Zelophehad's Daughters

Fastest hymn: Go Forth with Faith (Saturday morning), All Creatures of Our God and King (Saturday afternoon), Praise to the Lord, the Almighty (Sunday morning), How Firm a Foundation (Sunday morning), and Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise (Sunday afternoon) all felt quite fast to me.
Slowest hymn: If I Listen with My Heart (Saturday morning)
Best hymn: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing (Sunday morning). This will probably always be my favorite whenever it’s sung, especially the Mack Wilberg arrangement.
Other good hymns: His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Saturday morning), My Song in the Night (Saturday afternoon)
Worst hymn: God Bless Our Prophet Dear (Sunday afternoon)

Liken the hymnbook to yourself: Henry B. Eyring, in announcing the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” called it “My Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

Longest prayer: 148 seconds, J. Anette Dennis, Saturday afternoon benediction
Shortest prayer: 65 seconds, John D. Amos, Sunday afternoon invocation

Longest talk: Tamara W. Runia, 1575 words
Shortest talk: Edward Dube, 902 words

Best titles:

Tamara W. Runia, “The Sculpting of Our Souls”
Paul H. Sinclair, “Quick to Help, Slow to Judge”
Michael A. Dunn, “The Ninety and Ten”

Most footnotes: Hutch U. Fale, 33
Fewest footnotes: Five speakers had zero. All used in-text citations instead.
Longest footnote: Patrick Kearon’s note 10 was 523 words.
Footnote most detracting from a talk’s message: Patrick Kearon’s note 10 was a lengthy quote from Dallin H. Oaks about the danger of spending time with unbelievers. This undermined the hopeful message of his talk about how Jesus wants to lift us up.

Best footnotes:

D. Todd Christofferson’s references and notes about gambling departed from the Conference norm both in being largely secular and actually interesting.
Paul H. Sinclair added a lot of commentary in his footnotes, including things like explaining the idiom “going to the well too many times” and reassuring that “it does not apply when speaking of Jesus Christ.”

Most unnecessary footnote: Hutch U. Fale opened his talk by saying “I am a child of God and He loves me,” and cited Henry B. Eyring. If that isn’t the most basic, agreed-upon LDS doctrine, I don’t know what is.

In Blogging, Fun

A Heretic Reviews 20 Years of His Own Blogging

Ziff28 September 202623 Comments

As of this year, I’ve been blogging at ZD for two decades! This is about 40% of my life, longer than I’ve held any one job, and longer than I’ve lived in any one US state. I spent a lot of time in graduate school, so it still isn’t quite as long as the total amount of time I was in school. And I’ve been married quite a bit longer than I’ve been blogging. But still, it’s a long freaking time! Of course, a lot of my persistence is just technological stubbornness, as interest in the blogs leaked away first to text-based social media, and then even further to social media based on images and videos, while I’ve just hung around here in my comfort zone. It’s also fringe Mormonism stubbornness, as it seems like a lot of people on the edges either eventually leave or (less often, I think) return to being more in the mainstream of the Church, while I’ve stayed in largely the same place over time.

I’ve been thinking back over what I’ve blogged about over the years, and I thought it might be fun to do a review of my blogging in kind of the format of my Conference reviews. (For a different take, back in 2019, I did a more data-and-chart review of myself.) Like in those posts, some of the categories are more objective and others more subjective, so I understand if you disagree with my selections. And of course it’s particularly difficult to evaluate my own work, as even posts I look back on now and maybe cringe at were still things that I thought a lot about and in many cases did a lot of data collection for. So what I’m saying is that I understand if you see my evaluations of my posts as clearly being done with rose-colored glasses.

Total posts: 442

Most posts in a year: 33, in 2015

Most posts in a quarter: 12, in 2015Q2

Most posts in a month: 6, in November, 2015, the month when the Exclusion Policy came out

Last month in which I failed to post: July, 2018. (I realize posting once a month is a low bar, but I’m not the most energetic blogger.)

Favorite titles:

Least favorite title: Pewferences

Phoning it in titles:

I’ve used variations on the phrase “correlated cards for Valentine’s Day” for five different posts.
I’ve also used variations on the phrase “Conference predictions” for four different posts.

