Showing all posts by Ziff

In Church Life, Church Policy

Disavowing old teachings could reduce leader roulette

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

After Elder Uchtdorf introduced the new, more principle-based For the Strength of Youth pamphlet last October, my YW-age daughter came home from a church meeting where she said her leaders told her that actually, all the old rules from the previous version still apply. So all the micromanaging, harsh, and unrealistic rules are still in force. Sexual feelings are still categorically wicked, and tattoos are still bad. Really, I thought the idea of the new version was to get rid of these overly detailed rules that don’t apply to everyone (or for some of them, anyone) and just teach general principles and have the kids learn to make moral decisions themselves.

What this incident illustrates is at least part of where leader roulette comes from in the Church. As has been discussed on the Bloggernacle at great length over the years, the GAs’ general refusal to disavow old teachings, coupled with all their effort put into maintaining the idea that their teachings never change in the first place, leaves all the old teachings out there just waiting for Church members to glom onto them and teach them as the Church’s current position. My daughter’s experience just shows this happening in real time. The old teachings about the wickedness of multiple piercings per ear, for example, are all still out there. Nobody’s going to go back and add an asterisk to say, this Gordon B. Hinckley Conference talk from 2000 where he preaches against them (as well as tattoos) to explain oh by the way, we no longer teach this. So any teacher or leader who’s looking for the Church’s position on tattoos can still easily stumble on such teachings.

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In Statistics, Temple

Do people make more temple appointments during Conference weekend?

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

I thought this might be an interesting question because if ever people are going to be inspired to want to go to the temple, you’d think it would be during Conference. Sister or Elder So-and-So gives an inspiring talk about temple work, and even though temples are of course closed during Conference, it’s easy while watching or listening to just whip out your phone or computer and make a temple appointment.

I looked at this question using the Church’s same handy online temple appointment scheduler that you’d use to make an appointment. Helpfully, it reports the number of seats available for a proxy ordinance session, so it was straightforward for me to check the number of seats available before Conference weekend, and then again afterward. For comparison with Conference weekend, I also checked the change in number of seats available across the four weekends around Conference weekend, two before, and two after.

Because it was still a bit laborious for me to gather the data, I reduced the sample in several ways:

  • I looked only at endowment sessions (because they’re the most time-consuming of temple ordinances).
  • I looked at only sessions for the week following the weekend I was checking. For example, for Conference weekend, which was April 1st-2nd, I looked at sessions for Tuesday April 4th through Saturday April 8th. (Most temples are closed on Mondays. The exceptions I’ve found are Aba Nigeria and Provo Utah, but I excluded the few sessions on Mondays for these temples.)
  • I looked at only a sample of open temples. I chose them by region, to try to be at least kind of representative of the areas where the Church has temples. Within each region, I chose the temple that appeared to generally offer the most endowment sessions, because I figured more sessions would give more data and more chance to find an effect.
  • For each session, I checked its available seat count just twice, once on the Friday evening before the weekend, and again on the Monday evening after the weekend. (Note that for a few temples in the Pacific and therefore many time zones ahead of me in the US, I checked their counts in mornings instead, to be sure that I wasn’t checking so late on Monday that some of their Tuesday sessions had already begun.)

In addition to the worldwide sample of temples, I was also in the middle of gathering data for another project on all temples in Utah, so I was able to include them as well. The temples outside Utah in the sample are the following: Aba Nigeria, Boise Idaho, Campinas Brazil, Chicago Illinois, Dallas Texas, Guatemala City Guatemala, Hamilton New Zealand, Lima Peru, Madrid Spain, Manila Philippines, Mesa Arizona, Mexico City Mexico, Nuku’alofa Tonga, Orlando Florida, Preston England, Seattle Washington, and Washington D.C. The open Utah temples are the following: Bountiful, Brigham City, Cedar City, Draper, Jordan River, Logan, Monticello, Mount Timpanogos, Ogden, Oquirrh Mountain, Payson, Provo City Center, Provo, and Vernal.

