It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything. Read More
Pet Projects GAs Might Endorse
Ronald A. Rasband recently dedicated a new campus of the American Heritage School, which sounds like it’s a Mormon Christian nationalist place that I’m guessing will teach things like the wickedness of separation of church and state. Now that he’s opened the possibility of Q15 members using their position to suggest Church endorsement of their pet projects, I’m wondering what places other Q15 members might go for. Here are some guesses:
Russell M. Nelson – Hundreds of new temples all over the world (I guess this one doesn’t really qualify, because he’s gone a lot further than just implying Church endorsement.)
Dallin H. Oaks – Museum of Straight History at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia
Dieter F. Uchtdorf – Luftwaffe visiting exhibit at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio
Neil L. Andersen – White Fertility Enhancement Project at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina
Gary E. Stevenson – Fitness Center for the Stars in Bel-Air, California
Jeffrey R. Holland – Expanded Dodo Research Center at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar (a pretty good school)
Kevin W. Pearson (hoping to become a Q15 member) – Texas State Prison system’s Panopticon Project in Huntsville, Texas
What pet projects do you expect to see Q15 members endorsing?
What types of questions might differentiate types of Mormons?
I was intrigued by a guest post at W&T a couple of weeks ago where an anonymous poster shared a question from a survey the Church was doing that invited respondents to categorize themselves as one of five types of Church members. (These appear to be unrelated to Robert Kirby’s five types of Mormons.) Here are the five types. Note that I’m dropping the edits between the February and October versions shown in the W&T post and just going with the October version.
- I am committed to the gospel, but personal spirituality is more important to me than being institutionally religious. I may attend worship services regularly, but I don’t feel obligated to attend every meeting. As a Christian, I value being open-minded, fair, and tolerant.
- I am committed to the gospel, and the Church plays a central role in my life. I believe all of its teachings. I usually read my scriptures daily. I think members should be strictly obedient to the counsel they receive from their priesthood leaders.
- I primarily belong to the Church because of family, tradition, culture, or community. I usually enjoy participating in the Church socially, and feel that God rules more by love than by fear.
- I am generally less interested in religion and/or spirituality. Even though I may believe some Church teachings, they don’t play a large role in my life. I don’t attend church as often as other people do. Sometimes I have been frustrated by the impact of religion on society.
- I am committed to the gospel, and the Church is important to me I try to follow its teachings and do the things I’m supposed to, balancing with life’s other priorities. I tend to focus on practical applications of the gospel that are most relevant to my current life and family situation.
What most surprised me about this is that the survey apparently just straight up asked people to categorize themselves. This seems way out of the norm to me for how social science questionnaires work. I mean, I understand that companies, and I guess churches, might make profiles of common types of their customers or members. But it seems much more conventional to me that instead of asking people to directly categorize themselves, a researcher would ask them a bunch of far simpler questions, and then aggregate the responses by looking at which ones correlate with each other and come up with the types without showing them to the people taking the survey. If you’re familiar with the problem of double-barreled questions, which ask more than one thing at a time, these are like ten-barreled questions.
I strongly suspect that that’s what the Church researchers originally did. And that got me to wondering what questions they might have asked to try to get at types of Church members. In this post, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I hope or wish they asked, and that of course I’d love to see data on for a large number of Church members to see if types of Mormons fall out like I’d expect.
Beliefs
How strongly to you believe in each of the following Latter-day Saint doctrines?
Response options: Don’t believe at all to believe completely
- God lives.
- God loves us.
- God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.
- Jesus lived a perfect life.
- Jesus Christ atoned for our sins.
- The early church established by Jesus fell into apostasy.
- Joseph Smith restored the Church.
- Prophetic authority to lead the Church has been passed in an unbroken line from Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson.
- The Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record of a people who lived in the Americas.
- The Book of Abraham is a translation of an ancient record written by Abraham.
- We lived in the pre-mortal existence before our life on earth.
- There is life after death.
- Our place in the life after death will depend on the kind of life we have lived.
- Our place in the life after death will depend on whether we have performed the required ordinances (or someone else has performed them on our behalf).
