Conference Review, October 2019

This post has some of my favorite and least-favorite things from this last General Conference. I’m sorry it has been a few weeks so it might be largely forgotten. Anyway, please share your favorites and least favorites in the comments if you’d like.

Best story: Elder Alliaud’s story of his non-member mother quizzing him when he decided to get baptized, including asking him, “Do you have any idea how long church is?”
Worst story, hedge about the law category: Elder Christofferson’s story of the paralyzed patriarch where he carefully made it clear that it was a priesthood holder and not some unwashed heathen (or worse yet, woman), who supported the patriarch’s hands when he gave blessings.
Worst story, endlessly serving woman category: Elder Christofferson again, although this time sharing a story he heard from Elder Bednar and his wife about a very recently widowed woman who of course still served as an usher at a temple dedication, thus helpfully normalizing the idea that women should be forever serving and never thinking of themselves.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Best visual aid: The Del Parson painting of a smiling, welcoming Jesus included by President Aburto in her talk “Thru Cloud and Sunshine, Lord, Abide with Me!”
Worst visual aid: The picture of a (to me) comically distressed-looking Moses included by Elder Stevenson near the end of his talk “Deceive Me Not”
Worst visual aid, missing category: Elder Uchtdorf made mention of Hobbits throughout his talk, but didn’t show us a picture of even one Hobbit!

Best laughs: Elder Holland’s report of the little boy who laid on the floor and raised his foot during the sustainings last General Conference;  Elder Gong’s story of the longsuffering Primary teacher who didn’t interrupt the child who prayed and expressed gratitude for each letter and number.
Worst laugh: President Oaks making light of a woman’s concern over whether she would have to share a house with a sister wife in the next life.

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Stay

I’ve heard it said a lot in fringe and ex-Mormon spaces that General Authorities are spending more time now than they used to talking to and about people who leave the Church. This has been my impression as well. It occurred to me just recently as I was looking through some Conference talks that checking this impression out might be as simple as looking for how often they use one word: stay.

In the past couple of decades in Conference, we’ve been exhorted to stay by the tree, stay on the path (twice!), stay on the high road, and of course, in I think the talk of this type I’ve seen discussed most, to stay in the boat. And these are just the talk titles! It does make sense to me that GAs would use this word a lot if they’re concerned about people leaving. You stay instead of leaving, going, exiting, ending, or finishing. But it also reminds me of commands we use to train dogs. Sit, stay, heel.

Stay isn’t my favorite word because it seems to me that it values the past over the future. Progress that’s already been made is fine, but stay with what you’ve done and don’t continue to move. GAs worry that moves we make will be regressing, but I wonder if they sometimes misidentify progress as regress if it doesn’t fit into the sometimes rigid life paths they prescribe.

Anyway, I looked up use of the word stay in the Corpus of LDS General Conference talks to see if it has been used more recently than it had been before. Here are the results since 1950. The lighter line shows the yearly usage rates per million words, and the darker line shows the five-year moving average, which smooths out some of the yearly bumps and makes for something that’s easier to look for patterns in.
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Most Viewed Conference Talks on YouTube (Part 1)

What are the most liked General Conference talks? I wrote a post a few years ago where I looked at Facebook likes of talks to see which talks got the most likes. Unfortunately, when I went back recently to update this post, I found that the Facebook like button has been removed from the General Conference talk pages on lds.org. Using the Wayback Machine, I looked at site snapshots going back a few years, and it looks like this feature was removed in March, 2016. I was lamenting this fact on Facebook when my co-blogger Katya pointed out that Conference talks are still available on YouTube, and there are like and dislike buttons.

I wrote a little script to get the counts of views, likes, and dislikes for all the talks posted at the LDS General Conference YouTube channel. This includes talks from April 1971 through April 2019 Conferences. The channel also has videos for other things like musical numbers and statistical reports, but for this post, I’m just looking at the talks.

There are a total of 3,508 talks across the 97 Conferences, given by 473 unique speakers. Just as an aside, the data needed a bit of cleaning for me to make speakers’ names consistent, as there are typos in some of their  names (for example, A. Theodore Tuttle is identified once as “A. Theodore Turtle”), as well as straight up inconsistent naming (for example, M. Russell Ballard is identified at least once using the suffix “Jr.,” but most of the time it isn’t included).

Here’s a list of the top 20 speakers who have given the most talks.

