While many Mormons look forward to General Conference for the messages from church leaders, MormonLeaks is creating a new tradition of increased leaks around the semi-annual meeting that even former members can get excited about. MormonLeaks founder Ryan McKnight recently promised leaks every day until General Conference, and Tuesday was the first drop.
Today’s release included four PowerPoint presentations, and the sheer number of charts and figures would make any statistician’s mouth water. The first related to reception of early Gospel Topics essays among members in the United States, the subject of this post. The other three PowerPoint docs related to other various studies. One was a 2013 study revealing ward council characteristics in five different areas of the world (the label deceptively says it’s related to the missionary age change, but it’s not). Another was a 2013 study of mid-single Mormons and weighing experiences and outcomes in conventional wards versus single units. The last was a 2004 study of middle-aged Mormon men comparing their BYU or other college experiences with later career, family, and religiosity outcomes.
I’ve previously written about events leading up to the Gospel Topics essays, but I’ll try to summarize. The institutional church has been challenged by increasing access to difficult church history topics via the internet. In the early 2000s, the church history department began to take baby steps towards increased transparency, reversing a decades-old trend, but the church continued to rely on outside organizations like FARMS and FairMormon to directly address the concerns of members rather than create any official apologetic responses. In 2010, many members in Sweden were troubled by historical topics, and a visit by two church historians did little to ease their minds. In March 2012, apologetic resources from various sources were gathered and sent to church leaders there, the “Swedish Rescue,” in order to stem rising disaffection. Here in the states, the Bottgate episode of February 2012 also made clear the need for official apologetic responses not just for members, but also to accurately present current positions of church leaders on potentially embarrassing topics for outside media. At some point, the church commissioned scholars to begin working on a series of essays on common troublesome historical and doctrinal topics.[1] Rumors of the existence of these essays began swirling in early 2013. The first two essays were released on November 20th of that year.
According to the PowerPoint presentation MormonLeaks released, a study was conducted in April 2014 to gauge how bishops and other members were responding to the essays. At that point, seven essays had been released:
- “Are Mormons Christian?” (November 20, 2013)
- “First Vision Accounts” (November 20, 2013)
- “Race and the Priesthood” (December 6, 2013)
- “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah” (December 16, 2013)
- “Book of Mormon Translation” (December 30, 2013)
- “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies” (January 31, 2014)
- “Becoming Like God” (February 24, 2014)
Local news media covered the release of many of these essays (see here and here, for example). The church announced the expansion of the Gospel Topics section of their website on the same day the first two essays were released, though they only mentioned “Are Mormons Christian?” in the announcement. “First Vision Accounts” got left out. I can’t find a church announcement for any other essays until November 2014 after the media uproar on the October release of the Nauvoo and post-Manifesto polygamy essays. So, basically, those people who knew about the essays in April 2014 weren’t hearing about them from the church.
Survey Results
The survey was given to bishops and other active adult members of the church in the United States. It is unclear how many members were surveyed. Bishops were better read on the essays, with 65% having viewed at least one (5% had read all seven). Among active adult members, only 37% had viewed at least one (2% viewed all seven).
The presentation pointed out that men were slightly more likely to have read the essays than women (41% of men read at least one article, while only 37% of women did the same). It’s unclear whether they included bishops in that calculation of males. It’d be skewed given how many would’ve felt a greater obligation to look at the essays.
Unsurprisingly, higher educated people were more likely to have viewed the essays. Of those with doctoral degrees, 63% had read at least one essay. Those with vocational training or some college were at the low end with 36%, which I still find impressive. (Those with a high school diploma were slightly higher at 38%.) There were no statistically significant differences based on age or region of the United States.
Like I said, there are many charts and percentages on the PowerPoint, so take a look for yourself if interested. Here are some other tidbits the presenters felt were important:
- The most viewed essays among both bishops and adult members were “Are Mormons Christians?” and “Race and the Priesthood.” (Aside: On the original Church News article advertising the updated Gospel Topics section, the “Are Mormons Christians” essay was directly linked. That might account for the popularity in spite of the fact only a quarter of those who saw the essay bothered to read it all. Again, the other essay released at the same time, “First Vision Accounts,” was not mentioned.)
