Showing all posts by Ziff

In Abortion, GA's

Church Rhetoric on Abortion and Why Members Are Generally Pro-life

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

Is the LDS Church more pro-life or pro-choice when it comes to abortion? This is an easy question, right? The Church strongly opposes abortion, so it’s clearly more pro-life.

But the answer isn’t quite that simple. As Peggy Fletcher Stack pointed out in a Salt Lake Tribune article a couple of months ago, the fact that the Church acknowledges any conditions under which it does not object to abortion makes it out of alignment with at least the most extreme versions of pro-life arguments and laws, which seek to ban abortion under all circumstances. As a result, she also notes, the Church takes fire from at least some pro-life groups for not being sufficiently opposed to abortion. Along similar lines to Stack’s article, a few years ago, TopHat of the Exponent framed the Church’s position as being pro-choice, and praised the Church for recognizing exceptions under which its policy permits abortion.

But of course, if you ask individual members what they think, Mormons (or American Mormons, at least) are more likely than any other group but one (Jehovah’s Witnesses) to want abortion to be illegal. This was a finding of the Pew Research 2014 Religious Landscape Survey. Of Mormons surveyed, 70% said abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, putting us behind only Jehovah’s Witnesses at 75%.

(Note that this is just a graph I made from the Pew graph so that I could sort by percentage rather than by religious group name. If you follow the link in the paragraph above, you’ll find a graph with the same numbers.)

So what gives? If Church policy allows for situations in which abortion may be justified, why do Mormons generally lean toward banning abortion in general?

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In General Conference, Statistics

Most Viewed Conference Talks on YouTube (Part 1)

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

What are the most liked General Conference talks? I wrote a post a few years ago where I looked at Facebook likes of talks to see which talks got the most likes. Unfortunately, when I went back recently to update this post, I found that the Facebook like button has been removed from the General Conference talk pages on lds.org. Using the Wayback Machine, I looked at site snapshots going back a few years, and it looks like this feature was removed in March, 2016. I was lamenting this fact on Facebook when my co-blogger Katya pointed out that Conference talks are still available on YouTube, and there are like and dislike buttons.

I wrote a little script to get the counts of views, likes, and dislikes for all the talks posted at the LDS General Conference YouTube channel. This includes talks from April 1971 through April 2019 Conferences. The channel also has videos for other things like musical numbers and statistical reports, but for this post, I’m just looking at the talks.

There are a total of 3,508 talks across the 97 Conferences, given by 473 unique speakers. Just as an aside, the data needed a bit of cleaning for me to make speakers’ names consistent, as there are typos in some of their  names (for example, A. Theodore Tuttle is identified once as “A. Theodore Turtle”), as well as straight up inconsistent naming (for example, M. Russell Ballard is identified at least once using the suffix “Jr.,” but most of the time it isn’t included).

Here’s a list of the top 20 speakers who have given the most talks.

Wow! Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson have each given over 6% of all the talks in the sample, and each more than twice as many as any other speaker. I guess this is no surprise given how long both served not only as Church President, but also in the First Presidency. President Nelson would have to live–and be healthy enough to deliver Conference talks–for over a decade to get close to them. It’s probably Elder Bednar, who doesn’t even make this list (he’s at #23 with 29 talks) who has the best chance of joining them, as he’s likely to serve as Church President for a long time.

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In GA's, Women

R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to President Nelson!

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

In April Conference, President Nelson said the following to the men and boys in priesthood session:

Another way we can also do better and be better is how we honor the women in our lives, beginning with our wives and daughters, our mothers and sisters.

Here he echoed a number of previous statements he’s made about how important it is for men to honor and respect women. For example, in a 1999 talk, he said:

We who bear the holy priesthood have a sacred duty to honor our sisters. . . . We respect sisters—not only in our immediate families but all the wonderful sisters in our lives. As daughters of God, their potential is divine.

