okay so then here's what he does this sneaky sneaky little Economist he says I wonder where they go after church so he I sense a landmine I have a feeling it makes members of the church look really really good or super hypocritical and we're just totally full of crap right really bad liquor store attendance he also looks at I Love These Guys these she's just these guys their blood is ice they don't care what anybody this is why Chuck Schumer said don't mess with the intelligence Community cuz they have 15 ways till Sunday to absolutely just just screw you so that's great news for LLY Saints bad news for Catholics and bad news for everybody just1 Bill CH the more frequently some attends the Richer they are yeah this is a very robust data po bottle make it right let me give you something to Cate come on tobacco store attendance he can tell is lowest among wondering why I move the way I do I just feel so good we're going to track their cell phones to see where they are on Sundays if they actually attend how long they attend for and then we're going to track to see if they live up latterday Saints have the least income variations when atheists say oh all you religious people are hypocrites they're actually wrong got our scripture notes up and running all of the scriptural references used in this episode will be brought to you by scripture notes.com for a free trial to scripture notes please visit the link in the description welcome ladies and gentlemen back to word radio I'm your host cardinellis today I'm joined in the studio by Jonah Barnes the associate professor of all things apocryphal who's going to talk to us about this cell phone data that has been gleaned by an economist who found out who the churchi people in America are using data from their smartphones and let me guess I haven't I haven't spoiled this for the audience but by your smile I have a feeling it makes members of the church look really really good or super hypocritical and we're just totally full of crap right really bad or just really bad so which one is it are Mormons the church people in America or are they just totally full of crap Jonah Barnes go well this is how this is how you find out so up until now the way that you tell of somebody's religious or their religious practices you ask on the US what is it the US general religious survey or pure research you ask them right yeah totally this economist because economists are soulless machines brutal my family is full of economists so I can say that right they're just like I don't care what people people say I don't believe anything people say we're going to track their cell phones to see where they are on Sundays if they actually attend how long they attend for and then we're going to track to see if they live up to those covenants that they're Mak did BYU did BYU commission this study to see if their students were actually going to church did the LDS church like secretly bankroll this dude you but you could check out what he finds it's kind of freaky this is kind of freaky what you can tell by this I think how did he get this can you see for me it's kind ofy so all right so this comes from a guy Devin G Pope who excellent job uh did this research study uh back in 2014 no when was it oh no it was 2024 this is very recent okay April 2024 yeah this is just like we're right on the heels of this so it's called religious worship attendance in America evidence from cell phone data so he tracks people's cell phones on their days of worship to see are they actually living up to what they claim and the and the uh findings are all over the place they're super cool um he says that using the Geo data from a smartphone over 2 million Americans he's tracked them for years he's been doing this a long time so this this this total amount of data is enormous okay so the things that you're going to see here are not like slipshod well maybe we looked at a dozen people like no like this is very solid very good work okay so the first thing that you're seeing here is of cell phone usage so do people actually bring their phone okay you got to know am I tracking the right thing so he does is due diligence and he says are these people bringing their phones to church with them to worship services and this uh little chart here will will tell you okay so this is what he found the dark blue means they always bring their phones okay so the data he's going to he's going to get from that is going to be very reliable okay okay yeah interesting as it moves lighter color it means they don't really take it so it's going to be a little iier so I don't know if that's actually really cool cuz these people are technologically savvy and plugged in or if I just know they're it's I don't know if it's bad that so many people have their phone at church because I know some families that don't bring it and I just think you know that's a Chad worship move yeah kind of that's a Chad worship move yeah I thought I thought the same thing I thought the same thing I was like oh well you got to make your data good so you hope everybody brings their cell phone and then I was like do you hope everybody brings their cell phone yeah maybe I don't so what's fascinating you know the group that brings their cell phone to worship Services more than any other group in America Millennials the Church of Jesus Christ lday Saints oh really we are the