Ziff – Page 2 – Zelophehad's Daughters

How the Church could change

Ziff9 September 20254 Comments

How can the Church change? This is often a question on my mind, as there are so many things I’d like to see changed, such as ordaining women, for example. To say the Church is resistant to change would be an understatement. And even more so, it resists the public perception that it could be changed by outside pressure. But of course it does change all the time. These changes are always framed as just new ways of doing the same fundamental things, though. As Steve Taysom said so well in his biography of Joseph F. Smith,

Successful religions, meaning those that are historically persistent, find ways to make necessary changes to remain viable within a given cultural and historical context while simultaneously explaining away the changes as nonexistent, unimportant, or as epiphenomena that are changes in appearance only, and which are actually in service of a larger, unchanging phenomenon.

Image by Augusto Ordóñez from Pixabay. This guy looks younger than most GAs, but I love his look of annoyance. I’m imagining him reading this post and saying “No, Ziff. We never change.”

Reading articles for my last post on modesty rhetoric, I was pleasantly surprised that several of them waved away past teachings on modesty as being 100% about clothing. But I was also kind of amazed that they so obviously elided where those past teachings came from. Here’s an example from a 2019 New Era article:

When you hear the word modesty, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Probably a list of clothing “do’s and don’ts” that you’ve been taught since you were little. But let’s try thinking of modesty in a different way.

I love the moving on to think of modesty in a different way, but I also think it’s absurd to not admit where the teachings “since you were little” came from, namely Church leaders and manuals and magazines and rhetoric in general.

So maybe this is how the Church can change: by pretending that its previous teachings that are now being discarded didn’t happen, or somehow came from some other source.

In Modesty, Statistics

Modesty rhetoric in Church magazines has declined since the mid-2010s

Ziff7 August 20258 August 20258 Comments

Over a decade ago (have I really been blogging that long?), I wrote a couple of posts (2011, 2014) where I counted up articles in Church magazines that talked about modesty in dress. Briefly, I found that modesty rhetoric had really ramped up since the turn of the millennium, and not surprisingly, was aimed more at women and girls than at men and boys.

In this post, I’m updating my 2014 post to include ten more years of data. I used the same scoring method that I did in 2014. (The gist is that I used Google to search for articles from magazines on the Church website that used forms of the word modest, and then scored each article for roughly what fraction was about modesty in dress, and also whether it was targeted at women/girls, men/boys, or both.) This graph shows what I found.

The bottom line, like I said in the title, is that there’s been a dramatic decrease since about the time I wrote my last post. This has been particularly noticeable for teen girls, who as far as I can tell haven’t been talked to about modesty since before the pandemic. This trend seems consistent with the Church’s introduction in 2022 of a new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet that is generally less prescriptive and more principles-based. And I noticed in reading the articles that do talk about modesty that they seem much more matter-of-fact and less frantic than previous ones. For example, here’s a good one from the New Era in 2019.

Adult women, on the other hand, have seen a modest 😉 increase in rhetoric aimed at them in the past few years. This also seems consistent with increased focus from the Church on the importance of wearing temple garments, with for example J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks talking about it in Conference last year. Of course this focus is mostly on women, as women’s garments are less compatible with commonly available women’s clothes than men’s are with men’s clothes, and in a patriarchal church like ours, women’s dress will always be seen as more of an issue than men’s.

So, two cheers for the results, for teen girls and children in general anyway. It’s definitely a positive step when we can back off body shaming young people who are often the most psychologically vulnerable among us. And for the adult women, I can hope that the new sleeveless-leaning ones will maybe reduce the friction between garments and typical clothing styles a little, and perhaps encourage GAs to worry about something more substantial in their Conference talks.

In Books

Why do Mormons love Jane Austen?

Ziff21 July 202510 Comments

Wait, do Mormons love Jane Austen? I grew up in Utah Valley, surrounded by lots of other Mormons, so it was sometimes hard for me to tell what cultural things were particular to Mormons versus common among Americans (or even larger groups). That being said, I did always feel like there was a particular love of all things Jane Austen among people around me. I didn’t participate much in it. I didn’t read any of her books, although I did watch some movie adaptations, with my favorite being the excellent 1995 Sense and Sensibility that Emma Thompson both wrote and starred in.

