Ziff – Page 4 – Zelophehad's Daughters

Fastest musical number: “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah,” Saturday morning.
Slowest musical number: “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” Sunday afternoon
Best musical number: “All Creatures of Our God and King,” Saturday morning
Worst musical number: “Let Us All Press On,” Sunday morning. This was a weird and drawn-out arrangement that made an already overly bouncy hymn worse.

Longest prayer: 91 seconds, Susan H. Porter, Saturday evening benediction. This is a really short longest prayer. Typically there is at least one over 100 seconds.
Shortest prayer: 54 seconds, Weatherford T. Clayton, Sunday morning invocation

Longest talk: 2028 words, D. Todd Christofferson
Shortest talk: 374 words, Russell M. Nelson, in the last talk of Conference where he mostly just announced new temples.

Choir successes, non-music category:

The missionary choir that sang in the Saturday afternoon session for once didn’t only include young missionaries, but also senior missionaries, which I thought was nice.
The child-and-youth choir that sang in the Saturday evening session included several teen boys with hair to their collars or longer. (One of them was the son of April Young Bennett at the Exponent; she blogged about their experience.) It’s encouraging to me when BYU rules stop being applied to the whole Church.

Choir failure, non-music category: The same child-and-youth choir was seated not in a typical arrangement with boys on one side and girls on the other, but with the boys in the center and the girls around the periphery. This seems like a striking illustration of how we think about the relative importance of boys and girls in the Church.

In Gender Issues, Hymns, Music

Gender-Neutralizing the Hymns: A Proof of Concept

Ziff27 September 202219 Comments

How difficult would it be to make our hymns gender-neutral? If I could make one change to our hymnal, I’m with Mike C. in this 2014 post: this is the change I’d make. Incidentally, I would also be in favor of making our scriptures gender-neutral, but I expect modifying the hymns would be a much easier sell at this point (not that either is likely to happen soon). My reasoning is the same in either case. As it’s become less acceptable and less common in the world in general for words like “man” to be used to refer to humanity in general, women’s experience at church becomes more and more of a contrast with the rest of their lives. Virtually every reading of scripture and many singing of hymns just emphasizes again to women how unimportant, how peripheral, they are in the Church. Of course I’d rather we changed the actual structure of the Church to make women more equal, but while that’s not happening, modifying our hymns would be a good step.

There’s even precedent for gender-neutralizing hymns, at least a little. Douglas Campbell documents in this 1995 Dialogue article that in the update to the current 1985 hymnal from its predecessor, a few hymns had some of their language changed from gender-exclusive to gender-neutral. Still, I realize that such changes are unlikely to be made wholesale. I can’t imagine Presidents Nelson or Oaks signing off on such changes, for example. Perhaps in a few more decades when we get our next new hymnal, the GAs of the day might consider it.

In this post, I’m going to look at a very mundane question that has always kind of lurked in the back of my mind on this topic. If we actually did want to change the language of our hymns to make them gender-neutral, how difficult would it be? I looked at 20% the hymns in our current hymnal (all hymn numbers that are evenly divisible by five, so 68 of the 341) and tried my hand at rewriting the gender-exclusive words into gender-neutral words. My goal was just to see how easy or difficult the exercise was.

First, I made a list of all the gender-exclusive words in these 68 hymns. There are 379 in total, or about five and a half per hymn. Most of them, though, are references to Jesus or God (e.g., Father, Son, Lord, and King). I’m not considering these types of usages. I’m only interested in gender-exclusive words that refer to people in general, or to Church members. This table shows the breakdown of the 379 words.

It’s just the 55 words from the second and fourth rows, then, that I attempted to gender-neutralize. All but two of the 55 are male gender-specific words. To be complete, I tried to gender-neutralize them all, male or female. One other note, in case anyone is ever interested enough to try to retrace my steps: if a word occurs multiple times in a hymn because a line is repeated (like in a chorus), I count each repeat as a separate instance.

In Fun, Sacrament

New Rules for the Sacrament

Ziff12 September 202212 September 202219 Comments

Now that President Oaks’s preference for people to take the sacrament with their right hand has been enshrined in the Handbook (see instruction #7), we here at ZD are excited to leak the following list of additional rules for the sacrament that President Oaks also proposed but that have been put on hold until he becomes Church President.

