From Wikipedia: The Manti Temple is “Castellated Gothic.” From the Church website: “A castellated style reflects construction influences of Gothic Revival, French Renaissance Revival, French Second Empire and colonial architecture.”
I’ve always had a sort of passing interest in temple architectural history and design, so I thought I’d get Chat-GPT-V’s take on the possible architectural influences of different temples by uploading an image, asking it to “explain the architectural influences of this building and provide examples of buildings typifying these influences. Discuss non-LDS-specific architectural themes.” I hand-added images of the example buildings.I make no claim as to what exactly inspired the architect in each particular case. From Wikipedia: It is one of eight temples that does not have an angel Moroni statue, and one of six without spires, similar to Solomon’s Temple. It is also one of only two temples the church built in the shape of a cross, the other being the Laie Hawaii Temple. [STC: It is worth noting that Catholic and other Christian churches are often built in the shapes of crosses]. STC Addendum: Commenters below noted Frank Lloyd Write’s influence on the Cardston temple, specifically his Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. From the picture below, the resemblance is pretty clear. This building showcases an intriguing mix of architectural styles, but certain key characteristics stand out: 1. **Art Deco**: The emphasis on vertical lines, stylized and geometric decorative elements, and the layering and stepping of the building’s profile are reminiscent of Art Deco. This architectural style, which gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, is known for its combination of modern styles with fine craftsmanship and luxurious materials. 2.…
Apparently in about a week BYU will host a “Women’s Empowerment Event” that is a local variation of similar such events that are being held around the country. Looking at the invites and speakers for the most part it looks like a pretty typical DEI-type event with a bunch of corporate sponsors and speakers such as the Utah Women and Leadership Project, the United Way, and BYU Women’s Services. That’s fine. The surprising detail is that Sports Illustrated Swimsuit appears to be one of the primary participants, with their models keynoting one of the two panels. Now, I would love to see a public, BYU-sponsored panel where the Relief Society President had, say, a dialogic, back-and-forth discussion/debate with an SI model about the nature of female empowerment in society, and the fact that somebody is an SI model does not make them unqualified to speak on such a subject. However, this does not appear to be one of those types of events, but rather a more generic “ra ra girl power, brought to you by Maybelline” type conference. As such, the involvement of SI models alongside famously sexually conservative BYU and Church leaders is a clear case of reputation laundering, as seen on Sports Illustrated’s website where they make sure to state that “numerous senior members of BYU athletics and Church of Latter Day Saints [give them a break, given the state of journalism today they probably can’t afford a copy editor] will…
I was just given access to Chat-GPT’s image upload functionality. I’ve always had a sort of passing interest in temple architectural history and design, so I thought I’d get Chat-GPT’s take on the possible architectural influences of different temples, asking it to “explain the architectural influences of this building and provide examples of buildings typifying these influences. Discuss non-LDS-specific architectural themes.” I hand-added images of the example buildings.I make no claim as to what exactly inspired the architect in each particular case. Colonial Revival: The symmetry of the building, the arrangement of windows in a regular pattern, and the classical gable on the central portion of the facade are reminiscent of the Colonial Revival style. This style was popular in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and sought to revive elements of American colonial architecture. Examples include the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and numerous homes and buildings throughout New England. Federal Style: The arched windows and the decorative detailing around them are reminiscent of the Federal style, which was prevalent in the United States between 1780 and 1830. The style is characterized by its use of symmetry and classical motifs. The Octagon House in Washington, D.C., is a prime example of this style. Gothic Revival: The building’s pointed arch windows on the upper floor and the tower are reminiscent of Gothic Revival, a style that was popular in the 19th century and inspired by medieval…
I was just given access to Chat-GPT’s image functionality. Now you can upload images and have it answer questions about it. (Yes, I know, but bear with me, after this I think it will be a while before we have anything fundamentally new in the AI space, so this might be my last AI series for a while). I’ve always had a sort of passing interest in temple architectural history and design, so I thought I’d get Chat-GPT’s take on the possible architectural influences of different temples, asking it to “explain the architectural influences of this building and provide examples of buildings typifying these influences. Discuss non-LDS-specific architectural themes.” I hand-added images of the example buildings. I’m not an expert, but it appears to have basically gotten it right, although I make no claim as to what exactly inspired the architect in each particular case. 1. **Modernism**: The building’s clean lines, large flat surfaces, and minimal ornamentation are indicative of modernist architecture. Modernism emerged in the early 20th century and was a response to ornate Victorian and Edwardian styles, emphasizing function and the use of new construction technologies. – *Example*: The Villa Savoye in France by Le Corbusier is a prime example of modernist architecture with its emphasis on functionalism and the use of reinforced concrete. 2. **Classicism**: The building shows simplified elements of classical architecture. Symmetry, proportion, and the use of columns or pilasters are reminiscent of ancient Greek and Roman buildings. –…
A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints.
