Zelophehad's Daughters

What makes an ordinance count?

Ziff22 February 202219 Comments

I read an article recently about a Catholic priest who was found to have been saying a wrong word when he performed baptisms, and that he had been doing so since 1995. His dioceses has declared that this makes all the baptisms he performed invalid, and all subsequent rites (such as marriage) also invalid, because they are supposed to be preceded by baptism.

I’m interested in how a similar finding would play out in a Mormon context. Of course, we don’t have anyone whose job it is to baptize like a Catholic priest does. I’m guessing most child-of-record baptisms are performed by the child’s father when he’s available and a priesthood holder, and most convert baptisms are performed by male missionaries. Perhaps the closest we get would be a temple sealer, who could perform hundreds or thousands of sealings. So what would happen if it were discovered that a sealer had said a wrong word in thousands of sealings?

I think the answer hinges on whether we see ordinances as being more like magic spells, or more like parts of a relationship between us and God. If an ordinance is like a magic spell, it’s crucial that the words be said exactly right. The ordinance, spoken by someone with the proper authority, is operating on the world in the way that a chemistry experiment or a baking recipe does. The cake you’re making doesn’t care about your intent. It cares that you put the right ingredients together in the right way and bake the result at the right temperature for the right amount of time. If, on the other hand, the ordinance is part of a relationship, then the exact wording doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing it to show our commitment to God, in front of our community, and so long as both understand what our intent is, then getting the words exactly right might not be crucial.

In Fun

Even More Correlated Cards for Valentine’s Day

Ziff10 February 202210 Comments

In Faith, Reviews

Katie Langston’s Sealed

Ziff25 January 202225 January 202213 Comments

One good reason to read about other people’s lives is to learn about their experiences that are different from our own. But another good reason is to learn about their experiences that are the same, because it makes us feel less alone. It is for this second reason that I most enjoyed Katie Langston’s memoir Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace.

I’ve blogged before about how I grew up a neurotic Mormon. I worried about being able to keep track of all my many sins so I could properly repent of them all. I worried about impending nuclear war that some people seemed to so gleefully anticipate. But where I was neurotic, Katie (sorry I’m going to be all uncouth and call her by her first name because I know her through the Mormon feminist groups) suffered from full-on scrupulosity, although it wasn’t until she was an adult that she was able to put a name to it. She was so worried as a child that she was sinning and not remembering that she began confessing to her parents about things she was quite sure she hadn’t done, but couldn’t be 100% certain, so it seemed safer to confess and accept punishment than risk letting a sin be forgotten. She writes about how, when she turned eight and the time came to be baptized, she hoped to put it off a little, figuring that if she only got one chance to wipe her slate clean, she shouldn’t be too hasty to rush in and use it up. Unfortunately, by bringing the scheduling question up with her father, she found that she had inadvertently accelerated the process. Although I never thought of this strategy as a kid, I had so much the same line of thinking about sin.

Similarly relating her experience back to mine, where I grew up with parents who were pretty strict about church teachings, hers leaned toward fundamentalism. She was homeschooled for years, to keep her mind safe from the wickedness of secular ideas. Her parents fell into the orbit of anti-government preppers, but fortunately, when some of the most radical among them asked her parents to go with them to Mexico and become polygamists, they declined, and the experience may have pushed them toward finally sending Katie to public school.

Over and over, I so much identified with her stress about her sins. She continued to struggle with scrupulosity while on her mission in Bulgaria. Here’s a passage that I think captures her dilemma perfectly:

The Questions showed no mercy. Every day, they threatened to overtake me with despair; every night, I lay in bed, weeping silently so as to prevent my companion from hearing. I read Book of Mormon passages where characters had profound born-again experiences and felt the Spirit was their guilt away. I wanted desperately to sense something similar. What was wrong with me, that God wouldn’t grant me an experience like that? I had never, for as long as I could remember, felt whole. I’d had moments—an hour or two here, a day or two there—but always The Questions returned, driving me to the brink of what was bearable, urging me to succumb to darkness.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2021: Funniest Comments

Ziff11 January 202218 Comments

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: 2020 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.

