Showing all posts by Ziff

In Politics

How the Church Sets Members Up to Become Trump Apologists

Author ZiffPosted on 23 Comments

Like many other Mormons, I’ve been appalled in the last several years to see how many of my co-religionists are only too happy to cast their lot with Donald Trump. Trump seems like exactly the type of person who would have us clutching our collective pearls, given his history as a proud sexual assaulter and serial adulturer, not to mention his complete lack of interest in or knowledge of Christianity. And even setting aside his personal failings, his presidency has been a continuous series of policies that seem designed to be as anti-humane as possible, for example, his policy of separating families of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border or his attempt to use remotely taught classes as an excuse to send all international college students home. And even setting aside his personal failings and vicious policies, there’s his naked racism, his constant shout-outs to and encouragement of white supremacists.

Of course none of these things about Trump are news. This thing wasn’t done in a corner. What’s puzzling is that so many Mormons–American Mormons anyway–are so supportive of Trump, so anxious to rush to defend him. I’ve even seen Mormons using the “God’s flawed vessel” language that I think is borrowed from evangelical Christians. How did this come to be, that a religion that is so big on rules around sex in particular, and rules in general for that matter, produced so many adherents who happily and even eagerly support such an awful person? I think the answer is that the Church set them up for it.

Read More

In Mormon Culture, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Movies on IMDB

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

After writing a silly post a few weeks ago with suggestions for movies the Church should make, I got to wondering how actual Mormon movies are rated on IMDB. I’m thinking here not just of Church-made movies, but of movies made about Mormons by non-Church studios, stuff like God’s Army or Saturday’s Warrior. I didn’t have any particular questions I wanted to answer with the data or any hypotheses to test. I just thought it might be interesting to look descriptively at what the ratings look like.

I got ratings from IMDB for a list of 75 Mormon movies. I made an initial list working from the following sources:

  • Movies I have personally seen or am aware of
  • Movies at least 30 minutes long on the Hard-to-Find Mormon Videos YouTube channel (which is for Church-produced movies only)
  • Movies appearing on the Wikipedia page on Mormon cinema
  • Movies Google suggested when I searched for “Mormon movies”
  • Movies appearing on some user-created lists of Mormon movies on IMDB

I dropped from the initial lists any movies that met any of these criteria:

  • Have fewer than 10 ratings on IMDB
  • Don’t prominently feature Mormons or Mormonism, unless the movie is made by the Church (e.g., Johnny Lingo is included even though it doesn’t mention church because it was made by BYU, but Napoleon Dynamite, which showed up on some of the searches and lists, is excluded)
  • Don’t take a positive view of Mormonism (This is an easy call for movies like The God Makers, but I also made some judgment calls based on descriptions and reviews I read on IMDB. For example, I used this rule to exclude the 1950 movie The Wagon Master, which has the protagonists guiding a group of Mormon pioneers, but it sounds like isn’t really a movie about Mormons, and the Mormons are more just neutral background.)

I grouped the 75 movies into four categories:

  • Church produced, scripture or Church history topic – 7 movies
  • Church produced, other topic – 6 movies
  • Not Church produced, scripture or Church history topic – 16 movies
  • Not Church produced, other topic – 46 movies

Ratings by Movie Category

One thought I had when looking at these ratings is that perhaps raters of Mormon movies, who I would expect to be largely Mormon themselves, might give these movies high ratings for reasons other than (or in addition to) thinking they were good. For example, giving Mormon movies high ratings might be seen as a kind of missionary work, because if you can inflate their ratings, maybe non-Mormons will be more likely to take notice and watch them and discover how great the Church is. I also thought these extra reasons might be more of a factor in rating movies that are closer to the core mission of the Church, so they would have the greatest effect for movies that are produced by the Church, or are about a scripture or Church history topic, or both.

This graph shows the average rating by category. Note that this is the average of movie averages, not the average of the individual ratings. I chose this to avoid having one movie count for more than another just because it received more ratings. I also wanted to use IMDB’s weighted average ratings, where they adjust the rating “in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it,” and these ratings are only available for movies as a whole, not for individual raters.

