Postmormon Postmortem

Sixteen questions stand between a Mormon and a wallet-sized card that gets them through the temple doors — but not one of them asks how you treat other people. Jess and Hannah break down every question in the 2026 Mormon temple recommend interview, tracing its history back to 1922 and the 1976 addition of the honesty question (added only after Utah was branded "the fraud capital of the nation...

What happens when research produces findings Mormon apologists don’t want to hear? In 2011, Church Historian Marlin Jensen admitted that Mormonism was going through a period of massive apostasy, unlike anything since Kirtland. More than a decade later, faithful Mormon researcher Jeff Strong gathered thousands of responses about why people left the church—and found that the real reasons were church...

Why are Mormons leaving the church, and what does Jeff Strong’s research reveal about the culture they’re leaving behind? In Torn , faithful Mormon researcher Jeff Strong examines why current and former members disengage from the church. His research identifies church history and truth claims as the largest reason people give for leaving, followed by social issues, church experience, and pressures...

Ask American Mormons how often they go to church and roughly three quarters say they attend every week. Track where people actually go on Sundays, and the number drops to about 15%. In 2024, University of Chicago economist Devin Pope used cell-phone location data from 2.1 million Americans to measure religious attendance based on behavior rather than self-report. Among Mormons, only about one in s...

A BYU student and decorated Vietnam pilot may have been D.B. Cooper — and his own family hid the parachute logbooks that prove it for decades. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was a Green Beret, Purple Heart recipient, devout Mormon, and BYU law enforcement student who hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 in April 1972 — five months after D.B. Cooper's original 1971 hijacking. We trace his Mormon upbringin...

What do you know about Mormons on the Titanic? Irene Corbett was a Mormon woman from Utah who traveled to London for advanced midwifery training, despite opposition from her husband and counsel from Church president Joseph F. Smith to stay home with her family. In April 1912, she boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second-class passenger. She died when the ship sank, leaving three young childr...

BYU didn't suspend its quarterback for the rape and strangulation allegations against him. It suspended him under the Mormon Church's honor code for one word he used in his own defense: consensual. Jess and Hannah trace three decades of BYU honor code cases — Omarr Morgan (1997), Tico Pringle (2006), Harvey Unga and Keilani Moeaki (2010), and the January 2004 party case — alongside two current cas...

The Mormon Church helped slash a rival paper's revenue nearly in half, in a deal negotiated in secret. Jess and Hannah trace a 180-year fight over who controls the news in Mormon Utah: Joseph Smith ordering the Nauvoo Expositor's press destroyed, the founding of the church-owned Deseret News, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and John D. Lee's execution, the Salt Lake Tribune's Pulitzer-winning BYU Ho...

When Salt Lake City discovered that its gravedigger had been returning to graves after burials, stripping bodies of their clothing, and taking the clothes home to just… look it? Well, it raised more than a few questions. Jean de Baptiste had been a Mormon convert, a gold miner in Australia, and eventually the gravedigger at the Salt Lake City Cemetery. His crimes came to light after Moroni Clawson...

In January 2011, Gerrit Gong stood before the Quorum of the Twelve with a warning: could WikiLeaks — the group behind the Chelsea Manning leaks — embarrass or damage the Mormon Church? Instead of security protocol, the room's attention turned to Dallin Oaks' comments about "the homosexual agenda." Five years later, that exact briefing surfaced in the Mormon Leaks archive — becoming the most-viewed...

The LDS Church is encouraging wards to advertise their events directly to people outside the church through a program called “activity sharing.” Hannah and Jess look at the church’s instructions for making ward activities more appealing to a community audience, including replacing Mormon terminology with phrases like “women’s group,” “children’s group,” and “Sunday worship service.” They also quer...

Is the Mormon Church a cult? We ran mainstream Mormonism through the actual clinical frameworks researchers use for cultic control — not the insult, the real definitions. Using Steven Hassan's BITE model (behavior, information, thought, and emotional control) and Janja Lalich's concept of bounded choice from  Bounded Choice , we test Mormon teachings on tithing, garments, temple worthiness, missio...

Mormon True Crime episodes will drop on Saturday from now on... not usually this late. Think of this week as a two-fer Sunday. Elizabeth Smart was fourteen years old when Brian David Mitchell entered her Salt Lake City home, held a knife to her throat, and kidnapped her from the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. For the next nine months, Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, held Elizabet...

