“This earth was once a garden place, with all her glories common, and men did live a holy race, and worship Jesus face to face, in Adam-ondi-Ahman.”

- Mormon hymn “Adam-ondi-Ahman”

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The Mormons really thought they cooked when they set up their theocratic enclave in Far West, Missouri in 1836 after getting justly kicked out of Jackson County; at long last, the Mormons had won themselves a home outside of Ohio or New York.

The 1834 Zion’s Camp mission to use quasi-military force to attempt re-seizing the properties Mormons left behind in Jackson County after their eviction was a colossal failure. However, in private correspondence, the Attorney General and Governor of Missouri expressed deep concern over the Mormons’ ability to mount a sizable militia force relatively quickly.

Actions taken by so-called “Anti-Mormons” only further radicalized the Mormons who had already given up everything, in many cases multiple times, to support the now nomadic church that was created just a few short years prior. These Mormons had nothing to lose, driven by 2nd Great Awakening fervor, their cult of personality Joseph Smith, and a tendency to antagonize the locals no matter where they went. Remember all of the angry mobs?

Surely nothing can go wrong.

This is Putting the Moron in Moroni: Martyrs, Mormons, and Misery in Missouri.

In July, against my better judgement, I took a road trip from the Twin Cities to Missouri to visit Mormon holy sites. In this series, we’re looking at my bonkers experiences, the historical context of just what the hell happened at these historical sites, and analyzing what this bit that went too far can tell us about the world’s most American religion.

This week, we visit the Garden of Eden…sorta, Joseph commits banking fraud and gets kicked out of Ohio, and we try and fail to determine once and for all whether this is all a f*****g joke to them or not. Thanks for reading and listening.

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When we last checked in with Joey and the gang, the pressure was starting to build.

It’s 1837, and Joe and his boys (for the most part) are still based out of Kirtland, Ohio. The church was in dire financial straits—as you’ll recall, the Mormons were not the rich pseudo-communitarians they are today. There was no Swig or Crumbl to directly funnel money up to the church.

Joseph had largely relied on revelations and good-natured frontierspeople giving up what little they had for the church Smith convinced them was true. Joseph Smith relied on well-meaning rubes, like Martin Harris and the folks he stayed with in Hiram, OH when he was tarred and feathered, to string along enough money to make it to the next venture.

Like all good cults, Joseph used revelations and prophecies to try to will new money and resources into existence. This worked, for the most part, but new temples, like the one in Kirtland that was dedicated in 1836, were not cheap. It didn’t help that his people had been violently evicted from the holy homeland that he had declared, and the well-documented flaring of tensions between the Ohio and Missouri communities was coming to a head.

You might remember the United Firm from a few editions ago. This was a short-lived business venture of Smith’s cult that, paired with the Law of Consecration, created a mutual aid network (or at least purported to) that focused on pooling resources to create community wealth for the Mormons. What I didn’t mention, is that this endeavor, which was focused solely in Missouri, collapsed in 1834 with the Mormons being kicked out of Jackson County.

In late 1836, Joseph concocted quite the scheme to bolster the church’s coffers. Long before the Federal Reserve existed, and during a time where banking in the US was pretty much nothing like it is today, Joseph thought the easiest way for the church to raise money would be to simply create a church-owned bank. After all, banks were the ones making their own bank notes and banking was wildly different state-by-state. S**t was fake!

Smith wanted to take advantage of the largely unregulated and undeveloped American (and Ohioan) banking system, and devised the “Kirtland Safety Society,” which despite its nice-sounding name was effectively a bank meant to literally print money for the church.

Or so they thought.

Orson Hyde, one of Smith’s Kirtland lackeys, was sent to the Ohio capitol seeking a bank charter from legislators to authorize their church bank. Believe it or not, this did not work. Joseph Smith chalked it up to typical Anti-Mormonism. “If thine scam shall not come to pass then thee shall even blameth thine biggest haters” is something he could have said about the situation.

There was some luck on a second visit to the legislature, but a noted-anti-Mormon activist legislator that had personal beef with Joseph Smith intervened to make sure the Mormons didn’t get their coveted charter. From ‘36-’37, Jacksonian Democrats took power in Ohio and rejected every bank charter but one for two years. Call it good governance or bad timing but regardless it wasn’t going Joseph’s way.