Kirkstall, commenting on Buddhist Bishop’s post “The Holy Temple: What is Sacred is not Secret, and What is Secret is not Sacred” at W&T:

Consider the mechanical brevity of confirmations in the baptistry. The hands go on the head, the words are said, the hands come off again (Very Important). Repeat dozens of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times. Salvation by assembly line. The spirits of the long-imprisoned dead shuffle by like so many patrons of the local DMV.

Left Field, commenting on Ziff’s post “Nacle Notebook 2020: Funniest Comments” at ZD:

After eight consecutive years, I don’t make the cut!? There’s no way I lost. There’s no way. I won by hundreds of thousands of votes! I won by a lot! You had dead people voting! That’s criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and Ryan, your lawyer. I had the funniest comments, by far! I just want you to find 11,780 votes for my funniest comment. There’s nothing wrong with you saying you recalculated!

This is what I looked like while preparing this post. Image credit: Dan Cook on Unsplash.

In Music, Statistics

Hymn Tempo in 1973 and 1985 Hymnals

Ziff6 January 202221 Comments

This is what then-apostle Spencer W. Kimball had to say in a report of a 1955 mission tour (my source for the quote is Ardis Parshall):

Music: It is generally sung too fast.

If you’re like most Mormons I know, your complaints typically run in the opposite direction: Music is played and sung too slowly in church. This has certainly been my experience. I recall in the ward my wife and I lived in when we were first married a couple of decades ago, the hymns were so slow in sacrament meeting that I took to timing them and comparing to the suggested tempo in the hymnal and whispering complaints to my wife about how big the differences were. And that was before smartphones, so I had to do the math in my head! Along the same lines, you might notice that in my Conference review posts, I typically note particularly fast musical numbers for praise.

I was thinking about this issue while I’ve gathered some data from the hymnal in preparation for the release of the Church’s new hymnal. Like in my last post, I’m looking at the 1985 hymnal and the previous hymnal (the copy I have is from 1973, but it was largely unchanged from 1948). It occurred to me that, because many hymns appear virtually unchanged in both hymnals, I could line them up next to each other and see if the compilers of the 1985 hymnal generally suggested faster or slower tempos than the compilers of the previous hymnal did. This would be an indicator of whether they thought music was being played and sung too fast or too slowly.

For example, “The Spirit of God” appears in the 1973 hymnal with a tempo of 100 beats per minute (bpm), and in the 1985 hymnal with a tempo of 96-112 bpm. It is in 4/4 time in both hymnals, and the tune is the same. As you probably know, the 1985 hymnal always suggests a tempo range. The 1973 hymnal just suggests a single tempo, although I’m guessing it was with the expectation that there would be variation around it in practice.

I was able to find 250 matched pairs of hymns to compare across the two hymnals. I matched them on both title (taking into account that sometimes the titles changed for the same hymn) and composer, to be sure that I wasn’t comparing hymns set to different tunes. I used the 1985 hymnal as the starting point, and looked for a matching hymn for each in the 1973 hymnal. A few hymns appear more than once in the 1985 hymnal and therefore also more than once in the set of 250. For example, “Come, Come Ye Saints” is #30 in the 1985 hymnal, and also #326, for men’s voices.

This graph summarizes where the 1973 tempos fall in comparison to the 1985 tempos for the 250 matched pairs of hymns.

The most frequent result is that the 1973 tempo falls within the 1985 interval (the middle bar). But when it doesn’t, it’s much more common that the 1973 tempo is slower than the 1985 interval than that it’s faster. When the 1973 tempo is at the end of the interval, it’s over four times as likely (26% vs. 6%) to be at the slow end as at the fast end. When it’s entirely outside the interval, it’s over ten times as likely (22% vs. 2%) to be outside at the slow end as outside at the fast end. Another way of summarizing the same data, although it’s not shown in the graph, is that the average fraction of the 1985 tempo range that is faster than the 1973 tempo is 72%. Overall, it seems clear that the compilers of the 1985 hymnal were generally trying to speed the hymns up.

