Zelophehad's Daughters

Funniest number: The statistical report gives Church membership as 16,663,663. So five sixes, and two threes that can be added together to yield a sixth six! Talk about victories for Satan!

Best musical number: “Arise, O God, and Shine,” Saturday morning
Worst musical number: “God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son,” Priesthood. I just found this slow and uninteresting.
Highest-tempo musical number: “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah,” Saturday afternoon. I didn’t actually measure tempos, but this one seemed quite fast.
Best choir outfits: Korean girls singing “I Love to See the Temple,” Sunday morning

Longest talk: D. Todd Christofferson, “Why the Covenant Path,” 2179 words
Shortest talk: Russell M. Nelson, “Welcome Message,” 507 words

Longest prayer (“I should have been giving a talk.”): Arnulfo Valenzuela, Sunday morning benediction, 144 seconds
Shortest prayer (“Let’s move this thing along!”): Carl B. Cook, Saturday afternoon invocation, 54 seconds

Best title: Dale G. Renlund, “Infuriating Unfairness”
Emphatic titles: Ahmad S. Corbitt (“You Can Gather Israel!”) and S. Gifford Nielsen (“This Is Our Time!”) gave consecutive talks with exclamation marks on the titles. Henry B. Eyring (“Bless in His Name”) unfortunately didn’t continue the trend.
Missed opportunity title: Choi Hong (Sam) Wong titled his talk “They Cannot Prevail; We Cannot Fall,” when with just one letter change and very little meaning change, he could have made it rhyme: “They Cannot Prevail; We Cannot Fail.”
1955 called and wants its title back: Dallin H. Oaks, “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution”

Best visual aid: Dallin H. Oaks, amid a bunch of stock photos of Jesus that we’ve all seen a thousand times, showed a photo of a family that’s delightfully imperfect, with one person not looking at the camera at all, and a baby who looks like they might be about to bust into a fuss.

Best stories:

Gary E. Stevenson told of how Church members driven out of Missouri in 1838 were cared for so kindly by residents of Quincy, Illinois. I appreciate this as a counterweight to the prevalent narrative of how early Church members were constantly persecuted.
Gerrit W. Gong told of a young woman selling ice cream cones out of a pushcart who he witnessed having her cart upended and her cones smashed by an angry customer. The scale of her pain might not have been great in the grand scheme of things, but I appreciated how he told the story with no resolution and no happy ending, which I feel like very much goes against the typical Mormon grain of wrapping stories up with a bow. He concluded:

I can still see the young woman on her knees in the street, trying to save broken wafer pieces, tears of anguish streaming down her face. Her image haunts me, a reminder of the unkindness, uncaring, misunderstanding we too often inflict on each other.
Jorge T. Becerra told of a dream Brigham Young had where he encountered Joseph Smith driving a big herd of sheep and goats that were varied in size and appearance. Brigham asked Joseph what he was going to do with such an unruly flock, and Joseph seemed unconcerned and said “they are all good in their places.” Brigham took it to mean the Church should gather a variety of people. I really appreciated Joseph’s line, particularly given that the most familiar discussion of sheep and goats in the scriptures is of Jesus separating them. This seems like an unusually hands-off approach to differences between people in the Church.

In Church Policy, Feminism

Invisible (Mormon) Women

Ziff11 March 202119 Comments

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez documents and discusses what she calls gender data gaps. These are places where data that’s gathered from only (or mostly) men are used to make design or policy decisions that have bad effects on women because, on average they differ from men in consistent ways. Although she doesn’t ever gather them in a list like this, I think there are at least three different points at which data from women can be lost.