Church data on me I’d like to see before the hackers get it
The Church recently released a statement about a cyberattack they had suffered this last March (they waited this long to say something at the request of federal law enforcement). It sounds like the attackers made off with information on some Church members like name, membership number, and preferred language. But this got me to wondering about what other data I’d like to see if the Church is keeping it on me. I remember from the movie “The Mountain of the Lord” how Wilford Woodruff said it was important that we be “a record-keeping people,” so I have no doubt there are many records being kept that are far more interesting than my preferred language. Here are some examples of what I’d like to see:
Attendance
- The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church, and whether this has varied by whether it’s football season or not.
- The fraction of Sundays I’ve been in church where I’ve maybe attended what one of my sisters calls “the church of the hallway” during second/third hours.
- My on-time performance for sacrament meeting, and whether it varied by my ward’s meeting time slot. (I assume I’ve done worse with 9am, for example, versus 11am, but I’m actually not sure. Maybe later starting times just lead me to be more lackadaisical.)
- The fraction of stake conferences I’ve attended.
- How many different church buildings I’ve attended church at regularly.
- How many church buildings I’ve attended church at at least once.
- How much church buildings I’ve played basketball or volleyball in, without ever attending church meetings there.
A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2022
Fastest musical number: “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah,” Saturday morning.
Slowest musical number: “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” Sunday afternoon
Best musical number: “All Creatures of Our God and King,” Saturday morning
Worst musical number: “Let Us All Press On,” Sunday morning. This was a weird and drawn-out arrangement that made an already overly bouncy hymn worse.
Longest prayer: 91 seconds, Susan H. Porter, Saturday evening benediction. This is a really short longest prayer. Typically there is at least one over 100 seconds.
Shortest prayer: 54 seconds, Weatherford T. Clayton, Sunday morning invocation
Longest talk: 2028 words, D. Todd Christofferson
Shortest talk: 374 words, Russell M. Nelson, in the last talk of Conference where he mostly just announced new temples.
Choir successes, non-music category:
- The missionary choir that sang in the Saturday afternoon session for once didn’t only include young missionaries, but also senior missionaries, which I thought was nice.
- The child-and-youth choir that sang in the Saturday evening session included several teen boys with hair to their collars or longer. (One of them was the son of April Young Bennett at the Exponent; she blogged about their experience.) It’s encouraging to me when BYU rules stop being applied to the whole Church.
Choir failure, non-music category: The same child-and-youth choir was seated not in a typical arrangement with boys on one side and girls on the other, but with the boys in the center and the girls around the periphery. This seems like a striking illustration of how we think about the relative importance of boys and girls in the Church.
Gender-Neutralizing the Hymns: A Proof of Concept
How difficult would it be to make our hymns gender-neutral? If I could make one change to our hymnal, I’m with Mike C. in this 2014 post: this is the change I’d make. Incidentally, I would also be in favor of making our scriptures gender-neutral, but I expect modifying the hymns would be a much easier sell at this point (not that either is likely to happen soon). My reasoning is the same in either case. As it’s become less acceptable and less common in the world in general for words like “man” to be used to refer to humanity in general, women’s experience at church becomes more and more of a contrast with the rest of their lives. Virtually every reading of scripture and many singing of hymns just emphasizes again to women how unimportant, how peripheral, they are in the Church. Of course I’d rather we changed the actual structure of the Church to make women more equal, but while that’s not happening, modifying our hymns would be a good step.
There’s even precedent for gender-neutralizing hymns, at least a little. Douglas Campbell documents in this 1995 Dialogue article that in the update to the current 1985 hymnal from its predecessor, a few hymns had some of their language changed from gender-exclusive to gender-neutral. Still, I realize that such changes are unlikely to be made wholesale. I can’t imagine Presidents Nelson or Oaks signing off on such changes, for example. Perhaps in a few more decades when we get our next new hymnal, the GAs of the day might consider it.