In Music, Statistics

Mood of Hymns for Men vs. Hymns for Women

Ziff17 December 202116 Comments

I’m getting ready for the Church to release the new hymnal, although I realize it will be a while still before it comes out. In preparation, I’ve been looking at some comparisons of the current 1985 hymnal with the one that preceded it. From Wikipedia, it looks like the previous hymnal was released in 1948, revised in 1950, and added to just a little in 1960. The copy I own has a copyright date of 1973, but it looks like it’s just the 1960 version (although I can tell that its preface from 1973 because it is signed by the First Presidency of Harold B. Lee, N. Eldon Tanner, and Marion G. Romney).

One difference between the two hymnals that I’ve noticed is in the hymns to be sung by men versus those to be sung by women. More particularly, the difference is in the moods used to describe how the hymns are to be sung. By “moods,” I mean the one- or two-word adverb descriptions written at the top of the hymn. For example, the current hymnbook says that hymn #1, “The Morning Breaks” is to be sung triumphantly. In the 1973 hymnal, the moods for men’s hymns aren’t too different from the moods for women’s hymns. In the 1985 hymnal, the moods for men’s versus women’s hymns are more markedly different. Because there are a lot of different mood words assigned to the hymns, I lumped them into three groups for convenience in display. Mood words like boldly I called “high energy.” Mood words like reverently I called “holy.” And mood words like peacefully I called “low energy.” Here’s a graph comparing the hymns for men and for women in the two hymnals.

The total number of hymns specifically for men or for women was much larger in the 1973 hymnal (47 for men; 41 for women) than in the 1985 hymnal (19 for men; 10 for women). As you can see, in the graph, I’m showing percentages instead of counts to make the comparisons easier to look at. (Note that six of the 41 women’s hymns in the 1973 are excluded from the comparison because they either have no mood description, or they have a tempo word in place of a mood description.)

In the 1973 hymnal, there’s some tendency for men to be assigned more high energy moods and women more holy and low energy moods. In the 1985 hymnal, this difference gets much larger, as over two thirds of men’s hymns have high energy moods, and only 10% of women’s hymns do. This isn’t at all a surprising difference to run into. I am disappointed, though, to see that the hymn selectors’ ideas of traditional gender roles, with active men and passive, worshipful women, is translated into the hymns they select and the moods they apply to them. I hope that the new hymnal doesn’t feature such a difference, but I’m guessing that it probably will.

In Depression, General Conference, Mental Health

Bits of Conference That Might Be Harmful to Mental Health

Ziff2 November 202128 Comments

Like I said in my review a few weeks ago, I really appreciated Erich W. Kopischke’s talk “Addressing Mental Health” this last General Conference. The motivator for him to give the talk was that his son who went on a mission suffered from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and suicidality, and as a result, returned home after being out for four weeks. Elder Kopischke talked about the need for people who are supporting their loved ones who are facing mental health issues to learn more and to judge less:

Learning will lead to more understanding, more acceptance, more compassion, more love. It can lessen tragedy while helping us develop and manage healthy expectations and healthy interactions.

What struck me, though, thinking about his message was how many other messages in that very Conference were probably contributing to people’s mental health struggles. I realize it’s way beyond what one talk could accomplish, but there is so much preaching of perfectionism and black-and-white thinking that really needs to be toned down if GAs want to be serious about helping improve members’ mental health.

Here’s a list of some of the bits of Conference that I thought were possibly harmful to mental health. Of course, I’m no mental health expert. I’m just a run-of-the-mill neurotic Mormon, prone to depression and anxiety, so those are the types of issues I’ll focus most on. Also, note that I’m doing my church experience on the easiest setting, as a straight, white, married, cisgender man. There are plenty of messages in a typical Conference that are hard on single people, or LGBT people, or childless people, that really don’t strike me because I’m not their target. So what I’m struck by is probably a lower bound estimate for the total number of potentially harmful messages.