Longest title: A Mother There or Multiple Mothers There? A look at whether GA statements about Heavenly Mother leave the door open for polygamy

Shortest title: Stay

Wannabe academic title: Distal Effects of Missionary Age Changes

Worst title typo: Different Way [sic] the Handbook Says “Don’t”

Most graphs: Nacle Numbers, 2003-2008, Part 2: The Blogs had 45 graphs, followed closely by Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?, which had 44.

Fewest graphs: A ton of posts tied with zero.

Favorite graph: I particularly like this graph I made for a 2024 post that shows estimated shifting of patrons from temple to temple in Utah when one temple is closed. I think it’s most fun because it’s so unusual for me. Mostly I just make tons of line and bar graphs.

Least favorite graph: The graph in this 2020 post where I counted which Q15 members were following Russell M. Nelson’s exhortation to post about gratitude on social media looks really ugly to me now. I didn’t choose colors or bar spacing well.

In Church Life, Church Policy

What Church policy changes would be sticky?

Ziff8 September 202615 Comments

Photo by Connor Scott McManus from Pexels

One of my sisters who has taught freshperson writing classes for years says that over that time, she’s come to write her syllabus more strictly and then soften it as the need arises rather than trying to go the other way. She says it’s clearly just easier for the students if any shifts are toward more leniency rather than more severity, even if her policies start out more lenient in the latter situation. Along similar lines, I was thinking about how maybe Church policy changes might be easier in one direction than another. In other words, they’re more resistant to change, or stickier, when moving in one direction than another. Or more generally, some particular policies might be stickier than others, regardless of the direction of movement, or maybe policies in a particular area (e.g., Word of Wisdom) might be more or less sticky. (Note that I’m borrowing the language of policy stickiness from the idea of wage and price stickiness in economics, where either can stay at a nominal level more than you’d expect even as its real value changes. The reasons for wage and price stickiness seem pretty different from the reasons for Church policy stickiness, so I don’t think it’s a good analogy, but I like the term.)

We just saw an example of this kind of stickiness and non-stickiness (slipperiness?) this last Sunday, when the Church’s Sunday meetings moved back to having three periods, but rather than going back to the old three-hour block that we had from 1980 to 2018, now shortens them to fit into the two-hour block we’ve had since 2019. I think this was an interesting test case because one aspect of the Nelson-era policy—the number of meetings—was changed, while another—the meeting block length—was retained. I find the stickiness of the meeting block length particularly intriguing, because I wonder if President Oaks would have preferred to go back to a three-meeting/three-hour block like we had before, but decided that shortening the block was easier than lengthening it, that is, the meeting block length was stickier in one direction than the other.

You can anticipate my question, then: Which policy changes that past Church presidents have implemented or future Church presidents might implement might be sticky? And which might be slippery? I’m especially interested in this question because the Church might have a mix of gentler and harsher presidents in the next few decades. I’m hoping that maybe some of the gentler ones might implement some kinder policies that later presidents, regardless of how harsh they might want to be, would find it difficult to undo.

Word of Wisdom: A substantial fraction of Mormons are drinking coffee, it seems like far more than when I was young. What if a future Church president said he’d had a revelation, and coffee was now okay by the Word of Wisdom? I suspect, with some momentum already in that direction, that such a change would be pretty sticky and hard for a later president to undo without alienating a large fraction of Church members.

In Books, Temple

What did 4500 Mormons have to say about wearing garments?

Ziff31 August 20264 Comments

I recently read a fascinating book titled Mormon Garments, authored by Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan, and Larissa Kanno Kindred. I’ve read discussions of temple garments on the Bloggernacle over the years, and I’ve run into a lot of discussions of issues that I, as a man, had just never run into. This book does a great job of pulling together a whole host of these issues around garment wearing, many of which were still new to me, relying largely on a 2014 survey the authors did of over 4500 Church members about their thoughts and experiences with garments.

The book opens with a chapter on the history of temple garments. I learned a bunch here, like the fact that garments were originally “progressive and innovative underwear in the nineteenth century” and only later, like post-World War II, became an instrument of modesty enforcement. If I have it right, there weren’t even separate designs for women and men until the 1950s, and the Church hadn’t even fully taken over production of them until a decade or two before. I was also surprised to learn that a Church committee in the 1930s made a recommendation that garments be made sleeveless, which was rejected at the time, only to finally be implemented in just the last few years.

