Postmormon Postmortem

Hannah and Jess break down the First Presidency’s coordinated fifth Sunday lesson on the U.S. Constitution — a lesson directed to every U.S. ward on May 31st, teaching that the Constitution enabled the restoration. Dallin Oaks spent his apostolic career filing amicus briefs in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Fulton v. Philadelphia, and 303 Creative — all three about religious exemptions from LGBTQ nondiscri...

The papyri Joseph Smith claimed to translate survived. Egyptologists read them. They're a standard funerary text. The LDS Church published an essay about it. We read it so you don't have to do it alone. This is Episode 2 of our Gospel Topics Essay series. We walk through the full Book of Abraham history: the 1835 Kirtland purchase, the 1912 Spalding analysis (eight independent Egyptologist...

You paid ten percent. Every year. The church grew it to $265 billion inside a fund hidden from the federal government for twenty-two years. The SEC noticed. The fine was five million dollars. This episode of Postmormon Postmortem is Jess working through one question: what does it actually cost to belong to the LDS Church, and where does that money go? She covers the Ensign Peak SEC settlement and...

A 17-year-old Mormon girl called police in 1928, saying the maid killed the baby. When police arrived she smiled, and introduced herself as the maid. Erna Janoschek murdered baby Thais Dianne Liliencrantz in Oakland, then became a courtroom spectacle: laughing, refusing an insanity label, and narrating the crime in her own intriguing jailhouse prose.  Hannah and Jess trace the case through Edward...

The LDS Church holds an estimated $265 billion in assets. Its investment income now exceeds what it collects from member tithing. And it still requires 10% of your income for life to stay a full member. This episode is the structural overview — the bird's eye view of how the LDS Church was built, how it extracts money, labor, data, and loyalty from members, and why it keeps working even when p...

In 2013, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly published essays on its official website addressing its most contested historical questions — no announcement, no First Presidency letter, buried six clicks deep in their sitemap. The Book of Mormon Translation essay acknowledges what Emma Smith, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer all said: Joseph translated with a brown seer stone, wi...

The LDS Church spent millions on "I'm a Mormon." Then called the word a victory for Satan. Now they've filed a federal lawsuit to prove it's still theirs. We're breaking down the April 2026 federal lawsuit against Mormon Stories host John Dehlin — and why the legal story is stranger than any headline has made it sound. What this episode covers: the "I'm a Mormon&...

A Mormon faith crisis is rarely a sudden decision. It's a gradual process of discovering information the church knew and didn't share — inside a system engineered to make every question feel like a moral failure. A Mormon faith crisis is rarely sudden. It's discovering information the church knew and withheld — inside a system that makes every question feel like a moral failure.   Comm...

You were taught that your resistance was the problem. David Archuleta did everything the church asked — for thirty years. This is what that actually looks like from the inside. Jess and Hannah use David Archuleta's memoir Devout as a case study in what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints produces — not as an accident, but as a predictable outcome — when its theology of priesthood a...

How the Mormon Church Turns Institutional Policy Into Divine Revelation — With Receipts   When the church shortened sacrament meeting for Palm Sunday 2026, they called it inspired. When they reversed the LGBTQ policy in 2019, also revelation. The mechanism has five steps. Here they are.   Jess and Hannah trace the five-step mechanism by which LDS institutional policy becomes divine revelation: ide...

Why Your Body Stays Stuck in Fear After Leaving Mormonism — And What Actually Helps   You've left intellectually. Done the reading. So why does your body still brace when you disappoint an authority figure? Religious trauma doesn't live in your beliefs — it lives in your nervous system.   Drawing on Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, Jess and Hannah explain why insight alo...

At 17, Jess sat in sacrament meeting hiding bruises on her neck and did the math. She knew she would have to leave. This is the episode she and Hannah wish someone had handed them on the way out the door.    Leaving Mormonism isn't a swap of one belief system for another — it's the collapse of an entire existential architecture. The identity work that follows isn't recovery of a self that existed...

