A Heretic Reviews 20 Years of His Own Blogging

As of this year, I’ve been blogging at ZD for two decades! This is about 40% of my life, longer than I’ve held any one job, and longer than I’ve lived in any one US state. I spent a lot of time in graduate school, so it still isn’t quite as long as the total amount of time I was in school. And I’ve been married quite a bit longer than I’ve been blogging. But still, it’s a long freaking time! Of course, a lot of my persistence is just technological stubbornness, as interest in the blogs leaked away first to text-based social media, and then even further to social media based on images and videos, while I’ve just hung around here in my comfort zone. It’s also fringe Mormonism stubbornness, as it seems like a lot of people on the edges either eventually leave or (less often, I think) return to being more in the mainstream of the Church, while I’ve stayed in largely the same place over time.

I’ve been thinking back over what I’ve blogged about over the years, and I thought it might be fun to do a review of my blogging in kind of the format of my Conference reviews. (For a different take, back in 2019, I did a more data-and-chart review of myself.) Like in those posts, some of the categories are more objective and others more subjective, so I understand if you disagree with my selections. And of course it’s particularly difficult to evaluate my own work, as even posts I look back on now and maybe cringe at were still things that I thought a lot about and in many cases did a lot of data collection for. So what I’m saying is that I understand if you see my evaluations of my posts as clearly being done with rose-colored glasses.

Total posts: 442

Most posts in a year: 33, in 2015

Most posts in a quarter: 12, in 2015Q2

Most posts in a month: 6, in November, 2015, the month when the Exclusion Policy came out

Last month in which I failed to post: July, 2018. (I realize posting once a month is a low bar, but I’m not the most energetic blogger.)

Favorite titles:

• The Selfish Gene (-ral Authority)
• The Incredible Shrinking Statistical Report
• Mary, did you know . . . you need to cover up?

Least favorite title: Pewferences

Phoning it in titles:

• I’ve used variations on the phrase “correlated cards for Valentine’s Day” for five different posts.
• I’ve also used variations on the phrase “Conference predictions” for four different posts.

Longest title: A Mother There or Multiple Mothers There? A look at whether GA statements about Heavenly Mother leave the door open for polygamy

Shortest title: Stay

Wannabe academic title: Distal Effects of Missionary Age Changes

Worst title typo: Different Way [sic] the Handbook Says “Don’t”

Most graphs: Nacle Numbers, 2003-2008, Part 2: The Blogs had 45 graphs, followed closely by Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?, which had 44.

Fewest graphs: A ton of posts tied with zero.

Favorite graph: I particularly like this graph I made for a 2024 post that shows estimated shifting of patrons from temple to temple in Utah when one temple is closed. I think it’s most fun because it’s so unusual for me. Mostly I just make tons of line and bar graphs.

Least favorite graph: The graph in this 2020 post where I counted which Q15 members were following Russell M. Nelson’s exhortation to post about gratitude on social media looks really ugly to me now. I didn’t choose colors or bar spacing well.

Most images: Do Scripture Stories ever depict heavenly people of color? had 210 images, because I included every image I found of a heavenly being across the illustrated scripture stories so any interested reader could check my work.

Favorite stock image: I really like how bleak and forlorn this one looks. I used it with my post You can be happy when you’re dead.

Posts that were clearer in my head than how they came out:

• Optimally (un)reasonable commandments
• Harm by Individuals, Harm by Systems
• Ideas I Accepted Uncritically
• Mormon Fundamentalism and LDS Fundamentalism

Longest-running series:

• Bloggernacle funniest comments (18 years)
• Predicting who will be Church president (not exactly a series, but I’ve been writing similar posts on the topic since 2009, and all the way through this year)

Fastest series: Church interest during the pandemic — I wrote three posts on this in six days in May, 2020, and was done with it.

