“The besetting sin of religious thought is not doubt but credulity — the willingness to believe what we wish were true rather than what the evidence compels us to accept.”
— adapted from Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion
There is something simultaneously admirable and deeply troubling about Zander Sturgill’s Facebook post. Admirable because it reflects a genuine moral impulse — a citizen’s righteous anger at the possibility that powerful men escaped accountability for unspeakable crimes against children. Troubling because in his eagerness to press the Book of Mormon into service as a contemporary political decoder ring, Sturgill has committed precisely the epistemological error that Moroni, if he existed as a historical figure, would likely have found alarming: the substitution of pattern-matching for evidence, and the weaponization of sacred text to baptize a particular political narrative as divine truth.
Let us be clear about what is at stake here, because clarity is the first casualty whenever apocalyptic frameworks meet cable-news politics. Sturgill is not merely making a political argument. He is making a theological claim — that the Book of Mormon specifically illuminates the Epstein network and the Trump administration’s handling of those files, and that faithful Latter-day Saints are therefore religiously obligated to oppose one and demand the other. This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims, as the philosopher Carl Sagan reminded us, demand extraordinary evidence. What Sturgill offers instead is typology — the ancient and endlessly elastic art of finding in old texts the mirror of present anxieties.
Zander Sturgill on Facebook:
Feb. 17, 2026 at 8:23 a.m.
Why should us Latter-day Saints not let the Trump administration cover up the Epstein files? The Book of Mormon has the answer! It warns that organized evil thrives in the dark to control society. Secret Combinations.They use “whoredoms” or exploitation to keep people in darkness (Ether 8:16). The files detail the horrific trafficking and sexual abuse of minors as a primary tool for compromise and leverage over high-profile individuals.
These groups are built “to get power and gain” by putting themselves above the law (Ether 8:22–23). The Epstein network was a curated circle of the world’s most powerful people, designed to ensure they remained influential and untouchable by the justice system.
They seek to “overthrow the freedom of all lands” by corrupting leadership (Ether 8:25). By compromising politicians, royalty, and business leaders, these networks bypass the law and undermine the very foundation of a free society.
They use “secret plans” to ensure that no one “divulges” their actions (Ether 8:9, 14). We see this in the aggressive use of high-level NDAs and systemic threats that successfully kept victims and staff silent for decades.
They use “murder” to keep their secrets in darkness (Ether 8:16). While there is no direct proof of a “hit” yet, there is certainly concerning evidence mounting, from suspicious jail cell circumstances to the “disappearance” of key associates, that fits the pattern of silencing those who know too much.
God commands us to “awake to a sense of your awful situation” when we see these things happening (Ether 8:24). This is a direct call for us to pay attention as these documents and people are covered up, rather than ignoring the “secret works of darkness” happening in our time.
Frankly, our Utah Republican representatives are becoming part of the problem for bowing to Trump rather than stepping up. LDS should be a huge part of this movement alongside the few Republican representatives like Massie, Mace, Greene, Luna and the Democrats.
Moroni didn’t write this as an interesting history story. He wrote it so we would recognize these “secret combinations” today and do something before they destroy the nation.
The Hermeneutical Trap
Ether 8 is, without question, one of the most dramatically charged passages in the entire Latter-day Saint scriptural canon. Moroni’s warning about secret combinations reads with the urgency of a man who has watched an entire civilization collapse and cannot bear to think the tragedy will be repeated. The passage has genuine literary power. And therein lies the danger.
Powerful texts exercise a gravitational pull on the imagination. They invite application. And application, unchecked by methodological rigor, slides almost imperceptibly into eisegesis — the reading of meaning into a text rather than the drawing of meaning from it. When Sturgill maps the Gadianton robbers (Helaman 6:26–27) onto the Epstein network, he is not doing exegesis. He is doing something far more psychologically satisfying and far more intellectually dangerous: he is finding what he was already looking for.
Consider the extraordinary flexibility of the “secret combination” interpretive framework as it has functioned in LDS history. In the nineteenth century, anti-polygamy crusaders applied Ether 8 to the early Mormon church itself. In the early twentieth century, LDS leaders occasionally invoked it against labor unions. By mid-century, the framework attached itself to Communism with such enthusiasm that Ezra Taft Benson, then an apostle, became deeply entangled with the John Birch Society — itself a secret-combination-hunting organization that J. Edgar Hoover privately considered a destabilizing influence on American democracy. In the 1970s, various LDS thinkers applied the framework to the United Nations and international banking. Today, Sturgill applies it to the Epstein network and the Republican establishment simultaneously.
The framework, in other words, has been applied to virtually every major perceived threat in American culture for over a century, often by LDS thinkers of sincere faith and considerable intelligence. Its very adaptability should give us pause. A prophetic framework that can identify essentially any powerful organized group as a secret combination is not functioning as a precision instrument. It is functioning as a Rorschach test — revealing the interpreter’s fears more reliably than it reveals historical reality.
On Evidence and the Epstein Files
Now let us address the Epstein matter directly, because it deserves sober analysis rather than scriptural theater.
Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were real. The trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors documented in the existing public record is among the most sordid chapters in the history of American elite dysfunction. The failure of American institutions — prosecutors, law enforcement, the justice system — to hold Epstein accountable across multiple decades is a genuine scandal, a documented institutional failure that reflects poorly on every administration, Republican and Democratic, that touched that case. The names already in the public record are damning enough: powerful men who enjoyed Epstein’s company and hospitality without, apparently, asking too many uncomfortable questions.
The question of what the unreleased files contain, and what the Trump administration’s actual posture toward their release is, is a legitimate political question. Sturgill is not wrong that accountability matters. He is not wrong that transparency is a democratic value worth defending.
