DiscussMormonism.com

Three years after Russell M. Nelson issued his 2018 edict that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and everyone else — essentially purge “Mormon” from their lexicon, writer and researcher Jana Riess analyzed how that directive had affected social media trends.

Were people searching for “Mormon” less and “Latter-day Saint” (the church’s preferred shorthand for members) more?

In particular, Riess, a Latter-day Saint and Religion News Service columnist, looked at Google Trends for relevant data.

“Search engine history is not a perfect measure of language usage, but it’s useful,” she wrote in 2021. “And, yes, we have seen a reduction in searches using the word ‘Mormon’ in the United States over the past five years.”

That was not, Riess concluded, because “Latter-day Saint” was on the rise.

“There’s been no corresponding uptick of interest in Latter-day Saint,” she wrote. “Instead, there’s been an apparent overall decrease in searches for anything to do with the church or its members.”

Now, let’s fast-forward four years. Nelson died on Sept. 27, 2025, and Dallin H. Oaks took over as prophet-president a couple of weeks later. It is worth asking again: Has Nelson’s initiative altered search habits now?

(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)

Riess again looked at Google Trends and found that the searches for “Mormon” vastly outnumber the ones for “Latter-day Saint” over time, she said, “and this hasn’t changed in a significant way in the last two decades.”

In January 2018, when Nelson took office, the ratio between Mormon and Latter-day Saint, she noted, “was 33 to 1.” In November 2025, Riess said, “it was 73 to 1, driven by so much pop culture interest in ‘Mormon.’”

Looking at the past 18 months, searches for “Mormon” spiked in September 2024, May 2025 and November 2025, she observed. “All three of those weeks were, you guessed it, the new seasons for “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”

In the end, Riess explained, Google search data does not reflect that the campaign to eliminate use of “Mormon” has worked — at least so far.

“It’s possible that ‘Latter-day Saint’ will eventually gain traction if the church continues to push hard for it,” she said. “But, in the meantime, it’s intriguing that the church’s tremendous and expensive push into social media advertising to attract converts often doesn’t mention either term.”

Res Ipsa wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 25, 2026 4:10 pm

Church leadership is indistinguishable from a bunch of guys making it up as they go along. I’m old enough to remember the “Golden Questions:” What do you know about the Mormon Church? Would you like to know more? That’s what we were taught to ask friends, co-workers, seatmates on airplanes, etc.

We are all old enough to remember the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — Missionary representatives of the Church in Temple Square and around the world.

Everyone here remembers the “I’m a Mormon” campaign run by the church itself.

And then, with only a change in geriatric leadership, the entire membership has to perform a 180 pivot of mental gymnastics and believe that referring to the church by the nickname it has embraced and promoted for decades was of the devil? Did this just slip God’s mind for over 50 years?

Dr. Sunstoned wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 25, 2026 10:47 pm

The Mormon name was Nelson's pet peeve. He even tried to give a talk about it when Hinckley was alive, and Hinckley shut him down hard. Nelson fumed about that for decades. So one of the first things he did as the new president was address his pet peeve, and he even called it "revelation" and low-key "Satanic" so TBMs can't argue with him about it. But he is dead now, and we all know that a dead prophet has no honor in Mormon country.

All the money and time spent scrubbing websites, printed material, and renaming everything will be for naught. Five years from now, the usage frequency will be back up, and if anyone remembers Nelson at all, it will be in the context of "he was speaking as a man".