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Mo Numbers
Analyzing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) from a statistical perspective.

Statistical breakdown of LDS (Mormon) scripture citations

The LDS Scripture Citation Index is a great resource for finding data about scripture citations from General Conference talks, Journal of Discourses speeches, and writings in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

While the Citation Index provides the raw data itself, it doesn’t always break it out in ways that make it easy to understand what’s going on, so I ran a variety of queries and compiled the data into spreadsheets to answer some of the questions I had.

What emerged were some interesting insights into how the Saints approach the scriptures. Even though the data is only a slice of actual scriptural engagement (e.g., it doesn’t include personal scripture study, regular church talks, Sunday School lessons, etc.), it at least tells us something about which volumes, books, chapters, and verses are generally prioritized, and how those priorities evolve over time.

It should also be noted that the data isn’t continuous, due to the historical timing of the citation sources. There’s a batch of references from the 1830s through the 1880s (which is interesting for historical comparison) and then another batch from the 1940s onward. Most of what I’m looking at will be for the latter batch of numbers, both because it’s more comprehensive and because it’s more representative of modern usage.

Citations by volume

Here’s a breakdown of the count of scriptural references by volume by decade, given as percentages of all references:

Here are the raw numbers, in case you’re curious:

One of the most interesting trends here is certainly the rise in prominence of the Book of Mormon from the late 1980s onward. Prior to that, the New Testament was the most-cited volume of scripture throughout nearly every decade of the Church’s history.

The surge in the 1980s was likely due to the strong priority placed on the Book of Mormon by President Ezra Taft Benson, who had developed a particularly strong testimony of the volume while serving as a missionary in Britain during the early 1920s. His strong feelings on prioritizing the Book of Mormon are clearly evident in talks such as “Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon” and “The Book of Mormon—Keystone of Our Religion.” With that about of priority being placed on the Book of Mormon from the head of the Church, it’s unsurprising to see that kind of shift.

References to the Doctrine & Covenants and Pearl of Great Price remained relatively steady, as did references to the Old Testament. The New Testament took the largest hit in terms of citation share, with General Conference speakers looking increasingly to the Book of Mormon’s account of Christ’s coming and ministry.

Citations by book

For simplicity in displaying information, I’m going to focus on citations from the 1940s onward (which actually aren’t too different from the 1800s data). The following charts are given as percentages of all references within a volume of scripture.

Old testament

New Testament

Book of Mormon

Pearl of Great Price

Doctrine & Covenants

I handled the D&C a bit differently as a volume because it’s divided into sections rather than books and chapters. Because there are 138 such chapters (i.e., a lot of manual data entry), I opted to skip it and summarize the 1940s-2010s data in a single batch.

Here are the most popular sections of the D&C by number of citations:

Density breakdown

While the popularity of specific books over others is largely based on content, it can still certainly be affected by the overall size of the books. The Articles of Faith, for example, have only 13 verses, while Psalms has 2,461.

So, I decided to see which volumes and books of scriptures had the highest density of references relative to their overall verses counts.

Nothing particularly surprising there. The smaller volumes had a higher density of citations relative to their verse counts, while the larger ones had a smaller density.

The books with the highest density of citations relative to their verse counts were the following (citations per 1000 verses):

  • Old Testament: Malachi (838), Daniel (413), Genesis (256)
  • New Testament: Matthew (986), John (813), 2 Timothy (778)
  • Book of Mormon: Moroni (1,236), Enos (930), 3 Nephi (832)
  • Pearl of Great Price: Articles of Faith (5,300), Joseph Smith—History (2,287), Abraham / Joseph Smith—Matthew (tie: 742)

Next time…

In a future installment I’ll be sharing some additional statistics, including the most-cited verses across all volumes of scripture. Stay tuned!