Guest – Zelophehad's Daughters

Go to the Smarthouse of the Lord

Guest17 October 202418 October 20246 Comments

This guest post comes from Zatch, who last year also shared “Go to the ~~House~~ Mansion of the Lord.”

My spouse and I were talking earlier about the challenge of staffing all those new temples. Clearly steps have already been taken to limit the number of personnel required to operate a temple:

Recorded movies/slideshows instead of live actors in the endowment presentation
Digitization (bar codes on ordinance cards)
Minimizing physical contact in the endowment ceremony
Removing laundries, cafeterias

At one point in our conversation my spouse joked that maybe they’ll just use AI to fill in the gaps. That got us thinking about the role of technology in the temple, and how it could be used to further reduce the staffing footprint required. We came up with the following ideas, arranged roughly in order of most to least feasible (or least to most wacko):

Digital translation – Bilingual temple workers are great, but your smartphone can deliver a live translation of your rote ordinance recitation just as easily.
Automated entry kiosks replacing workers at the recommend desk. Would be easy-peasy to implement; I go through three of these on my way to work every morning: one to get on the metro, one to get into my building, and one to get into my corridor.

In Fun, Statistics

Church President Probabilities: 10,000 Possibilities

Guest30 September 20243 Comments

Frequent commenter DaveW used the results of the Monte Carlo simulation from my last post on Church president probabilities to put together this fun follow-up post (and as an added bonus, he corrected an error in my post that came up from cutting off the simulation at 360 months).

I love numbers and spreadsheets and attempts to predict the future that rarely work out, so I’ve been a long time fan of Ziff’s work in projecting the future of the presidency of The Church. Longtime readers will be familiar with his Church President Probability posts going back to 2015. Ziff has done an admirable job of building a model and running 10,000 simulations to compile a view of things that are likely to occur with the presidency of the church. But I’ve always wondered, what about the improbable scenarios? What are the craziest outcomes in his 10,000 simulations that aren’t likely to happen, but still certainly could? Well, Ziff has been kind enough to let me look through his results, and now I guess he’s letting me share them here on ZD.

These uncommon outcomes come from Ziff’s work, so he deserves most of the credit here, but I did make one small improvement. His simulations only went 30 years into the future, which is generally pretty good for talking about the lifespans of senior citizens, but in some instances we needed a few more years to see how things would play out, so I extended his forecasts as much as an additional 20 years, so we can really see the outliers. One impact is that Ziff is slightly underestimating the odds that Kearon will become president some day (it’s more like 38%, not 34%), and the average time as president is a bit higher for the younger apostles (Kearon’s average should be more like 6 years, not 4).

Like all the super hero movies they seem to make now, these 10,000 simulations open us up to 10,000 possible universes. Almost anything can happen in the multiverse. So let’s explore some strange new worlds

World 2803: Some things can last forever?
The Q15 stay very healthy, and Andersen is surprisingly the next to go in 2027. Then Oaks goes in 2031 just before his 99th birthday, followed quickly by Uchtdorf that same year. In 2033 we lose Eyring (99), and Christofferson and Gong. Cook lasts until age 96 in 2037, and Holland until age 99 in 2039. And who is still in the biggest of the red chairs through all of this? Nelson, who makes it to his 120th birthday before finally turning the keys over to Bednar in September 2044. No one else reached 120 in any of the simulations. Eyring was the only one to crack 115, with 1 scenario where he made it to 118. The chart below shows the presidential succession through all the current Q15 for the simulation. (The x-axis shows the month and year.)

