Showing all posts in Mormon Culture

In Mormon Culture, Social Issues

Four Reasons Church Members Feel Compelled to Attribute Motives to People Who Leave

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

There’s a whole genre of blog posts and articles out there in Mormon land that analyze precisely why people would leave the Church. I guess this isn’t surprising coming from the rank and file of Church membership, as GAs themselves both address people on the fringe in their Conference talks and make pronouncements about their motives when they leave.

In this post, I thought it would be fun to turn the question around and try to come up with reasons why I think we Church members are so interested in attributing motives to people who leave the Church.

First, people leaving violate the Church’s growth narrative. Although this has dropped off in recent years as growth has flattened out, the Church has for decades liked to trumpet its growth numbers as evidence of truthfulness. We’re the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, rolling forth to fill the whole earth. We’re carrying the gospel “till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear.” We are the church that “will fill North and South America—it will fill the world.” So if the Church is supposed to make all this tremendous progress and experience all this growth, how does it even make sense that people would not only refuse to join, but some who are already members would proactively leave?

Photo by Hannah Reding on Unsplash

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In Mormon Culture, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Movies on IMDB

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

I grouped the 75 movies into four categories:

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

Ratings by Movie Category

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

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

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In Church Life, Doctrine, Mormon Culture

Things I Like About Mormonism

Author LynnettePosted on 6 Comments

I went to have a chat the other day with the rector of the local Episcopal church where I’ve been attending services, mostly just because I am manically talkative right now and always looking for a new victim to process my religious journey with. Fortunately, he turned out to be a skilled listener. And something that really impressed me came early on, after I told him my basic background (namely that I was a super conflicted Mormon who’d been recently dabbling in all things Episcopal and loving it). He easily could have used that as a launching point to do a sales pitch for the Episcopal tradition, or plunged into a narrative of Mormonism as an oppressive tradition from which I needed to escape. But instead, rather my to my surprise, the first thing he asked was, “what do you like about Mormonism?” As a lifelong Mormon I am perhaps overly alert to potential proselytizing, and the thought may have crossed my mind that this could be a trick question, part of “building a relationship of trust” or “establishing common ground” so that then you can later pounce and get the person to convert. But as the conversation continued, it was clear that nothing of the sort was happening. He genuinely wanted to learn more about Mormonism (he didn’t know much), and in particular my experience of it. He didn’t have an agenda for me; he just wanted to hear about my spiritual journey. It’s an absolute delight to talk to someone with that attitude.

Anyway, the conversation got me thinking about what I do like about Mormonism, and inspired me to dig out a post I started years ago on the topic and expand it. Here are some of the things I came up with:
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In Community, Happiness, Mormon Culture

The Social Functions of Happiness

Author SeraphinePosted on 19 Comments

Because of all the other bloggernacle posts on happiness and maintaining appearances (see Dave’s Mormon Inquiry, Feminist Mormon Housewives, and Exponent II), I’ve been thinking about this subject for much of the day today. However, my thoughts have taken a slight detour through my academic interests.

I do a lot of work on thinking about the ways in which emotions are not only signals of internal states or biological processes, but have social functions. In Catherine Lutz’ Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, she argues that emotional concepts cannot be thought of as independent of the culture and society from which they originate, and that the discourses and structures to which emotions belong determine their very nature. She explains that “the concepts of emotion can more profitably be viewed as serving complex communicative, moral, and cultural purposes rather than simply as labels for internal states whose nature or essence is presumed to be universal” (5). Read More