Home › Forums › Inspiration / Mussar › Why people become OTD (with the focus on the "why") › Reply To: Why people become OTD (with the focus on the "why")
1) As I mentioned in one of my posts, one of the groups behind this survey is Project Makom, which is trying to do what you describe. They are using survey data in order to make programming for that purpose.
2) MO is definitely better than OTD, but it’s not inherently worse than yeshivish/chassidish, either.
3) It’s not like “if you’re going to go OTD, then you may as well become MO.” You need to have solid reasons to stay frum, including MO (which is what Makom’s working on), because many of the surveyed MO people left frumkeit because they didn’t believe in God anymore, which as far as I know is still a requirement in MO. A lot of the feminist stuff is only somewhat resolved in the majority of MO communities (and for the record, I think that without using the “f-word,” you can be a lot more menschlich and equitable to women than people already are in the yeshivish world without messing with halacha one iota, and I think that many MO communities are on the ball with that), and plenty of it is unresolvable. So it’s not like these people with these specific hangups may as well have just become MO. In fact, many of Project Makom’s members never even had a crisis of faith at all- they started leaning away from religion, or away from charedi life to MO life, as the case may be, for purely sociological reasons (lack of education and skills, desiring more exposure to the outside world, etc). If that’s why people leave religion, then promoting MO hashkafic thought is certainly beneficial. But if the person is having a genuine crisis of faith, then yeshivish, chassidish, and MO are all the same.