Sometimes data isn’t gathered from women at all. For example, a medical researcher might decide that women are too complicated what with menstrual cycles and possible pregnancy, so they study only men and then just assume that the results generalize. Or decision-making bodies that consist of all or mostly men use their personal experience to make policy decisions, without even considering that their experience might not be representative because of their gender. For example, Criado Perez discusses governments making decisions about snow removal and public transportation and even city design with an eye toward trip patterns of commuting to work and back home that is more common among men. In so doing, they ignore or downplay the importance of a pattern more common among women where they go to multiple destinations in one trip. This is especially common among people who care for children or the elderly, which are tasks that women do far more often than men do.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men, but isn’t reported in disaggregated form, so it’s not clear whether there are gender differences or not.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men and is reported disaggregated, but decision-makers are still ultimately unconcerned with the differences. This is generally the case for data on harassment of political office holders that Criado Perez reports, where women holding office are harassed more often and more seriously by their colleagues and even their constituents than men holding office are, but the response of heads of legislative bodies seems to be to tell women to toughen up rather than to do anything themselves to make harassment more difficult.
Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Reading this book got me to thinking about how gender data gaps might affect Church policies. Of course it’s obvious that many Church policies discriminate against women by design, for example the priesthood ban for women. But what the book made me think about is all the ways in which the Church maybe unintentionally makes policies that differentially affect women, and the decision-makers just aren’t very aware of it because they include no women (or if they do, the women know that their place is to not talk too much).

Another thing too is that in terms of the three points at which data on women might be lost that I’ve listed, the Church seems like it’s often stuck at what might be called step zero. That is, Church leaders are loath to admit that they need any data from anyone, men or women, because surely God will put into their minds everything they need to know, and they really don’t want to be troubled by input from rank-and-file members.

But that’s beside the point. What I’m going to do in the rest of this post is just list some Church policies and practices I came up with that are maybe not explicitly designed to give women a worse church experience than men, but end up doing so anyway. These are the types of things that, even without making major changes like ordaining women, could be improved if GAs (and in some cases even local leaders) closed their gender data gaps by getting more input from women.

The requirement for endowed members to wear temple garments is much more burdensome to women than it is to men. Although they’re roughly the same shape as men’s, women’s garments are less compatible with typical clothing options available to women than men’s are with typical clothing options available to men. And that’s to say nothing of issues like yeast infections, which the cisgender men among the ranks of the GAs aren’t going to be personally familiar with. (For much more on this issue, see Angela C.’s excellent post from several years ago at BCC.) Even if getting more women’s input only meant a softening of language around how consistently garments are to be worn, it seems like this would be an improvement.
Mothers’ lounges (or whatever the rooms are called in church buildings where women can retreat to breastfeed their children) are consistently too small, too poorly ventilated, too poorly furnished, and too frequently attached to bathrooms. Sometimes they’re non-existent. All this is anecdotal, but it seems like the pattern is so consistent that it clearly reveals a problem. If more women were asked to give input on building design, perhaps this could be fixed.

In Race, Reviews

Joanna Brooks’s Mormonism and White Supremacy

Ziff1 March 20214 Comments

I recently read (listened to, actually[1]) Joanna Brooks’s book Mormonism and White Supremacy. It was a fascinating book. She covers pieces of Church history with the priesthood/temple ban that I maybe knew the broad strokes of, but that I didn’t know any of the details of.

For example, she traces the reported recollections of men who were actually present at and in some cases participants in the ordination of black men like Elijah Abel in the early years of the Church. Two of them, Abraham Smoot and Zebedee Coltrin, had changed their tune by 1879, when they both told John Taylor in a meeting that Joseph Smith had always opposed the ordination of black men. Joseph F. Smith disagreed with them in 1879, but by 1908, he had come around to their point of view and reported that Joseph Smith had later declared Abel’s ordination “null and void.” Brooks hypothesizes that Joseph F. Smith’s change of heart might have been related to the recent death of Jane Manning James. She suggests that the presence of prominent black Mormons like James might have actually served as a brake for a while on such editing of recollections. In any case, I was fascinated to read this bit of connecting of dots as to how the Church went from ordaining black men at the beginning to deciding that no, in fact, black people were to be barred from both priesthood and the temple.

In Fun, Temple

Temple Ratings on Google Maps, Part 2

Ziff22 February 202113 Comments

Last week, I put up a post where I looked at ratings of LDS temples on Google Maps. This is a follow-up where I’m going to talk about what I read in the reviews of temples.

I looked at the same population of temples that I did in the previous post: the 168 that have been dedicated. For each, I read some of the reviews. I didn’t read all the reviews because (1) especially for the most-reviewed temples, there are a lot, and (2) many of them are pretty much the same. There are tons and tons of five-star ratings with people saying how wonderful and beautiful and peaceful the temple is, whichever temple it is. What I did is to first sort the reviews by “most relevant” and read the first 10-20, and then sort them again by “lowest rating” and read at least all the one- and two-star reviews. I chose “most relevant” because I figure Google’s algorithm for choosing these is likely to choose reviews that stand out in one way or another. I chose “lowest rating,” as you can probably guess, because it’s the five-star reviews that are the most homogeneous, and the low reviews that are most likely to say something unique (or funny!) Every unhappy temple reviewer is unhappy in their own way.