This graph shows results for non-Utah temples. The bars show the average change in number of available seats per endowment session between Friday and Monday (again, the actual sessions are the following Tuesday through Saturday). For each temple, the left bar shows the average change across the two weekends before Conference, the middle bar shows the average change across Conference weekend, and the right bar shows the average change across the two weekends after Conference. The lines that point up and down from the top of each bar and end in short horizontal lines are standard errors. (If you don’t want to read some statsy explanation at the link, you can just think of them as a measure of reliability: if these are small, we have more confidence that the true average change is close to the bar height, and if they’re big, we have less confidence.) Where I’ve shaded in the before-Conference or after-Conference bars, this means that they’re statistically significantly different from the Conference bar for the same temple. (The specific statistical test I used was a t-test, two tailed, meaning it looks for differences in either direction–bigger or smaller.)

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In Church Policy, Liturgy

Why no Christmas-and-Easter Mormons?

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

My tween daughter recently asked me about people who attend church only at Christmas and Easter. She said that she likes going to church, but that if she ever quit, she couldn’t imagine still attending on these major holidays. At least in my experience, this is a common feeling among Mormons. I mean that I haven’t noticed ward members attending on or around Christmas and Easter who don’t also attend pretty regularly the rest of the year. Part of the reason, I think, is that the LDS Church is such a high-demand church. It’s definitely designed for, and expects members to be, either all in or all out. There’s not much room for people who are kinda sorta in, for whatever reason or at whatever level of activity.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

But maybe a bigger reason is that we don’t as a church really do anything special for Christmas or Easter. I was thinking about this recently because there was extra discussion of even Palm Sunday and Holy Week at General Conference. And there was the First Presidency letter that canceled the second hour of church on Easter. At least in my area, there was also supposed to be some effort to invite non-Mormons to come, and to make sacrament meeting nicer than usual. This might have been passed down from the Area Presidency or someone; I couldn’t find a church-wide reference to it.

My ward did have a nice Easter sacrament meeting, with several musical numbers and some good talks focused on Jesus. But it struck me that it was still just a sacrament meeting, built out of the same usual building blocks of talks and singing and prayers and sacrament. Making a special effort at Easter (or Christmas) to make those building blocks better doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the same type of meeting. Other than the sacrament, which is of course the same every week, there isn’t any ceremony or ritual. Other than sacrament and singing (and the odd sustaining vote), there isn’t congregation participation. I think it’s telling even that we call it a meeting rather than a worship service or something like that that lots of other Christians would expect. It makes it sound very businesslike, which I think fits because we’re a pretty businesslike church.

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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2023

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

Fastest hymn: “I Believe in Christ,” Sunday morning.
Slowest hymn: “I Stand All Amazed,” Sunday afternoon.
Best hymn: “High on the Mountain Top,” Saturday morning. This is frequently sung as a congregational hymn, which means a vanilla arrangement, so it was fun to hear a different version with stuff like organ interludes.
Worst hymn: “Keep the Commandments,” Saturday morning. This is a dull hymn to begin with, and the bland arrangement didn’t improve it.

Image by Elle Stallings from Pixabay

Longest prayer: 270 seconds, Adeyinka A. Ojediran, Sunday afternoon benediction. This was the second-longest Conference prayer I’ve ever seen, being beaten out only by D. Rex Gerratt’s 274-second prayer in 2007. (My data does only go back to 1996, and is spotty prior to 2005.)
Longest prayer, honorable mention: 186 seconds, Thierry K. Mutombo, Sunday morning benediction. At the time he gave it, this was the longest prayer since 2010, but then he was upstaged by Elder Ojediran the very next session.
Shortest prayer: 45 seconds, Mark L. Pace, Saturday morning benediction.

Best title: Vern P. Stanfill, “The Imperfect Harvest”
Phoning it in title: Gerrit W. Gong, “Ministering”
Most overwrought title: Ahmad S. Corbitt, “Do You Know Why I as a Christian Believe in Christ?”

Good patterns:

  • With Russell M. Nelson, Dallin H. Oaks, and Neil L. Andersen focusing on different issues, and Jeffrey R. Holland and his musket sidelined with COVID, there was no mention of LGBTQ issues, which is so often an area where speakers say cruel things.
  • Some men in the Logan Institute choir (Saturday evening) and the BYU choir (Saturday afternoon) actually had facial hair! And hair touching or over the collar! (Yes, even the BYU choir. Don’t tell the Honor Code Office!)

