A common perception is that 1) Hardly anybody used to leave the Church, and 2) Now lots of people leave the Church. There are still people who see themselves as unique in having a family member who has left, when now I think that’s more the rule than the exception.
First off, as I have pointed out before, more people are indeed leaving the Church now than in the past. (Incidentally, people are really interested in that fact; that post is by far one of my most-read).
That being said, I think we have an exaggerated sense of how much things are different nowadas. If you were raised, LDS, umpteenth generation yadda yadda, then by definition you are the end result of an unbroken line of people staying in the Church, so all things being equal you’re going to experience a regression to the mean, where you had a 100% retention in your line, but every additional generation has a lower-than-100% chance of staying, thus making it seem like there’s some grand line of Church faithfulness being broken every time somebody leaves the Church. (I somewhat fallaciously point this dynamic out whenever my wife gets worried about a sick kid–but dear, we come from a line of 100% survival and reproductive success going back eons!).*
Survivorship bias also comes into play. The classic case of survivorship bias is when air force planners in World War II identified the locations of bullet holes in the planes to decide where to put extra armor, until somebody pointed out that those were the planes that made it back. Of course there were no bullet holes over the engine, because a plane with a damaged engine probably wasn’t going to make it back.
It doesn’t take long going through family histories to get the stories of the people who didn’t come out West, or who left after the railroad came through, or what have you. We don’t hear their stories, so from our perspective it looks like pretty much everybody stayed until the Internet, like some insulated Amish community or East European Shtetl. But they’re there.
My wife is related to Fay Wray, one of the original “scream queens,” who left the Church early in her career (if not sooner).
My wife’s ex-Mo Great-Great-Great Aunt
Then there’s Jack Dempsey, the world champion boxer, and Kimball Young (grandson of Brigham), one of the first presidents of the American Sociological Association. A lot of people left back when supposedly nobody was leaving.
I had a fun experience when I was interviewing a very devout, traditional Catholic man with a large family my research:
“As a Catholic you surely recognize that X Y Z”
[Me thinking, here’s the awkward part] “Actually, I’m not Catholic,”
“Well, what are you?”
“I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka “Mormons””
“Oh” (awkward pause). My father is named XYZ, his father was named XYZ, and his father…and his father was Samuel Smith!”
And then we spent the rest of the time talking about the religious politics of late-era Nauvoo.
So yes, while your personal family history might be an unbroken chain of people who got up in the morning, took their turns at the irrigation ditch, and baptized their kids, that’s because you’re around as a multi-generational Mormon to talk about your Mormonism, but that experience isn’t representative of the cornucopia of people joining and leaving the Church throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. So yes, more people are leaving now, but let’s not exaggerate how crisp the lines of religious transmission were back in the day.
*We see this in the value investing world. I don’t know near enough to have a strong opinion on the matter, but my understanding is there’s a debate as to whether the Warren Buffets who beat the stock market a lot are geniuses or lucky, since if you take a thousand people and flip a coin five times for each of them some of them are going to just get five in a row by chance and can lecture everybody about how their success is due to this One Weird Trick, but if you select the lucky winners and flip the coin again, they’ll only have a 50% chance.
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