I’ll start with some general trends I noticed across reviews, and then finish by quoting some interesting and fun reviews.

One interesting trend is that reviewers clearly disagree about who they’re writing a review for. A subset is clearly writing a review for a Mormon audience. They’ll mention all kinds of operational details about the temple, like how to find the baptistry, or they’ll give answers to questions like whether the temple requires that you make an appointment in advance, or rents clothes, or has a cafeteria or patron housing. A larger set of reviewers is writing for a non-Mormon audience. They’ll explain how you need a recommend to get in, or talk about proxy ordinances or Mormon doctrine more generally. Most often, they’ll just say how the temple is the most wonderful place in the world, and how peaceful they feel when they go there. I see this as being aimed at non-Mormons even if it’s quite vague, because Mormons already know that Mormons love to go to the temple (or at least, are supposed to love to go to the temple).

In Statistics, Temple

Temple Ratings on Google Maps, Part 1

Ziff18 February 202110 Comments

I read a mention somewhere recently of the fact that you can rate and review LDS temples on Google Maps just like you’d rate or review a restaurant or bookstore. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at this rating data, just to see what’s there. For each of the 168 temples that has been dedicated, I noted the following:

Number of ratings of each possible number of stars (1-5) — note that all that’s shown by Google Maps is a little chart, but if you poke into the HTML, you can find the actual counts of ratings
Top words from the reviews and how often they were used — Google Maps helpfully compiles these
Year the temple was dedicated — from Church website
Location of the temple, which I aggregated into the following regions: Utah, West US (excluding Utah, divided at Mississippi River), East US, Canada & Alaska, Mexico & Central America & Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia/Pacific (including Hawaii)

I also browsed through some of the reviews, and copied snippets that I found funny or interesting. I’ll share those in an upcoming post.

Average ratings

To start, the most interesting question to me is which temple is rated highest. Unfortunately, although I can give you an answer, there’s just hardly any variability to speak of. On the 5-star scale, temples’ ratings range from Tokyo Japan at the low end with 4.48 up to Detroit Michigan at the high end with 4.97. Really, across temples, it’s just a bunch of ratings of five stars, with only the occasional four or lower. And in retrospect, this probably isn’t all that surprising, as it’s overwhelmingly going to be Mormons rating the temples, and they’re overwhelmingly going to give five stars. There are definitely non- or ex- or anti-Mormons rating temples, and sometimes giving lower ratings to show their displeasure, but compared to ratings by Mormons who love to see the temple, they are few and far between.

So instead of looking at average rating for each temple, I went back and looked just at the percentage of ratings that were five stars. Looked at this way, the data has a little more variability. The lowest value is 75.3% for Suva Fiji, and the highest is 98.2% for Palmyra New York. It doesn’t look like there are any real differences by dedication year, but there might be by region. Here’s a graph. I’ve ordered the regions by highest to lowest average.

It’s interesting that the US regions have the highest averages, followed by the other Americas regions, followed by the rest of the world. I did two statistical tests (t-tests, two tailed) to compare the groups of regions, one comparing US versus other Americas and the other comparing other Americas versus the rest of the world. Both were statistically significant (p < .001). This means it’s unlikely that we would see differences this big between the groups if the underlying populations actually had the same average percentage of five-star ratings.

In Fun

New Testament Valentines

Ziff11 February 202111 February 20214 Comments

In Statistics

Fighting in the Comments at the Church Newsroom

Ziff1 February 20219 Comments

Before I read all the contentious comments on the Church Newsroom group post that congratulated Biden and Harris for winning the US Presidential election, I was only vaguely aware of the Church Newsroom Facebook presence. Sure, as a Mormon with lots of Mormon Facebook friends, I’ve seen people link to it now and again, but I don’t know that I had ever clicked through to it more than once or twice. And I certainly had no idea that it was the site of such epic comment wars. If you had asked me, I would have guessed that all the comments would be blandly supportive, kind of like letters to the editor in the Ensign. Now that I’ve noticed it, though, it seems like the comment wars keep coming back. A bunch of fighting broke out again on January 15th when the Q15 (finally) condemned the attempted coup by Trump supporters the previous Wednesday. Comments were quickly closed, as they also had been eventually on the Biden/Harris post. But then just a few days later, a bunch of GAs had the gall to get vaccinated against COVID, and the fighting broke out all over again. (You can see my satire of some of the positions commenters took in my most recent post.)

