I recently started putting together xmormon.org , a sister site to luciferslantern.com. The focus of the site is pretty straightforward: collecting the stories of ex-Mormons throughout history and building a resource center for people who have left the church. The basic premise is that people have been leaving Mormonism since the earliest days of the church. If you’ve left, or you’re in the middle of figuring out what leaving means for you, you’re not the first person to walk that road. You won’t be the last either. Because I'm impatient and want to get this ball rolling, I’m using Wikipedia’s Creative Commons license to get initial articls poated. This license allows existing articles to be copied and adapted as long as the license requirements are followed. From there, I’m giving each article a more standard format, then adding context, cleanup, and workikg to add original material over time. I’m just one guy, so this seemed like the most realistic way to start building the site ...
A review of General Conference discourse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reveals an interesting shift. Temples have always been mentioned more often than tithing, but the gap has widened dramatically in recent decades. References to tithing appear to be steadily declining, while references to temples have skyrocketed. The question is why. Data was pulled in 2024 from www.lds-general-conference.org The 2020 dataset sees a large decline in both Tithing and Temple references due to only being halfway through the decade In the nineteenth century, church leaders spoke openly about tithing because the church needed money. The institution faced repeated financial strain. The Panic of 1893 damaged the Utah economy, and federal legislation such as the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 resulted in the confiscation of church property. Under those conditions, leaders frequently urged members to contribute financially. That urgency faded once the church stabilized its finances. In...
