May 2020 – Zelophehad's Daughters

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Ziff22 May 202022 May 202011 Comments

The Church released guidelines a couple of days ago for how returning to church meetings will look. Given how quickly the Church acted in closing temples and suspending church meetings as the COVID-19 pandemic started, I’m disappointed that these guidelines don’t seem to take it all that seriously. This post is a laundry list of comments on the Church’s guidelines and a wishlist of guidelines I would like to see before I’d be really comfortable attending church in person again.

Greetings

Mormons are a handshaking people. Sometimes we’re even huggers. These types of greetings aren’t safe with the coronavirus on the loose. The Church’s guidelines do mention this, but only in the context of people known to be sick: “Avoid close contact with people who are sick (this may include avoiding shaking hands or other customary greetings).” This seems to overlook the entire problem we’re facing, which is that people who appear well may be carrying the virus! I wish they would have said more generally something about not engaging in greetings that involve touching other people, and suggesting touchless greetings like waves or bows in their place.

Sacrament

The guidelines suggest that people sit only in every other row in the chapel so that the sacrament can be passed to everyone directly. This is a good step, but I don’t think it goes far enough. A single symptom-free carrier priest could still infect an entire ward in a heartbeat. I like the idea I’ve seen several people suggest of having people bring their own bread and water. The priest would say the sacrament prayer like usual, but it would be blessing the bread and water people already have with them. This would be in keeping with the Church’s statement about the prayer-giver and the emblems having to be in the same location.

I suspect, though, that Church leaders wouldn’t go for such a solution, because it would require possibly non-priesthood-holders to prepare the sacrament, in whatever sense of the word prepare. So I have a more radical solution that is completely in keeping with the guidelines. How about if we have someone stand at the pulpit and say the sacrament prayer, but not to bless any emblems, but rather just to remind us of the sacrament and help us look forward to a time when we can take it again and recommit to live our covenants? This is precisely what the April document “Directions for Essential Ordinances, Blessings, and Other Church Functions” already recommends for people in “unusual circumstances” who don’t have access to the sacrament. Well, now we’re in the unusual circumstance of not being able to take the sacrament together safely, so how about if we put it on hold until we can?

This would take a forward-thinking bishop, but a side advantage of this setup would be that women could be the sacrament prayer readers some weeks. Remember that there’s nothing actually being blessed. It’s just like when individual people read and ponder the sacrament prayers at home, only now we’re in the same room, so we’re having one person read aloud for efficiency. As a believer in the need for women’s ordination, I love the idea of normalizing our hearing the sacrament prayers spoken in women’s voices.

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part III: Comparison between churches

Ziff20 May 20208 June 20204 Comments

How has interest in different churches changed during the coronavirus pandemic? This is a question that occurred to me while I was working on my last couple of posts where I looked at Google Trends data about the LDS Church in particular.

In this post, I’ve gathered Google Trends data on a bunch of different churches and I’ll show daily 2019 vs. 2020 comparisons for each one. I’m only making comparisons to Christian churches, and my list is pretty US-centric, both because I went with what I was most familiar with. Here’s the complete list, along with what Google Trends categorizes each as. Note that I went with what looked like a high-volume search term for each church or denomination, so for example for Methodists I chose the United Methodist Church, but for Baptists, which represents lots of different churches, even the biggest organizations (e.g., Southern Baptist Convention) had far lower volume, so I just went with “Baptists.” In addition to traditional denominations and fringe groups like us and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I included a couple of big megachurches because I understand they’ve been growing a lot relative to the old mainline denominations. I’ve ordered them as fringe groups first, followed by mainstream ones sort of from high (more ritual) to low (less ritual) (based on nothing more than my sense of them), with the megachurches at the end.

Church or belief (Google trends suggested term)	Google trends category
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints	Church
Jehovah’s Witnesses	Denomination
Seventh-Day Adventist Church	Denomination
Catholic Church	Church
Eastern Orthodox Church	Church
Episcopal Church	United States (I guess to differentiate from Anglican churches in other countries?)
Lutheranism	Church
Presbyterianism	Church
United Methodist Church	Denomination
Baptists	Church
African Methodist Episcopal	Church
Pentecostalism	Following
Lakewood Church	Church in Houston, Texas
Saddleback Church	Topic

As commenters on my first post pointed out, in the particular case of the LDS Church, there are reasons to doubt that this is that good a measure of interest in the Church. And what I found in my second post supported that, with far different results for a search term used by members of the Church versus by non-members. Given that difference, with all these other churches that I’m far less familiar with, who even knows what other complications I’m overlooking? There are probably a lot, but I think the data are fun to look at anyway if you just keep your truckload of salt handy.