But getting back to the question, I was honestly a bit surprised when I looked Jane Austen up on Google Trends and found that not only did Utah rank high, it ranked number one! And Idaho was number two. So that seems like pretty good evidence that I was right that Mormons (at least American Mormons) might have a thing for Jane Austen.

In Fun

Hi hungry, I’m Dad: Dad jokes for Father’s Day

Ziff15 June 20256 Comments

To celebrate Father’s Day, here are a few of my Mormon-themed (or at least church-related) dad jokes. Please recall as you read that when your eyes roll, they are momentarily pointed toward heaven. You’re welcome. (Note: In case you’re curious, I’m the author of all of these jokes, at least as far as I know. But given how joke-telling is a social activity, and they get written and re-written as they’re passed around, it’s entirely possible that I’ve unconsciously borrowed from other sources.)

Q: If Isaiah lived today, what would he call his TV show where he lamented people’s obsession with clothes?
A: Everybody Loves Raiment.

In Fun

Mormon Product Ideas

Ziff6 June 202517 June 20253 Comments

As someone who’s still blogging in 2025, I realize that I’m several generations behind in how things are done online nowadays. I was thinking of moving on to become a Mormon influencer on TikChat or InstaSnap or somesuch, and was wondering about the contraptions I might get to test or endorse. Here are some of my ideas.

Image credit: Pascal Lapalme on Openclipart

Lust monitor. These are a pair of smart glasses which constantly check what you’re is looking at, with special focus on other’s body parts. If you look at any part of another person’s body below the neck for more than one second (time may be adjustable), the glasses will deliver a small shock to your eyeballs. It’s not quite plucking out the offending eye, but it’s a reminder of the possibility. Note: Not recommended for medical professionals or massage therapists.
Hidden inflatable seat cushion. For all those times you’re stuck sitting on a hard chair in second hour, or sacrament meeting, or any meeting really! Your fellow members might give you the side eye if you openly pull out a cushioned stadium seat. The pioneers walked across the plains, and you can’t even manage to sit on a hard chair for an hour? But with this subtle inflatable cushion that slips easily into your skirt or pants, you can quietly fill it and have more cushion for the tush-in’. Bonus points if it doesn’t sound like you’re passing gas when you let the air out.

In Gender Issues, General Conference

Why do women give better conference talks than men?

Ziff27 May 20259 Comments

Tamara W. Runia, who’s serving as First Counselor in the YW General Presidency, gave by far my favorite talk of April’s General Conference. I also enjoyed her previous talk in 2023. She’s dueling with Patrick Kearon in my head for my current favorite speaker. And in the previous General RS Presidency, I loved Conference talks from both counselors, Sharon Eubank and Reyna I. Aburto. It occurred to me that there are more women giving strikingly good Conference talks (at least in my view) than there are men, perhaps not in absolute numbers, but certainly as a percentage of the total numbers of women and men giving talks.

Why might this be so? I’ve come up with a couple of lists of reasons. The first is a list of hows, that outline the characteristics of their talks where I feel like they outdo men. The second is a list of whys. These are my guesses about what the causes might be behind the hows that make their talks different.

How

Women speakers are less often doctrinaire than men are, less prone to try to lay down the law of This Is The Way Things Are. They seem more often to frame the advice they give as advice, rather than as commandment.
Women seem more often concerned with interpersonal connection, and less concerned with hierarchy, even Church hierarchy. Some men seem deeply concerned with members’ submission to Church hierarchy, and to them in particular. They are the Oracles of the Most High God, and they are darn well going to remind us of it. I find this extremely grating.
It’s my impression that women are more likely to address people who are out of the Church’s main target demographic, which seems to be young couples who are raising young children. They’re more open to acknowledging that people might be unmarried or widowed or even gay, or that they might be lonely or depressed.
Women are less prone to repeating their stories or even virtually entire talks, as some men do.

