Last year I spent a chunk of time listening to a Rabbi explaining the differences between Tanakh and Christian translations thereof, and that was really interesting. Despite all this, though, I never quite turned the corner and decided that actually, dude was in the right and it was time to convert to Judaism but in the process, I still learned a lot and enjoyed what I learned. Notably, though, that was an active participant in a faith with real, meaningful scholarship about actual historical events and real translations to work from, exploring and expositing the truth of them as best he understood it. That was really interesting to me.
When we talk about Mormonism, those tools aren’t going to be useful.
This is because Mormons are absolutely founded on complete nonsense.
I have no love for any faith as you may well know but I must underscore this one, when the time comes to discuss Mormonism there is no reading of their histories and claims that can be done in a non-adversarial way. There is no way that a corporation worth a hundred and twenty billion dollars that owns more tobacco farms than charities should be treated as if its claims towards a divine access of truth are in any way to be given the benefit of the doubt.
I feel like the story of the Mormon church is an interesting one in the history of flimflam. Of hokum. Of lies and white supremacy. As with all American faiths, we have enough true provable things about its history that it makes a legitimately interesting thing to examine. But you need someone who knows it, and knows its problems, and is willing to approach it with an honesty towards that.
Bryce Blankenagle runs two different Mormon podcasts; The Glass Box podcast, which is a current affairs podcast with an eye towards the Mormon Church, and Naked Mormonism, a long form, day by day, point by point reading of the history of the making of the Book of Mormon. There’s a third thing he does, which is a reading of The Book of Mormon with AronRa and some other Formons, but the Naked Mormonism Podcast, which feels like the larger whole work, is two hundred and sixty episode podcast, across four years, with the largest episodes tallying up over eight hours of in-depth breakdowns for complicated historical moments or specific competing theories of history.
The podcast is pretty rough when you go back to the start to listen to it. Bryce was a truck driver with an interest before he was a podcaster, and the result is that a lot of early episodes get pretty profane and rough, and things get smoother and more approachable after that. Note that approachable is important: at one point, Blankenagel realised that he did want to make something Mormons who were questioning could engage with, and so adjusted from a rougher, bawdy tone with regular swearing, to something that avoided it. This is a really important thing to learn about audiences, by the way: Who are you trying to reach? Who are you actually talking to?
The subject material is confrontational to Mormon aesthetics. It’s filled to the brim with very reasonable, very true things like Joseph Smith’s criminal history, or the claims made in the Book of Mormon contrasted with reality, or the history of Mormon Archaeology and linguistics. These are stories that powerfully capture the story of a cult and its apologists, and the non-stop ways in which any outsider can see the work of an abuser exploiting the people around him. Things that should seem obvious to anyone inside but somehow aren’t.
For me, I find this really fun, not just because Mormonism isn’t true, but because Mormonism’s history is lurid and wild. It’s a crime drama, a Sopranos style setup with a sex creep at the heart of it, all told in a period of history where the good guns hadn’t been made because the Mormons hadn’t finished making them yet.
That’s Naked Mormonism as a historical podcast. Glass Box is a more general access Formon Podcast. They do things like speak to investigators who have information about church finances, or the history and background of scandals and behaviours that are uniquely Mormon. They talk about General Conference every time that happens – and in case you were unaware, every year, the Mormon church wheels out its elders to televise a public broadcast of the things they’re doing this year, and what that means and how they are blessed, and these things are historically, full of lies or just yikesy details. This year, they were happy to announce the first nonwhite speaker at General Conference.
This year they announced the first nonwhite speaker.
The Glass Box podcast also brings in people whose experiences of Mormonism are outside of Bryce’s. There’s an episode about the quandraries of making polyamry illegal and the subsequent problems and abuse that engenders. There’s a conversation about missionary work as exploited free labour. There’s a talk about the way that a lack of oversight leads to exploitation of the church’s resource system. It’s a fascinating look into a part of the world you might not understand, which is the burgeoning, very real theocratic state within America and the ways that system is hiding its own deeply capitalist rot.
And I know, it’s Decemberween, you might not be in the mood for a massive bummer in the form of a five hundred hours of historical context for a cult’s origins, or a weekly podcast about the ways in which a modern day legal system has broken down its own principles of separation of church and state. I get it, it’s a bummer! But it’s also important to know about these things if only to share them with people who are questioning, who are confused, and who wished they had someone reach out to them.
This is a time of year where a lot of religious oppression and social manipulation ramps up.
Keep an eye out for one another.