most phone tied worship group in America is it because they have so many great apps for like the scriptures oh and there's circles now dude dude the Boomers approved social media and they made their own social media which by the way I had so much fun on circles this week I'm gonna have to do an episode of this with Britney my wife like I could totally tell some of the older people were figuring out social media because they started typing in saying um like Jan do you see that when I post a picture from my camera roll it doesn't show up here or like is anybody else having this problem and like all of like the old people in my ward and even some of the like gen xers that I thought were a lot more technologically savvy like couldn't like figure this stuff out and I was just like oh here it goes they are not ready they are not ready to be an award with cardinellis and social media and so I just said well let me check for my camera roll to see if any of my pictures post and I started putting up nude art like like the The Birth of Venus and I started putting up like the statue of David but like Zoomed In from like his like chest to his kneecaps and like The Thinker I got like a 3D rendering of The Thinker so I just started posting classical artwork that was like fully nude you are a terrorist you are a terrorist and then you see it just like start to have a heart attack like what this is Art like this is beautiful like this it's Michelangelo guys come on yeah seriously man you are a terrorist yeah so anyway um so it turns out that we use cell phones more than any other worship group okay so I'm thrilled I've actually never been on circles I don't think I've ever been on circles is it it's pretty pretty legit I don't know it's actually very basic and simple and really super effective I kind of think had circles come out pre Facebook it's like simple social media and it works great it works great that's really funny though so Michelangelo those days yeah I was literally trying to get a call from like my Bishop but he just won't do it like my Bishop like he does not take any you know what c this is why this is why we have wives to stop us doing things like this who are going to be like give me that phone do not do this like that's why we have exactly dude okay so anyways the so the survey says that members of the church Jesus Christ are the most plugged in when they're in their worship Services the least most are Jews who do not bring their phones to religious worship services oh interesting oh wait a second wait a second isn't that because they have a thing about electronic devices on the Sabbath I think there's something I think there's something in there because the paper says like obviously the Jews wouldn't yeah like because they shut down elevators in Jerusalem on Saturday so they don't have to press the button yeah okay I mean they don't shut them down but they automate them so that means that means that the data for the Jewish uh people surveyed is going to be a little less reliable but okay a little bit but he controls for all this all right so some of the findings so uh he says the intensity of religious observance correlates with the host oh well no we're not going to do that one yet that one's just too fun oh okay well hurry up okay so it says for examp so he says um uh firstly 48% of people go to a religious worship service at least once during the year okay okay which is actually not that great if you think about it now that correlates very well with the 46% of people who say that so so they say they go and the cell phone data says yeah actually they do once a year so if you're thinking once a year people are very accurate but then it says however only 3% of Americans attend Services weekly compared to 22% who said they did whoa wait wait wait wait wait wait so 22% say I go weekly yep but cell phone data shows only 3% actually go yeah brutal oh that's Savage now the way that he measures that and I hope I get this right uh uh Brother Devon but the way that he measures that is he says if you go 77% of the time so he takes like 40 some odd weeks he sees do you go 36 of those weeks and so that correlates with 77% of the time if you do you're considered weekly cuz you can't be missing here and there or whatever so he's like that's pretty strict it's like you got to be going all the time yeah so only 3% do and 22% say they do so when you're asking people do you actually go to church most people they think back and they're like well sure well 77% is a high bar and is the cell phone dat data saying your Chapel because like for example a member in the High Council who oftentimes goes to different chapels on Sunday is indeed going to church every Sunday but if the cell phone knows that oh well his church building is 23968 Oakwood Boulevard and he's only been to 23968 Oakwood Boulevard 40% of the Sundays he's actually not going to church well when in reality he's gone to all the churches he's probably the most active wow and you know what I just thought considering General Conference yeah General Conference no one's going to go but we're still in our homes working yeah so General Conference nobody's going to go that's two Sundays Christmas and Easter you're often times traveling but members of our church will go to with other people or other Wards I don't know if I'm in my Chapel 80% of the time probably