And in a 2006 talk, he said this:

[B]rethren, your foremost priesthood duty is to nurture your marriage—to care for, respect, honor, and love your wife. Be a blessing to her and your children.

And in a 1997 talk, he said this:

[S]ome temple marriages fail because a husband forgets that his highest and most important priesthood duty is to honor and sustain his wife. The best thing that a father can do for his children is to “love their mother.”

I’m encouraged that he’s made it a point to repeatedly remind men to be good to the women around us. But of course this isn’t the only thing that he’s said about women in Conference. Actually, when I first read the line from April Conference that I quoted above, it struck me as a little strange, because I was sure I remembered President Nelson saying some less positive things about women in Conference.

I looked back through all of his Conference talks since he was called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 1984 to look for things he said to or about women to get an overall sense of what he thinks of women. I thought this might be especially instructive given that, as has been much discussed on the blogs, President Nelson signaled his distaste for nicknames and shortenings of the Church’s name in a Conference talk back in 1990. Given this, it seems that we might pick up ideas about what he thinks about women more generally by also looking back at his Conference talks. Unfortunately, I found that not all of the things he’s said to and about women have been as nice as the quotes above.

The first pattern I see in his talks that I find troubling is that he’s praised women for being quiet about any complaints they may have. In his first Conference talk after being called, he praised his wife thusly:

Her sacrifices to bring our ten wonderful children into this world, teaching and training them, while always supporting me without a murmur through my responsibilities in the Church and in my profession, are monumental.

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In Fun, Music

Beatles Songs, Mormonized

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

At the Sunstone Symposium this year, Todd Compton, Harold Peterson, and Clair Von Barrus are giving a presentation titled “The Beatles, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mormonism.” (Follow the link in the image on the right for more information or to register for Sunstone. If you do, just know that I’ll be jealous!)

Inspired by their topic, I thought it might be fun to imagine what a few of their song lyrics might have been if they had been Mormons. Here are three of my attempts. If you feel so inclined, please feel free to add yours in the comments.

Here Comes the Son

Here comes the Son, here comes the Son
And I say He’s the light.

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In Blogging

13 Years of Ziff

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

Note: This post is straight-up navel gazing. Consider yourself warned.

This month marks 13 years since I wrote my first post at ZD. That post was about asking for change in the Church. If you think I’ve been blogging about the same thing over and over for a long time, you’re pretty much right.

One thing that I think has changed in my blogging is that over time, I’ve shifted from more blogging about numbers-related stuff to more blogging that’s just plain silliness. I definitely still enjoy looking at Mormon (or Mormon-adjacent) data and trying to find an interesting pattern in it to write about. But I guess I’ve found that I also very much enjoy writing goofy parodies of Mormon stuff, or rewriting things to make them Mormon-ish. And silly blogging has the added benefit of being much less labor-intensive than stats blogging is. Rather than spending potentially dozens of hours on a post, I can spend maybe one or two. Also, as much as I try to make the numbers-based stuff approachable, I suspect that silly blogging has the potential to connect with more people, as humor is more generally shared than a love of numbers is.

The larger context of ZD and the Bloggernacle have also changed. I think when I first started blogging, after my sisters and their friends had started the blog months before, I was a little more intimidated by my surroundings, both on this blog and on the Bloggernacle more generally. To fit in well, I wanted to say important and well-thought-out things, and working with numbers felt like it gave me the chance to make something I wrote important and well-thought-out, as I’m often better with data than I am with prose. In contrast to those first few years, now that ZD has been around a while, our place in the Bloggernacle is pretty firmly established as decidedly heretical backwater. We’re also much quieter than we used to be, with many of us bloggers moving on to Heavenly Mother status (although I hold out hope that at least some of those moves might yet be temporary). In this context, I feel more comfortable that the  hundreds dozens of readers who are still here (thank you for sticking with us!) kind of know what to expect, and have made peace with our quirks. So I’m more willing to let my silliness show, and to dash off a quick goofy post and put it up than I ever would have been in our earlier days.