Under the counsel of counsel, the Mormons decided they would move forward and start a bank in everything but name. They founded The Kirtland Safety Society “Anti-Banking Company” (KSSABC), and I wish I was joking about the name.

They had already secured the printing stamp to create bank notes as the “Kirtland Safety Society Bank,” so they had to add an awkward “ANTI” and “ING CO.” in tiny print on either side of the word bank so you know they are definitely not in any way a bank. Smith must have been well-versed in the Fielder Method, because this was a very “Dumb Starbucks” strategy: The plan: call it an “anti-bank” to avoid banking regulations.

The legally dubious KSSABC was a disaster right from the get-go in January 1837.

Immediately, lawsuits were filed against the company’s officials, including Sidney Rigdon and Joseph Smith. They were lampooned in local media for printing worthless “Mormon money.” The company would not make it to the end of the year, and was seized with $100k in debt, including $30k used to bail Smith out of jail for running an illegal bank.

This was the last straw for some significant early members of the church, including all three of the Book of Mormon’s original witnesses. They had been willing to put up with a lot of b******t: Joseph was a lying philanderer running a racket to fund trips to Missouri, Canada, upstate New York, Philadelphia, and pretty much anywhere he wanted to go. His followers had made embarrassing exoduses from various places at the hands of angry mobs. Hoity-toity upstate New Yorkers were now willingly associating with hicks from Missouri and Ohio. The horror of it all!

But for many of his longest and loyalest followers, swindling faithful believers into giving their money to an illegal bank to offset Joseph’s traveling and poor financial management was a bridge too far.

The fallout was incredible—Joseph Smith condemned his now former-friends with excommunications and public denouncements. Smith’s vengance campaign against his now-oppss was further fracturing the Mormon project in Ohio, which was coming to a head by the end of 1837.

A follower named Warren Parrish rallied disillusioned Saints to fight back against Joseph. He allegedly led an armed insurrection mid-church service, and Parrish publicly chastised Smith and the church in the paper, and even tapped Martin Harris to join his cause, who now claimed he had never seen the Golden Plates at all.

Behind the scenes, as outlined in John Turner’s extraordinary biography of Joseph Smith, simply called Joseph Smith, Smith’s loyalists were privately irritated with Joseph’s sexual promiscuity. This was before Smith hard-launched polygamy as doctrine, and between financial ruin and moral corruption, Joseph’s church in Ohio was at its weakest and it was so painfully obvious that it was squarely his fault.

Would you believe it if I told you that Parrish’s armed insurrection against Smith actually worked?

Parrish successfully commandeered the Kirtland Temple, while Smith and his confederation of rubes and criminals were followed by an angry mob looking to arrest Smith to stand trial. A warrant was out for Smith’s arrest for fraudulent banking, again.

For the umpteenth time in his life, Joseph Smith and his followers were driven away from their home for legitimate reasons, but Smith played it off as typical anti-Mormon b******t.

The Mormon experiment in Kirtland was over for now, and for the rest of Smith’s life, at that. And we didn’t even talk about all the other b******t, like the mummies and the papyri and all the stupid theology-building revelations he would have during these self-inflicted tribulations.

Smith set off for Missouri, and hundreds of Mormons, including most of his loyalists, followed in-tow. They headed for Caldwell County, and its seat, Far West to unify the once divided church into a community of 4,000+. A significant number of detractors would stay in Ohio and the Kirtland Temple would eventually come under ownership of resident-Utah-opps, Community of Christ. The LDS Church in Utah would not come to own the temple until 2024.

In case being run out of Ohio wasn’t enough, Joseph Smith and his band of refugee Mormons were testing how far they could go with the limited liberties the Missouri government had afforded them in Caldwell County.

By the end of January, the church had formally moved its headquarters to Far West. Despite getting a dedicated enclave in Caldwell county, many settlers chose to set up homesteads and settlements outside of it, in neighboring areas, notably Daviess County.

A Mormon named Lyman Wight was one of these Daviess County settlers, and set up a homestead and ferry along the Grand River in February 1838. Joseph Smith visited in April, and told Lyman that this location, just outside of their legally sanctioned haven, was actually the place Adam and Eve were sent to after being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Isn’t that f*****g convenient?

This stupid-ass revelation pisses me off so much.

