Postmormon Postmortem

In 1856, believing in plural marriage helped you qualify for the Mormon temple. Later, advocating it could keep you out. Nearly 200 years of recommend questions show who decides what "worthy" means. From Joseph Smith's 1842 Nauvoo endowment to a 2026 seminary lesson, this is the history of how the Mormon temple recommend went from a leader's judgment call to a standardized worthiness interview. You'll hear about the 1856 Endowment House criteria, the Mormon Reformation's 27-question catechism, Wilford Woodruff countersigning thousands of recommends, the 1922 uniform recommend book, the 1976 honesty question historian Edward Kimball ties to Utah's fraud reputation, Russell M. Nelson's 2019 "strive" rewrite, digital recommends in 2021, and the 2024 garment question. Worthy has meant something different in 1856, 1976, and 2024. A definition that keeps changing was never a measure of you. Support the show: Venmo: @postmormonpostmortem buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com New episodes every Sunday at 9 AM — just in time for sacrament meeting.

In 1993, Cody Judy walked onto the stage at BYU’s Marriott Center, claimed he had a bomb, and demanded that Howard W. Hunter read a letter naming Judy the new president of the Mormon Church. Judy said Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and ancient apostles had told him what to do. But Mormon history already had a long record of people claiming revelation that challenged the authority of church leaders. In this episode of Mormon True Crime, we follow Cody Judy’s story and look at Hiram Page and his seer stone, James Strang’s claim to succeed Joseph Smith, Ron Lafferty’s “removal revelation,” Brian David Mitchell, Denver Snuffer, and the Mormon rules around who gets to receive revelation for whom. SOURCES Deseret News, “Suspect in Fireside Bomb Threat Says He Was Fulfilling Prophecies,” February 9, 1993. Deseret News, “Fireside Disrupted With Threat of Bomb,” February 13, 1993. Deseret News, “Suspect Linked to Guns Left at Square,” February 8, 1993. Deseret News, “Self-Proclaimed Prophet Escapes From Hospital,” March 23, 1993. Deseret News, “Judy Gives Up After 3 1/2 Days in the Foothills,” March 27, 1993. Deseret News, “Judy Arraigned on a Charge of Escape,” March 31, 1993. Deseret News, “Judy Pleads Guilty to ‘Bomb’ Threat,” June 3, 1993. Deseret News, “Judy Gets 1–15 Years for BYU Bomb Threat,” August 11, 1993. Deseret News, “President Hunter’s Attacker Tells Parole Board He Was Misunderstood,” November 21, 1995. Howard W. Hunter, “An Anchor to the Souls of Men,” BYU devotional, February 7, 1993. Church News, “Book of Mormon Symposium: ‘There is no place for despair,’” February 13, 1993. Joseph Smith Papers, “Revelation, September 1830–B [D&C 28].” Joseph Smith Papers, “Minutes, 26 September 1830.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Doctrine and Covenants 28. Joseph Smith Papers, “James J. Strang Claimed to be JS’s Successor,” July 9, 1844. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Succession of Church Leadership.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Foundations of the Restoration Teacher Manual, “Succession in the Presidency.” State v. Lafferty, 749 P.2d 1239 (Utah 1988). Lafferty v. Crowther, U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, 2017. Lafferty v. Benzon, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, 2019. Denver Snuffer, “The Facts,” June 2014. Salt Lake Tribune, “Mormon Land: A Conversation With Denver Snuffer About the Remnant Movement,” December 2021. Religion News Service / Salt Lake Tribune, “A New Mormon Offshoot Movement Is Growing, but Can It Last?” August 2017. Salt Lake Tribune, “The Lord Has Extended His Hand Again — Hundreds Gather, Canonize New Scriptures for Growing Mormon Offshoot,” September 2017. Denver Snuffer, Preserving the Restoration, Lecture 10, September 2014. Salt Lake Tribune, “Controversial Mormon writer gets the word: He’s out of the church,” September 12, 2013. Judy v. Obama et al., U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, October 7, 2014. U.S. Supreme Court docket, Judy v. Obama, No. 14-9396, closed October 8, 2015.

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. If this one gets you thinking, we'd love a rating and a review — it's the easiest way to help other people find the show. Other ways to support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com

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. Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com New episodes every Sunday at 9 AM — just in time for sacrament meeting.

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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com

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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com

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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com 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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com

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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com 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. Support the show: buymeacoffee.com/postmormonpostmortem Ad-free listening from $2/month: patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem TikTok & Instagram: @postmormonpostmortem postmormonpostmortem.com 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?