Mueller, Max Perry. ““One in Faith, One in Color, One in Language”: The Deseret Alphabet and Early Latter-day Saint Theologies of Racial Restoration.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2026): lfaf069.

This article places the Deseret alphabet—the Latter-day Saints’ mid-nineteenth-century attempt at orthographic reform—in a broader field of inquiry that explores the role that religious scriptures played in the formation of racial and national identities in the Anglo-American world. Such analysis of the Deseret alphabet also sheds new light onto Anglo-American Christians’ deployment of scriptures to shape Natives and European immigrants into respectable American subjects and citizens, while also excluding African Americans from this people-shaping process. The Deseret alphabet’s creators hoped orthographic supersession would not only speed up religious and linguistic restoration but also racial restoration. Latter-day Saints hoped that the new Mormon script, better than the old Roman script, and scriptures would restore (supposedly accursed) non-whites and not-fully whites to the raceless—as in “white”—original human form, uniting diverse Mormon converts into one Mormon people worthy to receive the imminently returning Christ.

Poulsen, Alexander. “What Missionary Activities Lead to Baptisms? Evidence from a Latter-day Saint Mission in Brazil.” Mormon Social Science Association: 79.

What missionary activities lead to convert baptisms into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Is it most important to contact many new people, making it more likely that missionaries find potential converts with whom the church’s message resonates? Or is it more important to teach lessons in cooperation with local members, to help potential converts learn what church participation might look like in their lives, and begin to be integrated into the church community? I provide a statistical framework to answer these questions using data on weekly missionary activities (missionary key indicator data). While the answers to these questions may vary by setting, I provide an answer for one setting by analyzing weekly missionary data from 89 mission areas and 233 missionaries in a mission in southern Brazil for the year 2011. I find that lessons taught with a local member of the church present are associated with almost two times greater an increase in baptisms compared to lessons without a member present and over two times greater an increase in sacrament meeting attendees. I find that in the mission being studied, contacting additional new people and finding new potential converts does not increase subsequent baptisms. These findings suggest that (1) social connections are an important driver of church affiliation; and (2) in the mission studied, there could have been an increase in convert baptisms if missionaries spent less time trying to find additional people to teach and more time recruiting local members to join them for lessons. This same statistical framework could be used to gain similar insights about other settings, given the appropriate data.

Hulme, Alyssa Calder. “Sexism in Silicon Slopes: Religion and Gendered Organizational Structures in the New Economy.” Mormon Social Science Association: 43.

This study investigates the role of religion in perpetuating gender inequality within contemporary workplaces, focusing on Silicon Slopes. Applying gendered organizational theory, I show how religious beliefs sustain discriminatory organizational norms and practices because religion is built into the gendered logic employed by company founders and their employees. Through 94 in-depth interviews and 147 hours of ethnographic fieldwork, I use an innovative social network strategy to examine the impact of Mormon religious beliefs on gender and labor dynamics in Utah’s emerging tech space. This study reveals three key insights: (1) Religion shapes educational and professional norms, leading to the structural disenfranchisement of women within organizations, irrespective of women’s religious affiliation. (2) Religious teachings continue to influence corporate norms and language, even when divorced from their original source, thereby perpetuating gender biases in the workplace. (3) Despite shifts in religious dedication among company founders, religiously influenced gendered logics persist, impacting organizational dynamics of a growing company with employees from around the world. These findings underscore the profound and direct impact of religion on women’s economic precarity, particularly when they are closely associated with LDS male professional gatekeepers who adhere to gender complementarian beliefs. Furthermore, religious leaders wield significant influence over the global economy through the creation of structuring documents on gender, labor, and family dynamics.

Brady, Reilly H. ““Guard Your Virtue with Your Life”: Current and Former Latter-day Saint Women’s Experiences with Purity Teachings and Gender-Based Violence1.” Mormon Social Science Association: 17.

This study investigates purity expectations directed toward girls and women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The 19 semi-structured interviews explore current and former LDS women’s conceptualizations of purity teachings, the impacts of those teachings, and any connections between purity and gender-based violence. The vast majority of interview participants discussed receiving lessons in their youth communicating that LDS girls and women must maintain not only their own purity, but also the purity of boys and men, a concept that this study defines as “responsibility rhetoric.” Purity expectations resulted in increased shame for many participants, including in connection to experiences of gender-based violence. Although this study’s initial flyer recruited participants solely based on experiences with purity teachings, 42% of interview participants discussed an experience that falls within this study’s definition of gender-based violence. This highlights the embedded role purity expectations have played in these participants’ experiences and reveals a prevalence of gender-based violence among this study’s participants. This study identifies two categories of analysis to understand the mutual embeddedness of purity and gender-based violence: (1) themes of violence embedded in gendered purity teachings and (2) themes of gendered purity embedded in experiences of gender-based violence.

Johnson, Jake. “The Mormon hip-hop musical project.” New Religions, Spiritualities, and Popular Music (2026).

No available abstract.

Williams, Amy D., and Jonathan Ostenson. “Rhetoric and Affect: The Role of Faith in Student Writers’ Wayfinding.” Written Communication (2026): 07410883251410169.

This article adds to previous literature on writing “wayfinding” by examining how a writer’s religious beliefs and commitments shape their rhetorical choices and influence their writing wayfinding. The 5-year longitudinal study we report here used discourse-based interviews to understand the experiences of student writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Examining texts our study participants wrote in and outside of college classrooms, our analysis highlights moments when they used emotion and affect as rhetorical strategies to accomplish instrumental and relational goals. We found that in these moments, participants’ commitments as Latter-day Saints and their related identities significantly affected their writing decisions and their sense of wayfinding, particularly as they navigated writing contexts outside of familiar academic settings. The article suggests that understanding the challenges and opportunities writers face in the intersections between their rhetorical choices and their commitments as members of an organized church can help writing teachers better support students’ writing development.

Ream, Geoffrey L., and Estee Hirsch. “Conservative Christian Non-Affirming Ideologies About LGBTQIA+ Issues: Cultural Competence for Practice with Families of LGBTQIA+ Youth.” LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2026): 1-14.

This article addresses cultural competence issues for mental health practitioners working with conservative Christian families of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, or other minoritized sexual and gender (LGBTQIA+) youth. We compare and contrast non-affirming ideologies about LGBTQIA+ issues across the four statistically largest conservative Christian movements in the United States: the Black Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Evangelicals, and the Latter-Day Saints. We explore the premise that non-affirming ideologies surrounding LGBTQIA+ issues are integral to these movements’ broader efforts to address specific conditions of oppression and privilege faced by their adherents. We argue that this perspective may support anti-oppressive practice by helping practitioners understand why conservative Christian families might remain committed to beliefs that secular mental health fields associate with harm toward LGBTQIA+ children. We propose that this understanding may help practitioners address these beliefs in a nuanced way while applying techniques we describe toward the end.