Category: Social Sciences and Economics

  • Scams in Zion, Part III: Utah is Indeed the Ponzi Scheme Capital of the US

    Scams in Zion, Part III: Utah is Indeed the Ponzi Scheme Capital of the US

    Stephen C

    It’s been a long time coming, but this is part III of a series on “Scams in Zion,” with part I (showing that Latter-day Saint-heavy counties have less fraud) here, and part II discussing our multilevel marketing problem here.    Here I’m directly addressing a particular kind of affinity fraud we’re known for: Ponzi schemes.…

  • “Oh God, Where Art Thou? (!)” On Anger at God

    “Oh God, Where Art Thou? (!)” On Anger at God

    Stephen C

    I had a season in my life when I was angry at God and it was more than a passing blip that was quickly buried under fear of getting struck by lightning. Anger at God is in some ways the summun malum of sin. Having moments of weakness that lead to poor decisions is one…

  • Is There Less Crime Around the Manhattan Temple?

    Is There Less Crime Around the Manhattan Temple?

    Stephen C

    The New York Police Department has very fine-grained data on crime frequency, with latitude and longitude coordinates for reported crimes. Of course, I’m sure a cop isn’t walking around with a GPS device to get it exact, and if you look at the data it tends to be laid out on a grid, suggesting that…

  • The Church in 2080, Part VI: My Long-Term Growth Prognosis

    Stephen C

    I’m on the record at various places on this blog as warning about future hiccups in Church growth. Medium-term, I think we need to reconcile ourselves to a world where the center of traditional Church strength enters a period of no or negative growth for the foreseeable future. Additionally, as developing countries become developed countries…

  • The Church in 2080, Part II: The Kids Are Not All Right, or the Post-Post-Gen Zers

    Stephen C

    There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the mental health crisis facing the liberal kids these days. I don’t know if I have much to add in terms of generalities that hasn’t already been said, so here I’ll discuss its relevance for the Church long-term.  If youth were leaving organized religion in droves and…

  • The Church in 2080, Part I: Race, Ethnicity, and Languages

    Stephen C

    Projecting out on a very long horizon is a bit of a fool’s errand because of unknown unknowns, which is why most formal demographic, political, or economic projections have time horizons measured in the decades at the most. Still, occasionally it’s fun to project out farther (For example, the UN came out with a report…

  • Do People Believe in Hell?

    Do People Believe in Hell?

    Stephen C

    God it is, you say, who judges in this way; he is the persecutor of newborn children; he it is who send tiny babies to eternal flames… It would be right and proper to treat you as beneath argument: you have come so far from religious feeling, from civilized feeling, so far indeed from mere…

  • Superforecasting the Church for 2023

    Superforecasting the Church for 2023

    Stephen C

    Note: After this post went live and the organizer reached out to me, some of these specific predictions were added to an actual prediction market at Manifold Markets.  In the past public predictions usually took the form of some pundit making a prognistication about an event that was going to happen years in the future,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…