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Since I was in high school, I’ve had a fascination with the members of and institution that is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, AKA the Mormon Church.

The LDS Church is largely known by Americans today as a quirky religion in Utah with overly chipper, sometimes pushy and irritating, members who proselytize with Sister/Elder name tags and go door-to-door on missions across the world.

The So-Called Church (TSSC) likes to keep it that way. TSSC is often accused, particularly by former members, as being closer to a cult than a traditional denomination of Christianity. The religion has been controversial from the very beginning, with its race science-obsessed fiction-inspired lore, con man and criminal founder, Joseph Smith who came up with a canon reason to f**k his friends’ wives (he was also a pedophile), and the mob violence its followers tended to bring to wherever they settled.

Mormon kids receive a sanitized view of the world, particularly an incomplete view and history of their own church and its theology. Many Mormons won’t even understand if you try to push back against the most unsavory parts of the Church’s history, particularly Joseph Smith’s affinity for f*****g other people’s wives and also being a f*****g pedophile.

Sheltered kids beget sheltered adults beget sheltered kids and so forth. It is extremely common for Mormons who leave to be frequently harassed by practicing members, disowned by family (especially financially, which is particularly risky if they skipped college to do a mission), and otherwise undergo years of deprogramming to think like a normal f*****g person and not a Mormon. There’s a reason Wikipedia has an entire article devoted to LGBTQ Mormon suicides.

Today, Mormonism is most closely associated with Utah, but like all good wacko 19th-century American religions, started in Upstate New York (Palmyra, to be exact), before moving to Kirtland, Ohio, and then Independence, Missouri, and finally Nauvoo, Illinois before Joseph Smith’s assassination by an angry mob.

Well, you might know that Missouri and Illinois are a completely doable weekend road trip from Minnesota. And that’s exactly what I did.

I’ve wanted to do a Mormon pilgrimage for a while, and this plan materialized after a friend of my fiancee and I’s was making a cross-country move from CA to PA. This friend also happens to be the first ex-Mormon I’ve met and welcomed into my life. We pitched the idea that we meet them in Missouri and do a road trip to various important sites to Mormons, specifically:

* Temple Lot in Independence, MO, where Joseph Smith declared Jesus would return for the rapture; it was also where he said the Garden of Eden was,

* The site also has a massive Mormon temple that is actually run by the church’s largest splinter group, the Community of Christ (who will be a frequent foil for the Mormons in this series)

* Liberty Jail in Liberty, MO, where Joseph Smith and conspirators were held on treason charges after the Mormon War of 1838,

* Far West, MO, which was to be the location of a Mormon temple and was at one point the largest Mormon community at 4,000,

* Adam-ondi-Ahman in Daviess County, MO, the location where Joseph Smith claimed Adam and Eve were banished to after getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and the closest thing to the Garden of Eden on Earth,

* Nauvoo, IL, a small town that was once the center of Mormondom and is where Joseph Smith is buried today, and finally

* Carthage Jail, in Carthage, IL, where Joseph and his brother Hiram were held and consequently murdered by an angry mob.

In this series, I want to document the most insane s**t I saw, heard, and experienced immersing myself in Mormon tourism at a time where Mormonism is at a crossroads: do they maintain their unique theology as an out-group of Christendom, or pull back and embrace a more mainstream protestant approach, allying itself with the country’s evangelicals?

Is all the tithing money in the world enough to stop this house of UNO cards from tumbling down?

This is Putting the Moron in Moroni: Martyrs, Mormons, & Misery in Missouri, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride as we explore some of the most foundational, sacred, and underwhelming holy sites in Mormonism.

Don’t miss a single issue of this limited series, Putting the Moron in Moroni and all your other favorite UTP originals and surrender your personal information to me.

Before we can talk about the trip, we need a primer from what they would call an “Anti-Mormon” AKA me.