Series on the decline:

• Bloggernacle funniest comments — The Bloggernacle is so much smaller and less busy than it used to be that I have had a lot less material to work with in recent years.
• GA/Scripture Valentines — GAs aren’t giving memorable talks often enough for me to have easily-recognizable source material, so I’ve paused this one for a while.

Series I should have started sooner: Conference review — This really plays to my strengths (at least the way I do it), like willingness to read through a lot of source material to find interesting tidbits, rather than requiring really deep analysis.

Series I’ve enjoyed less over time: Predicting who will be Church president — This one has been a lot of fun, and I appreciate that it’s a consistently hot topic, as with each new Q15 member passing, and each new one called, there’s renewed interest. I have come to see, though, that going to the length of using a mortality table and making all the graphs is overkill, as the table is never going to do a good job of predicting lifespans for the individual men in the Q15.

Favorite satires:

• A Correlated Mormon Gender Issues Survey
• An Agenda for President Nelson’s First 40 Days in Office
• Captain Trumponi and the Title of Biglity
• Rejected Names for Church Wi-Fi Networks
• The Wickeness of Hand-washing

Least favorite satires:

• Elder Wickman Warns of “Powerful Coastal Forces”
• Gospel Topics Essay Redirects
• Two Is the New Three
• Increase, decrease; To-may-to, to-mah-to
• Seven Little-known Perks of Being a GA

Favorite April Fool’s post: Trump to Resign Presidency to Become Mormon General Authority

Least favorite April Fool’s post: Prepentance

Favorite personal posts:

• Random Memories of Growing Up a Neurotic Mormon
• Don’t Ask. Don’t Seek. Don’t Knock.

Most comments: A Modest Bit of Data, my first look at modesty rhetoric in Church magazines, in 2011, drew 102 comments.

Fewest comments: Ten posts tied with zero.

Longest post: My Nacle Notebook 2008: Interesting Comments, 18,307 words

Longest post that isn’t mostly quotes or data tables: My April 2025 heretic’s review of General Conference was 6,542 words. It’s actually number 18 overall, behind a bunch of funniest comments collection posts, my 2024 post where I analyzed 12,000 comments (and quoted 100 favorites) on the Church’s Instagram post after J. Anette Dennis said no other organization had given more power to women than the Church, some Nacle Numbers posts from the very early years of the blogs, and my collection of appreciative quotes about Feminist Mormon Housewives from 2010.

Shortest post: My first two Valentine’s Day posts just had images, and zero words.

Favorite data analysis:

• I really liked how this 2020 post turned out, where I looked at arguments on the Church’ Newsroom’s Facebook post after the Church congratulated Joe Biden on his win in the US presidential election.
• I was also particularly happy with this 2024 post I mentioned above where I read and categorized 12,000 comments on a Church Instagram post quoting J. Anette Dennis.

Favorite analysis, non-number-crunching category:

• Church Rhetoric on Abortion and Why Members Are Generally Pro-life — I felt like reading through a bunch of GA comments on abortion really made clear to me that while they might say in the Handbook that abortion is okay under some circumstances, they expect that if women are truly righteous, they’ll never make use of them and actually get an abortion.
• No, there have not been 30 talks about child abuse in General Conference since 1976 — Responding to this claim by the Church in 2016 was right in my wheelhouse, since I’m always searching through Conference talks and counting things up in them.

Favorite data analysis, community-building category: It’s from a long-ago time now, but I enjoyed how my 2008 post where I looked at how much people commented on various blogs across the Bloggernacle drew lots of attention and discussion and made the Bloggernacle feel like a slightly warmer place.

Favorite data analysis, actually discovering new information:

• With this 2014 post, I found that Q15 members who had more children were more prone to cite Genesis 1:28 (about multiplying and replenishing) in their Conference talks.
• With this 2018 post, I found that women really do like Dieter F. Uchtdorf more than men, at least in the sense of clicking “like” on Facebook.
• I thought it was cool that I found when working on this 2022 post that the assemblers of the 1985 hymnal pretty consistently sped up the tempos of hymns being retained from the previous version.

