As a musician in the Church, I’ve organized several Christmas programs for sacrament meetings over the years. The format that I’ve come to prefer is to have two narrators, one sharing Christmas and Advent themed thoughts, then another reading related scriptures to tell the story of Christmas. After each narrator shares a thought, a music number is performed that relates to the thoughts. (I generally recommend keeping the ward choir contributions to three or less, depending on your ward/branch’s circumstances, so the other ones are usually Primary, solos, and small groups performing.) I thought I would share the basic template that I’ve used most often in case it is helpful to anyone preparing Christmas programs in the future.
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, November 2024
Hinderaker, Amorette. ““It was Nothing That was Super Subversive”: Resistance as a Narrative Process in Dialectical Identity Spaces Among Mothers of LGBTQ+ Children in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Communication Studies (2024): 1-22.
The Restored Gospel, the Great Apostasy, and St. Clement
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…
Monogamy is the Rule, Part 2: Celestial Marriage and Plural Marriage
The process of coming to understand how sealing created kinship networks was complicated, however, and became intertwined with the development of plural marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle sealings (and their promised blessings) from plural marriage, even though monogamous marriages are the official standard in the Church today.
Book Update – Fragments of Revelation
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.
Rowdy Children, Judgment, and the Foyer
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…
The Cinematic Sexualization and Romanticization of Missionaries
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…
The war hymns bring me solace and comfort
Periodically someone or another will issue a call to remove hymns with militaristic themes or martial music from the hymnbook, or at least rewrite them to make them overtly pacifistic. The sentiment is noble and understandable, but mistaken. The new hymnbook may reduce the number of martial hymns or soften their edges, but I hope the new hymnbook keeps at least some of them. Especially in troubled times, the martial hymns are one place I can find peace.
Don’t Mess With The Amish: Demography, Religion, and Block Voting
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…
Monogamy is the Rule, Part 1: Revelation Adapted to the Circumstances
“Someday my prince will come, / in the Millennium, / and he will say to me, / ‘Will you be number three? / I will be true to you, / and you, and you, and you…’”
Public service announcements: election edition
Attention everybody:
Are Most Members Really Unmarried? Part II With Newer Data
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…
Book review — “The Book of Mormon for the Least of These: Helaman-Moroni”
“The lessons we learn from scripture depend on the questions we ask… The Book of Mormon…warrants the most challenging questions we can throw at it. This book attempts to ask those difficult questions.” So opens this third and final volume of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, focusing on the books of Helaman through Moroni. Specifically, this commentary asks what the Book of Mormon says “about genocide, bigotry, environmental destruction, poverty, and inequality? What can it offer a world that is broken, full of hatred and unfettered greed?” The Book of Mormon and this commentary have lots to say on these (and many other) crucial topics for this day and age. Olsen Hemming and Salleh bring myriad insights. (I counted more than 40 notes or highlights in my copy.) From underlining the unfairness of the justice system that locked up five innocent men in Helaman 9 (“how many times in the Book of Mormon do innocent people go to prison?”), to drawing attention to the failures of Nephi the prophet (“a promise from God that your work is right is not a promise of ease and safety”), to inviting readers to reflect on the likely fate of women and children carried away into the wilderness by robbers (“vulnerable bodies are frequently a casualty of men’s wars”). Again and again, the authors point to themes often largely neglected in discussions of these books. Olsen Hemming and…
President Oaks Now Speaks Tamil, and Elder Bednar Now Speaks Spanish
I had heard that this was on the horizon, but now it’s free for everybody (well, 3 videos a month). You can upload a YouTube video and not only have it create a translation, but it is more or less in the voice of the individual, and the lips are synced so that it actually looks like they’re saying the words. I know that the Church is rightfully careful about the uses of AI, but the potential for this in the future is obvious. “For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language,”
A Review: Come Up Hither to Zion: William Marks and the Mormon Concept of Gathering
Come Up Hither to Zion: William Marks and the Mormon Concept of Gathering by Cheryl L. Bruno and John S. Dinger is an enlightening biography that brings attention to a significant yet often overlooked figure in the early Latter Day Saint movement.
The Black Menaces, The Election, and Demographic Morality Plays
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,…
The Paris Art Mission
I love that Latter-day Saint temples tend to be well-decorated with artwork, including the temple murals. I still find it a bit painful that the murals were not preserved as part of the Salt Lake City Temple renovation, but still find the history of the original murals in the Salt Lake City Temple to be fascinating, particularly due to the Paris Art Mission initiative. Notably, Linda Jones Gibbs discussed the history of the Paris Art Mission in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.
When is it Okay to Participate in Other Faiths’ Practices?
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…
Slavery vs Unfree Labor in Utah
Slavery is one of the darkest subjects in the history of the United States. It was an issue that impacted so many lives (in ways that echo through to the present day) and arguments over it tore the nation apart. Utah Territory was no different in that they were caught in intense debates over the morality of the practice and what to do about it. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, W. Paul Reeve and Christopher B. Rich discussed the history of unfree labor and slavery in Utah Territory, building on their recently published book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah. What follows here is a copost to the full interview
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, October 2024
Williams, Peter. “Detecting Semantic Differences between LDS and Christian Speech.” Schwa (2024).
Saints, Volume 4: A Review
The fourth and final volume of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days was published today. This newest book, Sounded in Every Ear, tells the story of the Latter-day Saints from 1955 to 2020, bringing the history up nearly to the present day. It discusses an era in which conversion rates exploded in South America, the Pacific islands, eastern Asia, and Africa. The 1978 revelation that ended the priesthood and temple ban was an important event enabling that growth. Temple construction to support membership across the world became a big deal, with the number of temples jumping from 9 functioning temples in 3 countries in 1955 to 197 dedicated temples in scores of countries today.
Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity III: Why I believe
In the last two posts, I’ve argued that a limited chronology model primarily focused on Mosiah-3 Nephi 7 doesn’t excessively strain historical plausibility, and then turned around and argued that 1 Nephi-Enos was a living text that was adapted to reflect the state of the Nephite coalition around the time of Benjamin and later. But what does this have to do with a rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity?
Advancing Technology And A Young Earth
I previously argued in Public Square Magazine that advancements in AI may be making a compelling secular case for the existence of God. Following on from that article, I’d like to explore another related topic.
Moroni and Temple Sites
Moroni is an important figure in Latter-day Saint lore. For example, I’ve written previously about how some authors have taken any mention of angels and the Book of Mormon in the same story as a reference to Moroni, whether that conclusion is warranted or not. But another area in which Moroni plays a role is in stories about the dedication of early temple sites of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One prominent example is a story of the dedication of the Manti Temple site. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Christopher Blythe discussed the story of Moroni and the Manti Temple. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.