I want to make it very clear that I believe the Mormon Church is exploitative and employs cult-like strategies to maintain a congregation of yes-men willing to give incredible amounts of money and time to the Mormon cause. I believe Mormon culture is toxic, and its more important than ever that we remember exactly who the LDS church is, and for me, who better to do that than the Church themselves through their missionaries and holy sites. It’s my belief that this is a cult and Joseph Smith was a criminal and a cult leader.

Since 2000, the LDS church has enjoyed its strongest era of soft power and relevance in American culture since its inception in 1830, all thanks to mass communication.

Mormonism thrives on TV. The TikTok age has brought forth hundreds of wildly successfully Mormon influencers who romanticize the ideal Mormon life, where moms are homemakers and dads are patriarchs endowed by God.

The most far-reaching and successful work of pop culture about the church is the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which takes every opportunity to roast Mormons and also to be extremely racist. Thank you, Trey Parker and Matt Stone for missing the whole point all the time. It obviously didn’t bother the Mormons too much, considering they are usually the primary Playbill sponsor for productions since.

Shocking documentaries have been made, and books written, about splinter groups where the most conservative, patriarchal doctrines are turned up to 11. I’m talking about groups like Warren Jeffs’ Fundamentalist LDS (FLDS) sect, and other sects’ various crimes highlighted in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. Turns out an environment obsessed with bloodlines, control, and conformity begets sociopaths who are EXTREMELY obsessed bloodlines, control, and conformity and also being pedophiles.

Mormons’ shockingly outsized influence on pop culture extends far beyond television and social media; Mormons can also sing and write books and start dessert/sweet treat fast food chains.

David Archuleta was famously LDS before abandoning the church and decrying it in his 2024 song “Hell Together.” 2010’s Jeep Commercial Core rock band Imagine Dragons is famously Mormon, which explains their safe, family-friendly music that can still be heard on variety station airwaves across the country today. Pop culture aficionados can enjoy Benson Boone flipping like a jackass off a piano as he sings his boring songs about falling in love. Generations of hormonal high school orchestra students have been enamored with the vaguely sexualized manic pixie dreamgirl that is violinist Lindsey Stirling (who disavowed the church when she was featured on Archuleta’s song named above).

The late-aughts were a boom time movies and books by Mormons. Nearly every kid in America was quoting the still exceptionally funny Napoleon Dynamite, which was made by an active, practicing Mormon. Middle school girlies weren’t free either: the Twilight series is an infamously Mormon work. Stephanie Meyer is a practicing Mormon and the books are known as a quintessential modern Mormon classic, evidenced by its presence at the Far West Temple gift shop, “The Country Store.” We haven’t even talked about Mitt Romney (and we won’t).

Mormons are also making their mark on the American diet. Crumbl is a national 1000-calorie cookie fast food chain that was started in Utah by Mormons, with over 1,000 locations across the US as of June 2025. The “dirty soda” trend originated in Utah, where soda shops outnumber coffee shops due to the religion’s rules against consuming coffee (Minnesota has our own version, whose owners are LDS, called Sota). Cafe Zupa’s has exploded as the primary national competitor against Panera Bread’s monopoly on the bakery-cafe dining concept.

All of these people, works, and organizations associated with the Church and its members vary in “how Mormon” they are, but regardless, the church and its adherents genuinely believe that people making half-baked 1000-calorie cookies are actually missionaries spreading the word of God.

Beyond the cultural impact, Mormonism, and specifically the mainline Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is basically an infinite money glitch for those at the top.

Despite supposedly having just 17 million followers worldwide, the Mormon church is the most financially successful religious institution on the planet, with assets, including cash, amounting to an estimated $293 billion. This has largely been the result of the faith’s doctrine of tithing, where members, no matter what they must sacrifice to do so, must contribute 10% of their income directly to the church.