Wow! Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson have each given over 6% of all the talks in the sample, and each more than twice as many as any other speaker. I guess this is no surprise given how long both served not only as Church President, but also in the First Presidency. President Nelson would have to live–and be healthy enough to deliver Conference talks–for over a decade to get close to them. It’s probably Elder Bednar, who doesn’t even make this list (he’s at #23 with 29 talks) who has the best chance of joining them, as he’s likely to serve as Church President for a long time.

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References to the New Church President in Conference

In a comment here at ZD last year, Leonard R suggested that it seemed to him that speakers in Conference have become more prone recently to refer to or quote the President of the Church in their talks. Now that President Nelson has two Conferences under his belt, I thought it might be interesting to look at how often recent Church Presidents were referred to or quoted in their first two Conferences.

I used the ever-handy LDS General Conference Corpus. I looked up references to each new Church President’s last name only (to be sure I wasn’t missing any mentions where he was referred to as simply President [last name] rather than in the usual way, as our beloved prophet and leader, even President [first name middle initial last name]). Since this is just a first pass, I didn’t even check through the results to be sure I wasn’t accidentally including references to other Nelsons, Monsons, Hinckleys, etc., although I suspect that if such references do occur in the data, they are likely to be few.

Here are the results.

I’ve put an asterisk on Howard W. Hunter because he was only President for one Conference before passing away. One solution to this might have been just to double his references, but I decided against doing this because I suspect there is probably a dropoff between a new President’s first and second Conferences.

Anyway, this doesn’t actually get at Leonard R’s question terribly well because we typically have a new Church President only once a decade or so, but the trend for the last few Church Presidents certainly does look hopeful. Perhaps when I have more time, I’ll come back to this question and look at it in more detail.

Two Is the New Three

In a special press conference, President Russell M. Nelson announced a series of changes in the Church related to the shortening of its Sunday meeting schedule from three hours to two, which had been announced in this last weekend’s General Conference:

  • The afterlife now includes only two kingdoms: Celestial and Telestial. “We considered keeping Terrestrial, since it has the benefit of being an actual recognized word,” he explained, “but as I read the description of this kingdom in Doctrine and Covenants 76, it was impressed upon my mind that the Lord’s will is that any so-called ‘honorable men of the earth’ who can’t manage to see through the subtle craftiness of men be grouped with the wicked in the Telestial Kingdom.”
  • The triple combination has been renamed the double combination, with the de-canonization of the Pearl of Great Price. President Nelson noted that although the Pearl of Great Price contains “some inspired writings,” it may also be misleading, for example, in that the Articles of Faith purport to summarize the Church’s key beliefs, but make no mention of the importance of heterosexual marriage or of God’s eternal hatred of gay and transgender people.

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More Conference Predictions

Given my remarkable success at predicting things that would happen in April General Conference, I thought I would try my hand again with some more Conference predictions for October.

  • In a stunning rebuke of the murmurnacle, President Nelson will announce that not only will the three hour block not be shortened to two hours, it will actually be lengthened to four hours. Existing meetings and classes will not be changed in length. The extra hour will be used for a mandatory meeting where all ward members (including primary and nursery-aged children) sit in council and discuss the importance of Defending the Family. Meetinghouses used by three wards will follow the 8-12/10-2/12-4 schedule. Fifth Sundays will be celebrated with a special five-hour block, with each meeting lengthened by 25%.

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General Conference Predictions

General Conference starts tomorrow, and this provides all kinds of opportunities to speculate about what changes in the Church it might bring. Of course we can speculate before every Conference, but this one is particularly ripe given that there will be two new members of the Quorum of the Twelve called, and that it will be President Nelson’s first Conference. President Monson was unwell for years, so there may have been big decisions that the other Q15 members left unmade. Now, with President Nelson appearing to be in good health, he may move forward with some items that had been on hold.

Here’s my speculation about the new Quorum of the Twelve members: They will be white, and will have a strong connection to Utah. Risky speculation, I know! Seriously, though, I was extremely disappointed in 2015 when, even with three Q12 positions to fill at the same time, President Monson still couldn’t bring himself to call a person of color to the Quorum. My guess is that President Nelson will be even less likely to do so. Also, given how much he clearly loves God’s Most Holy and Most Blessed Order of the Eternal and Most Divine Gender Roles, Which Were and Are from All Eternity to All Eternity, I’m betting that he won’t call anyone like Elder Renlund to the Quorum. Elder Renlund’s wife had (gasp) a career, and to make it worse, only one child. I really doubt that President Nelson could see someone like him as being faithful enough. So my expectation is not just two older white men with ties to Utah, but two older white men with ties to Utah who are descended from polygamists and whose wives were SAHMs and had plenty of kids.

