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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2024

Author ZiffPosted on 10 Comments

Best hymn: “Oh, What Songs of the Heart,” Saturday evening. It gets bonus points for mention of Heavenly Parents, but I really liked it musically too.
Worst hymn:  “Lord, I Would Follow Thee,” Sunday morning. This was just very bland.
Fastest hymn: “The Lord Is My Light,” Saturday evening.
Slowest hymn: “Did You Think to Pray?” Saturday morning.
Best and worst choir: I really liked the Utah Valley Institute choir that sang Saturday evening. I was much less a fan of the BYU-I choir that sang Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a knock on their singing; I just felt like the arrangements they sang had weird pacing changes. (Sorry, as a music noob, I can’t explain it any better.)

Longest prayer: 167 seconds, S. Gifford Nielsen, Saturday morning invocation.
Shortest prayer: 51 seconds, Emily Belle Freeman, Saturday afternoon benediction. I appreciated that she didn’t force herself to use proper prayer pronouns.
Unsurprising prayer difference: Men gave eight prayers, with the shortest being 93 seconds (average of 114 seconds). Women gave two prayers, with the longer being 68 seconds.

Best slip of the tongue: While conducting the Sunday afternoon session, Quentin L. Cook welcomed us to the 109th annual General Conference. (It was actually the 194th.)

Best title: Patrick Kearon, “God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home”
Overdone title: Dale G. Renlund, “The Powerful, Virtuous Cycle of the Doctrine of Christ” I didn’t realize until I read the talk that he was quoting Russell M. Nelson, who has a love of hyperbole.

Longest talk: D. Todd Christofferson, 1961 words. (He also gave the longest talk among Q15 members last conference.)
Shortest talk: Susan H. Porter, 1252 words.

Best laugh:

  • Dale G. Renlund showed with his hands the sizes of the tiny waves that knocked him off his kayak.
  • Massimo De Feo told how his wife told him the reason he didn’t remember them having any major problems was that he had a short memory.

Strangest joke: Jeffrey R. Holland, who hadn’t given a talk in a couple of conferences because of health issues, joked that it was because he gave a bad talk last time. He said that he was at risk of being banned again, “positioned on a trapdoor with a very delicate latch.” While I appreciate his willingness to laugh at himself, I found this an odd choice of jokes precisely because we have seen that speakers don’t get removed from the rotation if they do bad things. You can try to stealth canonize your favorite proclamation and still come back. You can openly set up a money-making scheme and still come back. It seems like a weird thing to call attention to.

Bad pattern: There was wall-to-wall discussion of temples and covenants. Two speakers—J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks—brought up temple garments, which I feel like are mentioned in conference rarely if ever. (Gerrit W. Gong even exhorted members to buy our own temple clothes.) I have to wonder if President Nelson has noticed that maybe all the new temples he’s announcing aren’t drawing as much new patronage as he had hoped, so now he’s trying to drum up some more traffic to make them look more successful. This discussion showed up in some strange lines:

  • Jack N. Gerard said that in performing the atonement, Jesus “fulfilled the covenant He had made with His Father.” I feel like I’ve never heard this called a covenant before. Is this new doctrine?
  • Andrea Muñoz Spannaus said that “obeying our covenants” is one key to drawing on the power of Christ. Obeying? I’ve heard keeping, but a covenant isn’t a commandment or a rule.
  • Ulisses Soares assured us that “having the spirit of the Lord’s house in us changes us, completely.” Wait, so the temple has its own spirit now? Is the Holy Ghost at risk of being displaced?

Beloved buzzwords:

  • Russell M. Nelson’s “think celestial” line from last conference was picked up and repeated by a number of speakers, sometimes in strange ways. For example, Neil L. Andersen, with a reference to D&C 87, said that “[The Lord] spoke of a righteous people resisting the deceptions of the adversary, disciplining their faith, thinking celestial, . . .” Really? He spoke of that?
  • There’s clearly been a push to call temples “houses of the Lord.” This often sounds clumsy. For example, here’s the opening to David A. Bednar’s talk: “During a recent open house and media day for a new house of the Lord, . . .” Of course, President Nelson has also pushed to use the full name of the Church, regardless of how or where it doesn’t fit, so he’s clearly not one to be deterred by verbal clumsiness.
  • Ronald A. Rasband appears to not be able to give a talk without saying “by divine design.”

