Showing all posts by Ziff

In Gender Issues

A Correlated Mormon Gender Issues Survey

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

It has come to the attention of the Church Correlation Department that a so-called group of so-called academics has undertaken to do a so-called survey on so-called gender issues among so-called members of the so-called Church. As internet information (including surveys) does not have a truth filter, the Correlation Department has undertaken to edit the survey so that it may be more faith promoting, and less tainted by the philosophies of (wo)men.

Please tell us a little about how you heard about this survey. Who referred you to it?

  • The Holy Ghost whispered to me that I should take it.
  • The Three Nephites exhorted me to take it while they were changing my flat tire.
  • The spirit of a just man made perfect appeared to me and made known unto me that I must take it. I know that I was not deceived, as he refused to shake my hand.
  • Other.

Of course your name is on the records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On which other organizations’ records is your name also recorded? (Mark all that apply.)

  • The Republican Party
  • The Church of the Firstborn
  • The Quorum of the Anointed
  • The Council of Fifty
  • The Lamb’s Book of Life

What is your eternal gender?

  • Presider
  • Nurturer

How active are you in the Church?

  • Fully active
  • Fully active, but struggling with being less active

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In Polygamy

Joseph’s (First) Wife, Emma

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

How would you describe Emma Hale’s relationship with Joseph Smith? They were married, so she was his wife. But now that the Church is being somewhat more open about Joseph’s polygamy, shouldn’t we be a little more accurate and describe Emma as Joseph’s first wife?

This question occurred to me while reading BHodges’s post at BCC where he lists a bunch of references to Joseph Smith’s polygamy in Church sources. He points out that of course he’s not listing Church source references to Emma and Joseph that do not mention Joseph’s polygamy, because they’re much more common than the references that do talk about polygamy. I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at some of these sources, though, to see if Emma is ever referred to as Joseph’s first wife. More generally, I wanted to look at these sources because even though we know in a general sense that they’re probably numerous and that they probably gloss over or ignore Joseph’s polygamy, seeing the particulars might give us a better sense of just how common they are and how much glossing and hiding they do.

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In General Conference, Statistics

Most Liked Conference Talks (Now with better data!)

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

I wrote a post last year in which I tried to assess which Conference talks were most liked by Church members. The method I used was very much a kludge: I looked at the change in Facebook likes for each speaker during the session in which he or she gave a talk. Fortunately, a friend pointed out to me that there’s a much simpler way to measure this. The individual web pages for each Conference talk have a count of how many people liked the talk itself on Facebook. So of course this was data that I was interested in going back to look at.

The Facebook like buttons were added to all Conference talks, going back to 1971. Beyond a couple of years ago, of course, there aren’t many likes since most old Conference talks (other than a few classics) probably aren’t referred to all that often. I might go back later and look at the older talks, but for now I was just interested in the Conferences recent enough that someone could hear a talk in Conference, and then later in the week look it up on lds.org and click like, so I limited myself to 2012 through 2014–the last six Conferences.

There are three things to note about the data. First, I got the like counts a couple of days ago, so they’re already out of date. Second, for like counts over 1,000, the like button shows a count in thousands. I got exact counts by querying Graph Search directly. (I found this on stackoverflow somewhere, but now can’t recall where. The method is to point your browser to the URL http://graph.facebook.com/?id=<URL of talk>.) Third, the like counts for the most recent Conference are lower than for previous Conferences, probably because it has only been a few weeks since Conference occurred, and people haven’t had lots of chances to re-read or re-hear a talk and go back and like it.

Here are the ten most liked talks from the past six Conferences.

top 10 talks by likes

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In OW

The Correlated Story of Zelophehad’s Daughters

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

It has come to the attention of the Church Correlation Department that many of the stories told in the Bible have not passed Correlation review prior to being included in the scriptural canon. Rather than go through a lengthy and complex process of decanonization, the Correlation Department has undertaken to simply rewrite the unreviewed stories to smooth off the rough edges. The resulting stories will preserve the gospel truths present in the original, but will remove the false philosophies of men that have been inserted by evil and conspiring scribes.

Our first rewritten scripture story comes from Numbers 27.