A question that might be even bigger than who the new Q12 members will be is whether President Nelson will canonize the Family Proclamation. This seems like the perfect example of an issue that was left in limbo with President Monson’s deteriorating health, that President Nelson might jump to solve. Really, though, after reading a bunch of discussions on the Bloggernacle and on Facebook, I’ve come to agree with those who argue that it doesn’t really matter if he does or not. One of my sisters pointed out that for the FamProc to enter the canon would kind of be a step down. The canon is what we read now and again and pull proof texts out of. The FamProc is what we love so much that we hang it on our walls! It’s better than canon. What I really expect is that, rather than canonizing it, President Nelson will borrow some lines from Joseph Smith and tell us that “The Family Proclamation is the most correct of any proclamation on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man will get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other proclamation.” That’s what he’ll do: cement its place as super-canon.

It also might be worth wondering whether President Nelson, or any of the other speakers, will mention all the fallout from the Joseph Bishop scandal. My guess would be no, both considering the timing–all the news has broken so close to Conference, and talks are planned well in advance–and the content–GAs won’t want to bring the issue to the attention of anyone who hasn’t already heard about it. This is a topic like polygamy, where the Church will probably be sure to keep any of its responses carefully out of the way of most members, to avoid causing more trouble than they solve. Kind of like the Gospel Topics essays.

What do you think will happen at Conference?

 

The Slowing of Church Growth

This post comes to us from Christian Anderson, a biostatistician living in San Diego county. He previously guest posted on mentions of Heavenly Parents in General Conference.

In the Saturday Afternoon Session of General Conference on Apr 1, 2017, the church announced a membership of 15,882,417. Combined with last year’s total, this represented an increase of 248,218 members and 1.59%. For many denominations, this would be a banner year. However, for the LDS church it represents a remarkable underperformance relative to historical trends and enthusiastic predictions by some members.

Absolute growth
In terms of absolute growth, the addition of nearly a quarter million members is still a substantial achievement. After all, the church didn’t reach 250,000 members total until 1897. However, since 1984 the church had reported growth of at least that magnitude for 32 consecutive years until last Saturday. Reported is an important word here, as membership totals reported in General Conference were rounded off to the nearest 10,000 from 1984-1991, and there are several statistical anomalies in the various time series suggesting that totals sometimes reflect incomplete reports (usually reflected by an anomaly in the opposite direction in the next year).

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Conference Talks Most Likely to Be Edited

Ever since Boyd K. Packer’s October 2010 Conference talk “Cleansing the Inner Vessel” was significantly edited between the version he delivered and the printed version, I’ve seen increased attention paid to differences between the spoken and printed versions of Conference talks.

Given that we’re in the relatively brief window of time between all the Conference talks being given and the release of their printed versions (other than the Women’s Session, for which they’re already out), I thought it might be fun to speculate about what edits we might see this time around. Here are some of my guesses. I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

Speaker Spoken version Printed version (my guess)
Brough, Saturday morning “I earnestly prayed to know if I had to give my dog away [after my father was called as a mission president]. My answer did not come in a moment. Rather, a specific thought kept penetrating my mind: Don’t be a burden to your parents.” “I earnestly prayed to know if I had to give my dog away [after my father was called as a mission president]. My answer came in a flash, as my beloved dog was simultaneously struck by lightning and run over by a train. I rejoiced in the miracle God had provided to keep me from being a burden to my parents.”

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Heavenly Parents at Conference

This guest post comes to us from Christian Anderson.

It’s always nice to hear how the old folks at home are doing. It seems like we’ve been hearing more and more about Them recently.

Back in April 2013, Ziff (https://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2013/04/29/heavenly-parents-are-we-really-talking-about-you-more/ and references therein) noted that there seemed to be an increasing number of references to “Heavenly Parents” in General Conference and more widely in church materials. This post discusses three aspects of that trend: 1) It has not only continued but accelerated over the last three years, 2) there has been a shift in which authorities are mentioning Them, and 3) the fraught issue of capitalization.

An accelerating trend

Few speakers mentioned Heavenly Parents in the decades before 1995, with an average of 0.48 references per year (that’s both April and October conferences combined). That all changed with “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”, which affirms in its third sentence that each human being is “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents”, triggering seven references to Heavenly Parents that year. In the years 1996-2012, references to “Heavenly Parents” nearly tripled to 1.41 references per year (p=0.0057), but never more than three in any one year. 2013 saw a spike to a record nine references, followed by a fall back to one reference in 2014, a return to nine references in 2015, and finally a grand total of 15 references this year. Exactly half of the 56 talks that mention Heavenly Parents have been delivered in the last four years.