In Statistics, Temple

Go to the House Mansion of the Lord

Guest5 July 202329 Comments

This guest post comes to ZD courtesy of Zatch. Zatch is a lapsed physicist living and working in Washington DC with his wife, son, and another kid on the way. Zatch’s Bloggernacle credentials are that one time he was in this Borderlanders article under his alter ego Zeke: https://forthosewhowonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Adolscent-Borderlanders1.pdf

In high school, I was voted “most likely to never buy a car,” and in college my wife studied urban planning. Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that, after recently attending a cousin’s wedding in the Draper Temple, one of the first things we talked about was how inaccessible the Draper Temple is to anyone without a car. For those who don’t know, the Draper Temple is far up on the hillside, 3+ miles (5+ km) from and 500+ feet (155+ meters) of elevation above the freeway. Unless you are into hiking or mountain biking (things we actually saw people doing on the way in), it is not easy to get there without a car.

This is actually a conversation my spouse and I have a lot. Between work, school, missions, etc. the two of us have lived in at least 8 temple districts across the US. Ignoring Utah for a moment (a place where they literally built cities around the temple), nearly every temple near which we’ve lived has been located not in the city it is named for, but rather one of the city’s wealthy suburbs:

Tucson -> Catalina Foothills
Indianapolis -> Carmel
Detroit -> Bloomfield Hills
Atlanta -> Sandy Springs
Oakland -> Oakland, but up a steep hill from downtown and still in a wealthy neighborhood
Washington D.C. -> Kensington, MD

My personal inclination is that the entire temple-going experience favors those with money. If it were up to me, clothing rental would be free, childcare would be provided, and we’d be opening more cafeterias instead of shutting them down (especially since, as I’ve claimed without evidence, many temples are in wealthy residential areas without places to eat). But that is a rant for another post.* Today I want to focus on one specific aspect of temple attendance: getting there.

Assumptions

I started from the most recent list of temples on the church website. From there, I filtered out any that have not yet had a location announced, but I did include several that are currently under construction but where the location has been announced. I cut out any temples that were named for geographic features rather than cities (e.g. Gila Valley, Mount Timpanogos). This left me with a list of 212 temples, which I grouped into regions using the same bins that Ziff used in his most recent temple-related post.

As my measure of “ease-of-access,” I used Google Maps to estimate how long it takes to travel from the city center (as defined by Google) to the temple, traveling by 1) car, 2) public transit, and 3) foot.** I set the departure time to 7am on a Saturday to avoid issues from current local traffic. The choice to use city center as a point of origin is easily the weakest point of my analysis, but I still think it’s a reasonable assumption for a couple of reasons:

For members who live in the specified city, you could assume (and this is clearly an assumption) that they are randomly scattered throughout the city such that on average they live near the city center. Some will live in the northwest, some in the southeast, but hopefully those differences all cancel each other out when you include enough people.
For members who do not live in the specified city and who must arrive by bus, train, or other public transit, I think it’s plausible that they would be dropped off at a terminal somewhere near the city center and then continue to the temple from there.

I thought about using the nearest (non-temple adjacent) meetinghouse as a point of origin instead of the Google-appointed city center, but that would have at least doubled the effort so I didn’t do it. This might give us a better indicator of the average member location than what I did, so please let me know if anyone gives it a try.

Results

The first question I decided to answer is “How many temples are accessible by public transit?”

I noticed that some of the Utah temples (e.g. Ogden) were showing no public transit option even though I know for a fact that’s not true. Given that the Ogden temple is two blocks from what I would consider the city center, I’m guessing Google has a hidden “why on earth would you take a bus for this?” feature. To compensate, I added a 15-minute walking distance filter; that is, if you can walk from the Google-declared city center to the temple in 15 minutes or less, it counts as having a public transit option. The following table shows the number of temples in each region, and the percentage of temples inaccessible via public transit.

Region	# of temples in region	# with no public transit	% with no public transit
Africa	8	6	75.00%
Asia & Pacific	32	10	31.25%
Europe	14	1	7.14%
Latin America & Caribbean	53	25	47.17%
Eastern North America	27	9	33.33%
Western North America	54	17	31.48%
Utah	24	7	29.17%
Worldwide	212	75	35.38%

In Uncategorized

Take a Survey About Spirituality During the Pandemic

Guest24 June 2020

From a PhD student in Counseling Psychology at BYU:

“What we believe makes a real difference. Decades of research shows that religious beliefs affect individuals’ emotional well-being, including depression and anxiety levels. Believers tend to report greater peace, gratitude, and hopefulness than non-believers. However, we all experience troubles. As we experience increased isolation and hardships associated with COVID 19, our mental health can be affected. Researchers seeking to understand how our spirituality influences our emotional lives during this trying time invite you to participate in a brief 15-minute survey. We will report the results of this research on our blog in the future. Thank you for sharing your experiences!”