Materials

Homemade bread is preferred for the sacrament, but store bought may also be used in cases where the women in the unit have rejected their divine gender role.
Bread should be neither too sweet nor too savory, as either of these may detract from the simplicity of the ordinance.
Bread color should be as white as possible, to provide the most delightsome possible representation of the Savior.
The use of filtered water is encouraged, but not required. A water filter may be installed in the church building, but if so, it must be funded by the members in the units using the building.
The carbonation or flavoring of sacrament water is strictly prohibited.
The temperature of water should be between 45 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit (7.2 and 12.8 degrees Celsius).
The use of ice cubes in place of water is prohibited.

In Abuse

Four Things That Hamper the Church’s Anti-Abuse Messages

Ziff1 September 20222 Comments

I’ve been thinking about the Church’s response to the AP story about the sex abuse case in Arizona. In it, there’s a bit that says “Church teachings and handbooks are clear and unequivocal about the evils of abuse.” This is definitely a good step, but what struck me is that I think it’s hard for the anti-abuse message to get across clearly when the Church has organizational features and makes rhetorical choices that can actually enable abuse (and here I’m thinking of abuse more generally, not just in the particular Arizona case). There are four issues in particular that I was thinking of.

The first is the authoritarian power structure. In the Church organization, control and information are only supposed to flow in one direction. GAs periodically remind us that they’re too busy to listen to us individually. This is bad for the Church in that it makes it difficult for those at the top to get real feedback. But it’s also a bad family structure. It sets parents (and fathers in particular) up as authorities who are not to be questioned. I don’t know if being an unquestioned authority makes someone more likely to become abusive in the first place, but it seems like it’s definitely smoothing the path for them to continue if they start, as a potential brake has been removed.

In GA's

The Q15 and the Big Five Personality Traits

Ziff12 August 202212 August 20225 Comments

In personality psychology, there’s a dominant model that suggests there are five big factors that capture many differences in personality traits. In this post, I’m going to speculate about where the Q15 might fall on each of these five personality traits (mostly where they fall collectively), and how this might make them different from members of the Church in general.

Here are abbreviated definitions of each of the traits in the Wikipedia article on the Big Five. (Note that I’ve excerpted only what I think are the most descriptive bits, but to make them more readable, I haven’t used ellipses where I’ve omitted parts.)

Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. Those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven – sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.
Conscientiousness is a tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.
Extroversion is characterized by breadth of activities and energy creation from external means. Extroverts enjoy interacting with people, and are often perceived as full of energy. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals. Introverts have lower social engagement and energy levels than extroverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. (Note that it’s also sometimes spelled extraversion, as in the Wikipedia article.)
Agreeableness reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others.
Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. Those who score high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress. Individuals who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings.

In Hymns, Music

Some thoughts on hymns and the hymnal update

Ziff11 July 202237 Comments

In preparation for the release of the new hymnal, I’ve been working on a comparison of the current (1985) hymnal with its predecessor (first published in 1948; I’m using a slightly revised version from 1973). In this post, I’m just sharing some random things that came to mind while doing this comparison.

Hymn Titles

“Though Deepening Trials” is a clunky title for a hymn. In my experience, over half the time, people say the first word as through, which I think is completely understandable. Though is just a limp and unexpected word to begin a hymn title with. The problem, really, is that the first line is used as the title. From the 1973 hymnal to the 1985 one, several hymns had their titles switched from being the first line to being their most core or oft-repeated line. For example, “Ere You Left Your Room This Morning“ became “Did You Think to Pray?” and “When Upon Life’s Billows“ became “Count Your Blessings.” The problem is that “Though Deepening Trials” doesn’t have a chorus or oft-repeated phrase, which is why, I assume, the 1985 hymnal compilers left its title as-is.
“Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion” always sounds to me like damning with faint praise. “What do you think of Zion?” “Well, I’m not a fan, but I’ve heard glorious things are sung of it.”
The title “Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord” always makes me chuckle, because if you just added a question mark to the end, it sounds like something a long-suffering servant would say when their master kept making annoying demands. I imagine it being said by the servant in the Parable of the Vineyard in Jacob 5, when he was so tired of the Lord wanting to go back to the vineyard over and over and over.

In Abortion, Modesty, Patriarchy

Modesty and Abortion

Ziff30 June 202222 Comments

With the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, leaving the question of abortion up to individual states, many American Mormons are celebrating the chance they have to live in a state that bans all (or nearly all) abortions. The Church’s official position allows for abortion under some circumstances, which makes it not consistent with such blanket bans. So why the inconsistency? Why, when the official position allows for some exceptions, are so many Church members excited to have all abortions banned?

