BT Guy, I wonder if they have lost/are losing respect/admiration for Torah, or if they have lost respect and admiration for community and leadership. I can tell you that my experience discussing this phenomenon with people in the Chareidi/Yeshivish world puts people in four camps.
1. Those who don’t see any fundamental problems and don’t want to hear about problems and challenges, because it’s all in the hands of the Aibishter and they have ‘al ma lismoch’ in their lives and don’t want or need to question. Many of these people are the happy plurality of Chareidi populations, and likely represent a majority of chareidi and yeshivish communities. In a way, these people have a pure emunah, but they are also sometimes the ones who will ignore or deflect issues of abuse or crime or simple lack of menschlichkeit in the community because they can’t deal with the thought that someone in our community could possibly be doing such things.
2. Those who see the beauty of a Torah lifestyle, but who are upset, even disgusted by action condoned or ignored by some in positions of leadership, who don’t subscribe to the increasing kano’us they are seeing, and are worried about their institutions and their children in a less wholesome community than it could be. These individuals maintain both the lifestyle and the emunah in Torah and HKBH, but have had their dependence on leadership rattled, and their understanding of what Daas Torah means shaken. They don’t want to rock the boat, though, so they quietly live with their disappointment.
3. Those who can no longer see the beauty of the Torah lifestyle they grew up in, and have lost not only their respect for our community’s leadership and institutions, but also believe that these problems indicate fundamental flaws in the Torah way of life that they can not resolve or reconcile. Nonetheless, because of their spouse or their kids or simply because they don’t know any other way, they remain in the community, doing lip service in public but feeling nothing inside. I don’t think they are “orthoprax” because they want to deceive everyone, I think they are orthoprax because, fundamentally, they are afraid of the implications of change.
4. Those who either leave or are forced out of the community because they can not or do not want to fit within it, who sometimes quietly disappear, but who sometimes make a spectacular noise and likely a huge chilul hashem on the way out, like the two recent cases that have been in the news.
There are also those – a fair number, I expect, who come to a point of compromised emunah not because of the shortcomings of the community, but because of their own personal issues, be they familial, financial, emotional, or otherwise. I have a lot of empathy for these individuals and can only hope they find peace within themselves, as that might lead them back to stronger emunah.