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments
Image credit: Openclipart

If we’re between Palm Sunday and Easter, that must mean it’s Holy Week. But more importantly for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after Easter comes General Conference! I have some guesses about things we will and won’t hear about.

  • Church purchase of Kirtland Temple: 70%
  • Church top purchaser of land in Nebraska: << 1%
  • Church purchase of Pacific Gateway Industrial development in 2022: << 1%
  • Kirtland Temple, the first temple of the Restoration: 90%
  • Kirtland Safety Society, the first financial institution of the Restoration: < 1%

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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2023

Author ZiffPosted on 22 Comments

Best hymn: “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” Saturday afternoon.
Worst hymn: “We Listen to a Prophet’s Voice,” Saturday morning. We can’t seriously claim to believe in fallible prophets while we sing this hymn.
Fastest hymn: “Arise, O God, and Shine,” Saturday evening.
Slowest hymn: “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus,” Sunday morning.
Best tacit admission that the hymn is too long: The YA choir singing “I Believe in Christ” Saturday evening just skipped verse 2.

Longest prayer: 164 seconds, Michael T. Nelson, Saturday morning benediction
Shortest prayer: 49 seconds, Clark G. Gilbert, Saturday evening invocation

Best title: Robert M. Daines, “Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus”.
Worst title: M. Russell Ballard, “Praise to the Man”. Can we please just not with the prophet worship?
Title that sounds like a threat: Yoon Hwan Choi, “Do You Want to Be Happy?”. Well, do ya, punk?

Good patterns:

Bad patterns:

  • Multiple speakers used threats to get their points across. Dallin H. Oaks and Russell M. Nelson threatened people with lesser kingdoms in the next life if we don’t shape up. Carlos A. Godoy and Valeri V. Cordón warned parents that we’ll lose our children if we’re not devoted enough.
  • Joni L. Koch and Adilson de Paula Parrella felt like they still needed to make a big deal about the correct name of the Church. For Elder Kock, it felt particularly out of the blue, as he was talking about humility, and then brought the topic up as part of a “pop quiz” on humility. What?
  • It’s not good news when multiple speakers (D. Todd Christofferson and Russell M. Nelson) are quoting from D&C 132. Even if they’re not talking directly about polygamy and women as interchangeable objects, you can bet they’re talking about adjacent topics.
  • Two speakers (Yoon Hwan Choi and Gerrit W. Gong) talked about how Church members shouldn’t turn down callings.

Random interesting bits:

  • I appreciated that when he wanted a sports example, Gary E. Stevenson not only went for a sport not popular in the US (soccer), but he talked about women’s soccer.
  • Ulisses Soares compared the many groups of humanity to the Iguaçú Falls in Brazil that come from the Iguaçú River. This makes the second Conference in a row with a Brazilian river analogy, as in April, Dale G. Renlund talked about the pororoca in the Amazon, where the water flows backward under some conditions. I look forward to seeing which speaker will take up the baton and keep this topic going next April!
  • In talking about the afterlife, Dallin H. Oaks gender-neutralized the description of people in the celestial kingdom, quoting D&C 76:58 with daughters added: “they are gods, even the sons [and daughters] of God,” but a few paragraphs later, he didn’t gender-neutralize people in the terrestrial (“honorable men of the earth”) or telestial kingdoms (“he who cannot abide . . . a terrestrial glory” [ellipsis in original]). Honestly, I appreciate that he tried, as it’s often not obvious when scripture writers meant men as people and when they meant it as just men. But I also think this highlights the concern so many women have that they’re really not that important in LDS thought, except as tickets.

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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2023

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

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

Image by Elle Stallings from Pixabay

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

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

Good patterns:

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

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

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In Fun, General Conference

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

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

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

Photo by Evan Qu on Unsplash

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

 

Words and phrases

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

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2022

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

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

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

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

Choir successes, non-music category:

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

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

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2022

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

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

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

Things we don’t talk about:

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

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

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

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

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference to retain some COVID-era adaptations

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

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

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

Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash

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

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference and the Saturday Night Session Selector

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

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

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

 

In Depression, General Conference, Mental Health

Bits of Conference That Might Be Harmful to Mental Health

Author ZiffPosted on 28 Comments

Like I said in my review a few weeks ago, I really appreciated Erich W. Kopischke’s talk “Addressing Mental Health” this last General Conference. The motivator for him to give the talk was that his son who went on a mission suffered from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and suicidality, and as a result, returned home after being out for four weeks. Elder Kopischke talked about the need for people who are supporting their loved ones who are facing mental health issues to learn more and to judge less:

Learning will lead to more understanding, more acceptance, more compassion, more love. It can lessen tragedy while helping us develop and manage healthy expectations and healthy interactions.