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2021

Ziff11 October 202112 October 202128 Comments

Best musical numbers: “Come, Ye Children of the Lord”, Saturday morning; “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”, Saturday evening
Worst musical number: “Hark, All Ye Nations”, Saturday afternoon. I appreciate when choirs sing new arrangements so we can hear new takes on old hymns, but I didn’t like this particular one.
Most up-tempo musical numbers: “Come, Rejoice” and “Sing Praise to Him”, both Sunday morning
Worst line in a musical number: “How many drops of blood were spilled for me?” from “This is the Christ”, Saturday afternoon. Please, could we not embrace making ourselves feel more guilty?
Biggest music-related surprise: Not one but two men in the BYU choir that sang Saturday evening had mustaches. (I’m just going to assume that their organist, whose face was hidden behind a mask, was also sporting a goatee.)

Longest prayer: Steven J. Lund, Saturday evening invocation, 83 seconds (This is the shortest longest prayer for a Conference I’ve found in the prayer length data I could find. The previous shortest longest was 94 seconds in April, 2019.)
Shortest prayer: Amy E. Wright, Saturday morning benediction, 54 seconds

Longest talk: Gary E. Stevenson, “Simply Beautiful—Beautifully Simple”, 1821 words
Shortest talk: Russell M. Nelson gave talks to open and close Conference that were about 550 words. No other talk was shorter than 1000 words.

Best title: Bradley R. Wilcox, “Worthiness Is Not Flawlessness”. A sermon in a sentence.

Best visual aid: Clark G. Gilbert’s photo of himself as a kid.

Your name will be assimilated into standard Conference format: Becky Craven, who’s listed under that name on the Church website, was introduced as “Rebecca L. Craven” when she was going to give a prayer in the Saturday afternoon session.

Latest member of the BYU athlete-to-GA pipeline: Vaiangina Sikahema (following Gifford Nielsen and Devin Durrant). My faith would be most strengthened if the next member were Elder James R. McMahon.

Best laugh: Bradley R. Wilcox told of a time when voice to text converted his intended message to his daughter and son-in-law “Hey, you two. Sure love you!” into “Hate you two. Should love you.”

Best labels for deity: Dieter F. Uchtdorf referred to “the gentle Christ,” “our bountiful and forgiving God,” and the “God of new beginnings.” Camille N. Johnson called Jesus “the Master Author.”

Best stories:

Sharon Eubank told about some German LDS women who discovered that women among Afghan refugees who had arrived near them had lost their head coverings. The LDS women then sewed head coverings for the Afghan women. I love this story because the women helped the refugees, and in particular because they helped them in a way that showed them taking the recipients’ religion seriously.
Dale G. Renlund told of how when a temple was built in Finland, the temple committee, made up entirely of Finns, decided to allow visiting Russians to perform the first ordinances in the temple, in spite of the fact that the Russians and Finns have historically been enemies. He concluded, “The Finns were no less Finnish; the Russians were no less Russian; neither group abandoned their culture, history, or experiences to banish enmity. They did not need to. Instead, they chose to make their discipleship of Jesus Christ their primary consideration.”
Brent H. Nielson told the story of how his family rallied around his father when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but in the end, he died in just a few months. I appreciated how this story lacked a Correlated ending, with a miraculous healing and doctors and nurses converted to boot.

In Temple

What fraction of temples are announced in General Conference?

Ziff30 September 202118 Comments

Given the general failure of my Conference prediction posts, I’ll understand if you doubt me, but I think it’s probably a safe bet that this weekend’s General Conference will feature the announcement of several new temples. Of course, right? The Church is in a spree of building (or at least announcing) new temples, and where else are they going to be announced other than Conference?

I would have figured that of course temples are announced in Conference, but then I have a relatively short memory. I got to thinking about this question when reading First Presidency letters for my last post, when I stumbled on one about the Rexburg, Idaho temple that came out in December, 2003. December? That’s not Conference!

I went through the Church’s list of temples and noted the announcement date for each one. Rather than checking against historical lists of Conference dates, I just counted a temple as announced in Conference if its announcement date was in the first week of April or October or on March 31st or September 30th (since the Saturday sessions sometimes take place on those days). This graph shows both the number of temples announced (indicated by blue shading) and the percentage announced in Conference (indicated by the red line). Note that because the data in some years is thin, even with years prior to 1975 excluded, I grouped the years in threes to try to make patterns easier to look at.

