Ziff – Page 7 – Zelophehad's Daughters

I was in a ward once where the Gospel Doctrine teacher loved to quote from the end of D&C 121. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s the piece that talks about how priesthood authority shouldn’t be used to control people. Here’s verse 39:

We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

This is a bit of Mormon scripture that I like quite a bit. I’m (working on being) a feminist and I don’t like hierarchies, so this reminder of how easy it is for people holding power to use it in bad ways to control people they have power over seems like a really important one to me.

In spite of that, I never liked how the Gospel Doctrine teacher used the scripture. He never used it as a starting point for us to consider how unrighteous dominion might be a problem that we had seen or experienced or participated in. Instead, he used it as an excuse for ignoring any issues or questions with the Church. For example, he once told us that people pushing for women’s ordination were wrong because we have D&C 121, so unrighteous dominion isn’t a problem in the Church. I’m wondering if his problem wasn’t that he had watched G.I. Joe as a kid, and the line “knowing is half the battle” from its little morals at the end of the episodes had morphed in his head to “knowing is all the battle.”

This teacher’s misguided belief that if a problem is brought up in our scriptures it’s pretty much solved already got me to wondering how the Church could change to take the inevitability of unrighteous dominion more seriously. Because as it stands, the organization of the Church clearly agrees with the Gospel Doctrine teacher and not with me. If you feel like a ward leader is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can go to the bishop. The bishop who most likely called the leader, and isn’t likely to be sympathetic to you. If you feel like your bishop is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can have the same problem with the stake president, who similarly probably called the bishop. (And even if he didn’t, he has the power to call and release bishops, so he’s likely to think the bishop is doing a good job.) If your stake president isn’t sympathetic, well, as I’ve seen many Bloggernacle commenters say over the years, you can go to God and pray that he’ll soften their hearts, or perhaps inspire the GAs to contact them about it. It’s not a very good system for getting any serious issues addressed, but it does seem like a great system to keep people compliant and quiet, and keep any real problems from reaching the GAs’ ears.

In LGBT Issues, Statistics

How often do BYU student speakers at commencement suggest they’re straight?

Ziff27 August 202127 August 202118 Comments

Like many other people, I was dismayed to read Elder Holland’s recent speech at BYU where he advocated the use of metaphorical muskets to fire at people who he sees as not sufficiently faithful to the Church’s anti-LGBT stance. He seemed very concerned about a slippery slope that starts with a student expressing the idea (approved by powers that be in the administration!) that they were gay and also loved by God that might lead to . . . it’s unclear exactly what. Maybe a student would say they’re single and also loved by God, or trans and also loved by God. I can’t really get Elder Holland’s concern here, since the people approving the speeches work for the Q15, so if he doesn’t like that they approved it, he should maybe call an internal meeting over it rather than wringing his hands about it in public. Anyway, at the same time that he’s deeply concerned with this slippery slope, Elder Holland seems totally unconcerned with another slippery slope that he starts by bringing up the metaphor of using muskets to shoot at people who aren’t straight-friendly enough. This slippery slope starts with discussion of metaphorical musket fire and moves to discussion of real musket fire (helpfully already supplied by DezNat folks and their friends) and ends with physical violence against LGBT people. I think this should be a much bigger concern, but clearly Elder Holland doesn’t agree. I don’t even want to know how much he sympathizes with DezNat. I was clearly wrong when I placed him as “lean progressive” on my Q15 spectrum just a couple of months ago.

In COVID, Fun, Music

Because I’ve Been Infected Much

Ziff19 August 202119 August 20217 Comments

We here at ZD have learned that the following hymn has been submitted to the Church by a group of devoted anti-vaxxers for possible inclusion in the new hymnbook. It is sung to the tune of “Because I Have Been Given Much.”

Because I’ve been infected much, I too infect.

I’ll pass a virus on before you can detect!

In me the germs will reproduce,

I will then quickly let them loose,

So they can put themselves to use!

Because I’ve learned to never share another’s load,

And never to someone in need compassion showed,

I will not ever wear a mask,

I will be angry if you ask,

Don’t say it; I’ll take you to task!

Because I have such natural immunity,

I have no need of helping my community.

COVID vaccines I will eschew,

Washing my hands I will skip too,

If someone dies I hope it’s you!

In Church Policy, COVID

Did the First Presidency letter increase masking at church?