A few years ago, I wrote a post where I asked this question and suggested an answer based on reviewing a bunch of Church rhetoric around abortion. I concluded that while GAs wrote the exceptions, their rhetoric constantly minimizes their occurrence, making them seem so rare as to be negligible.

Today I want to consider another line of explanation in addition: Church rhetoric on other issues—I’m taking modesty as an example—is based on a deeply patriarchal worldview that is straightforward to apply to abortion too. Note, just to be clear, that I’m not arguing that the Church’s stance on modesty causes its (or its members’) stance on abortion. I’m just saying that they’re both driven by the same underlying stance on women, so when GAs talk about one issue, it’s easy for members to understand the worldview and generalize it to another issue.

Image credit: National Photo Company, retrieved from Library of Congress PPOC

Here are some points of similarity I’m thinking of:

Men’s responsibility is ignored.

In Church modesty rhetoric, there is lots of discussion of women (and girls) needing to dress a particular way to avoid giving men (and boys) sexual thoughts or ideas about their sexual availability. There is no discussion of the need for men to stop themselves from objectifying women, regardless of how they’re dressed. (This is in contrast, of course, to Jesus’s famous admonition that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out . . .”)

It’s easy to see how this line of thinking lines up with abortion too. Nearly all pregnancies result from an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but anti-abortion rhetoric focuses pretty much completely on women. Sex is something that just happens, and so is pregnancy. Men’s participation is ignored. It’s assumed that if women don’t want to be pregnant, it’s on them to prevent it from happening. The whole topic of abortion isn’t even brought up until there’s a pregnancy.

The same line of thinking plays out in the Church too. Men are never reminded not to pressure their partners into unwanted sex or into unwanted pregnancy. In fact, given that couples are told to work out their childbearing decisions between themselves and God, but husbands are also told they’re to preside over their families, it seems likely that the effect in many families is that husbands dictate to wives how many children they will be bearing. Also, needless to say given that even these topics aren’t discussed, men are certainly never told explicitly not to commit rape.

In Chicken Patriarchy, Feminism

Happy Divine Gender Role Enforcement Day!

Ziff19 June 202212 Comments

For Father’s Day today, my ward gave men a treat, but sacrament meeting talks weren’t focused on the importance of fathers or anything like that. This feels consistent with my experience generally. Father’s Day is mentioned at church, and sometimes talked about, but Mother’s Day by contrast is absolutely essential. It would be unthinkable to have talks about tithing or food storage on Mother’s Day, or even (at least in my experience) to have a stake conference. But Father’s Day is totally fair game to tromp on with other topics. Just to be clear, I’m absolutely not complaining about this. I’m just observing. I can buy my own treats.

The reason this happens is, I think, pretty obvious. Since it has become less acceptable to openly put women down and GAs have largely rhetorically moved from patriarchy to chicken patriarchy, they’ve needed to embrace their opportunities to pedestalize women, and explain at every turn how very very honored and equal they are. Mother’s Day is a great opportunity. Largely male speakers can rhapsodize at the pulpit about how wonderfully self-sacrificing their mothers and wives are, and how inspiring they find it that these women choose to give up their own aspirations in life to serve as supports to the men in their lives. Needless to say, there is no parallel need to reassure men about how important we are. The very structure of the Church communicates it to us constantly. Father’s Day is a nice afterthought, a reminder that oh, sure, fatherhood matters too. But it’s not doing the work that motherhood is, rhetorically, to make it seem more okay that women aren’t ordained or allowed to handle money or run wards or sacrament meetings or the highest Church councils or baptisms or funerals or excommunications. The Church embraces Mother’s Day more than Father’s Day for the same reason that we get conference talks called The Honored Place of Woman, The Moral Force of Women, LDS Women Are Incredible!, and Woman—Of Infinite Worth, but no parallel talks directed at men.

But of course it’s just my experience that a bigger deal is made at church of Mother’s Day than Father’s Day. And I’d understand if you’re a bit suspicious that I’m remembering it that way simply because I expect it to be that way. So I thought I’d do a quick look at Church magazines. I looked for references to both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Ensign (this was the Google search string I used for Mother’s Day: “mother’s day” site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign). I didn’t read through each article, but I did do some quick checking to make sure the results weren’t spurious (for example, excluding those that matched only because the Table of Contents on the left of the article listed another article that had “Mother’s Day” in the title).