In Church Policy, COVID, Temple

“Temple patrons and workers are ASKED to wear face masks”

Ziff24 September 202115 Comments

I was happy to see the First Presidency’s letter this week where they asked temple workers and patrons to wear masks. But I have to admit that I’m really puzzled by the wording. They’re asking patrons and workers to wear masks? Why not require it? I mean, the Church owns the temples, after all. They can set the rules there. It’s not like with vaccination, where the Church really has no control, but which the First Presidency urged us to do just last month (and reiterated in this letter). Couldn’t they at least urge mask-wearing in the temple? Saying that people are asked to wear masks just sounds far weaker than I would have expected.

I worked in a couple of public libraries for a number of years, and in one, people were limited to checking out no more than five DVDs at a time. A sign next to the DVD section said something like “Please take no more than five DVDs.” Someone once asked me why the sign said “please,” because it made it sound like a request. We had the rule, so why not just say what it was? Anyway, I feel like the First Presidency statement brings up the same question. If it’s announcing a rule that people have to wear masks to go in the temple, the letter’s soft language is failing to communicate, because I’ve already seen people arguing online that they can go to the temple unmasked because this is only a request.

I think it’s stating a rule, but they just got carried away in softening their language. Here’s the full paragraph from the letter I’m taking the quote from.

As cases of COVID-19 increase in many areas, we want to do everything possible to allow temples to remain open. Therefore, effective immediately, all temple patrons and workers are asked to wear face masks at all times while in the temple. These safety protocols are temporary, based on COVID-19 conditions, and will be rescinded as soon as circumstances permit.

Here are reasons why I think the letter is making a rule:

It says “effective immediately.” If they were only making a request, timing wouldn’t matter, as not everyone would be expected to comply anyway. When they’re making a new rule, though, they need to be explicit about when it starts, so saying when it becomes effective signals that it’s a rule.

In Church Policy, Unrighteous dominion

How could the Church take unrighteous dominion seriously?

Ziff10 September 202113 Comments

I was in a ward once where the Gospel Doctrine teacher loved to quote from the end of D&C 121. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s the piece that talks about how priesthood authority shouldn’t be used to control people. Here’s verse 39:

We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

This is a bit of Mormon scripture that I like quite a bit. I’m (working on being) a feminist and I don’t like hierarchies, so this reminder of how easy it is for people holding power to use it in bad ways to control people they have power over seems like a really important one to me.

In spite of that, I never liked how the Gospel Doctrine teacher used the scripture. He never used it as a starting point for us to consider how unrighteous dominion might be a problem that we had seen or experienced or participated in. Instead, he used it as an excuse for ignoring any issues or questions with the Church. For example, he once told us that people pushing for women’s ordination were wrong because we have D&C 121, so unrighteous dominion isn’t a problem in the Church. I’m wondering if his problem wasn’t that he had watched G.I. Joe as a kid, and the line “knowing is half the battle” from its little morals at the end of the episodes had morphed in his head to “knowing is all the battle.”

This teacher’s misguided belief that if a problem is brought up in our scriptures it’s pretty much solved already got me to wondering how the Church could change to take the inevitability of unrighteous dominion more seriously. Because as it stands, the organization of the Church clearly agrees with the Gospel Doctrine teacher and not with me. If you feel like a ward leader is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can go to the bishop. The bishop who most likely called the leader, and isn’t likely to be sympathetic to you. If you feel like your bishop is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can have the same problem with the stake president, who similarly probably called the bishop. (And even if he didn’t, he has the power to call and release bishops, so he’s likely to think the bishop is doing a good job.) If your stake president isn’t sympathetic, well, as I’ve seen many Bloggernacle commenters say over the years, you can go to God and pray that he’ll soften their hearts, or perhaps inspire the GAs to contact them about it. It’s not a very good system for getting any serious issues addressed, but it does seem like a great system to keep people compliant and quiet, and keep any real problems from reaching the GAs’ ears.

In LGBT Issues, Statistics

How often do BYU student speakers at commencement suggest they’re straight?