All participants are eligible to receive one of three $50 Amazon eGift cards given at random (odds of winning are about 1 in 200).

Link to survey

In Church Life

Pregnancy Prophets!

Guest10 January 20204 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Josiah of the blog Josiah Reckons.

We love babies at our church! Our community is excited when someone in the ward is going to have a baby. People are quick to congratulate and offer support.

My wife and I had three children while in our 20’s. People gave encouragement, clothes, toys, food, and support in many other ways. Our church can be very supportive of couples with children.

Specious Signs

In our excitement, we love to talk about pregnancy and babies with expecting parents, but we can get carried away in our enthusiasm. Sometimes we start to think we are pregnancy prophets. We think we are seers seeing the signs of the times. And sometimes we say things that lead to awkward revelations like “Not Pregnant!”.

Being sick last week, and bloated this week is not the same as being pregnant. Gaining a little weight is not the same as being pregnant. Not bouncing back to pre-pregnancy weight ‘fast enough’ is not the same as being pregnant again. Working a couple of weekends and then showing up to church looking tired is not the same as being pregnant. Use your imagination, there are lots of possible reasons a person might look similar to someone in the early stages of pregnancy.

In Children, GA's, Statistics

Family size and church leadership

Guest20 May 201821 May 20189 Comments

This guest post comes to us courtesy of Christian N. K. Anderson.

Recently, a friend told me her bishop came up to her, touched her belly, and asked, “Sister, when are you going to bring more spirit children into the world?” In a similar vein, an Elders Quorum President recently told a different friend in a different state that it was too bad she had only three children, as he had seven and they were all successful. The five married couples in my wife’s family have so far collectively produced one child, and we routinely swap stories of being criticized or asked openly by virtual strangers to justify this state of affairs. Why does this happen so frequently?

One of the ways Jello-Belt LDS culture is increasingly out-of-step with contemporary US culture is the belief that fecundity is positively correlated with virtue. Some of this no doubt stems from over-the-pulpit exhortations that “The commandment to multiply and replenish the earth has never been rescinded” (Packer, Apr 2015, compare first paragraph of the FamProc), the fetishizing of the family (as an institution, but with vigorous legal opposition to many instantiations of LDS families), and explicit direction to have children even when financially unable to do so (Andersen, Oct 2011; quoted and enhanced in the Eternal Family Sunday School manual). This empowers people like the bishop and EQP mentioned above to feel no qualms about intruding themselves into what would otherwise be a profoundly personal decision: they are simply encouraging fellow saints to become better humans by performing the Kantian categorical morally good act of having another child (no matter the circumstances) the same way they might encourage a fellow saint to forgive an enemy or visit a sick member.

These beliefs and rhetoric are increasingly anachronistic, not just in contemporary US culture, but among LDS members, and also among the LDS leaders who continue to make these sweeping generalizations. While a 2015 lesson manual encourage teachers to express disapproval for a US fertility rate that has dropped 45% since 1960, it fails to mention that rate at which LDS members reported their children fell by 70% over a far briefer period: from 24.2 children of record per 1000 members as recently as 1982 to 7.32 in the year of the manual’s publication. It has continued to decrease to 6.62 according to the most recent April 2018 statistical report. Of course, this is tracking children of record, not total number of births; with activity dropping below 33% in the US and 15% in Central America, a large number of babies born to nominal members are likely never recorded by ward clerks. Nevertheless, I expected this underreporting to be partially offset by church growth in countries with birth rates far higher than the United States’.