Then came the daughters of Zelophehad to petition Moses. For their father died in the wilderness, and had no sons. They desired that Moses bring their cause before the Lord, that perhaps the inheritance of their father might pass unto them. And these are the names of the daughters of Zelophehad: Mahlah, Noah, and Hoglah, and Milcah, and Tirzah.

But Nadab spake unto them, saying, Surely Moses shall not consider such a small matter. And he turned them away.

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In Statistics, Temple

Temple talk trends

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

Over at fMh yesterday, Sara Katherine Staheli Hanks introduced a new series, “When the Temple Hurts.” I was particularly interested in a point she made in the post about how often we discuss the temple in lessons and talks at church:

The temple is a regular focus of meetings, lessons, talks, and discussions in church settings. I’d estimate that, in my experience, 1 out of every 4-5 Sundays in my adult life as a church member has included a talk or lesson where the temple was a primary focus.

I’ve been teaching primary now for a couple of years, and my memory of adult classes is maybe suffering from a bit of haziness, but Sara’s numbers sound good to me. This would mean an average of at least one temple-related lesson or talk per month, with of course lots of variation where there is a cluster of them, and then maybe no mentions for a longer period of time.

I would be interested to know how well that matches up with other people’s experience. It seems like this would be a difficult thing to measure well. Sure, we have correlated lesson manuals, but we also have locally chosen topics for things like sacrament meetings, first Sunday meetings in RS and priesthood quorums, and Teachings for Our Time lessons. And for that matter, even how correlated lessons are taught varies a lot from ward to ward and from teacher to teacher (much to the frustration of the Correlation people, I’m sure).

So I thought I would look at a related question that’s easier for me to answer, which is whether talk about the temple at the general level of the Church has been increasing or decreasing over time. If there’s a noticeable change over time, this is probably felt by people in their local experiences, as general-level material like Conference talks are not only used directly in the preparation of lessons and talks, but they also likely help drive local leaders’ perceptions of what topics are important at the moment.

I used the ever-wonderful Corpus of General Conference Talks to look at how often the word temple has been used in Conference since 1900. This graph shows the result. The dark purple line is the 10-year moving average, and the faded purple line shows the year-to-year rates.

temple refs in conference 1900-2013 Read More

In Music

Behold! A Little Fact’ry!

Author ZiffPosted on 23 Comments

It’s almost Conference time again, and although it has only been six months, I can hardly remember what was said in April. Perhaps Conference talks would be easier to remember if they were set to music. It seems appropriate to set them to the music of hymns, since Conference talks and hymns both inhabit that space of being sorta kinda but not really completely scripture.

I’ll start with an easy one. Here’s a singable version of then-Elder Boyd K. Packer’s classic “To Young Men Only,” given in the Priesthood Session of October 1976 Conference. Sing to the tune of “Behold! A Royal Army.”

Behold! A little fact’ry
Is in you; it begins
To make a sacred substance,
But opens you to sins.
Your fact’ry will run slowly,
And when it makes too much,
It opens a release valve:
This valve you must not touch!

Tamper not! Tamper not!
Do not touch that release valve!
Tamper not! Tamper not!
If tempted, sing a hymn!
Tamper not! Tamper not! Tamper not!
Your fact’ry lights keep dim.

 

In General Conference, Statistics

The Incredible Shrinking Statistical Report

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

If you look back through Church statistical reports released in every April Conference (and who hasn’t?), you find that it’s not exactly the same information that gets reported each year. I don’t mean that the numbers change; I mean that which categories of numbers even get reported change. There has been less change in recent years, but if you look back to the 80s, you’ll find lots of categories of information that used to be reported that aren’t anymore. For example, you’ll find number of babies blessed (last reported in 1988), number of boys and men who hold different priesthood offices (1986),  number of proxy temple ordinances (1984), marriage rate (1983), and number of women in the Relief Society (1977).

I thought it might be interesting to look at what categories of information have been reported in statistical reports at different times, as well as how many total categories of information have been reported. This first graph shows how many line items (separate numbers representing different pieces of information) were in the statistical report each year from 1971 to 2014.