In this post, I’m going to look at a very mundane question that has always kind of lurked in the back of my mind on this topic. If we actually did want to change the language of our hymns to make them gender-neutral, how difficult would it be? I looked at 20% the hymns in our current hymnal (all hymn numbers that are evenly divisible by five, so 68 of the 341) and tried my hand at rewriting the gender-exclusive words into gender-neutral words. My goal was just to see how easy or difficult the exercise was.
First, I made a list of all the gender-exclusive words in these 68 hymns. There are 379 in total, or about five and a half per hymn. Most of them, though, are references to Jesus or God (e.g., Father, Son, Lord, and King). I’m not considering these types of usages. I’m only interested in gender-exclusive words that refer to people in general, or to Church members. This table shows the breakdown of the 379 words.
It’s just the 55 words from the second and fourth rows, then, that I attempted to gender-neutralize. All but two of the 55 are male gender-specific words. To be complete, I tried to gender-neutralize them all, male or female. One other note, in case anyone is ever interested enough to try to retrace my steps: if a word occurs multiple times in a hymn because a line is repeated (like in a chorus), I count each repeat as a separate instance.
New Rules for the Sacrament
Now that President Oaks’s preference for people to take the sacrament with their right hand has been enshrined in the Handbook (see instruction #7), we here at ZD are excited to leak the following list of additional rules for the sacrament that President Oaks also proposed but that have been put on hold until he becomes Church President.
Materials
- Homemade bread is preferred for the sacrament, but store bought may also be used in cases where the women in the unit have rejected their divine gender role.
- Bread should be neither too sweet nor too savory, as either of these may detract from the simplicity of the ordinance.
- Bread color should be as white as possible, to provide the most delightsome possible representation of the Savior.
- The use of filtered water is encouraged, but not required. A water filter may be installed in the church building, but if so, it must be funded by the members in the units using the building.
- The carbonation or flavoring of sacrament water is strictly prohibited.
- The temperature of water should be between 45 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit (7.2 and 12.8 degrees Celsius).
- The use of ice cubes in place of water is prohibited.
How Talking to a Quaker Helped Me With Leaving the Church
It was the spring of 2019, and it had been over a year since I’d been baptized into the Episcopal church. I still felt like it was the best decision I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still haunted sometimes. I was sitting in a Taize service one Sunday evening and thinking about my decision to leave the LDS faith, and I started to feel sick. Some fears are old ones; some fears are laid down in your understanding of the world before you’ve even begun to develop a sense of self. I’d been told all my life that walking away from God’s One True Church was a terrible mistake with eternal consequences, and even though my conversion had been an amazing experience, that didn’t always cancel out the anxiety, or erase the years of General Conference talks given in ominous tones by human leaders who were one hundred percent positive that they spoke for God. I wanted conversion to be more straightforward, cleaner; I wanted it to be a light that was so blinding that I could no longer even see the past, and I had no choice but to go forward. But while it was undeniably life-changing, my past was still there, a part of me to be reckoned with. Read More
Four Things That Hamper the Church’s Anti-Abuse Messages
I’ve been thinking about the Church’s response to the AP story about the sex abuse case in Arizona. In it, there’s a bit that says “Church teachings and handbooks are clear and unequivocal about the evils of abuse.” This is definitely a good step, but what struck me is that I think it’s hard for the anti-abuse message to get across clearly when the Church has organizational features and makes rhetorical choices that can actually enable abuse (and here I’m thinking of abuse more generally, not just in the particular Arizona case). There are four issues in particular that I was thinking of.
The first is the authoritarian power structure. In the Church organization, control and information are only supposed to flow in one direction. GAs periodically remind us that they’re too busy to listen to us individually. This is bad for the Church in that it makes it difficult for those at the top to get real feedback. But it’s also a bad family structure. It sets parents (and fathers in particular) up as authorities who are not to be questioned. I don’t know if being an unquestioned authority makes someone more likely to become abusive in the first place, but it seems like it’s definitely smoothing the path for them to continue if they start, as a potential brake has been removed.
Visiting the JWs
In 2017, I spent a lot of time church-hopping. My visit to the JWs is one that still stands out in my memory as being particularly interesting from a Mormon perspective.