Ziff27 August 202127 August 202118 Comments

Like many other people, I was dismayed to read Elder Holland’s recent speech at BYU where he advocated the use of metaphorical muskets to fire at people who he sees as not sufficiently faithful to the Church’s anti-LGBT stance. He seemed very concerned about a slippery slope that starts with a student expressing the idea (approved by powers that be in the administration!) that they were gay and also loved by God that might lead to . . . it’s unclear exactly what. Maybe a student would say they’re single and also loved by God, or trans and also loved by God. I can’t really get Elder Holland’s concern here, since the people approving the speeches work for the Q15, so if he doesn’t like that they approved it, he should maybe call an internal meeting over it rather than wringing his hands about it in public. Anyway, at the same time that he’s deeply concerned with this slippery slope, Elder Holland seems totally unconcerned with another slippery slope that he starts by bringing up the metaphor of using muskets to shoot at people who aren’t straight-friendly enough. This slippery slope starts with discussion of metaphorical musket fire and moves to discussion of real musket fire (helpfully already supplied by DezNat folks and their friends) and ends with physical violence against LGBT people. I think this should be a much bigger concern, but clearly Elder Holland doesn’t agree. I don’t even want to know how much he sympathizes with DezNat. I was clearly wrong when I placed him as “lean progressive” on my Q15 spectrum just a couple of months ago.

In COVID, Fun, Music

Because I’ve Been Infected Much

Ziff19 August 202119 August 20217 Comments

We here at ZD have learned that the following hymn has been submitted to the Church by a group of devoted anti-vaxxers for possible inclusion in the new hymnbook. It is sung to the tune of “Because I Have Been Given Much.”

Because I’ve been infected much, I too infect.

I’ll pass a virus on before you can detect!

In me the germs will reproduce,

I will then quickly let them loose,

So they can put themselves to use!

Because I’ve learned to never share another’s load,

And never to someone in need compassion showed,

I will not ever wear a mask,

I will be angry if you ask,

Don’t say it; I’ll take you to task!

Because I have such natural immunity,

I have no need of helping my community.

COVID vaccines I will eschew,

Washing my hands I will skip too,

If someone dies I hope it’s you!

In Church Policy, COVID

Did the First Presidency letter increase masking at church?

Ziff16 August 202118 Comments

Like many other people, I was very happy to see the First Presidency’s message last week where they urged members to get vaccinated against COVID and to wear masks. Sure, I can quibble with the timing (it would have been nice if they had said this months ago) or the wording (the caveat that masks are only urged “whenever social distancing is not possible” seems a little silly given that social distancing is pretty much impossible at church, when entering and exiting at the very least), but overall it’s excellent. It’s a welcome sign that the First Presidency actually does see themselves as running the Church, and they don’t intend to cede control of the American part of the Church entirely to the Fox News crowd.

I was really curious to see what effect the letter would have in my ward. First, some background: I live in a suburban ward in the American Midwest. It’s almost entirely white people. Politically, it strikes me as pretty middle of the road for wards I’ve lived in. As you’d guess, there are definitely more people on the conservative side, but there are also a smattering of Democrats. Among the conservatives, there are at least some old-school conservatives who really don’t like Trump, but there are also some who love him and his populist message of exclusion and hatred.

In Church Policy, Fun

Ten More Changes the Church Could Make and Un-make before Next Conference

Ziff4 August 20218 Comments

The Church has announced that the Saturday night session of General Conference will be held after all, although it’s not going to be a priesthood or women’s session, but another general session. I think it’s unfortunate that the net effect of the change will most likely be fewer women speakers. I am happy, though, to see Church leaders being willing to reconsider changes they’ve made, even after those changes have been made public, like they also did with the Manti Temple renovation. Of course I still have lots of things to complain about, like that I wish GAs would seriously consider larger changes, like how to spend the Church’s money or how to give the Church a more robust and representative leadership structure by extending the priesthood to women. And the constant tinkering really isn’t compatible with the obedience-demanding stance of the Church. I’m fine with the reality that Church leaders are feeling their way in the dark just like the rest of us, but I think it’s manifestly absurd when they demand absolute loyalty and zero questions or dissent while they clearly don’t know exactly what they’re doing much of the time either.

