Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Postmormon Postmortem

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 strong relationship with theatre and musical performance in the first place.

We’re drawing on the ideas of musicologist Jake Johnson’s work on Mormonism and musical theatre, including his argument that performance became a way for Mormons to express religious identity, build community, and create a Mormon alternative to outside entertainment.

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 cover the "trial balloon" read from religion writer Jana Riess, the awkward question nobody wanted to ask about why presidencies still can't be mixed-gender, the actual membership numbers (and why a net loss of 186 people matters more than it sounds like it should), and the July profile of a woman thriving in her new calling — printed just as the harder story about why women are leaving quietly disappeared from the coverage.

Two things can be true at once: a woman running Sunday School in one ward doesn't cancel out what the data says about her daughter's generation. It doesn't explain it either.

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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 less a lecture and more two people realizing, out loud, how much of their childhoods they're still carrying. They talk about parents who were consistent only in their anger, or wildly inconsistent in everything; siblings raised feral because Mom was overwhelmed and Dad was checked out; the particular terror of "the last days" and food storage drills; the conditional promise of an "eternal family"; and the quiet, permanent work of learning not to trust your own judgment.

It's personal, it's a little raw, and it might explain more about your own upbringing — Mormon or not — than you expect.

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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 to Mormonism; his years as a high priest, stake high councilor, bishopric counselor, and Salt Lake Temple worker; and his move into Ezra Taft Benson, conspiracy politics, alternative health, the one mighty and strong, the Davidic servant, and celestial plural marriage.

We look at Wanda Barzee’s Mormon upbringing, family history, mental-health problems, music and temple work, and her role in preserving Mitchell’s revelations and helping build the religious world in which Brian became Immanuel David Isaiah and Wanda became Hephzibah.

The episode follows their years of wandering, the Seven Diamonds Plus One society, their attempts to recruit plural wives, The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah, their excommunication in June 2002, and the Mormon Church’s response after their arrest.

Sources (not exhaustive)

United States v. Brian David Mitchell, Case No. 2:08-cr-00125-DAK, U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. Memorandum Decision & Order Determining Competency, 2010.

State v. Barzee, 2007 UT 95, Utah Supreme Court.

Full Transcript of ‘The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah.’ Deseret News, March 15, 2003.

Wanda Barzee Says She ‘Learned to Be Submissive and Obedient.’ Deseret News, November 18, 2010.

Transcript: Wanda Barzee Testifies in the Elizabeth Smart Kidnap Trial. The Salt Lake Tribune, November 18, 2010.

Complex Picture of Pair Emerges. Deseret News, March 14, 2003.

Erroneous Reporting of Elizabeth Smart Case. Mormon Church Newsroom, March 24, 2003.

A full source list for every episode is available in the receipts archive on Patreon.

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, and Sister Fanny Clain — a missionary injured in the 2016 Brussels airport bombing while stuck waiting on the exact visa Smith's phone call skipped entirely. In 2016, Mormon Leaks published video of the briefing. In 2017, two advocacy groups filed a formal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act complaint with the DOJ and State Department over Smith's dealings with then-Ambassador Ronen Sen. No investigation has ever been publicly reported. This only makes sense if you grew up Mormon — access has always had a shape, and nobody with the standing to say so out loud ever did.

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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"). Then: The Salt Lake Tribune asked 400+ readers what question they'd add — and the answers converged on one glaring gap the church still hasn't addressed. Plus a candid conversation on "worthy" vs. "worthless," Mormon-affinity fraud, and why perfectionism might be the real cost of a compliance-based faith.

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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 history, social issues, church experience, and distrust of the institution rather than the familiar explanations about laziness, sin, or wanting an easier life.

Then came the apologetic response.

We look at how some faithful Mormon writers responded to Strong’s research, why self-report suddenly becomes suspect when former members explain why they left, and how the same pattern appears in debates over the Gospel Topics Essays, Mormon retention data, internal reformers, and institutional boundary enforcement.

At the center of it all is a simple question: what evidence would actually be enough for faithful Mormons to accept that the church culture itself is part of the reason people leave?