but like that's really close to being 77% oh I don't know man interesting there might there could be but still this is a very robust data set that he got totally so what he says is so uh the number of occasional versus frequent attenders varies substantially so for example this is the first example he gives there are approximately 14 times more Americans identifying as Catholics than Latter-Day Saints but more latterday Saints attend weekly than Catholics oh so even though they're 14 times more Catholics in the US we are more active I thought they would dwarf us wait wait so I want to make sure I got this information right okay K hold on you're saying if I understand you right you're saying that just in raw data the numbers of Latter-day Saints that go to church on Sunday is more than the number of Catholics that make it into the pews and attend church on Sunday even though in just raw number of baptisms and people that self declare as Catholic even though there's 16 times the amount of Catholics 14 times y or 14 times the amount of Catholics more members of the Church of Jesus Christ lday Saints AKA Mormons go to church and Catholics too yep so On Any Given Sunday if you were to look over all the pews you'd see more latterday Saints in church than you would Catholics in church in America despite the fact that they dwarf Us in raw numbers 14 to one so oh that is brutal it's brutal that's brutal so that's great news for latterday Saints bad news for Catholics and bad news for everybody because we want more Catholics atur I don't want to steal your thunder but I am looking ahead a little bit here and it said he doesn't want to go through the graphs but from Muslims Buddhists and latterday Saints the more frequently some attends the Richer they are yeah for all other religions the most frequent attenders are poorer kind of interesting okay so shed some light on that what's going on there so fascinating okay so generally speaking and this is this is a Trope that atheists feed into a lot is that if you go to church you tend to be poor so poor people go to church more the more affluent you get the less you attend that's kind of been and what do they call that they call that the um what is it the the wallet wallet barrier or something where as Pop oh I know no that's W cont interception I'm thinking of you know wallet apostasy or something one of my buddies was a very wealthy Frenchman that got baptized and like three out of four of his friends said like wait why are you going to church like right you have money right you right and you see you see this across cultures you see this across developing nations Across the Western World the wealthier people get the less they attend right and so what he's saying is that yes that holds true except for Muslims Buddhists and lday Saints now there's one group in this group of three that stands out and that's latterday Saints are not immigrants most Muslims and Buddhists that he or a much higher percentage that he's looking at in his data are are recent immigrants or immigrants and that could correlate with greater economic Mobility that they managed to make it to America and so they're already a little more well off and then they are attending Services whereas lot of saints that's not the case we've been here for oh this is awesome okay keep going dude this so this is so cool it's so cool okay so uh then he says um also in this similar vein these guys are economists I love these guys he says Muslims have twice as much income variation between randomly selected co- congregants as latterday Saints so if you look at a Congregation of Muslims you're going to see a ton of income variation some very poor and some very wealthy well because if you have a Syrian immigrant who just barely escaped Civil War right with like some third generation Prince of uh you know Persian guy whose dad started the print shop in 1979 and is a millionaire you're it's going to be the stats will be brutal whereas and compared to L Saints have the least um uh income variation so in LLY St pews people are the closest in terms of income now well that's also because we're divided by geography yep okay so you're not going to so yeah so that makes sense you're going to have a Suburban Ward and people are all kind of similar socioeconomic status you're going to have an inner city Ward kind of similar socioeconomic status so we don't have huge variation socioeconomic status however I should say that's not very good we need more poor people in our churches we need we need we need to get them in we need to get them in there so anyways um so those are some go to New York or Los Angeles bro I bet you're right actually I say you won't have you don't have a problem talking okay so then here's what he does this sneaky sneaky little Economist he says I wonder where they go after church so he I sense a landmine that's so good okay okay okay so he tracks and he says okay so you say you don't smoke and you don't drink let's test that so he says tobacco store attendance he can tell is lowest among latterday Saints and highest among Jehovah's Witnesses and Buddhists wa yeah wait wait wait wait wait wait yeah so jdubs hit the cigar shop at but but hold on that's not outlawed in there religion though right I I thought it was oh maybe drinking no no you're allowed to drink in fact I I had a friend who was a jdub convert that