In Statistics

The Church’s retention problem, increasing with younger members

Ziff10 August 20268 Comments

In Clark G. Gilbert’s April Conference talk, he referred to Ryan Burge’s Substack Graphs About Religion. Gilbert (see his note 11) was talking about people still being concerned with meaning and purpose in life even after leaving religion. Now, though, Burge has a post up that I’m quite sure will not be referred to in Conference, titled “The LDS Church Has a Retention Problem.” (Although it has already gotten a defensive response from a BYU professor in the Deseret News.)

Burge uses Pew Religious Landscape Study data to compare retention among Mormons and other religious groups and finds Mormons score poorly. He has a lot of interesting things to say in his post, and I definitely recommend you go read the whole thing if it sounds at all interesting. I wanted to focus on just one point he made, though, which is that Mormon retention is lower among younger people. Here’s one of his charts:

As you can see, retention is lower among younger people, as Burge discusses. But what I find striking is that this comparison actually understates the retention problem. The oldest respondents have had far more years of adulthood, far more opportunities to leave, but they still have higher retention rates than the younger respondents do after far fewer years.

Here’s a reworking of just the Mormon data from the chart above. I took the midpoint of each decade cohort (i.e., 1945 for 1940s or earlier, 1955 for 1950s, etc.) and calculated age in 2023, which is the starting year of the Religious Landscape Study.

If there were a similar exit rate for each of the cohorts, the pattern in the scatterplot would go down to the right, as the older cohorts that have had more time to leave would have had more people leave. (I admit here that I’m assuming a situation where people who leave hardly ever come back, although I admit it does occasionally happen, in stories often trumpeted in Conference.) But instead, the pattern goes up to the right, showing younger people having left at a far faster rate than older people.

Here’s one other way to look at the question, and a crude way to quantify it. In the table below, for each age cohort, I figured out what constant yearly loss rate would lead to the observed total loss rate for each age cohort. For example, for the oldest group, the midpoint age in 2023 is 78 (2023 – 1945). With a 68% retention rate, this means 32% have left. For simplicity, I assumed leaving starts at age 18. Then I found the yearly loss rate that would be required to yield a 32% loss rate after 60 years (78 – 18). This turns out to be 0.64%. This just means that (1 – 0.64%)⁶⁰ = 68%, or in other words, if you reduce the starting number by 0.64% each year for 60 years, you end up with 68% of your starting number remaining. Here’s a table with the same calculation for each age cohort.

The yearly loss goes from well under 1% for the 1940s and 1950s cohorts to between 1% and 2% for the 1960s and 1970s cohorts to nearly doubling from the 1970s to the 1980s cohorts to more than doubling from the 1980s to 1990s cohorts. There are a lot of caveats: if you look at Burge’s original chart, the LDS error bars are wide because the LDS samples are small. I’m only showing loss per year estimates to a tenth of a percent in the table above because it’s needed to distinguish the values for the oldest cohorts. Of course these values have lots of error in them and are nothing like as precise as I’m showing. And like as always with Pew data, it’s the US only. But even given all this, I find the conclusion striking: the Church appears to be doing a really poor job of retaining American members born in the 1980s and later.

In Church Life, Church Policy, Doctrine

Hedges about the law, relaxations within it

Ziff21 July 20263 Comments

I think it was a podcast host I heard (perhaps John Larsen or John Dehlin—it has been years since I listened to podcasts regularly, so I don’t recall) who used to ask guests a few small questions at the beginning about how devoutly Mormon their upbringing was. He’d ask about a few issues that even quite orthodox Mormons differ on, just to get a sense of their background. I thought it might be interesting to list out a bunch of these, both those that set a higher standard than the commandment, what are often called hedges about the law, and those that lower the standard of the law, what I’m calling relaxations of the law. These hedges and relaxations are ones that I’ve run into at one time or another, either in my own experience, or (mostly) in stories I’ve heard from others.

You’re probably immediately thinking, but it’s not all that clear in many cases what the law is. And of course you’re 100% correct. LDS commandments are sometimes vague, and often a moving target. I’m assuming here that there’s some central actual commandment that the hedges and relaxations are variations around. But we might disagree about what the actual commandment is. And in fact, it might make more sense to just think of what I’m taking about with no reference to an “actual” commandment, and just as a description of the distribution of people’s beliefs about what LDS rules are. This would mesh nicely with Lynnette’s post years ago where she described doctrine as a grammar that we can observe from members rather than a set of propositions that is imposed from the top down.