Timestamps

00:00 The Church’s Crisis of Faith and Membership

01:38 Research Insights on Disaffiliation

03:55 Institutional Responses to Data

06:31 Case Studies of Disaffiliation

08:43 The Role of Self-Report in Faith

09:50 The Parable of the Sower Revisited

12:42 The Challenge of Accepting Data

14:53 Thoughts on Faith and Doubt

Sources

Strong, J. (2026). Torn: Why people we love are leaving the Church and what we can learn from them. Coolstream Publishing.

https://www.tornbyjeffstrong.com/

Lakip, C. (2026, June 17). Misrepresented members: A reaction to Jeff Strong’s book “Torn.” Meridian Magazine.

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/misrepresented-members-a-reaction-to-jeff-strongs-booktorn/

Cunningham, C. D. (2026, June 11). The borrowed wisdom of ‘Torn.’ Public Square Magazine. 

https://publicsquaremag.org/media-education/reading/the-borrowed-wisdom-of-torn/

Ellsworth, D. T. (2026, June 3). Beyond “church culture”: A response to Jeff Strong’s Torn. Interpreter Foundation.

https://interpreterfoundation.org/beyond-church-culture-a-response-to-jeff-strongs-torn/

Sources for every episode are available in the Receipts Archive on Patreon.

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 associated with Mormon life.

We look at Strong’s findings on trust, fear, obedience, belonging, control, Mormon parenting, leadership culture, and what former members say would have to change before they would consider returning.

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 seven attended nearly every week.

We look at the enormous gap between reported Mormon church attendance and actual attendance, why people overreport religious behavior, and what Pope’s data shows about who is really sitting in those pews every Sunday.

Pope, D. G. (2024). Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data. Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2024-58. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4821716 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4821716

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 upbringing in a first-cousin marriage, the helicopter-run Sunday services he organized for Mormon soldiers in Vietnam, his wife Karen's role as an accomplice, his death in an FBI shootout after a Lewisburg prison escape, and the decades his family spent hiding the parachute logbooks connecting him to Cooper. We cover Bernie Rhodes and Russell Calame's investigation and Karen's 1990s lawsuit over the book D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy. This only makes sense once you understand what a Mormon family will bury to keep the story straight.

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New Mormon True Crime episodes every Saturday.

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 children behind.

Nearly a century later, Apostle Quentin L. Cook used Irene’s story in General Conference, saying it was believed she gave up her chance at a lifeboat to care for injured passengers. The source for that claim turns out to be a family story told by a grandson who was born long after her death, with no surviving witness placing Irene there.

Then there are the six Mormon missionaries who supposedly escaped the Titanic after a providential change of plans. Contemporary records tell a rather different story: the missionaries sailed from Liverpool on the Mauretania, and the surviving evidence gives little reason to believe they were ever booked on the Titanic at all.

This week on What Do You Know Wednesday, Hannah tells Jess how two Mormon stories became attached to the most famous shipwreck in history—and what happens when family lore, faith-promoting storytelling, and historical fact begin to blur together.

Bennett, R. E., & Jensen, J. L. (2007). “Nearer, My God, to Thee”: The sinking of the Titanic. In C. Doxey, R. C. Freeman, R. N. Holzapfel, & D. A. Wright (Eds.), Regional studies in Latter-day Saint Church history: The British Isles (pp. 109–127). Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.https://rsc.byu.edu/regional-studies-latter-day-saint-church-history-british-isles/nearer-my-god-thee-sinking-titanic 

Cook, Q. L. (2011, October). The songs they could not sing. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2011/10/the-songs-they-could-not-sing 

From the mission field. (1912, April 18). Millennial Star, 74, 254. The Church of Jesus Christ

Sonne, C. B. (1988). A man named Alma: The world of Alma Sonne. Horizon Publishers. history.churchofjesuschrist.org

The sinking of the world’s greatest liner. (1912, April 18). Millennial Star, 74, 250. The Church of Jesus Christ

Contemporary Utah newspaper coverage used throughout the episode.

Full sources for every episode are available in our Receipts Archive on Patreon.

