LDS General Conference weekend is upon us. I will likely write a review of this, the 181st session of conference, as I have the past several sessions. But I’m frankly less interested in what will be said this weekend, and more interested in what has been said over the entire span of general conference’s history.
BYU has engineered a phenomenal tool with which to study trends in general conference. It’s called the Corpus, and it gives you access to a database of all the conference talks from 1851 to 2010—that’s 10,000 talks, 24 million words!
I searched dozens of keywords to measure their relative frequency in conference talks over time. Below are some of my results.
“Abortion” – Pew Research Center finds that Mormons are the second most pro-life demographic in America, so it’s curious that abortion has received so little attention in recent decades.
“Atheism” – Atheism has been off Mormonism’s radar for several decades, but it is again becoming a concern/target for church leaders.
“Atonement” – I’m not sure what best explains this trend. I suppose, though, that it’s in keeping with the church’s efforts to be seen as a more mainstream Christian sect.
“Book of Mormon” – Until the mid-20th century, the Bible was actually cited more often than the Book of Mormon by church leaders. President Ezra Taft Benson in the 1980s gave the Book of Mormon significantly greater emphasis.
“Communism” – Mormon paranoia about communism and socialism long predates Glenn Beck. I think, though, that Mormon teachings better lend themselves to social justice-oriented, communitarian societies.
“Evolution” – Amid the Scopes Monkey Trial, everyone was talking about evolution—and Mormons, apparently, were no exception.
“First Vision” – Regarding the First Vision, LDS historian James B. Allen wrote in a 1966 Dialogue article, “the general [early] membership of the Church knew little, if anything, about it.”
“Hell” – When the Saints made it to the Utah territory, Brigham Young instituted a “Mormon Reformation”, which was marked by heated, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. And thus the inordinate use of “hell” in conference talks in the 1850s.
“Homosexuality” – Preachments against homosexuality and other sexual ‘sins’ were a theme throughout Spencer W. Kimball’s tenure as church president. And despite the church’s very public politicking against gay marriage, leaders now seem reluctant to explicitly mention homosexuality.
“Negroes” – All six utterances of “negroes” in the 1960s came from Benson, the bulk of them in a talk wherein he dismissed “so-called civil rights” as a communist conspiracy.
“Polygamy” – I wonder what happened in 1890…
“Pornography” – An interesting fact masked by this chart is that the occurrence of the word “pornography” in conference talks fell dramatically after 2005.
“Word of Wisdom” – Heber J. Grant, church president during the Prohibition era, made stricter adherence to the Word of Wisdom a requirement for temple worthiness.
The greatest threat to society probably ever: porn. Of course.
Jon — would you mind if I posted this to a couple of Post-Mormon lists I’m on? We have some greater researchers in our group, and they probably don’t know about this tool — I’d like to notify them about it.
Sue
Share away!
Sorry, meant to say “great researchers”.
Sounds a little pompous the way I goofed it.
The one that surprises me is “homosexuality.” There are really no mentions of it in the 2000s?
That surprised me too. It was obviously discussed, but church leaders must have avoided the word recently.
Did you run other synonyms/euphemisms for homosexuality? Maybe Same Sex Attraction?
Good call out. I did run “same-sex” and it came up with 5 occurrences in the 1990s, but that’s it. “Same-sex attraction” and other variants came up with zero hits.
“Same-gender” actually yielded 3 results for the 2000s.
what dataset are you using for this analysis? I’m becoming curious what the conference talk wordcloud and what kinds of markov chains are most common
What do you mean exactly? Sorry. I’m not a statistician.
Looks like their dataset is hidden behind copyright. No way to do anything with markov chains unless you collect it all yourself. Fantastically lame.
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I’ve read somewhere that there’s an inverse relationship between the terms “Free Agency” and “Obedience” in GC talks… very interesting that up to the 70′s “Free Agency” was a much more popular topic. In the 80′s, “Obedience” took its place as the topic of choice…. I’d be interested to see if that’s true.
It is now more commonly just called “agency” in the church.
“Obedience” hasn’t changed much over the years, so I tested “free agency”. Initially, I thought the results were very compelling–the use of “free agency” plummeted in the last couple of decades. However, I then searched “agency”, and that word is still very popular in conference talks. So all that happened was they changed “free agency” for “agency.”
Some questions unanswered by your display here is how comparable is one decade to another? Are you including only annual conferences, or also semianual conferences? How many talks were delivered at each? Has this changed over time? Is it really fair to compare a word count from the past decade to a word count from a decade in the 1800′s (e.g. are the total numbers of words from each decade comparable)?
It doesn’t compare total word count, but relative frequency. These data account for the fact that some conferences are longer than others. Pay less attention to the “FREQ” measure and more to the “PER MIL”.
I’ve noticed in the last conference that even though they don’t mention the actual words such as homosexuallity, it’s still an implied subject. For instance when Boyd K Packer stated in the April 2011 conference:
It’s very clear that even though he doesn’t state homosexuality, it’s still made know that it’ is a sin almost as bad as murder. The entire conference may not have used the word homosexuality there was still lessons that pertain to that subject.
We were just thinking about doing a study like this… it is interesting to me that the 2000′s show no activity for talks on Homosexuality, yet there has clearly been talks done on the subject…particularly around the Prop 8 fiasco. I would love to know if you have specific data for that? Or is the data less significant to appear on the graph?
Thanks for posting this.
Just saw above comments.