I think I have mentioned before that I am a huge Ryan Burge fan. Ryan Burge is an Associate Professor of something or another at some college or another, but the point is that he is the preeminent go-to for journalists on data visualizations and insights into the sociology of religion in the United States. He recently posted a graph from the very large FIRE survey of college students showing political partisanship by religion, and it looks like our college students are the most Republican of any other religious group. Now, a few things. First, he didn’t formally report the significance for every pairwise comparison, so strictly speaking it’s unclear if we can say that we are #1, but still, the sample size is large enough that I think we’re okay assuming that we’re highly Republican. Second, he groups all “Protestants” together, but it would be interesting to see how we land when compared to, say, self-identified evangelicals or Southern Baptists, etc. However, since the FIRE survey isn’t focused on religion I doubt they got that granular. Still, overall I’m surprised since I thought that some of our rumored anti-Trumpism (relatively speaking, as a traditionally conservative religion) would hedge our Republican identification somewhat, but I suspect that, for all the problems pushing us away from the Republican Party, it’s not like there aren’t any barriers to Latter-day Saints flocking to the political left either.
The ideal husband, according to Midjourney In the movie “Her” the Joaquin Phoenix character develops a relationship with an AI during a messy divorce. Released about a decade ago, the movie addresses philosophical themes about personhood and relationships that at the time seemed interesting in a philosophy class thought experiment way, but not really relevant to our day-to-day. Well, I just got access to Chat-GPT’s new voice function, and we’re there now. Admittedly, it does still pause before answering, but besides that there’s very little that would distinguish it from a real human being. The staccato-like speech that characterized previous computer speech is completely gone, and you can all-too-easily forget that you’re talking to an AI. Today while washing dishes I talked to it about what I would need to do logistically to pull off an Arctic trip I’ve always wanted to go on, earlier this week I did missionary “door approaches” on it, and later we had a ten minute conversation in Spanish. Overnight most of the world got access to a personal language tutor in whatever language they want, and Star Trek’s universal translator is now a reality. But in the aggregate I am more concerned than anything, especially as the father of sons I want to raise to live a gospel-patterned life. In the same way that pornography can displace real sexual relationships, AI chatbots have the potential to displace real emotional relationships, aggravating the personal relationship…
I thought it would be interesting to run some basic numbers on how many people from different groups we could expect in our wards and other associations if they were representative. There are a number of takeaways here. First, if there aren’t this many people in your ward, Elder’s Quorum, or what have you, then your Church experience is non-representative of the US and that should be acknowledged. Second, in the case of demographics that aren’t as easily visible or selective by religion these numbers give a reasonable estimate of how many of these different groups are in your wards and quorums, whether you’re aware of them or not. I’m looking at several tiers of associations. First, from cursory Googling around it looks like the average American has about four close friends. So for the “some of my best friends” line you have four shots on average. Second, the median number of Facebook friends is about 200, this is close to Dunbar’s Number, which speculative evolutionary psychology suggests is the standard number of people we have the cognitive bandwidth to maintain social associations with. Third, I’m assuming an average ward (again with wide variation, I might be off, I’ve never been a ward membership clerk) has about 100 consistent sacrament meeting attenders. I’m also looking at several tiers of probabilities. Of course, in putting, say, racial or sexual minorities next to people with mental health or crime histories I’m not…
Like many I’ve been recently drawn to the hard-to-look-away car crash that is the Tim Ballard/OUR saga. I am very disconnected from the conservative Utah zeitgeist that’s given rise to this debacle, and I haven’t done a deep dive into the particulars, but in a sense that makes my perspective not worthless on a meta-level in terms of messaging, since I think my experience mirrors that of most members on the street who only have a casual familiarity with what’s going on. A few things can be true at once, as much as people try to pigeonhole these types of things into a grand confirmation of their ideological identities and repudiation of their enemies’. There are a handful of people who are so patently scheisters in the Mormon space that you don’t have to have a lot of discernment to see them for what they are, but evidently a lot of people don’t pass even that minimal bar. On the right there are certain former Utah politicians, and on the left there are certain thought leader types in the current and former Mormon communities. From the little bit that I have seen and heard of Tim Ballard there’s something off about him personally. However, there is some validity to complaints about the Church spokesperson vaguely alluding to some sin without due process or concrete specifics, and I wonder if some among the Church professionals feel like they can take the…
