How General Conference Will Change when Nobody Attends

The Church announced today that the April General Conference will be held in the Conference Center, but that to limit the spread of COVID-19, the public will not be admitted. Only “general authorities, general officers and their spouses, musicians, choirs, technicians, and others” who are participating will be allowed in. I applaud this move. It’s great to see the Church being proactive in helping to limit this disease that WHO just officially labeled a pandemic.

 

I’m wondering, though, how having no audience (or a very small one made up only of spouses of participants) will change Conference. I’ve never been to Conference in person, so I’m just going to be making some guesses, and I look forward to you sharing your thoughts in the comments.

Will they still have sustaings of General Authorities and General Officers?

On the one hand, I can see a real argument for just dispensing with this. It takes time that’s already so limited that we can hardly get a woman speaker in edgewise, for example. We’re already asked to do these sustainings (although not in as much detail, maybe) in semiannual stake conferences and semiannual ward conferences, and we’re asked if we sustain everyone in biannual temple recommend interviews. There’s also precedent for dropping something like this, kind of, in that another administrative part of Conference–the statistical report–has recently been moved to being online only. The sustainings are different in that they’re supposed to be interactive, at least in theory.

Of course in practice, as has been often noted on the Bloggernacle, sustainings have become nothing more than a loyalty test, and there’s no real organizational response to someone voting opposed other than “would you just please leave?” That’s a reason GAs might just as soon get rid of it, as the open nature of the meeting means that occasionally (very occasionally) a few people vote opposed. But given how rare such instances are, and how important Church leaders clearly feel that member loyalty to them is, I suspect they would strongly prefer to keep it. After all, the vast majority of people watching Conference were already watching it remotely, so moving a few thousand more people out of the Conference Center won’t make much difference. I imagine that the cameras will just pan over the few hundred attendees voting to sustain rather than the many thousands that we usually see.

Who will laugh at the jokes?

Most speakers aren’t terribly funny, but a few are. Who will be there to laugh when Elder Uchtdorf tells the tale of the Chewbacca costume? Who will be there to chuckle uncomfortably when President Oaks tells the story of a woman who was worried about polygamy in the next life? Over at T&S a few years ago, David Evans looked at an entire Conference and found about 5.5 discernible laughs per hour by the congregation. I’m guessing that the small audience of spouses will still laugh at the jokes, but it might sound like nothing when there are so few of them in such a gigantic space.

Will the mostly empty room affect the speakers?

I’ve never spoken at a gathering that’s anything like the size of Conference, but I know from my little experience teaching fairly small classes that a speaker can take energy from seeing the engagement in their class or audience. I wonder if the speakers will have a different experience speaking to a largely empty room, and if that difference will show up at all in how they speak. One reason I think we might not see anything different is that many GAs have already had a lot of practice with this format when they speak at broadcast stake conferences. I don’t think these are broadcast from the Conference Center, but at least these would give them experience speaking to an audience they can’t see.

Will the mostly empty room affect MoTab TabCATS?

I’m guessing a clear no on this one. I imagine they must practice a ton, probably at least some of the time in an empty Conference Center. This should be no big deal to them.

Where will the protestors go?

I understand that it’s a Conference tradition for protestors to gather around the Conference Center and Temple Square to remind Church members that they need to find the real Jesus. (Feel free to straighten me out on this if you have experience; I’ve heard there are more evangelical Christian protestors than secular protestors). I assume they’ll know that Conference is off. With all attendees likely arriving by underground passage or whatever that connects all the Church’s buildings nearby, they won’t have a soul to talk to. I assume they’ll just take this Conference off.

Could this be the start of a trend?

I wonder if, having gotten a taste of the simplicity of a Conference without the public, Church leaders might not decide that they actually prefer it this way. As I said above, the only theoretically interactive part–the sustainings–aren’t really that interactive now. Holding a Conference that allows the public in always risks that someone will disrupt it, even if that risk is small. With increasing controversy around the anti-gay parts of the BYU Honor Code, I wonder if GAs are actually breathing a sigh of relief that they don’t have to worry about anything happening this time.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll go back to Conference-as-usual in October. But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if we didn’t. When the Church already urges members not to try to contact leaders, it seems like just the next logical step to bar us from Conference too.