Several of us here at Wheat & Tares were recently discussing whether Wendy Watson Nelson has affected the topics about which President Nelson has chosen to speak, so I decided to perform a quick analysis of his General Conference talks going back to 1995.
First, though, for those unfamiliar with why we would be interested in this question, I’ll give a bit of background. According to LDS Newsroom, President Russell Nelson and Wendy Watson Nelson were married April 6, 2006. Wendy Watson was President Nelson’s second wife. His first wife was Dantzel White Nelson, who died February 12, 2005.
Sister Wendy Watson Nelson was a professor of marriage and family therapy at BYU prior to her marriage to President Nelson, and had written several books about relationships, marriage, and family. Since they have been married, she, along with President Nelson, has spoken at several firesides and face-to-face events, most recently in Las Vegas, Nevada. She frequently provides marriage and relationship advice at these events. She is highly educated, has teaching experience in these topics, is willing to speak frequently on these topics, and is much younger than President Nelson. Naturally, several of us at Wheat & Tares were curious as to what type of influence, if any, she might have on President Nelson’s talks.
Since President and Sister Nelson were married in April 2006, in performing my analysis I had initially thought I’d grab all of President Nelson’s talks going back to 1995 so as to get a similar number of years pre-marriage as there are available post-marriage; however, I was unable to find any way on lds.org to sort President Nelson’s talks chronologically. I had considered sucking down all of his talks from the site and sorting them myself, but was reluctant to do so due to potential loads that might place on the Church’s web servers (there are a lot of talks). It just seemed like I’d be crossing some line, so I settled on General Conference talks. I downloaded all of President Nelson’s General Conference talks going back to April 1995 and ran them through a tool that performs a word count on the text. I kept the top ten words used in each talk and added them to a data frame within a Python program. Finally, I filtered the talks for words associated with marriage and family (the areas of Sister Nelson’s expertise), and then graphed them on a time series chart along with a reference line for the Nelson’s marriage.
Here it is (you can click on it to make it larger):
One thing that is interesting is that then Elder Nelson’s talk at the April 2006 General Conference, within days of his marriage to Wendy Watson, was titled, “Nurturing Marriage”. You can clearly see that the words “marriage”, “wife”, and “husband” were all frequently used within that talk and that the markers for those words line up with the dashed reference line I added for the date of his marriage to Wendy Watson.
I should also mention that the frequency of the use of these words pales in comparison to President Nelson’s use of words such as “Jesus”, “God”, “priesthood”, or “prophet”.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Wheat & Tares 
should also mention that the frequency of the use of these words pales in comparison to President Nelson’s use of words such as “Jesus”, “God”, “priesthood”, or “prophet”.”
That is good.
My first response when I read the title of your post was: I sure hope not. Wendy Watson’s approach to teaching about family and about sexuality is indisputably harmful, especially to young people. Just read some of the reviews of her The Not Even Once Club. Or look up her BYU-H devotional talk about “praying away the gay.” She is someone who, shockingly given her professional position, has no understanding of (or at least gives no credence to) current, research-supported ideas about gender, sexuality and identity.
If you go to the BYU Speeches website and search by author, the speeches are listed chronologically. I know his August 1994 speech was bigtime focused on defending traditional definitions of marriage and family with all the gay marriage stuff swirling around.
President Nelson has always been a big proponent of marriage and family, long before he met Wendy. He and Dantzel had 10 kids, and he wasn’t shy about talking about that. I think you’d have to look a lot deeper than just family-related key words to determine if Wendy’s philosophy really affected anything he taught.
I think you’ve made a good case for the influence. I think so much of our thinking about sex is generational. In his generation, it was mostly not talked about. His talks seem to focus on reigning in all things sexual, including what married people do in the bedroom https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/04/nurturing-marriage?lang=eng “If a couple allows lewd language or pornography to corrupt their intimacy, they offend the Creator . . .” I think a lot of Boomers think that Wendy Watson Nelson is progressive and edgy because she likes to talk about “intimacy” and seems comfortable with the topic. A lot of younger people just think that she gives bad advice. Sadly, I think a lot of the concepts she puts forward tend to reinforce the negative attitudes we Mormons have about sex that contribute to a lot of shame, guilt and problems in marriage. Our theology is very sex positive and I think that LDS sex therapists like Jennifer Finlayson-Fife do a great job of giving good information, presenting healthy attitudes and tying it back to our theology.
@Mary Ann: Thanks for the pointer toward the BYU Speeches website. I was unaware of the site.
Indeed, President Nelson has spoken about the family and marriage quite a bit before he met Wendy. Ultimately, I don’t think it is possible to determine whether or how she has affected the topics of his talks. Suppose we saw an uptick since their marriage in his talks mentioning “prophets”. Does that mean she influenced it? There is just no way to know so I focused on topics about which she is known to speak. And, at the end of the day, she is being given a voice herself, so it hardly seems necessary for Pres. Nelson to speak about the same topics. Still, he does seem to discuss marriage-related topics more frequently in the ten years since they’ve been married than he did in the previous ten.