Seeing all these fights in such a short period of time made me wonder a few things about the Church Newsroom group. Has it always been this full of conflict? Was there ever a time when it was full of nothing but people praising the Church’s news releases? If so, what changed? Was it the rise of Trump that got people in a more argumentative mood? Was it the COVID pandemic? Or maybe was it a change in the Newsroom staff’s moderation strategy, where they were once more hands-on and then moved to being more hands-off?

To make an attempt at answering these questions, I read back through all the old Church Newsroom Facebook group posts I could find. Unfortunately, I discovered that they only go back to August of 2019. Prior to that, it looks like the Newsroom’s Facebook presence was a page rather than a group, and it was at the URL www.facebook.com/MormonNewsroom (redirects from www.facebook.com/LDSNewsroom, the redirect still works even though the page is gone). You can still see it mentioned, for example, in this 2011 Newsroom article on the Church’s social media presence. I’ve looked at some snapshots of the old page using the WayBack Machine, and it’s clear that there were comments on the posts, but the snapshots aren’t anything like frequent or complete enough for me to reconstruct anything.

So without being able to go back before 2016, my question about Trump being a trigger for the fighting was off the table, but at least I could still look at the beginning of COVID. From August 2019 to January 2021, I found 453 Newsroom posts. (It’s possible that I missed a few; I fought with Facebook’s determined desire to show me what it thought I’d find most interesting rather than just listing posts chronologically.) I didn’t want to take the time to read all the comments on all the posts, so for each post, I just noted the following:

Date
Topic of the post
Total number of comments
Number of top-level comments (i.e., that are not replies to a comment)
Number of subthreads (strings of comments following a top-level comment) that featured fighting
When there was fighting, brief notes about what it was about

In Fun, Health

The Wickedness of Hand-washing

Ziff26 January 202116 Comments

For context, read comments on this Church Newsroom post about GAs getting vaccinated for COVID.

As a faithful Latter-day Saint, I was deeply saddened to discover the following image on the Church’s own website.

I am very disappointed to discover Church leaders–the men who I sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators–wading into such a politically fraught topic as hand washing without considering the effects of their words. I am especially disappointed to see repentance, a sacred gospel principle, being analogized with hand-washing, a wholly Satanic activity.

My family and I are deeply committed anti-hand-washers. We have not arrived at this conclusion lightly. We have done our research, and we will not be swayed by wicked and controlling government agencies such as the CDC, with their attempts to steal our liberty by forcing hand-washing on us.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2020: Funniest Comments

Ziff4 January 202113 Comments

Twenty twenty was a decidedly unfunny year. To me, though, this meant that we had more need than ever to find chances to laugh. Toward that end, this post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments and bits of posts that I read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of these are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each person’s name a link to the original source, so you can go and read them in their original context if you want. Also, the comments are in roughly chronological order.

hawkgrrrl, in her post “What’s the Point of BYU?” at W&T:

To provide match-making for young Mormons, particularly those who grew up in areas with few Mormons to date or potentially marry. Otherwise, where would all those RMs go to find the hot wives their disgusting mission presidents promised them as a reward for faithful service?

p, commenting on hawkgrrrl’s post:

I was . . . a poor kid from rural Arizona. My nonmember parents sent me to BYU in part to shield me from the hippie rebellion of the late 60’s early 70’s. Little did they know that California Mormons were sending their wild-ass hippie kids to BYU to straighten them out! I never had so much fun in my life[!]

Yes, this is the visual equivalent of a laugh track. Photo credit: Brian Lundquist on Unsplash

In Politics, Statistics

I read 2200 comments on the Church Newsroom post so you don’t have to.

Ziff28 December 202018 May 202113 Comments

Two weeks ago, the US Electoral College voted Joe Biden in as the next US President. The same day, the Church released a boilerplate statement congratulating Biden and Kamala Harris on their win, thanking Trump and Pence for their service, and asking members to pray for all of them. The statement was then linked in the Church’s public Newsroom group on Facebook. Commenters there proceeded to hold a heated debate that ran to 2200 comments before the Church’s public affairs people (I’m assuming) shut it down.