This graph shows the number of line items in the statistical report each year from 1971 to 2014.

line items in statistical reports 1971-2014

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In Patriarchal Blessings, Statistics

Do women’s patriarchal blessings mention a career?

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

Several months ago (in May, I think), there was a discussion at the Mormon Hub that turned to whether women’s patriarchal blessings mentioned a career or not. Heather (who blogs at Doves and Serpents) and I thought it would be interesting to see if we could get a little data on the question. Heather put together a brief survey, and we asked for responses in the Hub and in the fMh Facebook group. For purposes of comparison, we asked for men to respond too, although we got far more responses from women.

We got a total of 422 responses (actually slightly more, but a few were incomplete and couldn’t be included): 359 from women, and 63 from men. The years they reported receiving their patriarchal blessings ranged from 1941 to 2013.

This graph shows overall results, ignoring year of the blessing:

patriarchal blessings mentioning career by sexNot surprisingly, patriarchs mentioned career far more often for men than they did for women.

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In Equality, OW

We don’t need no stinkin’ dictionary!

Author ZiffPosted on 25 Comments

This is an exchange between Jane Little and Michael Otterson in Little’s BBC piece “Sister Saints – Women and the Mormons” (starting at about 11:20; also see the accompanying article here):

JL: Just to deal with Kate Kelly, just to clarify, was she excommunicated for apostasy?

MO: The letter that went out, that they actually published on their website, briefly, at least they released it to the media, indicated that the reason why that disciplinary action was taken was for apostasy. I’m not sure it actually used the word, but apostasy is seen as repeated and deliberate advocating to doctrines contrary to the Church, especially encouraging other people to take the same position.

JL: So you would say she is an apostate, under that definition?

MO: Yeah.

JL: The dictionary definition says it’s renouncing your faith, which is somewhat different.

MO: Well, I don’t think I[‘m] particularly obligated to worry about what it says in Oxford or Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. Our definition of apostasy is repeated open advocacy of doctrines contrary to the Church.

It’s not surprising that Otterson would want to use an unconventional definition of apostasy. It allows him to use a more serious-sounding word than “insufficient submissiveness in the face of leaders’ demands” in explaining why Kate Kelly had to be kicked out. I realize, of course, that he was taking his definition from the Handbook, but that just means it’s the Church leaders who wrote or commissioned the Handbook who are making up a new definition to allow them to borrow strength from an existing weighty word.

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In OW

Insider/outsider language in President Hinckley’s "there’s no agitation" statement

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

In a 1997 interview with Australian reporter David Ransom, President Hinckley said that there was “no agitation” for women to receive the priesthood. Ordain Women cites this comment in their FAQ as a motivation for agitating for ordination. (Dane Laverty also earlier cited this comment as his rationale for his similar project, Agitating Faithfully.)

I’ve seen some argument in the Bloggernacle about what President Hinckley meant when he said this. OW’s FAQ calls it a “challenge” to agitate. Opponents of OW have responded that of course he didn’t mean that he wanted people to agitate for ending the female priesthood ban. He was just pointing out a simple fact: nobody was agitating.

I think a useful way to think about this argument is to consider President Hinckley’s comment in the framework of insider language versus outsider language. Read More

In GA's, Statistics

A So-called "Post"

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

In Angela C.’s hilarious post “Mormon Jargon 2” at BCC, this is her entry for “so-called”:

So-called (adj.) I sneer at whatever word follows this adjective

It seems like this is a term GAs use fairly often to indicate disapproval, as Angela observes. Elder Oaks, for example, last October, used it at least a couple of times (maybe even three?) in his talk “No Other Gods” (although only one occurrence made it into the written version). I thought it might be interesting to look back at who uses “so-called” most often, what they’re disapproving of, and whether there is any trend over time in its usage.

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In Blogging, GA's, Statistics

Which GAs Do Readers of Different Blogs Like?

