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.
In April Conference, President Nelson said the following to the men and boys in priesthood session:
Another way we can also do better and be better is how we honor the women in our lives, beginning with our wives and daughters, our mothers and sisters.
Here he echoed a number of previous statements he’s made about how important it is for men to honor and respect women. For example, in a 1999 talk, he said:
We who bear the holy priesthood have a sacred duty to honor our sisters. . . . We respect sisters—not only in our immediate families but all the wonderful sisters in our lives. As daughters of God, their potential is divine.
And in a 2006 talk, he said this:
[B]rethren, your foremost priesthood duty is to nurture your marriage—to care for, respect, honor, and love your wife. Be a blessing to her and your children.
And in a 1997 talk, he said this:
[S]ome temple marriages fail because a husband forgets that his highest and most important priesthood duty is to honor and sustain his wife. The best thing that a father can do for his children is to “love their mother.”
I’m encouraged that he’s made it a point to repeatedly remind men to be good to the women around us. But of course this isn’t the only thing that he’s said about women in Conference. Actually, when I first read the line from April Conference that I quoted above, it struck me as a little strange, because I was sure I remembered President Nelson saying some less positive things about women in Conference.
I looked back through all of his Conference talks since he was called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 1984 to look for things he said to or about women to get an overall sense of what he thinks of women. I thought this might be especially instructive given that, as has been much discussed on the blogs, President Nelson signaled his distaste for nicknames and shortenings of the Church’s name in a Conference talk back in 1990. Given this, it seems that we might pick up ideas about what he thinks about women more generally by also looking back at his Conference talks. Unfortunately, I found that not all of the things he’s said to and about women have been as nice as the quotes above.
The first pattern I see in his talks that I find troubling is that he’s praised women for being quiet about any complaints they may have. In his first Conference talk after being called, he praised his wife thusly:
Her sacrifices to bring our ten wonderful children into this world, teaching and training them, while always supporting me without a murmur through my responsibilities in the Church and in my profession, are monumental.