Least favorite data analysis:

• They always say the same thing in Conference — I wrote one post on Conference talk redundancy in 2013, and had done a bunch of work to gather the data and was planning more posts, but I never went back to it. My whole method for assessing redundancy didn’t work very well, and the questions I was looking at weren’t terribly interesting.
• Do Utah and Idaho use more unusual names than other states do? — The Social Security name data I used to look at this was really interesting, but the approach I used was over-focused on a weird measure. I hope to revisit this question at some point.
• General Conference Talk Complexity by Speaker (and by Session) — It was a fun idea, but looking at reading level of different speakers’ Conference talks didn’t really turn up anything interesting.

Least successful post category: Book reviews — Actually, calling my posts about books I’ve read “reviews” is kind of overstating it. They more boil down to here’s a brief summary and some thoughts I had on this fun book. In any case, it’s clearly not a post type I draw much discussion with.

Most surprisingly successful post category: Music — I have no musical skill of any kind, but clearly it’s a topic a lot of people like to discuss, because even when I write my layperson’s musings about hymns (e.g., favorite and least favorite lines, musings on the new hymnal), a lot of people comment.

Things that have changed since I blogged about them:

• In 2006, I wondered how the shortage of Mormon men could be solved. Recently, it seems like women are leaving the Church more.
• I asked in 2007 why the Church still kept the Handbook under lock and key. In 2020, the Church put the Handbook on their website so everyone could read it.
• Also in 2007, I wondered why the Church discouraged women from serving missions, with Gordon B. Hinckley’s 1997 talk saying missionary work was “essentially a priesthood responsibility” remaining the last word. Since the 2010s, though, discouragement has been reduced or maybe even removed. In 2012, Thomas S. Monson announced the minimum age for women was lowered from 21 to 19, and he used softer language, saying to women “we welcome your service.” Women’s minimum age was then lowered from 19 to 18 just last year, and Dallin H. Oaks said it was fine for missionaries to meet their marriage partner on their mission. As a result, about a third of missionaries are now women.
• In 2010, I suggested the Church might start dropping older content from its website rather than keeping its current archive of General Conference and magazine material going back to 1971. Although they haven’t removed older material generally, they have removed it selectively (e.g., Boyd K. Packer’s “To Young Men Only” isn’t available, even though it was a Conference talk) or edited it (e.g., Hartman Rector, Jr.’s speculations about the origins of homosexuality were edited out of his 1981 Conference talk) or added disclaimers (for example, to this 1973 Ensign article, “Strengthening the Patriarchal Order in the Home”).
• Also in 2010, I suggested some reasons for moving to a one-hour block on Sundays during the holidays. In 2024, the Church announced that we’d do this for Christmas and Easter.
• I first blogged about Church modesty rhetoric aimed at teens in 2011. When I looked back at the question last year, I found it has declined markedly over the last decade.
• In 2014, I complained about the absolutist language in For the Strength of Youth that set up standards that were impossible to achieve and not actually good goals to aim for. In 2022, the Church announced a new pamphlet that’s much more focused on principles.
• In 2021, I looked at what fraction of new temples were announced in Conference. In 2025, just after Russell M. Nelson’s death, Dallin H. Oaks announced that new temple announcements would no longer be made in Conference.

(To be clear, I’m not claiming that my blogging played any kind of a causal role in any of these changes. If there’s any relationship between what I blogged and what the Church did, it’s probably one of common cause: GAs saw some of the same issues I did and came up with some of the same solutions.)

A question you might ask is how much longer I’ll keep this blogging up, as a lone man in the blog of Zelophehad. I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s safe to say not another twenty years! I’ll keep going as long as I’m still having fun with some little projects and some silliness and as long as at least a few people read and engage. So if you’ve read or commented for any fraction of the past two decades, thank you so much!