Read More

In Church Policy

A Monopoly on Exaltation

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

I read a discussion in a Facebook group recently that touched on the use of Elder Bednar’s infamous “don’t choose to be offended” talk (the actual title is “And Nothing Shall Offend Them”) as an excuse for people to say or do offensive things. Anecdotally, it sure seems like this is the major use that this talk is put to. I’ve seen the talk referred to many times, but it has been a long time since I actually read it, so this time I did.

What struck me in reading the talk this time is that I feel like Elder Bednar is making perhaps a narrower point than I had thought. He opens the talk with a story about how, as a stake president, he loved to go with bishops in his stake to visit inactive members. He would listen to their stories, and then gently berate them for letting offense that they had experienced at church interfere with all the blessings they can get only from church, like the sacrament and the Gift of the Holy Ghost. He doesn’t say anything about the success rate he got from confronting people–I’m guessing he would have told success stories here if he had any–but the important point is that he isn’t telling us that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be offended in general. He’s telling us that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be offended in a Church context, because we’ll be missing out on unique opportunities that we can get nowhere else.

I have always thought this talk fit with other talks on interpersonal relationships, on issues like anger or forgiveness. But now I think it actually fits better with talks like Elder Ballard’s “To Whom Shall We Go?,” where he asks people leaving the Church where they will go to get the support and ordinances the Church offers. Or with President Hinckley’s less confrontational but similar message where he quotes a young convert who was facing ostracism from his family as saying “It’s true, isn’t it?” and then “Then what else matters?” Or with President Nelson’s recent talk where he tried to close the temple work for the dead loophole so people wouldn’t think they could get away with living church-free lives now.

Especially in light of these other messages, the underlying assumption of Elder Bednar’s talk is that the Church has essential things–ordinances, but also teachings–that simply can’t be had anywhere else. It makes sense if this is true, then, that no amount of offensive behavior from local leaders, or indeed from general leaders, is a good reason to leave. The Church holds a monopoly on exaltation, so people who want to be exalted had better be willing to put up with anything so they don’t risk losing their access.

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

In the world of money and markets, monopolists are often guilty of (or perceived as being guilty of) leveraging their monopoly power to get more money out of their customers. The Church isn’t designed to be a money-making enterprise (although there may have been some mission creep). I appreciate that there are many things that General Authorities probably could do given the Church’s exaltation monopoly that they haven’t. They could increase tithing. “Where else will you go?” they could ask. They could inflict all kinds of more onerous burdens on members. They could require monthly or weekly temple attendance. They could require bishops to review members’ tax returns to be sure they’re paying enough tithing. They could re-start a United Order, and require members to deed all property to the Church. I think they don’t do things like this because they don’t see them as necessary, and again, unlike a business monopoly, they’re not trying to exploit the monopoly. They’re just pointing out that it exists.

Read More

In Fun

Mormon Movie Ideas

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Mormon movies. I’m talking about Church-produced movies that would be shown in Sunday School classes or maybe randomly at activities and for sure in seminary. I recall classics like the one about the guy who was wandering through a desert and found a pump that he had to prime before using. But instead of using the water left with the pump to prime it, he drank it, and then the pump ws of no use, and he stumbled out in the desert and died. Or “Cipher in the Snow,” the tear-jerker about the boy who died because nobody noticed him. Or the classic “Morality for Youth,” which my sisters and friends always simply called “The River Movie.” By the way, I really appreciate the unnamed person who runs the YouTube channel “Hard-to-Find Mormon Videos,” where you can watch these and many, many more.

So I got to thinking about what movies the Church should make next. I’m pretty out of touch with what’s being made now. I know there are lots of short clips that feature a snippet of a GAs’ talk voicing over people acting out something related to the talk. But I’m not up on what this generation’s river movie is, for example. Of course that didn’t stop me from coming up with a few ideas, which I’m sharing here. If anyone from the Church media department is reading this, I totally don’t mind if you borrow any of them.

Image credit: Library of Congress

Read More

In Polygamy

D&C 132 for Kids

Author ZiffPosted on 23 Comments

Here’s what the D&C Scripture Stories on the Church website has to say about Section 132. I’ve included both the pictures and the associated text below each picture.

