Discussion of the Name of the Church in Conference

Last fall, after President Nelson made it a point of emphasis that he didn’t want the Church to be called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church, or for its members to be called Mormons, I wrote a post where I asked what this quick turnabout on the “Mormon” label meant for decision-making in the Q15. The theory is that they’re supposed to be unanimous, but this change, particularly so (relatively) soon after things like the Church’s “Meet the Mormons” movie and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign suggested to me that decisions are made by the Church President, and the others just serve as rubber stamps. I wasn’t alone in writing about this, of course. Many other people on the blogs brought up, for example, that Elder Nelson had given a talk on this issue in 1990, to which President Hinckley responded the very next Conference where he gently contradicted Elder Nelson and explained that he had come to peace with the common use of the nickname, and he simply hoped that Church members would strive to make it have positive associations.

After this 1990 back-and-forth, I thought the issue had pretty much lain dormant until President Nelson brought it up last fall, first in an announcement before Conference, and then in a Conference talk. But I’ve been reading through some Conference talks for an unrelated project, and I found that I missed a few related follow-ups.

First, then-Elder Nelson didn’t entirely drop his point after President Hinckley’s talk. In a 1993 talk given at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (that someone must have thought was pretty important, because it’s listed with the October 1993 General Conference talks), he said near the beginning,

I would like to speak of the organization I represent. I would like to speak of the institution and of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the “Mormon” church. That is not its correct name, as many of you may know; it is only a nickname

And again, two years later in a Conference talk, he clearly wanted to bring the issue up again, but, unwilling to openly challenge President Hinckley, he instead slipped in this relatively large footnote to a pretty much wholly unrelated point in his talk. (The footnote is number 37, right after the phrase “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Speaking of correct names, we are reminded of a proclamation given by the Lord: “Thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (D&C 115:4). He did not say, “Thus shall my church be named.” He said, “Thus shall my church be called.” Members have been cautioned by the Brethren, who wrote: “We feel that some may be misled by the too frequent use of the term ‘Mormon Church’” (Member-Missionary Class, Instructor’s Guide, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1982, p. 2).

I don’t know if he thought of it as a response to Elder Nelson, but the very next year, President Hinckley gave a talk where he quoted extensively from an interview he had had with the journalist Mike Wallace. In the parts he quoted, Wallace referred several times to “Mormons,” the “Mormon Church,” and “Mormonism,” and President Hinckley never corrected him.

As far as I can tell (and I’ve done some searches but I haven’t gone over every talk to be sure), the issue wasn’t raised in Conference again until after President Hinckley’s death in 2008. When it came back up, it wasn’t Elder Nelson who brought it up, but Boyd K. Packer. In a 2011 talk that ranged across several topics, he said,

Because of the Book of Mormon, we are frequently called the Mormon Church, a title we do not resent, but it is really not accurate.

After quoting 3 Nephi 27 where Jesus talked about the name of his church, President Packer concluded:

Obedient to revelation, we call ourselves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rather than the Mormon Church. It is one thing for others to refer to the Church as the Mormon Church or to us as Mormons; it is quite another for us to do so.

Interestingly, when he said the Mormon Church is “a title we do not resent,” he was borrowing language from Marion G. Romney (that’s President Romney–eat your heart out, Mitt!) who said in a 1979 talk:

Members of the Church do not resent being referred to as Mormons, nor does the Church resent being referred to as the Mormon church.

President Romney also referred to the Church using its full name in the opening of his talk, but also added that it is “frequently referred to as the Mormon Church.” My reading of their tone is that President Romney really didn’t resent having the Church called the Mormon Church, while President Packer said the Church didn’t resent it in a protesting-too-much way, because he clearly did resent it.

M. Russell Ballard took up the baton from President Packer and gave an entire talk on the issue the very next Conference. He referred to First Presidency letters that encouraged use of the full name of the Church:

Because the full name of the Church is so important, I echo the revelations from the scriptures, the First Presidency’s instructions in letters of 1982 and 2001, and the words of other Apostles who have encouraged the members of the Church to uphold and teach the world that the Church is known by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He also went a step further than President Packer in making completely clear that he thought we should resent the use of “Mormon Church”:

We do not need to stop using the name Mormon when appropriate, but we should continue to give emphasis to the full and correct name of the Church itself. In other words, we should avoid and discourage the term “Mormon Church.”

He took what seems like a realistic approach, though, to the Church’s online presence using the URL mormon.org for public-facing information, and media campaigns referring to Church members as Mormons, accepting that “As a practical matter, those outside of our faith come looking for us searching for that term.”

Elder Ballard also found the issue of the Church’s name important enough that he brought it back up briefly in a 2014 Conference talk.

Anyway, what I think I clearly got wrong in thinking about President Nelson’s push for using the full name of the Church was thinking that it was just his personal gospel hobby that he had brought up in 1990, and nobody else’s. In reality, when he brought this up with the Q15 after becoming Church President, he clearly had President Ballard on his side, and he could point to President Packer as also having been a champion of the cause. And it’s not like the issue had lain dormant for three decades. It had been brought up several times in public, considering the Conference talks and that there was a First Presidency letter in 2001 that then-Elder Ballard referred to. And this means that it was probably discussed far more often in private among the Q15 members.

I do feel like the main point of my post last fall still stands, though. I was clearly wrong in thinking that President Nelson was alone in wanting to make this change. But even if President Ballard was on his side, or even if other Q15 members who haven’t spoken up in Conference about this issue were on his side, the question is still open about how their decision-making works if so many of them felt like mormon.org and “I’m a Mormon” were okay under President Monson, but they now all agree under President Nelson that they’re bad.

One last think I looked at is just how often the full name of the Church is said in Conference, and how often the term “Mormon Church” is used. I used the LDS General Conference Corpus (formerly known as the Mormon Church Conference Corpus [not really]). The graph below shows the number of uses of each of these phrases per million words since 1950. The lighter lines are yearly rates and the darker lines are five-year moving averages.

There’s really not a whole lot to see here. The full name of the Church has, not surprisingly, been used far more often than “Mormon Church” for the entire time period. One possibly interesting point is that it looks like use of “Mormon Church” fell from being uncommon to being even more rare (many years with no references), starting about 1980. I find this interesting because it seems like Elder Nelson, in originally pushing use of the full name of the Church in 1990, might have been reflecting a trend that was already happening, rather than pushing it to happen. This reminds me of an analysis (scroll down to “Tangent 1”) I did a few years ago where I found that the Book of Mormon started being referred to more in Conference in the 1980s, but interestingly, President Benson’s famous talk on the importance of the Book of Mormon came after the shift and not before.

One other thing I should note is that when I looked at individual uses of “Mormon Church” in Conference, most seemed to be in quotes of non-Mormons, er, non-Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members, so it’s not as though GAs were frequently referring to the Church as the Mormon Church. It seems like it’s these references that have been dropped since 1980 or so (and would be extra verboten now), as speakers probably just reduce what they’re quoting to avoid including any references to the “Mormon Church.”

I apologize for beating this dead horse some more, but I thought a couple of bits of information here might be interesting.