Isn’t it convenient that the Garden of Eden and site of Christ’s Second Coming was in the first frontier community that Joseph felt he could overpower with numbers alone?

Isn’t it convenient that, after getting kicked out of effectively three places (Palmyra, NY, Kirtland, OH, and Jackson County, MO), the last place they would end up would be near a new, even more b******t-ass holy site?

Isn’t it convenient that this holy site is on property already-owned by a TBM and was theoretically an important strategic location, what with the ferry and all?

Isn’t it convenient that Joseph can use the story he invented about Adam and Eve could be used to justify why they aren’t in Jackson County? That they, like Adam and Eve, were struck out of the literal same paradise in Jackson County, Missouri because of Satan?

Isn’t it convenient that this new location was near water, had lots of flat land, and would align with Smith’s expansionist agenda, providing enough land and resources to support at least a small community of Mormons outside of Caldwell County?

Yeah, it’s really f*****g convenient.

Smith formally revealed in May 1838 that this area, known as Wight’s Ferry, about 20 miles north of Far West, was actually an ancient religious site called Adam-ondi-Ahman, which he claimed means “Valley of the Gods” in the non-existent “Adamic” language. Always with the fake f*****g languages.

He claimed that random rocks were “altars” and that it was clearly the place God sent Adam and Eve after they were evicted from Eden. There’s so much d*****s lore that I truly do not have the time or respect to cover it all.

Let’s just visit this stupid f*****g field and get it over with.

Our trip to Adam-ondi-Ahman was more treacherous than we expected.

The very-Missourian elder missionary at the Country Store had made it obvious that the main road was not an option. I white-knuckled it in my mostly pristine and not-at-all-off-road-capable ‘24 Honda Civic across dozens of miles of dirt roads, all a little fucked from recent rainfall (See: the washed out bridge—once again, take a f*****g hint, Mormons!)

I’ll be honest here: even with an exmo on hand, our understanding of this site was…not clear. I knew we weren’t in Jackson County, so I just assumed that The Book of Mormon (musical) had simply gotten their theology wrong, like they did by saying God lives on a planet called Kolob (it’s actually a planet near a star named Kolob), but no, it was just us who were wrong.

We referred to this place as “Mormon Garden of Eden” the entire trip. We continued to do so even after getting a slightly better understanding once we were at the actual historical site: this was supposed to be a different place Adam and Eve went, but was also still a paradise in its own right? It’s not the gathering place for the Second Coming but is one of the places some people will gather for the Second Coming, which is happening about 30 miles away in Independence, of course.

God I hate this theology so much, it’s almost like an illiterate con man came up with it on the fly.

The actual park is pretty big, but there are only a couple of lookout points worth seeing. We weren’t aware that there was much else here, so we missed the cornerstones for the never-built temple at Adam-ondi-Ahman (notice a f*****g pattern???). Instead, we went to the closest overlook that featured the shortest walk. Mind you, it was f*****g hot out and we were crabby and knew it was just going to be an empty field.

The parking/picnic area of this park felt like any county or state park I’ve been anywhere. A small shelter housed bathrooms (I’ll give the Mormons credit: their bathrooms are really nice), with outdoor public drinking fountains including water bottle filler-uppers, and a couple of picnic tables for you to have a picnic with your stupid family.

There was a family walking up from the overlook that we passed. They did not acknowledge us. A woman was parked near us and she was sitting at one of the picnic tables, journaling (a very common Mormon hobby). She only acknowledged us through glares and stares.

I noticed three things on the .1 mile trail to the overlook: 1) a lot of f*****g flowers to cover up the smell of manure, again, 2) no apple trees in sight (what kind of Garden of Eden is this???) and 3) the world’s tackiest f*****g signs.

This edition of this series is called “Is This A Joke to Them?” and references what I said multiple times at Adam-ondi-Ahman: Is this a f*****g joke to them?

Dotted along the path and throughout the park were these cookie cutter CNC’ed wooden signs that read: “Warning: Please Stay On The Path, Snakes May Be Present.”

I honestly was at a loss for words. Is this a tongue-in-cheek joke meant to give the good-natured family-friendly pilgrims a light chuckle as they hit the extremely boring and relatively meaningless historical sites? Are they being serious, do Mormons actually think they’ll run into the f*****g serpent from Genesis? Is this supposed to be the Garden of Eden or a place they were banished to? It doesn’t make sense to me that the serpent would have also followed them out of the Garden of Eden. IS THIS A F*****G JOKE TO THEM???