In Fun

New Gospel Topics Essay

Guest21 September 20176 Comments

ZD is pleased to share this post from Moss.

In theology and practice, BYU Dining Services embraces the universal beverage spectrum. Latter-day Saint scripture and teachings affirm that God loves all of His children and makes refreshment available to all. God created the many diverse drinks and libations and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.”

The structure and organization of BYU encourage a variety of beverages. Latter-day Saints attend eateries according to the geographical boundaries of their local ward, or congregation. By definition, this means that the culinary composition of Mormon diets generally mirrors that of the wider local community. The Church’s lay ministry also tends to facilitate integration: a Pepsi-drinking bishop may preside over a mostly Sprite congregation; a woman with a Dr Pepper in each hand may be paired with another woman who enjoys Coke Zero to visit the homes of a thirsty membership. Church members of different levels of caffeination regularly minister in one another’s homes and serve alongside one another as teachers, as youth leaders, and in myriad other assignments in their local congregations. Such practices make The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a thoroughly hydrated faith.

Despite this modern reality, for much of its history—from the mid-1950s until 2017—BYU did not serve caffeinated beverages anywhere on its campus.

In General Conference, Statistics

The Slowing of Church Growth

Guest10 April 201710 April 201715 Comments

This post comes to us from Christian Anderson, a biostatistician living in San Diego county. He previously guest posted on mentions of Heavenly Parents in General Conference.

In the Saturday Afternoon Session of General Conference on Apr 1, 2017, the church announced a membership of 15,882,417. Combined with last year’s total, this represented an increase of 248,218 members and 1.59%. For many denominations, this would be a banner year. However, for the LDS church it represents a remarkable underperformance relative to historical trends and enthusiastic predictions by some members.

Absolute growth
In terms of absolute growth, the addition of nearly a quarter million members is still a substantial achievement. After all, the church didn’t reach 250,000 members total until 1897. However, since 1984 the church had reported growth of at least that magnitude for 32 consecutive years until last Saturday. Reported is an important word here, as membership totals reported in General Conference were rounded off to the nearest 10,000 from 1984-1991, and there are several statistical anomalies in the various time series suggesting that totals sometimes reflect incomplete reports (usually reflected by an anomaly in the opposite direction in the next year).

In Heaven

Gays and the Mormon Afterlife

Guest9 January 20176 Comments

This guest post comes from a regular ZD reader going by the name of Humboldt.

Yesterday, I was talking to my mom about a mutual acquaintance of ours who happens to be gay. He’s the son of a very strong Mormon family that mentored my parents and our family decades ago. He and I went to BYU at about the same time, so I know him too. We were talking about some family photos that had been posted on Facebook, when my mom made the comment that it’s a good thing that our mutual acquaintance isn’t married. Her implication was that gay marriage was intrinsically so wrong, so disordered, so sinful, that it would be better for gay people to live life alone than be married. This was a pretty shocking idea to me, so rather than ask her more about why she would say this, I moved the conversation along, as I usually do when I’m feeling threatened. Read More

In GA's, General Conference, Heavenly Mother, Statistics

Heavenly Parents at Conference

Guest1 November 20163 November 201613 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Christian Anderson.

It’s always nice to hear how the old folks at home are doing. It seems like we’ve been hearing more and more about Them recently.

Back in April 2013, Ziff (https://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2013/04/29/heavenly-parents-are-we-really-talking-about-you-more/ and references therein) noted that there seemed to be an increasing number of references to “Heavenly Parents” in General Conference and more widely in church materials. This post discusses three aspects of that trend: 1) It has not only continued but accelerated over the last three years, 2) there has been a shift in which authorities are mentioning Them, and 3) the fraught issue of capitalization.