Ziff16 August 202118 Comments

Like many other people, I was very happy to see the First Presidency’s message last week where they urged members to get vaccinated against COVID and to wear masks. Sure, I can quibble with the timing (it would have been nice if they had said this months ago) or the wording (the caveat that masks are only urged “whenever social distancing is not possible” seems a little silly given that social distancing is pretty much impossible at church, when entering and exiting at the very least), but overall it’s excellent. It’s a welcome sign that the First Presidency actually does see themselves as running the Church, and they don’t intend to cede control of the American part of the Church entirely to the Fox News crowd.

I was really curious to see what effect the letter would have in my ward. First, some background: I live in a suburban ward in the American Midwest. It’s almost entirely white people. Politically, it strikes me as pretty middle of the road for wards I’ve lived in. As you’d guess, there are definitely more people on the conservative side, but there are also a smattering of Democrats. Among the conservatives, there are at least some old-school conservatives who really don’t like Trump, but there are also some who love him and his populist message of exclusion and hatred.

In Church Policy, Fun

Ten More Changes the Church Could Make and Un-make before Next Conference

Ziff4 August 20218 Comments

The Church has announced that the Saturday night session of General Conference will be held after all, although it’s not going to be a priesthood or women’s session, but another general session. I think it’s unfortunate that the net effect of the change will most likely be fewer women speakers. I am happy, though, to see Church leaders being willing to reconsider changes they’ve made, even after those changes have been made public, like they also did with the Manti Temple renovation. Of course I still have lots of things to complain about, like that I wish GAs would seriously consider larger changes, like how to spend the Church’s money or how to give the Church a more robust and representative leadership structure by extending the priesthood to women. And the constant tinkering really isn’t compatible with the obedience-demanding stance of the Church. I’m fine with the reality that Church leaders are feeling their way in the dark just like the rest of us, but I think it’s manifestly absurd when they demand absolute loyalty and zero questions or dissent while they clearly don’t know exactly what they’re doing much of the time either.

Mostly, though, rather than seriously considering what this change might mean, I wanted to go my more typical silly route and come up with a list of changes the Church might make and un-make before October Conference. If you have more suggestions, please don’t hesitate to add them in the comments!

In Profanity

A Mormon Swear Word

Ziff12 July 202120 Comments

What might a Mormon swear word look like? I’m not talking about softened versions of profanities like shiz and fetch and flip that many Mormons use to avoid their harsher cousins. (Although I admit that, especially given that my blogging name comes from the Book of Mormon, I have a soft spot for shiz, since it’s not only a fun word, but a Book of Mormon character.) I mean a full-fledged expletive that people could clutch their pearls when they hear.

What prompted me to ask this question was that I recently started reading Benjamin K. Bergen’s book on profanity, What the F. In the first couple of chapters, Bergen looks at the types of words that get used as profanities. Across languages, it seems like they are references to holy things made profane (which is of course where the word profanity comes from), to sex, and to defecation/urination/vomiting. (Bergen includes a fourth category, slurs, but to me, this seems like a different type of word.) It’s the first group that interests me here. He points out that a substantial fraction of the most common profanities in places where the Catholic Church is or has been influential are not just religious words, but particularly Catholic-related ones:

Quebecois French . . . makes heavy use of what it calls sacres (“consecrations”) — strong profanities related to Catholicism and Catholic liturgical concepts. Far stronger than merde (“shit”) or foutre (“fuck”) in Quebec are tabarnack (“tabernacle”), calisse (“chalice”), and calvaire (“Calvary”).

The Mormon angle here is just that I was wondering what kind of Mormon holy word might be turned into a profanity if the LDS Church were as influential as Catholicism.

In Fun

Gospel Topics Essay Redirects

Ziff6 July 20216 Comments

The Church recently took down its Gospel Topics essay titled “Becoming Like God.” Here’s a WayBack Machine snapshot of what it used to say. For a little while, the page redirected to the “Are Mormons Christian?” essay. Now, at least for the moment, it redirects to itself. I’m including a screenshot because I figure this likely won’t last for long.

The redirect to “Are Mormons Christian?” got me to thinking that there are all kinds of potentially troubling issues that could be listed in the Gospel Topics Essays, but then redirected to other topics. Rather than giving readers the essay they think they want, give them the essay they should have wanted, right? The following are my suggestions.

Are Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormon? . . . redirects to . . . No

Are Mormons Christian? . . . redirects to . . . Are Mormons Mormon?

Are Mormons Mormon? . . . redirects to . . . Are Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormon?

Book of Mormon Anachronisms . . . redirects to . . . What Is History, Really?