kind of complained about some that that like there's some kind of rubber claws in there for that and I don't want to speak for the religion as a whole but um I I I'm yeah it's like the the Google tells you're not allowed to be like drunken I think is how she explained it to me uh you're allowed to drink but you're not allowed to drink to the point of drunkenness which is unbiblical in their eyes but who's the person that's going to dictate what that is well this says here from the National Institute of Health that Jehovah's Witnesses believe God does not approve of unhealthy and unclean habits like smoking or drug use jov's Witnesses do not smoke or or use any other tobacco products so this is part of their religion oh no really they have the highest highest tobacco store attendance according oh no and they're going after church according to the cell phone data brutal oh no JS JBS brother you're like qu's second favorite you can't be doing that man brutal now liquor store attendance he also looks at I Love These Guys these she just these guys their blood is ice they don't care what anybody this is why Chuck Schumer said don't mess with the intelligence Community cuz they have 15 ways till Sunday to absolutely just just screw you and like okay so yeah okay so how many people are hitting the bar after church so liquor store attendants lowest among latterday Saints highest among Jews actually the highest for hitting the liquor store is that because there's so many secular Jews that just kind of go to synagogue with their parents could be could be could be I don't think they have the we don't have they don't have the prohibitions that we do so that's not hypocrisy that's just you know they want to go have a good time I guess right it's actually part of their liturgy if you think about it but uh booze oh wine yeah yeah right I support that not Malt Liquor ni okay cool okay so then so this right here is a comparison between the cell phone data and what they self-report so if you look at se the self-reporting goes left to right the cell phone data goes top to bottom so according to both the most religious people the churchi people in America are the church state in America is Utah wow look at that yep they report that religious and the cell phone data bears that out is what dude you know what Utah gets ragged on a lot but that stat right there literally proves The Peculiar people self slogan that they got going on in Utah is earned and and shows that oops wrong button and and shows that you know these people are actually putting their money where their mouth is and freaking good on them dude dude look at that this I'm going to pull this one up just by itself yeah dude so people can see that just a little bit bigger there Utah is top right just loud and proud Bea that's awesome yeah and what this graph also shows is that the cell phone data generally does track with the religion census so it isn't completely crazy there's some funny hypocrisies that he's found but generally it's reliable people are for the most part telling the truth not completely but for the most part so yeah Utah ranks tip of the top for they report their religious and they're following through with it um let's see other cool findings so there's one uh bar graph here that shows weekly attenders over 77% okay the most attentive people are latterday Saints so this is dude by a margin by a huge we are twice as twice as churchy as Jehovah's Witnesses wow and I thought they were the most zealous dude yeah twice as attendee I'm not sure what you call this but this so he he tracked over 40 some odd weeks and if you went over 77% of the time I mean that's you can't miss a lot that's a lot right yeah um he says latterday Saints beat everybody now the four the 2% 14% you have to take out there a lot of noise people who say that they're latterday Saints but they're inactive or or whatever the the but so the numbers are all trending super low the point is is that latterday Saints are twice as attending I don't know what you say twice as attendant nerdy attendant as Church attendant nerdy geeky Church geek Jesus Freak twice as much as Jehovah's Witnesses and Protestants which are second place we're twice as much as the second place group and then from there goes down to Orthodox Muslims Catholics and so on and so on so wow we are nerds okay we are nerdy nerdy people that is well you know what honestly freaking good on I I have so much respect for anybody that puts their uh just puts their money where their mouth is and just like yeah just lives I don't care what freaking Faith you are if you're actually just outdoing it I'm like I got respect for you and this is the and this is the great takeaway from this data the great takeaway from this isn't look how churchy we are the takeaway from this this is a tragedy we want all Jehovah's Witnesses going to their services you and me we want all Muslims going to mosque we want all all Jews go to the synagogues all Faith with a couple of reforms and a couple of these faiths no I'm just kidding Jacob Hansen right now is like what Muslims what but but we want everybody to believe in something bigger than themselves when you stop believing in something bigger than yourself you start believing in anything that's 100 that's always been my ethos is that dude first things first you you got to shed the arrogance of man