Sunday, June 4, 2017, 2:30 pm worship service
I was nervous about this visit, because I feared that they would aggressively try to convert me. Which made me laugh at myself, given my Mormon background. They met in a very utilitarian, plain building; from what I’ve seen, all the Kingdom Halls look the same. In the lobby, I found information about what areas of Bloomington met at what times. (Geographically assigned congregations meeting in the same building at different times also felt very Mormon!) Read More
The Q15 and the Big Five Personality Traits
In personality psychology, there’s a dominant model that suggests there are five big factors that capture many differences in personality traits. In this post, I’m going to speculate about where the Q15 might fall on each of these five personality traits (mostly where they fall collectively), and how this might make them different from members of the Church in general.
Here are abbreviated definitions of each of the traits in the Wikipedia article on the Big Five. (Note that I’ve excerpted only what I think are the most descriptive bits, but to make them more readable, I haven’t used ellipses where I’ve omitted parts.)
- Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. Those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven – sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.
- Conscientiousness is a tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.
- Extroversion is characterized by breadth of activities and energy creation from external means. Extroverts enjoy interacting with people, and are often perceived as full of energy. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals. Introverts have lower social engagement and energy levels than extroverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. (Note that it’s also sometimes spelled extraversion, as in the Wikipedia article.)
- Agreeableness reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others.
- Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. Those who score high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress. Individuals who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings.
Some thoughts on hymns and the hymnal update
In preparation for the release of the new hymnal, I’ve been working on a comparison of the current (1985) hymnal with its predecessor (first published in 1948; I’m using a slightly revised version from 1973). In this post, I’m just sharing some random things that came to mind while doing this comparison.
Hymn Titles
- “Though Deepening Trials” is a clunky title for a hymn. In my experience, over half the time, people say the first word as through, which I think is completely understandable. Though is just a limp and unexpected word to begin a hymn title with. The problem, really, is that the first line is used as the title. From the 1973 hymnal to the 1985 one, several hymns had their titles switched from being the first line to being their most core or oft-repeated line. For example, “Ere You Left Your Room This Morning“ became “Did You Think to Pray?” and “When Upon Life’s Billows“ became “Count Your Blessings.” The problem is that “Though Deepening Trials” doesn’t have a chorus or oft-repeated phrase, which is why, I assume, the 1985 hymnal compilers left its title as-is.
- “Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion” always sounds to me like damning with faint praise. “What do you think of Zion?” “Well, I’m not a fan, but I’ve heard glorious things are sung of it.”
- The title “Again, Our Dear Redeeming Lord” always makes me chuckle, because if you just added a question mark to the end, it sounds like something a long-suffering servant would say when their master kept making annoying demands. I imagine it being said by the servant in the Parable of the Vineyard in Jacob 5, when he was so tired of the Lord wanting to go back to the vineyard over and over and over.
A Tangible Presence: Thoughts on the Eucharist
If I hadn’t grown up immersed in Christian symbolism, I suspect that I would find the Eucharist both bizarre and deeply disturbing, perhaps even offensive. Even as accustomed as I am to the whole thing, the sheer strangeness of it still hits me at times. I wish that Jesus had come up with a different ritual for remembering him, I sometimes think. I’m not sure how much I care for this one. In John 6, Jesus graphically comments that “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (v. 56), and links this eating and drinking to eternal life. The disciples complain that this is a difficult teaching (v. 60), and then many of them end up leaving him (v. 66). Honestly, I’m sympathetic. I don’t think that this would have won me over.
But on a week-to-week basis, I find that I struggle less with the weirdness of the ritual, and more with how mundane it actually is in practice. Maybe I’ve read too many exciting accounts in which the Eucharist worked wonders, but I find myself wanting it to be a mystical experience, to be somehow transcendent. I don’t think that it ever has been. Read More
Modesty and Abortion
With the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, leaving the question of abortion up to individual states, many American Mormons are celebrating the chance they have to live in a state that bans all (or nearly all) abortions. The Church’s official position allows for abortion under some circumstances, which makes it not consistent with such blanket bans. So why the inconsistency? Why, when the official position allows for some exceptions, are so many Church members excited to have all abortions banned?