I wonder if the distribution might vary as you move further away from the Mormon corridor. A few months ago, I was at the Claremont Mormon Studies Conference, and Nancy Ross presented on interviews she had done with Mormon women in Finland as part of the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project. I was struck by how she pointed out that the women she talked to were able to shrug off Church teachings on gender roles, teachings that I, even as a man, saw as quite central to Mormonism, because they went against the ideas about gender roles the women already had as part of their broader culture. Or I’m thinking of Gina Colvin-Ruwhiu’s discussion of her experiences in New Zealand (that I think I heard her discussing on podcasts years ago, but which I don’t have links for), where I’m pretty sure I heard her say something similar about Mormons being able to just ignore some stuff that came out of Salt Lake as nonsense. If Church members far from the Mormon corridor are able to ignore teachings that don’t jive with their experience, I wonder if this might lead to fewer hedges about the law or maybe more relaxations.

In Church Life, Church Policy

Ways the Church is like a large corporation (other than money)

Ziff30 June 20266 Comments

I spent a number of years in higher education, first as a graduate student who was slow to finish, and then, for a little while, as a professor. I wasn’t terribly good at being a professor, so over a decade ago, I jumped ship for the corporate world, where I’ve held various number crunching jobs ever since. One thing that’s struck me in my time in the corporate world is how many ways my experience at work is similar to my experience at church.

One quick aside: When people talk about the Church as being a corporation, they most often mean it seems like a money-making enterprise, like that it buys and sells stocks and real estate and gets into legal arguments over things like trademarks. In this post, when I’m comparing the Church to a corporation, I’m instead thinking of my day-to-day church experience.

Here are some ways my church experience is like my experience being an employee of a large corporation:

New programs replace old programs, and the leaders presenting the new programs bear their testimony of how inspired the programs are. Of course, in the corporate world, people don’t say they’re “bearing testimony,” but when I think, for example, how I’ve heard leaders gushing over how AI is going to change our whole workplace and make everything better, it sounds quite a bit like a testimony.

In Books, Church Life, Doctrine

How would the Church respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence?

Ziff17 June 20266 Comments

What if the aliens send missionaries to us? (Image credit: anarres on Openclipart.)

I recently read astronomer David Weintraub’s book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? He spends the first section of the book discussing the recent discovery of thousands of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars). He points out that it may not be long before astronomers’ more sensitive and sophisticated tools allow them to also detect evidence of life on some of those planets, particularly through measuring things like atmospheric makeup that are unlikely to arise through inorganic processes. This section is just motivation for the second, larger section where he reviews what leaders and theologians in various religions have said about extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligence and what these statements might mean for how churches and believers would respond to discoveries like these. I was fascinated to find that there’s such a rich tradition of discussing this possibility among some Catholic thinkers, for example, and also unsurprised to find that American evangelicals are likely to think of aliens as demons, and of the universe as having been created only for humans.

In Books, Feminism

50 Years of Exponent II

Ziff21 May 2026Leave a comment

Before my sisters and friends started ZD, I hadn’t even heard of Exponent II. But once I got into participating in the bloggernacle, I got to know and enjoy their blog. Even more fun, through commenting there and having their bloggers comment here, I got to know some of the bloggers, and have even been lucky enough to meet some of them over the years at social gatherings and Mormon meetups like Sunstone.

So of course I was very happy to learn that Katie Ludlow Rich and Heather Sundahl have marked the fiftieth anniversary of the organization with a book! It’s been out for almost two years now, so you’ve likely already heard about it if you’re connected to the Mormon feminist world. I’m sorry I’m so slow to getting to reading and saying anything about it, but then just last week, I wrote a post partly about a book that was first published in English in 1930, so maybe this is fast for me!

Roughly the first third of the book is a history of the organization Exponent II, from its founding in 1974 by a group of feminist-minded Mormon women in Boston, right up to 2024. I found this section fascinating, especially as someone whose knowledge of the organization has almost entirely been just in reading the blog, which in the grand scheme of things, is a janey-come-lately in comparison with the original paper. Rich and Sundahl had access to minutes of meetings of the organization, and even better, in many cases were able to interview women who had served in key roles over the years. They got into all kinds of nitty-gritty details about how the physical production of the paper was managed, in addition to the bigger picture issues like editorial decisions about topics to focus on.

