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.

🎧 New episodes every Sunday.

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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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This week on Mormon Monday, we’re talking about Elder Kyle S. McKay, a General Authority Seventy and Church Historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who apologized after making racially offensive remarks at the Yukon Oklahoma Stake conference.

McKay opened his remarks by talking about “This Little Light of Mine,” a hymn recently added to the church’s new hymnbook. From there, he made comments involving white members imitating Black singing, slavery language, and “Swanee River.”

We walk through what he said, why the hymn history matters, why his apology deserves attention, and what this moment reveals about race, authority, and lived Mormon culture.

SOURCES

The Salt Lake Tribune, “‘I deeply regret saying what I said’ — A high-level LDS Church leader apologizes for offensive remarks”

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/06/13/high-level-lds-church-leader/

LDS Daily, “Everything You Need to Know About the Controversy Surrounding Elder Kyle S. McKay’s Comments”

https://www.ldsdaily.com/world/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-controversy-surrounding-elder-kyle-s-mckays-comments/\

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Race and the Priesthood”

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng

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

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Someone showed up in our comments with three arguments, one after another — missing scrolls, Chicago Fire, syncretism. Behind that comment is a funded nonprofit, studio space, and SEO training. Here's the machine.

We traced a comment section exchange back to the Ancient America Foundation — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose stated mission pillars include "Missionary Productivity" and "Gospel Advocacy," and whose own website says it exists to do "things the institutional Church cannot do." Its creator arm, the Faith Creators Alliance, runs studios in Utah, coaches 70+ creators on SEO and audience growth, and feeds interested viewers directly to missionaries through a pipeline called Discover the Book of Mormon.

The episode covers the Book of Abraham facsimile problem, why the missing scrolls argument fails on Joseph Smith's own paper trail, the two-layer irony of the Church's Gospel Topics Essay hedge being amplified at scale, and what Russell M. Nelson's 2018 social media fast looks like next to a 70-creator influence operation.

You weren't imagining it. You were the only one who didn't know what you were dealing with.

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Joseph Smith’s “Happiness Letter” is famous for the line “Happiness is the object and design of our existence.”

But the full letter was connected to Nancy Rigdon, the 19-year-old daughter of Sidney Rigdon, after she refused Joseph Smith’s proposal of plural marriage.

We walk through the proposal, Nancy’s refusal, the full text of the letter, Joseph’s denial, Nancy’s confrontation, Sidney Rigdon’s private appeal, and Orson Hyde’s later public attack on Nancy’s character.

The Church has quoted the pretty part for generations. The full context is much harder to explain.

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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 Mormonism outside the Christian community of faith between 1995 and 2001. The Pentagon didn't start this argument. It just put it on a form.

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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 non-apology and institutional DARVO built into "the Church is perfect but the people aren't"; niceness as social control versus kindness that costs something; concern carrying eternal family stakes that make setting limits feel like breaking a sealing; spiritual bypassing — psychologist John Welwood's concept of caring from a safe distance — and how "I'll pray for you" lets a whole ward agree you need fixing without anyone having to stay in the room; and testimony as conversation ender, where Boyd K. Packer's doctrine of certainty-through-repetition replaces engagement with a door that sounds like an open one. The harm was real. You weren't making it up. You were trying to name a structure that made naming it feel like the problem.

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