Good/bad pattern: Russell M. Nelson gave only one full talk and the usual half-talk at the end to announce new temples, and the other First Presidency members gave only one talk each (like last Conference) leaving more opportunity for different people (especially women) to speak. Unfortunately, rather than getting more women added to the lineup, we just got an abbreviated Saturday evening session.
Bad pattern: Speakers capitalize even random titles for prophets (“Father Lehi,” “Prophet Joseph”), but of course still refuse to capitalize—or even mention—Heavenly Mother.

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In Statistics

Revisiting New Children of Record Data

Author ZiffPosted on 2 Comments

I wrote a post last year after April Conference about the new children of record counts that the Church reports every April for the previous calendar year. In that post, I pointed out that, after the marked decline in new children of record the Church reported during COVID, the bounce back the following year was far less than would be expected if it were just a matter of clearing a backlog of children who weren’t recorded during the height of the pandemic. I speculated that perhaps this was evidence of a decline in activity level that wasn’t bouncing back.

Now that we have the 2022 data from the 2023 statistical report, it looks like I was probably too hasty in my interpretation. Here’s a graph with the new data.

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In Fun

Church Announces New Cryptocurrency: WritCoin

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

On the eve of its 193rd annual General Conference, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a startling announcement, through spokesman Brigham Orson Andreasson: the Church is getting into cryptocurrency. However, rather than involving itself with any existing cryptocurrency, the Church is introducing its own, a version to be called HolyWritCoin, or simply WritCoin. Andreasson explained that WritCoin is similar in some ways to other cryptocurrencies, but it also has its differences, and in fact technically fits into an entirely new category that is not cryptographic (hidden writing), but rather holygraphic (sacred writing, not to be confused with holographic). “It does not partake of the blockchain technology of the world,” he said, “but rather it uses a higher, holier technology known as rockreign. Rock refers to the rock of revelation upon which the Savior built his Church, and reign refers to the eternal reign of the Father and the Son.” He also likened the coming forth of WritCoin to the coming forth of the Church: “Just as inspired reformers of the Protestant Reformation paved the way for the Restoration, inspired creators of cryptocurrency have paved the way for the holygraphic WritCoin.”

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In Statistics

Mormons: To know us is to love us (or not)

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Pew released a report last week on a recent survey where they asked American respondents how they view various religious groups (and atheists). With the caveat that it only gives results for seven broad groups (e.g., all evangelical Christians are one group), Mormons fare the worst. Only 15% of respondents view us very or somewhat favorably, while 25% view us very or somewhat unfavorably. The difference of -10 percentage points is the worst for any of the groups, and is twice as large as for the second-worst-scoring group (Muslims, who get 17% and 22%, respectively, for a difference of -5). This is consistent with results of a similar YouGov survey published a few months ago, where Mormons weren’t the group seen least favorably, but we scored near the bottom, and mostly only beat out groups too small to be mentioned separately in the Pew report (e.g., FLDS, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Satanists).

One tidbit that I found most interesting in the report was that knowing a Mormon doesn’t improve respondents’ ratings of us. Here’s the complete breakdown from Pew, with the favorability ratings for respondents who do know someone from the group in the left graph, and those for respondents who don’t know someone from the group in the right graph.

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In Fun, General Conference

Topics We Will and Won’t Hear about at General Conference

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

General Conference is less than a month away. What topics do you think we’ll hear about? What topics

Photo by Evan Qu on Unsplash

will speakers carefully avoid? Here’s a list of some of my guesses of topics and phrases and possible policy changes, along with the likelihood that they’ll come up in Conference talks.