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 cases: quarterback Jake Retzlaff's 2025 honor code suspension over a consensual-sex admission, and receiver Parker Kingston's ongoing rape prosecution, which BYU has never publicly connected to the honor code at all. They also revisit Madi Barney, the survivor BYU investigated for reporting her own rape in 2015. The pattern: BYU's honor code was built to punish sex, not violence — and the silence around assault allegations isn't an accident, it's the mechanism.

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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 Honor Code investigation, and the 2013 deal that slashed the Tribune's revenue share from 58 percent to 30 percent overnight. It's a story about institutional power, media control, and what it costs to keep telling the truth anyway. Sometimes pressure doesn't look like a headline — it looks like a renegotiated contract nobody outside the industry ever hears about.

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New episodes every Sunday at 9 AM — just in time for sacrament meeting.

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 was exhumed and found naked in his coffin. The investigation led police to Baptiste’s house, where they found more than they bargained for.

We talk about how Baptiste’s odd proclivities were discovered, the Mormon beliefs that made the crime especially horrifying, his extraordinary punishment, and the mystery of what happened in the end.

New episodes of Postmormon Postmortem every Sunday at 9 a.m.

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 video of the entire batch. Jess and Hannah break down the leaked tape, the men who claim the gift of revelation, and the institutional blind spot they never saw coming.

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 query the church’s featured “success story”: a woman who attended an Easter breakfast, returned for Sunday services, and was introduced to the missionaries.

So when a ward advertises a “community” event, where does community outreach end and missionary recruitment start?

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, missionary service, and apostasy discipline against the same standards used to evaluate the Unification Church, the Democratic Workers Party, and Heaven's Gate. We cover Hassan's own writing on Mormonism, what happens when former missionary Tom Hopkins investigates the Church's claims, and what leaving actually costs when you were born into the belief system rather than recruited into it as an adult. High-control religion isn't about how strange the beliefs sound from outside — it's about how much of your life the system reaches into.

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New episodes every Sunday at 9 AM — just in time for sacrament meeting.

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 Elizabeth captive while Mitchell declared himself a prophet, claimed continuing revelation from God, “sealed” Elizabeth to himself as a plural wife, gave her priesthood blessings, renamed her, and repeatedly used Mormon doctrine and religious language to justify his control and abuse.

Drawing from Elizabeth's account of her captivity and testimony from Brian David Mitchell’s federal trial, we follow the kidnapping from the Smart family home into the mountains above Salt Lake City, through the search for Elizabeth, Mitchell’s attempts to take additional girls, the move to California, and Elizabeth’s eventual return to Utah.

The question that would eventually dominate Mitchell’s prosecution was how much did he understand about what he was doing? The answer we want to know: how much did he believe his own garbage?

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 different parts of the face, and the researchers’ attempts to explain the so-called “Mormon glow.” We get into perceived health, skin information, spirituality, and the Mormon belief in a visible “brightness of countenance.” Then, of course, there’s the way LDS media is going to spin it.

Full source list available on Patreon

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 with family money, custody, their children’s church involvement, and their increasingly hostile relationship.

Then, on February 16, 2022, Jared was shot and killed after stopping to move a tire placed in the road in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. His two-year-old daughter was sitting in the back seat.

In this Mormon Monday, Hannah and Jess get into the Gardner family money, Shanna’s departure from the church, Jared’s continuing Mormonism, the custody fight, Mario Fernandez Saldana, Henry Tenon, the $10,000 in checks, Bishop Scott Currie, Kim Jensen’s messy police interviews, the funeral potatoes texts, and the prosecution’s alleged murder-for-hire case.

Mario Fernandez Saldana’s trial began today, August 17, 2026. Shanna Gardner’s trial is scheduled to follow, and we’ll be following the Mormon pieces as the cases unfold.

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 Morain's trauma-and-dissociation reading. Covered: the 1813 leg surgery, the Smith family's repeated financial collapse, years of treasure-digging, the 1826 court hearing, Alvin's death, and the gaps between Joseph's own First Vision accounts. This isn't a takedown — it's a case study in how a traumatized child became a man other people needed to believe in.

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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 wife, Tausha Haight, her mother, Gail Earl, and all five of his children — Macie, Briley, Ammon, Sienna, and Gavin — before killing himself. The case left behind an unusually detailed record: police interviews, child-abuse investigations, texts from the children, internet searches, financial and employment information, Michael’s recordings, and a handwritten note centered on grievance, reputation, and his lifelong pursuit of the “ideal of an eternal family.”