But let’s look at the data, shall we? I’ve written 243 posts in 13 years, or about one and a half a month. In one way, that feels like not very many, as I suspect that it’s no more than a month or two’s work for a serious blogger like Ardis. But in another way, it feels like a ton, just because there have been so many posts that I thought about and agonized over and rewrote so many times.

I went back and put all of them into one of four categories: numbers, silly, other church, and other non-church. Of the 243, 90 (37%) fell into numbers, 49 (20%) into silly, 96 (40%) into other church, and 8 (3%) into other non-church. So I’ve written almost twice as many numbers-based posts as silly posts. But in the past few years, as I had suspected, I’ve flipped and written more silly posts. Since the beginning of 2017, I’ve written more silly posts (26) than numbers-based (16) or other church (17). Here’s a graph that shows the percentage by type across time.

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In Music

Two Songs I Hope Don’t Make It into the Children’s Songbook

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

Chad Nielsen’s recent post at T&S on updates on the hymn book revision process reminded me that there are a couple of songs that I’m really, really hoping don’t make it into the new Children’s Songbook. The first isn’t even in there now, but from Chad’s post, it sounds like it’s a strong candidate. It’s “If the Savior Stood Beside Me.”

If your ward loves this song like mine and you’ve been in Primary in the past couple of decades, you’re probably familiar with it. Its lyrics begin with its title, and then has the singer ask if they would do various things differently if the Savior stood beside them. “Would I do the things I do?” “Would I think of his commandments and try harder to be true?” “Would I say the things I say?” “Would I try to share the gospel?” “Would I speak more reverently?”

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I understand that this might just be because I’m a neurotic Mormon, but the tone of this song strikes me as very much shaming kids and reminding them that they need to stop having so much fun and return to the grim, joyless path that Jesus wants them to be on. And yes, I know there are scriptures and statements by GAs about how the gospel means living joyously, but I think for kids in particular, what they often learn in Primary is that Jesus is most concerned with having them shut up and stop wiggling. So having them sing a song where they question whether they would do this or that or the other thing if Jesus were standing there seems to me to be very much a reminder that having fun is for places other than church, and when we’re at church, we’re quiet and miserable.

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In Church Policy, Doctrine, Temple

(Tinkering Intensifies)

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

When my sisters and friends started ZD way back during the Hinckley administration, I had an idea of how the Church worked that turned out to be false. I thought that the Church was clearly a slow-moving organization that would make a serious change only every generation or two. I figured that most of what they (we, as I joined only later) blogged about would be long-term issues on which the Church hadn’t changed its approach for decades.

My view turned out to be wrong because it turned out that Church leaders are tinkering with policies all the time. Just a few examples: They raised the bar on missionary service, making it harder to go on a mission, and then later they lowered the missionary ages. In response to Ordain Women, they started broadcasting the priesthood session of Conference. They added some of the women leaders to the Church-level committees. In response to (or in spite of?) Let Women Pray, they started having a few women pray in General Conference. In response to organized agitation from folks at BCC and fMh (and others, I’m sure), they clarified the policy on allowing young women to do baptisms for the dead while on their periods. In response to the Obergefell decision, they modified the Handbook to add the Exclusion Policy.

One thing I’m still unsure of is whether Church leaders were always tinkering with policies like this, or whether it was a new thing where they considered changes more quickly in the new sped-up internet-powered world. I’m kind of guessing the former, but I suspect people who know more Church history than I do will have a more informed answer.

Image credit: This is a combination of two images from clipart-library.com.

But what I really want to talk about is the accelerated tinkering of the Nelson administration. To me, he seems obviously far more willing to change things that he doesn’t think are working than any of his predecessors in my lifetime. Just last week, the Church released news of the latest change: the end of the one-year waiting period between civil marriages and temple sealings in countries where temple sealers are authorized to perform marriages. Of course before that there was the ending of the Exclusion Policy, the temple ceremony changes at the beginning of the year, the deprecation of the use of “Mormon” as a name for the Church or its members, the relaxed rules on missionaries calling home, the combining of priesthood quorums, and the revision of visiting and home teaching into the ministering program. And I’m sure I’m missing others.