 

Words and phrases

  • “Youth battalion” — 90%
  • “Middle-aged battalion” — < 1%
  • “Senior citizen battalion” — << 1%
  • “Youth corps” — < 1%
  • “Let God prevail” — > 99%
  • “Covenant path” — 99%
  • “Plan of happiness” — 60%
  • “Plan of salvation” — 10%
  • “Divine design” — 20%
  • “Hinge point” — 10%
  • “Under the banner of heaven” — << 1%
  • “Big 12” — 1%
  • “SEC [Southeastern Conference]” — < 1%
  • “SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission]” — << 1%
  • “We consider this matter closed.” — << 1%
  • “In all material respects, contributions received, expenditures made, and assets of the Church have been recorded and administered in accordance with approved Church budgets, policies, and accounting practices.” — 99%

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In Church Life

Dual Relationships at Church

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

I really enjoy Alison Green’s workplace issues advice blog Ask a Manager. One type of question I’ve seen her field many times asks about having more than one relationship with someone at work. By that I mean that they’re in a situation (or considering going into one) where they’re not only in a co-worker relationship, or supervisor and supervisee relationship, but also a family or friend or other business relationship. For example, I’ve seen letter writers ask about hiring a friend or family member (or the other way around, about accepting an offer to work for a friend or family member), or about accepting an offer to work a side job for the boss at their first job, but as a babysitter for their kids, or about agreeing to rent an apartment they own to their boss at work.

From what I’ve read, Green universally recommends against these types of dual relationships. (She doesn’t use this term, but I’m borrowing it from mental health, where it’s used to describe a situation where a therapist and client also have another relationship in another context.) She typically points out that there are all kinds of difficult ways that events in one relationship can then leak into the other relationship. For example, if you hire your friend and then you have to give them a bad performance review, will they remain friends? If you rent an apartment to your boss and they’re unhappy with a rent increase you propose as their landlord, will they fire you?

I got to thinking about this kind of dual relationship in a church context when I read Dave B.’s recent post “Is There a Deep Church?” at W&T. His post raises the question of how much influence Church employees have even though GAs are ostensibly in charge, in a kind of parallel way to the question of how much influence government employees have, even though elected officials are ostensibly in charge. This is a tangent to Dave’s post, but it occurred to me that Church employees have a dual relationship with the Church, as both employees and members. I was also reminded of Scott B.’s 2011 post at BCC, “Seeking Pastoral Care at BYU,” where he points out that people affiliated with BYU have dual relationships with their bishops: while bishops are in theory people BYU students or employees could go to for pastoral care in times of crisis, bishops are also the ones who can get them fired or kicked out of school if the bishops decide their crisis is somehow sinful.

Image credit: Clipart Library

In this post, I’ll list all the dual relationships that happen in a Church context that I can think of. Also, in Alison Green style, for each one I’ll outline at least one way that an event in one part of the dual relationship could leak into the other part. Finally, I’ll see if I can come up with a suggestion for a different way the Church could handle the situation to avoid the problem of the dual relationship.

Church employees in general

  • Description: The Church is both their religion and their employer.
  • How it could go wrong: If a Church employee gets a bad evaluation, will their bishop also be notified to give them Church discipline? Or if a Church employee gets a big calling (stake president?), will they expect a promotion at work? It seems like this relationship is also easy for the Church to exploit by reminding employees of their temple covenants to give everything to the Church. If employees are unhappy with the size of their salary or their raise, say, their supervisors can just call them faithless and threaten them with Church discipline.
  • Possible solution: For many Church employees, it seems likely that there’s no particular reason they need to be Mormon. The Church could have a policy of hiring only non-Mormons unless there’s a particular reason they need a Church member for a position. Alternatively, they could probably just outsource some functions to third parties entirely, cutting the Church out of the equation. I think they already hire marketing and legal firms in some situations. This process could just be expanded.

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In Statistics, Temple

Big Temples and Small Temples

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

Right before the turn of the millennium, President Hinckley rolled out a new temple-building campaign that reimagined what a temple could be. The Church began building temples that were far smaller than their predecessors, but were also much closer to where members lived.

It has been a couple of decades since then, and President Nelson has his own slew of newly-announced temples. I don’t think he’s made an explicit point like President Hinckley did, of saying they’ll be smaller. I think the sizes are clearly varying by location.

I got to wondering how much of the temple capacity of the Church is still in Utah, or still in the US. My impression is that even with many of the small Hinckley-era temples being built in the US, there are still often quite large temples built here, even in the Mormon corridor. Look at Payson, Utah (dedicated in 2015), for example, or Gilbert, Arizona (dedicated in 2014).

