MORMONISM... MINGLED WITH MEMETICS
RESEARCHING THE MORMON MEMOSPHERE
A relatively easy way to introduce some objectivity in discussions of changes in the "memosphere" is to measure the number of times certain words, phrases, or topics are mentioned in the society being examined. This is only one of many possible approaches, but it lends itself ideally to research on the Mormon Church. The church has been holding bi-annual General Conferences of nearly uniform duration for over a century now. Now these conference talks are available with an easy search engine on CD-Rom. I don't have access to this CD from where I am right now and had to do my best using the official church website, which only has conference records back to 1971. I am open to collaborating with guests of this site in doing more research on mormon memes using church software.

 

Number of mentions of "second coming" in church General Conference talks, 1971-2001

I wanted to try to show quantitatively what I have felt intuitively: perception of "Christ's Second Coming" and other end-of-the-world events has changed in the Mormon Church. Today these events are mentioned rarely in official church texts (essentially as a theoretical possibility that members need to prepare spiritually for -- yet another grave reason to keep the commandments), though church membership -- especially youth -- continue to take these events literally and talk about them frequently.

Here's how often the phrase "second coming" has come up in General Conferences since 1971 (each * = one mention):

1971 * * * * * * * * * *
1972 * * *
1973 * * * * * * *
1974 * * * * * * * * * *
1975 * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
1976 * * * * * *
1977 * * *
1978 * * * * * * *
1979 * * * *
1980 * * * * *
1981 * * * * * * * * * *
1982 * * * *
1983 * * *
1984 *
1985 * *
1986 * * * * * * * *
1987 *
1988 * * *
1989 * * *
1990 *
1991 * * *
1992 *
1993 * * *
1994 * * * * * *
1995 * * * * * *
1996 * * *
1997  
1998 * * * * *
1999 * * *
2000 * * * *
2001 * * *

As you can see, the "Second Coming" has been mentioned less frequently in recent years. In fact, this data has a correlation of -0.504, which means there has been a fairly strong non-random downward tendency over these years. It would be much more interesting to have this data for the entire last century.

I also did this test for the phrases "growth of the church," "first vision," and "book of mormon," but did not find any similar tendencies over the past 30 years. However, in gathering "Book of Mormon" mentions I discovered a huge surge during President Benson's period as Prophet of the church (The Book of Mormon was his favorite hobby topic) with an immediate drop back to normal after his death. Also, I noticed that President Hinckley, the current prophet, rarely ever spoke of the Book of Mormon over this same period, though he spoke frequently at every conference.

In addition to tracking the above topics for the entire period of General Conference history, it would be interesting to track some of the following terms:

"last days"
"inactivity"
"joseph smith"
"missionary work"
"doctrine"
"jesus christ"
"duty"
"obedience"
"calling and election"
"message"
"pearl of great price"
"chastity"

...etc.

If anyone does this research, I would be more than willing to post it on this site.

 
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