Postmormon Postmortem

On September 6, the Mormon Church rolled out a new worldwide Sunday schedule: 60-minute sacrament meeting, then just 25 minutes each for Sunday School and Relief Society, elders quorum, Young Women, or Aaronic Priesthood. Sunday School and quorum meetings now happen every week instead of alternating.

In this Mormon Monday, we look at what the Church says the change accomplishes, and what it might cost. We trace how LDS meeting sched...

In 1922, Mormon Church president Heber J. Grant pointed to a box of records and told his new secretary, “You won’t be needing those.” Inside: the Council of Fifty.

The Council of Fifty was Joseph Smith’s secret 1844 political body in Nauvoo, Illinois, and its members voted to accept him as “Prophet, Priest & King.” Jess and Hannah go through the minutes: the secrecy vow, the April 25 revelatio...

In April 2005, Raven Abaroa called 911 from his Durham, North Carolina home and told the operator his wife had been shot. Janet Abaroa, 25 and pregnant, had been stabbed three times while their six-month-old son slept in the next room.

Hannah and Jess follow the case from a temple marriage in Washington, D.C., through embezzlement charges, a $500,000 life insurance policy, an exhumation that recovered a contact lens from Janet&rsqu...

Jess explains Church Correlation to Hannah, and the closest comparison she could find is McDonald's.

Before 1960, Relief Society, Primary, and Sunday School ran their own curriculum, magazines, conferences, and administrative structures. Missions published their own magazines. One Mexican mission spent around 360 missionary hours every month producing one of them. Lessons written in Utah landed strangely abroad, and the Relief Socie...

On September 16, the Mormon Church sent a letter to all 1,300 congregations in Idaho telling members to oppose the Idaho Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, an abortion ballot measure. Five days later, 339 congregations in Nevada got a letter with the same instruction and the same wording about voicing opposition "in a respectful manner." Missouri and Virginia also have abortion measures on the November ballot. The Church has not...

Brigham Young said God revealed that Adam is our Father and God. In 1976, Mormon president Spencer W. Kimball denounced the Adam-God theory as false doctrine. How do you know which prophet to trust?

In April 1852, Brigham Young told General Conference that Adam is "our Father and our God." Wilford Woodruff and Hosea Stout both recorded it in their diaries, and Heber C. Kimball and apostle Franklin D. Richards backed it up. Orson Pra...

Former Mormon MTC president Joseph Bishop became the subject of a sex scandal after a former sister missionary, McKenna Denson, secretly recorded him in 2017. Denson has accused Bishop of raping her at the Provo Missionary Training Center in 1984.

We follow her reports to Mormon leaders, the recording, the police investigation, and the lawsuit that ended without a trial.

This episode includes discussion of childhood sexual abuse, ra...

Around 2011, a bishop in Bisbee, Arizona heard a man confess to sexually abusing his daughter. He didn't call the police or child protective services. He called a helpline the Mormon Church set up for bishops, and the person who answered worked for a law firm.

On July 30, 2026, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the bishops in the Paul Adams case had no duty to report what they learned through confession. This Mormon M...

Cliven Bundy refused to pay federal grazing fees. Armed supporters faced federal agents at his Nevada ranch, and his son Ammon later led the occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

We look at the Mormon beliefs the Bundys used to explain their actions, the history of Native land in both places, and what happened after the standoffs.

The main source for this episode is Betsy Gaines Quammen's "American Zion: A S...

This week on Mormon True Crime, Hannah and Jess dig into the Keystone Securities case: a mining stock offering, allegedly false and misleading statements, and a broker-dealer registration that got revoked. Ballard was personally named as a cause of that revocation. He was never criminally convicted, and Mormon apologetics site FAIR has a list of defenses — but the SEC's findings stood.

Then they connect it to something more re...

In October 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs signed an executive order declaring that the Mormons "must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary."

That order still anchors Mormon claims of persecution, including in a recent interview where a Mormon reached for Missouri when asked whether Mormons were more oppressed than Black Americans.

Jess set out to confirm one number: how many people died because of the extermin...

Asked to name one Mormon slave, a former Nevada Senate candidate said he couldn't. Green Flake was baptized Mormon while enslaved and entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, before Brigham Young.Josh Stacy ran for Nevada State Senate in 2024 and lost his primary. A clip of him telling Dr. Will James that Mormons were oppressed more than Black Americans then showed up in Instagram reels. What he left out: Sidney Rigdon's 1838 "war of ...

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 H...

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 C...

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 mu...

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...

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 talks her through the theory, 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 p...

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 hi...