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.
Interesting. Thanks, as always, Ziff.
Question: at the end, you say, “but the trend for the last few Church Presidents certainly does look hopeful.” What do you mean? I’m not challenging you at all; I just didn’t understand what you meant by that sentence.
Wow, thanks for doing this.
It does seem to track what I sensed. Almost 3Xs as many references to President Nelson as to President Benson, and just under/over twice as many as Presidents Hunter and Hinckley. And while President Hunter’s term will become an increasing anamoly, it would be interesting to see if the trend continues after third, fourth, fifth conferences.
But fascinating to see how high it was for President Kimball. I wasn’t expecting that.
Your comment re: President Hunter makes me wonder with President Nelson – was there more first session or second?
Thanks again!
Good question, Hunter, sorry to not be clear. I just meant it looked hopeful for Leonard R’s hypothesis.
You’re welcome, Leonard R! It’s a great question, and I hope to follow up when we have more Conferences in the book for President Nelson, to see what level the references to him settle down to after the initial peak. I’ll have to look into the first-to-second Conference dropoff, and perhaps see how it fits into the larger trend of likely dropoff after a new President’s first Conference.
I live in a country where “the hard sell” is frowned upon. It certainly seemed like there was a hard sell going on. Also some rather unpleasant sycophant behaviour. More appealing to just be judged on his merits.
Ziff, a great post as always. (I’m a little behind in my ZD readings.) Your statistical answers to Mormon questions (and Sam Brunson’s posts on the intersection of tax and church) warm this nerdy Mormon boy’s heart.