Book of Mormon and DNA . . . redirects to . . . DNA: Reality or Illusion?

In General Conference

General Conference Was Different in the 1960s (even setting aside the talks)

Ziff23 June 202116 Comments

I recently flipped through reports of General Conference from the 1960s (to get lists of speakers for my last post, as they’re only listed on the Church website back to 1971). I didn’t read through the talks, but even just looking at what the men conducting each session said, several things struck me that are different from my experience watching Conference, which started in the 1980s.

David O. McKay used to conduct every single session. Starting from April 1960, the first time someone else conducted a session was in April 1962, when he allowed Hugh B. Brown to break his streak. And I didn’t check how far back into the 1950s it went. He might have been doing it for a decade. I have to admit that if, say, Russell M. Nelson had started doing this when he became Church President, it would strike me as overly controlling.
Through October 1962, all new wards, stakes, and stake presidents were announced in Conference. It’s striking how much smaller the Church was that that could even be a possibility. I remember as a kid, hearing the story of how Spencer W. Kimball was called from being a stake president to being a member of the Q12, and how amazing that was. He was called in 1943. Given the size of the Church at that time, that seems much less remarkable than I had thought (and than it had been taught to me).
The sustaining of Church officers included listing David O. McKay as trustee-in-trust for the Church. I don’t think I learned of the Church’s corporate structure until I read this series of posts by Daymon Smith at BCC a decade ago.
Conference used to take three days, and was timed to always have one of the days fall on April 6th, even if it meant having the days be non-consecutive.
The men conducting Conference used to often announce a rolling list of the next two speakers. For example, they’d announce that Elder A and Elder B would speak. Then Elder A would speak, and the man conducting would announce Elder B and Elder C.

In General Conference, Statistics

General Conference Talks by Speaker Position Since 1960

Ziff17 June 20211 Comment

How many women will speak in General Conference now that the Church has announced that it’s discontinuing Saturday night gender-specific sessions? This was the major question I asked in my post last week on this change. I worry that we’ll go back to just having two women speak per Conference, the norm for the last several years when you ignore gender-specific sessions. Some commenters on the post were more optimistic that there would be more, though.

I was wondering about which other group of speakers (i.e., holders of what position–Seventies, Q12, or whatever) might have their speaking opportunities reduced to make space for more women speaking. I thought it could be helpful to look back at recent history, to see how many speaking slots the different positions have been allocated. I went back to 1960, because that turned out to be a good compromise between getting a good amount of data and me running out of energy.

Of course the total number of talks per Conference isn’t constant. This graph shows the average number of talks per Conference each year. I’m showing the average each year instead of showing the talk counts Conference by Conference because there’s often a lot of up-and-down noise between April and October (for reasons like the statistical and auditing reports only occurring in April) that makes the trend across time harder to look at. Averaging each year smooths those little ups and downs out, although you can see there’s still plenty of year-to-year variation.

In Church Policy, General Conference

General Conference, Now 20% Shorter!

Ziff8 June 202122 Comments

The Church announced yesterday that, starting with October Conference this year, the Saturday evening session (priesthood in April, women’s in October) will be discontinued. I have a few thoughts on this change, but they don’t really hang together at all, so I’m just going to list them.

I’m all for fewer meetings, particularly in General Conference. Ten hours of meetings over a weekend is a lot! I appreciate President Nelson’s willingness to tinker with Church practices and not just assume that the way things have been must be the way things will be.
As I read former Ordain Women board member Heather Olson Beal pointing out elsewhere online, it seems like this change can be traced to OW’s actions several years ago where women asked to be admitted in person to the priesthood session. In response, clearly in an attempt to take the wind out of OW’s sails, the next year the Church started broadcasting and streaming the priesthood session like it did other sessions. But now that this session is available to anyone, the Church’s announcement reasons, what’s the point of having it at all?
This change is being made because all sessions of general conference are now available to anyone who desires to watch or listen.
This argument seems odd to me. It says that the crucial characteristic that made priesthood session priesthood session was that it was closed, and no random people (especially not women, apparently) could listen in. I had always thought that what made priesthood session different was the content: there are talks there directed to priesthood holder that don’t really apply to non-priesthood holders.
It’s not at all surprising that with the ending of priesthood session, women’s session is also ended. It does seem like the “if it’s not closed, what’s the point” argument does not apply to women’s session, so that’s not a reason to end it. But of course, in a patriarchal church, it would be surprising if women got to do an extra thing that men weren’t doing. So the end of priesthood session also means the end of women’s session.
It seems inevitable to me that the ending of the gender-specific sessions won’t end speakers in Conference wanting to talk to only men or only women. This will just mean that these talks will now occur in the remaining general sessions. I’m guessing that there will be more talks aimed specifically at men than specifically at women, although perhaps this will be a good thing, considering how often talks aimed at women are about enforcing gender roles.
As Peggy Fletcher Stack and Scott D. Pierce’s article points out, this change will almost certainly lead to fewer women speaking in Conference, as the women’s session was typically a chance to hear from three women, even if few spoke in the general sessions. This graph shows the number of women (including one YW who spoke last year) speaking each Conference since 2010. Up until the women’s session and priesthood session started alternating in April and October, there were typically two women speaking in the general sessions, plus three more in the women’s session. (The graph includes the RS and YW meetings before they were official Conference sessions.) It seems likely that two women speaking per conference is the norm we’ll go back to. This change will flow through to the rest of the curriculum too, which is so much all Conference all the time now, and we’ll hear from hardly any women at all. I’d like to hope that this was an unintended side effect of the change, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was a very much intended effect.