They didn’t delete the comments that were already up, though, so I thought it would be a fun project to read through them and look for patterns like most commonly raised issues. To be complete, I should note that some of the comments clearly had been deleted, as there were only 1882 remaining when I read them (starting about a week ago). However, given how many pretty unhinged comments still remain up, I doubt that it was the Church PA people deleting them. Rather, it seems more likely that people who had made comments went back and deleted them.

Here’s the data I noted for each of the comments:

Name of the person making it. I noted this so I could see if it was a few people making a ton of comments, or a lot of people making a few.
Lean of the comment (Biden – strong, Biden – weak, neutral, Trump – weak, or Trump – strong). Of course this is subjective but it’s pretty clear most of the time.
Issues raised, which I sorted into a few dozen categories.
Number of words.
Comment being replied to, so I could see which comments drew the most replies.
Number of reactions: Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry

For the 103 people who made five or more comments, I also noted the following:

Overall lean of their comments. This was straightforward, as people pretty much always showed a consistent lean from one comment to another.
Total number of comments.
Gender. Most people declare their gender in their profile.
Age category (younger, middle aged, older). As most people don’t give their age on Facebook, I guessed based on graduation and marriage dates and apparent ages of children or grandchildren. I was thinking of the age groups as being approximately < 40 for younger, 40 – 64 for middle aged, and 65+ for older. Of the 103 people, I assigned age categories to 92 of them.

Comment Lean

As the graph below shows, Trump-leaning comments outnumbered Biden-leaning ones by nearly a 2:1 ratio. There were also nearly as many neutral comments as Biden-leaning ones.

In Christmas, Fun

More Christmas Classics, Mormonized

Ziff11 December 20204 Comments

The Polar Express

A young boy is surprised to discover a train stopping right next to his house on Christmas Eve night. He learns that it’s going to the North Pole, so he boards it and finds it packed with children. Hot chocolate is being served, but the boy, remembering his study of D&C 89, righteously turns down this evil hot drink. The train rushes through forests and up mountains and finally arrives at the North Pole, where a

huge throng of elves is waiting for Santa to bestow the first gift of Christmas. The boy is chosen to be the recipient of the gift, and Santa tells him he can choose anything he likes. Eschewing the contents of Santa’s gigantic bag, the boy chooses a small stone that is sitting on the seat of Santa’s sleigh, because the stone appears to be glowing with a strange light. The boy is devastated to find when he returns to the train that the stone has fallen out of his pocket. Fortunately, Santa slips it in with the gifts the boy opens on Christmas morning. Sadly, though, the glow has disappeared. The boy thinks of putting it in a dark place, such as an upturned top hat, to see if any glow remains. He is delighted to discover that not only does it still glow, but it shows letters in sequence that make up a message. Thrilled, he transcribes the message and finds that it repeats over and over “Be sure to read your scriptures.” The boy’s friends are able to read the message too, but as time passes and they age, one by one they lose the ability, but for all his life, the boy is always able to see it.

In Statistics

Q15 Members Giving Thanks

Ziff30 November 202010 Comments

On the Friday before (US) Thanksgiving, President Nelson suggested that people share messages of gratitude on social media in the next week, using the hashtag #GiveThanks. I saw a friend of a friend on Facebook point out that the other members of the Q15 weren’t all equally diligent in responding to his call. As of a couple of days before Thanksgiving, a few had not posted with the hashtag even once. I thought this was a really interesting point. The Q15 members’ response might be thought of as a little case study in how important they find it to publicly show that they’re following the prophet.

This graph shows the number of Facebook posts each member of the Q15 wrote during the week prior to Thanksgiving plus one day afterward (because a couple of them also posted on that day using the hashtag). For comparison, I also checked how often they posted during the same time period in 2019. (Note that I didn’t count a post twice when the same post was written twice but just in different languages.)

President Nelson definitely got overall participation in pre-Thanksgiving posts up with his challenge. More interestingly, the Q15 members varied in how much they posted. Before I counted, I guessed that Elder Andersen would take the top spot, as he seems the most obsequious to me. I certainly wouldn’t have picked President Ballard and Elder Renlund as the top posters, although Elder Andersen was only one post behind.