But there is a significant distance between “we should demand accountability and transparency” and “Ether 8 predicted this, and Utah Republicans who support Trump are complicit in a secret combination.” The first is a civic argument. The second is a theological claim draped in the language of prophecy, and it carries risks that Sturgill appears not to have considered.
The most serious risk is this: when you clothe a political position in prophetic authority, you transform disagreement into apostasy. If opposing the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files is not merely a political preference but a religious obligation revealed in scripture, then faithful Latter-day Saints who hold a different political judgment are not merely wrong — they are spiritually compromised, perhaps even complicit in the works of darkness. This is a profound and reckless move. It is the logic by which religious communities have justified political persecutions since the beginning of recorded history.
The Political Allegiances Sturgill Endorses
We should also pause over something that Sturgill apparently does not find troubling: his recommendation that Latter-day Saints align themselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert as avatars of prophetically-mandated truth-seeking. These are representatives whose public careers have featured, among other things, aggressive promotion of QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories — the very epistemological ecosystem in which the Epstein “secret combination” narrative has primarily flourished.
There is an uncomfortable irony here. The QAnon movement, which has done more than any other modern political phenomenon to weaponize the Epstein narrative, is itself a textbook example of what scholars call a “revelatory epistemology” — a system of belief in which hidden truths are accessible only to the initiated, evidence is irrelevant to those outside the movement, and pattern-recognition substitutes for verification. It is, structurally, almost indistinguishable from the hermeneutical method Sturgill employs in his reading of Ether 8. Both systems begin with the conviction that malevolent powers operate in darkness, that the mainstream cannot see what the awakened can see, and that connecting the right dots reveals a comprehensive picture of organized evil.
That these two systems should find each other so congenial is not surprising. What is surprising is that a Latter-day Saint, drawing on a tradition with sophisticated theological resources for epistemological humility, should fail to notice the family resemblance.
What Moroni Actually Wrote
A more careful reading of Ether 8 reveals something interesting. Moroni is not offering a geopolitical decoder key for every subsequent generation. He is writing within a specific Jaredite-Nephite theological framework in which secret combinations represent a cosmic spiritual category — the organized rejection of God’s sovereignty in favor of human power-seeking. The text’s force comes from this theological weight, not from its capacity to predict specific twenty-first-century institutions.
More importantly, Moroni’s warning is addressed to the Gentiles who shall possess this land — a sweeping, eschatological audience — and his remedy is not political activism per se, but repentance and covenant fidelity. The text is not a call to identify the right political coalition and support it. It is a call to moral and spiritual renewal at the level of civilization. When Moroni writes that the Lord commands us to awake to our “awful situation,” he is not writing a progressive or conservative political manifesto. He is writing a lament.
Sturgill’s reading, ironically, commits a variant of the same error he attributes to his political opponents: it domesticates a sweeping prophetic vision, reducing it to the service of a particular news cycle. The Book of Mormon deserves better than to be converted into a commentary on cable news feuds.
The Deeper Question
Underneath Sturgill’s post is a question worth taking seriously: how should people of faith relate to political corruption? This is not a trivial question. Religious communities have historically provided some of the most important moral resources for resisting institutional evil — from the abolitionist movement to the Civil Rights movement to the Catholic resistance to totalitarianism in twentieth-century Europe. The prophetic tradition is real, and its capacity to speak truth to power is one of the most genuinely valuable things religion has contributed to human civilization.
But the prophetic tradition at its best has always been marked by a willingness to begin with evidence, to be specific about the evils being named, and to speak with moral rather than partisan authority. The great prophetic voices — Amos, Jeremiah, Bonhoeffer, King — named specific identifiable evils with specific identifiable victims, and paid a personal cost for doing so. They did not read ancient texts as political road maps and then endorse particular congressional representatives as God’s instruments.
Sturgill’s moral instinct — that child trafficking is evil, that accountability matters, that powerful men should not be above the law — is sound. The Book of Mormon is not necessary to reach that conclusion, and invoking it does not strengthen it. What it does is transform a case that should be built on evidence into a case built on typology, and that transformation makes it weaker, not stronger, precisely because it invites readers to skip the evidentiary work.
A Conclusion Moroni Might Have Recognized
There is something genuinely melancholy about watching a tradition with the theological sophistication of Latter-day Saint thought reduced to the production of politically inflected scripture memes. Joseph Smith, whatever we make of his claims, was a figure of remarkable religious imagination. The Book of Mormon, whatever its origins, is a text that has sustained genuine moral and theological reflection for nearly two centuries. It deserves to be engaged with the seriousness its best readers have always brought to it.
Zander Sturgill is clearly a man who cares about his faith and his country. That combination of commitments is not without honor. But caring deeply is not the same as reasoning carefully, and the conflation of the two is one of the great recurring dangers of religious political engagement.
The Epstein files may indeed contain damning information. The Trump administration’s posture toward transparency may indeed deserve scrutiny. The corruption of powerful institutions by wealthy predators is a real and documented phenomenon. These are cases worth making, and they should be made — with evidence, with specificity, with the kind of institutional accountability that a self-governing society demands of itself.
They do not need the Book of Mormon to be true. And enlisting the Book of Mormon in their service, without evidence and with conspiratorial enthusiasm, risks not illuminating the darkness Sturgill fears but deepening it — by adding to the epistemic chaos of our moment yet another voice insisting that ancient texts confirm what we already suspected, that our political enemies are not merely wrong but cosmically evil, and that the line between civic disagreement and participation in secret combinations runs precisely where our own convictions happen to draw it.
Moroni, allegedly writing from the ruins of a civilization destroyed by exactly that kind of self-righteous certainty, might have recognized the irony.