In GA's

Fifteen Men, Fifteen Churches

Ziff1 June 202129 Comments

It seems to me that President Nelson’s willingness to push his ~~gospel hobbies~~ idiosyncratic ideas on the Church as revelation really opens up new possibilities for how dramatically the Church might change in the future as other Q15 members take over the top spot. Of course the direction the Church took was always going to depend on who was Church President, but at least to me, it had felt in the past like the range of possible futures was pretty narrow, regardless of who the President was. Now, with President Nelson having opened the door to possibly more dramatic changes, I wonder if future Church Presidents will also jump at the opportunity to push their unique vision on the Church. Of course they might not, but that’s much less fun to speculate about.

One thing this made me think of is that I could put each of the current Q15 members on a spectrum of how they think the Church should look, from the most fundamentalist to the most progressive. I’m not thinking of fundamentalist here as meaning anything specific to polygamy, as it often does in a Mormon context. Rather, I mean more a general black-and-white scriptural literalist pro-gender roles type of view like it means in religion more generally. Also, I’m not thinking of progressive in an absolute sense, like compared to say other churches that might be considered progressive, but rather progressive compared to our recent history and what otherwise might be expected for our future. In the graphic below, I’ve put each member on a five-point scale, based on my sense from what he’s said in Conference and other venues. I’m sure you’ll disagree with me on at least some of them, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. For sure, the men I’ve put in the “status quo” position I feel like I have the least sense of, so perhaps that could better be thought of as a “heck if I know!” category.

In General Conference, Statistics

Quotes of Current Church President in Conference, April 2011 vs. April 2021

Ziff11 May 202117 Comments

Since President Nelson assumed office, I’ve read a number of discussions of how he seems to get quoted a lot in General Conference, even in comparison with previous Church Presidents. For example, it’s mentions of his name rather than quotes, but TheFingerLakesBandit posted a graph (presumably based on Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks data) on the Mormon Subreddit a few months ago that showed that President Nelson’s name has a much bigger spike than any other newly-called Church President since World War II or so. And this certainly matches my own experience: I feel like he’s quoted a ton.

When I was working on my Conference review post last month, I decided to note all the sources quoted so I could do a little comparison. I chose to compare this last Conference against April 2011. I chose it as a comparison point not because it was a decade ago, but because at that point, Thomas S. Monson had been Church President for about as long as Russell M. Nelson has been now (it was the seventh Conference as President for each of them).

For each quote in each talk, I noted the following:

The speaker’s name and position
The source of the quote
The length of the quote in words

Of course there are many different sources quoted in Conference. The majority are from scriptures, but there are also lots of other Mormon and even occasionally non-Mormon sources. To make the data easier to look at, I sorted the quotes into the following categories by type of source:

Deity (scriptures that are in the words of Jesus)
Ancient prophet (most non-deity scriptures)
Latter-day prophet (including some D&C verses in Joseph Smith’s voice instead of Jesus’s)
Latter-day GA
Current prophet
Current GA
Other Mormon
Other non-Mormon (including occasional bits of scripture like Pharisees interrogating Jesus)

I excluded three types of quotes entirely:

