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.

It looks like there has been an increase since maybe the mid-1990s. The five-year moving average was nearly always below 100 through the mid-1980s, but since the mid-1990s, it has been over 150 a few times and has never fallen back below 100.

One phrase that I was sure I would find was “stay on the covenant path,” but it looks like the preferred phrasing might be to “keep on the covenant path.” Keep certainly isn’t a synonym of stay, but it definitely seems to me that it’s in a nearby space, semantically. I looked keep up in the Corpus and found this:

The overall level is quite a bit higher, but there is some similarity in patterns over time. Specifically, the five-year moving average in the past few years is as high as it has ever been since 1950, just like in the stay graph.

One last search I did was to check for stay and its synonyms (which the Corpus helpfully allows you to do by just putting an equals sign before a word: =stay). Here is the result:It’s not quite as clear as in the previous two graphs, but it does look like the highest five-year moving averages have occurred since about 2013, although there is also a little dip in there.

The results of these searches are at least consistent with the idea that GAs have been talking more about people leaving the Church in recent years. It’s just a couple of pieces of data, and far from conclusive, but still, I find it interesting to see that these results match up with what I would have expected.