Zelophehad's Daughters

Do women really like Elder Uchtdorf more?

Ziff13 June 20185 Comments

Yes. Yes they do.

Or, at least it looks like they do more on Facebook. Here’s a list of the most common patterns of likes of Q15 members by women and men. In the second row, liking Elder Uchtdorf alone is done by 6% of women but only 4% of men. The two percentage point difference (in the last column) is the largest difference for any Q15 like pattern. (Perhaps he really does need to cover up to prevent the women of the Church from sinning in their thoughts!) The pattern men have most compared to women is liking all Q15 members but the three most junior, which 2.5% of men, but only 1.3% of women do.

In Mental Health, Personal Narratives, Therapy

Ending Therapy

Lynnette8 June 20188 June 20185 Comments

Next week, I’m ending work with a therapist I’ve been seeing for over a decade. This has caused me to reflect a lot on our years of working together, and what it’s meant for me. It feels like a strange thing to blog about this, maybe, but I don’t really know what the correct venue is for processing a relationship like this. I don’t feel like there are a lot of cultural scripts for talking about therapy that don’t involve poking fun at it (which I don’t necessarily object to; I’ve seen What About Bob? so many times that I can extensively quote it). But this is a big deal for me. Read More

In Conversion, God, Spiritual Experience

Finding God Again, Except Not Really; An Overly Long Narrative of My Recent Spiritual Journey

Lynnette3 June 20183 June 201810 Comments

It was about two years ago that I decided I was done, that I was giving up on religion. This wasn’t just another predictable development in my on-again, off-again angsty relationship with Mormonism, which for a long time I half-heartedly claimed I was going to leave at least a dozen times a year. This was bigger than that. I felt done with religion altogether. After spending a huge chunk of my life absolutely obsessed with it, to the point of getting a PhD in the subject, I found myself thinking that maybe it was time to move on. I’ll find a new hobby, I told myself. This is over.

In GA's, Statistics

Likes of Q15 Members on Facebook

Ziff31 May 20189 Comments

Here’s a chart showing the total number of likes of Q15 members on Facebook as of late March of this year. Of course, the numbers have shifted a fair amount since then, especially for President Nelson, who’s gotten a big bump since becoming President.

In Conversion, Episcopalians, Happiness

I Couldn’t Resist Happiness

Lynnette30 May 201830 May 201812 Comments

I’ve often seen the inoculation model proposed as a way to equip people to deal with challenging aspects of the LDS church. The basic idea is that if you initially encounter the difficult things about Mormonism in a context that’s friendly to the church, you’re much less likely to get freaked out when you run across them elsewhere. I don’t know how well that works for everyone, but for much of my life I felt that to some extent that dynamic had been true for me. Maybe not always the friendly context part, but definitely the finding out earlier rather than later part. At the very least, by the time I hit midlife, I felt that I was in some sense inoculated. I never had the experience described by many people I know of stumbling across major things as an adult about which they had previously been unaware, and that shook them to the core. Read More

In Children, GA's, Statistics

Family size and church leadership

Guest20 May 201821 May 20189 Comments

This guest post comes to us courtesy of Christian N. K. Anderson.

Recently, a friend told me her bishop came up to her, touched her belly, and asked, “Sister, when are you going to bring more spirit children into the world?” In a similar vein, an Elders Quorum President recently told a different friend in a different state that it was too bad she had only three children, as he had seven and they were all successful. The five married couples in my wife’s family have so far collectively produced one child, and we routinely swap stories of being criticized or asked openly by virtual strangers to justify this state of affairs. Why does this happen so frequently?

One of the ways Jello-Belt LDS culture is increasingly out-of-step with contemporary US culture is the belief that fecundity is positively correlated with virtue. Some of this no doubt stems from over-the-pulpit exhortations that “The commandment to multiply and replenish the earth has never been rescinded” (Packer, Apr 2015, compare first paragraph of the FamProc), the fetishizing of the family (as an institution, but with vigorous legal opposition to many instantiations of LDS families), and explicit direction to have children even when financially unable to do so (Andersen, Oct 2011; quoted and enhanced in the Eternal Family Sunday School manual). This empowers people like the bishop and EQP mentioned above to feel no qualms about intruding themselves into what would otherwise be a profoundly personal decision: they are simply encouraging fellow saints to become better humans by performing the Kantian categorical morally good act of having another child (no matter the circumstances) the same way they might encourage a fellow saint to forgive an enemy or visit a sick member.

