Latter Data Saints

Author’s note: This post is a modified version of the original presentation.

In an article published in the Atlantic, McKay Coppins described Mormonism as “the Most American Religion,”¹ attributing some of the American nature to the church’s origins. After all, the new book of scripture was set in the Americas, and Joseph Smith made direct connections between the restoration of the gospel and the founding of the United States and its Constitution.

Despite its origins, Mormonism is a worldwide religion. As of this year, 60% of the members on record for the LDS church are located outside of the United States.² Even in 1971, 40% of the members on record were located outside of the US.³ Russell M. Nelson, having been called as the General Superintendent of the Deseret Sunday School Union, recognized the worldwide nature of the Church. According to the General Sunday School minutes, he stated that “one of the greatest responsibilities we have in the church is deAmericanization of our programs and materials.”⁴

Author’s note: This post is a modified version of the original presentation.

Most content analysis in Mormon studies relies on General Conference talks. This is primarily due to accessibility. Various tools such as the General Conference corpus and WordCruncher are available through BYU. Talks since 1971 are on the Church website.

A significantly underutilized source for content analysis are Sunday School manuals. While manuals prior to 1972 have received some attention, the standardized Gospel Doctrine manuals have been largely ignored in Mormon studies.

Sunday School manuals are used by nearly all church members, and have the effect of codifying, disseminating, and reinforcing doctrine. Church doctrine is most thoroughly provided within Sunday School manuals. Although manuals aren’t canonized, they do constitute some level of official church doctrinal position.

There has been a significant amount of research done on Sunday School manuals for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) prior to 1972. While I’m not entirely sure why research hasn’t been pursued after the major shift from the Deseret Sunday School Union to simply Sunday School and the subsequent correlation of manuals, the inaccessibility of the manuals is probably one of the biggest inhibitors.

To that end, my goal is to make the manuals available in corpus form, searchable on this website. While that’s still in progress, I do want to provide a complete timeline of manuals used between 1972 and 2023. Most of them are currently digitized through the Church History Library (under the call number M257.36 S957gd) or available digitally on the Church’s website.