A few years ago, I wrote a post where I asked this question and suggested an answer based on reviewing a bunch of Church rhetoric around abortion. I concluded that while GAs wrote the exceptions, their rhetoric constantly minimizes their occurrence, making them seem so rare as to be negligible.
Today I want to consider another line of explanation in addition: Church rhetoric on other issues—I’m taking modesty as an example—is based on a deeply patriarchal worldview that is straightforward to apply to abortion too. Note, just to be clear, that I’m not arguing that the Church’s stance on modesty causes its (or its members’) stance on abortion. I’m just saying that they’re both driven by the same underlying stance on women, so when GAs talk about one issue, it’s easy for members to understand the worldview and generalize it to another issue.
Here are some points of similarity I’m thinking of:
Men’s responsibility is ignored.
In Church modesty rhetoric, there is lots of discussion of women (and girls) needing to dress a particular way to avoid giving men (and boys) sexual thoughts or ideas about their sexual availability. There is no discussion of the need for men to stop themselves from objectifying women, regardless of how they’re dressed. (This is in contrast, of course, to Jesus’s famous admonition that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out . . .”)
It’s easy to see how this line of thinking lines up with abortion too. Nearly all pregnancies result from an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but anti-abortion rhetoric focuses pretty much completely on women. Sex is something that just happens, and so is pregnancy. Men’s participation is ignored. It’s assumed that if women don’t want to be pregnant, it’s on them to prevent it from happening. The whole topic of abortion isn’t even brought up until there’s a pregnancy.
The same line of thinking plays out in the Church too. Men are never reminded not to pressure their partners into unwanted sex or into unwanted pregnancy. In fact, given that couples are told to work out their childbearing decisions between themselves and God, but husbands are also told they’re to preside over their families, it seems likely that the effect in many families is that husbands dictate to wives how many children they will be bearing. Also, needless to say given that even these topics aren’t discussed, men are certainly never told explicitly not to commit rape.
A Religious Perspective on Abortion
I definitely did not plan on writing about abortion for my first post back. Honestly, it’s a subject I tend to avoid, largely because I feel like all the arguments on both sides have been elucidated a million times already and I don’t think I have much to add, and because conversations on the topic seem to go absolutely nowhere. But here we are, and for obvious reasons, I am feeling the need to do a bit of reflection. Read More
Happy Divine Gender Role Enforcement Day!
For Father’s Day today, my ward gave men a treat, but sacrament meeting talks weren’t focused on the importance of fathers or anything like that. This feels consistent with my experience generally. Father’s Day is mentioned at church, and sometimes talked about, but Mother’s Day by contrast is absolutely essential. It would be unthinkable to have talks about tithing or food storage on Mother’s Day, or even (at least in my experience) to have a stake conference. But Father’s Day is totally fair game to tromp on with other topics. Just to be clear, I’m absolutely not complaining about this. I’m just observing. I can buy my own treats.
The reason this happens is, I think, pretty obvious. Since it has become less acceptable to openly put women down and GAs have largely rhetorically moved from patriarchy to chicken patriarchy, they’ve needed to embrace their opportunities to pedestalize women, and explain at every turn how very very honored and equal they are. Mother’s Day is a great opportunity. Largely male speakers can rhapsodize at the pulpit about how wonderfully self-sacrificing their mothers and wives are, and how inspiring they find it that these women choose to give up their own aspirations in life to serve as supports to the men in their lives. Needless to say, there is no parallel need to reassure men about how important we are. The very structure of the Church communicates it to us constantly. Father’s Day is a nice afterthought, a reminder that oh, sure, fatherhood matters too. But it’s not doing the work that motherhood is, rhetorically, to make it seem more okay that women aren’t ordained or allowed to handle money or run wards or sacrament meetings or the highest Church councils or baptisms or funerals or excommunications. The Church embraces Mother’s Day more than Father’s Day for the same reason that we get conference talks called The Honored Place of Woman, The Moral Force of Women, LDS Women Are Incredible!, and Woman—Of Infinite Worth, but no parallel talks directed at men.
