Zelophehad's Daughters

Is there room for wonder in the Church?

Ziff7 September 20183 Comments

Earlier this year, I blogged about the Pew Religious Landscape Study and looked at some of the results, comparing Mormons to members of a few other groups. One of the questions in the survey asked people how often they felt a deep sense of wonder about the universe. Here are results for Mormons and the other groups I was looking at.

Mormons don’t have quite as many people answering “at least once a week” as do Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, or agnostics, but like all the groups I looked at, we have more people answering this than any other response frequency. By this measure, Mormons are pretty middle-of-the-pack when it comes to experiencing wonder.

I was recently thinking about this question when I read Nate Staniforth’s book Here Is Real Magic. Staniforth is a magician, and the book is largely memoir, but he also spends a fair amount of time discussing the question of why magic is fascinating to him. The answer boils down to wonder: Performing magic often allows him to see wonder provoked in his audiences, and he treasures this experience because in his view, wonder is so uncommon and so precious. He even subtitles the book A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World. Here’s one point where he describes his experience of using magic to induce wonder:

From the students on the playground at recess to this man named Ahmed who worked in a terrible neighborhood in Kolkata, the response to great magic is the same: a mouth stunned open, widening eyes, fear, doubt, and then openly, nakedly, joy. Pure joy. The transformation is far, far more amazing than the trick, which is just a tool designed to create this moment. A moment of pure astonishment makes you forget to be cool. It makes you forget to be composed or distinguished. It make you forget to–consciously–be anything. The faces that are revealed when our masks of self-awareness are propriety are blasted away are, simply, beautiful [p. 100].

In Depression, Mental Health, Prayer, Revelation, Spiritual Experience

When Good Spiritual Practice Goes Bad: Prayer, Rumination, and Revelations of Damnation

Lynnette21 August 201821 August 20187 Comments

CW: brief mention of self-injury

I still have vivid memories of a particular day in December over a decade ago. I was in my second year of doctoral work at the time, and I spent an evening talking with some of my fellow students. We found ourselves disagreeing about a number of theological questions, including the topic of whether God’s justice would allow for universal salvation. I was the only LDS student in the group (in fact, I was the only LDS student in the doctoral program); the other participants represented a variety of religious backgrounds and theological outlooks. My memory is that people were trying to be respectful, but there was an undercurrent of tension, and I left feeling a little unsettled.

In Church Policy, Fun

Mormon Edits

Ziff17 August 20184 Comments

Joseph Smith taught that Mormon means more good. Taking this meaning, then, I’m wondering what Mormon edits we might get to see now that President Nelson has announced that God isn’t a fan of Mormon as a label for LDS (sorry, Latter-day Saint) -related things.

At a minimum, I’m hoping to see the following edits made to the scriptures:

Mosiah 18:8

And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God . . .

3 Nephi 5:12

And behold, I am called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, being called after the land of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . . .

D&C 135:8

. . . their innocent blood on the floor of Carthage jail is a broad seal affixed to “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-ism” that cannot be rejected by any court on earth . . .

In Agency, Modesty, Sexuality

Modesty and Locus of Control

Ziff8 August 201812 Comments

The discussion over at the Exponent about the Utah woman who had her bishop and stake president refuse to renew her temple recommend because she refused to follow their counsel to cover herself while breastfeeding in church reminded me of a concept I remember discussing in psychology classes. That concept is locus of control. Here’s the first line of the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In personality psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.

People are thought to fall along a continuum from having an internal locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by decisions they make–to an external locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by other people or other things outside themselves. You can read the full Wikipedia article or look up any of a big pile of academic papers talking about locus of control, but the level I’m thinking about it is as simple as this brief description.

I think it’s clear that Church teachings are heavily focused on pushing us to have an internal locus of control. For example, Lehi tells Jacob in 2 Nephi 2:27: Read More

In Gay Marriage, Singles

How to Support Same-Sex Marriage Without Throwing Single Straight People Under the Bus

Lynnette27 July 201827 July 201811 Comments

When it comes to the topic of gay Mormons, I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen some variant of this conversation:

Defender of gay Mormons: “It’s unrealistic and unfair for the church to expect gay Mormons to give up all hope of companionship and remain celibate for their whole lives.”

Defender of the church: “It might be a difficult thing to ask, but it’s doable. Look at all the single straight people who also have to live the law of chastity!”

Defender of gay Mormons: “Those two situations aren’t at all parallel, because at least straight people have the hope of marriage.” Read More

In Agency, Obedience, Revelation

On Not Being God’s Victim (or, Nephi is Still Responsible for Killing Laban)

Lynnette22 June 201822 June 20189 Comments

An unsettling tendency among religious people, especially those with a strong belief in an interventionist God, is to throw God under the bus when dealing with decisions they or others have made that seem unwise or even immoral. The narrative goes something like this: “I didn’t personally want to do x. It wasn’t my idea. But God told me to do it, so I had to obey.” There are clear payoffs for the person who adopts this story: you don’t have to take responsibility for decisions you’ve made that might appear morally dubious, just so long as you can maintain that they were divinely mandated; and as a bonus, you get to feel extra righteous because you were so obedient, even in a situation where you ostensibly didn’t want to be. Read More

In Hymns, Music

Now Let Us Rejoice in the Hymnbook Revisions

Ziff18 June 201810 Comments

The Church has announced that the hymnbook and children’s songbook are both going to be revised. I have a bunch of random thoughts on this. I’ll put them in three lists to try to create some illusion of organization.

Good News

The Church is actually asking for our feedback for once! Here’s the survey. (I’m assuming they’ll do something to limit multiple responses from the same person. I’m actually surprised that it looks like they’re not requiring an lds.org account login to participate.)
From the FAQ on the project: “New and existing hymns and songs from around the world will be evaluated and considered for inclusion.” This seems like great news, and a welcome change from the English-only hymns we have now. In the Church News story, Elder Kopischke, who’s an adviser to the project, says “We hope that these new books will also include some of the best hymns and songs originating in other languages that will then be translated into English and the other languages of the world.”
Elder Curtis, another adviser to the project, says (in the Church News story) “As an extension to the new printed hymnbook and songbook, additional sacred music will be made available online, including music of local interest in each language.” This also sounds like very welcome news to me, as so much music in church is limited by what’s in the hymnbook, so if the hymnbook is expanded with these official supplements, this will give us much more music (potentially) to choose from in church.
Also from the FAQ: “Because the new core collections will be the same in every language, national anthems will not be included in the printed hymnbooks.” I am very happy at the possibility of a little more uncoupling of nationalism–particularly American nationalism–from our religion.

In Fun

Our Donald

Ziff17 June 20183 Comments

Evangelical Christians aren’t typically big on saying the Lord’s Prayer, but I understand that this revised version is gaining some traction:

Our Donald which art in the White House, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy tariffs come, Thy will be done in Congress, as it is by executive order.
Give us this day our daily tweets.
And reduce our taxes, but reduce moreso the taxes of our corporations.
And protect us from brown people at our border, as thou deliverest us from brown people kneeling at football games. For thine is the Presidency, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

In GA's, Statistics

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?