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In Depression, LGBT Issues, Statistics

A Look at Crisis Text Line Data on LGBT Issues and Suicidality

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

Crisis Text Line is a support service for people in crisis. It’s like a suicide hotline, but more general in that the service has crisis counselors trained to respond to a broad range of crises. Also unlike a traditional suicide hotline, it’s reached by text rather than by voice. As a result of this, according to a New Yorker story from 2015 about the service, most who use it are teenagers.

Of particular interest to me, the organization also publishes aggregate data about what types of crises its clients contact them about, and from what states, as well as trends by day of the week, time of day, and across historical time (since 2015). I thought it would be interesting to look at these data to see if there were evidence of the particular stress that LGBT people are put under in Mormonism, particularly after the November 2015 exclusion policy came to light.

Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the Crisis Text Line data doesn’t include information about clients’ religious affiliation, so I’ll just use the rough approximation of using Utah data as a proxy for Mormon experience. On the up side, though, a big advantage of these data is that they summarize reports of clients’ crises by type–where I’ll just be looking at LGBT-related and suicidal thinking–rather than having only completed suicide counts to go on. Distress over one’s sexual orientation or gender identity and suicidal thinking are surely far more common than suicide itself, so these data are potentially richer than data on completed suicides alone.

Here’s a map that shows US states ranked by frequency of clients texting about issues of gender or sexual identity as a percentage of all texts received from the state. Utah ranks number seven.

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In Fun, Satan

Are you ready for four times as much Satan?

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

President Nelson said in Priesthood Session last night that Satan is quadrupling his efforts against LDS members. But what exactly does this mean? I have some theories.

Image credit: www.Vecteezy.com
  • In addition to riding on and controlling the waters, Satan now also controls three additional liquids: chocolate milk, mercury, and blood. Missionaries will be prohibited to consume, swim in, or ride in a boat on any of these.
  • Satan now leads away four thirds of the host of heaven rather than merely one. This requires him to lead some stubborn host members away more than once. (The fact that he has to do this explains why any host members remained on God’s side at all.)

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In GA's, Nov 5 Policy

Some Thoughts on the End of the Exclusion Policy

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

The Church announced today that the exclusion policy of November 2015, which branded people in gay marriages as apostates and denied blessing and baptism to their children, is ending. I have a bunch of thoughts on this that I’d like to share (most of which I’ve probably borrowed in one form or another from discussions with friends on Facebook).

  • First, I’m thrilled! The exclusion policy was terrible from the beginning. It was bad in its direct effect of exclusion, but perhaps even worse in the signal it sent to LGBT people that they are seen as uniquely wicked by the Church, requiring a special bit in the Handbook to outline just how awful they are. I am therefore very happy to see the Q15 decide to drop it.
  • I am honestly shocked–in a good way–that President Nelson allowed this change to happen during his presidency. He’s widely seen as its architect, even though it was put in place during President Monson’s tenure. I am impressed that President Nelson is willing to let go of something he once defended as being revelation, rather than leaving it for the next Church president to undo.
  • All the above notwithstanding, I think it’s awful that Church leaders still absolutely refuse to say–or even imply–either that they were wrong or that they are sorry. It’s great that the policy is being taken back, but with no admission of wrong or apology, where does that leave all the people who were hurt during the three and a half years it was in place? Do Church leaders seriously expect us to believe that it was just the will of God that they suffer, but that now God has changed his mind? This change feels similar to the changes made in the endowment ceremony just a couple of months ago. It was great that the hierarchy-imposing structure was reduced, but it was awful that there was not even a mention of the pain that had been caused to so many women by the the “hearken” and “obey” covenants and the resulting power differential they were put under.