Using the research on family annihilation, we examine the patterns that show up again and again in these cases — grievance, coercive control, threatened identity, family breakdown, masculinity, and the belief that a wife and children are extensions of the man at the center of the family. The Haight case also brings Mormon ideas about the eternal family, priesthood authority, reputation, forgiveness, and public image into the frame.

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 contact — decades before the Mormon Church built an actual correlation department to standardize anything else — this is the story of an organic, decentralized system of women's labor that's never once been treated as an institutional achievement.

In this episode of What Do You Know Wednesday, Jess and Hannah dig into where the ward cookbook tradition actually comes from, how it got commercialized (and turned into Olympic pins), how it ended up on Netflix, and why it's still happening today — new moms getting handed fresh copies of ward recipe books with zero institutional prompting.

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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 "Beginnings" sold more than 150,000 copies. Jess and Hannah trace her life: her marriage to Gerald, a gay man she cared for until his death from AIDS, later published as "Goodbye, I Love You"; her feminist search for Heavenly Mother in "Mother Wove the Morning" and "Finding Mother God"; her advocacy for gay Mormon families in "No More Goodbyes"; and "The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy," her reckoning with a doctrine still built into LDS temple sealings. She never got a real answer for the harm. She got the words for it — and that was the beginning of getting free for a lot of people.

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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 Encircle, decades of church-counseled mixed-orientation marriages, Utah's suicide data, John Dehlin's 2015 study on orientation change efforts, and the 2015 exclusion policy that barred children of same-sex couples from baptism — reversed in 2019 with no apology. Part three of the institutional harm series, following "The Grammar of Harm" and "The Architecture of Exclusion." The welcome was never unconditional. This is the fine print.

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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 considered insane when she understood that murder was illegal but believed killing her children was morally necessary.

Hannah and Jess examine Tanya’s collapse after her husband abandoned the family, the Mormon doctrines that structured her reasoning, the church leaders who recognized that she was suicidal, the jury that felt compelled to convict her, and the extraordinary sentence that placed her on lifetime probation rather than sending her to prison.

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 became a churchwide campaign of mass repentance.

They cover the 27 questions home missionaries asked Mormon families, the sharp rise in plural marriages, Brigham Young’s blood atonement preaching, the castration of Thomas Lewis by Bishop Warren Snow and local men, and the Reformation’s connection to the siege mentality surrounding the Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre.

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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't growing. Six months earlier, church president Dallin Oaks told a crowd in Burley, Idaho that the lowered missionary age for women was meant to bring marriage ages down. Jess and Hannah trace the timeline from Oaks' own words to the ground-breaking, then look at what the data says about the risk on the other side — degree attainment, income recovery, and what it costs a woman to have built nothing of her own by the time a marriage ends.

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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/Peterson Making Sense exchange on truth and fitness, Pew retention data showing younger Mormon women now leaving faster than Mormon men, the Strengthening Church Members Committee documented by D. Michael Quinn, the SEC's 2023 Ensign Peak Advisors settlement, and Helen Mar Kimball's sealing to Joseph Smith at fourteen. The church doesn't need the myth to hold up. It just needs you to keep showing up.

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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 found that Utah’s divorce rate was higher than the national average, even though Mormonism placed extraordinary emphasis on marriage and family. He argued that the Church’s usual response—asking individuals to repent and try harder—ignored structural problems within the culture itself.

In this episode, Hannah examines Christensen’s research on temple marriage and divorce, Mormon purity culture, early marriage, birth control, gender roles, priesthood authority, and the gap between the idealized Mormon family and the reality many families experience.

More than fifty years later, his analysis remains strikingly relevant.

Read Harold T. Christensen’s “Stress Points in Mormon Family Culture”:https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/stress-points-in-mormon-family-culture/

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Wade Christofferson, brother of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apostle D. Todd Christofferson, pleaded guilty to child abuse. Six church leaders knew first. None called police.