Here are two hypotheses I had before I gathered the data: (1) There would be more references to Mother’s Day than to Father’s Day, and (2) the number of references to Mother’s Day in particular would go up from the 1970s to the 1990s as the Church moved more toward becoming the Church of the Family Proclamation.

As you can see, the total number of mentions is small enough that I put it into five-year bins to make the results easier to look at. The data are surprisingly consistent with both of my hypotheses. Mother’s Day has 68 total mentions, and Father’s Day only has 24. Also, the mentions of Mother’s Day went up markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, although they’ve dropped off again since then.

Again, the number of mentions is really small. For Mother’s Day, 68 in the 50 years of the Ensign is only 1.4 mentions a year. So it’s not like discussion of these holidays is dominating Church discourse. But when one or the other does get brought up, it is, as I expected, far more often Mother’s Day.

I’d love to hear your experiences of whether Mother’s Day or Father’s Day has gotten more emphasis in wards you have lived in.

In Church Policy, GA's

Which Issues Do GAs Consider Unimportant?

Ziff11 May 202215 Comments

Here’s a quote from Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk this last conference:

Of course, in our present day, tremendously difficult issues face any disciple of Jesus Christ. The leaders of this Church are giving their lives to seeking the Lord’s guidance in the resolution of these challenges. If some are not resolved to the satisfaction of everyone, perhaps they constitute part of the cross Jesus said we would have to take up in order to follow Him. [emphasis in original]

I appreciate that he (obliquely) admitted that the GAs maybe don’t have unlimited time or energy to solve all the questions of Church doctrine and policy that face them. I think it’s interesting, though, to consider what problems they do and don’t consider important enough to address. It seems quite clear that the further removed an issue is from the GAs’ personal experience, the less likely it is they’ll consider it important, and the more likely they’ll just wave it away as “well, that’s your cross to bear.”

Here are some questions that I think should obviously be pressing on GAs’ minds, but that they seem largely unconcerned about:

How could the Church more welcoming to single people? Two speakers in April 2021 conference mentioned how many single people there are in the Church. Tellingly, M. Russell Ballard brought this issue up only after he was widowed and it became more salient to him. But is there any doctrinal innovation, or even any Church program, or even any rhetorical shift to try to help single people feel more welcome? Not that I’ve seen. It was a brief mention of the issue that appeared quickly and was gone just as fast. The Church remains a place for married people, and single people are an afterthought at best.

In Heavenly Mother

Gatekeeping Heavenly Mother

Ziff4 May 20227 Comments

Recently, I was listening to an episode of the podcast “At Last She Said It” where the hosts were talking about the New Testament story of the woman with an issue of blood (for 12 years!) who was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’s robe. They made the point that the woman would have been considered ritually unclean because of her issue of blood, so it seems unlikely that she would have been able to meet with Jesus by going through any kind of official channel. So that may be why she just wedged herself through the crowd to get to him rather than trying to meet with his disciples first or something.

(Incidentally, if you enjoy podcasts and Mormon feminism, I think you should give “At Last She Said It” a try. The hosts are really interesting and insightful, and I appreciate hearing their commentary. I often hear them frame things in ways or make points that I hadn’t considered, even on topics I’ve been reading women’s commentary about online for years and years.)

Their point got me to thinking about more of the stories in the New Testament in the framework of gatekeeping or people going to great lengths to get to Jesus. For example, there was Zacchaeus, who was at first deterred by a crowd, but then climbed a tree to get Jesus’s attention, and was able to have him come to his house. The crowd was an incidental rather than an intentional obstacle, although then of course when Jesus said he was going to Zacchaeus’s house, they complained that he was hanging out with a sinning publican. Or there was the man who was let down through a roof into a house to get access to Jesus and was promptly forgiven of his sins and healed. In both of these examples, there wasn’t anyone intentionally gatekeeping access to Jesus. But in the case where people brought their children to Jesus, his disciples turned them away before Jesus famously told them to “Suffer little children . . . to come unto me.” And then there was the time a bunch of people followed Jesus into the desert to hear him preach, and his apostles wanted to send them back to their towns after a while to get food, but Jesus miraculously fed them so they could stay. Or there was the blind man who heard Jesus and his entourage were passing by and cried out for Jesus to heal him, and wasn’t deterred even when others in Jesus’s party shushed him. Jesus healed him.