In Church Policy, LGBT Issues, Patriarchy

Why does the Church copy the world’s hierarchies?

Ziff9 May 20257 Comments

There’s a certain flavor of criticism of the Church that I’ve seen before that I think of as criticism from first principles. It doesn’t criticize the Church in comparison with other churches, or with secular organizations or secular norms, or with its own history or scriptures or rules, but rather just with a feel of what a church that’s actually listening to God should be doing. I feel like the revelations in the past few years of just how much wealth the Church has amassed, for example, have drawn a lot of critiques like this. It just doesn’t seem right for a church, of all organizations, to have so much money.

You can probably explain both the criticisms of this type and the apologetic responses as well as I can. The apologetic responses are straightforward. Our ways aren’t God’s ways. Like Job, where were we when God laid the foundations of the earth? Our role is to go and do as we’re told like Nephi, not murmur about every little thing like his brothers.

In any case, that’s the type of criticism I’m raising today. My question is why the Church, which rhetorically makes such a big deal about being un-worldly, do such a great job of copying the world’s hierarchies. I was thinking through the most obvious hierarchies we can see out there in the world in general, where one group of people has more power than another, and it seems like the Church, in spite of its rhetoric, manages to borrow them all.

Men over women: Patriarchy is one of the most prominent features of the Church. Sure, with time, the rhetoric around it has softened into a more chicken form, and since Ordain Women, GAs have told women that they really kinda sorta had the priesthood all along. But the fact is that the Church is still run by men and men only, both at a general and a local level. Women are advisors at best, and they’re frequently straight up ignored.

In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2025

Ziff18 April 202513 Comments

Fastest hymn: Sing Praise to Him (Saturday afternoon)
Slowest hymn: Were You There? (Saturday evening)
Best hymn: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty (Sunday morning)
Worst hymn: God Is Love (Saturday morning)
Most entertaining choir member: See the amazing mustache on a BYU student choir member during the hymn Rejoice, the Lord Is King. I’ve linked a moment in the video when he’s most visible, but I’m clearly not the only one struck by him, as a shot centered on him is currently being used as the thumbnail for the video on YouTube, when most often the thumbnail is a shot of the whole choir.

Longest prayer: 127 seconds, Jorge F. Zeballos, Saturday morning benediction.
Shortest prayer: 44 seconds, Kevin S. Hamilton, Saturday morning invocation. This was the shortest prayer since Claudio R. M. Costa gave a 43-second prayer in April, 2019.

Best image: I like Robert Zund’s Road to Emmaus painting that Henry B. Eyring used in his talk.

Best laughs:

Jeffrey R. Holland told a story of one of his grandchildren biting another, after which their father told the victim of the bit that the biter probably didn’t even know what it felt like to be bitten. Naturally, the victim took this as an invitation to bite back.
Patrick Kearon talked about gifts, and informed his listeners that even some animals give gifts. He cited two examples: penguins and bonobos. I feel like he might be trolling us (and perhaps some of his fellow Q15 members) here, as penguins are in the news now for being targets of some of Trump’s misguided tariffs, and bonobos are best known for their healthy sexual appetite, especially for homosexual sex.

In Prayer

What’s wrong with written prayers?

Ziff28 March 202511 Comments

Mormons don’t do rote prayers. I feel like this was a central teaching in my upbringing. We weren’t like the other Christians who foolishly just said the Lord’s Prayer or recited the 23rd Psalm over and over. We said each prayer new from the heart, at least in theory. Related to this, does anyone else recall how stressful it was to give the closing prayer after a lesson on prayer, because you had to try extra hard to make your prayer original?

The scriptural support for this position isn’t hard to find. Our go-to is of course Jesus condemning praying with vain repetitions like the heathens in Matthew 6. But we also have the bad example of the Zoramites in Alma 31, who not only dissented from the true church and gave a self-aggrandizing prayer on their Rameumptom, but all gave the same self-aggrandizing prayer. (Not surprisingly, only the Zoramite men got to do this, as the women probably weren’t chosen by God in quite the same way.)