Can people really identify Mormons just by looking at their faces? In 2010, psychologists Nicholas Rule, James Garrett and Nalini Ambady found that both Mormons and non-Mormons could classify Mormon faces at rates slightly better than chance…. which left them with a new question: what exactly were people seeing? Hannah walks Jess through the experiments, including the follow-up tests that removed...

The murder of Jared Bridegan involves his ex-wife Shanna Gardner, her then-husband Mario Fernandez Saldana, and Mario’s former tenant Henry Tenon. And Mormonism runs all the way through the case. Shanna grew up in the wealthy Mormon family behind Stampin’ Up!, served a mission, and married Jared in the Salt Lake City Temple. During their marriage and bitter divorce, religion became intertwined wit...

At seven, surgeons cut into Joseph Smith's leg without anesthesia. At seventeen, an angel told him where to dig. A psychiatrist, a historian, and a surgeon trace the line between the two. Hosts Jess and Hannah open a two-part series on Joseph Smith's childhood, drawing on three psychobiographical studies: Robert Anderson's psychoanalytic reading, Dan Vogel's "pious fraud" framework, and William Mo...

If you grew up Mormon, you already know what a “good family” is supposed to look like: temple marriage, church service, a successful provider, children in the pew, and problems kept inside the home. The Haight family murders in Enoch, Utah force a harder question: what happens when a man treats his family as part of his identity, status, and control? On January 4, 2023, Michael Haight killed his w...

Every ward had one — spiral-bound, typed on a typewriter, funeral potatoes on page whatever. But the story behind the ward cookbook goes back further than the 1970s nostalgia object it's remembered as. From pioneer-trail survival recipes to a 1907 cookbook from a New Zealand mission, to the "Relief Society network" that spread identical Jell-O salads and potato casseroles between wards with zero c...

Carol Lynn Pearson spent sixty years writing the truth about Mormon patriarchy, Heavenly Mother, and loving a gay husband through AIDS — without ever fully leaving the church that caused her pain. Carol Lynn Pearson died July 29, 2026, at eighty-six, after nearly sixty years as one of the most widely read Mormon writers alive — a poet, playwright, and LGBTQ advocate whose debut collection "Beginni...

Gay and Mormon isn't a contradiction — the church says so. But the welcome runs out fast: celibacy for life, a mixed-orientation marriage, or you lose the temple recommend, the calling, the family. Jess and Hannah trace the architecture behind the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' "conditional belonging" for LGBTQ members: the same-sex-attraction-vs-gay language rules, North Star and En...

In 1979, Tanya Adams threw her two young sons from Washington’s Cable Bridge into the Columbia River. A devout Mormon experiencing psychosis, Tanya believed that killing Ryan and Christopher before they reached the age of accountability would guarantee them a place in the celestial kingdom. She confessed hours later and never denied what she had done. The legal question was whether she could be co...

The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857 brought mass rebaptism, home interrogation, pressure to enter plural marriage, and blood atonement sermons to Mormon Utah. In this episode of What Do You Know Wednesday, Hannah quizzes Jess on the seven-month campaign led by Brigham Young and Jedediah M. Grant. They trace how crop failures, food shortages, grasshopper infestations, and fear of divine punishment...

In January, Dallin Oaks said he wanted Latter-day Saints marrying younger. Six months later, BYU broke ground on 240 married-student apartments. Jess and Hannah just put the dates next to each other.  BYU is tearing down nine 1962-era buildings at Wymount Terrace to build 240 new married-student units, while BYU–Hawaii pours $117 million into its own married-housing expansion on a campus that isn&...

Jordan Peterson has never said a word about Mormonism. But the demythologizing argument he's known for is letting believing Mormons stay despite doubting the church's own history. We trace the demythologizing move from Rudolf Bultmann's 1940s theology through Paul Tillich and Joseph Campbell to Jordan Peterson, whose audience is 91% male by his own count. We cover the Sam Harris/Peters...

In 1972, faithful Mormon sociologist Harold T. Christensen published a warning about the pressures built into LDS family culture. Using decades of research on marriage, sexuality, fertility, and family life, he identified five major stress points: sexual repression, young marriage, guilt surrounding premarital sex, pressure to have large families, and patriarchal authority in the home. Christensen...