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In Fun

Prepentance

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

ZD is pleased to share the following press release from the Mormon Newsroom. The release is scheduled to be run immediately following General Conference, but it has been leaked to us on an exclusive basis by the Three Nephites.

After President Nelson’s inspired announcement of the Church’s move from a focus on repentance, which looks backward at sins that have already been committed, to a focus on prepentance, which looks forward at sins that have not yet been committed, he has directed that the creation of the following FAQ about prepentance.

Q: How can I know what things to prepent of, if I haven’t committed the sins yet?

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In Missions

I Hope They Don’t Call Me on a Mission

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

I have an 18-year-old son who recently started his mission. He’s not going anywhere, though; he’s doing a service mission. He lives at home, and he works every weekday (and occasional Saturdays) at a nearby bishop’s storehouse and a community food bank. Between the two, he does lots of physically moving stuff around to organize it and to fill people’s orders, and he also gets to do things that he finds far more entertaining, like fiddle with the record-keeping and reporting processes at the storehouse to try to make them more efficient.

My son decided near his eighteenth birthday that serving a two-year proselytizing mission would be too anxiety-provoking for him. He still wanted to serve a mission, though, so he approached our bishop and told him he wanted to do just one year and do a service mission. Happily, our bishop was on board, and he’s been very supportive through the whole process. The process of getting my son officially called was long and drawn out because the way the Church was handling service missions was in the middle of a major change when my son went to the bishop. So it took a while, but he’s finally official and doing his work. He seems to be enjoying it.

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In General Conference, Statistics

References to the New Church President in Conference

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

In a comment here at ZD last year, Leonard R suggested that it seemed to him that speakers in Conference have become more prone recently to refer to or quote the President of the Church in their talks. Now that President Nelson has two Conferences under his belt, I thought it might be interesting to look at how often recent Church Presidents were referred to or quoted in their first two Conferences.

I used the ever-handy LDS General Conference Corpus. I looked up references to each new Church President’s last name only (to be sure I wasn’t missing any mentions where he was referred to as simply President [last name] rather than in the usual way, as our beloved prophet and leader, even President [first name middle initial last name]). Since this is just a first pass, I didn’t even check through the results to be sure I wasn’t accidentally including references to other Nelsons, Monsons, Hinckleys, etc., although I suspect that if such references do occur in the data, they are likely to be few.

Here are the results.

I’ve put an asterisk on Howard W. Hunter because he was only President for one Conference before passing away. One solution to this might have been just to double his references, but I decided against doing this because I suspect there is probably a dropoff between a new President’s first and second Conferences.

Anyway, this doesn’t actually get at Leonard R’s question terribly well because we typically have a new Church President only once a decade or so, but the trend for the last few Church Presidents certainly does look hopeful. Perhaps when I have more time, I’ll come back to this question and look at it in more detail.

In Fun

Mormon Titles, Very Slightly Revised

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

I’ve seen threads on Reddit where people slightly alter movie titles to completely change what the story is about. I thought this might be an entertaining thing to try with some Mormon-related book and movie titles. This post has my attempts. Please add yours in the comments if you are willing.

The Work and the Gory — This series tells a dramatized version of early Mormon history, with special focus on the Danites.

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In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2018: Funniest Comments

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle last year. In case you missed them, here are links to compilations from past years: 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of what I’m quoting here is excerpted from longer comments or posts. I’ve made the commenters’ names links that point back to the original source in case you want to read more. I’ve put the comments in roughly chronological order.

Em, in her post “Mercia Second Ward” at the Exponent:

Recently a remarkable cache of documents has been discovered that shows just how much medieval saints resembled modern day wards! . . . . The moment [the ward librarian’s] back was turned some breezy teacher would waltz in to make a few copies, ignoring the “library demons only” sign on the scriptorium  and wouldn’t you know it, the parchment would get stuck or start unravelling uncontrollably.  Oh look, there it goes again.  “This is so typical,” she thought as she heaved a giant tome of “church illustrations volume 7” onto the checkout desk.  “At least I get to miss Sunday school and talk with my friend.”  Despite its drawbacks, the Ward Librarian was a plum job even back then.

