Laws? What laws?

The position of the Mormon church is that one should obey the laws of the nation in which one resides. In fact, holding (at least most, maybe even any) callings generally requires that one is not currently in a state of breaking local laws. However, the church makes it a point to not inquire into immigration status—so if someone is a resident of a place but they are breaking the law by not holding a legally valid residency status (i.e., citizenship or some other sort of residency permit), they can still hold a calling. In fact, i have known people who did not hold legal residence status in their country of residence but still received callings as full-time missionaries.

I figure that a number of people find this either good or bad,* but i simply find it interesting that the church has effectively decided to ignore one statutory part of the nature of national borders.

* And note that if there are any comments that seem to me to be even remotely a rant about immigration policy and enforcement, no matter how cogent they might be, will be summarily deleted.

What’s up with the cities?

So i’ve been traveling to the east coast the last little bit (hence the lack of posts), and that led me to an observation:

     →We are such an incredibly non-urban church!

Or, more precisely, we just don’t seem to do central cities. I mean, the way conferences in my field work is that they generally end on Sunday around noon and then i spend my afternoon flying home so i don’t get to go to church, but this time i actually had the time to go to church after the meeting ended—but there wasn’t a Mormon congregation anywhere i could have gotten to.

And i was in downtown Boston, which is a pretty big city—over 625,000 people. Really? We only have one ward in the entire city,* and i’d’ve had to have figured out a way to the suburbs to get to another one?

And i’m not cherry-picking here—Philadelphia has a similarly meager presence in the city itself compared to the suburbs, as does Washington DC. Even here in Alaska, where we’ve got a good presence in Anchorage, the suburbs have more congregations than you’d expect given their comparative population.

And even in the heart of Mormon country, there’s gobs and tons of church units in Salt Lake City, but compared to its suburbs? Not even close.

So what is it about our church that doesn’t appeal to city dwellers so much?** Back when i was growing up on the east coast people used to chalk it up to our whiteness (what with the cities having such a large number of non-white individuals), but that kind of falls apart when you see the same pattern in Anchorage and Salt Lake City.

So: Any ideas?

* One English-speaking non-singles ward, that is.
** In the United States, at least. My intuition is that you’re more likely to see Mormonism as an urban church is some other parts of the world.

Daughter effects?

So the “daughter effect” has been well-documented in the business world—if a company’s chief executive officer (or similar) has any daughters, and particularly a daughter as an oldest child, that company is more likely to have policies and practices of the type that are generally seen as being friendly to women.

So this has gotten me wondering—is there a similar sort of effect among Mormon leaders (bishops, stake presidents, mission presidents, general authorities)? If one of them has daughters, especially an oldest child who’s a daughter, is he more likely to, say, listen to women in stake or ward or whatever councils, or focus on young women equally as much as the young men, or promote visiting teaching as vigorously as home teaching, or whatever else one might come up with? Also, how would one measure this?

Utah Valley University has a decent and growing Mormon Studies program, and Brigham Young University has a lot of folks interested in the social scientific study of religion, and the University of Illinois has a history of research into Mormonism, so there’s got to be somebody out there who has the desire and training to look into this.

Parent(s)?

Here’s a question: The church’s records have spots for each member’s mother and father. However, there are plenty of family units out there where children are legally the children of two mothers or two fathers. So how do the church’s records deal with this, given that they enforce mothers as female and fathers as male?

Who should count?

Can we stop calling the Relief Society “the largest women’s organization in the world”? It strikes me as a bit of a dishonest label, actually—i mean, just because you happen to be female, have been baptized into the Mormon church at some point, and have survived to your eighteenth birthday (or gotten married, whichever comes first), well, that makes you a part of the Relief Society.

Sorry, folks, that’s not an organization, that’s a convenient label for a group of people. If women actually consciously chose whether to be affiliated with the Relief Society,* like used to be the case, well, then i could see that being a meaningful claim. But how many of the women whose “membership” in the Relief Society supposedly makes it such a large organization are actually involved in it? If someone’s so far outside of it as many of those women are, why in the world do we count them?

* Which was one of Joseph Smith’s quite emphatic bars to entry into the Relief Society. (Actually living according to gospel principles was another, and i’ll note in passing that that’s not a part of the requirements nowadays, either.)

What happens when the world isn’t as bad as we say?