Sometimes a speaker quotes a source and then uses a phrase from that source repeatedly throughout their talk. For example, in her 2011 talk, Mary N. Cook quoted the song “Kindness Begins with Me.” Then, throughout the talk, she repeated the phrase “remember this: kindness begins with me” several more times (and once just “kindness begins with me”). I counted the first quote, but excluded the others.
Sometimes a speaker quotes someone in the context of telling a story rather than because they’ve said a wise thing. When a quote was just used for the story, I excluded it, because I wanted to count only cases where someone is quoted for their wisdom. For example, in this 2011 talk, Quentin L. Cook told the story you might remember about a teen girl’s purse that was left at a dance, and how the people who found it inferred what kind of person she was based on its contents. In telling the story, he quoted from the stake YW President talking about the contents of the purse. I didn’t include this quote.
Following the same principle as the previous point, if a speaker quoted something they thought listeners might be saying or thinking, I didn’t count that. For example, also in a 2011 talk, Dieter F. Uchtdorf supposed that people might be texting each other about his talk and saying “He’s been speaking for 10 minutes and still no aviation analogy!” As this wasn’t included in the talk because it shares a bit of wisdom, I excluded it.

The biggest difference between the two Conferences is that April 2011 had an extra session (General Young Women) because it was before women’s meetings were moved to Conference weekend and alternated with General Priesthood meeting. The number of talks was similar, though (37 in 2011, 35 in 2021), because the 2021 talks were generally shorter (an average of 1560 words versus 1820 in 2011). A similar fraction of the total words in talks were quotes, 15% in 2011 and 16% in 2021. Because of this, I did all the analyses below by looking at quotes of a particular source as a fraction of total quotes, rather than as a a fraction of total words. Also, to take into account different length of quotes, I used words in quotes as the unit of analysis (for example, counting a 20-word quote for twice as much as a 10-word quote) rather than individual quotes.

This first graph shows the percentage of quoted words coming from each of the eight source types, comparing April 2011 against April 2021. For example, the leftmost blue bar says that about 33% of words in quotes in April 2011 Conference were quotes of deity.

In Infallibility

Don’t call us (and we won’t call you either)

Ziff6 May 202119 Comments

If you follow Mormon news at all, you probably saw that the Church has reversed course on renovating the Manti temple. The murals inside it will now be preserved rather than either being removed entirely or removed and preserved elsewhere. This was great news for all the many people who raised their voices in opposition when the Church’s plans to remove the murals as part of the renovation came to light a couple of months ago.

I honestly didn’t have strong feelings on the issue. I was disappointed in what seemed like yet another step in turning the Church away from any concern with wonder and toward making it like the most efficient possible business. Of course, that’s a long-running trend, since at least post-World War II I’m guessing, and this is only the latest step. Mostly, my concern was that many of my friends were appalled by this move, so I was concerned on their behalf.

But now the Q15 have changed their minds, which I think is great! What I still find irritating, though, is their refusal to acknowledge that response from members had anything to do with it. President Nelson didn’t say member input didn’t matter, but he carefully didn’t mention it:

As we have continued to seek the direction of the Lord on this matter, we have been impressed to modify our earlier plans for the Manti Utah Temple so that the pioneer craftsmanship, artwork and character will be preserved, including the painted murals loved by so many.

In GA's, Statistics

What age would each Q15 member need to reach to become Church President?

Ziff27 April 202111 May 20215 Comments

Note: In the original version of this post, I had Elders Gong and Soares out of order at the bottom of the graph. Thanks to Jim, who commented on the previous post to point out the problem, I’ve now fixed it.

While I was working on my last post about each Q15 member’s probability of becoming Church President, I realized that I could look at the question a different way. Rather than calculating probability, I could work out how long each member would have to live in order to outlive everyone senior to him. For those much younger than those senior to them, this will be a relatively young age; for those close in age or perhaps even older than those senior to them, this will be a greater age. I know probability answers the question of who’s likely to make the top spot more directly, but I like the vividness of the how long would he have to live question.

Using the same method I used in the last post (see the Method section below for details), I calculated the life expectancy for each current Q15 member from the SOA mortality table I’ve been using. Then it was straightforward to also find, for each member, the longest remaining life expectancy of any other member senior to him, and from that, the age he would have to reach to become Church President.

I thought it would also be fun to look at needed life expectancy to become Church President for past Q15 members. This is even easier to calculate, as everyone’s lifespan is already known, so there are no life expectancy calculations required. For each member, I just noted the latest death date of anyone senior to him, and subtracted the member’s birthday to get the age he needed to reach to become Church President.