Joseph Smith asked the Lord some questions about marriage. Jesus told him that a man and woman should be married by a man who has the priesthood. They should be married in the temple. If they obey God’s commandments, they will be married forever. [D&C 132:1-29]

Righteous people who are married in the temple will live in the celestial kingdom of heaven. Their children who obey God will belong to them, and they will be an eternal family. They will live with God and will become like Him. [D&C 132:1-29]

Jesus also told Joseph about the history of marriage among His people who lived anciently. [D&C 132:34-39]

That’s it. Three quick pictures. Not a word about polygamy. Nothing about the threats to destroy Emma. Really, though, I don’t blame the curriculum staff who put this together. It’s got to be a tough assignment to extract something that’s consistent with the Church’s current image of itself from that section.

Read More

In Fun

19 Reasons Why True Latter-day Saints Would Never Wear a Mask

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

A bunch of people in Utah Valley, likely mostly Mormons, recently made clear how much they hate the idea of having their kids wear masks when they go back to school in the fall. And they have a good case. Here are 19 reasons why true Latter-day Saints would never wear a mask.

Photo by Jacob Boavista on Unsplash.

  1. Mask is a four-letter word, like holy and moly.
  2. If God wanted us to wear masks, we would be born wearing them.
  3. President Nelson has communicated divine censure for use of the word Mormon, and other m-words are clearly also unholy (e.g., mutual, Missouri, masturbation).
  4. Mask wearing is an attempt to frustrate God’s divine Plan of Pestilence (which took the baton from the Plan of Happiness just this year). All attempts to frustrate this plan, including but not limited to mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing, and vaccine development, are obviously wicked.
  5. Masks interfere with sacred communication. As we learn in the temple, holy language would be muffled if spoken through a layer of cloth.
  6. If mask wearing is so important, why does the inspired American Constitution contain the 3/5 compromise, where the vote of a mask-wearer counts for 3/5 as much as the vote of a bare-faced patriot?
  7. Mask is only one letter different from mark, and a careful re-translation of the Book of Revelation indicates that it was the mask of the beast that the wicked would don in the last days rather than the mark of the beast.
  8. Wearing a mask shows concern for one’s community, which is clearly an unholy perversion of God’s plan of looking out for number one. As the Book of Mormon teaches, “every man fare[s] in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prosper[s] according to his genius, and . . . every man conquer[s] according to his strength.”
  9. In football, which is an obviously righteous sport because it provides so much revenue for the Lord’s University, mask-related infractions come with among the most severe penalties.
  10. Church Halloween activities ban masks, and just as the divine admonition to greet one another with “Merry Christmas” and not “Happy Holidays” extends beyond the Christmas season, so also does the requirement to not don masks extend beyond the Halloween season and throughout the whole year.
  11. The BYUs ban beards, which are clearly nothing more than an attempt to grow a natural mask. The natural mask is an enemy to God, and so also is the artificial mask.
  12. The righteous society that arose after Jesus’s visit to the New World, as described in 4 Nephi, “had all things in common among them.” Early Christians in the Old World did the same. The “all things” clearly included viruses, so wearers of masks are wickedly withholding and refusing to share their infections with their fellow saints.
  13. A member of the Quorum of the Twelve has titled a talk “Don’t Wear Masks.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
  14. Church leaders would never teach that clothing be chosen with an eye toward protecting those around you.
  15. Wearing masks is trusting in the arm of flesh. Just as faithful Latter-day Saints reject all man-made medicine as the arm of flesh, should we not also likewise reject masks?
  16. Jesus taught that believers would be protected from poison and snakes, not by masks, but by faith alone.
  17. COVID-19 is a fake disease made up to embarrass God’s chosen vessel, Donald J. Trump. Does not COVID stand for Conspiracy Organized to Vigorously Impeach Donald?
  18. Wearing a mask is nothing more than a trial run for a gigantic face tattoo.
  19. Since when has an extra layer of clothing ever provided a shield or a protection to anyone?
In General Conference, Prayer, Statistics

General Conference prayer length

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

When I wrote a review of Conference back in April, I noticed that the prayers were noticeably longer in this Conference than last October’s. It got me to thinking that although I have an intuitive sense of what feels like a short or a long prayer, I don’t know what actually counts as a short or a long prayer in comparison with other prayers in Conference. I was also interested to know whether there has been any trend over time in prayer length. Like maybe a new Church President sent a memo to all prayer-givers to tell them to hustle things along in their prayers, so they suddenly got shorter. And of course now that we’ve had women praying in general sessions for several years, an obvious question is whether their prayers are similar in length to the men’s or shorter (or longer!) My guess was that they would be shorter, given that men are encouraged to take up more space in every other area of the Church.