These beliefs and rhetoric are increasingly anachronistic, not just in contemporary US culture, but among LDS members, and also among the LDS leaders who continue to make these sweeping generalizations. While a 2015 lesson manual encourage teachers to express disapproval for a US fertility rate that has dropped 45% since 1960, it fails to mention that rate at which LDS members reported their children fell by 70% over a far briefer period: from 24.2 children of record per 1000 members as recently as 1982 to 7.32 in the year of the manual’s publication. It has continued to decrease to 6.62 according to the most recent April 2018 statistical report. Of course, this is tracking children of record, not total number of births; with activity dropping below 33% in the US and 15% in Central America, a large number of babies born to nominal members are likely never recorded by ward clerks. Nevertheless, I expected this underreporting to be partially offset by church growth in countries with birth rates far higher than the United States’.

In Uncategorized

Dove Song: A Review

Petra6 May 20182 Comments

Just to declare my potential biases up-front: I received a copy of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother In Mormon Poetry in exchange for a review. Also, I know some of the contributors.

In my last review of a book of Heavenly Mother poetry, I asked for more: more perspectives, more poems, more essays, more talk of Heavenly Mother in general. Well, ask and ye shall receive, as Peculiar Press has come out with an entire anthology of Heavenly Mother poetry, from the early origins of the Church to the present day.

In Fun

18 More Websites That Should Be Blocked on Church Wi-Fi

Ziff3 May 20184 Comments

The Church announced (to its local leaders leaders) that some social networking, video and audio streaming, and gaming sites will be blocked on meetinghouse WiFi beginning this month. Of course when I saw the headline that mentioned social networking, I immediately thought of the 800-pound gorilla of social networking sites: Facebook. But no, it looks like Facebook has been spared, perhaps because some missionaries are now using it to find people to teach. Instead, the blocks hit sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and MySpace.

In Uncategorized

Mother’s Milk: A Review

Petra15 April 201815 April 20183 Comments

I first read Mother’s Milk, by Rachel Hunt Steenblik, last July, about a month after I learned I was pregnant for the first time. I tried to see myself as the mother portrayed in these poems, but mostly failed: I had constant nausea and threw up 5-10 time a day for two months straight in my first trimester, and so I felt no magical love connection to the fetus, whom we nicknamed Barfolomew. I mostly just felt tired, and irritated at the way this hostile force had overtaken my body. The poems were lovely, tasty snack-sized deep thoughts, but, like Lynnette has written about on this blog, I wasn’t really a Heavenly Mother person, and the mothering portrayed in many of the poems–nursing, weaning, comforting in the night–didn’t resonate with me. I tried to hold space to change my mind, though: many of my friends talked about childbirth as a quasi-magical experience, a primal connection to their mothering self, and, despite the pain, glowed about the love they felt for their child right away, or for a rush of instant recognition when their child was placed on their chest.

In Revelation, Spiritual Experience, Truth

What Happens When Leaders are Duped by Predators, and Other Hard Questions about Spiritual Guidance

Lynnette6 April 201812 Comments

The Mormon circles in which I am active have been rocked in recent weeks by the stories about Joseph L. Bishop, the former MTC president who has been accused by two women of sexual abuse during his time in that position. Much of the discussion of this situation that I’ve seen has focused on the problems of systems which protect predators, and a culture which disbelieves victims. I think these are vital problems to bring up, and I’m glad to see them being discussed. But I’d like to raise another issue which I see as central to this whole mess. To put it baldly: how is it that church leaders who are said to have special gifts of spiritual discernment get duped by predators? In other words, why didn’t the many church leaders who must have been involved over the years in selecting Bishop for different positions ever have any sense that something was amiss? And this is far from an isolated instance. You only have to raise the issue of what happens when people report abuse to church leaders on a blog or a Facebook group to get story after story of victims who weren’t believed by their bishops and stake presidents. I’ve seen this firsthand, watching an abusive relative con multiple local leaders into accepting his extremely farfetched version of events. Yet I was taught again and again during my decades in the church that leaders had special access to revelation regarding those under their stewardship, that they were being guided by the Spirit in their judgments. How is one to make sense of all of this?