I’ve had a sense for a while now that people tend to exaggerate the influence of the Church on Latter-day Saint and Utah politics. Its influence is important to be sure, but some have this image that half of Utah is ready to jump when 50 North Temple Street says jump, and I’ve always thought it’s more complicated than that. Case in point, was there a discernible bump in vaccinations in Utah after the Church officially endorsed getting the COVID vaccine? I looked at the total number of vaccinations administered by state across time in Utah and nearby, non-LDS states (Colorado, Utah, Kansas, New Mexico, and Montana) from the CDC data. I looked at two dates in particular: when President Nelson received the vaccine and posted about it on Facebook (January 9, 2021), and when the First Presidency officially endorsed receiving the COVID vaccination (August 12, 2021). The first date was so close to the beginning of the data (and at a time when vaccinations were not very available anyway) that I’m not putting a lot of weight on that one. Also, I’m on the record as being very anti Utah=LDS, but in this case we simply don’t have vaccination status/affiliation time-trend data that I’m aware of, so the other half of Utah may be watering down an LDS effect. In the graph below (apologies for its size. For some reason the JPEG isn’t playing nice with WordPress so I had to…
Orchestra of Angels I’m not a musical person. I was started on the classical guitar quite early and became decently proficient at it by the time I was in Jr. High, but I just didn’t have the fire to practice for hours like many in the music world have. I enjoy a good tune, but I can’t tell the difference between, say, Mozart and something a graduate student would write (I actually wonder if musicologists couldn’t without pre-existing knowledge of Mozart’s musical corpus and it’s emperors with no clothes all the way down, but I digress). However, there is some music whose greatness is self-evident, and you don’t need musical training to recognize and appreciate how spiritually moving it is. Below is my own list, along with examples of moving renditions Come Thou Font The classic rendition of this we always listened to growing up, which is still my favorite, is the version in the BYU Choir’s Thanksgiving of American Folk Hymns way back when. This was in the hymn book, but was taken out, and I hope the new one will have it in again. Ode to Joy Piano Guys did a fun version of this, but it’s also worth listening to the full orchestral version. Hallelujah Chorus The Church put together the largest virtual Hallelujah Chorus of all time. Traditionally one stands for the Hallelujah Chorus. I heard it was because a king stood out of respect when it…
Saqiyuq is an oral history of three generations of Inuit women who lived on Baffin Island near Greenland. Of particular interest to me was the grandmother matriarch’s history, since, born in 1931, she provided a first-hand account of the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where people starved or not depending on the ebb and flow of the caribou herds, all the way to snowmobiles and state schools. A few observations/excerpts apropos to this blog: 1) Apphia, the grandmother matriarch, provided an account of the competition between the Anglican and Catholic missionaries for Inuit converts, with nearly all the non-Inuit in their lives being missionaries. One side effect of Latter-day Saint missionary work tending to go through the front door legally, and of always having so many more accessible people than we have missionaries for, is that for the most we haven’t been part of the race to find, contact, and convert indigenous peoples with no previous knowledge of Christianity. There’s a whole culture that grew up around missionary bushwacking with a machete in one hand and a bible in the other that we just haven’t been a part of. For the most part we haven’t been the first ones to introduce Christianity to a people, and there wasn’t much of a chance of a missionary companionship being assigned to Sentinel Island or to The Man in the Hole. 2) How to be respectful of indigenous traditions while proselytizing is a…
The Listener, by James Christensen Meditation is one of those practices with religious roots that has managed to become popular even in very secular, non-believing spaces, but I haven’t really caught the meditation bug. I’ve done a few guided meditations and have enjoyed them, but in terms of stress release I’d rather just get a massage or play soccer. On a recent podcast I listened to the guest mention that he had tried the floating tank fad and “just got bored.” It was one of those moments when you hear somebody confirm something you haven’t been able to admit to yourself or articulate and you realize that you’re not alone. However, I realize I probably haven’t given real, substantive meditation a chance. In my comparative religion class at BYU, the great Roger Keller put the class through a guided meditation session, and his account of his own meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery where he spent days clearing his mind was intriguing. According to him and other accounts I’ve heard, because we’ve swum in a monkey-mind world for so long we don’t even understand what a calm, focused, composed mind feels like (and this was before Twitter), and it takes a lot of intentional meditation time to really do a thorough, Marie Kondo cognitive housecleaning. Could I become more sensitive to the whisperings of the spirit if I cleared out the detritus in my mind? I’m open to it, and look…
