelation. Everyone took this as a statement that birth control was morally licit, basically nobody at all sought personal revelation on the matter. I personally wasn’t even aware of any of this until later in life.

I would generally counsel against any form of birth control except non-hormonal IUDs on purely secular grounds.

I also assert regardless of any arguments that vasectomies and hysterectomies for non medical reasons are horrible forms of body mutilation.

The two main reasons our birth rates are dropping (though they are still higher than almost anyone else’s in modernity except maybe the Amish) is delayed age of marriage and then postponing having children for the first few years of marriage. Birth control has little to do with the former–the strictures against fornication are strong and as obeyed as they ever were–the problem is more likely to be porn and masturbation.

The delay in having children once married is, of course, a birth control problem.

LA,
one of my assumptions is that there are a fair number of inactive people who still have their children blessed, but that may be a bad assumption. It comes from my experience in legacy LDS areas and even in those areas I’m not sure its true any more.
A smaller church with 2.6 – 2.7 TFR is a much better place to be in.
That said, there still appears to have been a worrying and near-catastrophic decline over the last decade.
Either our birthrates are going down rapidly or there is a marked increase in the inactivity rate. Probably the truth is some combination.

The good news is that there doesn’t appear to have been a fertility hit from the Covid vaccine. A number of people are saying there is one, but it doesn’t show up in our statistics.

“The two main reasons our birth rates are dropping (though they are still higher than almost anyone else’s in modernity except maybe the Amish) is delayed age of marriage and then postponing having children for the first few years of marriage.”

That’s the front half, but there is also the back half of retiring from having children earlier, deciding that eight or nine years of babies and toddlers is enough and it is time to go on to other things. Eighteen-year spreads from first to last birth were more common in decades past than twelve-year spreads are now. We have become the procreative equivalent of people who don’t start a real job in their profession until 28 and then retire at 59.

I have been pondering the whole transgender issue and I think the problem goes deeper than surgery and hormones. If we are not Mothers and Fathers, wives and husbands, then what difference does it make? Transgenderism then, is merely the side-effect of not taking these roles seriously.

I am not minimizing that sin, but rather pointing out that the fundamental roots of the error may go much deeper.

As a 32 single adult member of the Church, it does seem that a lot of members are having a hard time getting married. And even the ones who managed to get married young, many of them are only having 2-3 kids. Even elders that I knew on my mission who were phenomenal missionaries are only having 2-3 kids. There is only one that I can recall that has 4 or more kids. Pres. Dallin H. Oaks’ talk given to the YSA regarding dating was long overdue. A similar talk needs to be given to married couples in the Church regarding having children.

And again, my family is an anomaly. Though two of the seven haven’t married yet, the ones that have, have 4, 2, 3-soon-to-be-4, and 5 children respectively, with my recently-married brother and his wife planning on somewhere in the realm of 8 if they can get them (my newest sister-in-law is going to be an incredible mom, my brother likewise a really fun dad).

@ bobdaduck,
I think your analysis of the situation is more right than I’d like to admit. I just want a man (not a boy) who can care for my family without requiring my full-time participation in the workforce. Priesthood worthiness and participation in the church is also non-negotiable, because I don’t want to be unequally yoked. Apparently this standard is too high now for some reason, which irks me because the standard for dating women is frustratingly obtuse but includes none of the characteristics of a good wife so far as I can tell.

EC – the strange thing is, you will find worthy men every bit as frustrated. And the standards for what interests the opposite sex no less superficial or confusing.

Bobdaduck – I’d encourage her to ask him out if she could find a man at all! There are no single, active LDS men in her age range at all here is southern MN. NONE! She hasn’t met any at huge regional conferences either.
She is searching for a job in a larger city but no luck so far. We are praying for some miracles in her life.

only the first would be named [] (jr) the rest would receive arrays

Rozy I am going to start a traveling circus soon, a combination pageant, roadshow, riot, and YSA conference, hopefully your daughter can come along

“Rozy I am going to start a traveling circus soon, a combination pageant, roadshow, riot, and YSA conference, hopefully your daughter can come along”

This is the most wonderful thing I’ve read in a month of Sundays

Single adult active LDS man. Simply cannot find single childbearing age women to date at all. Probably not ever going to marry.

WHY can’t the single men and women find each other? Do we need to set up a matchmaking service complete with ecclesiastical endorsements? Are people looking too much at the outward appearance and not enough on the heart (and testimony and desire to live life according the The Family-A Proclamation)?
Can someone set up a matchmaking service? I don’t have any app building expertise, but it would sure be helpful to many faithful single saints.

Anon – I have certainly been there. I am married now, but for many years (15+) I was a single father in Arizona. No matter how often people told me the relative numbers were in my favor, I certainly never experienced it. Years between dates. Put your faith in God and pray without ceasing like the Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge.

Rozy – I have long thought that matchmaking was due for a big comeback – though the one time I met with one, she just looked at me and said no.

But this would NOT be something that would work best by app. There needs to be personal one-on-one by people. We need more professional Yentas!

We may be in the ‘ our brithrates are actually pretty decent, we just don’t nave very many members’ territory.

https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1680381507326689280

Still not happy with that 25% absolute drop over a decade.

Do you mean that active LDS membership has a TFR of about 3, and is declining.

Both of these are bad news; since if the LDS elite can only ‘manage’ c.3 children per couple, given the massively greater-than-any-other-church emphasis on having large families (as a positive religious value).