To answer these questions, I watched a bunch of videos of the beginnings and ends of General Conference sessions and noted who was praying and timed the prayers. The videos came from the Church’s General Conference YouTube channel and to the General Conference page on the Church website. Although there are videos of individual talks going back to 1971, there are only full session videos going back to about 2005, with occasional sessions or parts of sessions available for another decade before that.

As an aside, I’m serious about saying “parts of sessions.” The Church’s YouTube channel videos of full sessions are good for recent Conferences, but as you go back, they have lots of errors. There are several videos that are labeled as full sessions, but they end after five or ten minutes. There are a few that are mislabeled, which I only realized when the introduction in the video itself said it was a different year than the labeling of the video did. There’s even one video that shows the same session twice, back-to-back. On the Church website itself, there are a lot of sessions that claim to have video (i.e., there is a link to watch) but then they can’t be played. And there’s also at least some mislabeling. Fortunately, in at least some cases, the audio-only recording works. I submitted feedback on the Church’s website, but I couldn’t find a way to do so on its YouTube Conference channel. I know this is an extremely long shot, but if you happen to know how I could reach whoever is running it, I would be happy to supply a list of issues that need to be fixed.

Okay, on to the data! I noted lengths for 381 prayers between 1996 and 2020. (You’d think I would have had an even number since each session has two prayers, but like I was complaining about above, a few of the videos include only the opening prayer.) The average length was 93 seconds. This is within the range I expected, and it’s also consistent with my sense of what constitutes a long prayer, as while watching all these prayers, I typically started to feel like they were dragging when they went over about 100 seconds. It’s just unfortunate that older session videos aren’t available too, because I recall Conference prayers in the 1980s when I was a kid sometimes going on what felt like forever. Looking back, though, I wonder if it wasn’t just my age and shorter attention span that made them feel extra long.

This graph shows average length across time.

Note that the dot for 1996 is just because there were no recordings available for 1997 or 1998. It looks like maybe prayers were longer in the Hinckley years than in the Monson years. Maybe.

Read More

In Fun, Music

Joseph Smith’s First (or Second) Prayer

Author ZiffPosted on 2 Comments

Rumor has it that the folks assembling the new Church hymnal are planning to embrace the multiple accounts of the First Vision with a completely rewritten version of the hymn “Joseph Smith’s First Prayer.” We here at ZD are pleased to present this draft leaked to us from hidden sources deep in the COB.

1. Oh, how lovely was the morning!
Or perhaps ’twas afternoon!
Bees were humming, sweet birds singing,
Or the birds may have ceased to croon,
When within the shady woodland
Joseph sought the God of love,
Or he may have wandered, unplanned,
When he got word from above.

Photo by Axel Holen on Unsplash

2. Humbly kneeling, sweet appealing—
’Twas the boy’s first uttered prayer—
Or perhaps he’d been concealing
Vocal prayers that were far from rare;
But undaunted, still he trusted
In his Heav’nly Father’s care,
Or he may have been quite daunted
And been filled with deep despair.

3. Suddenly a light descended,
Brighter far than noonday sun,
Or perhaps from earth ascended
Thick darkness that left him stunned,
While appeared two heav’nly beings,
God the Father and the Son,
Or it might have been just angels
Or a heav’nly being One.

4. “Joseph, this is my Beloved;
Hear him!” Oh, how sweet the word!
Or the Lord alone announced
Joseph’s sins would no more be heard.
Oh, what rapture filled his bosom,
For he saw the living God,
Or perhaps he found it humdrum,
And he noised it not abroad.