In Books, Church Policy

Interesting precursors of Mormon ideas I stumbled on in a couple of history books

Ziff12 May 20265 Comments

This is exactly how I look when I’m reading. Except that I’m not this attractive, nor do I dress this fashionably. Also, I don’t read in such lovely rooms. But other than those tiny details, this is pretty much me. Photo by Wind Tan on Unsplash

I recently read a couple of books that had nothing to do with Mormonism, but which brought up ideas that I thought had interesting connections to Mormon ideas. The first book was Max Weber’s sociology classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. As the title suggests, Weber connects the rise of capitalism to the earlier rise of Protestantism (particular Calvinism) and its ideas around diligently working in the world as one of the evidences to show yourself as one of those God had predestined to be saved. I found it fascinating, particularly for Weber’s discussion of what capitalism is, and the traditional economies that it replaced, and how not inevitable the replacement feels in retrospect.

For this post, though, what’s interesting is that I found a few tidbits that seemed like precursors of Mormon ideas. Weber’s book was first published around the turn of the twentieth century, so it doesn’t predate the Church, but Weber quotes from some of early Protestant religious thinkers who do. For example, here’s a description of what I would think of as the pride cycle of the Book of Mormon:

I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and the love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that . . . a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the [people] in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.

Can you guess who Weber is quoting here?

In Church Life, Fun, Young Women

Class half full / Class half empty

Ziff21 April 202611 Comments

The Church announced new names for the Young Women classes yesterday. They are “Builders of Faith,” “Messengers of Hope,” and “Gatherers of Light” for (turning) 12-13, 14-15, and 16-17 classes, respectively. So no more calling the YW class just by their ages, which felt kind of cold to me. But also no going back to Beehives, Mia Maids, and Laurels. I hope you’ve already seen the re-designed movie poster for Once I Was a Builder of Faith.

On the class half empty side, I do have some complaints:

These names are a mouthful, just like saying the full name of the Church is. The previous class names, for all the drawbacks they might have had, were at least each only two syllables. I’m guessing the new names, to the degree they’re actually used, will typically be shortened to just their first word.
In spite of the little explanatory sentence in the press release for each class name, there’s nothing in any of the names particularly associated with the age the girls are. On the boys’ side, we have actual scripture about what deacons, teachers, and priests are supposed to do. Although to be fair, we largely ignore it because it was written at a time when holders of these offices were expected to be adult men. And it’s a good thing, too. Who wants a 14-15-year-old boy “watch[ing] over the church always“?
The names are nice in a kind of vague way. They seem to be about positive characteristics the girls could cultivate. But they’re also far from anything concrete.
Speaking of complaints, we should just ordain teen girls along with women.
And if we’re not going to ordain them, we could at least have them prepare and pass the sacrament, as the only scriptural comment on needing priesthood seems to be about blessing the sacrament. Sam Brunson at BCC has blogged several times about this point.

On the class half full side, I think I only need to list some other possible class names that I’m sure were kicked around in some committee somewhere before being ultimately rejected:

Guardians of Virtue
Garnishers of Virtue
Unceasing Garnishers of Virtue
Guardians of Chastity
Immorality Preventers
Those Who Do Not Become Pornography
Those Whose Eyes Are Not Wanton and Their Necks Not Stretched Stretched Forth
The Modestly Covered
Purveyors of Purity
Eschewers of Fame and Fortune
Auxiliaries in Training
Supporters of the Priesthood
Hidden from the World
Mothers-to-Be
Mothers

What do you think of the new names? Are they more good or more bad? And of course I’d love to hear alternative class names that may have been rejected!

In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2026

Ziff9 April 202629 Comments

Fastest hymn: Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Sunday morning
Slowest hymn: Consider the Lilies, Sunday morning
Best hymn: Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Sunday morning and Redeemer of Israel, Sunday afternoon
Worst hymn: Lord, I Would Follow Thee, Sunday afternoon, was too soft and slow. Also, I dislike We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet in principle, regardless of how it’s sung or played.