What these stories have in common is that someone wants to get to Jesus for healing or blessing and someone (or something) is standing in their way, and nevertheless they persist and get to him. The person trying to get to him always appear in a good light, and the people standing in the way don’t come off so well. It’s more often that Jesus implicitly scolds the gatekeepers, like with the clamoring blind man where Jesus ignored his shushing companions and called for the man to be brought to him, but in the story with the children, he actually rebukes the gatekeepers.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Now we have lots of Church members who want to acknowledge or talk about or pray to Heavenly Mother, and the GAs are acting as gatekeepers. Dale G. Renlund last conference followed in the footsteps of Gordon B. Hinckley a few decades ago, in maybe saying things as softly as he could, but still telling members that they shouldn’t be praying to Heavenly Mother. The GAs are clearly uncomfortable with any groundswell of interest in her.

In Statistics

New Children of Record and Church Activity

Ziff18 April 20228 Comments

In this post, I just want to make a small point about the Church’s report of new children of record in the annual statistical report. Here’s a graph showing annual end-of-year counts since 2010.

The count was flat for several years, but then started falling consistently from year to year starting in 2015. And then of course it fell off a cliff in 2020, going from 94,000 all the way to 65,000, a drop of over 30%. (For the rest of this post, I’m going to abbreviate thousands as “K,” so 94K is 94,000.)

It seems clear that the 2020 decline was caused by COVID. But there are (at least) two possible mechanisms that could be driving the effect of COVID on new children of record. One is that COVID affected birth rates. I had the idea in the back of my head that economic downturns are often associated with declining birth rates, and a quick Google turns up at least one paper that suggests that that’s true. However, given the nine month length of human gestation and the fact that COVID was officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it seems pretty unlikely that couples were changing their childbearing plans and having the effects show up before the end of the year.

The other possible mechanism by which COVID could affect children of record is through church activity. The children of record count is effectively a count of children born to or adopted by LDS families where at least one parent is active enough to get them recorded on Church records. With COVID pushing church meetings to be online, or suspended entirely, it’s not surprising that families were less diligent about recording their births and adoptions with their local units than they would have been in ordinary times. So I think the big drop from 2019 to 2020 makes sense.

What is striking, though, is that the 2020 to 2021 recovery is smaller than I would expect. New children of record rebounded from 65K to 89K, which seems like a healthy gain. But if my guess that people were just lax in recording new births and adoptions is right, there should have been a big backlog from 2020 that got recorded as people largely returned to attending church in person in 2021. Really, the 2021 count should have exceeded 2019 if this was the case.

In Missionary Work, Statistics

Proselytizing vs. Service Missionary Counts in the Church Statistical Report

Ziff11 April 202215 Comments

It may not be read in general conference anymore, but needless to say, I was interested to take a look at the Church’s 2021 statistical report. One interesting thing I noticed has to do with the counts of proselytizing versus service missionaries. Here’s a graph showing the end-of-year counts of missionaries since 2010. You can see in the count of proselytizing missionaries the jump with the age change in 2012, the slow decline afterward, and then the dramatic drop with COVID and then some recovery. The count of service missionaries has had fewer dramatic movements, increasing through 2018, then declining for a couple of years, and then increasing sharply in 2021.

As I mentioned in my conference review post, several speakers reminded young men that they need to be serving missions, and that young women can go as well. For example, here’s President Nelson in the opening talk of the conference:

Today I reaffirm strongly that the Lord has asked every worthy, able young man to prepare for and serve a mission. For Latter-day Saint young men, missionary service is a priesthood responsibility. . . . For you young and able sisters, a mission is also a powerful, but optional, opportunity. . . . Your decision to serve a mission, whether a proselyting or a service mission, will bless you and many others. [italics in original]

As an aside, I find the patronizing tone directed toward young women grating, but I feel like at least it represents a step forward from President Hinckley’s 1997 talk where he pretty openly discouraged women from serving. Anecdotally, for some women I know who were missionaries at the time, the talk led many elders to sneer to them, “Why don’t you just go home?”

Looking back to the graph, President Nelson and the other GAs are clearly concerned with the upper line, the count of proselytizing missionaries. It fell from about 67,000 at the end of 2019 to about 52,000 at the end of 2020. Of course this can be attributed to the pandemic. But then through 2021, even as vaccines became more widely available, it rebounded only a little, to about 55,000. I suspect they’re concerned that all the disruption in missionary work because of COVID has made missionary service seem more optional.