To quote and expand on a joke Emily made: if the Catholics thought they knew where the Garden of Eden was, and were able to control that land, it would be beyond decadent. There’d be a convent and monastery, massive cathedral/basilica, priceless art and relics, gold leaf covering f*****g everything. But not the Mormons. The same church with decadent temples, a literal infinite money glitch, and a lifetime of being “persecuted” had stupid f*****g tacky signs probably made by a volunteer to get a chuckle out of Mormon dads.

In case that weren’t bad enough, when we finally got to the overlook, we realized that the vast majority of this sacred place—a place where Mormons LITERALLY believe Adam and Eve once lived—is actually a productive farm utilizing factory agriculture. There is a visibly large irrigation system and tightly-kept rows of crops. There isn’t an event space, a place of worship, a church, a temple, a museum, historical artifacts, missionaries to teach you things, somber memorials to pioneers. There are no crosses, no angel Moroni, no statues of Joseph Smith, no representations of Adam and Eve, no recreations of the Mormon settlement. AND THE GIFT SHOP IS 20 F*****G MILES AWAY. I WILL BECOME THE F*****G JOKER!

Worst of all was some extremely dark news about this specific religious site that came out while I was working on this newsletter edition specifically.

On August 23, 2025, Elder Brent Blackburn, 68, who was serving a mission in Missouri, tragically died at Adam-ondi-Ahman in a lawn mowing accident.

Let’s break this down:

* Older, retired Mormons will continue to serve missions like their spry counterparts during their retirement, usually with their spouse. Our tour guide at Carthage Jail (in a couple of weeks) remarked that she struggled with our tour because her husband was out sick. Like the younger missionaries, these are volunteers who will pay their own way, including directly to the church, in order to serve their mission,

* While much of the land at Adam-ondi-Ahman is a working farm along the riverbank, the touristy parts are at the top of a hill and covered in turf grass that needs to be mowed like anywhere else,

* The Mormon Church in Utah has more money than any other religious organization on Earth.

So why was a 68-year-old volunteer missionary, who was paying to volunteer, mowing the lawn here? There is no reason, aside from pure greed, that the corporate church would rely solely on volunteer labor for maintaining these sites. A landscaping company would, at least one would hope, have the equipment, training, and staff to complete the tasks faster, better, and safer than a 68-year-old volunteer. from Utah. I’ll add that the closest hospital to Adam-ondi-Ahman is 30 miles away, and we were only able to take dirt roads to get there.

If this weren’t insulting enough to rank and file Mormons, the Temple Lot Church of Christ, the splinter of a splinter group that owns the little white building and the accompanying Temple Lot in Independence, had a hired landscaping crew that was getting ready to mow the Temple Lot when we visited earlier that day. And we were there for, what, 20 minutes max?

Even the splinter group with literally just one physical location is competent enough to manage their site professionally. The Utah apostates saw the late Elder Blackburn as expendable, and he did not deserve that.

I don’t think there’s any fun way to bring it back around, other than that this is a microcosm of what Mormonism is and always has been about: exploiting people’s time and money. More importantly, in remembering Elder Blackburn as martyr against the Great and Abominable Church of the Devil in Utah, we recognize the LDS Church for what it has become: a cold, callous, and capitalistic corporate machine.

So Adam-ondi-Ahman is not the Garden of Eden, but it’s also not-not the Garden of Eden. No amount of kitschy signs, eager, faithful volunteers unknowingly in danger, and side-eyeing LDS devotees will make this site any more interesting. It really does feel like a joke. If it’s such a holy place, why is the actual site nothing more than a roadside attraction? There’s nothing to see, almost no interpretive signs, and no missionaries standing around to parrot “fun” “facts” at you.

Next week, we go back to Jackson County after Joseph’s shenanigans and alienation of his most loyal friends land him in hot water with the government, we try to go to an actual real-life Swig location, and we witness the effectiveness of the Mormon programming firsthand as we take the tacky guided tour of Liberty Jail in Liberty, MO.

Did the “Snakes May Be Present” sign piss you off as much as it pissed me off? Tell everyone you know about this unserious Ponzi scheme cult of a religion and share my newsletter with them. Everyone is fascinated with these people and surely so is someone you know.

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