Author: Stephen C

  • My Top Religious Themed Movies, Ranked

    Stephen C

    A well done religious-themed movie can be a powerful spiritual experience. Unfortunately, the movie industry generally either shies away from religious themes (unless to deride them), or they fit in the Christian cinema niche that produces simple starches for the masses. It is hard to find a religious-themed movie that is authentically spiritually touching and…

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part III: The Creation of Life

    Stephen C

    Like most Latter-day Saints, my testimony of the Church is based more on the numinous than the intellectual. However, I still remember the moment when, ruminating on my AP biology class while taking a break during my summer lifeguarding job, I decided that there is no way life could have just spontaneously happened, and that…

  • Why Latter-day Saints (Or Anyone Else) Should Not Feel Bad about Having Kids on Government Assistance

    Stephen C

    When I was in graduate school with a young family my wife and I went on government assistance. We didn’t have a car so I had to fill our stroller up with groceries every third day. Of course, one particularly cold winter our stroller got a flat and we couldn’t fix it, so I had…

  • What Happens If All the Apostles Pass Away?

    Stephen C

    Many countries have continuity of government plans for what to do if the leadership suddenly dies in some sort of a catastrophe. The United States famously has a “designated survivor” that is in a secure location during the State of the Union so that somebody in the line of succession can be preserved if the…

  • Big Science Questions and the Gospel, Part II: Consciousness and the Soul

    Stephen C

    Any reasonably intelligent person can understand the principles involved in the search for extraterrestrial life issue that I addressed in my last science post. However, the issue of consciousness is fundamentally mind-wracking and forces us to question some of our basic intuitions. It can get crazy; with some philosophers going so far as to claim…

  • Reproductive Trends in the Church and General Authority Family Size

    Reproductive Trends in the Church and General Authority Family Size

    Stephen C

    Years ago I had fantasies of writing a book on the history of Latter-day Saint fertility. That dream has been put on hold, probably until after my kids are out of the house (and there’s more data), but before I realized it wasn’t going to happen in between a day job and a large young…

  • The Gospel and Cutting Edge Science, Part I: The Other Children of God

    Stephen C

    “John saw curious looking beasts in heaven, he saw every creature that was in heaven, all the beasts, fowls, & fish in heaven, actually there, giving glory to God. I suppose John saw beings there, that had been saved from ten thousand times ten thousand earths like this, strange beasts of which we have no…

  • Polygamy and “Extra Women”

    Polygamy and “Extra Women”

    Stephen C

    The idea that polygamy helped provide spouses for a surplus of women who had joined the Church is an old one, as is its purported refutation. However, the refutations I read were based on Census data and didn’t seem super rigorous since 1) censuses include children born in the Church, and 2) not everybody in…

  • Vaccine Hesitancy (or the Lack Thereof) among Members

    Stephen C

    One of the stereotypes conservative US members have to deal with is the idea that they click their heels and salute every time the Church makes a political statement, when anybody who’s had deep political discussions with them understands that there are multiple layers of nuances and influences built into their decision making process. Consequently,…

  • Filling the Measure of Their Creation In Pioneer Utah 

    Filling the Measure of Their Creation In Pioneer Utah 

    Stephen C

    I like people; that’s why I got a PhD in demography. My ideal existence is some rural village where my bevy of kids play outside in the streets with all the other neighborhood kids while the adults chat on front porches, where life is essentially an expanding cycle of weddings, births, and reunions (which according…

  • The Future of the Church is Orthodox

    Stephen C

    I recently helped conduct a much-overdue national survey of Catholic priests that, among other things, confirmed what most informed Catholic observers already knew: younger priests are much, much more conservative than their older counterparts. While a significant proportion of older priests disagree with fundamental Catholic Church teachings regarding homosexuality, for example, among the latest generation there…

  • Are Latter-day Saint Marriages Happier?

    Stephen C

    A few weeks ago I posted some numbers that suggested that Latter-day Saints have significantly lower divorce rates than non-Latter-day Saints. Fair enough, but are these marriages actually happier, or is this just because the stigma against divorce in Latter-day Saint culture is keeping marriages together that would have otherwise divorced? Unlike the divorce question,…

  • Is the COVID Slump in Church Growth “Real”?

    Is the COVID Slump in Church Growth “Real”?

    Stephen C

    In a previous post I discussed how, according to reported baptisms, 2020 was a particularly low Church growth year, presumably due to COVID.  Thankfully, the 2021 General Social Survey data recently dropped, so we can look at whether the COVID slump is “real,” in terms of people identifying as Latter-day Saints, or whether it’s just…

  • Hugh Nibley Will Never Happen Again

    Stephen C

    During my time as an undergraduate at BYU I noticed there were certain Latter-day Saint scholars that were looked up and aspired to by different groups. These were the days of Rough Stone Rolling when the “New Mormon History” seemed ascendent after a false labor with Leonard Arrington. Various Bushman acolytes aspired to follow in…

  • From the Mouth of Two or Three Surveys

    Stephen C

    My post a few days ago looked at whether members of the Church in the US reported a lower likelihood of identifying as “divorced” than non-members in Pew data.  However, afterwards some friends raised valid concerns about the fact that remarried divorcees would have identified as “remarried.” Therefore, if Latter-day Saints were remarried at a higher…

  • Are Latter-day Saint Marriages More Stable?

    Stephen C

    Various researchers have addressed this question with older (pre-2010 data), and have shown that in general Latter-day Saints have lower divorce rates, but what about more recent years? The largest (relatively) recent survey of Latter-day Saints is the 2014 Pew Religous Landscape Survey which included 661 Latter-day Saints, allowing for a simple comparison of marital status. …

  • Is Church Growth Declining?

    Is Church Growth Declining?

    Stephen C

    I’m a Church growth amateur; occasionally I enjoy dropping by Matt Martinich’s blog to look at the latest temple predictions, and I’ll often skim through headlines about the latest data point on Church growth and what it means. However, for some time now I’ve been suspicious that we’re reading way too much into the natural…

  • Are We Going to Be Able to Buy the Kirtland Temple?

    Are We Going to Be Able to Buy the Kirtland Temple?

    Stephen C

    I’ve always been fascinated with sacred real estate disputes, and we certainly have our own. The most salient–the American “Temple Mount”–is probably the Temple Lot in Independence, the story of which makes for fascinating reading: a geographically precise, small plot of land is prophesied by Joseph Smith as the location of a future temple. After…

  • Is the Church Replacing Itself in the United States? Population Momentum and its Capacity to Hide Decline

    Is the Church Replacing Itself in the United States? Population Momentum and its Capacity to Hide Decline

    Stephen C

    The following is Stephen Cranny’s fourth guest post here at Times & Seasons. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and six children According to conventional wisdom, the Church in the United States and other developed …

  • Are Half of All Church Members in the US Single?

    Are Half of All Church Members in the US Single?

    Stephen C

    The following is Stephen Cranny’s third guest post here at Times & Seasons. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and five children. I was surprised at the Church’s seeming statement (I’ll discuss why it was “seeming”…

  • What do people look up about the Church on Wikipedia?

    Stephen C

    The following is Stephen Cranny’s second guest post here at Times & Seasons. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and five children. When somebody is looking up material about the Latter-day Saint movement on their own,…

  • Is Activity Increasing Among US-based Latter-day Saints?

    Stephen C

    The following is a guest post from Stephen Cranny. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and five children. I calculated the percent of people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints who are “active” (attend Church about…