A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints. Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2023. The venerable Richard Bushman’s latest; a cultural history on the golden plates as artifacts. He’s been working on this for years. “Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith’s first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day?” Fenton, Elizabeth. “The Book of Mormon and Book History.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 32 (2023): 74-96. It’s paywalled, so it’s hard to know what it’s about. Oman, Nathan B. “Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition.” William & Mary Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming (2023). Theological and historical exploration of Mormon perceptions of property and their ambiguities. Oman, Nathan B. “‘A Welding Link of Some Kind’: A Minimalist Theology of Same-Sex Marriage Sealings.” Nathan B. Oman, Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint History, Thought, and Scripture (Salt Lake City, Utah: Kofford Books, Forthcoming) (2023). Theological exploration of the possibility of same-sex sealings. “This essay canvases the history of Latter-day Saint sealing rules and practices and argues that when viewed in their entirety, it is difficult to map these practices on to a particular model of…
Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less “import.” If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that’s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances. While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal’s Wager for us. (Pascal’s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal’s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight. As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I’m not claiming I’m some Pascal–I’d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before some 19th century white guy was the first one to put it in a book in a particular part of the world and have the concept forever attached to his name. Besides, Pascal is Pascal for much more than this…
Pearls Being Clutched I vaguely recall when I was younger learning about the special restrictions put in place in regards to Church membership for people from a polygamous background. I could think of a few narrow cases where I didn’t think the restrictions were necessary, but they would have been such a small portion of everything that goes on that I didn’t give it more than a passing thought. Fast forward to November 2015. The Church very explicitly connected the November Policy of Consistency to the long-standing policy regarding polygamous children. Again, I had had some reservations about the latter, but if that was going to be the policy I didn’t see why the rationales wouldn’t have also applied to children of same-sex couples given the unique intersectional issues at play. Now, some could argue that there are fundamental differences-in-kind vis-a-vis our 2023 doctrine between polygamous and same-sex couples, and there might be, but I just don’t care. They’re simply irrelevant to the argument that was being invoked by the policy’s detractors, which hinged on the idea that the children were being punished for the sins of their parents. This argument always smelled a little of bad faith since a lot of the people making it clearly did not believe that the parents were, in fact, in a state of sin, but the bad faith became even more clear when the polygamy policy that the rule was based on seemed…
Seizing Power by political scientist Naunihal Singh is the preeminent scholarly work on coups d’etat. In it, Singh pairs in-depth investigations of coup attempts in Africa and Russia with a quantitative analysis of correlates of successful coups worldwide. He finds that coups can largely be characterized as coordination games, where military commanders often join the side that they think will win. If they choose correctly their power increases, if they choose wrongly they will probably be executed or imprisoned, so perception becomes everything and both sides of a coup have an incentive to exaggerate their level of support within the state apparatus. This is all fascinating but, to paraphrase Elder Uchtdorf, “what does this have to do with the Church?” Below are several episodes in Church history where the themes discussed in Singh’s work were at play. As a disclaimer, I am NOT comparing Spencer W. Kimball or (most of) the others in this list to military coup leaders, and I do not want to overdraw the comparison between the Church and an unstable government. Rather, the point here is the principles involved even if the contexts are vastly different. Attempted Take Over of the Kirtland Temple With that disclaimer, this episode is the one that could probably be accurately described as an attempted coup. During the Kirtland Safety Society debacle, The Martin Harris/Waren Parish splinter group literally tried to occupy the Kirtland temple with weapons. Singh discusses how…