But of course it’s just my experience that a bigger deal is made at church of Mother’s Day than Father’s Day. And I’d understand if you’re a bit suspicious that I’m remembering it that way simply because I expect it to be that way. So I thought I’d do a quick look at Church magazines. I looked for references to both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Ensign (this was the Google search string I used for Mother’s Day: “mother’s day” site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign). I didn’t read through each article, but I did do some quick checking to make sure the results weren’t spurious (for example, excluding those that matched only because the Table of Contents on the left of the article listed another article that had “Mother’s Day” in the title).
Here are two hypotheses I had before I gathered the data: (1) There would be more references to Mother’s Day than to Father’s Day, and (2) the number of references to Mother’s Day in particular would go up from the 1970s to the 1990s as the Church moved more toward becoming the Church of the Family Proclamation.
As you can see, the total number of mentions is small enough that I put it into five-year bins to make the results easier to look at. The data are surprisingly consistent with both of my hypotheses. Mother’s Day has 68 total mentions, and Father’s Day only has 24. Also, the mentions of Mother’s Day went up markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, although they’ve dropped off again since then.
Again, the number of mentions is really small. For Mother’s Day, 68 in the 50 years of the Ensign is only 1.4 mentions a year. So it’s not like discussion of these holidays is dominating Church discourse. But when one or the other does get brought up, it is, as I expected, far more often Mother’s Day.
I’d love to hear your experiences of whether Mother’s Day or Father’s Day has gotten more emphasis in wards you have lived in.
A New Lynnette? Lynnette Strikes Back? The Return of Lynnette? Regardless, I’m Back!
I didn’t actually mean to stop blogging and disappear, and leave my faithful brother Ziff to keep ZD going all alone. The last time I posted, I see, was at the very beginning of the pandemic. And then I lost my energy to say much of anything. I was in the hospital, yet again, in July of 2020, which was an unusually weird experience because of covid. If you know my history, you know that I’ve weathered a lot of depression storms, but that year I really lost my momentum, and somehow I never made it back to blogging.
However, it’s occurred to me this spring that I evidently still have a lot to say, which currently is often showing up in ridiculously long Facebook posts, and I started thinking that maybe I needed to find more outlets for that. Read More
Which Issues Do GAs Consider Unimportant?
Here’s a quote from Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk this last conference:
Of course, in our present day, tremendously difficult issues face any disciple of Jesus Christ. The leaders of this Church are giving their lives to seeking the Lord’s guidance in the resolution of these challenges. If some are not resolved to the satisfaction of everyone, perhaps they constitute part of the cross Jesus said we would have to take up in order to follow Him. [emphasis in original]
I appreciate that he (obliquely) admitted that the GAs maybe don’t have unlimited time or energy to solve all the questions of Church doctrine and policy that face them. I think it’s interesting, though, to consider what problems they do and don’t consider important enough to address. It seems quite clear that the further removed an issue is from the GAs’ personal experience, the less likely it is they’ll consider it important, and the more likely they’ll just wave it away as “well, that’s your cross to bear.”
Here are some questions that I think should obviously be pressing on GAs’ minds, but that they seem largely unconcerned about:
- How could the Church more welcoming to single people? Two speakers in April 2021 conference mentioned how many single people there are in the Church. Tellingly, M. Russell Ballard brought this issue up only after he was widowed and it became more salient to him. But is there any doctrinal innovation, or even any Church program, or even any rhetorical shift to try to help single people feel more welcome? Not that I’ve seen. It was a brief mention of the issue that appeared quickly and was gone just as fast. The Church remains a place for married people, and single people are an afterthought at best.
Gatekeeping Heavenly Mother
Recently, I was listening to an episode of the podcast “At Last She Said It” where the hosts were talking about the New Testament story of the woman with an issue of blood (for 12 years!) who was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’s robe. They made the point that the woman would have been considered ritually unclean because of her issue of blood, so it seems unlikely that she would have been able to meet with Jesus by going through any kind of official channel. So that may be why she just wedged herself through the crowd to get to him rather than trying to meet with his disciples first or something.