Why Leaving Mormonism Is So Hard — The Psychology of Identity, Belonging, Cognitive Dissonance, and Sunk Costs   Intelligent, thoughtful people stay in the Mormon church long after encountering evidence that should have sent them running. This is not a failure of intelligence. It's how belief architecture works.   This research-dense episode applies the psychology of belief directly to LDS ins...

Elder James E. Christensen was beaten for months and scalded to death in his bathtub by his mission companion in 1977. His killer, Douglas Beiger, served zero days in prison.   The case that made Hannah angry enough to start a podcast. James Christensen had permanent neurological damage from a childhood accident and desperately wanted to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day...

Your Mormon family isn't ignoring you because they don't love you. The church built three specific mechanisms that make hearing you institutionally impossible.   Jess and Hannah break down the architecture of institutional deafness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The obedience-equals-morality framework means anyone reporting harm becomes the problem before they finish t...

The Mormon Psychiatrist Who Declared a Child Killer Cured — Then Visited a Sadistic Canadian Cult Leader   In 1985, Dr. C. Jess Grosbeck declared Rodney Lundberg — who had stabbed his 11-month-old son as a test of faith — cured and ready for release. Then he flew to visit Moses Thériault's compound.   Hannah's solo bonus episode follows the Rodney Lundberg case into territory as disturbing...

The New York Times Called Mormon Women "The Church's Best Export" — Here's Everything Wrong With That   The New York Times published a trend piece on Mormon women in reality TV. A podcast host called them "the church's best export." The Times printed it. This episode is the follow-up they didn't do.    An export is something you produce, brand, and send out for...

On November 23, 1981, Rodney Lundberg placed his 11-month-old son on a table, gripped a butcher knife, and waited for God to intervene the way God intervened for Abraham. God didn't stop him.   This is not a story about one man's mental breakdown. It's a story about how an entire religious culture enabled, validated, and then returned a child killer to society in three years. The Abrah...

How does one religion consume so much of its members' time, money, mental energy, and social life? This episode answers that question systematically — and shows that every piece of it was deliberate.    The Mormon church is what sociologists call a totalizing institution. The calling system assigns — not asks — members to volunteer positions framed as divine appointment: you cannot say no to G...

In Mormon theology, gender is eternal — it existed before birth and continues after death. Women were foreordained to be mothers. An 11-year-old boy holds more religious authority than your grandmother.    Jess and Hannah trace the theology, the history, and the real-world consequences. The motherhood doctrine intensified in the 1950s when leaders explicitly taught that mothers working outside the...

If someone in your life is Mormon — or post-Mormon — and you're not sure what that actually means, this is where to start. Golden plates, seer stones, three degrees of heaven, and the only true church on earth.    If someone in your life is Mormon or post-Mormon and you're not sure what that actually means, this is where to start. The Foundations series is built for never-Mormons who want...

Why your Mormon coworker drinks Red Bull but won't touch coffee. Why Utah has dirty soda shops with cult followings among devout members. Why Mitt Romney's Diet Coke became a doctrinal crisis in 2012.   In 1833, Joseph Smith received a health revelation he explicitly said was "not by commandment or constraint" — while his own church stores sold coffee and tea, and while he smoked...

Dr. Gina Colvin's "Ordinary Mormon Trauma" — The Framework That Finally Names What Happened to You   "Ordinary Mormon trauma" is not the dramatic incidents. It's the daily, invisible harm of growing up trained to be nice but not kind, obedient but not teachable, disciplined but not emotionally regulated.    Dr. Gina Colvin — former Mormon academic and host of A Thoughtf...

The LDS Church paid $350,000 to hide historical documents — and every single one was fake. Meet the returned missionary who forged Mormon history and built pipe bombs when the bills came due. Mark Hofmann spent five years selling forged documents to the highest levels of LDS leadership — the Anthon Transcript, the Salamander Letter, the Joseph Smith III Blessing — exploiting the Mormon Church'...

We're diving into Abducted in Plain Sight—the Netflix documentary. On the surface, it's a story about a child predator who kidnapped the same girl twice. But underneath? It's a devastating exposé of how religious trust, toxic niceness, and institutional denial create the perfect storm for abuse. We'll talk about grooming, the Mormon obsession with appearances, and why "He's such a good member of t...