To answer my question, I looked on the Church website at how many endowment sessions there were in each open temple, and how many seats were available in those sessions, for two dates in February: the 14th and the 25th. I checked the number of available seats at least a month before the session dates so that few would be likely to be scheduled. I chose these date to have one weekday and one Saturday, and to not be right next to each other, so a temple that might be closed for cleaning on one day, for example, might open back up on the other. Also, I chose to look at endowment sessions because they’re by far the most time-intensive of vicarious ordinances, so they’re the biggest potential bottleneck.

There are 161 temples with at least one endowment session on February 14th or 25th. (I did notice that a few temples that weren’t listed as having sessions available when I started gathering data did when I checked back in the last few days, so it’s possible that a few more will open between now and then so I may be undercounting a little.) Here’s a breakdown by region.

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In Books, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Books on GoodReads

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

I wrote a post a couple of years ago where I looked at how Mormon-related movies were rated on IMDB. I thought it would be fun to do a similar look at how Mormon-related books are rated on GoodReads.

I got ratings for 568 books, mostly Mormon-related, but with a few others for comparison. The Mormon-related ones were scriptures, Church-published materials like manuals, and books by GAs, Mormon studies people, and popular Mormon authors (e.g., Jack Weyland, Anita Stansfield). The non-Mormon ones were a few Bibles, the Left Behind series, the top 10 fiction and non-fiction books on the GoodReads lists (I’m not sure exactly of the criteria for these), and 20 fiction and 20 non-fiction books I was hoping would be more representative of average books, so I chose them off of GoodReads user-created lists that had nothing to do with the book content (one was strange titles and the other was interesting covers). I required a book to have at least 50 ratings to be included, although I made exceptions for three extra bad ones I was interested in: the ERA-era book Woman, written by a bunch of GAs, the priesthood/temple-ban-justifying Mormonism and the Negro, and the mansplained classic Woman and the Priesthood. Note that I’ve gathered this data in bits and pieces over the last month or so, so some of the numbers might be a little out of date.

I assigned the books to categories depending on how Correlation-friendly they were. Unfortunately, I’ve only read a small fraction of the books, so I didn’t have firsthand knowledge in most cases. However, most books make pretty clear what type they are. For example, Mormon studies books are typically published by university presses. More correlated books are typically published by Deseret Book or Shadow Mountain. Anyway, this table shows, for all the Mormon books, the number of books in the sample and their average rating on the 1-to-5 scale used by GoodReads.

In my post on movies, I speculated that there would be higher ratings for movies produced by the Church, or that were scripture-adjacent, and that did turn out to be the case. It looks like there’s a similar pattern here, as scriptures rate the highest, and generally categories rank lower in average rating as they move further from being correlated. Here’s a brief explanation of what falls into each category:

  • Scriptures — LDS scriptures in different forms (e.g., Book of Mormon separate vs. Triple Combination) plus some non-LDS editions of the Bible.
  • Correlated — Church manuals and books that have essentially become manuals (e.g., Jesus the Christ).
  • GA biography — Biographies of GAs.
  • Near correlated — Nearly all books by GAs, as well as books by people like John Bytheway who are striving to be correlated, and novels by writers with similar goals (Gerald Lund, Chris Heimerdinger).
  • Correlation friendly — Books that aren’t quite trying to be correlated, but are still very Church-friendly, like many of the Givens’s books, Hugh Nibley, and some of Patrick Mason’s.
  • Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who’s still Mormon (e.g., Leonard Arrington’s Adventures of a Church Historian).
  • Mormon studies — Any look at a Mormon topic from a scholarly perspective, so for example Maxine Hanks’s Women and Authority, or John Turner’s biography of Brigham Young, or Kathleen Flake’s book about the seating of Reed Smoot in the US Senate.
  • Ex-Mormon memoir — Memoir of someone who left Mormonism, regardless of hostility level, so everything from Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints to Katie Langston’s Sealed.
  • Not correlation friendly — This includes books with ideas that GAs would generally frown on, even if the writers aren’t hostile to the Church, so for example anything by Carol Lynn Pearson that’s too kind to gay people or too open to Heavenly Mother or rejecting polygamy.
  • Anti — The only book I got in this category is Ed Decker’s classic The God Makers.