(Incidentally, if you enjoy podcasts and Mormon feminism, I think you should give “At Last She Said It” a try. The hosts are really interesting and insightful, and I appreciate hearing their commentary. I often hear them frame things in ways or make points that I hadn’t considered, even on topics I’ve been reading women’s commentary about online for years and years.)
Their point got me to thinking about more of the stories in the New Testament in the framework of gatekeeping or people going to great lengths to get to Jesus. For example, there was Zacchaeus, who was at first deterred by a crowd, but then climbed a tree to get Jesus’s attention, and was able to have him come to his house. The crowd was an incidental rather than an intentional obstacle, although then of course when Jesus said he was going to Zacchaeus’s house, they complained that he was hanging out with a sinning publican. Or there was the man who was let down through a roof into a house to get access to Jesus and was promptly forgiven of his sins and healed. In both of these examples, there wasn’t anyone intentionally gatekeeping access to Jesus. But in the case where people brought their children to Jesus, his disciples turned them away before Jesus famously told them to “Suffer little children . . . to come unto me.” And then there was the time a bunch of people followed Jesus into the desert to hear him preach, and his apostles wanted to send them back to their towns after a while to get food, but Jesus miraculously fed them so they could stay. Or there was the blind man who heard Jesus and his entourage were passing by and cried out for Jesus to heal him, and wasn’t deterred even when others in Jesus’s party shushed him. Jesus healed him.
What these stories have in common is that someone wants to get to Jesus for healing or blessing and someone (or something) is standing in their way, and nevertheless they persist and get to him. The person trying to get to him always appear in a good light, and the people standing in the way don’t come off so well. It’s more often that Jesus implicitly scolds the gatekeepers, like with the clamoring blind man where Jesus ignored his shushing companions and called for the man to be brought to him, but in the story with the children, he actually rebukes the gatekeepers.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Now we have lots of Church members who want to acknowledge or talk about or pray to Heavenly Mother, and the GAs are acting as gatekeepers. Dale G. Renlund last conference followed in the footsteps of Gordon B. Hinckley a few decades ago, in maybe saying things as softly as he could, but still telling members that they shouldn’t be praying to Heavenly Mother. The GAs are clearly uncomfortable with any groundswell of interest in her.
New Children of Record and Church Activity
In this post, I just want to make a small point about the Church’s report of new children of record in the annual statistical report. Here’s a graph showing annual end-of-year counts since 2010.
The count was flat for several years, but then started falling consistently from year to year starting in 2015. And then of course it fell off a cliff in 2020, going from 94,000 all the way to 65,000, a drop of over 30%. (For the rest of this post, I’m going to abbreviate thousands as “K,” so 94K is 94,000.)
It seems clear that the 2020 decline was caused by COVID. But there are (at least) two possible mechanisms that could be driving the effect of COVID on new children of record. One is that COVID affected birth rates. I had the idea in the back of my head that economic downturns are often associated with declining birth rates, and a quick Google turns up at least one paper that suggests that that’s true. However, given the nine month length of human gestation and the fact that COVID was officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it seems pretty unlikely that couples were changing their childbearing plans and having the effects show up before the end of the year.
The other possible mechanism by which COVID could affect children of record is through church activity. The children of record count is effectively a count of children born to or adopted by LDS families where at least one parent is active enough to get them recorded on Church records. With COVID pushing church meetings to be online, or suspended entirely, it’s not surprising that families were less diligent about recording their births and adoptions with their local units than they would have been in ordinary times. So I think the big drop from 2019 to 2020 makes sense.
What is striking, though, is that the 2020 to 2021 recovery is smaller than I would expect. New children of record rebounded from 65K to 89K, which seems like a healthy gain. But if my guess that people were just lax in recording new births and adoptions is right, there should have been a big backlog from 2020 that got recorded as people largely returned to attending church in person in 2021. Really, the 2021 count should have exceeded 2019 if this was the case.