- Personal study or curiosity was the top motive for bishops or members to seek out the essays. Bishops were slightly more likely to have read the essays in order to help others. The essays were rarely used to prepare lessons.
- Many people might be surprised to find out that most respondents found the material in the essays clear (90-97% for bishops, 78-96% for members) and helpful (89-98% for bishops, 74-93% for members). Satisfaction for the various essays was a bit lower (77-92% for bishops, 57-88% for members). The least satisfying essay for both groups was “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies,” followed by “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah” and “Race and the Priesthood.” A decent chunk of respondents also felt those three essays were the most incomplete. (It should be noted that two other plural marriage essays were later released, providing more information on early and post-Manifesto polygamy.)
Study Repercussions?
The PowerPoint document was created in September 2014. By that point, two other Gospel Topics essays had been released: “Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints” (May 13, 2014) and “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham” (July 8, 2014). Neither created much fanfare beyond single articles in local news media.
Interestingly, on September 9th, the same month the leaked PowerPoint was created, a memorandum was sent by the Priesthood Department to mission presidents, stake presidents, and bishops worldwide calling attention to the Gospel Topics section of the church’s website. While the essays were not cited specifically, the department explained the purpose of the Gospel Topics section (and, by extension, the essays):
When church members have questions regarding [LDS] history and doctrine, possibly arising when detractors spread misinformation and doubt, you may want to direct their attention to these resources.
Bishops were encouraged to recommend the Gospel Topics section for personal study, but only if the need arose.
What’s Happened Since Then?
A lot. The essays have since been incorporated into both seminary and institute curriculum. All CES instructors have now been instructed to “know the content of these essays like you know the back of your hand.” Seminary students are learning in their Doctrinal Mastery program to use resources like the Gospel Topics essays to provide answers for themselves and those around them. Even the 2017 Gospel Doctrine curriculum encourages teachers to point class members towards the essays.
This leaked PowerPoint is a snapshot of the church’s inoculation strategy in embryo. There was clearly concern on the part of church leaders in providing members with these resources (Would the essays help? Would they be satisfactory?), in spite of countless man-hours put in by both scholars and church leaders to get that information public.
What are your thoughts on this leak?
[1] Shannon Flynn wrote a guest post last April reporting on an address by Elder Marlin K. Jensen where he talked about the creation of the essays in a bit more detail. Rick B has also written about his interviews with Paul Reeve, Brian Hales, and Ugo Peregro, where they discuss their involvement in the writing of the essays.
Wheat & Tares 
Interesting finds. I go back and forth on the purpose and roll out of the essays. I think, on the whole, it’s a good move to publish them, most of them are well done and the information is slowly getting out to the general Church membership. I am surprised how many ward and family members have not read them. Unfortunately, I believe there are several deliberate diversion tactics in the essays. There are a lot of issues around the Book of Mormon: King James language and errors, The Long War and anachronisms, to name a few. Of those issues, the Church picked DNA as something to analyze in an essay. That essay is designed to be confusing. I would guess 95% of readers get lost in the weeds about 1/3 of the way through. This is by design, with the idea that someone would get part-way through the essay, give up and walk away thinking “wow, this stuff is complex, it’s hard to determine one way or the other.” The “Are Mormons Christians?” essay seems to be a softball in the words of John Shelby Spong “answering questions no one is asking.” The real meat is in the polygamy essays, Book of Abraham, and race and the priesthood. The race and priesthood essay all but admits it was all a mistake and based on racist ideas, not any doctrine. In my experience, the general Church membership have not accepted this idea and have not thought through the theological implications of that admission.
I have also noticed a general trend with a lot of these issues. For a long time they were taboo. Now, I feel like the Church and general membership are ready to admit they exist and want credit for acknowledging them, but are not ready to ask the tough questions or think through the implications. This is a prime example https://www.lds.org/broadcasts/the-truth-restored?lang=eng. The point of this seemed to be “hey, we had a worldwide broadcast where we talked about the different First Vision accounts.” That’s a good first step, but the talk was essentially 1. Here is why the First Vision is important; 2. Different accounts exist; and 3. This is my testimony of the First Vision. So, you get credit for acknowledging that it is an issue, but there is no acknowledgement of the difficult questions or implications. This is a good first step, but not a long-term solution.