Author ZiffPosted on 29 Comments

I thought this might be a fun question to look at, and thanks to Facebook’s Graph Search, I have at least an approximate way to answer it. Graph Search will let you look for people who “like” different combinations of pages. (For the remainder of this post, I’m going to drop the quotation marks on “like” when describing Facebook likes, because they just get tiring to look at, and I figure you know what I’m talking about.) Most blogs that I wanted to look at have a Facebook page that readers can like, so I just looked up people who liked the Facebook page for each blog, and then looked at how many of each of these people liked each member of the Quorum of 15. One small difficulty I encountered is that Graph Search is more interested in showing me individual people than in giving me an exact count (which makes sense given what Facebook is for). It estimates the number of people who like a blog page and a GA page as more than 10, or fewer than 1000, or whatever, but I couldn’t get an exact count without repeatedly scrolling to the bottom of the results so that it would pull up even more results until it could find no more.

One thing I wanted to adjust for is that the general membership of the Church likes different Q15 members more or less often on Facebook (as I’ve blogged about before and plan to again). So I thought it would be most interesting to see which Q15 members are most liked by readers of different blogs, compared to how often the GAs are liked overall. For example, President Monson alone accounts for nearly 20% of all likes of Q15 members. If he gets only 15% of likes given to Q15 members by readers of a particular blog, this indicates he’s less popular among readers of the blog than among members in general (even if he still gets more likes than any other Q15 member from readers of the blog).

Here are results for ZD. The differences are in percentage points (the percentage of all likes of Q15 members going to this member among likers of the blog minus the same calculation for all Facebook users). I put the First Presidency at the left because a lot of the action is there, and then put the Q12 in order of seniority. Note that I’ve added the colors just to make it easier to see who is who at a glance. A lot of these graphs look similar, so I think it can be helpful to have the colors so you can easily look for the same person as you look across graphs.

zelophehad's daughtersWell, that’s a pretty straightforward pattern. ZD readers like President Uchtdorf. They really, really like him. Most everyone else falls below overall norms to compensate.

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In General Conference, Scripture, Statistics

Which RS/YW/Primary Presidency Members Prefer Which Books of Scripture?

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

I blogged a few days ago about which books of scripture Quorum of 15 members cite more or less frequency in Conference. BethSmash asked to see results for women leaders.

Unfortunately, getting trends over time for the women leaders requires more work than I have the energy for right now. I would need to get not only distribution of citations by book of scripture for each person, but for each person in each year. Sorry, BethSmash! But I did get counts of citations for each person ignoring when the talk was given, and I’ve done the same adjustment I did for the Quorum of 15 members in the other post, adjusting for the prevailing citation norms at the times the people were in their callings. I’ve put these in this post, in case they’re of any interest.

I looked in the LDSSCI for citation counts for all members of a Relief Society, Young Women’s, or Primary General Presidency since the mid-1970s. I didn’t look back any further because if I remember right, women didn’t speak regularly in Conference before the 1980s, and there weren’t General Women’s meetings (which the LDSSCI includes) before the late 1970s.

Here are counts for all RS, YW, and Primary Presidency members who had at least 10 scripture citations in their talks (regardless of how many talks it took them to use that many references). There are 42 women who meet this criterion. I’ve put them in order by calling year.

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In GA's, General Conference, Scripture, Statistics

Which GAs Prefer Which Books of Scripture?

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

Thanks to the handy LDS Scripture Citation Index (LDSSCI), it’s easy to get data to answer this question. I looked up each of the current members of the Quorum of 15 to see how often he cited the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price in his Conference talks. For example, for President Monson, the counts are 332, 818, 184, 255, and 32, respectively. Here are counts for all Quorum members:

Counts
Member OT NT BoM D&C PGP Total
Monson 332 818 184 255 32 1621
Packer 125 312 559 470 96 1562
Perry 95 116 141 106 74 532
Nelson 399 695 910 945 209 3158
Oaks 149 538 504 386 60 1637
Ballard 26 139 133 111 32 441
Scott 25 57 203 144 34 463
Hales 77 336 291 187 78 969
Holland 70 243 140 74 24 551
Eyring 27 97 162 135 16 437
Uchtdorf 56 166 126 121 28 497
Bednar 19 60 148 87 15 329
Cook 27 57 73 82 9 248
Christofferson 11 129 139 118 26 423
Andersen 17 98 102 59 11 287