Longest talk: 1683 words, D. Todd Christofferson
Shortest talk: (excluding Dallin H. Oaks’s brief opening and closing talks) 881 words, Pedro X. Larreal

Overall, talk length was down markedly. The average was about 1200 words, or 1260 words excluding Dallin H. Oaks’s brief opening and closing messages. In October 2025, the average was about 1620 words, and the shortest was 1242 words, which would have been right in the middle this time.

Longest prayer: 110 seconds, Amy A. Wright, Sunday morning benediction
Shortest prayer: 59 seconds, Andrea Muñoz Spannaus, Saturday afternoon benediction and Paul V. Johnson, Sunday morning invocation

Overall, prayers were less variable in length than last Conference, when there were three over 130 seconds, but also three of 50 seconds or shorter. The average length was down a little, from 90 seconds to 85.

Ways Conference was different from Nelson-era Conferences:

The elimination of the Saturday night session, teased in 2021, was finally carried out.
Talks were shorter, as mentioned above. This seemed clearly designed to fit more speakers in each session.
I feel like there were fewer personal stories told than in past Conferences, perhaps as a result of talks being shortened. To me, this is a sad change, as personal stories are often my favorite parts of talks.
Dallin H. Oaks spoke more than once (although only one was a full-length talk), something Russell M. Nelson had stopped doing in the past few years.
Russell M. Nelson was referred to 157 times in October 2025 (74 times in talks and 83 times in footnotes). This Conference, he was referred to 38 times (9 in talks, 29 in footnotes). And I’m happy to see that speakers haven’t just re-aimed their obsequiousness at Dallin H. Oaks, who got 90 references (less than 60% as many, 39 in talks, 51 in footnotes). Let’s hope this pattern continues of not having every speaker refer to the Church president multiple times per talk.
Speakers were identified on the screen with only their names, rather than their names and titles as before. I like this change. It feels like a tiny step away from the worship of hierarchy.

In Church Policy, Patriarchy

Glacial improvement: Women can be Sunday School presidents

Ziff30 March 202610 Comments

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

In the early days of the Bloggernacle, I recall reading a post that listed changes the Church could make in its policies that would improve women’s equality and experience, without requiring ordaining women. (I’m unable to find the post again, and I’d love to hear if you know what I’m thinking of.) There was a whole long list, because the Church doesn’t only exclude women from doing things that actually require priesthood. It actually seems to exclude women as a kind of default setting, allowing them to do a thing that involves any kind of authority only after studied consideration (unless it involves children, in which case of course women are not only in charge, they’re expected to do all the work). For example, can women or girls pass the sacrament (or prepare it)? Of course not! There’s no scriptural reason for the ban. It just feels too priesthood-adjacent for the Q15 to allow it.

Of course some of these baseless bans have been lifted. Women can now give prayers in General Conference. They can witness baptisms (but just so women’s heads don’t get too big, so can baptized children). Just since Dallin H. Oaks took over the top spot from Russell M. Nelson, he finally removed the difference in the youngest age at which missionaries can serve, and just a couple of weeks ago, the Church announced that women can serve as Sunday School presidents. Like with witnessing baptisms, though, this comes with a caveat to make sure the ladies don’t get too uppity. Women and men can’t serve in mixed-gender presidencies all willy-nilly. They have to keep nice and separate, like it’s 1955, and women holding any kind of supervisory role is a new and dangerous idea.

In Books, Temple

Jonathan Stapley’s Holiness to the Lord

Ziff25 March 202626 March 2026Leave a comment

Near the end of his book Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, Jonathan Stapley says of his purpose in writing the book:

Scholars, media, and other observers have often had to choose between silence and exposé. The topics addressed in this book bridge the gap.

For me, this was the best aspect of the book. I haven’t read much on the temple, but what I have has been apologetic, like Boyd K. Packer’s The Holy Temple. It has been decades since I read it, but my memory is that it disappointingly doesn’t have much to say about what actually happens in the temple. It’s hand-wavy and makes very clear that everything is super duper 100% wonderful and sacred and never to be spoken of. At the other end, I haven’t read any straight up anti-Mormon exposé stuff since I was a missionary (weird, I know–I was in Texas and it was the 1990s and I wanted to know what I was up against), but I definitely recall the tone: Those Mormons are insane! Can you believe the absurd things they do in their temples?!?? Stapley very much steers away from both of these tones. Instead, he’s just very matter-of-fact about explaining what happens in the temple, the thinking behind it, if any was available at the time it began, and context around it.