The graph below shows life expectancy needed to reach the presidency for all Q15 members back to Heber J. Grant. It’s a little busy, so let me walk you through what’s in it.

Fatter bars with lighter shading show needed life expectancy to become Church President.
Skinnier bars with darker shading show actual lifespan (or current age for living members).
Outlined white bars tacked on the skinny bars for living members show remaining life expectancy.
Gray and black bars give actual, known values.
Blue bars are based on at least some life expectancy estimation.
Note that the graph cuts off the ages 0 to 20 to focus better on the ages where there are differences.

In GA's, Statistics

Church President Probabilities, Adjusted for Q15 Parents’ Lifespan

Ziff22 April 202111 May 20219 Comments

Note: As Jim pointed out in the comments, I mixed up the ordering of the two most junior Q15 members, Elders Gong and Soares. I clearly need to work on my quality control. 🙂 In any case, as it was straightforward to do, I’ve corrected the yearly probabilities graph below. Because it would require more work, I haven’t fixed the remainder of the post with all the parent lifespan-adjusted probabilities. They’re still mostly correct; just ignore the lines for Elders Gong and Soares.

I’ve blogged a number of times about probabilities of Q15 members becoming Church President (see the bottom of this post for links). I’ve always used a pretty similar method to get probabilities: use a single mortality table for all members, simulate their predicted lifespans a bunch of times by drawing random numbers and comparing them to the mortality table, and then check what the implication is in each simulation for who gets to be Church President and for how long.

A suggestion that commenters have sometimes made is that I could adjust the expected lifespans of each Q15 member based on how long his parents lived, as surely longevity is at least partly heritable. In this post, I’ll show results from my attempt to make just such an adjustment. I’ve got to warn you, though: this is based on kind of seat-of-the-pants reasoning, and I’ll understand if you don’t buy the assumptions I made. See the Method section below if you want the details.

First, though, here’s an up-to-date version of the yearly probability of being President graph that I’ve also shown in a few previous posts. This doesn’t include the adjustments based on parent lifespan that I’ll talk about below. I just take the yearly mortality probabilities for each Q15 member, given their age, from the Society of Actuaries’ RP-2014 table (specifically, white collar males, employee up until age 80, and healthy annuitant after that), and for each member, his probability of being Church President in a year is his probability of surviving to that year times the probability that all the men senior to him have died by that year.

As has been the case since I first looked at this question over a decade ago, it’s President Oaks, Elder Holland, and Elder Bednar who look like the best bets to become Church President. Elders Uchtdorf, Andersen, Stevenson, and Soares might have a shot. The remainder are less likely.

However, keep in mind that the biggest weakness of this analysis is that a mortality table describes the lifespan of large groups of people, and works less well for small groups or individuals. If you’re placing bets on who in the Q15 might become Church President, sure, Elder Bednar is probably a better bet than Elder Cook. But in a tiny sample like 15 men, all kinds of things could happen. Elder Bednar might contract an incurable illness tomorrow. Elder Cook might live to be 110.

President Nelson is a great illustration of how big errors can get. In my first post on the topic, back in 2009, my custom mortality table gave him only a 23% chance of becoming Church President, and an estimated 2.4 years in the position if he did make it. He’s obviously made it to the top spot now, and he’s been in for over three years and seems to be going strong. Of course a 23% chance isn’t really that close to zero, but for sure if I had placed bets in 2009, I wouldn’t have predicted Elder Nelson would ever become President Nelson. So the method can make mistakes, big ones. But of course that doesn’t stop me from using it. I can hardly contain myself, as it’s just so darned entertaining to speculate and guess, and to cloak my guesses in at least a veneer of reasonableness.

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2021

Ziff10 April 202123 Comments

Funniest number: The statistical report gives Church membership as 16,663,663. So five sixes, and two threes that can be added together to yield a sixth six! Talk about victories for Satan!

Best musical number: “Arise, O God, and Shine,” Saturday morning
Worst musical number: “God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son,” Priesthood. I just found this slow and uninteresting.
Highest-tempo musical number: “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah,” Saturday afternoon. I didn’t actually measure tempos, but this one seemed quite fast.
Best choir outfits: Korean girls singing “I Love to See the Temple,” Sunday morning

Longest talk: D. Todd Christofferson, “Why the Covenant Path,” 2179 words
Shortest talk: Russell M. Nelson, “Welcome Message,” 507 words

Longest prayer (“I should have been giving a talk.”): Arnulfo Valenzuela, Sunday morning benediction, 144 seconds
Shortest prayer (“Let’s move this thing along!”): Carl B. Cook, Saturday afternoon invocation, 54 seconds

