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.
[Read more • Will Russell Nelson’s push against “Mormon” last?]
“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.”
It’s also important to note that words people may input to find information online doesn’t necessarily mean they are using those terms when they speak or write.
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.”