Category: Liberal Arts

  • If I Didn’t Believe, Part IV: Meaning, Purpose, and Life in the Void

    If I Didn’t Believe, Part IV: Meaning, Purpose, and Life in the Void

    Stephen C

    Dying Universe Morality In the absence of a faith I don’t think I’d have very strong opinions about abstract or moral concepts. This isn’t one of those “if you don’t believe why don’t you kill your grandma?” arguments that make good-hearted atheists roll their eyes. I have no desire to kill grandmas regardless of my…

  • Proportion Latter-day Saint by County Maps

    Proportion Latter-day Saint by County Maps

    Stephen C

    I generated some chloropleths of proportion Latter-day Saint by county from the latest 2020 Religion Census data. Since outside the Mormon corridor the proportions are relatively low, and inside they are relatively high, I did three versions: one with the cutoff at 100%, one with a cutoff at  10%, and one with a cutoff at…

  • 2020 US Religion Census Just Dropped

    2020 US Religion Census Just Dropped

    Stephen C

    The decennial US Religion Census just dropped, so we now have fine-grained current data on percent LDS and number of congregations by county. My understanding is that the methodology for the Church’s reporting of their number changed in between waves, which affects our ability to compare the numbers between this and 2010 (I might be…

  • The Greatest Apostasy Since Kirtland? Following a Cohort of Members Across Time

    Stephen C

    For some years there have been rumors of a large-scale apostasy happening in the Church. These rumors are hard to test without insider information because most surveys have such small samples of Church members it’s really a case of peering through the glass darkly.  I’ve been on record suggesting that in the long run the Church…

  • Latter-day Saints and Extraterrestrials

    Stephen C

    I was asked to present a bit on the Latter-day Saint perspective on extraterrestrials for an “exotheology” reading group I’m a part of that’s mostly composed of British academics. The following are my thoughts I put together for the lecture.   I was asked to present because the Latter-day Saint (AKA Mormon) tradition has had…

  • You’re Probably Not as Edgy as You Think

    You’re Probably Not as Edgy as You Think

    Stephen C

      “Subculture deviance” is a theoretical perspective in the sociology of deviance that, in response to the question of why people deviate from societal norms, posits that people simply adhere to the norms of a subculture that is at variance with the broader culture. In other words, people who think they’re being radical, edgy freethinkers…

  • Scams in Zion, Part II: MLMs and Utah Socio-Religious Elites

    Scams in Zion, Part II: MLMs and Utah Socio-Religious Elites

    Stephen C

    It’s sort of an open secret that Utah has a pyramid scheme multilevel marketing problem. MLMs prey on financially vulnerable people and get them to weaken their personal connections–the most important thing in life and during a time when such precious connections are in increasingly short supply–for very little money, and some MLMs layer dubious, snake-oil…

  • Scams in Zion, Part I: Do Latter-day Saints Tend to Be Gullible Fraud Victims?

    Scams in Zion, Part I: Do Latter-day Saints Tend to Be Gullible Fraud Victims?

    Stephen C

    I just finished reading the Bernard Madoff biography Wizard of Lies that, in part, details how Madoff ingratiated himself with and defrauded a significant chunk of the East Coast Jewish community. Of course that sparked my thinking about parallels in our own religious community, as it has become sort of a truism that Latter-day Saints…

  • How Bad is Salt Lake City’s Sexual Assault Problem?

    How Bad is Salt Lake City’s Sexual Assault Problem?

    Stephen C

    Utah doesn’t do so great when it comes to its ranking of reported rape. However, as any sexual assault scholar will tell you, most rapes are not reported (and an even smaller fraction lead to a conviction). Low official rape numbers are sort of a Rorschach test, and can be interpreted as evidence of stigma…

  • The Early Church, Social Networks, and Conversion

    The Early Church, Social Networks, and Conversion

    Stephen C

    One of the core tenets of modern Latter-day Saint missionary strategy is that missionary work through members’ friends and family is much more efficient than cold-calling approaches like knocking on doors. This approach has its roots in the Rodney Stark hypothesis that religious movements largely grow through networks, and that even apparent cases of mass…

  • The Gospel, Psychopathy, and the Executioner’s Song

    Stephen C

    I just finished the Norman Mailer true-crime book The Executioner’s Song, an account of the murders and execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah. The Gilmore case received a lot of attention because 1) it was the first death penalty carried out after capital punishment was re-legalized in the US, and 2) Gilmore himself refused to…

  • Siring Gods

    Stephen C

    In my last post I noted that a paper I wrote on pre-Utah fertility rhetoric and theology for the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar was no longer available on their website, and that this was discouraging because I hadn’t kept a final copy because I assumed it would always be available on their site. After scrounging…

  • What Are The Odds of Being A Church Leader?

    Stephen C

    An issue that came up in my last post on church leadership as a marker of righteousness is that people are occasionally told that they are going to be the future bishops and stake presidents of the Church. There are a variety of problems with this: 1) it clearly implies a hierarchy when in theory…

  • The Future and the Church, Part VI: The Future of Religion Worldwide

    The Future and the Church, Part VI: The Future of Religion Worldwide

    Stephen C

    “The Future of Religion” is one of those big picture questions that has been addressed by a wide variety of intellectuals such as Freud, Rorty, and basically every European intellectual in the 19th century. (The fact that the end of religion has been right around the corner for more than a century now doesn’t help…

  • The Future and the Church, Part V: When Will There Be More African Wards than North American Wards?

    The Future and the Church, Part V: When Will There Be More African Wards than North American Wards?

    Stephen C

    I took the recent congregation numbers by continent reported by the Church and extrapolated the growth by continent to look at the likely composition of the Church in the future. Now, this is not a sophisticated projection (to put it gently). All I’m doing is estimating the starting point in 2010, deriving the percentage change…

  • [Languages of the Spirit] Doubt

    Mary Grey

    My husband frequently says of our team dynamic that he is the historian and I am the theologian, and that before I talk about anything I lay a theological framework for it. This is clearly interesting and endearing of me. The last couple of posts have been me laying the theological framework for this series,…

  • How Old Are Latter-day Saint Bishops?

    How Old Are Latter-day Saint Bishops?

    Stephen C

    Last time we used Duke’s National Congregations Study to see how racially representative Latter-day Saint bishops were of the Church. Today we’ll look at how old Latter-day Saint bishops are compared to their peer congregational leaders in other traditions. If we take the two most recent waves (2012 and 2018) of the survey and calculate…

  • Are Black and Hispanic Men Called as Bishops as Much as White Men?

    Are Black and Hispanic Men Called as Bishops as Much as White Men?

    Stephen C

    The other day I realized that Duke University’s National Congregations Study, which includes about 87 randomly sampled LDS wards, has information on the race and ethnicity of the “person who is the head or senior clergy person or religious leader in your congregation,” which I assume in the Latter-day Saint case is the bishop, so…

  • The Church’s Position on Sexuality

    Stephen C

    I’ve noticed a not-insignificant number of members, both orthodox and heterodox, assume that the Church’s position on human sexuality is a “just because the prophet said so” issue, and aren’t aware of any well thought out defenses of the Church’s (or conservative religion’s in general) position written by non-church leaders, so I’ve gone ahead and…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Making Sense of Prophecies (2): How to Read a Prophecy

    Making Sense of Prophecies (2): How to Read a Prophecy

    Jonathan Green

    Earlier scholarship has often understood the function of prophetic texts as providing information about the future.

  • 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…

  • 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. …