In GA's, Statistics

That’s President Soares to You: Probabilities of New Q12 Members Becoming Church President

Ziff6 April 201818 Comments

I’m so happy that I was so wrong last week when I predicted that President Nelson would call two white men from Utah to fill the openings in the Quorum of the Twelve. I’m thrilled that Elders Gong and Soares can bring some new perspectives to the Q15. And of course, one of the first things I looked up when I learned that they had been called was how old they are, because I was curious about what the chances were that either of them would make it to be Church President.

In this post, I’ve updated the simulation that I’ve run before to estimate the probabilities of each Q15 member becoming Church President. I last did this just a few months ago when President Monson passed away. The gist of it is that I use a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries, assume that the yearly mortality probabilities apply to all members of the Q15 equally, and then run a bunch of simulations (100,000 in this case) and in each, pick a bunch of random numbers and compare them to the mortality probabilities for each member and use the comparison to work out how much longer each man would live, and the resulting way that the Presidency would be handed from one member to the next–which members would get to serve as President and which ones wouldn’t. The process is described in a little more detail in this post from 2015. Anyway, the numbers for the most senior 13 members have changed little since my post in January. What’s interesting here is the probabilities for the new Q15 members.

The table below shows the probability of each Q15 member becoming Church President, and how many years he would serve if he did. Note that if you compare carefully, you might notice some small discrepancies between this table and the one in my January post. When I was running the simulations for this post, I realized that when I ran simulations for my January post, I had calculated current age by rounding to the nearest birthday (e.g., a man who is 65 and 7 months is counted as being 66) rather than the more conventional approach of calculating it by just looking at last birthday passed. If you noticed this error in the previous post and didn’t feel the need to correct me, thank you!

In General Conference

General Conference Predictions

Ziff30 March 201815 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 Church Policy

It is the nature and disposition of almost all men

Ziff23 March 201826 March 20183 Comments

Like many Americans, I have had a new appreciation for the existence of checks on the President’s power since Donald Trump was elected. They may not always work as they were intended to, but I’m glad that at least the framers were concerned about the question.

The organization of the US government (and of many other governments) is a striking contrast in this way to the organization of the LDS Church. As the Joseph Bishop story sadly shows, there really aren’t checks on the power of LDS church leaders. I mean, there are in cases where they do outrageous things in public, or if they get on the bad side of leaders over them. But what I’m talking about here is that if a church leader does awful things in private to the people he’s presiding over, then the victims have pretty much no recourse. A situation like this can always be reduced to he said/she said, and the presumption of higher-level church authorities appears to pretty much always be that the accused leader is innocent. The woman assaulted by Joseph Bishop reports having raised years later to her then-bishop, but he said he found her accusations not credible, based on the simple fact that Bishop had been called to several high callings in the Church.

In Uncategorized

As Now We Pass the Sacrament

Petra22 March 20183 Comments

This is slightly adapted from a sacrament meeting talk I gave a few years ago (hence, all the numbers are out of date). I recently stumbled on it while cleaning out some files and decided to share.

Let’s start with something about me: I have been a church-attending Mormon all my life. let’s calculate, for a minute, what that means, besides a closet full of skirts and a knowledge of all the verses to “I Believe in Christ”: I have taken the sacrament to renew my baptismal covenants approximately 782 times–17 years since my baptism, at 46 Sundays a year. (52, minus two Sundays for General Conference and two for stake conferences and two more for vacation Sundays or simply arriving at church late. I didn’t say I’ve been a perfectly church-attending Mormon all my life!) That, my friends, is a lot of times to do something and still not quite understand or enjoy it.

In GA's, Priesthood, Women

Women Are Like Hydrogen

Ziff8 March 20188 March 201811 Comments

I read some discussion on Facebook recently of a diagram showing the organization of the Church. I think the diagram was something like what’s shown in this post, but I’m not completely sure. Whatever the exact details of the diagram, what’s important about it is that the structure it showed included only men: First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, Seventies, stake presidents, bishops, etc. The striking thing was its exclusion of women.