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. We have prayers for ordinances that are required to follow a script. The sacrament, baptismal, and temple ordinances are all like this. And it could be just me, but I feel like the emphasis on this principle has declined in my lifetime. (Or it could be that the emphasis was, to begin with, particular to my ward, or even my family.) Also, perhaps coincidentally, I’m happy to see bishops in wards I’ve lived in appear to become much more forgiving when a priest stumbles over a word in a sacrament prayer. When I was a priest, decades ago, I feel like nobody got away with even the tiniest error without having to re-say the prayer.

In Fun

Russell M. Nelson’s Calendar Unleashed!

Ziff18 February 202511 Comments

A few days ago, Russell M. Nelson announced the long-awaited dates for the Salt Lake Temple open house: April to October . . . of 2027. As he appears to be opening up his calendar to officially put his stamp on upcoming events, I thought I’d speculate about some of his other calendar entries that he might loose upon the world:

X/X/202X — On the death of Russell M. Nelson, the remainder of the Q15 vote that to keep in remembrance the name of this most beloved of prophets, future presidents of the Church will be called the second Nelson, the third Nelson, and so forth, following the pattern put forth in Jacob 1:11. The Church membership’s vote is, of course, unanimous in favor.

In Fun

Uncorrelated Cards for Valentines Day

Ziff10 February 20255 Comments

In Music

Favorite and Least Favorite Lines in Hymns

Ziff27 January 202520 Comments

What are your favorite and least favorite lines in hymns? Are there any that make you happy to think of, or that make you cringe when you sing them? Here are a few of mine. I’ll start with my least favorites so I can end on a positive note.

Angels above us are silent notes taking
Of ev’ry action; then do what is right!
– Do What Is Right

I have enough stress with the visible entities in my life without worrying about angels spying on me and taking notes so they can scold me later.

There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question;

– Choose the Right

This is just patently wrong. Of course there are some decisions that have a moral dimension to them, but many decisions have no such dimension. If I’m choosing what color tie to wear to church, or what cereal to eat, there’s no reason for me to worry about whether I’m choosing the right. Furthermore, even when decisions do have a moral dimension, it’s typical for them to be far more complicated than just right and wrong. Rather, there are multiple options with all kinds of characteristics that we need to weigh. As Dallin H. Oaks famously reminded us, there may be good, better, and best.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2024: Funniest Comments

Ziff7 January 20259 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments (and lines in posts) that I read on the Bloggernacle last year. I’ve typically excerpted just a part of a longer comment or post. Each person’s name is a link back to the original comment or post, though, so you can go and see the larger context if you’re interested.

In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Dave B., in his post “How to Be A Good Ex-Mormon” at W&T:

Think of the Church as a very big room, maybe the Conference Center, with a variety of exits. There’s a door marked “Catholic,” there’s a door marked “Lutheran,” there’s a door marked “my local Evangelical mega-church,” there’s a door marked “None, nada, nothing, it’s just a big empty Universe, no God, no Force.” And then there are the specifically Mormon doors, one marked “Anti, and proud of it” one marked “formally but quietly disaffiliated,” another marked “quietly went inactive,” one marked “PIMO” (you don’t really go through that door, you just look at it wistfully), one marked “they exed me” (that’s the door you get pushed through, whether you want to or not).

Abby Maxwell Hansen, in her post “The Priesthood Makes You Special” at Exponent II:

This got me thinking about the renaming of the girls’ classes from Beehive, Mia Maid and Laurel to “12- & 13-year-old class”, “14- & 15-year-old class”, and “16- & 17-year-old class”. (These new class names roll right off the tongue just like saying “I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” does.)

Hawkgrrrl, in her post “Attention Seekers” at W&T:

Someone [on Twitter] asked what was the craziest rule your mission had, and I shared our mission rule that you couldn’t attend church if you didn’t have investigators . . . . After I made that comment, a bunch of “defenders of the faith” chimed in accusing me of making it up. . . .