One thing that y’all may have missed in the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend and Xmas shopping was the news that the teen pregnancy rate in the United States declined last year. And when i say it declined, i mean it declined—it dropped to a record low rate for the entire time records have been kept (70 years!), and this isn’t just a little blip downwards, but a continuation of a long-term trend.*

And yes, some of this is due to an increased use of contraception, but the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s analysis (which is only available in PDF format, and i don’t like linking to PDFs, so no link here, but it’s googlable) finds that a lot of it is also due to teens simply choosing not to have sex.** Kind of runs counter to the common Mormon meme that the world is busily going to hell in a handbasket, and that we need to aggressively shelter our kids from whatever the rest of the world is doing, since everybody else is getting more and more evil.***

So i’ll just say that what i became very thankful for this past Thanksgiving weekend was that my children are growing up in a world that seems to be getting more and more moral in some very important ways, whether we care to notice that or not.

* I recognize that the unwed teen pregnancy rate is a more interesting statistic for this entry than simply the teen pregnancy rate, but those statistics turn out to be really hard to come by—or, at least, reliable ones are hard to find. Part of the problem is that the best numbers for my purposes would be teen pregnancies in which conception (not just birth) occurred outside of marriage, and that doesn’t seem to be well-tracked by anybody.

**And before anybody decides to pull out the abortion card, i’ll simply note that the teen abortion rate has been steadily falling over the past several decades, and that the stats i’m talking about are pregnancy rates, anyway, not birth rates.

*** As does the fact that the peak year for the teen pregnancy rate (in the United States) was 1957. You mean teen pregnancies have been lower than that for more than 50 years, and we still haven’t realized that maybe the world isn’t all that more evil a place for our kids to grow up than it was when we were kids?

Some interesting stats

I was reading the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2008 U.S.  Religious Landscape Survey results for a linguistics research project,* and i ran across some interesting statistics that had nothing to do with my research, but i thought they were worth repeating here (but note that these stats reflect patterns only among U.S. adults):

Of all the adults who said that they grew up Mormon, 70% have stayed in the faith—and comparatively, that’s a pretty good rate.** Of those who left Mormonism, effectively half joined another church and half are now unaffiliated with any religion (which is pretty much normal for those who leave non-Protestant religions).

On the other side of things, 26% of all adult Mormons have converted from another faith, with fully half of those coming from Protestant faiths. Not necessarily surprising, that, given that pretty much half of all adults in the United States are Protestant—what surprised me was that only 1% of our adult membership grew up in churches that are neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic, even though those groups make up better than 7% of the nation’s population. (5% of our members were initially unaffiliated, though.)

* There’s actually a tangential Mormon connection to it—i’ll have to post something about it here sometime.

** Higher than us: Hindus at 84% retention, Jews at 76%, and members of Orthodox faiths at 73%. Roman Catholics are close at 68%. Interestingly, the majority of those raised unaffiliated with any religion have ended up affiliated with a religion, which actually surprised me.

David B gingerly touches the third rail, again

Same-sex marriage is a big issue for a lot of people, both within and without the Mormon church.* (In fact, it’s become a big issue for a lot of non-Mormons with regard to how they view the Mormon church itself. But that’s a side issue for today’s topic.)

In pretty much every opinion poll of the US population that i’ve seen on the topic of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get legally married, there’s been a consistent age breakdown: Those younger than me generally think there’s no problem with the idea, while those older than me think that it should never be allowed—my age seems to be the swing point for this effect.**

I haven’t seen any such polls of Mormons, though. That is, there are plenty of opinion polls that show that Mormons† are generally not in favor of allowing legal same-sex marriages, but there don’t appear to be any easily allowable breakdowns that show whether there’s an age effect among Mormons that parallels that of the general population.††

Anyway, i’m curious whether younger Mormons have different views on the subject of legal recognition of same-sex marriage than older Mormons do. Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers on this issue?‡

* And, as i’ve written before, i really don’t get why it’s such a big deal to so many Mormons, but I recognize that it is.

** And it’s not that people tend to be less likely to approve of it as they get older—i’ve been watching the polls on this issue for some years, and it really is my birth year that seems to be the most reliable inflection point.

† Important caveat: I’m talking only about Mormons in the United States here. While i’d be interested to learn the attitudes of Mormons outside of the United States (particularly in jurisdictions where same-sex marriages are legally recognized) on this subject, it’s beyond the bounds of what i can deal with in a single blog post.

†† I did find a report of a poll that reports on the breakdown of recent opinion polling on the subject among Utahns, and it found sharp differences by both religion and age, but it didn’t provide any sort of cross-tabulation ability to figure out what the effect of religion and age was.