I don’t fault the person who made the diagram or whoever shared it. It looked to me like it accurately captured how the Church is structured. If women are included anywhere, it’s at the margins, and perhaps informally, if any of the men in positions of authority ever discuss issues they’re facing with their wives.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that to be included in the hierarchy, men must be married. Bishops I think have to be married by rule. I’m not sure if it’s a rule for the other positions, but if it isn’t, it’s at least an extremely strong norm. The fact that each of these men is married but that their wives aren’t shown reminded me of diagrams of the structures of molecules that one of my kids was showing me recently. In at least some forms of these diagrams, most hydrogen atoms are not included explicitly. They are just assumed to be bonded at each atom where they would be required for the atom to have the right number of valence electrons.

Here’s an example, courtesy of the NIH’s PubChem website:

In Belief, Church Life, Statistics

Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?

Ziff6 March 201811 Comments

Since she started attending church with the Episcopalians, I’ve heard my sister Lynnette observe that members of her new church appear to have a much broader range of beliefs than Mormons do. I guess I had never really thought about this, but if it’s true, this seems like maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. There is lots of pressure to conform in Mormonism, all the way from scriptures that have Jesus saying “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine” to talks that exhort members to set aside the cultures they grew up in to join “the gospel culture.” And of course, this doesn’t even touch on the pressure at the local level to conform. Consider, for example, the immense backlash faced by women who participated in the “wear pants to church” actions a few years ago. They were not even going against a rule of any kind, but rather violating a norm and standing out, and this made a lot of rank-and-file members appear to lose their minds. I don’t have a very good sense of the Episcopal Church in general, but I’m guessing that, like many American Protestants, they are simply less top-down in their structure than Mormons are, so there’s more room for differences of opinion or even belief.

Really, though, what I thought would be even more interesting than reasoning out why or why not Mormons might be more homogeneous in belief than members of other churches, would be to see if there were any empirical evidence of this difference. It occurred to me that a great place to look would be the data gathered by the Pew Research Center in their Religious Landscape Study. It’s a US sample only, so it misses the larger fraction of Church membership that lives elsewhere, but it does represent the largest single concentration of Mormons in one country. I looked at Pew’s 2014 data. As these data are a few years old, they’ve already been discussed quite a bit on the Bloggernacle. I am coming at the results from a new angle, though. Rather than focusing on the particular answers respondents gave, I am interested in how similar the sets of answers are for members of the same church, regardless of what the particular answers are.

In Uncategorized

A Man By Any Other Name

Petra20 February 201820 February 20188 Comments

When we were using the Joseph F. Smith manual for Relief Society a few years ago, I remember reading a note in the intro material about Smith’s use of “men”, “man”, or “mankind”:

“Also, President Smith often used terms such as men, man, or mankind to refer to all people, both male and female. He frequently used the pronouns he, his, and him to refer to both genders. This was common in the language of his era. Despite the differences between these language conventions and current usage, President Smith’s teachings apply to both women and men.”

In Church Life, Lent, Suffering

Penitence: Some Reflection on Lent

Lynnette14 February 201814 February 20183 Comments

When they asked us about the meaning of “penitent” at a church group I was attending the other night, I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when near the end of the movie Indiana is going through various obstacles to get to the Holy Grail. The instruction is that “only the penitent man will pass,” and at the last minute, he realizes he has to kneel in order to avoid having his head chopped off. So when I hear “penitent,” I think, “be humble before God or be decapitated,” which seems like potentially useful information, especially if I ever go on a religious quest that involves elaborate traps.

In Fun

More Correlated Cards for Valentine’s Day

Ziff14 February 20185 Comments

In Uncategorized

God’s Economy Is Different

Petra13 February 201813 February 20186 Comments

The argument goes like this: if women get the priesthood—I mean, they won’t, because God doesn’t want them to, but just imagine if they did—then what would men do? They wouldn’t have anything special anymore, and if they can’t have anything special, why would they participate? Or sometimes it’s like this: if women have the priesthood (or, toning it down, if women can be Sunday School presidents, or pray in sacrament meeting, or what-have-you), fewer men will get to do it, and we wouldn’t want to limit their opportunities.