I’m not sure how this attitude applies to more or less densely populated Mormon areas. But from my own experience, when I lived in the midwest and was in young women’s, Mormonism played a much bigger role socially in that it took up a lot more of my time. Going to a Wednesday activity took 2 hours longer since girls from all around needed to be picked up and dropped off, they couldn’t just carpool with each other. Gathering at church actually filled a Mormon social void because it was the only place we saw other Mormons. In my current area with lots of Mormons there is a huge push to makes stakes and wards smaller. I’m curious to see how this plays out and if it exacerbates or relieves some of these issues.

When you grow up in wards where the boundaries are large – often spanning metropolitan areas – then you simply get a different dynamic than say the Wasatch Front where wards are a few blocks and you simply see other people from your ward daily. The dynamic shifts. For instance where I grew up I was the only Mormon in a student body of 1200 kids. How on earth would there be the dynamic compared to a ward where most of the kids go to the same school and same extracurricular activities?

I’d probably add general attitudes about “authority” and the accompanying fundamentalism and literalism, and teachings about LGBT individuals.

This was a significant factor for me: One of my children or grandchildren could be LGBT. I view LDS thought and culture as toxic to LGBT teens. I’m willing to step outside of the faith, if only to provide a safe path out for any friends or family who also need to take that road.

I write that without any animus at all. These are my genuine thoughts on the topic.

For my spouse, he has issues with historicity claims and not finding church as a community-minded or service-oriented institution to belong to. He feels there is not a significant emphasis on Christ and a heavy emphasis on preserving the institution for the institution’s sake.

As evidenced by mine and my husband’s situation, there are many and varied reasons why religiosity may be declining among my generation.

Much of what could make Sunday services more spiritual and edifying would need to involve macro structural changes that can only come from the top down. Even smaller ward changes would need to come from the bishop, and very few Millennials are now in the highest positions in wards and in the church.

“‘feeding others’ is how we ‘feed ourselves’ in the Church.”

Our youth program contradicts this statement. Between Sunday lessons, seminary, Wednesday activities, girls camp, youth conference, institute, and so on, youth are surrounded by opportunities that are designed to feed them and provide them spiritual experiences. And yet they are asked to do little to nothing in return. They are fed without feeding.

Once one becomes a Latter-Day Saint adult, you’re supposed to not need any of these spiritual experiences anymore, and turn entirely from the fed to the feeder. But it’s not a coincidence that most people’s most spiritual experiences happened in their youth. They shouldn’t have to feed on those vapors for the next 50 years. The need for spiritual experiences continues until you die. (And yes, you can create them for yourself, but something special happens in communal activities.) As a friend once put it, “Institute is wasted on the young.”

“A Church built on social interaction not valuing friendship is laughable.”

This statement is laughable. Let’s look at the structure of services — you go to Sacrament meeting, and need to keep quiet while listening to speaker; you go to Sunday school and need to keep quiet (besides making comments about the lesson) in order to listen to the teacher; you go to Priesthood/RS, where you need to keep quiet (except for making comments about the lesson); then you go home. There’s a few minutes of socializing between meetings (which many say is their favorite part of church), but that’s it for Sunday. On Wednesday nights you’re busy executing activities for the youth. Otherwise there’s socializing at the occasional ward activity, and a few minutes interspersed into your leadership meetings. But about 90% of church is not built on socializing at all. It is ancillary at best.

To feel a hunger for friendship and socialization that extends beyond passing and stolen moments isn’t hard to wrap one’s mind around. It’s a fundamental human need. Nearly every other church provides opportunities to meet together in Wednesday evening Bible studies and dinner groups, or morning prayer groups, while our church has no such spiritual/social opportunities. I feel most bad for men; men in other churches often have close groups where they can feel the power of fraternity and support. The idea (though its potential is baked into our theology) is foreign to Mormon men, who feel they must spend all their free time with family. As I once heard someone put it, “Mormon men are the loneliest men I’ve ever known.”

There are members who feel frustrated that the opinions of members of the RS and priesthood quorums simply do not matter. For better or worse, leaders make command decisions about matters which do not implicate the fundamental doctrines of the church without even asking the opinion of those who will be directly affected. There is no consultative or deliberative process in the church. The church is run by dictates, and the opinions of members – no matter how worthy or how faithful – simply do not count.

Although we still have a vestige of common consent and congregationalism in the church, in practice there is no such thing. So why exactly do we have meetings of priesthood “quorum” or a relief “society” if the opinions of the members of the quorum or the society are never sought out? Or the quorums or the societies never asked to give their consent to anything except as an empty formality?

Although there are serious potential issues with subsidiarity, congregationalism, or common consent in a church, the opposite has serious downsides too. It makes members feel like they are not members, but rather more like subjects or volunteers. Subjects whose opinions are not heard tend to resent their superiors. Volunteers whose opinions are not heard tend to walk away. To be a member in any meaningful sense of the term your opinion must actually matter.

Nowhere is this more than obvious when members refer to “the church” as an administrative organization separate and distinct from its own members. Clearly the body of Christ has a head, but it is the body of Christ that is the church and household of God. The body has members, and it seems like a pretty dim version of eternity to consider exaltation and membership in the kingdom of heaven as absolute subjection to what might for lack of a better term be considered an inspired despotism. At what point along the way is a member’s opinion going to actually matter? The perfect day, and not before?