Best title: Dale G. Renlund, “Infuriating Unfairness”
Emphatic titles: Ahmad S. Corbitt (“You Can Gather Israel!”) and S. Gifford Nielsen (“This Is Our Time!”) gave consecutive talks with exclamation marks on the titles. Henry B. Eyring (“Bless in His Name”) unfortunately didn’t continue the trend.
Missed opportunity title: Choi Hong (Sam) Wong titled his talk “They Cannot Prevail; We Cannot Fall,” when with just one letter change and very little meaning change, he could have made it rhyme: “They Cannot Prevail; We Cannot Fail.”
1955 called and wants its title back: Dallin H. Oaks, “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution”

Best visual aid: Dallin H. Oaks, amid a bunch of stock photos of Jesus that we’ve all seen a thousand times, showed a photo of a family that’s delightfully imperfect, with one person not looking at the camera at all, and a baby who looks like they might be about to bust into a fuss.

Best stories:

Gary E. Stevenson told of how Church members driven out of Missouri in 1838 were cared for so kindly by residents of Quincy, Illinois. I appreciate this as a counterweight to the prevalent narrative of how early Church members were constantly persecuted.
Gerrit W. Gong told of a young woman selling ice cream cones out of a pushcart who he witnessed having her cart upended and her cones smashed by an angry customer. The scale of her pain might not have been great in the grand scheme of things, but I appreciated how he told the story with no resolution and no happy ending, which I feel like very much goes against the typical Mormon grain of wrapping stories up with a bow. He concluded:

I can still see the young woman on her knees in the street, trying to save broken wafer pieces, tears of anguish streaming down her face. Her image haunts me, a reminder of the unkindness, uncaring, misunderstanding we too often inflict on each other.
Jorge T. Becerra told of a dream Brigham Young had where he encountered Joseph Smith driving a big herd of sheep and goats that were varied in size and appearance. Brigham asked Joseph what he was going to do with such an unruly flock, and Joseph seemed unconcerned and said “they are all good in their places.” Brigham took it to mean the Church should gather a variety of people. I really appreciated Joseph’s line, particularly given that the most familiar discussion of sheep and goats in the scriptures is of Jesus separating them. This seems like an unusually hands-off approach to differences between people in the Church.

In Church Policy, Feminism

Invisible (Mormon) Women

Ziff11 March 202119 Comments

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez documents and discusses what she calls gender data gaps. These are places where data that’s gathered from only (or mostly) men are used to make design or policy decisions that have bad effects on women because, on average they differ from men in consistent ways. Although she doesn’t ever gather them in a list like this, I think there are at least three different points at which data from women can be lost.

Sometimes data isn’t gathered from women at all. For example, a medical researcher might decide that women are too complicated what with menstrual cycles and possible pregnancy, so they study only men and then just assume that the results generalize. Or decision-making bodies that consist of all or mostly men use their personal experience to make policy decisions, without even considering that their experience might not be representative because of their gender. For example, Criado Perez discusses governments making decisions about snow removal and public transportation and even city design with an eye toward trip patterns of commuting to work and back home that is more common among men. In so doing, they ignore or downplay the importance of a pattern more common among women where they go to multiple destinations in one trip. This is especially common among people who care for children or the elderly, which are tasks that women do far more often than men do.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men, but isn’t reported in disaggregated form, so it’s not clear whether there are gender differences or not.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men and is reported disaggregated, but decision-makers are still ultimately unconcerned with the differences. This is generally the case for data on harassment of political office holders that Criado Perez reports, where women holding office are harassed more often and more seriously by their colleagues and even their constituents than men holding office are, but the response of heads of legislative bodies seems to be to tell women to toughen up rather than to do anything themselves to make harassment more difficult.
Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Reading this book got me to thinking about how gender data gaps might affect Church policies. Of course it’s obvious that many Church policies discriminate against women by design, for example the priesthood ban for women. But what the book made me think about is all the ways in which the Church maybe unintentionally makes policies that differentially affect women, and the decision-makers just aren’t very aware of it because they include no women (or if they do, the women know that their place is to not talk too much).

Another thing too is that in terms of the three points at which data on women might be lost that I’ve listed, the Church seems like it’s often stuck at what might be called step zero. That is, Church leaders are loath to admit that they need any data from anyone, men or women, because surely God will put into their minds everything they need to know, and they really don’t want to be troubled by input from rank-and-file members.