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2022

Ziff6 April 20227 April 202217 Comments

Best musical number: “Now Let Us Rejoice” Saturday afternoon. I really enjoyed this arrangement, and it gets bonus points for being so upbeat.
Worst musical number: “Our Prayer to Thee” Sunday afternoon. I’m not familiar with this hymn, but it just sounded way too soft and slow and what I think of as “Mormon reverent,” if that makes sense.
Fastest musical number: “In Hymns of Praise” Sunday afternoon. I didn’t actually check, but this seemed pretty fast to me.
Slowest musical number: “Oh, May My Soul Commune with Thee” Women’s session.
Best choir outfits: I appreciated that the women in the BYU-I choir on Saturday afternoon got to wear a very dark blue rather than a bright or pastel color that women are so often required to wear to show their adherence to divine gender roles.

Longest prayer: Vern P. Stanfill, Sunday afternoon benediction, 105 seconds. This is the second conference in a row where nobody got close to two minutes, which is kind of my rule of thumb for when a prayer starts to feel long.
Shortest prayer: Jan E. Newman, Saturday afternoon benediction, 62 seconds.

Things we don’t talk about:

Dale G. Renlund built his whole talk around a caution to women to not try to learn more about Heavenly Mother. Or pray to her. Or speculate about her. Or ask for revelation about her. He did stop short of telling them they shouldn’t mention her, but his message was still clear.
Gary E. Stevenson told a story of women in Poland who left strollers on a train platform for arriving Ukranian refugees who were fleeing the Russian invasion. He said “Poland,” but he couldn’t bring himself to say “Ukraine,” and certainly not “Russia.”
Russell M. Nelson did manage to say both “Ukraine” and “Russia,” but carefully avoided naming the Russian invasion for what it is, opting instead to vaguely refer to it as “the armed conflict in eastern Europe.”

Best title: Reyna I. Aburto, “We Are The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. A nice perspective, even if I think it misses the outsized control the GAs have.
Overwrought title: Patrick Kearon, “He Is Risen with Healing in His Wings: We Can Be More Than Conquerors”. I love the talk, but the title is just a bit much.
Trying too hard title: Becky Craven, “Do What Mattereth Most”.
Phoning-it-in title: Dallin H. Oaks, “Introductory Message”.

Talk that should have just been a Church Newsroom post: Dallin H. Oaks opened the Women’s session by explaining that the Saturday night session will be held going forward, but for different purposes at different times. I guess after the canceling and un-canceling of the session last year, the GAs felt like they had to come clean about the Saturday Night Session Selector (in principle, even if not in detail).

Best visual aid: Jeffrey R. Holland showed a note from a young girl who complained that conference is boring, and asked why we do it. It’s only too bad he didn’t actually discuss her question!

In Fun, General Conference

Conference to retain some COVID-era adaptations

Ziff1 April 20226 Comments

This weekend, the Church will hold its first general conference to welcome a large live audience since before the COVID pandemic began. Even with the return of an audience, though, Church spokesman Heber Gordon Alonzo Pratt explains that several adaptations made during the previous four conferences will be retained going forward.

First, during the sustaining votes, which are held each conference to allow members to express their support for the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve and all other general-level governing bodies of the Church (as presently constituted), audience members will no longer be asked to raise their hands in support. Rather, as during the pandemic, all audience members, whether viewing online or in person, and

in real time or later using recordings, will be presumed to have expressed support unless they explicitly express otherwise by contacting their stake president and surrendering their temple recommend (if applicable). Making this change permanent has a number of benefits, Pratt explained. First, it does not privilege the voices of in-person attendees over those of members who are far from Salt Lake. Second, it eases the minds of General Authorities who may become unsettled by the possibility of a dissenting vote occurring right before their very eyes. Third, it relieves attendees, who do not know ahead of time which session the sustainings will occur in, of the burden of having to raise their hands upwards of five times. “Essentially, we’re streamlining the sustaining process by making it opt out rather than opt in,” Pratt summarized.

In Sin, Statistics

Name Withheld

Ziff21 March 20226 Comments

A few years ago while reading the Ensign, I got to wondering about the reasons an article writer’s name is withheld. For an individual article, it’s typically pretty easy to guess, but I was wondering about larger trends. Even just cataloging the list of reasons seemed possibly interesting, because it’s a list of things that are considered shameful, but not too shameful. For example, a relatively large number of name withheld articles talk about divorce, but none that I’ve ever read talk about, say, bestiality. The articles provide a kind of list of troubling issues that are on writers’ (and editors’ and perhaps GAs’) minds. Also, while I was at it, I thought it would be fun to look at any trends across time and gender differences and a couple of other things.