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In GA's, Prayer

Thou hast revealed thy gospel hobbies.

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

The Church announced last month that second hour meetings should now begin with prayer. Also, while on the topic, the announcement reminded us that English-speaking members need to be saying thee, thou, thine, and thy when addressing God in prayers.

Of course, the issue of proper prayer language has long been a gospel hobby of Dallin H. Oaks in particular. I can’t even guess what interesting changes he might make if he outlives Russell M. Nelson to become Church President. Perhaps he’ll add a question to the temple recommend interview for English-speaking members only that asks if they’re using proper prayer language. Or perhaps he’ll require English-speaking wards and branches to submit audio recordings of their meetings so that the use of proper prayer language can be audited and corrected if necessary.

Photo by Adam Patterson on Unsplash

As has been discussed for years on the Bloggernacle, it’s weird that we turn these words around that used to be the informal forms of address to make them the formal ones, and so turn on its head the idea that God should be close to us, and instead puts him at a distance. It’s also strange to do different things in different languages. I’m sadly monolingual, but as others who speak more languages than one have also noted, it’s common that even the Church’s own materials (e.g., scriptures) in other languages follow the convention of using the less formal words when addressing God. So it’s English speakers only who need to put God at a distance; for everyone else, he can be treated as close.

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In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2022: Funniest Comments

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments and bits of posts that I read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of these are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each person’s name a link to the original source, so you can go and read them in their original context if you want. Also, the comments are in roughly chronological order.

Old Man, commenting on Bishop Bill’s post “Permanent Changes” at W&T:

How did Enoch get his people translated without strict adherence to the block schedule? How did the Old and New Testament prophets, prophetesses, apostles, etc., ever develop into the great human beings they were without long weekly meetings, youth programs and trek? How did ol’ Brigham cross the plains without a Sunday School Presidency, Primary, and not a single Eagle Scout on hand?

Michael Austin, in his post “BYU’s New Demonstration Policy Explained” at BCC:

This policy is designed to maximize our students’ moral agency–which we define as “the ability to exercise uncompromising obedience in the face of difficult moral choices while not being gay.”

Comments on Michael Austin’s post:

This policy may be part of a formal move to rebrand “BYU” as “BY-CES.”

the philosophies of men, mingled with with poorly drafted legalese.

Seriously, every one going on a date on the BYU campus needs to file for permission to demonstrate because they are 2 or more people meeting to raise awareness, primarily about each other.

Pairs and trios of missionaries will, I trust, apply for university sanction?

Also, pretty much like Jesus said: where two or three or gathered, lo, the honor code is there.

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In Christmas, Music

Mary, did you know . . . you need to cover up?

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

As part of the Church’s “Light the World” campaign this year, they released a set of images for people to share. One of them was a modified version of a painting of Mary and baby Jesus that had a number of edits made. See below to see the original and the modified versions. (I’m not sure who to credit for noticing this or making the comparison image. I’ve seen it mentioned in a bunch of Facebook groups and I think on the Mormon Reddit, but I’m not sure who made the original observation.) In honor of the covering up of any hint of Mary’s cleavage in the edited version, I’ve rewritten the song “Mary, Did You Know?”

 

Mary, did you know that your wicked breasts
Would cause good men to stumble?
Mary, did you know that your sinful chest
Made men’s composure crumble?
Did you know that your cover up
Would save men’s souls from sin?
These parts of you were secretly, morality’s linchpin

In Christmas, Church Life

Attending Church on Christmas

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

The Church announced back in November that as Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, church will be a sacrament meeting-only affair. (The wording of the announcement actually makes me chuckle—it says “the only meeting Church members need to attend that day is sacrament meeting”—which kind of sounds to me like a suggestion that wards should still hold the second hour, it’s just that nobody should feel obligated to attend it.) Although my memory isn’t great, it appears from this Church Tech Forum discussion that they made similar announcements in 2011 and 2016 when Christmas fell on a Sunday, as well as in 2017, when Christmas Eve did. But church wasn’t consistently shortened for Christmas on a Sunday in previous years. I definitely remember attending all three hours of church as a kid in the 1980s when Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1983 and 1988, and I recall being desperate to get the boring church stuff out of the way so I could get home and enjoy my presents! I’m not sure what I was up to in 1994, but in 2005, again I remember attending all three hours of church, as my wife and I were visiting her parents. In 2010, I even blogged about the question, suggesting that maybe church should be shortened around the holidays. Maybe I should take credit for the Church deciding to listen and start doing so!