This episode traces the Wade Christofferson case chronologically: the earliest documented abuse allegations in a Crystal Lake, Illinois ward in 1985, two bishops who heard direct disclosures four years apart, the 1996 excommunication and confidential membership record annotation meant to bar him from children, its unexplained removal between 1998 and 2006, and the five church leadership callings he held in Ohio afterward. We cover what apostle D. Todd Christofferson knew starting around 2020, the Area Seventy told in early 2025, the coded language in letters to a Utah child, and Wade's July 2026 guilty plea in federal court. Six officials knew before his arrest. None called police.

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This episode discusses child sexual abuse in detail, including coded language used against child victims. Listener discretion advised.

Two men went to their graves arguing over who invented the LDS CTR ring — and neither of them designed it alone. Jess traces the real, messy origin story on this WDYKW.

Every Mormon kid got a CTR ring, and almost none of them know it came from three separate committees fighting over credit for decades — the "Choose the Right" hymn from 1909, Gordon B. Hinckley's 1970 primary announcement, and jeweler Coy Miles, who claimed the whole thing was his idea. When Miles and artist Joel Isaac both died, their obituaries told two different stories about who really owned it. Jess and Hannah dig into the trademark filings, the 1990s Ring Masters gold rush, and the ring's stranger unofficial afterlives — including as a queer signaling symbol in 1990s Utah.

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A new nonprofit wants to give the LDS Church outright ownership of Martin's Cove — brokered by a man who sold the ranch bordering it during the same window he pitched the deal.

Jess and Hannah trace the 1856 Willie and Martin handcart disaster, Franklin D. Richards' decision to call a vote instead of halting departure, and Brigham Young's public rebuke that followed. Then they dig into the current push by Wyoming Friends for Martin's Cove to finally secure outright Church ownership of the site — a deal brokered by Ryan Lance, whose own ranch sale to the Ensign Group closed in January 2026, and whose land controls one of the only two routes into the "public" acreage being offered in exchange.

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In 2006 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly rewrote a sentence in its own scripture about DNA and Native American ancestry — years before anyone was told why.

Jess and Hannah trace the 1981 introduction naming Lamanites as the "principal ancestors" of Native Americans, the DNA research pointing to East Asian origin via the Bering Land Bridge, and the 2014 Gospel Topics essay explaining a change nobody announced. They cover Thomas Murphy's near-excommunication, Simon Southerton's 2005 excommunication, the Indian Student Placement Program, and George P. Lee, the first Native American General Authority, excommunicated for objecting to the retreat. The Church can edit a word. It rarely tells the people it taught directly that it was wrong.

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In March 1902, fourteen-year-old Clyde Felt admitted cutting Samuel Collins’s throat inside a cave above Salt Lake City. Collins had spent years cultivating relationships with neighborhood boys, giving them gifts, paying them, inviting them to spend the night, and asking them to perform sexual acts and violent “operations.”

Clyde said Collins repeatedly begged him to kill him and “could make me do things I didn’t want to do.” After the body was discovered, Salt Lake City police insisted Collins had killed himself, despite two physicians saying the wound could never have been self-inflicted. Clyde gave several conflicting accounts, falsely accused his closest friend, and eventually confessed.

The investigation revealed that Collins had sexually abused and paid boys in the neighborhood for at least two years. He had also asked them to castrate him, coached Clyde on what to say after his death, and instructed him to destroy and hide his body.

Clyde came from a prominent Mormon family with pioneer, polygamous, church, and newspaper connections. Officers hesitated to charge him. Members of the community praised him in jail. Church president Joseph F. Smith used the case to warn Mormon children about dime novels.

The murder charge was dismissed without a trial. Clyde spent time in reform school, served a Mormon mission, married in the Salt Lake Temple, and returned to respectable society. Samuel Collins was buried in a plain pine coffin at county expense.

Jess and Hannah reconstruct the case of Samuel Collins and Clyde Felt, the 1902 Hell’s Hollow killing, and the community that had to decide whether Clyde was a murderer, a victim, or both.

Every source we used for this episode – including 100+ newspaper reports – can be found in our receipt archive on Patreon.

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Some Mormons believe a bishop will one day announce it's time to gather at secret tent cities. Jess and Hannah break down the real cost — and history — behind LDS prepper culture.

