What's the difference between "stayers" and "leavers"?

Why do some Mormons who've experienced a shift in their theologocial or cosmological paradigm stick with the LDS church? And why do some leave?

It's obviously a subjective question, and the reasons will vary with each case. And responses to it tend to be a Rorschach test. Ask this question in Elders' Quorum or at the Ex-Mormon Conference, and your bound to hear many of the reasons that active members stay (or why they'd never leave) or why Ex-Mormons have left (and why they could never stay).

Some faithful Mormons would explain leavers as people who'd lost their testimony, wanted to engage in sinful behavior, or were took offense at some slight.

Ex-Mormons aside, it seems that Leavers are slightly more generous in ascribing motives to stayers: the personal costs of leaving may be high with devout family members, they fear disappointing family and friends, etc.

Both explanations have a some truth to them, though I find the average faithful Mormon explanation simplistic and accusatory. But, saying that someone "lost their testimony" is a pretty tidy, if jargony way of saying that their theological, historical, and/or cosmological paradigm shifted and was no longer congruent with the paradigm promoted by church leadership. That's true enough in my case. (Of course, the other two "explanations" - desiring to sin and being offended - are, in the vast majority of cases of which I'm aware, hogwash.)

But I wonder if there's something else separating the damaged wheat from the tares?

I was raised in a devout, though by no means dogmatic, LDS home. Though I don't recall my parents teaching me that the church was infallible, they did nothing to disabuse me of that notion when it was taught in church and seminary curricula, or declared from official pulpits. We didn't draw a distinction between the "gospel" and "the Church." Both were true and were treated as though they were merely synonyms.

It would be unfair to blame my parents for not making such an esoteric distinction. They were part of a culture that had married the two concepts long before I gained awareness.

But I wonder how different my reaction to actual church history, and more recently, the difference between my views on politics and Christian truth and those of official Mormondom, would have been had I been taught that Church is merely the delivery mechanism for the gospel; that it is no more fallible than any organization on earth, as it is made up of and led by human beings (ok, perhaps a more realistic expectation would be that the church is less fallible than other organizations, but, as an organization run by humans, it can foul things up).

In my experience, "stayers" are generally people who grew up in a less dogmatic, less devout household, and/or grew up in a less authoritarian church era - say the pre-Harold B. Lee years. Conversely, "leavers" seem to have had a more fundamentalist (in the non-polygamist sort of way), dogmatic upbringing, and/or grew up in an era in which the church and the gospel were conflated; in which there was an emphasis on "Following the Prophet." Though I'm not familiar with all the names in this volume, those I do recognize suggests that most stayers are considerably older than me.

I did a quick search on lds.org for "Follow the Prophet." This is by no means conclusive, but most of the hits are from General Conference talks and church magazine articles of the past thirty years. I think the earliest hit was a talk from 1979 - just a year before such expressions of blind obedience to authority reached their zenith in Ezra Taft Benson's "Fourteen Fundamentals on Following the Prophet."

It's difficult to make broad generalizations or to draw theories when looking at two relatively small samples. But I can't help but think that the era in which Mormons who've experienced a paradigm shift plays some part in their decision to stay or leave.