In History

Mormons Defending Confederate Statues

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

A few decades ago, I served a mission in the American South. This meant that I got to have lots of conversations with Christians who thought Mormonism was wrong from the get-go simply because we have extra scriptures in addition to the Bible. The Bible itself says you can’t add to or take away, they would say, so that’s all there can be. A point I sometimes tried to make in response was that even accepting all the books in the Bible as inspired does not require you to believe that they are the only inspired books. In other words, I was trying to separate the writers of the Bible from the compilers of the Bible, to point out that the compilers may not have had access to every inspired book, or they may have even made mistakes in leaving some books out.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Needless to say, this argument never made much headway with anyone I talked to. I remembered it recently, though, because the distinction between writers and later compilers seems parallel to a distinction that is relevant to the current debate in the United States about whether we should tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers and politicians. When people make arguments against removing these monuments because “you’re erasing history,” it seems to me that they’re missing the distinction between the historical figures who are portrayed by the monuments and the later politicians and private groups who chose to honor them. Just as the compilation of the Bible was done years (centuries) after the writing, and by different groups of people, Confederate statues were commissioned years later, by people other than those portrayed. To tear down a statue of a Confederate figure is not to pretend they didn’t exist. It is to say that we do not want to honor what they fought for. It is not erasing the history of their existence. It is disagreeing with the later groups who decided that what the Confederate figures had done was of good report.

Read More

In Race

Don’t Say His Name

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

President Nelson made a statement about the killing of George Floyd and subsequent violence on his Facebook page on Monday (and it was also published at the Church Newsroom). There is much that I like in the statement. For example, he said in part,

We abhor the reality that some would deny others respect and the most basic of freedoms because of the color of his or her skin.

I’m frustrated at his vagueness, though. Unlike statements made by many other churches and their leaders (many compiled by Sam Brunson at BCC), he doesn’t name Floyd or specifically mention his death. His statement is boilerplate enough that it might have come in response to any unjustified killing of any black man. Or, really, any race-motivated incident of any kind anywhere. Well, except for his explicit calling out of “looting, defacing, or destroying public or private property.” He saved some specificity for that point.

Read More

In Church Life, Church Meetings

Back to Church Wishlist

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

The Church released guidelines a couple of days ago for how returning to church meetings will look. Given how quickly the Church acted in closing temples and suspending church meetings as the COVID-19 pandemic started, I’m disappointed that these guidelines don’t seem to take it all that seriously. This post is a laundry list of comments on the Church’s guidelines and a wishlist of guidelines I would like to see before I’d be really comfortable attending church in person again.

Greetings

Mormons are a handshaking people. Sometimes we’re even huggers. These types of greetings aren’t safe with the coronavirus on the loose. The Church’s guidelines do mention this, but only in the context of people known to be sick: “Avoid close contact with people who are sick (this may include avoiding shaking hands or other customary greetings).” This seems to overlook the entire problem we’re facing, which is that people who appear well may be carrying the virus! I wish they would have said more generally something about not engaging in greetings that involve touching other people, and suggesting touchless greetings like waves or bows in their place.

Sacrament

The guidelines suggest that people sit only in every other row in the chapel so that the sacrament can be passed to everyone directly. This is a good step, but I don’t think it goes far enough. A single symptom-free carrier priest could still infect an entire ward in a heartbeat. I like the idea I’ve seen several people suggest of having people bring their own bread and water. The priest would say the sacrament prayer like usual, but it would be blessing the bread and water people already have with them. This would be in keeping with the Church’s statement about the prayer-giver and the emblems having to be in the same location.

I suspect, though, that Church leaders wouldn’t go for such a solution, because it would require possibly non-priesthood-holders to prepare the sacrament, in whatever sense of the word prepare. So I have a more radical solution that is completely in keeping with the guidelines. How about if we have someone stand at the pulpit and say the sacrament prayer, but not to bless any emblems, but rather just to remind us of the sacrament and help us look forward to a time when we can take it again and recommit to live our covenants? This is precisely what the April document “Directions for Essential Ordinances, Blessings, and Other Church Functions” already recommends for people in “unusual circumstances” who don’t have access to the sacrament. Well, now we’re in the unusual circumstance of not being able to take the sacrament together safely, so how about if we put it on hold until we can?

This would take a forward-thinking bishop, but a side advantage of this setup would be that women could be the sacrament prayer readers some weeks. Remember that there’s nothing actually being blessed. It’s just like when individual people read and ponder the sacrament prayers at home, only now we’re in the same room, so we’re having one person read aloud for efficiency. As a believer in the need for women’s ordination, I love the idea of normalizing our hearing the sacrament prayers spoken in women’s voices.