Next, to adjust for the fact that Quorum members differ in the total number of scripture citations they put in their talks, I converted the counts of citations to percentages of all citations by the member. Using President Monson as an example again, this means dividing each of his counts by book (332, 818, 184, 255, and 32) by his total (1621) to get his percentages. Here are percentages for all Quorum members:

Percentages
Member OT NT BoM D&C PGP
Monson 20% 50% 11% 16% 2%
Packer 8% 20% 36% 30% 6%
Perry 18% 22% 27% 20% 14%
Nelson 13% 22% 29% 30% 7%
Oaks 9% 33% 31% 24% 4%
Ballard 6% 32% 30% 25% 7%
Scott 5% 12% 44% 31% 7%
Hales 8% 35% 30% 19% 8%
Holland 13% 44% 25% 13% 4%
Eyring 6% 22% 37% 31% 4%
Uchtdorf 11% 33% 25% 24% 6%
Bednar 6% 18% 45% 26% 5%
Cook 11% 23% 29% 33% 4%
Christofferson 3% 30% 33% 28% 6%
Andersen 6% 34% 36% 21% 4%

(Note that the percentages do not add to 100 for some members because of rounding.)

Finally, I did one more adjustment to account for the norms of how often the different books of scripture are cited in Conference by all speakers during the years each Quorum member served. What I mean here is that at different points in time, different books of scripture were cited more or less by all speakers in Conference. Because members have been in the Quorum for different amounts of time, some of the differences between them can be accounted for by the different norms in Conference at the times they were giving talks.

The biggest shift in the time current Quorum members have served has been an increase in citations of the Book of Mormon. Here’s a graph showing the percentage of all citations of scriptures in Conference that came from each of the five books of scripture since 1942 (as far back as the LDSSCI has Conference talk data).

conference books of scripture quoted Read More

In OW, Priesthood, Statistics

When will the female priesthood ban end?

Author ZiffPosted on 26 Comments

Monday was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I was actually surprised at how badly I took the news of Kate Kelly’s excommunication. When I heard about it, I just felt sick, and even my usual coping strategy of information-seeking didn’t work very well. Every Facebook post and news story I read just made me feel sicker and want to cry more. I had expected beforehand that excommunication would be the outcome. Or at least I told myself that I was expecting it. Given how difficult hearing the actual news was for me, though, I guess I had been holding out more hope than I realized that the outcome would be something else–anything else.

But that was Monday. Today, I’m trying to think about the future, specifically, the future of the LDS female priesthood ban. I really believe that it will one day be lifted. I just have no idea when. But because I find it soothing to crunch numbers and speculate, I’ve gone ahead and done that in this post. I realize, though, that this is little more than guessing.

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In OW

Nine Ways OW Could Have Actually Protested at Conference

Author ZiffPosted on 28 Comments

Since the news broke that Kate Kelly is facing Church discipline, I’ve seen a number of people argue that she must have known she had it coming after she organized those public protests at Conference. I know this has been argued before, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the Ordain Women actions at the last two Conferences don’t qualify as protests by any reasonable stretch of the term. A protest is about opposing something. The OW actions were about asking for inclusion in something. They’re actually complete opposites to protests in terms of their starting assumptions: you protest things you think are bad; you ask to be included in things you think are good. OW was affirming the goodness of priesthood session, just like they’ve affirming the authority of the Quorum of 15 by asking them to ask God about ending the female priesthood ban.

I can see how people decide that the OW actions were protests, though. The problem, I think, is that we belong to a church that emphasizes obedience, conformity, and deference to authority so much. I mean, you can get people to look at you like you’re an alien by simply voting “opposed” on someone’s calling in sacrament meeting. You can get people to gasp in Sunday School (or elders quorum, or, I’m guessing, in Relief Society) by merely starting a comment with “I disagree.” It’s understandable, in a culture such as this, for an action even as mild and respectful as OW’s to make people deeply uncomfortable. I’m not surprised, then, that they reach for an inappropriately harsh word to try to describe it.

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In Uncategorized

Don’t Ask. Don’t Seek. Don’t Knock.