But that’s beside the point. What I’m going to do in the rest of this post is just list some Church policies and practices I came up with that are maybe not explicitly designed to give women a worse church experience than men, but end up doing so anyway. These are the types of things that, even without making major changes like ordaining women, could be improved if GAs (and in some cases even local leaders) closed their gender data gaps by getting more input from women.

The requirement for endowed members to wear temple garments is much more burdensome to women than it is to men. Although they’re roughly the same shape as men’s, women’s garments are less compatible with typical clothing options available to women than men’s are with typical clothing options available to men. And that’s to say nothing of issues like yeast infections, which the cisgender men among the ranks of the GAs aren’t going to be personally familiar with. (For much more on this issue, see Angela C.’s excellent post from several years ago at BCC.) Even if getting more women’s input only meant a softening of language around how consistently garments are to be worn, it seems like this would be an improvement.
Mothers’ lounges (or whatever the rooms are called in church buildings where women can retreat to breastfeed their children) are consistently too small, too poorly ventilated, too poorly furnished, and too frequently attached to bathrooms. Sometimes they’re non-existent. All this is anecdotal, but it seems like the pattern is so consistent that it clearly reveals a problem. If more women were asked to give input on building design, perhaps this could be fixed.

In Race, Reviews

Joanna Brooks’s Mormonism and White Supremacy

Ziff1 March 20214 Comments

I recently read (listened to, actually[1]) Joanna Brooks’s book Mormonism and White Supremacy. It was a fascinating book. She covers pieces of Church history with the priesthood/temple ban that I maybe knew the broad strokes of, but that I didn’t know any of the details of.

For example, she traces the reported recollections of men who were actually present at and in some cases participants in the ordination of black men like Elijah Abel in the early years of the Church. Two of them, Abraham Smoot and Zebedee Coltrin, had changed their tune by 1879, when they both told John Taylor in a meeting that Joseph Smith had always opposed the ordination of black men. Joseph F. Smith disagreed with them in 1879, but by 1908, he had come around to their point of view and reported that Joseph Smith had later declared Abel’s ordination “null and void.” Brooks hypothesizes that Joseph F. Smith’s change of heart might have been related to the recent death of Jane Manning James. She suggests that the presence of prominent black Mormons like James might have actually served as a brake for a while on such editing of recollections. In any case, I was fascinated to read this bit of connecting of dots as to how the Church went from ordaining black men at the beginning to deciding that no, in fact, black people were to be barred from both priesthood and the temple.

In Fun, Temple

Temple Ratings on Google Maps, Part 2

Ziff22 February 202113 Comments

Last week, I put up a post where I looked at ratings of LDS temples on Google Maps. This is a follow-up where I’m going to talk about what I read in the reviews of temples.

I looked at the same population of temples that I did in the previous post: the 168 that have been dedicated. For each, I read some of the reviews. I didn’t read all the reviews because (1) especially for the most-reviewed temples, there are a lot, and (2) many of them are pretty much the same. There are tons and tons of five-star ratings with people saying how wonderful and beautiful and peaceful the temple is, whichever temple it is. What I did is to first sort the reviews by “most relevant” and read the first 10-20, and then sort them again by “lowest rating” and read at least all the one- and two-star reviews. I chose “most relevant” because I figure Google’s algorithm for choosing these is likely to choose reviews that stand out in one way or another. I chose “lowest rating,” as you can probably guess, because it’s the five-star reviews that are the most homogeneous, and the low reviews that are most likely to say something unique (or funny!) Every unhappy temple reviewer is unhappy in their own way.

I’ll start with some general trends I noticed across reviews, and then finish by quoting some interesting and fun reviews.

One interesting trend is that reviewers clearly disagree about who they’re writing a review for. A subset is clearly writing a review for a Mormon audience. They’ll mention all kinds of operational details about the temple, like how to find the baptistry, or they’ll give answers to questions like whether the temple requires that you make an appointment in advance, or rents clothes, or has a cafeteria or patron housing. A larger set of reviewers is writing for a non-Mormon audience. They’ll explain how you need a recommend to get in, or talk about proxy ordinances or Mormon doctrine more generally. Most often, they’ll just say how the temple is the most wonderful place in the world, and how peaceful they feel when they go there. I see this as being aimed at non-Mormons even if it’s quite vague, because Mormons already know that Mormons love to go to the temple (or at least, are supposed to love to go to the temple).

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How could the Church take unrighteous dominion seriously?