Interesting, but I’m not sure there’s much shock value here. Or I suppose the shock value is that MormonLeaks still has someone stealing rather old PowerPoint presentations?
I also wonder how the church gathered the respondents. Was it random? If not, then I’m not sure the numbers really mean all that much in terms of the church.
ReTx, no shock value. I was interested in the idea that church leaders were trying to figure out if members were accessing the essays and, if so, how they were reacting. If you read Shannon Flynn’s post you can tell there was some opposition to the project. These surveys would’ve been important feedback if there was a disagreement brewing in the hierarchy. I like this because it’s a peek behind the curtain thing (rather than earth-shattering revelation).
The late war has less similarity to the Book of Mormon than Leaves of Grass and 50% of its matches come from the copyright statement.
Addressing it leads too quickly to snark.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you were going for shock value with your post, Mary Ann. More that the MormonLeaks group was doing so. It is interesting, but it’s pretty much what I’d expect the church to be talking about without any big surprises.
Fascinating Mary Ann, Thank you. I also enjoyed some of the other leaked documents you linked. I especially liked the caveats on the male outcomes presentation: “Our exploratory study does not allow us to conclude that attending BYU or Institute caused any of the reported outcomes”. Now if only we could get CES to actually believe that… and I’d love to see a study examining what the actual causes might be…
What would really be interesting is a comparison of male outcomes (and female outcomes) between attending BYU and BYU-I.
It would also be interesting to get information on what characteristics of families/individuals do seem to be more causal in outcome. I’m going to guess parental income/education level as the primary one.
I think I was part of the survey group this questions was asked of. Participation was based on a request I received via email. Surveys would come sporadically over about a year and a half. What I think is interesting, now that you mention results, is the somewhat large percentage of respondents who knew about or had read some of the essays. To me this might be an indication of the impact of the Bloggernacle, since at the time of the survey, the essays were not easily found, even if you were looking for them. The essays that I had read were because I read about them and they were linked to from other “non-official” sites, like this one. At the time I wondered whether the questions were actually a indirect way of letting me know there were essays, since as you mentioned, they weren’t really advertised.
ReTx, Agreed female outcome data would be interesting. Not least, knowing did they even do a female outcome study? Especially since one of the data points on the male outcomes was whether or not their wives were employed outside the home.
Stephen R. Marsh, I agree that The Long War plagiarism claims have many problems and the similarities are by no means a death nail for the BOM. However, this is obviously an issue for a lot of people and a major pillar in the CES Letter argument that BOM is a fraud. Why not tackle the BOM issues head-on in an essay or Church publication? Why not do an Institute, Stake or BYU religion class on the CES Letter and really look at the arguments? The answer is because the CES letter has some factually true assertions, some exaggerated claims and some really shaky claims. It’s tough to acknowledging the true ones and think through some of the implications. I would argue that the GT Essays and the findings of this study seem to show that the institutional Church and the general membership are just getting comfortable with the idea of putting our feet in the water and slowly wading in, but we’re not ready to really get wet yet.
Ranae, thanks for that insight. If they were emailed, it would limit the sample to slightly more tech-saavy members (since email addresses needed to be current in church record-keeping systems). In my current elderly ward, half the people would’ve been disqualified.
Felixfabulous, when comparing what’s been done in the last decade to the previous four, I’m sure some of the Brethren are feeling whiplash. It looks slow to us, but context matters.
I am shocked.
I tend to take a ham-fisted approach to statistics. Three categories: below 30%, the middle, and above 70%. I am not shocked that most people found the essays comprehensible and helpful. I am totally shocked that over half of bishops have read some of them. (Middle instead of below 30%) I am even more shocked that bishops read them at higher rates than other members. What bishop has the time for such nonsense when the widows are in need?
I live in a transient ward with people moving in and out quickly. Most are young and from the strong holds out west. I would imagine they might be sort of like a fairly representative sample of the LDS church millenials in the USA. Nobody ever says anything about the GTEs. You might as well start talking about how the Ainu of Japan are descended from the Nephites as anything remotely connected to the GTEs.
So are many people secretly reading them and pretending that they know nothing?
