Postmormon Postmortem

Did Joseph Smith really predict that the Constitution would hang by a thread and the Mormons would save it? Jess went looking for an easy debunking of the White Horse Prophecy. The history was messier than that. In this What You Know Wednesday, Jess walks Hannah through the origins of the White Horse Prophecy: a document attributed to Joseph Smith, written down by English convert Edwin Rushton dec...

The Book of Mormon warns that secret organizations infiltrate governments, corrupt institutions, and destroy nations. So what happens when Mormons apply those same warnings to their own church? Following a September 2026 Deseret News article about conspiracy thinking, we examine Mormonism's teachings about secret combinations, Ezra Taft Benson's warnings about modern conspiracies, and the...

What happens when a family remembers plural marriage as a sacred privilege—and barely remembers the wives? We discuss Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, the accounts of Lucy Walker, Helen Mar Kimball and Zina Huntington, and the church’s changing instructions on polygamy. We also look at what survived in our own families: stories of obedience and sacrifice, missing women, and questions nobody taught...

In 2000, Glen Helzer, a former Mormon missionary and Morgan Stanley financial adviser, told his younger brother Justin and a woman named Dawn Godman that a “Spirit” spoke directly to him, that he was a prophet, and that innocent people had to die. Within days, five people were dead: Ivan and Annette Stineman, Selina Bishop, Jennifer Villarin, and James Gamble. In this episode of Mormon True Crime,...

Brigham Young’s son-in-law built a career photographing church leaders, prominent Mormon families, and the Salt Lake Temple. Alongside that work, he sold erotic stereo views to customers across the country. Charles Ellis Johnson photographed Mormon prophets… and sold erotic photographs by mail from his Salt Lake City studio. His church portraits and “spicy pictures of girls” carried the same busin...

On September 6, the Mormon Church rolled out a new worldwide Sunday schedule: 60-minute sacrament meeting, then just 25 minutes each for Sunday School and Relief Society, elders quorum, Young Women, or Aaronic Priesthood. Sunday School and quorum meetings now happen every week instead of alternating. In this Mormon Monday, we look at what the Church says the change accomplishes, and what it might...

In 1922, Mormon Church president Heber J. Grant pointed to a box of records and told his new secretary, “You won’t be needing those.” Inside: the Council of Fifty. The Council of Fifty was Joseph Smith’s secret 1844 political body in Nauvoo, Illinois, and its members voted to accept him as “Prophet, Priest & King.” Jess and Hannah go through the minutes: the secrecy vow, the April 25 revelatio...

In April 2005, Raven Abaroa called 911 from his Durham, North Carolina home and told the operator his wife had been shot. Janet Abaroa, 25 and pregnant, had been stabbed three times while their six-month-old son slept in the next room. Hannah and Jess follow the case from a temple marriage in Washington, D.C., through embezzlement charges, a $500,000 life insurance policy, an exhumation that recov...

Jess explains Church Correlation to Hannah, and the closest comparison she could find is McDonald's. Before 1960, Relief Society, Primary, and Sunday School ran their own curriculum, magazines, conferences, and administrative structures. Missions published their own magazines. One Mexican mission spent around 360 missionary hours every month producing one of them. Lessons written in Utah landed st...

On September 16, the Mormon Church sent a letter to all 1,300 congregations in Idaho telling members to oppose the Idaho Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, an abortion ballot measure. Five days later, 339 congregations in Nevada got a letter with the same instruction and the same wording about voicing opposition "in a respectful manner." Missouri and Virginia also have abortion measur...

Brigham Young said God revealed that Adam is our Father and God. In 1976, Mormon president Spencer W. Kimball denounced the Adam-God theory as false doctrine. How do you know which prophet to trust? In April 1852, Brigham Young told General Conference that Adam is "our Father and our God." Wilford Woodruff and Hosea Stout both recorded it in their diaries, and Heber C. Kimball and apostl...

Former Mormon MTC president Joseph Bishop became the subject of a sex scandal after a former sister missionary, McKenna Denson, secretly recorded him in 2017. Denson has accused Bishop of raping her at the Provo Missionary Training Center in 1984. We follow her reports to Mormon leaders, the recording, the police investigation, and the lawsuit that ended without a trial. This episode includes disc...