‡ And yeah, Gallup may have it, but i’m not going to shell out cash to get past their paywall just to look into this. Maybe i should clarify: Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers available for free on this issue?

How young is too old?

Where did the widespread Mormon cultural imperative for (comparatively) young marriages come from? I mean, it’s not like terribly young marriages were the historical norm throughout human history and age of first marriage has just recently started to rise*—so it has to have started sometime. Did it get ported in from some other group? Is it of relatively recent vintage, at least among Mormons?** More interestingly (for me), why is it such a taken-for-granted thing nowadays?

* For example, according to Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage: A History, the median age of first marriage for women in England between 1500 and 1700 was 26.

** Looking at age of marriage for general authorities throughout church history, i actually do suspect it’s a relatively recent cultural development.

Yeah, i’m a social stats geek—so?

Thanks to Dave Sundwall at A Soft Answer, who turned me on a few weeks ago* to the Pew Center’s study of sociopolitical views held by Mormons in the US. It took me a while to get through it properly, but it was worth it. There’s some interesting stuff in there, but unfortunately a lot of what people seem to be taking away from it a simple comparison of percentages, concluding that all it says is that Mormons are all hyperconservative (but with an intriguingly nuanced view of abortion). This isn’t what the report says, though.

Well, that is, it does say that Mormons are generally more sociopolitically conservative than the US population overall. It’s the details that make that the wrong conclusion to draw.

First of all, there are some interesting regional differences. Unfortunately, the study didn’t appear to separate people out by where they grew up, but rather only by where they live. Given that lots of wards and branches across the US are populated by Mormons who grew up in the jello belt, i suspect that the findings mask what i believe is a truth about Mormonism and sociopolitical leanings: It isn’t that Mormons are generally conservative, it’s that Mormons generally hold sociopolitical views that more or less match the population they grew up with—but most US Mormons are from sociopolitically conservative parts of the country, and that skews the overall results. The Pew Center’s results give us no way of actually determining whether my expectation is true, but it hints that it may be more true than false.

Another interesting finding: Converts really are different than lifelong Mormons. This may be a regional effect, as well, of course—there are likely to be more lifelong Mormons from areas that have a large number of Mormons. I really wish the Pew Center had reported the results of multivariate (and nonlinear!) regression analyses—i know they have the ability to do so, given the people they have on staff, so why they don’t release that sort of thing i don’t know.

One really interesting thing is the age difference—younger Mormons are more likely to have religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are associated with higher degrees of religious devoutness. I don’t know if this stems from younger Mormons being actually more devout in general or younger non-devout nominal Mormons being more likely to self-identify as non-Mormon (and therefore not part of this survey)—it’d be interesting to know.

And finally, the last thing i’d like to point out is that a clear majority of Mormons polled state that there is one true way to interpret Mormon teachings. To be honest, this amused me—i mean, i suspect that what people were saying was one of two things: either “i know how to interpret Mormon teachings, and i’m right” (yeah, and every Mormon who disagrees with you on stuff like caffeinated beverages feels the same way), or “our prophet has the correct interpretation” (which is more interesting, since the respondent wouldn’t necessarily know what the one true interpretation might be).

Yeah, it may well be true that there is one correct interpretation of Mormon teachings—i suspect there is, though i don’t know that i’d give a firm “yes” in answer to that question, maybe a “if you mean does God know, then yes; if you mean does any mortal know all truth, then no”, but I doubt that would fit on the form—but i still haven’t seen a comprehensive Mormon catechism,** you know?

* If you follow this link, ignore the comments—somehow, it devolved instantly into namecalling and ax-grinding over immigration issues.

** I own a copy of the most recent Roman Catholic catechism. It’s a fascinating reference work, really—i’m kind of jealous. Yeah, we’ve got the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, but it’s just not the same.

General Conference review

So looking back on General Conference, i have to say that there were a number of moments that were worth keeping stored in my brain (chief among them for me: David A. Bednar giving the most complete and yet most succinct definition of the mysteries of God that i’ve ever heard), but there was really only one thing that sums up the memory of watching the entire ten hours of general sessions:

Dang, but we’re a buncha white folks!

I mean, there weren’t even enough visible minorities* in the choir for the camera people to perform their gratuitous zoom-in-on-the-one-person-of-color-in-the-crowd shots we’d all gotten so used to in previous conferences.**

*Many thanks to Statistics Canada for providing me with a most useful, though not uncontroversial, term.
**Not that i lament its passing. I mean, it got to be almost embarrassing, the way it looked like a desperate attempt to say “No, really—we are diverse! See?”