Author ZiffPosted on 27 Comments

Here are a few things I learned from the disciplinary action Kate Kelly and John Dehlin are threatened with:

  • The Ninth Article of Faith can pretty much be blotted out of the canon. As of 1842, there may have been “great and important” things still to be revealed. As of 2014, they have all been revealed, and we have no need of addressing new questions or receiving new revelation.
  • Jesus has been overruled. He said we should ask, seek, and knock. He was out of line. Asking is apostasy. The new rule is that your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him, so shut up!
  • Our God is a Correlated God. We don’t even need to limit ourselves to looking to scripture or prophets’ statements now to see the will of God. We simply need to look at the status quo in the Church to know God’s very mind. If there are organs and basketball hoops in our buildings, it is because God wills it. If lesson manuals are printed on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper, it is because God wills that. And if, with no scriptural or prophetic basis, we have banned women from holding the priesthood, God must have willed that too.
  • Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s “Come, Join with Us” wing of the Quorum of 15 isn’t as strong as Dallin H. Oaks’s “Would You Just Please Leave?” wing.

    • kate kelly and john dehlin utah pride parade 2014

  •  The PR department really is running the show in the Church. Kate’s informal discipline letter chastises her for “acting in public opposition to the Church and its leaders after having been counseled not to do so.” Which leaders? Who counseled her not to have OW events? Her local leaders never wanted to meet with her. And of course general leaders made a point of ignoring her requests to meet. That leaves only the PR department. She went against the PR department’s counsel, and acted in opposition to the PR department, so she’s being disciplined.
  • The PR department clearly doesn’t even care to try to be subtle with lying anymore. The blatant misrepresentation of the OW event was bad enough, but at least it could only be refuted by people who were there. But the claim that the disciplinary actions are completely local is just absurd. That they would say this knowing that it’s not remotely believable is depressing.
  • The Church really isn’t Kate Kelly’s or John Dehlin’s or yours or mine. It’s President Monson’s and maybe the FP and Quorum of Twelve’s a little bit. If they and the PR department decide they want to excommunicate people for asking questions too persistently, they can do that. If they decide to excommunicate people for wearing pants, or for being left-handed, they can do that too. There’s not really any check on how ridiculous they can be.
  • The Church is not a safe place for people who have questions. Perhaps it never was, and I’m only now seeing its true nature revealed. It could have gone other ways, though. There are scriptures and words of prophets that could support a more inclusive version of the Church. But I’m afraid these disciplinary councils will cast a long shadow for a long time on any attempts to push for that. I am so sad. I had hoped for so much better.

 

In Modesty, Statistics

Modesty Rhetoric in Church Magazines

Author ZiffPosted on 57 Comments

Has there been an increase in modesty rhetoric in the Church in the past few years, or are we just imagining things? I wrote a post a few years ago to try to answer this question by counting articles in Church magazines by year that used the word modesty in discussing dress. I found that yes, there had been an increase, particularly in the New Era and the Friend.

The question is one that I’ve seen come up a lot in the Mormon-themed Facebook groups where I participate, so the post still gets linked to now and again. I’ve wanted to update it, though, to make three changes: (1) add 3 more years of data, (2) improve my counting of mentions of modesty, and (3) count separately for modesty discussions aimed at women/YW/girls and men/YM/boys.

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In General Conference, Statistics

Plan of Salvation Happiness

Author ZiffPosted on 25 Comments

Note: I was unaware of it at the time I wrote this post, but there’s a much more in-depth look at these terms, as well as some additional ones like “plan of redemption” at the blog Nearing Kolob.

When I was growing up and I learned in church about God’s plan to get people back to live with him, the plan was always called the “plan of salvation.” But sometime between my childhood (1980s) and now, this plan has come to be described more often as the “plan of happiness.” The two terms are clearly used to refer to the same thing. For example, here’s Elder Nelson in an April 2013 Conference talk:

The Book of Mormon . . . explains God’s great plan of happiness—the plan of salvation.

I don’t recall when the change took place, though. So I did some digging in the Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks. The corpus goes all the way back to the 1850s, but it looks like the first usage of “plan of happiness” didn’t even take place until 1979. And it didn’t really become popular until 10-15 years later. I’ll make a graph to show you some more complete data.

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