Wendy’s understanding of marriage, family dynamics and sexuality is entirely academic, and not very practical. This is a woman who has never raised her own children, and her first marriage was to an octogenarian, yet she purports to be an expert in marriage and family. She’s basically a virgin sex therapist. Would you consider yourself qualified to fly a jet airplane only by virtue of studying the flight manual but having no real experience, or to perform surgery only by reading medical textbooks?
The only reason she has the audience she does is not because of her own qualifications or credentials, but because of who she is married to.
As for Pres. Nelson, I too have noticed a narrowing of his focus in recent years. As I recall, he gave a talk a few years ago about how wonderful it was to be sealed to two women at once.
It is hard to imagine that Sister Nelson’s views of sex, marriage, and family did not have some influence on Pres. Nelson’s evolving views. Although I really haven’t payed much attention — all those marriage and family and intimacy talks are mostly aimed at LDS singles. Once you’re married you kind of tune it all out.
A few months after Wendy married Elder Nelson, she did a fireside at the Institute at the University of Utah. The main thing that I remember from that very long talk was that she told about an experience she had when she was much younger and had the opportunity to marry a young man. She prayed about him and it didn’t feel right, so she didn’t marry him. Years later, she found out that he was gay. In telling us this story, it seemed to me like she was gloating that she had dodged the bullet back when she was younger, and now, look at her — she was married to an apostle instead! I have since then wondered if she has been a major influence on Elder Nelson’s views on homosexuality.
I suspect this is more a case of “birds of a feather” flocking together. They have views in common, so they married.
Jack Hughes: I made this argument a few years ago, but I was corrected (rightly) not to privilege p-in-v sex as the defining boundary of “sexual experience.” Certainly even virgins have sexual feelings and are sexual beings even if they are celibate. However, having said that, personally I find her views on human sexuality complete nonsense, uninformed by reality.
Fair enough. But I don’t think this is about privileging p-in-v or any other kind of sex above another. The point I was trying to get across was that Sister Nelson built a career of privately telling married couples what to do (and what not to do) in the most intimate areas of their relationships, but it’s kind of hypocritical that she has no lived experience to inform her advice, and thus has very, very narrow views about marriage, child-rearing, and healthy sexuality. Being married to an apostle unfortunately gives her a much wider platform from which to promote her views. We can only hope that, when it comes time for Pres. Nelson to be “released”, Sister Nelson will fade into obscurity shortly thereafter. In her defense, though, she has a lot of valuable experience to share about being a healthy, productive LDS single adult–but I imagine becoming the second wife to an elderly apostle is not a universal aspiration for LDS single women.
Well, regardless of how influenced Nelson is by his wife’s ideas, it is staggering to me that somebody who is educated in issues of family life and sexuality in the year 2018 can think that it is possible to change one’s sexuality through prayer. And it is frightening that she has the ear of the president of the church. God help us.
Troy Cline: Well said.
if you want a great site that has all of the modern brethren and all of their talks, public ones anyways check this site out
http://instituteofreligion.org/?&z=n&ga=4
It has all of a person’s conference talks, articles, BYU devotionals and any other publicly available talk
I really like this analysis, Cody. My inclination is that Angela’s interpretation is correct, though, that President and Sister Nelson both believe strongly in stuff like divine gender roles, so they found themselves to be a good match. Sadly, for those of us who don’t believe in such stuff.
I think she is a powerful influence in her husband, President Oaks, and Kristin Oaks, all of whom are close friends introduced by Sheri Dew who dined with both couples frequently. Beyond words, themes from Wendy’s careeer appear frequently.
I found it interesting though, to hear Elder Nelson’s GC talk the fall immediately after the keefuffle over the “not even once club” which seemed to be a correction of the book’s doctrine- a complete reversal. I imagine it wasn’t easy going home that night, but give him points for attempting to fix the issue. I wish he could do the same with lgbt messages, sexual messages, spiritual polygamy, etc, but I’m not holding my breath.
There are GA spouses who play small if not inconsequential roles in church work (often temporal support), and then there are advisor-spouses. I tend to think of Eliza R at Brigham’s right hand every morning over breakfast with her brilliant mind- discussing business as an advisor. On the other hand, there were several GA wives in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s who stayed home and raised the children, like widows or military wives. Wendy Watson Nelson and Kristin Oaks are academics, senior citizens and first-time brides who work full time as their spouses’ traveling and support companions. They are advisor wives. No doubt in my mind. Unlike Eliza who I imagine constantly “motivating” BY with pro-female ideas- tempering him with her superior wisdom, I experience a great deal of distress thinking about Wendy’s doctrinally-amiss ideas in the Prophet’s ear.
I perceive her career to be a legacy of failed attempts to prove bad hypotheses with sloppy and unconnected evidence. Additionally, idea of a virgin sex therapist makes me raise not one, but two Freudian eyebrows.