Postmormon Postmortem

In 1911, Gisbert Bossard secretly photographed the inside of the Salt Lake Temple, and Max Florence tried to sell the images back to the LDS Church. Joseph F. Smith refused to pay. Then the photos hit the front pages. This week on What Do You Know Wednesday, Hannah tells Jess the story of the Salt Lake Temple photo scandal: unauthorized temple images, attempted blackmail, a gardener with access, n...

Four young Latter-day Saints say their liberal politics came from  their faith, not despite it — and it exposes the gap between Church neutrality and ward culture. A Salt Lake Tribune piece profiles Riley Cooper, Eric Biggart, Laine McPherson, and Jayden Weekes — four young, liberal members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — on how missions, ward welfare service, and Relief Socie...

The apron Lucifer wears in the LDS temple ceremony isn't in Genesis — it's Masonic. Joseph Smith became a Master Mason in 1842, and seven weeks later, the endowment appeared using the same signs. Hosts Jess and Hannah trace Joseph Smith's rushed 1842 Masonic initiation under Grand Master Abraham Jonas, the pre-1990 temple penalties and their exact Masonic parallels, the Five Points of...

The Bear River Massacre is the deadliest massacre of Indigenous people by the United States military in American history, and most of us were never taught about it. This week on What Do You Know Wednesday, Jess walks Hannah through the history behind the LDS Church’s new digital resource, Native Saints: The Washakie Ward, and the much older history underneath it. On January 29, 1863, Colonel Patri...

The LDS Church doesn't need anyone to be cruel. The recommend interview, the ministering grid, and the love bombing cycle do the work — and they were built to. Jess and Hannah break down three structural practices built into LDS institutional life: temple recommend gatekeeping (and what the tithing declaration actually does inside that interview), passive shunning through record removal and mi...

Why does Utah's most Democratic city sit at the heart of the LDS Church? This week on Postmormon Postmortem, we examine Salt Lake City's political evolution, Utah's controversial redistricting battles, and the Church's claims of political neutrality. From gerrymandering and court fights to the Pentagon's rapid reversal on LDS religious classification, we explore what influence...

There's an earlier First Vision account — written in Joseph's own hand, kept in a church official's personal safe for decades. It describes a different age, a different reason, and one being, not two. Joseph Smith wrote the earliest account of the First Vision in 1832 — in his own hand, without a scribe. In it, he's in his sixteenth year, not his fourteenth. He doesn't go to pray because he's conf...

Utah has more MLMs per capita than any state in the country, and the three biggest — Young Living, Doterra, and Nu Skin — were all founded by members of the LDS Church. This week, Jess explains to Hannah why that isn’t an accident: ward lists that double as sales databases, missionary training that doubles as sales training, testimony culture that treats anecdote as proof, and a prosperity-gospel...

A missing Lego Star Wars collection somehow became one of the strangest Mormon-adjacent internet stories of the year so far. Bryan Mansell says his family’s valuable Lego collection was taken after a Bricks & Minifigs consignment deal went bad. Reckless Ben turned the dispute into a viral investigation. Then American Fork police got involved. There were searches, arrests, charges, a lawsuit, a...

This week on Mormon Monday, we’re talking about Elder Kyle S. McKay, a General Authority Seventy and Church Historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who apologized after making racially offensive remarks at the Yukon Oklahoma Stake conference. McKay opened his remarks by talking about “This Little Light of Mine,” a hymn recently added to the church’s new hymnbook. From there,...

Someone showed up in our comments with three arguments, one after another — missing scrolls, Chicago Fire, syncretism. Behind that comment is a funded nonprofit, studio space, and SEO training. Here's the machine. We traced a comment section exchange back to the Ancient America Foundation — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose stated mission pillars include "Missionary Productivity" and &quot...

Joseph Smith’s “Happiness Letter” is famous for the line “Happiness is the object and design of our existence.” But the full letter was connected to Nancy Rigdon, the 19-year-old daughter of Sidney Rigdon, after she refused Joseph Smith’s proposal of plural marriage. We walk through the proposal, Nancy’s refusal, the full text of the letter, Joseph’s denial, Nancy’s confrontation, Sidney Rigdon’s...