Jen Shah showed viewers a huge house, designer clothes, expensive parties, and the Shah Squad. Then came the fraud charges. Hannah introduces Jess to the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star, her Mormon upbringing, and the scam behind her business. We’re dropping What Do You Know Wednesday on Thursday this week because life can be surprising, and so can we! Follow or subscribe to not miss any ep...

Around 2011, a bishop in Bisbee, Arizona heard a man confess to sexually abusing his daughter. He didn't call the police or child protective services. He called a helpline the Mormon Church set up for bishops, and the person who answered worked for a law firm. On July 30, 2026, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the bishops in the Paul Adams case had no duty to report what they l...

Cliven Bundy refused to pay federal grazing fees. Armed supporters faced federal agents at his Nevada ranch, and his son Ammon later led the occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. We look at the Mormon beliefs the Bundys used to explain their actions, the history of Native land in both places, and what happened after the standoffs. The main source for this episode is Betsy Gaines...

This week on Mormon True Crime, Hannah and Jess dig into the Keystone Securities case: a mining stock offering, allegedly false and misleading statements, and a broker-dealer registration that got revoked. Ballard was personally named as a cause of that revocation. He was never criminally convicted, and Mormon apologetics site FAIR has a list of defenses — but the SEC's findings stood. Then th...

In October 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs signed an executive order declaring that the Mormons "must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary." That order still anchors Mormon claims of persecution, including in a recent interview where a Mormon reached for Missouri when asked whether Mormons were more oppressed than Black Americans. Jess set out to confirm one number...

Asked to name one Mormon slave, a former Nevada Senate candidate said he couldn't. Green Flake was baptized Mormon while enslaved and entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, before Brigham Young. Josh Stacy ran for Nevada State Senate in 2024 and lost his primary. A clip of him telling Dr. Will James that Mormons were oppressed more than Black Americans then showed up in Instagram reels. What he lef...

In 1856, believing in plural marriage helped you qualify for the Mormon temple. Later, advocating it could keep you out. Nearly 200 years of recommend questions show who decides what "worthy" means. From Joseph Smith's 1842 Nauvoo endowment to a 2026 seminary lesson, this is the history of how the Mormon temple recommend went from a leader's judgment call to a standardized worthi...

In 1993, Cody Judy walked onto the stage at BYU’s Marriott Center, claimed he had a bomb, and demanded that Howard W. Hunter read a letter naming Judy the new president of the Mormon Church. Judy said Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and ancient apostles had told him what to do. But Mormon history already had a long record of people claiming revelation that challenged the authority of church leaders. I...

Ward roadshows were once a major part of Mormon social life. Starting in Utah in the 1920s, wards wrote and performed short original musicals, competed against each other, and in the original version literally took the shows from chapel to chapel. In this What Do You Know? Wednesday, we look at where roadshows came from, how they became part of the MIA program, and why Mormons developed such a str...

In March 2026, the Mormon Church announced that women could now serve as Ward Sunday School presidents. A month later, buried in a routine statistical report, U.S. membership dropped for the first time in the church's history — and the group leaving fastest was young women. Jess and Hannah walk through both stories month by month, in the order they actually happened, to see how they collide. They...

Hannah springs something new on Jess this week: a psychology framework called Schema Therapy, and 18 patterns psychologist Jeffrey Young calls "early maladaptive schemas." Jess hasn't read any of it going in — Hannah teaches her the theory live, then they go through all 18 schemas together, asking the same question each time: did being raised Mormon teach us this, or reinforce it? What follows is...

In part 2 of Elizabeth Smart, we offer a prequel, going back through the lives of Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee before June 2002: their childhoods, marriages, Mormon lives, family relationships, and the religious system they built before they kidnapped fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart. We trace Mitchell’s history of violence, sexual abuse allegations and controlling behavior; his return t...

In 2009, a former U.S. senator told the Mormon Church's Quorum of the Twelve how he got 200 missionary visas approved with one phone call to a foreign ambassador. No one ever asked if it was legal. Jess and Hannah trace what happened after that 2009 briefing: Gordon Smith's Senate staff called "church broke," the R-1 and EB-4 visa backlogs that leave ordinary missionaries waiting up to five years,...