Really, the differences among the Q15 members probably aren’t meaningful, with the possible exception of Elder Uchtdorf’s zero. It seems to me that he really made a statement by not responding even minimally to President Nelson’s suggestion. I mean, if he had just thrown one post up, he certainly wouldn’t have been alone. Five other Q15 members did no more than that. But Elder Uchtdorf didn’t even reach that level. He didn’t post around Thanksgiving in 2019, and he didn’t do it again in 2020.

I realize that this is very likely overinterpreting, but I wonder if he figured that President Nelson already demoted him out of the First Presidency, so he has no need to try to stay on his good side with public displays of loyalty, as he’s unlikely to be demoted (or promoted) again. Every other Q15 member is either already in the First Presidency or is a candidate, should one of President Nelson’s counselors pre-decease him.

What do you think Elder Uchtdorf’s refusal to hop to and answer President Nelson’s call means?

In Reviews, Statistics

Jana Riess’s The Next Mormons

Ziff24 November 2020

Of all the discussions I read on the Bloggernacle, probably my favorite are the ones where people share their experience with the church. I love to hear about people’s experience with YW activities or missions or weird Sunday School classes. Church policies and doctrines and history can be interesting too, but it’s really the contemporary on the ground experience that fascinates me the most. Given this, I’m really the perfect target audience for Jana Riess’s book The Next Mormons.

The book was published in early 2019, which I know feels like about a decade ago in coronavirus time, and I know I’m slow in getting around to comment on it, and that if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve already read it. But I’ll continue just in case you haven’t. The heart of the book is a survey of American Mormons that Riess and Benjamin Knoll designed and had carried out in late 2016. They got responses from over 1,100 current Mormons and over 500 former Mormons. They asked a ton of interesting questions that Riess reports results on in the book. For example, they asked about personal beliefs and worship and spiritual practices, serving missions, temple worship, and family size, as well as more controversial issues like women’s ordination, the priesthood/temple ban, and the November policy. The subtitle of the book is “How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” so her focus is clearly on generational differences. But she also reports all kinds of interesting breakdowns by variables like gender, race, and current vs. former Mormon. Read More

In Fun, Politics

Captain Trumponi and the Title of Biglity

Ziff29 October 202029 October 202013 Comments

Utah Senator Mike Lee faced some backlash after he compared Donald Trump to Captain Moroni at a rally yesterday. In response, his office released the following passages of scripture about Captain Moroni to show that, with only a little tweaking, Trump is a perfect fit.

Alma 46:11-13

And now it came to pass that when Trumponi, who was the commander in chief of the armies of the Americans, had heard of these Democrats voting by mail, he was angry with Obamakiah.

And it came to pass that he rent his coat, which was a fur coat, the very finest; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of my mammon, my power, my owning of the libs, my wives and my affair partners and my affair partners who became wives and my one-night stands and my prostitutes and my porn stars and the victims of my assaults, and my children, Ivanka especially (and here, behold, he did add a winking emoji)—and he fastened it upon the end of a nine iron.

And he brushed on his majestic skin of orange, and his blue suit, and his red tie, and he girded on his holy MAGA hat about his head; and he took the nine iron, which had on the end thereof his rent coat, (and he called it the title of biglity) and he gathered his advisors and they all bowed themselves down unto him, and he charged them to pray to their God for the blessings of appointing judges and enriching the rich and punishing those with dark skin or an unknown tongue to rest upon him, so long as there should a band of white supremacists remain to possess the land—

In Doctrine, Family

By Divine Design

Ziff27 October 202024 November 20204 Comments

In one of the most often-discussed passages of almost-scripture on the Bloggernacle, the Family Proclamation reads:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that this isn’t one of my favorite parts. I don’t like the attempt to box women and men into prescribed gender roles. I especially don’t like it when these gender roles are attributed to God’s design, when it seems pretty obvious to me that they’re actually attributable to what the 1995 crop of GAs got comfortable with growing up. I think the opening phrase “by divine design” actually kind of signals this, as to me it suggests that the writers knew they didn’t have a scriptural leg to stand on when arguing for gender roles, so they figured they’d better just go big and claim that they (gender roles) came straight from God.