Utah senators are demanding the Pentagon fix its religious categories after the LDS Church wasn't listed under "Christian." We break down why that categorization reflects a 200-year-old theological dispute — covering the Nicene Creed, Joseph Smith's King Follett Discourse, the 2001 Vatican ruling on LDS baptisms, and how five major Christian denominations formally placed Mormonis...

Someone said something loving. You left feeling searched. Six specific LDS practices deliver harm through care language — and make naming it feel like the problem. Jess and Hannah name six practices embedded in Mormon family and institutional life that wound through warmth: tone policing backed by James E. Faust's 1996 doctrine that contention drives away the Spirit regardless of fault; the no...

In this minisode, Hannah looks at the Mountain Meadows Massacre through one specific question: what would a real apology from the Mormon Church actually sound like? Using a ten-part framework for meaningful apologies, she builds the apology the Church should have given to the victims’ descendants, then compares it to the Church’s actual response: silence, blame-shifting, scapegoating, “profound re...

New York magazine says America is in a second Mormon moment, and this time the church didn't do a thing — the influencers did it for them. This week on What Do You Know Wednesday, Jess puts Hannah on the spot with a phrase neither of us grew up with: the dry Mormon. A dry Mormon lives the lifestyle without the theology. No alcohol, no coffee, clean eating, modest fashion, community-first value...

David Bennett, a former Utah Supreme Court justice, wrote to Dallin Oaks in the Salt Lake Tribune on May 14. Oaks is also a former Utah Supreme Court justice and the current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ask: speak out for Utah's courts. The context is Proposition 4, the anti-gerrymandering law Utah voters passed in 2018. The legislature repealed it in 2020...

Joseph Smith married more than thirty women, including a fourteen-year-old, and the LDS Church's own Gospel Topics essay "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" admits it. Then it stops right where the reckoning would start. Jess and Hannah read the essay line by line and trace what it leaves out. Fanny Alger, the teenage domestic worker Joseph married first. Zina Huntington Jacobs, pregnant by h...

The LDS Church's investment arm just dropped $240 million on a luxury apartment complex in Florida. We connect that purchase to a deep-dive investigation into the Mormon Church in New Zealand — billions in assets, members in low-income communities paying tithing first, volunteers giving nearly a full-time week in unpaid labor, and an institution that asks for personal sacrifice while keeping i...

The LDS Church called the priesthood ban a "direct commandment from the Lord" for 126 years. In 2013, they published an essay. We read both — and the gap between them is the whole story. Jess and Hannah read the primary sources the 2013 Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood was written to address — and then read the essay itself. Brigham Young's 1852 speeches. The 1949 First Presidency st...

Baptism for the dead is one of the most distinctive practices in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this episode, Jess and Hannah talk through LDS proxy baptism, Joseph Smith’s introduction of the practice, the use of famous historical names, Wilford Woodruff’s temple work for American founders, and the repeated controversies involving Holocaust victims, Anne Frank, Adolf Hitler,...

High-control religion doesn't stay in the church. The same mechanisms run in MLMs, megachurches, political movements, and families. Here's the vocabulary to see it — wherever it shows up. The final episode of the Mormon Machinery series. Jess applies Robert Lifton's 8 features of thought reform and Stephen Hassan's BITE Model beyond Mormonism and the LDS Church — to Utah's MLM...

The LDS Church recently posted a story celebrating a husband who supports his wife’s career as a pediatric neurologist. What looked like a simple social media post quickly became a very Mormon argument about motherhood, women’s careers, and whether the church has changed its teachings or just softened its public language. In this episode of Mormon Monday, we talk about Jana Riess’s coverage of the...

Two Mormon brothers killed their brothers 30 years apart. Two obituaries that don't say how they died. One pattern that made both disappear. On June 18, 1964, Stephen Ferrin, 15, shot his 13-year-old brother David three times after David refused to obey a command. The obituary called him the victim of a Thursday shooting. In 1993, Joe DiLello spent four hours on a couch in Clearfield, Utah aft...

In the debut episode of What Do You Know Wednesday, Jess finds out what she knows about Tim Ballard — founder of Operation Underground Railroad and subject of the 2023 film Sound of Freedom . On the table: the six civil lawsuits filed against Ballard in October 2023, the "couple's ruse" his accusers describe in detail, a Mormon psychic who channels Nephi, and a true crime thread connecting one of...