Though I was hated and persecuted for saying that we had this mission rule, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? We actually had this mission rule; and who am I that I can lie about it, or why does the world think to make me deny what actually happened? For we had had this mission rule; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it (and probably didn’t like it), and I could not deny it…

Joseph Smith History 1: 25, sorta

In Children, Church Life, Suffering

Ideas I Accepted Uncritically

Ziff18 December 202418 December 20248 Comments

Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al – adam on Unsplash

President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.

Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.

“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”

Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.

Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)

What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.

In Christmas, Fun, Music

The Twelve Days of Temples

Ziff9 December 20249 December 20243 Comments

On the first day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the second day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . two vaporware ones¹
and renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the third day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . three in the Congo
two vaporware ones
etc.

On the fourth day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . four near Mexico City
three in the Congo
etc.

In Fun, General Conference, Music

Think Celestial: A hymn

Ziff26 November 202426 November 20244 Comments

A bunch of years ago, I wrote a post where I converted a particularly memorable Conference talk into a hymn. I thought this would be a fun exercise to try again, this time with Russell M. Nelson’s “Think Celestial” from October 2023. Sing to the tune of “Choose the Right.”

Celestial is the way you must be thinking.
Keep in mind the coming afterlife.
Think not you can be merry, eating, drinking.
Be celestial as man and wife.

Chorus
Celestial! Celestial!
Stop thoughts that may be troubling you!
Celestial! Celestial!
Recall you’re one of chosen few!

Fabulous is the plan that God has for us!
If we tithe, attend the temple oft.
Chastity is the rule, it’s ever been thus.
Be safe. Don’t risk your parts cut off!

Chorus

Celestial! It will answer every question!
Celestial! It solves all hurt and pain!
Celestial! It erases all depression!
Heed not those who dare to complain!

Chorus

In Statistics

How well does a mortality table predict Q15 member lifespan?

Ziff20 November 202411 Comments

This is a question people quite reasonably often ask when I blog about which Q15 members are likely to become Church president, using a mortality table as my guide. In this post, I used the same SOA mortality table I’ve been using to forecast longevity, and applied it to Q15 members who have already died, to see how well it predicted when we already know the outcome.

Of course a big weakness of this analysis is that Q15 members aren’t a big group, so it’s hard to say with much certainty how well the table is doing. In order to expand the sample a little, I looked back to all Q15 members who were in their positions in 1950 or who have been called since then, and have since died. For each month of each Q15 member’s life, starting from the later of January 1950 and his calling date, I checked how many actual months of life he had left, as well as what the SOA table said about how much life he had left.

“What the SOA table said” isn’t one number, though, because the table just gives, at each age, the probability of dying in the next year. (It breaks these down by employees and retirees, by women and men, by white collar and blue collar, and by disabled and non-disabled. I always use the white collar non-disabled men, the employees series as long as it goes, and then the retiree series.) What I do is to use these one-year mortality probabilities to find an implied distribution of probabilities of how much more time a man of a particular age has remaining. Really, what I want is just some summary statistics from that distribution: the mean and several percentiles, namely the 5th, the 25th, the 50th (also called the median), the 75th, and the 95th. At the end of the post, if you’re interested, I give a little more detail on this process.

This graph below shows a comparison of what the mortality table predicted versus how long a few Q15 members actually lived. The horizontal axis shows age, and the vertical axis shows years of life remaining. In the lower left, Bruce R. McConkie at age 66 (the left edge of the graph) had fewer than 4 years of life left, as he would die at 69. Cutting through almost the middle of the graph, Gordon B. Hinckley at age 66 had over 30 years left.

What’s interesting, of course, is the comparison of these actual life spans to what the mortality table would have predicted. The dashed black line shows the median of the distribution of probability implied by the mortality table at each age. As you can see, it flattens out as age approaches 100, as it always predicts at least a little more life (at least until age 120, where it gives a mortality probability of 100%). I haven’t shown the mean because it’s very similar to the median, falling a bit below it for younger ages, and a bit above it for older ages.

In Politics

How does Trump embody Latter-day Saint values?