After an introductory chapter that explains the process of going to the temple, the various ordinances performed there, and temple garments, roughly half of the rest of the book is a historical overview of the development and changes in temple worship, and the remainder is on particular themes. These chapters consider temple cosmology, including the Second Anointing, race and the temple, and the connection of the temple with funeral rites (mostly around the practice of dressing the deceased in temple robes before burial). The book is not long, only 164 pages (plus endnotes) and includes a few illustrations. I also found the length to be a plus, as a reader with some interest in the topic, but probably not enough to sustain me through a dense 500-page tome.

In Fun, Music, Trumpism

Onward Christian Trumpists

Ziff6 March 20266 Comments

I can neither confirm nor deny that the following rewrite of “Onward Christian Soldiers” that’s being considered for the new hymnal (as part of an effort to make Trumpists feel more comfortable at church) has been leaked to me by a very secret source from the COB that I will refer to as Deep Quote Unquote.

Onward Christian Trumpists!
Marching as to war,
With the flag of MAGA
Going on before.
Trump the royal master,
Leads against the gays;
Forward into battle
In these latter days!

Chorus
Onward Christian Trumpists!
Marching as to war,
With the flag of MAGA
Going on before!

Jesus is our mascot,
Donald is our God!
We shun woke compassion,
And the kindness fraud.
Lib’ruls’ hearts now fail them,
At our burning cross.
Whites now lift your voices
Praise our righteous boss!

Chorus

A censoring army,
We seek books to ban.
Brothers we are treading
Steps trod by the Klan.
We are not divided,
All one body we:
One in ruthless hatred,
One in cruelty.

Chorus

Onward then ye people;
Our pronoun-free throng.
Blend with ours your anger,
In our wrathful song.
Stop those fools from voting
Who don’t love our Trump!
We should only ask “How high?”
When Donald tells us “Jump!”

Chorus

In GA's, Statistics

Clark G. Gilbert already has over a 50% chance of becoming Church president

Ziff17 February 20269 Comments

Dallin H. Oaks selected Clark G. Gilbert to fill the Q12 vacancy left by Jeffrey R. Holland’s passing in December. Needless to say, as a person on the fringe of the Church, I’m not happy with the choice of such a boundary-policing culture warrior. But of course nobody asked me! Elder Gilbert enters the quorum much like President Oaks did in that he’s far younger than any more senior member, so he already looks like a good bet to one day be Church president.

Here’s a look at the Q15 members’ ages. They’re ranked by increasing seniority.

Note that I cut off the zero to fifty years part of the graph at the bottom to better focus on the interesting part. The trend is obvious, and unsurprising, that the more senior members are older. The real outliers are David A. Bendar toward the right side, and then Elder Gilbert all the way to the left. It’s not a surprise that, as the most junior member, he’s the youngest. But he’s the youngest by seven years, an unusually large gap.

Here are monthly predicted probabilities for each Q15 member to be Church president, based on a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries.

In Fun, Missions

Pickup Lines for Missionaries

Ziff11 February 20265 Comments

In an interview last month, Dallin H. Oaks said the missionary age change he recently announced for women (from 19 to 18) was to encourage earlier marriage. He also said it’s fine for missionaries to meet their future spouse on their mission:

In the time that we have lowered the age for young men and for young women in the past, we’ve seen an increase in people who meet someone in the mission field and marry them, which is perfectly appropriate if it doesn’t start too early in their missionary service.

What are current and future missionaries to do, with this abrupt turnabout from the old “lock your heart” advice? Especially given that it’s almost Valentine’s Day, I thought it might be fun to help them out with some Mormon-themed pickup lines.

Did we just leave the Garden of Eden? Because I think I’ve fallen for you.
Are you protecting me from being spewed out of the mouth of God’s messenger for being lukewarm? Because I’m hot for you.
Is your workout routine from the Jaredites? Because your physique is tight like unto a dish.
Are you Russell M. Nelson? Because you’ve got me thinking celestial . . . marriage.
Were you just at the butcher? Because you look like a help meat for me.
Are you the serpent’s head? Because I’ve got a crush on you.
Are you the promised land? Because I’ve been seeking for you.
Is your name Ammon? Because your smile is so dis-arming.
Are you part of the 19th-century sacrament? Because being with you is intoxicating.
Can you help me out with a Liahona? Because I just got lost in your eyes.
Did you just come from the temple? Because you’re looking well endowed.