Image credit: clipart-library.com

Read More

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part III: Comparison between churches

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

How has interest in different churches changed during the coronavirus pandemic? This is a question that occurred to me while I was working on my last couple of posts where I looked at Google Trends data about the LDS Church in particular.

In this post, I’ve gathered Google Trends data on a bunch of different churches and I’ll show daily 2019 vs. 2020 comparisons for each one. I’m only making comparisons to Christian churches, and my list is pretty US-centric, both because I went with what I was most familiar with. Here’s the complete list, along with what Google Trends categorizes each as. Note that I went with what looked like a high-volume search term for each church or denomination, so for example for Methodists I chose the United Methodist Church, but for Baptists, which represents lots of different churches, even the biggest organizations (e.g., Southern Baptist Convention) had far lower volume, so I just went with “Baptists.” In addition to traditional denominations and fringe groups like us and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I included a couple of big megachurches because I understand they’ve been growing a lot relative to the old mainline denominations. I’ve ordered them as fringe groups first, followed by mainstream ones sort of from high (more ritual) to low (less ritual) (based on nothing more than my sense of them), with the megachurches at the end.

Church or belief (Google trends suggested term) Google trends category
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church
Jehovah’s Witnesses Denomination
Seventh-Day Adventist Church Denomination
Catholic Church Church
Eastern Orthodox Church Church
Episcopal Church United States (I guess to differentiate from Anglican churches in other countries?)
Lutheranism Church
Presbyterianism Church
United Methodist Church Denomination
Baptists Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
Pentecostalism Following
Lakewood Church Church in Houston, Texas
Saddleback Church Topic

As commenters on my first post pointed out, in the particular case of the LDS Church, there are reasons to doubt that this is that good a measure of interest in the Church. And what I found in my second post supported that, with far different results for a search term used by members of the Church versus by non-members. Given that difference, with all these other churches that I’m far less familiar with, who even knows what other complications I’m overlooking? There are probably a lot, but I think the data are fun to look at anyway if you just keep your truckload of salt handy.

Also, while I’m bringing up reasons to be leery of the Google Trends data, let me show you something about their scaling that makes me a little crazy. I noticed when I accidentally moved the end date of a time series one day forward or back that it changed the whole rest of the series, rather than just omitting the day in question. This suggests to me that the scaling to 100 that the help mentions isn’t all that Google Trends is doing. Rather, it’s aggregating a bunch of data and probably smoothing it together with some kind of model under the hood.

Here, let me show you what I’m talking about. The graph shows daily results for worldwide searches for “Mormon” from April 1 of this year through different ending days.

Read More

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic part II: Members vs. non-members

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

I posted a few days ago about change in interest in church (in the LDS Church in particular) during the coronavirus. I used Google Trends data on searches for the Church. Commenters on the post (and on Facebook) made some excellent points about how differences might be attributable to change in interest from Mormons versus from non-Mormons. In this post, I’m going to make a quick attempt to tease that apart. (Commenters also raised other good critiques, such as that a change in Google Trends data might not reflect a difference in organic interest so much as a structural change in how church is happening during the pandemic, that are beyond the scope of what I will look at in this post.)

My approach is simple. Rather than looking at Google Trends data for just the Church itself, I’ll look at data for two different Mormon-related terms, one that’s more often used by Mormons, and one that’s more often used by non-Mormons. For the term more often used by Mormons, I chose “Come Follow Me,” an excellent suggestion Ardis made on my last post. Given that it’s a pretty well-known statement Jesus made in the New Testament, I wouldn’t have guessed how much its usage would be dominated by Mormons, but it clearly is. Looking at the Google Trends data, here are reasons I think it’s mostly being searched by Mormons:

  • Search volume is the highest for the US, and within the US, for Utah, followed by Idaho.
  • There are weekly Sunday peaks that disappear on Conference weekend.
  • The top five associated search terms Google Trends suggests are all Mormon related.