yeah you got to shed the self worship and just believe in something else yeah now that's all well and good but this last stat is super worrying it's the one you've got up here okay says the religions with the longest average visit duration Orthodox Christians go for 116 minutes a week latterday Saints 115 minutes a week this is this is worrying people this is out of hand why are we going for so darn long I'm just kidding I'm joking I'm joking or let's just go for 2 minutes longer and at least beat out yeah like at least get the number one spot you know this ecumenical stuff let's let's let's bury these guys you know come on oh dude this is way add on five more minutes and we'll and we'll rule the place so the religions with the shortest visit duration include Muslims with 51 minutes now I'm not sure that that's super Fair because Muslims I think might go more than once well also these people are praying to Mecca all the day yeah ex boy we could take some of that Muslim piety I I wish the West would learn a little piety from from the Muslims yeah and then Catholics 66 minutes Buddhists 71 minutes Jews go 92 minutes and Protestants 102 minutes um or kind of or kind of in the middle but the nerdiest churchi EST people who attend the most are latterday Saints and who attend the longest are almost latterday Saints so we are hopelessly churchy active people according to data this is not self-reported stuff this is actual data cell phone Data Tracking people's phones and you can tell uh oh yeah also the more religious you are in general the less you attend casinos liquor stores and strip clubs right so the more religious you are the less you go around those things so you know so I could see the casino things you don't want to lose your money uh so it makes sense lior stores you don't want to beat your wife best strip clubs come on man you just got to take the edge off you know what I'm saying just take the edge off oh and they forgot dispensaries bro you know just want to settle down a little at the end of the day sure that's Millennial wine wine glass bro be with this a few Stripes so the so the idea is that when atheists say oh all you religious people are hypocrites they're actually wrong they're actually wrong oh that's true they say oh oh you're all hiding stuff you're all about this he he clandestinely tracked cell phone data and found though when latterday Saints say they don't smoke and they don't drink they really don't when religious people say they don't go to casinos and strip clubs they really don't now all of the oh everybody that's always trying to say that like oh well I just try and follow the science and I don't want to say David over Dogma because I know that's there's technically a podcast called data over Dogma but all of like the data over Dogma people that try and act like oh well you know science tells what's really true meanwhile you guys just tell a story that you're hypocritical about and like I choose not to go to church because I don't want to be a hypocrite you're actually saying that cell phone data proves that if you do go to church there's a better chance that you aren't a hypocrite and you actually do follow yep oh man that you're doing the things you're saying you're doing and and he's managed to prove it to show it with how okay so how did this cat Devin G Pope you said his name is how did this cat figure this out on his own dime using cell phone data to smash some serious anti-mormon tropes some anti-religious tropes how did he do this alone with cell phone data and the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-Day Saints which literally pays out the nose all the time to get all kinds of silly surveys and and and data gleaned and so on and so forth how could they not figure this out but Devon G Pope does well but if the churcha but if the church did it you know everybody would be like well that's not you're all biased it shows latterday Saints don't go don't go to the tobacco store no one would believe it this is a cold blooded Economist he would burn his Grand mother if he ran out of firewood this guy's ice runs through his veins these people they only care about data I've got them in my family okay they have no when it comes to all their soul switches off and they're just interested in what the data says and this dude's one of them and his data Bears out you want these guys doing your research and he did a fantastic job Devon G Pope if you're out there excellent work brother we hope you go far this is very very cool all right well guys let us know what you guys think in the comment section of this episode uh do you think this is a bunch of hogwash does this not uh jive with your personal experience or are you feeling like this is spot on and Devin Pope wherever you are I know somebody's going to for you a link to this episode reach out we want to sit you down in that chair right over there and have a conversation um so please guys if you haven't yet please make sure you guys like this video please make sure you share this with your friends and as always for this and more please check us out at Ward radio.com I just feel so good hey guys thanks for watching the video we hope you liked it so please share with your friends and subscribe to our Channel also if you want to support us please consider purchasing 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