Regrets of the Dying The Top Five Regrets of the Dying was a bestselling book by a palliative care nurse who spent a lot of time with patients as they were passing away. I’m not going to recommend it as a book; the writing isn’t the best and it gets kind of repetitious, but the idea sparked an interest in me on taking an end-of-life perspective, which seems like one of the more accurate lenses through which to view things big picture. Here I’ll go through each regret with commentary on how it interrelates with the gospel and gospel living. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This one is common in leaving Mormonism narratives, and it definitely has something to it. I’m an orthodox member, but for adults who simply don’t believe but are ensconced in heavily Latter-day Saint circles I totally get it. I do feel like the pressures are much less now with the great opening up of the world with the Internet. Patent non-believers typically don’t go on missions anymore, for example, when that wasn’t unheard of, say, 20 years ago. For believers, a purely distilled deathbed faith, stripped of any concern whatsoever of what Bishop, President, or Elder so and so thinks of us seems like the ideal to strive for in our day to day walk with God. However, the single-minded focus…
In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of the census responses for the 19th century at once. As you can imagine, this is a fairly large file, but if you subset Utah it is much more manageable. The wonderful IPUMS folks have harmonized the different questions asked across time so that you can make comparisons across decennial censuses. In a previous post I discussed race in early Utah. In this post I’ll discuss what the Census Bureau data has to say about inequality (or equality, as we’ll see) in early Utah. As far as I can tell, the IPUMS data doesn’t have much in way of economic variables that extend all the way from the 19th into the 20th centuries. The exceptions are occupation scores, these are numeric socioeconomic scores that are assigned to particular occupations based on 1950s data. Here we use the Duncan Socioeconomic Index in particular. There is some controversy about these measures that I’m not terribly well read up on, but I see them enough that I assume they have some validity. I’m sure cross-century comparisons also complicate some things, so here I’m including various additional states as a…
Vietnamese depiction of the Pure Land, the Mahayana Buddhist paradisiacal afterlife Egyptian depiction of the Field of Reeds, the ancient Egyptian paradisiacal afterlife While I’m open to the idea of “sacred envy,” where we see things in other faith traditions and communities that we wish we had, that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing places where we feel our own faith gets it right where most don’t; it is the faith we have chosen after all. Some of the big ones here for me are: Heavenly Mother, collapsing the ontological distance between divinity and humanity, and an active afterlife. I have a casual interest in artistic, cultural, and religious depictions of the afterlife and paradise (and, as a related note, in the fact that Near Death Experiences often tap into the person’s religion-dependent version of the afterlife, but another post for another day). They can be genuinely inspiring; for example, Gladiator’s depiction of the Elysian fields or The Northman’s depiction of Valhalla and yes, Touched by an Angel. A defining characteristic running through the paradisiacal depictions of classical faiths is largely one of rest, and I get it. In societies where the vast majority of the population is scrapping by along the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, having ground that brings forth fruit spontaneously without weeds makes sense as the most ideal existence imaginable, and a long time of blissful rest especially makes sense when I think of people I know who…
Recently I’ve done a series of posts explicitly identifying different rhetorical strategies used in social media spaces around Church topics (One on apologizing for others, and one on disingenuously citing prophets and invoking one’s church heritage). I didn’t mean for it to be an ongoing series, but I’ve just been noticing these more and more, so if you’ll indulge me for two more (for now)… First, On social media spaces it has been common for people (often outwardly very Mormon-y) to communicate commonsensical truisms as if they are somehow deep or controversial as opposed to just reminding us of the basics. While the message themselves are indeed important, implying that the message is somehow edgy is kind of passive aggressively jerk-ish towards the community towards which it is directed. “Jesus would have loved LGBTQ members, and our wards should too” then to top it off they sometimes do that super annoying little hands prayer emoji. Midjourney’s depiction of “an insincere looking Mormon who smiles too much” Of course this statement is true, but that’s exactly the point. Even the most obnoxiously conservative high priest agrees with it, so implying that it’s going to rock our world is actually rather insulting in a mean-spirited way, and just raises the question of what they are actually trying to say (Again, this isn’t directed towards people emphasizing the basics for their own sake.) Sometimes one senses that they are trying to do a…