For the term more often used by non-Mormons, I’m using “Mormon,” which is ideal because President Nelson’s campaign to get us to stop saying it is clearly having an effect on people in the Church, but, not surprisingly, hasn’t been so quickly heeded by people outside the Church. As with “Come Follow Me,” the data looks consistent with the expectation of who’s using it, as the peaks are for Mormon-related news stories rather than for General Conference, when searches for the Church peak.

This graph shows daily results for “Come Follow Me” since the beginning of 2019.

Read More

In Statistics

Change in interest in church during the pandemic

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

I’ve seen the possibility floated in a number of places (e.g., in this W&T post) that when the Church resumes regular Sunday meetings, fewer people will go back than were attending regularly before the pandemic. I can certainly see the argument for this. It’s much easier to continuously keep up with a practice like weekly church attendance than to stop and start, particularly if there were already barriers making attendance difficult (distance, hearing offensive things, etc.).

I was wondering if there’s any way to forecast the degree to which this might happen by looking at what people are doing now, while not attending church. Of course this is an extremely difficult thing to measure. Not even individual wards, which typically have at least some sense of activity level from sacrament meeting attendance if nothing else, likely have much idea of what’s going on. But Google does. Google Trends tracks what people are searching for online. While this is obviously far from a perfect measure of how engage people still are with church while not attending, it might give us at least a little insight.

There are a few important things to know about Google Trends data:

  • You can get results by countries, states/provinces, and even metro areas. I wasn’t interested in geographic differences here, so everything I’ll show comes from worldwide results.
  • It doesn’t give absolute numbers–like the number of people who searched for something–but rather relative search numbers, comparing across search terms or across time for a single search term. It always gives results normed so the highest value is 100.
  • It lets you search for words (literal searches people have performed) or topics, where related searches about the same thing are aggregated. I chose to search for the topic “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” because I suspect Google is smart enough to aggregate searches like “Mormon church” and “LDS church,” and also because their help says that topics aggregate across languages. I also tried a few other LDS topics, but they gave a far smaller search volume, so for this analysis, I just stuck to that single topic.
  • You can get results back to 2004 and up to a few days ago. The granularity of the data you get depends on how long a time frame you ask for. If it’s short enough, you get daily data. If it’s longer, you get weekly or monthly. I wanted daily data from January 2019. This is a long enough period that if I asked for it all at once, I got weekly data. My solution was to ask for daily data in a series of three-month periods. Unfortunately, this means that each query for a three-month period was normed to a different maximum value. In order to make the results from the different three-month periods comparable, I set them to overlap a little. By doing this, I got two results for the days that appeared in both periods, and I could use the ratio between the values given for those days in the two periods to re-norm one period so that it was comparable to the other. I used a series of re-norming steps like this to stitch together the entire daily series from January 2019 to May 2020.

The graph below shows relative search volume for the Church for the entire period.

There are two extremely clear patterns: First, there are big spikes at General Conference time. Second, there are weekly spikes every Sunday. Both of these are probably unsurprising.

Read More

In Fun

Explanation of the Church’s New Logo

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

Although President Nelson discussed the Church’s new logo when he introduced it in General Conference, the Church, in consultation with McNaughton Fine Art, realized that what was also needed was a straightforward explanation of the deep symbolism of the logo, as was provided for the new Tabernacle Choir logo. We here at ZD are pleased to share this exclusive leaked draft of the document.

In General Conference

Conference Review, April 2020

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

Best story: It was very simple, but I enjoyed President Eyring’s story about hearing Elder Haight pray and thinking he sounded like he was smiling while he did.

Worst story, God plays favorites category: I wasn’t a fan of Elder Andersen’s story of the stake patriarch who Russell M. Nelson performed a miraculous heart surgery on. I felt like by mentioning his calling, Elder Andersen was suggesting that God of course intervened specially for this man, even when of course many other people die of heart problems all the time and don’t get miraculously healed.

Worst story, prosperity gospel category: Elder Clayton’s story of going to Paraguay during a financial crisis was horrifying. He explained how, in a meeting with stake presidents, he was overwhelmed when hearing about so many people’s problems, so he asked the stake presidents to tell him how many Church members who were paying tithing and fast offerings and doing their callings had problems, and the stake presidents said none of them. Elder Clayton was clearly relieved that he could dismiss all the problems of people he had carefully categorized as marginal Church members. I think Elder Clayton needs to learn about selection effects. Of course the people who were paying tithing and fast offerings weren’t having financial trouble. They were still able to pay! It’s not a question of righteous people paying tithing; it’s a question of better-off people paying tithing and then being classified as righteous. It was also appalling that he was so open about asking the stake presidents to tell him a different thing so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the discomfort of hearing about people’s problems.

