Showing all posts in General Conference

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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In General Conference

How General Conference Will Change when Nobody Attends

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

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

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

 

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

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

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference Review, October 2019

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

This post has some of my favorite and least-favorite things from this last General Conference. I’m sorry it has been a few weeks so it might be largely forgotten. Anyway, please share your favorites and least favorites in the comments if you’d like.

Best story: Elder Alliaud’s story of his non-member mother quizzing him when he decided to get baptized, including asking him, “Do you have any idea how long church is?”
Worst story, hedge about the law category: Elder Christofferson’s story of the paralyzed patriarch where he carefully made it clear that it was a priesthood holder and not some unwashed heathen (or worse yet, woman), who supported the patriarch’s hands when he gave blessings.
Worst story, endlessly serving woman category: Elder Christofferson again, although this time sharing a story he heard from Elder Bednar and his wife about a very recently widowed woman who of course still served as an usher at a temple dedication, thus helpfully normalizing the idea that women should be forever serving and never thinking of themselves.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Best visual aid: The Del Parson painting of a smiling, welcoming Jesus included by President Aburto in her talk “Thru Cloud and Sunshine, Lord, Abide with Me!”
Worst visual aid: The picture of a (to me) comically distressed-looking Moses included by Elder Stevenson near the end of his talk “Deceive Me Not”
Worst visual aid, missing category: Elder Uchtdorf made mention of Hobbits throughout his talk, but didn’t show us a picture of even one Hobbit!

Best laughs: Elder Holland’s report of the little boy who laid on the floor and raised his foot during the sustainings last General Conference;  Elder Gong’s story of the longsuffering Primary teacher who didn’t interrupt the child who prayed and expressed gratitude for each letter and number.
Worst laugh: President Oaks making light of a woman’s concern over whether she would have to share a house with a sister wife in the next life.

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In GA's, General Conference

Stay

Author ZiffPosted on 2 Comments

I’ve heard it said a lot in fringe and ex-Mormon spaces that General Authorities are spending more time now than they used to talking to and about people who leave the Church. This has been my impression as well. It occurred to me just recently as I was looking through some Conference talks that checking this impression out might be as simple as looking for how often they use one word: stay.

In the past couple of decades in Conference, we’ve been exhorted to stay by the tree, stay on the path (twice!), stay on the high road, and of course, in I think the talk of this type I’ve seen discussed most, to stay in the boat. And these are just the talk titles! It does make sense to me that GAs would use this word a lot if they’re concerned about people leaving. You stay instead of leaving, going, exiting, ending, or finishing. But it also reminds me of commands we use to train dogs. Sit, stay, heel.

Stay isn’t my favorite word because it seems to me that it values the past over the future. Progress that’s already been made is fine, but stay with what you’ve done and don’t continue to move. GAs worry that moves we make will be regressing, but I wonder if they sometimes misidentify progress as regress if it doesn’t fit into the sometimes rigid life paths they prescribe.

Anyway, I looked up use of the word stay in the Corpus of LDS General Conference talks to see if it has been used more recently than it had been before. Here are the results since 1950. The lighter line shows the yearly usage rates per million words, and the darker line shows the five-year moving average, which smooths out some of the yearly bumps and makes for something that’s easier to look for patterns in.
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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 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, General Conference

Two Is the New Three

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

In a special press conference, President Russell M. Nelson announced a series of changes in the Church related to the shortening of its Sunday meeting schedule from three hours to two, which had been announced in this last weekend’s General Conference:

  • The afterlife now includes only two kingdoms: Celestial and Telestial. “We considered keeping Terrestrial, since it has the benefit of being an actual recognized word,” he explained, “but as I read the description of this kingdom in Doctrine and Covenants 76, it was impressed upon my mind that the Lord’s will is that any so-called ‘honorable men of the earth’ who can’t manage to see through the subtle craftiness of men be grouped with the wicked in the Telestial Kingdom.”
  • The triple combination has been renamed the double combination, with the de-canonization of the Pearl of Great Price. President Nelson noted that although the Pearl of Great Price contains “some inspired writings,” it may also be misleading, for example, in that the Articles of Faith purport to summarize the Church’s key beliefs, but make no mention of the importance of heterosexual marriage or of God’s eternal hatred of gay and transgender people.

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In Fun, General Conference

More Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Given my remarkable success at predicting things that would happen in April General Conference, I thought I would try my hand again with some more Conference predictions for October.

  • In a stunning rebuke of the murmurnacle, President Nelson will announce that not only will the three hour block not be shortened to two hours, it will actually be lengthened to four hours. Existing meetings and classes will not be changed in length. The extra hour will be used for a mandatory meeting where all ward members (including primary and nursery-aged children) sit in council and discuss the importance of Defending the Family. Meetinghouses used by three wards will follow the 8-12/10-2/12-4 schedule. Fifth Sundays will be celebrated with a special five-hour block, with each meeting lengthened by 25%.

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In General Conference

General Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

General Conference starts tomorrow, and this provides all kinds of opportunities to speculate about what changes in the Church it might bring. Of course we can speculate before every Conference, but this one is particularly ripe given that there will be two new members of the Quorum of the Twelve called, and that it will be President Nelson’s first Conference. President Monson was unwell for years, so there may have been big decisions that the other Q15 members left unmade. Now, with President Nelson appearing to be in good health, he may move forward with some items that had been on hold.