1 and 2, Not the Church’s fault at this point (other than the mommy part that I can understand better) since the wards and stakes by birth year indicate more than half the local leadership consist of millennials. By the logic of the bullet points, millennials now have been passed the ball and they are dropping it while still blaming those who gave it to them. Besides “feeding others” is how we “feed ourselves” in the Church. There is no individual spiritual nourishment without service in Mormon theology. This gets into the whole selfish thing that the “self-help” and “find yourself” false doctrines have produced.

3. Not sure where to go with this one. I think the Church has recognized this and there has been a few General Conference talks about too many meetings without substance. But I am afraid what the Church has prioritized to replace them will not satisfy the narcissist “what about me” generation.

4. The feeling overwhelmed with callings is nothing new. Was around with my parents and probably been around since Joseph Smith sent the first Quorum of the Twelve off on missions. However, your explanation of family dynamics seems an awful lot like self-imposed problems. The Church warned of working mothers and it was quickly dismissed. There wasn’t even a shift (in the equality department) to maybe working mother and stay at home father. Nope, both genders had to be working to find some kind of status or satisfaction. I understand the difficulties of modern economics, but that isn’t the Church’s fault. Even the stay at home moms usually have resources available to alleviate some of the stress if they weren’t so darn stubborn and independent minded.

5. A Church built on social interaction not valuing friendship is laughable. Again, its the millennials fault they can’t make social connections with everyday situations. They need “clubs” or “hang-outs,” where they can be the life of the party or among the popular folks. It used to be introverts had trouble remaining members and now its extroverts. I just can’t get my head around so many contradictions.

When I was a teenager my interpretation of Scripture brought me to believe that my generation was the last one before the punishments of the last days leading to the Second Coming. Growing out of that I recognized so many unfulfilled prophecies that needed to happen first. Now, I look around at today’s society and quickly believe there is maybe one more generation left. The gentiles are going down a path that isn’t pleasant.

Many of the church’s values do resonate with us, at least in the abstract. It’s the implementation and culture that often do not resonate. And since implementation and culture seem to drive weekly services, they can greatly affect the perceived value of active participation.

For example, family is important to us. And I believe our theology is potentially expansive enough to include all types of families. But we don’t. Instead, we often treat families that differ from the 1950s era model as worthy of less respect and dignity, and I think doing so is immoral. As is the exclusion of some families that don’t fit our definition of family from meaningful (or any) participation in the church. Hearing repeated veiled and not so veiled attacks against gay marriage and the like, gets old fast. And it’s not something I feel comfortable teaching my children

We teach that our women are daughters of God with divine potential. Yet, our culture (and depending on how literally you take some of our scriptures and teachings, perhaps our doctrine) often treats women as somehow lesser than men. I don’t want my daughter to learn, either through explicit teachings or implicitly through church culture, that she limited or less than her brother. I want her to understand that she can go as far as her talents and work ethic will take her. And I don’t want my son to learn he is inherently better than any woman because he happens to be male. I want him to respect women, to be able to work with women, and see them as his equal.

We also teach of the importance of caring for the poor and the need to come together to create Zion. Yet, at least in most places I have lived, there is a strong conservative political bent at the ward level. As a result, lessons are often peppered with the comments regarding the godliness of naked capitalism and the dangers of those who advocate for anything to left of mitt Romney. To those of us left of center, this rhetoric can be less than welcoming.

We care about meaningful Sunday services. Our scripture and history could make for seriously interesting lessons. But most teachers have neither the time nor knowledge to really prepare such lessons. They do the best they can, with varying degrees of success.

I suppose this is a long winded way of saying we often feel the benfit of weekly attendance is pretty meager. And often, the costs, can be significant.

1) the church experience doesn’t seem meaningful or especially useful. The kids like nursery, but they would be just as happy to play at the park. Hearing members give well-intentioned but often boring sermons doesn’t provide much value. Nor does babysitting other memebers’ children in nursery or primary. We seem to have better, happier, and more fulfilling days on the Sunday’s we ditch church for other activities.

2) the church’s concerns (social issues and political concerns) just don’t resonate with my family. Our world view is just different.

3) I have serious doubts that leadership has any special insight into god’s mind. And without that, it can be struggle to regularly attend meetings that often fail to address issues that matter to us.

4) the things that really keeps us coming back are a) the kids seem to like it, and b) we have friends at church. If it weren’t for those things, we’d probably be gone.

However again let me emphasize this only represents one part of the Nones. An other subgroup isn’t attracted to any group participation. A lot of studies have noted that those who move to the Nones simply are less interested in social participation in general. There’s a certain disengageness that relates to participation in politics, sports teams, extra-curricular activities and so forth. Whether that’s tied to the internet allows those tendencies to be manifest in a different fashion or not isn’t clear.

One big problem of how Millennials are talked about in the press is to paint with too broad a brush. (This happened previously with Gen-X too) There’s a lot of diversity within a generation in a country as large as the US. We can talk about differences in aggregate but few fit the generalizations exactly.

Regarding Greg’s (17) point about meetings, I think a lot of people have reacted like that. And there definitely are generational gaps there. The last time I was in an EQ presidency though we did everything with email, texting, and Google Docs. It reduces a lot of meetings. Also the Church has long advocated having as few meetings as possible. (Elder Packer gave quite a few talks on this) It’s just that some individuals seem to love meandering meetings.

While the Church could definitely do better, I actually think it’s provided quite a few amazing resources in the past few years to reduce meetings and make things more efficient. I notice in our ward that nearly everyone under 50 uses tablets or phones for their scriptures, to use LDS Tools and so forth. Having internet in most chapels helps tremendously.

I just wish we’d get some more significant meeting reform since I think the current system just isn’t terribly ideal. I’d love shorter sacrament meetings and perhaps a change in how Sunday School/Primary is done.