I saw Peggy Fletcher Stack share this New York Times article (This is a gifted link to the article, so you can read it even if you don’t subscribe.) about different ways Christian churches are handling Christmas on a Sunday this year. According to results of one church’s survey, the percentage canceling church entirely is up five percentage points (from 11% to 16%) since this was last an issue in 2016. I really liked this summary point from Timothy Beal, a religious studies professor who was quoted in the article:

Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other. Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.

Photo by Frede Langlois on Unsplash

Anyway, considering the question again, I had a few thoughts. They don’t really hang together, so I’m just going to make a bulleted list.

  • Christmas church isn’t a big deal for us because we Mormons don’t follow a liturgical calendar. We don’t have particular different services for any holiday. Not Christmas, not even Easter, the centerpiece of Christian celebration. (Well, maybe Mother’s Day.) Sure, individual wards and branches can decide on their own to have a more music-and-scripture focused sacrament meeting on or around Christmas, and in my experience, many do, but that’s up to them. There’s nothing stopping a bishop from assigning speakers to talk on the City of Enoch or the Word of Wisdom this Sunday.

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In YW/YM

Parts I Like in the New For the Strength of Youth

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

As you know if you read ZD at all regularly, I’m mostly a complainer when it comes to Church-related issues. Today I wanted to break from my routine and talk about parts of the Church’s new edition of For the Strength of Youth that I appreciate. It still doesn’t fully match what I’d ideally hope for (for example, in maybe mentioning Heavenly Mother and not telling gay teens they need to live a celibate life), but it’s just so much better than the previous version (which, in my more usual vein, I wrote a post complaining about several years ago). If you want a more comprehensive look at the changes from the previous version, you might want to check out Elisa’s excellent post from October over at W&T.

I’ve put the quotes in the order they appear in the booklet. I’ve linked to each chapter before the quote or quotes I’m taking from it, in case you want to read them in context.

Message from the First Presidency

There may be times when you don’t feel strong or capable. That’s normal.

One of my biggest complaints about the previous version is that it pathologized some things that are perfectly normal for teens, like any sexual feelings at all. I am therefore very happy to see lines like this that tell teens in a straightforward way that they’re not alone when they have difficulties or struggles.

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In Fun, GA's

Pet Projects GAs Might Endorse

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

Ronald A. Rasband recently dedicated a new campus of the American Heritage School, which sounds like it’s a Mormon Christian nationalist place that I’m guessing will teach things like the wickedness of separation of church and state. Now that he’s opened the possibility of Q15 members using their position to suggest Church endorsement of their pet projects, I’m wondering what places other Q15 members might go for. Here are some guesses:

Russell M. Nelson – Hundreds of new temples all over the world (I guess this one doesn’t really qualify, because he’s gone a lot further than just implying Church endorsement.)

Dallin H. Oaks – Museum of Straight History at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia

Dieter F. Uchtdorf – Luftwaffe visiting exhibit at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio

Neil L. Andersen – White Fertility Enhancement Project at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina

Image credit: Cornelis Saftleven, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gary E. Stevenson – Fitness Center for the Stars in Bel-Air, California

 

Jeffrey R. Holland – Expanded Dodo Research Center at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar (a pretty good school)

Kevin W. Pearson (hoping to become a Q15 member) – Texas State Prison system’s Panopticon Project in Huntsville, Texas

What pet projects do you expect to see Q15 members endorsing?

 

In Church Life

What types of questions might differentiate types of Mormons?