Mostly, though, rather than seriously considering what this change might mean, I wanted to go my more typical silly route and come up with a list of changes the Church might make and un-make before October Conference. If you have more suggestions, please don’t hesitate to add them in the comments!

In Profanity

A Mormon Swear Word

Ziff12 July 202120 Comments

What might a Mormon swear word look like? I’m not talking about softened versions of profanities like shiz and fetch and flip that many Mormons use to avoid their harsher cousins. (Although I admit that, especially given that my blogging name comes from the Book of Mormon, I have a soft spot for shiz, since it’s not only a fun word, but a Book of Mormon character.) I mean a full-fledged expletive that people could clutch their pearls when they hear.

What prompted me to ask this question was that I recently started reading Benjamin K. Bergen’s book on profanity, What the F. In the first couple of chapters, Bergen looks at the types of words that get used as profanities. Across languages, it seems like they are references to holy things made profane (which is of course where the word profanity comes from), to sex, and to defecation/urination/vomiting. (Bergen includes a fourth category, slurs, but to me, this seems like a different type of word.) It’s the first group that interests me here. He points out that a substantial fraction of the most common profanities in places where the Catholic Church is or has been influential are not just religious words, but particularly Catholic-related ones:

Quebecois French . . . makes heavy use of what it calls sacres (“consecrations”) — strong profanities related to Catholicism and Catholic liturgical concepts. Far stronger than merde (“shit”) or foutre (“fuck”) in Quebec are tabarnack (“tabernacle”), calisse (“chalice”), and calvaire (“Calvary”).

The Mormon angle here is just that I was wondering what kind of Mormon holy word might be turned into a profanity if the LDS Church were as influential as Catholicism.

In Fun

Gospel Topics Essay Redirects

Ziff6 July 20216 Comments

The Church recently took down its Gospel Topics essay titled “Becoming Like God.” Here’s a WayBack Machine snapshot of what it used to say. For a little while, the page redirected to the “Are Mormons Christian?” essay. Now, at least for the moment, it redirects to itself. I’m including a screenshot because I figure this likely won’t last for long.

The redirect to “Are Mormons Christian?” got me to thinking that there are all kinds of potentially troubling issues that could be listed in the Gospel Topics Essays, but then redirected to other topics. Rather than giving readers the essay they think they want, give them the essay they should have wanted, right? The following are my suggestions.

Are Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormon? . . . redirects to . . . No

Are Mormons Christian? . . . redirects to . . . Are Mormons Mormon?

Are Mormons Mormon? . . . redirects to . . . Are Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormon?

Book of Mormon Anachronisms . . . redirects to . . . What Is History, Really?

Book of Mormon and DNA . . . redirects to . . . DNA: Reality or Illusion?

In General Conference

General Conference Was Different in the 1960s (even setting aside the talks)

Ziff23 June 202116 Comments

I recently flipped through reports of General Conference from the 1960s (to get lists of speakers for my last post, as they’re only listed on the Church website back to 1971). I didn’t read through the talks, but even just looking at what the men conducting each session said, several things struck me that are different from my experience watching Conference, which started in the 1980s.

David O. McKay used to conduct every single session. Starting from April 1960, the first time someone else conducted a session was in April 1962, when he allowed Hugh B. Brown to break his streak. And I didn’t check how far back into the 1950s it went. He might have been doing it for a decade. I have to admit that if, say, Russell M. Nelson had started doing this when he became Church President, it would strike me as overly controlling.
Through October 1962, all new wards, stakes, and stake presidents were announced in Conference. It’s striking how much smaller the Church was that that could even be a possibility. I remember as a kid, hearing the story of how Spencer W. Kimball was called from being a stake president to being a member of the Q12, and how amazing that was. He was called in 1943. Given the size of the Church at that time, that seems much less remarkable than I had thought (and than it had been taught to me).
The sustaining of Church officers included listing David O. McKay as trustee-in-trust for the Church. I don’t think I learned of the Church’s corporate structure until I read this series of posts by Daymon Smith at BCC a decade ago.
Conference used to take three days, and was timed to always have one of the days fall on April 6th, even if it meant having the days be non-consecutive.
The men conducting Conference used to often announce a rolling list of the next two speakers. For example, they’d announce that Elder A and Elder B would speak. Then Elder A would speak, and the man conducting would announce Elder B and Elder C.

