Postmormon Postmortem

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 The legislature repealed it in 2020...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...

Mormon influencers are showing up in exmo spaces — and it's not random. Jess breaks down the two categories: lifestyle creators making the church look aspirational, and apologetics accounts showing up in your comment sections with layered, funded arguments. We get into the Faith Creators Alliance, the nonprofit infrastructure supporting 70+ LDS creators with studio space and content strategy c...

A video about a boy’s priesthood authority drew a sudden wave of comments from Mormon influencer accounts. We walk through their four recurring arguments, the question nobody answered, and the networks that organize pro-Mormon content. ____________________________________________________________ Ways to Support the Show (THANK YOU!) https://www.venmo.com/postmormonpostmortem ☕ buymeacoffee.com/po...

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...

You were taught that the prophet cannot lead the church astray. You were also taught that polygamy was required for the highest celestial glory, that Black men were spiritually unworthy of the priesthood, and that the children of same-sex couples were apostates who had to disavow their parents to be baptized. All three of those were the word of God. All three have since been reversed. Each reversa...

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...