An accelerating trend

Few speakers mentioned Heavenly Parents in the decades before 1995, with an average of 0.48 references per year (that’s both April and October conferences combined). That all changed with “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”, which affirms in its third sentence that each human being is “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents”, triggering seven references to Heavenly Parents that year. In the years 1996-2012, references to “Heavenly Parents” nearly tripled to 1.41 references per year (p=0.0057), but never more than three in any one year. 2013 saw a spike to a record nine references, followed by a fall back to one reference in 2014, a return to nine references in 2015, and finally a grand total of 15 references this year. Exactly half of the 56 talks that mention Heavenly Parents have been delivered in the last four years.

In Uncategorized

Of Persecution, Polygamy, and Youth Treks

Guest4 July 20149 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Greg Nelson. Greg lives in Allen, Texas, with his wife and three kids, and has business degrees from both BYU and BYU-Idaho.

“In many ways, I feel about the Church the same way I feel about my family…I and my siblings might go on for hours about what’s wrong with the family, but let an outsider say one negative thing and my claws will come out. I fight it and complain about it, and it’s so deeply woven into my identity that I can’t imagine who I would be without it.” –Lynnette

This behavior is everywhere, but especially in our young missionaries. Just about every one of them returns home with a newfound loyalty and commitment to the church, developed at least in part by the refiner’s fire of outside criticism and persecution. With each slammed door, skins thicken and commitment swells. To be sure, some develop a loyalty because they’ve actually seen how the Gospel of Jesus Christ can transform and bless lives. But I submit that a significant number return home so certain of their testimonies simply by virtue of having that testimony challenged and questioned day in and day out. We as a people relish these missionary experiences. They strengthen our resolve. An example would be Elder Holland’s April 2014 General Conference talk, which describes in disturbing detail how two sister missionaries had food spit and thrown at them simply because they were Mormon. Read More

In Priesthood

Ordain Women, Women’s Ordination

Guest4 April 20144 April 201422 Comments

A guest post from Jacob Baker, whose first guest post on ZD can be found here. This post is also on Jacob’s personal blog.

At the outset, I should say that at this point nothing is going to stop Ordain Women, whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s clear that no amount of criticism or shaming will fracture the movement. In fact, these have really only served (unsurprisingly) to strengthen it and add to its numbers. OW may have begun as an organized movement but has become something of an event, in the philosophical sense of that word–the eruption of something new that breaks with the prevailing order, something which marks a before and after. Those who are riveted by an event (like Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ, after which he was never the same again) can only understand certain truths in its wake. Read More

In Uncategorized

10 Things to Like about the General Women’s Meeting

Guest29 March 201429 March 20148 Comments

This guest post comes to us from a ZD reader and commenter who goes by Thokozile. Thokozile studies cell biology, which mainly involves looking at tiny things and describing them in complicated ways. She has also been known to play the organ, wear purple pants, and lick banana slugs.

I was expecting the General Women’s Meeting to alternate between sappy, offensive, and boring. I can’t say I was wrong, nor can I say that it was historic, but my low expectations made it easy to notice the good things that happened. Read More

In Uncategorized

American Two-Party Politics Finds a New Battleground in the Ordain Women Movement

Guest24 March 201425 March 20149 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Esther, a globetrotting sociologist and West Coast native. She loves Jesus, her family and friends, Jimmy Fallon, Michelle Obama, fresh salsa, and Tillamook cheese. In that order.

The obvious drawback of belonging to the Only True And Living Church On The Earth is associating with a lot of people who like to be right all the time. There may be One True Church, but there is not one true political party. Unfortunately, sometimes we confuse our gift to know the truth with an ability to know all truth and to assume that whatever truth God has given to us applies to everyone else. Is it possible that God could inspire two different people to vote for two different political candidates? Read More

In Uncategorized

On Being Needed vs. Being Necessary: Some Thoughts on Women, Priesthood, and Responsibility

Guest5 February 20145 February 201419 Comments

[This post, from Jacob Baker, originally appeared at his blog All Eternity Shakes: Letters From the Vineyard. It has been slightly revised from the original. Jacob describes himself as “a student of religion and a stalwart fanboy of Zelophehad’s female offspring. Ok, and the guys too.” We’re excited to have him guest-posting for us.]