Here’s my speculation about the new Quorum of the Twelve members: They will be white, and will have a strong connection to Utah. Risky speculation, I know! Seriously, though, I was extremely disappointed in 2015 when, even with three Q12 positions to fill at the same time, President Monson still couldn’t bring himself to call a person of color to the Quorum. My guess is that President Nelson will be even less likely to do so. Also, given how much he clearly loves God’s Most Holy and Most Blessed Order of the Eternal and Most Divine Gender Roles, Which Were and Are from All Eternity to All Eternity, I’m betting that he won’t call anyone like Elder Renlund to the Quorum. Elder Renlund’s wife had (gasp) a career, and to make it worse, only one child. I really doubt that President Nelson could see someone like him as being faithful enough. So my expectation is not just two older white men with ties to Utah, but two older white men with ties to Utah who are descended from polygamists and whose wives were SAHMs and had plenty of kids.

A question that might be even bigger than who the new Q12 members will be is whether President Nelson will canonize the Family Proclamation. This seems like the perfect example of an issue that was left in limbo with President Monson’s deteriorating health, that President Nelson might jump to solve. Really, though, after reading a bunch of discussions on the Bloggernacle and on Facebook, I’ve come to agree with those who argue that it doesn’t really matter if he does or not. One of my sisters pointed out that for the FamProc to enter the canon would kind of be a step down. The canon is what we read now and again and pull proof texts out of. The FamProc is what we love so much that we hang it on our walls! It’s better than canon. What I really expect is that, rather than canonizing it, President Nelson will borrow some lines from Joseph Smith and tell us that “The Family Proclamation is the most correct of any proclamation on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man will get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other proclamation.” That’s what he’ll do: cement its place as super-canon.

It also might be worth wondering whether President Nelson, or any of the other speakers, will mention all the fallout from the Joseph Bishop scandal. My guess would be no, both considering the timing–all the news has broken so close to Conference, and talks are planned well in advance–and the content–GAs won’t want to bring the issue to the attention of anyone who hasn’t already heard about it. This is a topic like polygamy, where the Church will probably be sure to keep any of its responses carefully out of the way of most members, to avoid causing more trouble than they solve. Kind of like the Gospel Topics essays.

What do you think will happen at Conference?

 

In General Conference, Statistics

The Slowing of Church Growth

Author GuestPosted on 15 Comments

This post comes to us from Christian Anderson, a biostatistician living in San Diego county. He previously guest posted on mentions of Heavenly Parents in General Conference.

In the Saturday Afternoon Session of General Conference on Apr 1, 2017, the church announced a membership of 15,882,417. Combined with last year’s total, this represented an increase of 248,218 members and 1.59%. For many denominations, this would be a banner year. However, for the LDS church it represents a remarkable underperformance relative to historical trends and enthusiastic predictions by some members.

Absolute growth
In terms of absolute growth, the addition of nearly a quarter million members is still a substantial achievement. After all, the church didn’t reach 250,000 members total until 1897. However, since 1984 the church had reported growth of at least that magnitude for 32 consecutive years until last Saturday. Reported is an important word here, as membership totals reported in General Conference were rounded off to the nearest 10,000 from 1984-1991, and there are several statistical anomalies in the various time series suggesting that totals sometimes reflect incomplete reports (usually reflected by an anomaly in the opposite direction in the next year).

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference Talks Most Likely to Be Edited

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments

Ever since Boyd K. Packer’s October 2010 Conference talk “Cleansing the Inner Vessel” was significantly edited between the version he delivered and the printed version, I’ve seen increased attention paid to differences between the spoken and printed versions of Conference talks.

Given that we’re in the relatively brief window of time between all the Conference talks being given and the release of their printed versions (other than the Women’s Session, for which they’re already out), I thought it might be fun to speculate about what edits we might see this time around. Here are some of my guesses. I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

Speaker Spoken version Printed version (my guess)
Brough, Saturday morning “I earnestly prayed to know if I had to give my dog away [after my father was called as a mission president]. My answer did not come in a moment. Rather, a specific thought kept penetrating my mind: Don’t be a burden to your parents.” “I earnestly prayed to know if I had to give my dog away [after my father was called as a mission president]. My answer came in a flash, as my beloved dog was simultaneously struck by lightning and run over by a train. I rejoiced in the miracle God had provided to keep me from being a burden to my parents.”

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In GA's, General Conference, Heavenly Mother, Statistics

Heavenly Parents at Conference

Author GuestPosted on 13 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Christian Anderson.

It’s always nice to hear how the old folks at home are doing. It seems like we’ve been hearing more and more about Them recently.

Back in April 2013, Ziff (https://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2013/04/29/heavenly-parents-are-we-really-talking-about-you-more/ and references therein) noted that there seemed to be an increasing number of references to “Heavenly Parents” in General Conference and more widely in church materials. This post discusses three aspects of that trend: 1) It has not only continued but accelerated over the last three years, 2) there has been a shift in which authorities are mentioning Them, and 3) the fraught issue of capitalization.

An accelerating trend

Few speakers mentioned Heavenly Parents in the decades before 1995, with an average of 0.48 references per year (that’s both April and October conferences combined). That all changed with “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”, which affirms in its third sentence that each human being is “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents”, triggering seven references to Heavenly Parents that year. In the years 1996-2012, references to “Heavenly Parents” nearly tripled to 1.41 references per year (p=0.0057), but never more than three in any one year. 2013 saw a spike to a record nine references, followed by a fall back to one reference in 2014, a return to nine references in 2015, and finally a grand total of 15 references this year. Exactly half of the 56 talks that mention Heavenly Parents have been delivered in the last four years.

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In Fun, General Conference

Predictions for General Conference

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

General Conference already got underway last week, but I’m a bit slow, so I’m just now getting to making some predictions for the remainder of the sessions. You can help me out by telling me which in each pair of possible events is most likely to occur in the remainder of Conference.

Which in each pair is more likely?

  • President Monson talks about widows.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about airplanes.
  • President Monson talks about widowers.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about spaceplanes.
  • President Monson talks about Windows.
  • President Uchtdorf talks about Linux.

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