On this "What Do You Know Wednesday," Hannah quizzes Jess on modern LDS prepper culture — a world beyond basement food storage. They dig into "the call out" belief, the rumored gathering points in Rexburg, Idaho and Cardston, Alberta, a firsthand account from an anonymous former prepper interviewed by East Idaho News, and the real dollar cost of a year's supply of food, canvas tents, and charcoal for a family of five. They also trace it back to the Law of Consecration in 1830s Missouri. It's absurd, it's expensive, and somehow it's still cheaper than you'd think — right up until it isn't.

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The Salt Lake Temple just finished a $2 billion seismic retrofit. Russell Nelson says it'll be the safest place in Salt Lake Valley during an earthquake. The engineers might disagree about who deserves the credit. 

day Saints' newly completed Salt Lake Temple renovation — 98 base isolators, 263 miles of cable, and two decades of planning — and how the institution is already framing a predictable engineering outcome as prophetic foresight. They trace the pattern from Nelson's 2021 conference talk through the 2020 Magna earthquake to the Church's own "Led by the Spirit" account of a process that reads like standard bureaucratic sign-off. The temple didn't need a prophet to survive an earthquake. It needed geologists, cable, and a very large budget.

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Ted Bundy was baptized LDS in 1975, already having killed five women — and his ward defended him at trial. We trace how, and launch our series on the Mormon crimes those lists that include crimes like Bundy's leave out.

On Postmormon Postmortem, Jess and Hannah trace Ted Bundy's brief membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the baptism, the temple recommend, and journalist Lynn Packer's account of his ward defending him in court — then launch Mormon True Crime, a series on active, participating LDS members whose murders, fraud, and assault cases show no theological deviation and no public break from the church, including Israel Keyes and the Lyday, Pennington, Webb, and Haight cases. The deviation story isn't incomplete by accident — it's structurally convenient, and this is where they start saying the names it leaves out.

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A church president was asked a direct question about core Mormon doctrine — and answered like it didn't exist. There's a name for that pattern, and it goes back to Joseph Smith himself.

Jess and Hannah trace "Lying for the Lord" from Joseph Smith's 1835 denial of polygamy to Gordon B. Hinckley's 1997 TIME interview dodging a direct doctrinal question — with the King Follett Discourse, the Lorenzo Snow couplet, and three Gospel Topics Essays (polygamy, Race and the Priesthood, First Vision accounts) laid out as the paper trail. They also cover "milk before meat" missionary training and the 1993 excommunication of historian D. Michael Quinn. The pattern repeats: deny, control the narrative, publish the essay decades later.

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The Church sued a podcast over a logo. A group called "Latter-day Saints for Trump" used the actual Salt Lake Temple in a campaign ad and got a press release.

Twice. Two election cycles. The actual First Presidency's photos on a campaign website. The actual Family Proclamation as a mission statement. No cease-and-desist, no trademark claim, no lawsuit. Meanwhile Mormon Stories — run by an excommunicated critic — gets sued in federal court over a blue light-ray logo.

Neutrality is the claim. Selective enforcement is the pattern. Harsher on dissent, softer on power — every single time.

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The LDS Church denied this committee existed for years. Then it admitted the committee tracks members' speech, feeds files to bishops, and — the church says — never judges or punishes anyone itself.

Jess and Hannah trace the Strengthening Church Members Committee (SCMC) from its 1985 founding to 2023: the 1992 First Presidency statement confirming it, Doctrine and Covenants 123 as its scriptural citation, Boyd K. Packer's 1993 address naming scholars, feminists, and gay members as threats, the September Six disciplinary councils, Jeffrey R. Holland's on-camera BBC interview, and Lavina Fielding Anderson's excommunication, thirty years attending her ward as a non-member, and the restoration the First Presidency blocked until after her death. The committee was built so no one at the top would ever answer for what happened at the bottom.

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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, newspaper drama, and the church’s rush to take control of the story.

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 Society moments shaped their politics. Jess and Hannah break down YouGov data showing the GOP's shrinking advantage among Latter-day Saints, the Church's official political neutrality policy, and why "love thy neighbor" gets uncomfortable fast once you apply it to real immigration, health care, and LGBTQ policy. The old assumption that faith and one party are the same thing is doing more cultural work than doctrinal work.

