Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of the Great Apostasy in Latter-day Saint circles. As far as what we canonically know from D&C in the core of our concentric circles of authoritativeness, God told Joseph Smith that all the other sects were “wrong” and doctrinally incorrect. We also know, per John the Baptist, that priesthood authority was “taken…from the earth.” However, the details beyond that are fuzzy. For example, we don’t know when it was taken from the earth. Commentary has traditionally assumed that it was sunsetted with the death of the apostles but we don’t know for sure.  Clement is a first-hand account of a good, devout man trying to make things work in the immediate aftermath of the apostles. For the first time the Christian community had to figure out how to run a church without apostles ordained by Christ. (Early Church historians suggest that Clement himself knew the apostles, but these claims were all documented 100-200 years after Clement if I’m not mistaken, so I’m putting that in the maybe/maybe not category). Of course, as seen from the New Testament epistles, keeping everybody on the same page was no…

Read more →

Back in February, I announced that I have a book about the Doctrine and Covenants that is scheduled to be published by By Common Consent Press this December. After a lot of hard work by a lot of different people, I am happy to say that is still the case! Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants is now available for pre-order for the Kindle edition (which should be released in a week), with the paperback version planned to be released in the near future.

Read more →

I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.  Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but they are not entitled to the same level of equanimity and peaceful quiet as if they, you know, just went into the cultural hall (I promise the adults don’t bite).  This hasn’t happened recently, but occasionally you go into the…

Read more →

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister missionaries is shown to have a subdermal birth control, which the movie states would be a reason for Church discipline if known, which implies that either 1) the movie was implying that the sister missionary was sexually active, or 2) the birth control was used for hormonal regulatory purposes, and the movie producers were wrongfully implying that the Church prohibits the medical use of birth control per se. Whatever the case, the birth control knowledge of the missionaries had an actual part to play in the plot, so it might not have simply been prurience for prurience’s sake. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a sort of intended side effect of the sexual overtones throughout the movie, especially since the sexually explicit discussion is in the opening scene, possibly as a sort of click-bait. [spoiler alert end] The tension of the sexual combined with the wholesome is a common theme throughout time, space, and cultures. I suspect it’s one reason why there’s this destructive erotic interest heterosexual men across the world since biblical times have had with the idea of having sex with a…

Read more →

Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers.  In general this election has thrown a wrench in the “demography is destiny” ideology (I say ideology because there was never a lot of evidence to the idea that immigration would cause permanent democratic majorities; of course I’m partial but the DNC could have, you know, actually spoken to a demographer at some point, maybe?)  Still, this is one example where we are beginning to see the inexorable outcomes of demographic fundamentals in another way. To briefly summarize, according to some reports the largely neutral Amish were shaken out of their previous political apathy after health officials raided some of their raw milk outlets: registering in large numbers and voting republican, giving Trump tens of thousands of votes in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania. This doesn’t mean that they will vote republican forever, or that the democrats can’t find an angle to make a play for their votes, but in an increasingly secular world it shows the paradoxical power of small, highly fertile religious groups. In a world where modernity inevitably decreases fertility, the only highly fertile societies left are either those that are too poor to be…

Read more →

A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking at the Church’s raw records, which, as anybody who has systematically gone through a non-Utah ward list can tell you, is primarily populated by people who were baptized earlier in life but now have virtually nothing to do with the Church. I went ahead and updated this analysis with numbers from the Cooperative Election Survey, and basically found the same thing: the majority of Church members in the US are indeed married.(At the outset it is worth noting that here I am only considering the US Church; I don’t have any data to make any kind of judgment on the demographics of the international Church). However, we have an interesting new wrinkle, the trend is clearly in the direction of most members not fitting the archetype of the married member. Specifically, while in the late 2000s about 70% of Church members were married, that number dropped a little over 10 percentage points over the next 15 years. In 2023 54% of members in the CES were married; however that was with a sample size of 259 members, 2022 with 62% married had a sample size…