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Predictions for General Conference

General Conference already got underway last week, but I’m a bit slow, so I’m just now getting to making some predictions for the remainder of the sessions. You can help me out by telling me which in each pair of possible events is most likely to occur in the remainder of Conference.

Which in each pair is more likely?

  • President Monson talks about widows.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about airplanes.
  • President Monson talks about widowers.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about spaceplanes.
  • President Monson talks about Windows.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about Linux.

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No, there have not been 30 talks about child abuse in General Conference since 1976

The Mormon Newsroom article on child abuse from 2010 that was recently published with a 2016 date (because of a “technical error”) includes the following claim, as evidence of how seriously the Church takes child abuse:

Since 1976, more than 50 articles have appeared in Church publications condemning child abuse or educating members about it. As wrenching as the topic is, Church leaders have given sermons about it more than 30 times at the Church’s worldwide conferences.

I spend a fair amount of time poking through old General Conference talks, and this latter number—30 sermons about child abuse—seemed high to me. So I thought I would check it.

I used the lds.org search tool to search for “child abuse” (without the quotation marks), and limited the results to General Conference talks. The search doesn’t require the words to appear together, so I was casting a pretty wide net, not just looking for talks that had the exact phrase “child abuse.” In fact, I ended up having to discard a bunch of talks in the results because they never discussed child abuse even though they included both words (frequently they talked about drug abuse and mentioned a child in another context).

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Quote . . . Close Quote

I make the Sunday bulletins for my ward. I typically put a quote from a scripture or a Church leader that’s related to the theme of the sacrament meeting on the front. I often look for quotes from Church leaders by looking through recent Conference talks on related topics. Recently while I was doing this, I was reading a talk given by a member of a general auxiliary presidency, and I was struck by how much of her talk was made up of quotes of other sources. This reminded me of David Evans’s excellent post at T&S a few months ago where he looked at which speakers in Conference quote which types of sources. One of his findings was that higher-authority speakers quoted less from high authority sources than did lower-authority speakers.

What I wondered is whether higher-authority speakers quote other sources in general less than lower-authority speakers, regardless of the level of authority of the sources being quoted. An advantage of this question is that it didn’t require me to figure out authority levels of sources. Instead, I could just count words in talks and count how many of the words were in quotes.

I got data from all the talks in the last ten Conferences (October 2010 – April 2015). For each talk, I noted the speaker’s calling, the number of words in the talk, and the number of words in the talk that were part of a quote. Here are results by calling group.

Position Talks Percent quotes
 First Presidency  88  14.8%
 Quorum of the Twelve  118  21.8%
 Quorums of Seventy  99  21.5%
 Other – men  19  20.8%
 Other – women  50  24.1%

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Placement of Scriptures vs. Conference in Menus at LDS.org

Last week, the Church rolled out a redesigned version of the navigation menus at lds.org. The new menus rearranged links to parts of the site in order to make it easier for site visitors to find what we’re looking for.

One change in particular that seems unrelated to usability caught my eye, though. In the old menus, scriptures appeared in their own menu, and General Conference was in a menu labeled “Teachings.” Here’s a screenshot that shows the old menus. I’m sorry it doesn’t show General Conference under “Teachings,” as the old menus aren’t available anymore so I can’t take a new screenshot. I’ll just have to ask you to trust me that it was there. Also note that the callout calls the menus “new” because this image is from 2012, when the old menus were introduced.

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A Look at Conference Speakers’ Favorite Verses of Scripture

I thought it might be fun to look at which speakers in General Conference are most fond of quoting which particular verses of scripture. If you’re thinking you’ve seen me blog about this before, you’re right. It’s just that in my previous posts, I’ve only looked at the level of book of scripture, but now I’m getting all the way down to the verse level. I apologize in advance; I don’t have any interesting hypotheses to examine here. This is another post where I’m just looking at some data descriptively and saying, “Isn’t this cool?”

I took scripture reference data from the LDS Scripture Citation Index. I used the current version of their site and not the new beta version because it was easier for me to pull data from the current version. Unfortunately, this means that what I have is only updated through 2013. The Conference data begins in 1942.