Thinking about this phrase more, it got me to wondering where else in Church rhetoric it had been used, because I swear I had heard it in contexts other than FamProc quotes. I thought these contexts might be interesting to look at. Because if I’m right that use of this phrase signals a speaker who’s grasping for authority but has nothing to cite, then it’s interesting to see where else Church leaders might want to assert things but realize they have no authoritative backing. (I realize that this is a big if, because even I realize this interpretation might be a bit of a leap. I’ll understand if you stop reading here.)

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews Conference, October 2020

Ziff13 October 202018 Comments

Best visual aid: Carlos A. Godoy shared a picture of himself and his sister at the time they first investigated the Church as teenagers. I think it’s fun to see pictures of GAs back when they were younger, especially when they had long hair.

Most carefully vague visual aid: Dallin H. Oaks talked about the right to peacefully protest as a good thing, and accompanying his talk is a picture of some people protesting. The picture is very carefully taken to not actually show what cause the people are protesting about, though.

Weirdest visual aid: W. Christopher Waddell mentioned a Church-published pamphlet on personal finance that has been translated into a number of languages. The only image accompanying his talk is a picture of copies of this pamphlet in several different languages. I think it definitely would have been better to just have no image accompany the talk at all, as this one is pretty useless.

Best story: Dale G. Renlund told a story of two doctors discussing a patient who needed to be admitted to the hospital because of an ailment related to his consumption of alcohol. One doctor expressed frustration that the patient had brought his trouble on himself. The other reminded the first, “you became a physician to care for people and work to heal them. You didn’t become a physician to judge them.” I feel like Elder Renlund reinforced what he was saying with the story by describing both the patient and the first doctor in sympathetic terms. The patient was “a courteous, pleasant man,” and the first doctor’s frustration he attributed to “grueling training” and “sleep deprivation,” and he pointed out that after being corrected, she “diligently” cared for the patient.

In Fun, General Conference

Topics That Might Be Mentioned in Conference, with Associated Probabilities

Ziff28 September 20208 Comments

With General Conference, right around the corner, I thought it might be fun to make some guesses about topics that will or won’t be brought up by the speakers. But not only will I list the topics, for each topic, I’ll also provide an actual numerical estimate of the probability that at least one speaker will mention it. As a trained data tinkerer, I can assure you that these so-called “estimates” are completely made up! Please feel free to add your suggestions, or explain why my numbers are wrong, in the comments.

Topic	Probability
COVID-19 as a public health crisis	10%
COVID-19 as an analogy for a spiritually bad thing	50%
The need to stop the spread of COVID-19 by wearing masks	5%
The need to respect others’ beliefs about the dangers of wearing masks	20%
The announcement of official Church-branded masks, complete with the new logo, to be made available to all temple recommend-holding members	< 1%
The wickedness of the world, as evidenced by governments’ failure to label church meetings “essential” during COVID-19 lockdowns	60%
The wickedness of the world, as evidenced by some wealthy countries still refusing to provide health insurance to all their citizens.	<< 1%
Congratulations to Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand for handling the COVID-19 crisis so well	1%
Condemnation to Donald Trump and the United States for handling the COVID-19 crisis so badly	<< 1%
The importance of electing officials who will pass laws against abortion	10%
The importance of electing officials who will pass laws against gay marriage	15%
The importance of paying your taxes	< 1%
The importance of not going $300 million into debt	<< 1%
QAnon conspiracy theories as a bad thing	1%
QAnon conspiracy theories as a good thing	2%
Operation Underground Railroad	5%
Quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg	< 1%
Quote from Amy Coney Barrett	1%
Reminder that racism is bad	1%
Reminder that property destruction is uncalled for, even when people have been treated badly	5%
Announcement of one or more new temples	95%
Announcement of five or more new temples	50%
Announcement of ten or more new temples	5%
Retraction of a temple previously announced	< 1%
Salt Lake Temple renovation found to be too costly; temple is to be demolished and rebuilt	< 1%
New all-Zoom temple ordinances	<< 1%
Tithing, and how it’s even more important during hard times	40%
Death, and how it’s part of God’s plan	50%
Six new apostles called to “pack the Quorum”	<< 1%
Family Proclamation canonized	10%
Restoration Proclamation canonized	15%
D&C 132 de-canonized	<< 1%
Earthly polygamy reinstated	< 1%
Hosanna shout to be re-performed each Conference until membership can “get it right”	5%