The church has an official venture capital and investment management division called Ensign Peak. Wikipedia estimates that Ensign Peak alone manages more than $124 billion in the Church’s assets. How else do you think companies by BYU grads get their start-up money? Yet, stake presidents are urged to pressure members into tithing no matter how they and their family will suffer to do so. Mormon Facebook is full of AI-ass posts lauding people sacrificing food because they spent so much on tithing (not all Mormons are rich!)

The Church enjoys free labor from their members, as if 10% of their income wasn’t enough. The iconic image of two Mormon missionaries going door-to-door is etched into the cultural zeitgeist, but most people don’t realize that not only are these folks not getting paid, they are usually paying out of pocket directly to the church on top of volunteering their time. They are usually sent to a different part of the country (or world), have shitloads of rules they have to follow, and are usually encouraged to forego other commitments to do so. Seniors are also exploited; all volunteers we met were either college or retirment age.

We haven’t even talked about what they actually believe!

Mormons will be ecstatic to tell you how they have been persecuted throughout American history for their religious beliefs; they will be less eager to tell you what beliefs they have that caused them to be persecuted in the first place. Did I mention Joseph Smith was a pedophile?

The Book of Mormon (“Another Testament of Jesus Christ”) is the foundational text of the religion and also how Mormons got their nickname. The story goes that Joseph Smith Jr., the son of a carny con man in upstate New York, was visited by an angel named Moroni [sic], who told him how to find “golden plates” with a new gospel of the Bible, or something. He supposedly found and “translated” the plates by looking through a hat using a “seeing stone.” Nearly all of Joseph’s writings and “revelations” were dictated to someone else. This “translation” became what we know today as The Book of Mormon and was published in 1830.

It’s been speculated that it just so happens that Joseph Smith likely found a manuscript from a fiction author from Upstate New York that basically mirrors the premise of The Book of Mormon called A View of the Hebrews. If this weren’t enough, significant parts of the Book of Mormon are 1:1 taken from the King James bible.

The gist of the Book of Mormon is basically that sometime before the life of Jesus, a supposed “lost fourth tribe of Israel” had been on a sailing voyage and gone off course, which is basically the plot of A View of the Hebrews, a popular book in Upstate New York at the time. They landed in America and are today’s Native Americans. The book documents how these “Hebrews”, who the Book of Mormon calls “Lamanites,” kept their faith and did all sorts of s**t until its most famous sequence where Jesus Christ comes to America to visit the Lamanites after his resurrection.

It’s basically New Testament fanfiction, but Mormons believe that the Book of Mormon is a historical document, and despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, that it was literally divinely translated by Joseph Smith. They have spent A LOT of money trying to prove it’s historical accuracy.

Mormons also have two other texts: Doctrines & Covenants (D&C) and the Pearl of Great Price.

D&C outline revelations initially from Joseph Smith, but then from leaders of TSCC since his death. We get a lot of what would shape Mormonism’s most controversial beliefs, including D&C 132 which justifies so-called “plural marriage” AKA polygamy and permits men to take up multiple wives. It’s not like, a passing line, either. D&C 132 is loooong and makes it pretty clear what Joseph Smith wanted—as many wives as possible and to forbid his wife from leaving him for it.

“And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.” - D&C 132:54

The Pearl of Great Price is made up of two lost “books” of the bible: the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses. The Book of Abraham was “translated” from an Egyptian funeral papyri which Joseph Smith bought from a traveling salesman.

Instead of the traditional Christian heaven and hell, Mormons believe in an extremely complicated and oddly cosmological concept of three heavenly kingdoms: the Telestial, Terrestrial, and Celestial kingdoms.

People in the Telestial Kingdom are basically people who go to normal heaven. It’s amusing that in Mormon theology, non-Mormons are not automatically condemned to hell. Instead, they are condemned to a kind of Diet Heaven where they can be converted to Mormon in the afterlife via Mormonism’s famous “baptisms for the dead.”

The Terrestrial Kingdom is basically Diet Mormon Heaven, where Mormons go even if they weren’t following all the rules all the time.