Ziff21 October 20249 Comments

I read a comment recently at W&T about Church members in Arizona being split on whether Trump embodies Latter-day Saint values, with most believing he does, and a minority disagreeing. (I’m not linking to the comment because on a quick search, I couldn’t find it.) As you can guess if you’ve read ZD much, I’m very much with the minority.

But it did get me to thinking that clearly there’s some connection that can be drawn between Trumpism and Mormonism that so many Church members are picking up on. After some thought, here are some LDS principles I think Trump follows or exhibits that make him feel so right to so many American Mormons:

Patriarchy: Trump clearly has little use for women holding positions of authority. Similarly, the LDS Church gives women very little institutional authority, having all-male leadership both at the general and local level. While Trump and the Church obviously disagree about rules around sex, they agree that women are the attractive objects who are responsible for it. Perhaps Trump’s largest-looming legacy will be appointing judges to get Roe v. Wade overturned so states could restrict or ban abortion. Similarly, while GAs claim to believe in sometimes permissible abortion, the way they talk about the issue makes it pretty clear they expect these to be so rare as to be irrelevant.
White supremacy: Trump is a thoroughgoing, unapologetic racist. On the Church side, while it has made some steps in recent years with occasional nice statements about racism being wrong, the racial makeup of the leadership still shouts white supremacy. The unapologized-for and now carefully waved away century plus long priesthood/temple ban still shouts it. The racist justification for the Lamanites’ dark skins in the Book of Mormon still shouts it. It’s no surprise that lots of Church members are happy to embrace Trump’s racism.
Prosperity gospel: Trump is wealthy. He may have driven many businesses to bankruptcy, but he at least has the appearance of having a lot of money. He signed into law a tax cut strongly weighted toward him and his wealthy friends. The Church similarly has a problem with worshiping wealth. Men called to be GAs are typically businessmen and lawyers, and typically well-off. Along the same lines, at the local level, bishops and their counselors typically have white collar jobs. The Church spends a lot of money to make temples look fancy in ways that echo Trump’s love of plating things with gold. The Church’s requirement of tithing, which is a disproportionate burden for poorer people, makes it a more comfortable place for better-off people. While the prosperity gospel may not be taught in as many words, there is a lot of coded language that gets passed around like “self reliance” and Ezra Taft Benson’s famous line about people to take the slums out of themselves.
Nationalism: Trump is deeply concerned about the United States not being powerful or white enough. (This point is of course connected with white supremacy.) He doesn’t want the country involved in alliances like NATO, and he’s suspicious of trade agreements. He’d rather slap tariffs on imports to show other countries who’s boss. He hates immigrants, legal or not. In the Church, while there have been movements toward becoming more seriously international, the headquarters is still in the US, and the top leadership is still largely American. The influence of Ezra Taft Benson’s paranoid America-firstism may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s far from gone. We also still have things like God saying in our scriptures that he inspired the US Constitution and GAs (and former GAs) who are clearly America worshipers. One disconnect with Trumpism is that many American Mormons have served missions in other countries and tend to be more pro-immigrant than Trumpists in general.
Authoritarian control: Trump hates any checks on his power. He openly mused while president about becoming president-for-life, he called for the 2020 election to be postponed, and when it turned out not in his favor, he tried to have it overturned. He hates having reporters check him on his fabrications or publish anything critical of him. In the Church, while we have some nice aspirational statements like Joseph Smith’s “teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves,” we have far more a norm of leaders directing and members following. GAs are so unwilling to accept feedback from the rank-and-file that they periodically send a letter telling us we can raise issues no further than our stake presidents, and we should never contact them directly. Another very telling example is that we’ve turned the sustaining vote from an actual vote as it was at the beginning of the Church to a loyalty test, where anyone voting opposed on any calling is doing nothing but marking themselves as suspect.
Revering elders: Trump is an old man. For Latter-day Saints raised to revere the authority of GAs who are old men, he fits right in (not even to mention that he’s white and wealthy).