I’d love to hear your Mormon pickup lines in the comments too!

In Church Policy, Scripture

A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and now there can be more Bibles.

Ziff16 January 20264 Comments

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez ?? on Unsplash

The Church announced last month that the latest edition of the Handbook encourages English-speaking members to read different versions of the Bible in addition to the KJV. The announcement includes the line “Using multiple translations of the Bible is not new for the Church.” It isn’t surprising that they’d frame this change as not a change, given the Church’s never-ending insistence that it never changes, but of course it’s hilariously misleading given how devoted to being sola KJV-a we’ve been. But regardless of whether you think of this change as a big deal or just tidying things up around the edges, I did wonder at what changes in the Church we might see as a result of this new openness to more English Bible translations. I’m just a wild speculator, though, so I also recommend that if you want an actual historian’s take on how we got here and what the change might mean, you should read Matt Bowman’s post at BCC.

Doctrinal questions, big ones, will be raised by differences in translations. What will we say about the virgin birth when Isaiah 7:14 says that “the young woman is with child” (NRSVue) rather than “a virgin shall conceive”? Or how about our favorite proof texts about the Great Apostasy? When I was a missionary in the American South decades ago, we were taught to cite 2 Thessalonians 2:3 about a “falling away” as a clear reference to the loss of priesthood authority on the Earth. But what if it’s just a “rebellion” (NRSVue)? That sounds much less dramatic.

In Fun

Nacle Notebook 2025: Funniest Comment

Ziff5 January 202612 Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments and parts of post I read on the Bloggernacle in 2025. Most of what I’m quoting is excerpted from longer comments or posts, so I’ve linked to the sources.

In case you haven’t read them yet, here are links to compilations for previous years: 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

J. Martinez, in her post “Of Ritas and Rhodas: Deciphering the Origins of the Women’s Temple Names” at Exponent II:

It seems Johnny Lingo might have had it wrong and it wasn’t cows that determined your worth but the number of verses your temple name earned in the scriptures. Suddenly my five verses weren’t looking too shabby.

Bishop Bill, in his post “The Book of ???????” (suggesting alternative names for The Book of Mormon) at W&T:

We need a name that puts Satan in his place, and doesn’t upset God.

Comments on Bishop Bill’s post:

Dot:

The Book of the Savior, or The Church: Another Testament of Russell M Nelson and David A Bednar, with legal disclaimers by Dallin H Oaks

aporetic1:

I think that to avoid giving a victory to Satan, we should refer to it as “The Book of He Who Shall Not Be Named.” That should attract converts, right?

JLM:

How about some Jane Austin inspired titles.

Sense and Nonsense

Pride and Prophesy

In GA's, Statistics

Dieter F. Uchtdorf seems likely to become Church president

Ziff29 December 202513 Comments

Jeffrey R. Holland passed away over the weekend. As you know if you’ve read ZD for any length of time, one analysis I’ve done repeatedly is looking at who among the Q15 might become Church president. President Holland’s death looks like it really clears the way for Dieter F. Uchtdorf to reach the top spot. I pointed out when I looked at the question about a decade ago that then-Elder Holland was by far the biggest obstacle to him, as they were very close in age (born about a month apart in 1940), but Uchdorf was two spots lower in the line of succession.

To look at the question more systematically, I updated the analysis I’ve done a number of times, using a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries and a bunch of random number draws to simulate possible orders in which the Q15 members die, and as a result who among them becomes Church president and for how long. If you’re interested in a more detailed description of the method, see my 2023 post, although note that I’m now doing the simulation with monthly steps rather than annual steps.

Here are the predicted probabilities by future year. These are actually straight from calculations on the mortality table, and don’t depend on the simulation.

Uchdorf’s curve is still dwarfed by Bednar’s, but for the first time since I started doing this type of analysis, there’s a period of time when he’s the single most likely member to be holding the top spot. Also, this analysis uses the same mortality table for every quorum member, so it doesn’t account for the evident frailty of both Presidents Oaks and Eyring.