Women cannot be regarded as fully human until the full measure of responsibility and accountability is theirs. This is where the charged rhetorics of modesty, pedestalization, and singularity and specialness of gender are all mutually embedded–in the wonderful-terrible blessing and burden of cultural, institutional, and religious responsibility and accountability. This is also why the rhetoric of “equality” should be replaced with one of responsibility and accountability. Responsibility is what is really at stake with this kind of empowerment, and it is really what we mean by “equality.” Responsibility is the decisive and irrevocable difference between becoming angels or becoming gods. Read More

In Uncategorized

My life as a member of the church

Guest23 December 20123 Comments

The following is an excerpt from an interview between a member of the Strengthening the Members Committee and missionary rodent, shortly after she was taken into captivity

How long have you been following us?

My people first came to this planet in search of intelligent life in the hopes of opening trade negotiations, and seeking a new avenue for allies in our continuing war–

In Gender Issues

Talking About Gender Differences

Guest26 January 200918 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Beatrice.

In our society, we like to talk about the differences between men and women. It is the stuff upon which great novels and films are built. It can be used as a source of bonding with our same-sex peers “Oh, my husband does that too,” or it can be used to explain our relationship struggles “I just don’t understand why women do that.” Talking about the differences between men and women adds a certain richness to our lives and resonates with the way that we think about the world. There is something so appealing about the idea that “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” In church settings, there is an added layer to all of this. We like to talk about gender differences because it is an essential part of our doctrine. Women always were women and will always be women. Men always were men and will always be men. These inherent, divinely organized differences are the reason why men and women should play different roles in the church organization and in society. Read More

In Gender Issues

Guest Post: How Mormon Women Negotiate Contradiction

Guest17 March 20082 January 200929 Comments

The following is by Katya’s friend Nocturne, who is gathering information for a paper she’s writing, as explained below. We’re hoping her questions will generate insightful reflections upon personal experience and lively discussion. If you would like to respond to her questions privately, we’d encourage you to send your answers to “info at zelophehadsdaughters dot com” and we will happily pass them on to her.

Sex, in the biological sense, is the irreducible raw material upon which the social construction of gender is built. The Mormon meaning of gender and gender roles is inextricable from the history of power differential between genders. I am writing a paper on the contradictions that women in the church either have to accept or dismiss, explain away and legitimize or fight against. As women in the church, we are presented with contradictions: on one hand, we are taught that we have agency to act as you feel right, told to get educations, expected to be self-reliant, and held to high spiritual and intellectual standards, but, simultaneously, the church creates the expectation (and, maybe, manipulation) of only choosing one route: married, stay-at-home housewife, mother. Read More

In Abortion, Gender Issues, Legal Issues

After Gonzales v. Carhart

Guest1 May 20071 January 200931 Comments

This guest post comes to us from frequent ZD commenter and blogging veteran ECS.

Much of the publicity surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision has died down. The Court’s reasoning in Gonzales v. Carhart, however, deserves a closer look. Whether you believe a woman has a right to terminate her pregnancy is not the focus of this post. This post’s focus is on the problematic reasoning in the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales, that, among other things, questions the capacity of a woman to give informed consent to undergo a horrifying, yet perhaps necessary, abortion procedure. Read More

In Gender Issues

Having One Spouse Be In Charge

Guest12 January 200723 April 200830 Comments

(Since this issue came up several times in the comments on the feminist concerns poll, it seemed worth opening it up for discussion on its own thread.)

Proud Daughter of Eve wrote:

I have no problem with a man presiding in the home because someone has to be the head and if the mom is staying at home with the kids then isn’t that enough responsibility? Why does she have to make ALL the decisions in the house?

Sue (and others) responded:

Why does someone have to be the head? In our marriage, we’ve seen no need for one person to be in charge, or to have the final say. I don’t understand why it would be necessary…

What advantages and/or disadvantages do people see to having one spouse take an “in charge” kind of role? If you’re married, is that how you would describe your relationship?