It’s quite a bit, actually, that Trumpist Latter-day Saints are picking up on. Interestingly, I think it’s more often unspoken than spoken issues. For example, the Church doesn’t come out and say “women are lesser,” it just treats them differently. Or GAs don’t (any longer) say that people of color are lesser than whites, they just try to pretend the priesthood/temple ban never happened.

But I still disagree with Trumpist Mormons. Even if he’s a good example of white Christian nationalism, he utterly fails at any scriptural or other Church righteousness test. Let me give you a few.

In the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, Jesus pronounces blessedness on the following:

The poor in spirit.
They that mourn.
The meek.
They which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
The merciful.
The pure in heart.
The peacemakers.
They which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

None of these match Trump in the slightest. I imagine his supporters might argue that the last one does, because he’s widely hated for his righteousness in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. I totally disagree, as I don’t believe allowing or enacting abortion bans is righteousness. But even setting that one aside for the sake of argument, can you imagine anyone who fits this list worse? The meek? The merciful? The peacemakers? Trump is full of bluster, anger, and cruelty.

In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2024

Ziff14 October 202418 Comments

Fastest hymn: “On This Day of Joy and Gladness” (Sunday morning) and “Praise the Lord with Heart and Voice” (Sunday afternoon).
Slowest hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” (Sunday morning), at least at the beginning and end.
Best hymn: “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (Sunday morning), “And the Glory of the Lord” (Sunday afternoon), and “Holding Hands Around the World” (Saturday afternoon).
Worst hymn: “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet” (Sunday afternoon). This was just a usual congregational hymn, but I really don’t like it because it sounds like something that would be sung from a Rameumptom.

Longest prayer: 108 seconds, J. Kimo Esplin, Saturday morning invocation.
Shortest prayer: 51 seconds, Ciro Schmeil, Saturday afternoon opening.

Best title: “God’s Favourite,” Karl B. Hirst.
Phoning-it-in title: “Following Christ,” Dallin H. Oaks.

Best laugh:

Gerrit W. Gong and two of his grandchildren came up with the following dad joke: “What do you call a dinosaur who crashes his car? Tyrannosaurus Wrecks.”
David L. Buckner: “My father often reminded me that simply sitting in a pew on Sunday doesn’t make you a good Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car.”

Best image: I really like Yongsung Kim’s painting The Hand of God that Juan Pablo Villar showed in his talk. I appreciate how Jesus looks happy, rather than annoyed, to be reaching into the water to retrieve Peter (or us).

Most troublesome image: While talking about contention, Dallin H. Oaks showed a picture of two men arguing. When I first looked at the talk, it was included, but now it appears to be gone. (You can still see it on the video of the talk on YouTube if you’re curious.) I’m assuming this means someone decided it wasn’t correlated enough.

In Statistics

Church President Probabilities, Updated for President Nelson’s Birthday!

Ziff12 September 202416 September 202412 Comments

Russell M. Nelson turned 100 this week, so it seems like a good time to look at probabilities of who among the Q15 is likely to become Church president in the future. If you’ve read ZD for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me do this before. Here’s my most recent post (and here’s a follow-up post). I’m following the same method I’ve used in the past. Using this handy mortality table produced by the Society of Actuaries, I estimate the probability of each Q15 member having died for a number of times in the future. Then, using the logic of seniority and succession, I can calculate the probability of each member becoming president from the probabilities of (1) all members senior to him dying, while (2) he survives. One small change I made this time versus previous times is that I looked at monthly points in the future rather than yearly points. It’s nice to make more fine-grained graphs, but it doesn’t change the results materially. For more on the method, see the “Method” section in my 2023 post.

This first graph shows each Q15 member’s estimated survival probability out to 30 years (360 months) in the future. Calculating this has always been a step in the process, but I had never graphed it before and I thought it might be interesting to look at. What’s striking, I think, is where a man falls out of line with those near him in succession order. For example, Elder Bednar is between Elders Andersen and Renlund, but of course in seniority, he’s ahead of them, as well as Elders Rasband, Christofferson, and Cook, even though he is younger than they are.

This next graph shows probabilities of becoming Church president by year.