Read more →

A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes.  I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and close-minded. The not-so-subtle subtext was that only those silly privileged white kids would hold conservative opinions on social issues, whereas minorities with their wisdom gained from a lifetime of discrimination would naturally gravitate to another perspective.  Like The Book of Mormon musical implying that Africans don’t worship God because of theodicy issues, these folk hypotheses don’t really hold up to even cursory examination as, for example, Ugandans actually tend to be quite religious, and plenty of African Americans hold the conservative social views the Black Menaces are mocking white BYU students for.  These are specific examples of the kinds of demographic morality plays you see that often take trends with a kernel of empirical truth and blow them into narratives based on demographics. For example, the gender gap in abortion is real but very small–61% of men versus 64% of women support abortion in all or most cases. Yet, these single-digit differences are then often spun into some grand demographic morality play: in one corner you have old, white men who think that women having sex is icky, and in the other you have liberated,…

Read more →

A few months ago I participated in a Traditional Latin Mass. More traditional-minded Catholics will genuflect when walking by or across the Host. As a non-Catholic I hadn’t considered what I should do until I found myself walking next to it and had to make a snap decision. On one hand as somebody who doesn’t believe that the Eucharist is God’s literal flesh, I thought it would be insincere for me to briefly kneel to it, and perhaps patronizing to those who do believe that; on the other hand it was very clear that that was the expectation, and it could possibly be offensive if I just casually strolled next to their Holy of Holies. I genuflected, but more out of a reflexive desire to not make things awkward than some coherent, well-thought out philosophy of interfaith engagement.  Interfaith activities where somebody of one faith participates in the rituals, ceremonies, or services of another faith are tricky. In principle they can be fruitful educational and diplomatic activities, and every year or so I try to take my children to another service. However, they have to be done gingerly, and I haven’t seen a really good systematic take on when it is okay or not okay to participate in the rituals, ceremonies, or services of other faiths, so here’s my attempt to outline one after taking some time to think it through.  The particular risks of any interfaith activity can basically…

Read more →

A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946 by Fernando R. Gomez (founder of The Museum of Mormon Mexican History) provides a streamlined and updated look into the history of the Church in Mexico.

Read more →

  An amicus brief is a document submitted to courts by groups or people who have some interest in the outcome of the case. For landmark Supreme Court cases a lot of professional organizations, for example, will take a position and outline their reasons. My understanding is that the justices and their clerks don’t actually have to read these, but if it’s a brief from a person or organization that is important I assume they do, and occasionally the judge will cite an amicus brief in their decision-making. I went through the Supreme Court docket and identified all the recent cases where the Church submitted an official amicus brief as an interested party in some precedent-setting, landmark case before the Supreme Court. I then used AI to summarize it. So if you want to see the Church’s official position on, say, people not baking cakes for same-sex couples for religious reasons, it’s all there. As seen, the Church’s messaging to the Supreme Court (unsurprisingly) deals with religious liberties issues; matter of fact, it appears they have had something to say about virtually every major religious liberty case that has come before the Supreme Court. The Church appears to be helping build safeguards around religious liberty issues even if they do not immediately affect its operations. On one hand the Church tends to officially stay out of fights it doesn’t need to be involved in. For example, it doesn’t have the…

Read more →

The quotes around Latter-day Saint are not for Romney, but Brooks, as explained below. Also, none of this should suggest that I’m on Team Democrat, and I don’t want this to devolve into some brute-force democrat versus republican fight in the comments, but on the issue of, you know, not overthrowing the republic I think reasonable people can come together.  Like many I have been often disappointed by the paucity of republicans willing to stand-up to Trump, and I’m saddened that the one Senate republican who has a track record of putting his power where his mouth is will be retiring. However, in his recently published book, Bob Woodward reports that Trump wanted Mo Brooks, the Congressman from Alabama, to call for a special election to reinstate him as President 6 months into President Biden’s term. Evidently at this point Congressman Brooks (who admittedly had supported Trump’s earlier shenanigans with the 2020 election) had reached his limits, and he refused to do so. Predictably, President Trump’s feelings got a boo boo, he withdrew his support from Brooks, and Brooks lost his primary. Congressman Brooks is rather unique in that he was a Latter-day Saint convert in the deep, deep South who still won political office. In contrast to some Utah politicians whose Mormonism is an asset to play up in time for an election, one can’t help but see Brooks’ Mormonism as sincere given that it was undoubtedly a liability…

Read more →