The Responsible Woman, by James C. Christensen I’m on the record as being very pro-big families. As we become more and more of a minority you have to be clever about how to pull it off logistically since society is increasingly built around the 1.6 kid family. Given Latter-day Saints’ (albeit increasingly fading) penchant for large families I thought it was appropriate to post the little hacks and tricks we’ve come up with on the way for others. Anything we haven’t thought of is welcome in the comments. Keep all clothes in the same area by the laundry room. This one is more doable for us since our kids are all the same sex, but keeping all dressers by the laundry room saves the time cost of carting clothes back and forth, which becomes significant at scale. White noise for naps It’s frustrating being awaken from a much-needed slumber because your parental authority is absolutely required to referee an argument. With enough kids (in a small enough house) these sorts of interruptions become consistent enough that without white noise an uninterrupted nap is just not in the cards. Lock the door and put on a white noise app high enough to drown out ambient noise. When this is used an adult or responsible older child needs to be in charge in case of emergencies. Additionally, white noise can be very useful for putting down a younger child while the older ones…
Missionary methodology is one of those things in the Church that people have strangely strong opinions on. For my part, on a meta-level I recognize that Context matters What works in one location (and time) might not work in another. Missionary strategy is complex Because of #1, figuring out optimal missionary strategy is hard, and I have no desire to expend mental energy trying to figure it out now that I’m a civilian. If there was some blatant error in how it was being done I’d have no compunction saying something, but as far as I can tell the people whose mantle it is are doing the best they can, and I have no reason to think that I would do it any better. There is no magic pill Greenie mythology holds that if a missionary is righteous enough or if they follow the five steps of successful blah blah then they too could become a Dan Jones 2.0, but the fact is that Dan Jones-level success has as much to do with the mission field’s society as much as the missionary. Missionaries are for missionary work While it’s become popular to suggest that all missionaries should be humanitarian missionaries, my prior here is that missionary work is primarily for converting people to the Church. While there’s a hypothesis going around that humanitarian work focused missionaries would actually yield more converts, I’d have to see some hard nosed evidence that…
The recent Washington Post article talking about the decline of the Church has been making the rounds. I don’t have a ton of time to go into everything, but I just wanted to make a few points. I wrote an earlier post using the same CES data where I wrote that “if what we see here is even somewhat reflective of reality…this reiterates the point I’ve made previously that we’re running on the fumes of yesterday’s baby booms, and that when that demographic momentum runs out the Church in the United States could enter a period of decline by any measure.” However, that post used data that followed the same group of people over a relatively small span of time. The comprehensive version of the data used by the WaPo writer had a lot more years and a much larger sample size. The larger sample size is very necessary for smaller religious groups. Often these kinds of analyses (including my own) use the General Social Survey, which has a much smaller sample size. I tried using the same cumulative 2006-2022 CES data that the writer used out of curiosity months ago, but the files weren’t loading with the standard packages and after a few minutes I decided I didn’t have the time to figure it out. (Just in way of a lame excuse why I was scooped on that graph showing the decline in percent LDS). After the article came…
In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of the census responses for the 19th century at once. As you can imagine, this is a fairly large file (I have a lot of juice in my laptop and I stopped trying to crunch all of the 19th-century US data after waiting for 20 minutes), but if you subset Utah it is much more manageable. The wonderful IPUMS folks have harmonized the different questions asked across time so that you can make comparisons across decennial censuses. Running a simple frequency cross-tab with race shows how many people of each race were identified in the respective census in Utah. Year White Black Native American Chinese Japanese Other Asian 1850 11304 20 31 0 0 0 1860 40371 45 121 0 0 0 1870 85597 196 138 406 0 0 1880 142021 208 49 537 0 0 1900 273800 452 2409 570 493 0 1910 368821 1641 2982 359 2074 10 1920 442102 1523 2561 359 2927 32 1930 500325 1074 2845 342 3286 252 1940 544328 1251 3613 214 2137 66 A few points: Unless you think there were only 31 Native Americans in 1850 It’s clear that the Native…