The table below lists the top five verses cited for speakers in Conference since 1942. I’ve limited it to showing top fives for two groups of people: Q15 members who have at least 500 total verses cited, and female auxiliary leaders who have at least 100 total verses cited. Many of the speakers have a tie in their #5 spot, so I’ve extended the table to show all tied verses, except in a few cases where it would have made the table ridiculously long (e.g., Julie B. Beck has a 25-way tie at #5). I’ve also included a brief quote or summary note on each verse to help jog your memory for verses that are less well-known, and I’ve linked each verse reference to the scriptures at lds.org so you can go read them in full if you’re interested.

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Which GAs Prefer Which Books of Scripture? (Take 3)

This post is a follow-up to my post last week, where I looked at how much members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve (Q15) quote from each of the five books of scripture in the LDS canon in their Conference talks. In the previous post, I showed one breakdown for each Q15 member, aggregating his citations of scripture in all his Conference talks, across whatever period of years he served in the Q15. In this post, I’ll show trends across time for each individual Q15 member. The previous analysis would miss it if a GA changed over time from preferring the Book of Mormon to preferring the New Testament, for example. This analysis might be able to show such changes (if they’re large enough). As for the previous post, my data source is the LDS Scripture Citation Index.

The graphs below show seven-year moving averages for the percentages of citations each Q15 member took from each book of scripture. There’s nothing special about seven years for the moving average. I chose it by eyeball. The year-to-year data often jump around a lot, which isn’t surprising given that for Q15 members who aren’t in the First Presidency, one year’s worth of Conference talks is typically just two talks. Seven years of aggregation looked like a good compromise that smoothed out the yearly variation but didn’t smooth so much that it made changes over time disappear. One other note is that I’ve only made graphs for members who have at least 16 years of data. This allows for 10 years worth of seven-year moving averages to be shown (because the first six years are combined into the initial seven-year moving average).

Graphs for Q15 members are shown in the order they were called, which is the same ordering I used in my previous post. Also, to make it easier to look back and forth between the two posts, I’ve used the same color to represent data for each book of scripture as in the previous post. One warning with these graphs is that the scaling of both the horizontal and vertical axes changes from person to person to best display each Q15 member’s data, so be careful if you’re looking at comparisons across graphs.

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Most Liked Conference Talks (Now with better data!)

I wrote a post last year in which I tried to assess which Conference talks were most liked by Church members. The method I used was very much a kludge: I looked at the change in Facebook likes for each speaker during the session in which he or she gave a talk. Fortunately, a friend pointed out to me that there’s a much simpler way to measure this. The individual web pages for each Conference talk have a count of how many people liked the talk itself on Facebook. So of course this was data that I was interested in going back to look at.

The Facebook like buttons were added to all Conference talks, going back to 1971. Beyond a couple of years ago, of course, there aren’t many likes since most old Conference talks (other than a few classics) probably aren’t referred to all that often. I might go back later and look at the older talks, but for now I was just interested in the Conferences recent enough that someone could hear a talk in Conference, and then later in the week look it up on lds.org and click like, so I limited myself to 2012 through 2014–the last six Conferences.

There are three things to note about the data. First, I got the like counts a couple of days ago, so they’re already out of date. Second, for like counts over 1,000, the like button shows a count in thousands. I got exact counts by querying Graph Search directly. (I found this on stackoverflow somewhere, but now can’t recall where. The method is to point your browser to the URL http://graph.facebook.com/?id=<URL of talk>.) Third, the like counts for the most recent Conference are lower than for previous Conferences, probably because it has only been a few weeks since Conference occurred, and people haven’t had lots of chances to re-read or re-hear a talk and go back and like it.

Here are the ten most liked talks from the past six Conferences.

top 10 talks by likes

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The Incredible Shrinking Statistical Report

If you look back through Church statistical reports released in every April Conference (and who hasn’t?), you find that it’s not exactly the same information that gets reported each year. I don’t mean that the numbers change; I mean that which categories of numbers even get reported change. There has been less change in recent years, but if you look back to the 80s, you’ll find lots of categories of information that used to be reported that aren’t anymore. For example, you’ll find number of babies blessed (last reported in 1988), number of boys and men who hold different priesthood offices (1986),  number of proxy temple ordinances (1984), marriage rate (1983), and number of women in the Relief Society (1977).

I thought it might be interesting to look at what categories of information have been reported in statistical reports at different times, as well as how many total categories of information have been reported. This first graph shows how many line items (separate numbers representing different pieces of information) were in the statistical report each year from 1971 to 2014.

This graph shows the number of line items in the statistical report each year from 1971 to 2014.

line items in statistical reports 1971-2014

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