What struck me, though, thinking about his message was how many other messages in that very Conference were probably contributing to people’s mental health struggles. I realize it’s way beyond what one talk could accomplish, but there is so much preaching of perfectionism and black-and-white thinking that really needs to be toned down if GAs want to be serious about helping improve members’ mental health.

Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash

Here’s a list of some of the bits of Conference that I thought were possibly harmful to mental health. Of course, I’m no mental health expert. I’m just a run-of-the-mill neurotic Mormon, prone to depression and anxiety, so those are the types of issues I’ll focus most on. Also, note that I’m doing my church experience on the easiest setting, as a straight, white, married, cisgender man. There are plenty of messages in a typical Conference that are hard on single people, or LGBT people, or childless people, that really don’t strike me because I’m not their target. So what I’m struck by is probably a lower bound estimate for the total number of potentially harmful messages.

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2021

Author ZiffPosted on 28 Comments

Best musical numbers: “Come, Ye Children of the Lord”, Saturday morning; “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”, Saturday evening
Worst musical number: “Hark, All Ye Nations”, Saturday afternoon. I appreciate when choirs sing new arrangements so we can hear new takes on old hymns, but I didn’t like this particular one.
Most up-tempo musical numbers: “Come, Rejoice” and “Sing Praise to Him”, both Sunday morning
Worst line in a musical number: “How many drops of blood were spilled for me?” from “This is the Christ”, Saturday afternoon. Please, could we not embrace making ourselves feel more guilty?
Biggest music-related surprise: Not one but two men in the BYU choir that sang Saturday evening had mustaches. (I’m just going to assume that their organist, whose face was hidden behind a mask, was also sporting a goatee.)

Longest prayer: Steven J. Lund, Saturday evening invocation, 83 seconds (This is the shortest longest prayer for a Conference I’ve found in the prayer length data I could find. The previous shortest longest was 94 seconds in April, 2019.)
Shortest prayer: Amy E. Wright, Saturday morning benediction, 54 seconds

Longest talk: Gary E. Stevenson, “Simply Beautiful—Beautifully Simple”, 1821 words
Shortest talk: Russell M. Nelson gave talks to open and close Conference that were about 550 words. No other talk was shorter than 1000 words.

Best title: Bradley R. Wilcox, “Worthiness Is Not Flawlessness”. A sermon in a sentence.

Best visual aid: Clark G. Gilbert’s photo of himself as a kid.

Your name will be assimilated into standard Conference format: Becky Craven, who’s listed under that name on the Church website, was introduced as “Rebecca L. Craven” when she was going to give a prayer in the Saturday afternoon session.

Latest member of the BYU athlete-to-GA pipeline: Vaiangina Sikahema (following Gifford Nielsen and Devin Durrant). My faith would be most strengthened if the next member were Elder James R. McMahon.

Best laugh: Bradley R. Wilcox told of a time when voice to text converted his intended message to his daughter and son-in-law “Hey, you two. Sure love you!” into “Hate you two. Should love you.”

Best labels for deity: Dieter F. Uchtdorf referred to “the gentle Christ,” “our bountiful and forgiving God,” and the “God of new beginnings.” Camille N. Johnson called Jesus “the Master Author.”

Best stories:

  • Sharon Eubank told about some German LDS women who discovered that women among Afghan refugees who had arrived near them had lost their head coverings. The LDS women then sewed head coverings for the Afghan women. I love this story because the women helped the refugees, and in particular because they helped them in a way that showed them taking the recipients’ religion seriously.
  • Dale G. Renlund told of how when a temple was built in Finland, the temple committee, made up entirely of Finns, decided to allow visiting Russians to perform the first ordinances in the temple, in spite of the fact that the Russians and Finns have historically been enemies. He concluded, “The Finns were no less Finnish; the Russians were no less Russian; neither group abandoned their culture, history, or experiences to banish enmity. They did not need to. Instead, they chose to make their discipleship of Jesus Christ their primary consideration.”
  • Brent H. Nielson told the story of how his family rallied around his father when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but in the end, he died in just a few months. I appreciated how this story lacked a Correlated ending, with a miraculous healing and doctors and nurses converted to boot.