Also, while I’m bringing up reasons to be leery of the Google Trends data, let me show you something about their scaling that makes me a little crazy. I noticed when I accidentally moved the end date of a time series one day forward or back that it changed the whole rest of the series, rather than just omitting the day in question. This suggests to me that the scaling to 100 that the help mentions isn’t all that Google Trends is doing. Rather, it’s aggregating a bunch of data and probably smoothing it together with some kind of model under the hood.

Here, let me show you what I’m talking about. The graph shows daily results for worldwide searches for “Mormon” from April 1 of this year through different ending days.

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part II: Members vs. non-members

Ziff18 May 20203 Comments

I posted a few days ago about change in interest in church (in the LDS Church in particular) during the coronavirus. I used Google Trends data on searches for the Church. Commenters on the post (and on Facebook) made some excellent points about how differences might be attributable to change in interest from Mormons versus from non-Mormons. In this post, I’m going to make a quick attempt to tease that apart. (Commenters also raised other good critiques, such as that a change in Google Trends data might not reflect a difference in organic interest so much as a structural change in how church is happening during the pandemic, that are beyond the scope of what I will look at in this post.)

My approach is simple. Rather than looking at Google Trends data for just the Church itself, I’ll look at data for two different Mormon-related terms, one that’s more often used by Mormons, and one that’s more often used by non-Mormons. For the term more often used by Mormons, I chose “Come Follow Me,” an excellent suggestion Ardis made on my last post. Given that it’s a pretty well-known statement Jesus made in the New Testament, I wouldn’t have guessed how much its usage would be dominated by Mormons, but it clearly is. Looking at the Google Trends data, here are reasons I think it’s mostly being searched by Mormons:

Search volume is the highest for the US, and within the US, for Utah, followed by Idaho.
There are weekly Sunday peaks that disappear on Conference weekend.
The top five associated search terms Google Trends suggests are all Mormon related.

For the term more often used by non-Mormons, I’m using “Mormon,” which is ideal because President Nelson’s campaign to get us to stop saying it is clearly having an effect on people in the Church, but, not surprisingly, hasn’t been so quickly heeded by people outside the Church. As with “Come Follow Me,” the data looks consistent with the expectation of who’s using it, as the peaks are for Mormon-related news stories rather than for General Conference, when searches for the Church peak.

This graph shows daily results for “Come Follow Me” since the beginning of 2019.

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic

Ziff14 May 20207 Comments

I’ve seen the possibility floated in a number of places (e.g., in this W&T post) that when the Church resumes regular Sunday meetings, fewer people will go back than were attending regularly before the pandemic. I can certainly see the argument for this. It’s much easier to continuously keep up with a practice like weekly church attendance than to stop and start, particularly if there were already barriers making attendance difficult (distance, hearing offensive things, etc.).

I was wondering if there’s any way to forecast the degree to which this might happen by looking at what people are doing now, while not attending church. Of course this is an extremely difficult thing to measure. Not even individual wards, which typically have at least some sense of activity level from sacrament meeting attendance if nothing else, likely have much idea of what’s going on. But Google does. Google Trends tracks what people are searching for online. While this is obviously far from a perfect measure of how engage people still are with church while not attending, it might give us at least a little insight.

There are a few important things to know about Google Trends data:

You can get results by countries, states/provinces, and even metro areas. I wasn’t interested in geographic differences here, so everything I’ll show comes from worldwide results.
It doesn’t give absolute numbers–like the number of people who searched for something–but rather relative search numbers, comparing across search terms or across time for a single search term. It always gives results normed so the highest value is 100.
It lets you search for words (literal searches people have performed) or topics, where related searches about the same thing are aggregated. I chose to search for the topic “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” because I suspect Google is smart enough to aggregate searches like “Mormon church” and “LDS church,” and also because their help says that topics aggregate across languages. I also tried a few other LDS topics, but they gave a far smaller search volume, so for this analysis, I just stuck to that single topic.
You can get results back to 2004 and up to a few days ago. The granularity of the data you get depends on how long a time frame you ask for. If it’s short enough, you get daily data. If it’s longer, you get weekly or monthly. I wanted daily data from January 2019. This is a long enough period that if I asked for it all at once, I got weekly data. My solution was to ask for daily data in a series of three-month periods. Unfortunately, this means that each query for a three-month period was normed to a different maximum value. In order to make the results from the different three-month periods comparable, I set them to overlap a little. By doing this, I got two results for the days that appeared in both periods, and I could use the ratio between the values given for those days in the two periods to re-norm one period so that it was comparable to the other. I used a series of re-norming steps like this to stitch together the entire daily series from January 2019 to May 2020.

The graph below shows relative search volume for the Church for the entire period.

There are two extremely clear patterns: First, there are big spikes at General Conference time. Second, there are weekly spikes every Sunday. Both of these are probably unsurprising.