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SOURCES

Tribune article: We asked four young Latter-day Saints why they lean liberal. Here’s what they said.

Axios Study: GOP losing ground among Latter-day Saints

“Political Neutrality and Participation” (2023) newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org

The Church of Jesus Christ, General Handbook of Instructions, 38. Church Participation 

00:00 Political Identity Among Young Latter-day Saints

04:46 The Shift in Political Leanings

09:01 Personal Stories of Young Liberal Mormons

13:42 Cultural Tensions and Family Dynamics

17:43 Moral Language and Political Identity

22:38 Conclusion and Future Implications

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 Fellowship at the veil, the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress and its link to Joseph's last words at Carthage, the Hiram Abiff legend, and the 1826 disappearance of William Morgan — whose widow later became one of Joseph's plural wives. The apron was never decoration. It's the ceremony's own lesson in spotting a borrowed credential, aimed everywhere except at the man who wrote it.

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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 Patrick Edward Connor and roughly 200 California volunteers attacked a Northwestern Shoshone winter village near Bear River, killing somewhere between 250 and 400 Shoshone men, women, and children.

Mormon settlers had moved into Cache Valley, taken land and water the Northwestern Shoshone had lived on for generations, and territorial officials called in the military when the Shoshone fought back.

Ten years later, Chief Sagwitch and many surviving members of his band converted to Mormonism. They helped build the Logan Temple on land they considered sacred, paid tithing, held callings, built homes, raised families, and lived for decades in the Washakie settlement.

Then, in the 1960s, church representatives decided the settlement was abandoned and burned homes to prepare the land for sale. Some of those homes were still occupied.

We talk about Bear River, Washakie Ward, Mountain Meadows, the church’s persecution narrative, and what gets remembered when the institution controls the archive.

Sorry for what we said when we were Mormon.

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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 ministering reassignment, and love bombing as a retention tool that uses real warmth to close real distance. They also name — and forward — the LGBTQ conditional belonging episode, because that architecture is categorically distinct and needs its own space. If you've ever tried to explain to someone why leaving felt like losing everything, not just your faith, this is the framework you've been looking for. The harm doesn't need cruelty. It was designed in.

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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 looks like when faith, power, and politics intersect in modern Mormonism.

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 confused about which church to join. He goes because he already knows the churches have gone wrong. And one being appears: "I saw the Lord." No God the Father. No two Personages.

That account sat in the Church Historian's Office for 133 years. The pages were cut from Joseph's letterbook. The repair tape is cellophane — invented in 1930. The pages were held in Joseph Fielding Smith's personal office safe until a BYU graduate student's 1965 master's thesis made them available to scholars. The church got to call it a discovery.

Jess and Hannah work through all four Joseph-authored accounts, the Gospel Topics Essay's memory-variation argument and its specific limit, the rhetorical moves the essay makes around the phrase "I saw the Lord," and what it means to have borne testimony of one account of one event your entire life — without ever being given the earliest version of that event.

The memory argument applies to accounts people can access. It doesn't reach a document that was in a safe.

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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 thread that reads a full driveway as a sign of righteousness.

We dig into the income numbers the companies publish themselves (89% of active Young Living members average four dollars a year), Utah’s white-collar crime registry, and Dallin Oaks naming the problem long before he led the church that built the conditions for it. LulaRoe, Stampin’ Up, Wild Rose Beauty — if you were raised in this, you already know the pitch. 

By the end, Hannah has a lot more questions. 

Sorry for what we said when we were Mormon.

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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 restraining order, a closed Oregon franchise, and a growing online claim that this was all really about the “Mormon mafia.”

In this Postmormon Postmortem mini episode, we separate what’s documented from what people want to be true.

There’s also no honest way to talk about this story without talking about Utah County, Mormon social networks, in-group protection, reputation management, and the way shared religious culture can shape business, policing, and public trust.

You don’t need a secret Mormon cabal to explain this. You need a tight community, an instinct to protect your own, and a police department operating inside a heavily Mormon social world.

🎙️ Postmormon Postmortem, where we lovingly sift through the ashes of our former faith. 

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