In Politics

How the Church Sets Members Up to Become Trump Apologists

Ziff25 September 202023 Comments

Like many other Mormons, I’ve been appalled in the last several years to see how many of my co-religionists are only too happy to cast their lot with Donald Trump. Trump seems like exactly the type of person who would have us clutching our collective pearls, given his history as a proud sexual assaulter and serial adulturer, not to mention his complete lack of interest in or knowledge of Christianity. And even setting aside his personal failings, his presidency has been a continuous series of policies that seem designed to be as anti-humane as possible, for example, his policy of separating families of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border or his attempt to use remotely taught classes as an excuse to send all international college students home. And even setting aside his personal failings and vicious policies, there’s his naked racism, his constant shout-outs to and encouragement of white supremacists.

Of course none of these things about Trump are news. This thing wasn’t done in a corner. What’s puzzling is that so many Mormons–American Mormons anyway–are so supportive of Trump, so anxious to rush to defend him. I’ve even seen Mormons using the “God’s flawed vessel” language that I think is borrowed from evangelical Christians. How did this come to be, that a religion that is so big on rules around sex in particular, and rules in general for that matter, produced so many adherents who happily and even eagerly support such an awful person? I think the answer is that the Church set them up for it.

In Mormon Culture, Statistics

Ratings of Mormon Movies on IMDB

Ziff10 September 20208 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

I grouped the 75 movies into four categories:

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

Ratings by Movie Category

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

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

In Church Policy

A Monopoly on Exaltation

Ziff24 August 20205 Comments

I read a discussion in a Facebook group recently that touched on the use of Elder Bednar’s infamous “don’t choose to be offended” talk (the actual title is “And Nothing Shall Offend Them”) as an excuse for people to say or do offensive things. Anecdotally, it sure seems like this is the major use that this talk is put to. I’ve seen the talk referred to many times, but it has been a long time since I actually read it, so this time I did.

What struck me in reading the talk this time is that I feel like Elder Bednar is making perhaps a narrower point than I had thought. He opens the talk with a story about how, as a stake president, he loved to go with bishops in his stake to visit inactive members. He would listen to their stories, and then gently berate them for letting offense that they had experienced at church interfere with all the blessings they can get only from church, like the sacrament and the Gift of the Holy Ghost. He doesn’t say anything about the success rate he got from confronting people–I’m guessing he would have told success stories here if he had any–but the important point is that he isn’t telling us that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be offended in general. He’s telling us that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be offended in a Church context, because we’ll be missing out on unique opportunities that we can get nowhere else.

I have always thought this talk fit with other talks on interpersonal relationships, on issues like anger or forgiveness. But now I think it actually fits better with talks like Elder Ballard’s “To Whom Shall We Go?,” where he asks people leaving the Church where they will go to get the support and ordinances the Church offers. Or with President Hinckley’s less confrontational but similar message where he quotes a young convert who was facing ostracism from his family as saying “It’s true, isn’t it?” and then “Then what else matters?” Or with President Nelson’s recent talk where he tried to close the temple work for the dead loophole so people wouldn’t think they could get away with living church-free lives now.

Especially in light of these other messages, the underlying assumption of Elder Bednar’s talk is that the Church has essential things–ordinances, but also teachings–that simply can’t be had anywhere else. It makes sense if this is true, then, that no amount of offensive behavior from local leaders, or indeed from general leaders, is a good reason to leave. The Church holds a monopoly on exaltation, so people who want to be exalted had better be willing to put up with anything so they don’t risk losing their access.

In the world of money and markets, monopolists are often guilty of (or perceived as being guilty of) leveraging their monopoly power to get more money out of their customers. The Church isn’t designed to be a money-making enterprise (although there may have been some mission creep). I appreciate that there are many things that General Authorities probably could do given the Church’s exaltation monopoly that they haven’t. They could increase tithing. “Where else will you go?” they could ask. They could inflict all kinds of more onerous burdens on members. They could require monthly or weekly temple attendance. They could require bishops to review members’ tax returns to be sure they’re paying enough tithing. They could re-start a United Order, and require members to deed all property to the Church. I think they don’t do things like this because they don’t see them as necessary, and again, unlike a business monopoly, they’re not trying to exploit the monopoly. They’re just pointing out that it exists.