Best quote: Elder Giménez, quoting the third verse of “Be Still My Soul”:

Be still, my soul: The hour is hast’ning on
When we shall be forever with the Lord,
When disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: When change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

Worst quote: Elder Bednar, quoting Ezra Taft Benson’s quote where he explains that there are no systematic social problems, only righteous people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and wicked people who don’t:

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

Best visual aid: I really liked this picture Elder Stevenson showed of a bunch of granite blocks waiting to be used in the construction of the Salt Lake Temple.

Worst visual aid: President Bingham’s picture of the couple that races tandem bikes where of course the husband is in front and the wife is in back. (In case you missed it, you might enjoy Pandora’s response to the tandem bicycle analogy to marriage.)

Read More

In Statistics, Temple

A Temple-Announcing Spree

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

President Nelson announced eight new temples in General Conference on Sunday. This keeps up his pace from last year, when he announced 16 new temples across the two Conferences. Actual construction of all these new temples hasn’t kept up, though. Ground was broken for 11 new temples in 2019, but none have been started this year. This is why President Nelson’s spree seems to me to be more one of temple announcing than temple building. In any case, thinking about this gap between announced temples and built temples motivated me to look back at the data on the Church’s pace of the announcing, beginning construction on, and dedicating temples across the past few decades.

The graph below shows the year-by-year count of how many temples were announced, had construction begin, and were dedicated each year since 1950. I took the data from the list of temples on the Church website, and from Wikipedia where the information wasn’t available on the Church website because a temple is not yet dedicated or is being renovated.

Read More

In Fun, Music

Hymns for a Time of Coronavirus

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

Come, Come, Ye Saints

Photo by KIM DAE JEUNG from Pexels.

Come, come, ye Saints
No quarantining fear
But with joy
Keep away!
Though hard to you
May distancing appear
Let’s stay home
Day by day!
‘Tis better if we need to meet
To keep a distance of six feet!
Do this and joy, the virus quelled
All is well! All is well!

Now Let Us Be Home

Now let us be home in extended staycation.
For safety as strangers on earth let us stay.
Sad tidings of virus have come to each nation,
But soon blessed hour of containment, we pray!
When from all the people COVID will be driven,
And none will infect them from morn until ev’n,
And all shall come forth and embrace one another
The WHO and CDC will free all to come play!

(Thanks to Olea of the Exponent who suggested a nice edit that fixed the rhythm of the sixth line of “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”)

In General Conference

How General Conference Will Change when Nobody Attends

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

The Church announced today that the April General Conference will be held in the Conference Center, but that to limit the spread of COVID-19, the public will not be admitted. Only “general authorities, general officers and their spouses, musicians, choirs, technicians, and others” who are participating will be allowed in. I applaud this move. It’s great to see the Church being proactive in helping to limit this disease that WHO just officially labeled a pandemic.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

I’m wondering, though, how having no audience (or a very small one made up only of spouses of participants) will change Conference. I’ve never been to Conference in person, so I’m just going to be making some guesses, and I look forward to you sharing your thoughts in the comments.

Will they still have sustaings of General Authorities and General Officers?

Read More

In Church Policy

Different Way the Handbook Says “Don’t”

Author ZiffPosted on

I’ve noticed that there are a number of different wordings used in the Church Handbook to say not to do something. Of course, these differences long predate the new Handbook released this week. It was just the release of the new Handbook that got me to thinking about it now.

Here are seven different wordings I’ve seen in the handbook for saying “don’t.” (I’m sure this list is not exhaustive. These are just the ones I found from a quick look at a few sections.)

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

  • Members don’t do X.
  • The Church/Church leaders does/do not encourage X.
  • The Church/Church leaders counsel against doing X.
  • The Church/Church leaders strongly discourage doing X.
  • Members should not do X.
  • Members must not do X.
  • Doing X is prohibited/not authorized.

Read More