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In General Conference

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

Author ZiffPosted on 16 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.

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In General Conference, Statistics

General Conference Talks by Speaker Position Since 1960

Author ZiffPosted on 1 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.

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In Church Policy, General Conference

General Conference, Now 20% Shorter!

Author ZiffPosted on 22 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.

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In General Conference, Statistics

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

Author ZiffPosted on 17 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.

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2021

Author ZiffPosted on 23 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.

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews Conference, October 2020

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

Best visual aid: Carlos A. Godoy shared a picture of himself and his sister at the time they first investigated the Church as teenagers. I think it’s fun to see pictures of GAs back when they were younger, especially when they had long hair.

Most carefully vague visual aid: Dallin H. Oaks talked about the right to peacefully protest as a good thing, and accompanying his talk is a picture of some people protesting. The picture is very carefully taken to not actually show what cause the people are protesting about, though.

Weirdest visual aid: W. Christopher Waddell mentioned a Church-published pamphlet on personal finance that has been translated into a number of languages. The only image accompanying his talk is a picture of copies of this pamphlet in several different languages. I think it definitely would have been better to just have no image accompany the talk at all, as this one is pretty useless.

Best story: Dale G. Renlund told a story of two doctors discussing a patient who needed to be admitted to the hospital because of an ailment related to his consumption of alcohol. One doctor expressed frustration that the patient had brought his trouble on himself. The other reminded the first, “you became a physician to care for people and work to heal them. You didn’t become a physician to judge them.” I feel like Elder Renlund reinforced what he was saying with the story by describing both the patient and the first doctor in sympathetic terms. The patient was “a courteous, pleasant man,” and the first doctor’s frustration he attributed to “grueling training” and “sleep deprivation,” and he pointed out that after being corrected, she “diligently” cared for the patient.

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In Fun, General Conference

Topics That Might Be Mentioned in Conference, with Associated Probabilities

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

With General Conference, right around the corner, I thought it might be fun to make some guesses about topics that will or won’t be brought up by the speakers. But not only will I list the topics, for each topic, I’ll also provide an actual numerical estimate of the probability that at least one speaker will mention it. As a trained data tinkerer, I can assure you that these so-called “estimates” are completely made up! Please feel free to add your suggestions, or explain why my numbers are wrong, in the comments.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Topic Probability
COVID-19 as a public health crisis 10%
COVID-19 as an analogy for a spiritually bad thing 50%
The need to stop the spread of COVID-19 by wearing masks 5%
The need to respect others’ beliefs about the dangers of wearing masks 20%
The announcement of official Church-branded masks, complete with the new logo, to be made available to all temple recommend-holding members < 1%
The wickedness of the world, as evidenced by governments’ failure to label church meetings “essential” during COVID-19 lockdowns 60%
The wickedness of the world, as evidenced by some wealthy countries still refusing to provide health insurance to all their citizens. << 1%
Congratulations to Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand for handling the COVID-19 crisis so well 1%
Condemnation to Donald Trump and the United States for handling the COVID-19 crisis so badly << 1%
The importance of electing officials who will pass laws against abortion 10%
The importance of electing officials who will pass laws against gay marriage 15%
The importance of paying your taxes < 1%
The importance of not going $300 million into debt << 1%
QAnon conspiracy theories as a bad thing 1%
QAnon conspiracy theories as a good thing 2%
Operation Underground Railroad 5%
Quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg < 1%
Quote from Amy Coney Barrett 1%
Reminder that racism is bad 1%
Reminder that property destruction is uncalled for, even when people have been treated badly 5%
Announcement of one or more new temples 95%
Announcement of five or more new temples 50%
Announcement of ten or more new temples 5%
Retraction of a temple previously announced < 1%
Salt Lake Temple renovation found to be too costly; temple is to be demolished and rebuilt < 1%
New all-Zoom temple ordinances << 1%
Tithing, and how it’s even more important during hard times 40%
Death, and how it’s part of God’s plan 50%
Six new apostles called to “pack the Quorum” << 1%
Family Proclamation canonized 10%
Restoration Proclamation canonized 15%
D&C 132 de-canonized << 1%
Earthly polygamy reinstated < 1%
Hosanna shout to be re-performed each Conference until membership can “get it right” 5%
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.

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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.)

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