I’ve said it before; but – given what is happening – i.e. the CJCLDS has All the feature of a declining modern Christian church – there is no point in doubling-down on traditional LDS strategies – whether for church growth, family size, or indeed sustaining activity.

Following the usual pattern of denying the decline (and interpreting the indices of decline as positive!) will simply accelerate it.

Core strategies of recent decades all need honest and objective re-evaluation… missionaries, BoM-based techniques of evangelism, BU, processes of church life …

Even the, basic since c 1900, ideal of integrating LDS members with mainstream modern society financially/ economically, ethically, in terms of social esteem etc.

Other possibilities need to be explored very seriously – and soon.

Bruce,
I am in no sense interpreting the indices of decline as a positive. As it happens I agree with your entire comment.

The best case scenario here is that the church is much tinier than we think, maybe a little over 3 million people worldwide, And has birth rates that are not yet catastrophic but descending in that direction.

@G – Sorry to be harsh in what follows, but I think a there are things that deserve Far more consideration than they seem to be getting. The situation is Far more dangerous for the CJCLDS than seems to be acknowledged.

Two of the core CJCLDS principles seem to need serious re-examination. The first is the mission, the second is temples.

When it began – with the single mission to Lancashire in England – there were on average about three converts per day, most of whom emigrated to Salt Lake City.

Now? Well, from the outside, the mission program seems to be run for the spiritual benefit of the missionaries rather than to make converts (because it doesn’t make converts) – but doesn’t seem to be working very well even there.

If the mission really is for the spiritual benefit of missionaries, I would have thought (from what I know, as an outsider) it could be better designed – and maybe there should be a refocus on the post-mission (young adult) phase, when apostasy really becomes a problem.

Secondly, Temples. There is a striking inverse-correlation between an (ever-expanding?) program of Temple building and refurbishment, and the shrinking active church membership. More and more temples for fewer and fewer members…

What it looks like from the outside is analogous to the top-heavy structures of the declining mainstream churches; where the ‘senior management’ and building work are continually expanding, and serving an ever smaller proportion of members.

e.g. The church of England is losing members at 2 or more percent per year, but is still expanding the number of Bishops (many-fold greater than in the past), and their administration teams. The cathedrals and other big churches are ever more developed for tourism.

(One thing is clear – when managers have the upper hand in institutions of any kind, you get more building work; because construction is a major currency of managerial careerism. The UK is in a serious economic depression, but there has never been more building and construction work – including road-works – than now. It increased all through Covid and never stopped; and is, of course, fuelled by relentless and massive immigration.)

Aside; I must admit to having profound reservations about Mormonism in its second-phase development as a Temple religion – since this seems to contradict the fundamental metaphysical theology rooted in personal revelation, and only makes sense (to me) for the pre-1900 idea of the CJCLDS as a regional church, a mini-state, a way of life.

But either way, the expansion of Temple numbers on a shrinking active membership base, strikes me as a sign of pathology rather than health.

Perhaps the biggest thing that requires looking at is the basic (post 1900) strategy of international expansion, with the ideal of (in practice) a thinly-spread, societally-integrated, and multi-focus church. But this is operated with a leadership form that developed when the church was in one place and significantly separated from ‘the world’. Surely this cannot continue?

*

I must admit to feeling pessimistic about All forms of institutional organization, including churches, in this global totalitarian era of The West.

But I am sure that going-along with a strategy of increasing integration with the secular/ materialist/ leftist System will *certainly* lead to to destruction – whether this is decline in numbers and shrinkage of the organization and/or convergence to become a de facto branch of the mainstream social bureaucracy (i.e. ever-increasing the current direction of ‘convergence’); with loss of strong motivation to pursue genuinely Christian thought, motivation and behaviour (as has happened and continues with the Church of England, Roman Catholics, and evangelicals – for example).

i.e. On present trends: the CJCLDS *will* become some combination of a tiny remnant of serious Mormons, and/or a mere-shell posing as its former self – as has already happened to All other major social institutions from the military, police, and law; through education, arts, and science; to sports and entertainment.

Bruce C.,
You have a long way to go before you are as harsh as Jeremiah.
Our blog motto is, “all rebukes and warnings gladly accepted.” Especially yours.
Your point on the temple building program is one I understand very well. The enthusiasm that greets each new wave of temple announcements can create a feeling of pseudo-growth that covers for the stagnant conversion rates, the growing inactivity rates, and the dropping birth rates. On the other hand, I do understand why we have a temple culture for which personal revelation is no substitute. If you will forgive me for saying so, and indeed I do not mean it to be an insult, you have latterly become less of a fox and more of a hedgehog.

However, I continue to think that by far the most serious indicator is the ongoing decline in having children and even in family formation. In any people this would be a matter of fundamental concern, but in a people who God has given truth after truth about family and marriage and the sexes, it is catastrophic.

I believe that it is a secular law that *all* institutions wither and die over time. I share your awareness that under modern conditions this problem is even more acute because of the ongoing forced absorptions into the modern system. I am also aware that there a vast parallels right now between us and the mainstream denominations and the Catholics 20-50 years ago, and look where they ended up.

Our situation is likely to get much worse. And yet, despite being someone who has never had a testimony of Wilford Woodruff’s promise that the Church would never fall (and that isn’t even really what he promised, anyway), I keep getting these intimations that marvelous things are coming for me and for the Church and my people. It will take genuine miracles.