The Big Dawg of Mormon heaven is the Celestial Kingdom, where the most righteous Mormons became God-Kings over their own planet, well at least the men do. Earth was Jesus’ planet, so the idea is that you’ll become the Jesus of some other planet, I guess.

In Mormonism, marriages are not like they are at any other Christian church. Mormons undergo a “Sealing Ceremony,” where two people are sealed with the Holy Spirit and will live forever together in the Clestial Kingdom. Sealing is one of several so-called Ordinances which are all done at the Temple.

We can’t talk about the sealing ceremony without talking about polygamy. The Church tries its damnedest to try to get everyone to forget the whole polygamy thing. This is difficult, because it has pissed people off since the 1830s, when Joseph Smith allegedly started a “relationship” with 16 year-old Fanny Alger, who was a servant working for his wife Emma that they had adopted as their own child. Joseph Smith was alleged to have somewhere between 30-40 “wives,” including at least seven girls who were under 18, with multiple as young as 14 years-old.

Mormonism is extremely patriarchal, and some speculate that seemingly frivolous edicts were actually petty ways of getting revenge on followers who did things he didn’t like. The story goes that Joseph’s wife Emma was not pleased that he was f*****g other people’s wives (and that he was a pedophile), so to punish her for dissenting, he forbade her and her girlfriends from having their tea and coffee salons, so now today people go on suicide watch because they went to Starbucks.

You’d think the temple is a place they go every Sunday, right? Wrong.

Mormons attend two types of churches: a church/meeting house and the temple. The temple is only for ordinances, and most Mormons only go every once in a while.

Temples are not open to the public, and they don’t just let any Mormons in either. You have to earn what’s called a “Temple Recommend,” where your local dickhead in charge of your stake (which is what they call a parish) says you are a good enough Mormon to go do the final bosses of Mormonism. Getting a Recommend taken away literally withholds your ability to spend eternity with your family and you won’t go to heaven, and one of the requiremenst is “following the Word of Wisdom.” It can be taken away because you drank coffee or showed your shoulders. Cuuuuuuult.

If it makes you feel better, the Church doesn’t require background checks for clergy and insists at every turn that they have no legal obligation to be mandatory reporters (they direct clergy to call the “ecclesiastical help line,” not contacting police). Their founder was a pedophile. Surely deputizing random people to enforce who gets to enter heaven won’t be abused.

The funniest ordinance by far is the Endowment Ceremony. When we toured the Washington, DC Temple, we overheard a TBM in the Endowment Room giving a tour to, who I guess, were his gentile family members. He said:

“This is where we watch a movie”

And he’s not exaggerating. This ceremony includes the presentation of a silly movie, which was made in the 70s (they may have updated in the last couple of years), that depicts scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon. They then do some secret handshakes that are 1-for-1 stolen from Freemasons (who Joseph Smith was obsessed with). This is literally the last thing you have to do as a Good Mormon to go to heaven.

The whole thing feels like a loyalty test to see if you’ll still believe in the religion afterwards, especially because kids are not taught what happens in the temple before going. Alyssa Grenfell outlines in several videos that her first time getting temple ordinances was the first time she legitimately felt like she was in a cult.

Thanks for sticking with me on this first issue. If you haven’t gathered it, beneath the cheery facade of its members, the LDS Church is a profit-motivated corporation that uses a cult cosplaying as a racist religion started by an illiterate folk magic-obsessed sexual predator who Mormons literally believe is second only to Jesus Christ for who has done the most for mankind, something we were told at Liberty Jail and heard again at Carthage Jail.

Join us for the first stop on our trip: the City of Independence, county seat of Jackson County, Missouri.

Congratulations! *places hands on your head* You have been called by Heavenly Editor to spread the reformed gospel of the Uffda Times-Picayune. Your mission assignment is to send this to 10 apostates in hopes of getting them subscribaptized. Also I get to marry your wife.

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