Zelophehad's Daughters

Stay

Ziff17 September 20192 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.
Read More

In Church Policy, GA's

Discussion of the Name of the Church in Conference

Ziff13 September 20196 Comments

Last fall, after President Nelson made it a point of emphasis that he didn’t want the Church to be called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church, or for its members to be called Mormons, I wrote a post where I asked what this quick turnabout on the “Mormon” label meant for decision-making in the Q15. The theory is that they’re supposed to be unanimous, but this change, particularly so (relatively) soon after things like the Church’s “Meet the Mormons” movie and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign suggested to me that decisions are made by the Church President, and the others just serve as rubber stamps. I wasn’t alone in writing about this, of course. Many other people on the blogs brought up, for example, that Elder Nelson had given a talk on this issue in 1990, to which President Hinckley responded the very next Conference where he gently contradicted Elder Nelson and explained that he had come to peace with the common use of the nickname, and he simply hoped that Church members would strive to make it have positive associations.

After this 1990 back-and-forth, I thought the issue had pretty much lain dormant until President Nelson brought it up last fall, first in an announcement before Conference, and then in a Conference talk. But I’ve been reading through some Conference talks for an unrelated project, and I found that I missed a few related follow-ups.

First, then-Elder Nelson didn’t entirely drop his point after President Hinckley’s talk. In a 1993 talk given at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (that someone must have thought was pretty important, because it’s listed with the October 1993 General Conference talks), he said near the beginning,

I would like to speak of the organization I represent. I would like to speak of the institution and of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the “Mormon” church. That is not its correct name, as many of you may know; it is only a nickname

And again, two years later in a Conference talk, he clearly wanted to bring the issue up again, but, unwilling to openly challenge President Hinckley, he instead slipped in this relatively large footnote to a pretty much wholly unrelated point in his talk. (The footnote is number 37, right after the phrase “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Speaking of correct names, we are reminded of a proclamation given by the Lord: “Thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (D&C 115:4). He did not say, “Thus shall my church be named.” He said, “Thus shall my church be called.” Members have been cautioned by the Brethren, who wrote: “We feel that some may be misled by the too frequent use of the term ‘Mormon Church’” (Member-Missionary Class, Instructor’s Guide, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1982, p. 2).

In Fun

Updated List of Items Prohibited at Church

Ziff27 August 201924 August 20207 Comments

Now that the Church has upgraded firearms in church buildings from “inappropriate” to “prohibited,” it seems that now is a good time to release this draft list of other items considered for prohibition in church buildings that I’m quite sure my sources said has been floating around the COB.

Firelegs
Fire benders
The bends (anyone suffering from decompression sickness is to be healed or expelled immediately)

In Abortion, GA's

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

Ziff21 August 201917 December 201916 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

In General Conference, Statistics

Most Viewed Conference Talks on YouTube (Part 2)

Ziff30 July 201930 July 20196 Comments

A few weeks ago, I posted about the most viewed General Conference talks on YouTube. In that post, I looked at which speakers got the most views for their talks. In this post, I’ll look at which individual talks have gotten the most views.

Here’s the list of the top 20 in views.

In General Conference, Statistics

Most Viewed Conference Talks on YouTube (Part 1)

Ziff9 July 20197 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.

In GA's, Women

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

Ziff1 July 201917 Comments

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

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

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

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

And in a 2006 talk, he said this:

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

And in a 1997 talk, he said this:

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

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

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

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

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

In Fun, Music

Beatles Songs, Mormonized

Ziff27 June 201927 June 20195 Comments

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

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

Here Comes the Son

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

In Blogging

13 Years of Ziff

Ziff14 June 201916 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Music

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

Ziff28 May 201917 Comments

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

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

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

In Church Policy, Doctrine, Temple

(Tinkering Intensifies)

Ziff17 May 201911 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

In Depression, LGBT Issues, Statistics

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

Ziff2 May 20191 Comment

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

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

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

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

In Faith, Personal Narratives, Prayer

Praying Like a Mormon

Lynnette28 April 201928 April 20195 Comments

I’m in something called Education for Ministry, which is a four-year program run by the Episcopal church in which you study the Bible, the history of Christianity, and theology. (It’s somewhat confusingly named; it’s actually for laypeople. The idea is that everyone is called to a ministry of some kind, and this is supposed to help you discern and develop it.) My group has eight people, who come from a fun variety of religious backgrounds, and we meet every other Sunday afternoon. The others frequently express curiosity about Mormonism, and ask me lots of questions. One week they wanted to hear me pray like a Mormon, so I obliged and offered a closing prayer that would have sounded perfectly normal over the pulpit in a sacrament meeting. My classmates were underwhelmed, perhaps expecting something weirder. They said that I’d just sounded like a Baptist. (This amused me because I suspect neither most Mormons nor most Baptists would appreciate that comparison.)

In Easter, Good Friday, Liturgy

And It Was Night

Lynnette19 April 20195 Comments

“So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.” (John 13:30)

At the Maundy Thursday service last night at my parish, our visiting Quaker (because we have a visiting Quaker for Holy Week this year, which has been a fascinating experience in and of itself) gave the sermon, and talked about what the Last Supper, and indeed all of Holy Week, might have felt like for the disciples. Intense. Unsettling. Confusing.

I, of course, like all of you, know the end of the Easter story; I think I likely knew the end, the Resurrection, before I knew the beginning or the middle of the narrative. And that knowledge of what is to come inevitably shapes our perspective on the rest of the events. But the sermon called our attention to the fact that for those who were having these experiences, they didn’t know how it would turn out. The disciples at the Last Supper didn’t know it was the last. And they were likely rather confused as to why Jesus was adding an unfamiliar ritual to the meal, instructing them to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him. Read More

In Church Life, Conversion, Faith

A Faith for This Life

Lynnette14 April 20194 Comments

My decision to convert away from the LDS church was undeniably overdetermined. So many different factors; so many different threads. Some of them, I suspect, could have sparked the decision all on their own. And like so many life narratives of momentous events, already I note that I tell different versions of it at different times. The story is never quite the same. I imagine that I will continue to make sense of it all in new ways and with other perspectives as time goes by. So I can’t really say of any particular factor, this is the one thing that led to it all. However, when I look at major issues, one that I see being very deeply rooted is that I hit a point where I desperately wanted a religious tradition that had something to offer in this life, and not just the next one. Read More

In Authority, Church Life, Personal Narratives

Finally Leaving

Lynnette7 April 20197 April 201919 Comments

I still remember a Sunday when I was a young teenager, when the bishop felt impressed to get up at the end of sacrament meeting and share some counsel. I don’t remember any of the specifics of what he said. But I remember how he concluded his talk: in a voice of utter certainty, he said, “This is the will of the Lord for this ward.” And I loved that he said that. It made me feel so safe. God was aware of and interested in our ward, so tiny in comparison to the great vast world. God would send direction through priesthood leadership about even small decisions and issues. Weren’t we lucky to have that, while other people had to deal with uncertainty and doubt. We had a sure connection to God. Read More

In Fun, Satan

Are you ready for four times as much Satan?

Ziff7 April 20195 Comments

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

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

In GA's, Nov 5 Policy

Some Thoughts on the End of the Exclusion Policy

Ziff4 April 201911 Comments

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

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

In Fun

Prepentance

Ziff1 April 20191 April 20191 Comment

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

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

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

In Missions

I Hope They Don’t Call Me on a Mission

Ziff24 March 20199 Comments

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

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