In General Conference, Statistics

General Conference Talks by Speaker Position Since 1960

Ziff17 June 20211 Comment

How many women will speak in General Conference now that the Church has announced that it’s discontinuing Saturday night gender-specific sessions? This was the major question I asked in my post last week on this change. I worry that we’ll go back to just having two women speak per Conference, the norm for the last several years when you ignore gender-specific sessions. Some commenters on the post were more optimistic that there would be more, though.

I was wondering about which other group of speakers (i.e., holders of what position–Seventies, Q12, or whatever) might have their speaking opportunities reduced to make space for more women speaking. I thought it could be helpful to look back at recent history, to see how many speaking slots the different positions have been allocated. I went back to 1960, because that turned out to be a good compromise between getting a good amount of data and me running out of energy.

Of course the total number of talks per Conference isn’t constant. This graph shows the average number of talks per Conference each year. I’m showing the average each year instead of showing the talk counts Conference by Conference because there’s often a lot of up-and-down noise between April and October (for reasons like the statistical and auditing reports only occurring in April) that makes the trend across time harder to look at. Averaging each year smooths those little ups and downs out, although you can see there’s still plenty of year-to-year variation.

In Church Policy, General Conference

General Conference, Now 20% Shorter!

Ziff8 June 202122 Comments

The Church announced yesterday that, starting with October Conference this year, the Saturday evening session (priesthood in April, women’s in October) will be discontinued. I have a few thoughts on this change, but they don’t really hang together at all, so I’m just going to list them.

I’m all for fewer meetings, particularly in General Conference. Ten hours of meetings over a weekend is a lot! I appreciate President Nelson’s willingness to tinker with Church practices and not just assume that the way things have been must be the way things will be.
As I read former Ordain Women board member Heather Olson Beal pointing out elsewhere online, it seems like this change can be traced to OW’s actions several years ago where women asked to be admitted in person to the priesthood session. In response, clearly in an attempt to take the wind out of OW’s sails, the next year the Church started broadcasting and streaming the priesthood session like it did other sessions. But now that this session is available to anyone, the Church’s announcement reasons, what’s the point of having it at all?
This change is being made because all sessions of general conference are now available to anyone who desires to watch or listen.
This argument seems odd to me. It says that the crucial characteristic that made priesthood session priesthood session was that it was closed, and no random people (especially not women, apparently) could listen in. I had always thought that what made priesthood session different was the content: there are talks there directed to priesthood holder that don’t really apply to non-priesthood holders.
It’s not at all surprising that with the ending of priesthood session, women’s session is also ended. It does seem like the “if it’s not closed, what’s the point” argument does not apply to women’s session, so that’s not a reason to end it. But of course, in a patriarchal church, it would be surprising if women got to do an extra thing that men weren’t doing. So the end of priesthood session also means the end of women’s session.
It seems inevitable to me that the ending of the gender-specific sessions won’t end speakers in Conference wanting to talk to only men or only women. This will just mean that these talks will now occur in the remaining general sessions. I’m guessing that there will be more talks aimed specifically at men than specifically at women, although perhaps this will be a good thing, considering how often talks aimed at women are about enforcing gender roles.
As Peggy Fletcher Stack and Scott D. Pierce’s article points out, this change will almost certainly lead to fewer women speaking in Conference, as the women’s session was typically a chance to hear from three women, even if few spoke in the general sessions. This graph shows the number of women (including one YW who spoke last year) speaking each Conference since 2010. Up until the women’s session and priesthood session started alternating in April and October, there were typically two women speaking in the general sessions, plus three more in the women’s session. (The graph includes the RS and YW meetings before they were official Conference sessions.) It seems likely that two women speaking per conference is the norm we’ll go back to. This change will flow through to the rest of the curriculum too, which is so much all Conference all the time now, and we’ll hear from hardly any women at all. I’d like to hope that this was an unintended side effect of the change, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was a very much intended effect.