I initially planned to look at all magazines on the Church website since 1971, but looking at the Ensign alone turned out to be fairly time-consuming, so I didn’t go any further. Maybe I’ll go back and look at the others another time. I found 172 articles and letters to the editor, using the search “‘name withheld’ site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign”. (To be precise, a few weren’t labeled exactly “name withheld.” I manually checked all the letters to the editor from the 1970s, after I found their authorship was occasionally noted as “A regular reader” or something similar.)

For each of the 172 documents, I noted the following:

Publication year
Gender of the writer (I was able to figure this out for 121 of the 172, or 70%)
Is the name withheld because of something about the writer or something about another person?
Is the person the actor (e.g., used porn) or the victim (e.g., was abused) in the situation?
One or more reasons for the name to be withheld. (The max for any one document was four. Most documents had one. Three documents had zero, as I couldn’t figure out any reason at all.) I grouped these into 17 different categories, which I’ll list below with results.
The story end type. I classified these into three different categories: perfect (where people end up married in the temple or going on missions), good (where things end up better than they started), and learned (where things don’t get better, but the writer learns to better accept them). I also assigned some documents a not applicable here when there was no story arc. This was the case for a fair number of the letters to the editor, where writers with name withheld often say no more than “I suffer from the same problem as the person in such-and-such an article.”
How much the need to forgive the wrongdoer is discussed. I rated this as high, low (little discussion, or just reference to need to overcome bitterness and anger), or none.

I also tried noting down some other things, like the approximate age of the writer (typically difficult to figure out) or the location (rarely mentioned), but I wasn’t able to get enough useful data for them.

This graph shows the total number of documents in five-year periods across the history of the Ensign. Note that there’s no adjustment for possible differences in length of the magazine at different points in time.

Even with my extra combing through the 1970s issues, the prevalence of “name withheld” documents really didn’t take off until the latter half of the 1980s. It’s also interesting that it has dropped so dramatically in the latter part of the 2010s. I wonder if this is a change Russell M. Nelson has made, because even the 13 in the 2016-2020 period can be broken down into six in 2016 and seven total in the four following years.

In Church Life

Well done, good and faithful youth leaders

Ziff9 March 20226 Comments

All the discussion about Brad Wilcox’s awful talk recently led me to thinking, because he was addressing teens, about some of the teachers and leaders I had when I was that age. Unlike my sisters Lynnette and Kislilili, who attended Education Week religiously, and who as a result had the good fortune to hear all kinds of space doctrine from CES people like Brother Wilcox, I didn’t participate in any church activities outside our ward. In fact, I didn’t participate in many activities in our ward, for that matter. I did attend church every week, along with the rest of my family, and as a boy, I participated in passing and preparing and blessing the sacrament. But I skipped nearly all weekday activities, as they were too wrapped up in Boy Scouts, which I didn’t enjoy. All that being said, though, I’m remembering quite a few good experiences I had with leaders and teachers.

I was a difficult teenager. I was fairly bright, but I was constantly hyper-aware of my many shortcomings, and I figured that everyone else was too. As a result, I was very prickly and defensive and I’m sure not easy for my teachers and leaders to relate to. In spite of my general crabbiness at the time, I have several leaders who I remember fondly who said or did helpful things. Not all of my leaders and teachers were good, but really the majority of them were. I appreciate, especially in retrospect, thinking about what a hard kid I was, the effort they put in to making my church experience better.

A seminary teacher once speculated in class that half of the Church would make it to the celestial kingdom. This completely blew my mind. From a young age, I had absorbed the idea that the celestial kingdom was only for people who were perfect, who kept 100% track of all their sins and repented of all of them perfectly. It was quite clear to me that the celestial kingdom was an unobtainable goal for me, probably only open to GAs and their families, so I was just hoping for the terrestrial rather than the telestial kingdom. In other ways, this teacher wasn’t particularly focused on grace or hope or anything, but this one offhand line made me think maybe I could hope for something good in the afterlife.

In Fun, General Conference

Conference and the Saturday Night Session Selector

Ziff1 March 20221 March 20226 Comments

With the Church’s announcement that this April’s Conference will feature a women’s session, many members have been left puzzling at the General Authorities’ rationale for handling of the Saturday night session. Last year, they first announced that the session would be discontinued, but then later brought it back as a fifth general session. All this came after the Saturday night session was for many years always a priesthood session, but was then switched in 2018 to an alternating priesthood and women’s session.

