Showing all posts in June 2021

In General Conference

General Conference Was Different in the 1960s (even setting aside the talks)

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

I recently flipped through reports of General Conference from the 1960s (to get lists of speakers for my last post, as they’re only listed on the Church website back to 1971). I didn’t read through the talks, but even just looking at what the men conducting each session said, several things struck me that are different from my experience watching Conference, which started in the 1980s.

  • David O. McKay used to conduct every single session. Starting from April 1960, the first time someone else conducted a session was in April 1962, when he allowed Hugh B. Brown to break his streak. And I didn’t check how far back into the 1950s it went. He might have been doing it for a decade. I have to admit that if, say, Russell M. Nelson had started doing this when he became Church President, it would strike me as overly controlling.
  • Through October 1962, all new wards, stakes, and stake presidents were announced in Conference. It’s striking how much smaller the Church was that that could even be a possibility. I remember as a kid, hearing the story of how Spencer W. Kimball was called from being a stake president to being a member of the Q12, and how amazing that was. He was called in 1943. Given the size of the Church at that time, that seems much less remarkable than I had thought (and than it had been taught to me).
  • The sustaining of Church officers included listing David O. McKay as trustee-in-trust for the Church. I don’t think I learned of the Church’s corporate structure until I read this series of posts by Daymon Smith at BCC a decade ago.
  • Conference used to take three days, and was timed to always have one of the days fall on April 6th, even if it meant having the days be non-consecutive.
  • The men conducting Conference used to often announce a rolling list of the next two speakers. For example, they’d announce that Elder A and Elder B would speak. Then Elder A would speak, and the man conducting would announce Elder B and Elder C.

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In General Conference, Statistics

General Conference Talks by Speaker Position Since 1960

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

How many women will speak in General Conference now that the Church has announced that it’s discontinuing Saturday night gender-specific sessions? This was the major question I asked in my post last week on this change. I worry that we’ll go back to just having two women speak per Conference, the norm for the last several years when you ignore gender-specific sessions. Some commenters on the post were more optimistic that there would be more, though.

I was wondering about which other group of speakers (i.e., holders of what position–Seventies, Q12, or whatever) might have their speaking opportunities reduced to make space for more women speaking. I thought it could be helpful to look back at recent history, to see how many speaking slots the different positions have been allocated. I went back to 1960, because that turned out to be a good compromise between getting a good amount of data and me running out of energy.

Of course the total number of talks per Conference isn’t constant. This graph shows the average number of talks per Conference each year. I’m showing the average each year instead of showing the talk counts Conference by Conference because there’s often a lot of up-and-down noise between April and October (for reasons like the statistical and auditing reports only occurring in April) that makes the trend across time harder to look at. Averaging each year smooths those little ups and downs out, although you can see there’s still plenty of year-to-year variation.

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In Church Policy, General Conference

General Conference, Now 20% Shorter!

Author ZiffPosted on 22 Comments

The Church announced yesterday that, starting with October Conference this year, the Saturday evening session (priesthood in April, women’s in October) will be discontinued. I have a few thoughts on this change, but they don’t really hang together at all, so I’m just going to list them.

  • I’m all for fewer meetings, particularly in General Conference. Ten hours of meetings over a weekend is a lot! I appreciate President Nelson’s willingness to tinker with Church practices and not just assume that the way things have been must be the way things will be.
  • As I read former Ordain Women board member Heather Olson Beal pointing out elsewhere online, it seems like this change can be traced to OW’s actions several years ago where women asked to be admitted in person to the priesthood session. In response, clearly in an attempt to take the wind out of OW’s sails, the next year the Church started broadcasting and streaming the priesthood session like it did other sessions. But now that this session is available to anyone, the Church’s announcement reasons, what’s the point of having it at all?
    This change is being made because all sessions of general conference are now available to anyone who desires to watch or listen.
    This argument seems odd to me. It says that the crucial characteristic that made priesthood session priesthood session was that it was closed, and no random people (especially not women, apparently) could listen in. I had always thought that what made priesthood session different was the content: there are talks there directed to priesthood holder that don’t really apply to non-priesthood holders.
  • It’s not at all surprising that with the ending of priesthood session, women’s session is also ended. It does seem like the “if it’s not closed, what’s the point” argument does not apply to women’s session, so that’s not a reason to end it. But of course, in a patriarchal church, it would be surprising if women got to do an extra thing that men weren’t doing. So the end of priesthood session also means the end of women’s session.
  • It seems inevitable to me that the ending of the gender-specific sessions won’t end speakers in Conference wanting to talk to only men or only women. This will just mean that these talks will now occur in the remaining general sessions. I’m guessing that there will be more talks aimed specifically at men than specifically at women, although perhaps this will be a good thing, considering how often talks aimed at women are about enforcing gender roles.
  • As Peggy Fletcher Stack and Scott D. Pierce’s article points out, this change will almost certainly lead to fewer women speaking in Conference, as the women’s session was typically a chance to hear from three women, even if few spoke in the general sessions. This graph shows the number of women (including one YW who spoke last year) speaking each Conference since 2010. Up until the women’s session and priesthood session started alternating in April and October, there were typically two women speaking in the general sessions, plus three more in the women’s session. (The graph includes the RS and YW meetings before they were official Conference sessions.) It seems likely that two women speaking per conference is the norm we’ll go back to. This change will flow through to the rest of the curriculum too, which is so much all Conference all the time now, and we’ll hear from hardly any women at all. I’d like to hope that this was an unintended side effect of the change, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was a very much intended effect.

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In GA's

Fifteen Men, Fifteen Churches

Author ZiffPosted on 29 Comments

It seems to me that President Nelson’s willingness to push his gospel hobbies idiosyncratic ideas on the Church as revelation really opens up new possibilities for how dramatically the Church might change in the future as other Q15 members take over the top spot. Of course the direction the Church took was always going to depend on who was Church President, but at least to me, it had felt in the past like the range of possible futures was pretty narrow, regardless of who the President was. Now, with President Nelson having opened the door to possibly more dramatic changes, I wonder if future Church Presidents will also jump at the opportunity to push their unique vision on the Church. Of course they might not, but that’s much less fun to speculate about.

One thing this made me think of is that I could put each of the current Q15 members on a spectrum of how they think the Church should look, from the most fundamentalist to the most progressive. I’m not thinking of fundamentalist here as meaning anything specific to polygamy, as it often does in a Mormon context. Rather, I mean more a general black-and-white scriptural literalist pro-gender roles type of view like it means in religion more generally. Also, I’m not thinking of progressive in an absolute sense, like compared to say other churches that might be considered progressive, but rather progressive compared to our recent history and what otherwise might be expected for our future. In the graphic below, I’ve put each member on a five-point scale, based on my sense from what he’s said in Conference and other venues. I’m sure you’ll disagree with me on at least some of them, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. For sure, the men I’ve put in the “status quo” position I feel like I have the least sense of, so perhaps that could better be thought of as a “heck if I know!” category.

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