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In Statistics, Temple

Is there more temple attendance since the changes?

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

I’ve heard anecdotally in discussion on Facebook that people attending the temple since the changes in ordinances that came to light last week have found it much more crowded than usual. This seems like it shouldn’t be too surprising. That changes were coming was rumored at least in December, and I’m usually not the most plugged in to such things, so if I heard rumors in December, other people probably did long before that. Given the typical sameness of the temple from one visit to the next, people might be extra interested to go to see when they know it will be different. Add to that the fact that the changes may make the temple more palatable for feminists and other egalitarian-minded folks (although many also understandably feel deeply ambivalent about them), and a whole swath of people who might be on the fringes of temple attendance might want to return.

But of course what I’d love to have is some hard data to see if I can find evidence that this is really happening. Of course I don’t have actual temple attendance data, but what I do have that might serve as a very rough proxy is counts of the number of endowment sessions in each temple. I got these by looking at the individual temple pages on the Church’s site, all linked from this page that lists all the temples. Counts of sessions aren’t as good as counts of temple patrons, but the reality is that there’s zero chance that I’ll ever get anything like that, so I’ll just be happy with what I do have. Even more fortunately, I started taking monthly samples of endowment session counts in the middle of last year, so I have a little bit of past data to compare to. I haven’t counted all sessions for every day in each month, but what I have done is pick two days in each month–always a Saturday and the following Tuesday near the middle of the month–and count sessions on those days. (I chose Saturday and Tuesday because they’re the beginning and end of the temple week.)

This graph shows the total number of endowment sessions across all temples on the two sampled days for each month from April of last year to this month. (Note that the sampled days for this month haven’t even occurred yet; I’ve tried to take session counts in the week before the sampled days so I can get the most up-to-date information if the folks at the temple decide to make a late addition or deletion of a session.)

The total number of sessions looks pretty flat across time. It looks like January has a little dip from December rather than an increase. So, no evidence for the idea that temples are busier?

Not so fast! The situation is complicated by the fact that the totals are not coming from a constant set of temples. New temples open. Old temples are closed for renovation and then re-open later. Every temple (I think) is closed periodically for a few weeks at a time. This last issue means that I couldn’t just solve the problem by showing counts only for the set of temples that were open constantly through the entire period.

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In Ordinances, Temple

Are the changes in the temple meaningful?

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

In the psychology of perception, there’s the idea of a just-noticeable difference (JND) in some stimulus. For example, if a person is looking at a light, a JND is the smallest change in light that they’ll notice.

Some of the discussion around the changes that were just made in the temple ceremonies has made me think that we could define a parallel idea for how meaningful a change is: a just-meaningful difference (JMD). A JMD would be a change in something that’s just small enough to be meaningful.

To me, the changes the Church just made are far, far beyond the JMD threshold. The fact that women’s and men’s covenants are now parallel to each other rather than having women covenant to hearken to their husbands and men covenant to obey God is, I think, huge. The hearken covenant (and its even harsher predecessor, the obey covenant) have been the source of so much pain to so many Mormon women over the years. Similarly, the changes that have Eve no longer be silenced for the latter part of the endowment, and dropping the requirement that women be veiled are also very big. All these changes signal a fundamental reorganization of how women and men are though of being in relation to God. Instead of a hierarchical view where God presides over men, and men preside over women–one that Paul and Brigham Young would have preferred–we’ve taken some steps toward one where God is over all, regardless of their gender.

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In Christmas, Fun

The Night Before Smithsmas

Author ZiffPosted on 2 Comments

Twas the night before Smithsmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The manuscript sat on the table with care,
In hopes that the translator soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of stick pulling danced in their heads;
And mama in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon, it was casting a pillar of light,
And I shielded my eyes from the heavenly bright
When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a self-propelled sleigh with four men drawing near

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