It is nice to know they are being studied. But another question, much more important, what is the effect of reading them? Do they build and bolster faith? Or do they push people standing near the door on out? Does inoculation work?
BTW Mary Ann, the introduction is one of the best summaries of this recent chapter in our history I could imagine being written. Thank you for your thoughtful efforts.
I think it’s interesting that they are looking at these things. I tend to agree that MormonLeaks is often a yawner. What’s next? Dry cleaning receipts? But every once in a while, we do see something interesting. I suppose that’s the point of these online leaks – simply transparency.
I’m in the final drafts of a paper that does a stylometric comparison between Hunt’s Late War and the Book of Mormon. Hopefully I can finish it shortly.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that the survey was necessarily incomplete; if someone read the essays and left the church as a result, they would not show up in the statistics. I have no idea if people who did so are a statistically significant group, but I’ve heard enough first-hand accounts to know that this is definitely a thing.
Other useful questions might have included “Have you heard anyone in your ward or branch (besides your bishop or branch president) talk about them?” and quizzes to see how much people actually understood and retained. Although given that the intent of at least some of the essays seems to be to obfuscate the truth (as felixfabulous pointed out), a comprehension quiz made by the church would probably look very different from one made by an unindoctrinated observer.
Also, I would personally be less interested in “a comparison of The Book of Mormon and The Late War,” and more interested in a holistic look at the evidence which asks “what’s the most likely origin of the BoM?” My experience with Mormon apologists has been that they’re good at rhetoric, and looking for any and all holes in one thing at a time, but that they don’t really care what the cumulative weight of the evidence suggests.
Like, they’ll say “this and this and this town on the Vernal Holley map may not have existed in Joseph Smith’s time.” But when someone asks “so how come the rest of it lines up really well, and how come Cumorah is right here in New York, and how come Joseph Smith was telling people it took place right there, and how come all the doctrinal content of the BoM was a direct response to the stuff people were talking about at the time,” and on and on, and they’ve got nothing and go back to looking at mushrooms under a microscope while missing the forest for the trees.
I’ll add that the biggest problem with the sampling is that it is targeted to members who engage with the church using email. Right there you wipe out a ton of members and that tends to be a demographic difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a connection between engagement with the church and members who receive correspondence from the church via email.
ReTx, not just engagement. Those active on email communication from the church are also more likely to pay attention to online church happenings. The numbers would be skewed up. That may explain why these numbers are so much higher than many of us would expect. When I wrote my Gospel Topics “A Collective Shrug” post last year, I don’t think I’d ever believe a third of members had looked at at least one essay, and that was *years* after the first one was released. In October 2015 I taught GD, and even when worlwide media went nuts over the Nauvoo polygamy essay, only one classmember admitted to reading *any* of the church essays.
It is interesting to me how we can see statistics so differently. (this, of, course is no surprise). I see the Gospel Topic essay numbers as terrible indictment of our membership. Bishops reading none, one, two or three at 79%. General members for the same data set at 91%. To me that is awful. I believe some of the previous comments about e-mail participation affecting the numbers is a good observation. I think the real numbers would be worse. There is an other factor at play in this situation that has not been mentioned. I have a close friend who is a brother to a current General Authority. (1st. Quorum of Seventy) As recently as 18 months ago the General Authority was telling , at least some people, that the “controversial” essays were buried in the beginning among all of the topics so that members “would have to go through some good basic doctrine before getting to the controversial stuff.” This was at least one year (maybe more) after the controversial ones were brought up front. This told me four things. 1st. They really were buried in the beginning and quite on purpose. 2nd. Even though the General Authorities claim to be united they rarely are and as a result there some deep divisions. and mixed and multiple messages coming out. 3rd. There is still some unhappiness about the whole project . 4th. Some of the General Authorities are way behind the curve on what is going on in areas that are not part of their current assignments. I wonder if all of the General Authorities have read all of them, and if they have, could they now answer some simple questions about them? I would bet money that if the G.A.’s had to sit a test on them there would be quite a few C’s, D’s and a few F’s .
Shannon, one of today’s leaks supports your argument. It was a simple August 2014 email from a GA forwarding a list of the essays to date (with links), but he warned not to share or forward that email to anyone else. Of course by November 2014, the church was publishing the list of essays (with links) on the Mormon Newsroom page.