Here at ZD, we are pleased to share that we have learned the explanation for these seemingly random changes. Below is a photo leaked to us from a source deep in Church administration that appears to show President Nelson drumming up excitement before he spins the Saturday Night Selector wheel to decide what the Church will do for the upcoming Conference.

In Authority, Ordinances

What makes an ordinance count?

Ziff22 February 202219 Comments

I read an article recently about a Catholic priest who was found to have been saying a wrong word when he performed baptisms, and that he had been doing so since 1995. His dioceses has declared that this makes all the baptisms he performed invalid, and all subsequent rites (such as marriage) also invalid, because they are supposed to be preceded by baptism.

I’m interested in how a similar finding would play out in a Mormon context. Of course, we don’t have anyone whose job it is to baptize like a Catholic priest does. I’m guessing most child-of-record baptisms are performed by the child’s father when he’s available and a priesthood holder, and most convert baptisms are performed by male missionaries. Perhaps the closest we get would be a temple sealer, who could perform hundreds or thousands of sealings. So what would happen if it were discovered that a sealer had said a wrong word in thousands of sealings?

I think the answer hinges on whether we see ordinances as being more like magic spells, or more like parts of a relationship between us and God. If an ordinance is like a magic spell, it’s crucial that the words be said exactly right. The ordinance, spoken by someone with the proper authority, is operating on the world in the way that a chemistry experiment or a baking recipe does. The cake you’re making doesn’t care about your intent. It cares that you put the right ingredients together in the right way and bake the result at the right temperature for the right amount of time. If, on the other hand, the ordinance is part of a relationship, then the exact wording doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing it to show our commitment to God, in front of our community, and so long as both understand what our intent is, then getting the words exactly right might not be crucial.

In Fun

Even More Correlated Cards for Valentine’s Day

Ziff10 February 202210 Comments

In Faith, Reviews

Katie Langston’s Sealed

Ziff25 January 202225 January 202213 Comments

One good reason to read about other people’s lives is to learn about their experiences that are different from our own. But another good reason is to learn about their experiences that are the same, because it makes us feel less alone. It is for this second reason that I most enjoyed Katie Langston’s memoir Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace.

I’ve blogged before about how I grew up a neurotic Mormon. I worried about being able to keep track of all my many sins so I could properly repent of them all. I worried about impending nuclear war that some people seemed to so gleefully anticipate. But where I was neurotic, Katie (sorry I’m going to be all uncouth and call her by her first name because I know her through the Mormon feminist groups) suffered from full-on scrupulosity, although it wasn’t until she was an adult that she was able to put a name to it. She was so worried as a child that she was sinning and not remembering that she began confessing to her parents about things she was quite sure she hadn’t done, but couldn’t be 100% certain, so it seemed safer to confess and accept punishment than risk letting a sin be forgotten. She writes about how, when she turned eight and the time came to be baptized, she hoped to put it off a little, figuring that if she only got one chance to wipe her slate clean, she shouldn’t be too hasty to rush in and use it up. Unfortunately, by bringing the scheduling question up with her father, she found that she had inadvertently accelerated the process. Although I never thought of this strategy as a kid, I had so much the same line of thinking about sin.

Similarly relating her experience back to mine, where I grew up with parents who were pretty strict about church teachings, hers leaned toward fundamentalism. She was homeschooled for years, to keep her mind safe from the wickedness of secular ideas. Her parents fell into the orbit of anti-government preppers, but fortunately, when some of the most radical among them asked her parents to go with them to Mexico and become polygamists, they declined, and the experience may have pushed them toward finally sending Katie to public school.

Over and over, I so much identified with her stress about her sins. She continued to struggle with scrupulosity while on her mission in Bulgaria. Here’s a passage that I think captures her dilemma perfectly:

The Questions showed no mercy. Every day, they threatened to overtake me with despair; every night, I lay in bed, weeping silently so as to prevent my companion from hearing. I read Book of Mormon passages where characters had profound born-again experiences and felt the Spirit was their guilt away. I wanted desperately to sense something similar. What was wrong with me, that God wouldn’t grant me an experience like that? I had never, for as long as I could remember, felt whole. I’d had moments—an hour or two here, a day or two there—but always The Questions returned, driving me to the brink of what was bearable, urging me to succumb to darkness.

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A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2022