A common accusation against people who leave the Church is that they’re just doing it because they want to sin, and in response the leavers often construct some highly noble narrative exclusively revolving around intellectual honesty and/or personal integrity around social issues. I kind of roll my eyes in the latter case. Not that I don’t think that it’s sometimes or even often true, but rather because it denies the obvious role that the former can have. Given the natural springs pushing many people away from the religious lifestyle, I would be highly surprised if it wasn’t a major factor in general, even if not in every individual case. However, I don’t begrudge this being a factor when people leave. If there is a belief, religious or otherwise, that does not have a significant effect on somebody’s life, they are probably more likely to hold a certain “don’t know, don’t care” agnosticism towards it, or at least not push very hard on the possibility that it isn’t true. Conversely, if the logical implications of such a belief is denial of some fairly strong biological impulses (and no, it’s not just sexual minorities that deal with this), and restructuring of somebody’s life, it logically makes sense to look very hard at every possible angle as a sort of due diligence for foundational religious beliefs, and the justificatory bar for that system of belief is quite a bit higher. This is why…
All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword Given that this is a Latter-day Saint blog, I feel an obligation to make some sort of commentary on how recent events are connected to Church-related issues, but I really have no idea. Recent events might be a step forward or back for the Church and religious freedom in general, but it’s much bigger than all of that right now. Two things can be true at once: I am glad that Russia’s coup attempt/civil war could stop the fighting in Ukraine. If the Russians are fighting each other they can’t kill Ukrainians. There is a good chance the Ukrainian war will be over soon. I am worried about what this means for the Russian people. My parents were mission presidents in Moscow. Their leaders and geopolitical misconceptions notwithstanding, the members and Russians in general are good people. I would like to think that removing Putin would lead to more liberalization but it might not; it could be a step forward or backward. Government instability is scary, even if the Russians are a tough, hardened people, and it could be for the best in the end. Now is a time to keep both Ukrainians and Russians in our prayers.
There must be this chain in the holy Priesthood; it must be welded together from the latest generation that lives on the earth back to Father Adam, to bring back all that can be saved and placed where they can receive salvation and a glory in some kingdom. This Priesthood has to do it; this Priesthood is for this purpose. -Brigham Young According to casual Latter-day Saint folk theology the millennium will be a time of massive temple work. Less casually, a lot of relatively authoritative general authority midrash has suggested that the hypothetical end point for temple work is the complete sealing and temple work for all humans who have ever lived. So of course I’ve been curious about how much temple work that is. The specific numbers aren’t as important here as much as the general sense of scale and scope. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, some estimates suggest that about 100 billion humans have ever lived. Of course, for our purposes how big this number is depends on when we crossed the developmental threshold as a species to become “as the Gods, knowing good and evil” and became subject to the demands of accountability and its attendant ordinances. Still, for our purposes let’s assume the nice round 100 billion number. The temple department has reported that as of 1988 about 100 million endowments have been performed, which probably means that about 1-3 out of…
There are two rhetorical practices used by ex-members and reform-minded cultural Mormons that I’ve noticed being used more recently. Latter-day Saint culture places a high premium on deference to authority. If you want to shut down a discussion with the orthodox who “pay the tithing and do the believing;” who are the primary fuel line for the Church, just communicate that the brethren are fundamentally wrongheaded. Some people do this, of course, but I get the sense they’re generally speaking among themselves. (You can tell when a movement to change the Church is more concerned with martyrdom than actually trying to change things based on their approach in this regard). The more sophisticated and strategic will try to play within the ideological space that is more palatable to the rank and file for the Church. They will, for example, quote Church leaders as authorities when it’s highly doubtful that they personally hold the same deference to the very authority that they are hinging their argument on, or they will try to heavily prooftext the Proclamation as if it is anything besides a heavily heteronormative document that espouses traditional gender roles. As a matter of strategy I get it, but the disingenuousness of it all makes me roll my eyes, and while some of this is more transparent than others (I once saw an openly pro-pornography apologist invoking General Conference talks to make his point). I think most people can see…