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

I was intrigued by a guest post at W&T a couple of weeks ago where an anonymous poster shared a question from a survey the Church was doing that invited respondents to categorize themselves as one of five types of Church members. (These appear to be unrelated to Robert Kirby’s five types of Mormons.) Here are the five types. Note that I’m dropping the edits between the February and October versions shown in the W&T post and just going with the October version.

  • I am committed to the gospel, but personal spirituality is more important to me than being institutionally religious. I may attend worship services regularly, but I don’t feel obligated to attend every meeting. As a Christian, I value being open-minded, fair, and tolerant.
  • I am committed to the gospel, and the Church plays a central role in my life. I believe all of its teachings. I usually read my scriptures daily. I think members should be strictly obedient to the counsel they receive from their priesthood leaders.
  • I primarily belong to the Church because of family, tradition, culture, or community. I usually enjoy participating in the Church socially, and feel that God rules more by love than by fear.
  • I am generally less interested in religion and/or spirituality. Even though I may believe some Church teachings, they don’t play a large role in my life. I don’t attend church as often as other people do. Sometimes I have been frustrated by the impact of religion on society.
  • I am committed to the gospel, and the Church is important to me I try to follow its teachings and do the things I’m supposed to, balancing with life’s other priorities. I tend to focus on practical applications of the gospel that are most relevant to my current life and family situation.

Photo credit: Lukas at Pexels.

What most surprised me about this is that the survey apparently just straight up asked people to categorize themselves. This seems way out of the norm to me for how social science questionnaires work. I mean, I understand that companies, and I guess churches, might make profiles of common types of their customers or members. But it seems much more conventional to me that instead of asking people to directly categorize themselves, a researcher would ask them a bunch of far simpler questions, and then aggregate the responses by looking at which ones correlate with each other and come up with the types without showing them to the people taking the survey. If you’re familiar with the problem of double-barreled questions, which ask more than one thing at a time, these are like ten-barreled questions.

I strongly suspect that that’s what the Church researchers originally did. And that got me to wondering what questions they might have asked to try to get at types of Church members. In this post, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I hope or wish they asked, and that of course I’d love to see data on for a large number of Church members to see if types of Mormons fall out like I’d expect.

Beliefs

How strongly to you believe in each of the following Latter-day Saint doctrines?
Response options: Don’t believe at all to believe completely

  • God lives.
  • God loves us.
  • God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.
  • Jesus lived a perfect life.
  • Jesus Christ atoned for our sins.
  • The early church established by Jesus fell into apostasy.
  • Joseph Smith restored the Church.
  • Prophetic authority to lead the Church has been passed in an unbroken line from Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson.
  • The Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record of a people who lived in the Americas.
  • The Book of Abraham is a translation of an ancient record written by Abraham.
  • We lived in the pre-mortal existence before our life on earth.
  • There is life after death.
  • Our place in the life after death will depend on the kind of life we have lived.
  • Our place in the life after death will depend on whether we have performed the required ordinances (or someone else has performed them on our behalf).

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In Fun

Church data on me I’d like to see before the hackers get it

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments
Image credit: Massimo Botturi on Unsplash

The Church recently released a statement about a cyberattack they had suffered this last March (they waited this long to say something at the request of federal law enforcement). It sounds like the attackers made off with information on some Church members like name, membership number, and preferred language. But this got me to wondering about what other data I’d like to see if the Church is keeping it on me. I remember from the movie “The Mountain of the Lord” how Wilford Woodruff said it was important that we be “a record-keeping people,” so I have no doubt there are many records being kept that are far more interesting than my preferred language. Here are some examples of what I’d like to see:

Attendance

  • The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church, and whether this has varied by whether it’s football season or not.
  • The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church where I’ve maybe attended what one of my sisters calls “the church of the hallway” during second/third hours.
  • My on-time performance for sacrament meeting, and whether it varied by my ward’s meeting time slot. (I assume I’ve done worse with 9am, for example, versus 11am, but I’m actually not sure. Maybe later starting times just lead me to be more lackadaisical.)
  • The fraction of stake conferences I’ve attended.
  • How many different church buildings I’ve attended church at regularly.
  • How many church buildings I’ve attended church at at least once.
  • How much church buildings I’ve played basketball or volleyball in, without ever attending church meetings there.

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