A traditional Christian evaluation of LDS disciplinary practice — its origins, its mutations, its modern weaponization, and the New Testament standard it has progressively abandoned.
❦ ❦ ❦
Introduction: A Door That Used to Open Both Ways
Church discipline is one of those topics that respectable Christians of every century have preferred to discuss in hushed tones, if at all. To excommunicate someone — to declare in public that a brother or sister is no longer welcome at the table — is a grave act, and Scripture treats it as such. Yet the New Testament is candid about the reality of it. Paul tells the Corinthians that they must, in love, deliver an unrepentant man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved on the day of the Lord. Jesus Himself outlines a careful, graduated procedure in Matthew 18 — private confrontation, then witnesses, then the assembly — that aims, at every step, at restoration. The whole architecture of biblical discipline is bent toward homecoming, not exile. The door that closes after step four is meant to open again the moment the prodigal turns toward it.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the institution most Americans still call the Mormon Church — also practices excommunication, though since 2020 it has preferred the gentler-sounding euphemism “withdrawal of membership.” In its own self-presentation, the practice is portrayed as restorative, pastoral, even tender. The General Handbook describes membership councils as occasions of love and counsel. The official news releases speak of helping members repent and find peace. Reading the Church’s own materials, one might conclude that an LDS disciplinary council differs only in vocabulary from the patient Matthew 18 process commended by Jesus.
The lived record tells a different story. From the high councils of Far West, Missouri in 1838, through the bishop’s court that excommunicated biographer Fawn Brodie in absentia in 1946, through the September 1993 disciplining of six intellectuals whose only crime was scholarship, through the loss of Kate Kelly and John Dehlin in the mid-2010s, to the 2024 excommunication of British YouTuber “Nemo the Mormon” and the April 2026 ouster of Mormonish co-host Landon Brophy, a long pattern emerges. The discipline that announces itself as restorative has, in case after public case, functioned as something else entirely. It has functioned as silencing.
And in April 2026, the pattern took on a new and unmistakable form. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — through Intellectual Reserve, Inc. — filed a federal trademark and copyright lawsuit against John Dehlin and his Open Stories Foundation, the people behind the Mormon Stories podcast. Ten years after excommunicating Dehlin, the Church returned to court to attempt what ecclesiastical discipline had failed to accomplish: the silencing of his platform. The escalation matters. It tells us something the press releases will not.
This essay examines LDS excommunication from a traditional, biblical Christian perspective. It is not a polemical exercise. The questions are scholarly and pastoral, and they are asked in good faith of fellow human beings whose sincerity is not at issue: Where did the LDS practice of excommunication come from? How has its use shifted across two centuries? What does the New Testament actually require of a congregation when one of its members goes astray? And how has the modern LDS application of discipline come to look less and less like the New Testament’s restorative pattern and more and more like the ancient pattern of institutional self-protection that Christ Himself confronted in the Pharisees? The argument, plainly stated, is this: the LDS Church has progressively turned a doctrine that should restore into a mechanism that defends — not the holiness of the Body, but the reputation of the institution.
❦ ❦ ❦
I. The Origins of LDS Excommunication
The 1831 Revelation and the Architecture of D&C 42
The formal architecture of Latter-day Saint church discipline is older than most people realize. It is older than the Nauvoo Temple, older than the Quorum of the Twelve, older than the trek west, older than the secession of the RLDS movement. It is, in the chronology of LDS revelation, almost as old as the Church itself. In February 1831, less than a year after the formal organization of the Church of Christ at Fayette, New York, Joseph Smith dictated the revelation that would later be canonized as Doctrine and Covenants Section 42, frequently described in LDS literature as “the Law” of the Church. Verses 78 through 93 of that section laid the groundwork for what would become the Mormon disciplinary process, requiring that members who transgressed be brought before the elders of the church, that two or three witnesses establish every word, and that the unrepentant be “cast out.”
Whatever one’s view of the revelation’s source, two things must be acknowledged at the outset. First, Smith was attempting to import into his new movement the ordinary Protestant inheritance of church discipline. Excommunication was not a Mormon innovation. It was already practiced, in various forms, by Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Stone-Campbell Restorationists from whom Sidney Rigdon had come. Second — and this is a point that two religion-and-law scholars made forcefully in 2021 — Smith’s design contained, by the standards of his day, a striking concern for the procedural rights of the accused. As Isaac Barnes May and Samuel S. Wells wrote for Religion News Service, Smith’s revelation “broke new ground within the hothouse of American Protestantism” by attempting to protect persons placed on trial by their congregations from being denied the right to call witnesses or plead their case before their accusers.
Joseph Smith designed an innovative and humanitarian system of church discipline that protected the rights of the accused. So what happened? … Over a century before Gideon v. Wainwright, where the Supreme Court determined all criminal defendants had the right to an attorney, Mormons had some notion that counsel was required in ecclesiastical trials. Yet, by the middle of the 20th century, a growing community of dissenters among Latter-day Saints discovered a disciplinary process that seemed to be rigged against them.
— Isaac Barnes May & Samuel S. Wells, Religion News Service, April 24, 2021
Source: https://religionnews.com/2021/04/24/mormon-excommunication-was-not-designed-to-happen-this-way-say-scholars/
Two observations follow. The first is that the original LDS theology of discipline — at least on paper — was more procedurally generous than many of its Protestant contemporaries. The second, and the more important for our purposes, is that the modern LDS practice has diverged significantly from the founding design. The structure that Smith envisioned would, within a single generation, be applied in ways that fell well short of its own stated standards. By the time Mormonism reached the twentieth century, the gap between what the revelation required and what the institution actually did had grown wide enough to swallow whole careers, whole reputations, whole faith journeys.
Cowdery, Whitmer, and the Far West Precedent
The first high-profile excommunication in Latter-day Saint history offers a sobering lens through which to read everything that came after. Oliver Cowdery — the second elder of the Church, the principal scribe of the Book of Mormon, one of the Three Witnesses, and Joseph Smith’s closest associate during the foundational years — was excommunicated by a high council at Far West, Missouri, on April 12, 1838. He was charged with nine offenses. He did not appear in person. He sent a letter.
The official record offers a tidy theological reading: Cowdery had drifted into apostasy and resisted ecclesiastical authority. The full picture is rather more complicated. By early 1838, Cowdery had grown alarmed by Smith’s encroachment on the line separating church and state. He had voiced concerns about Smith’s relationship with Fanny Alger, the teenage maid in the Smith household at Kirtland — concerns that, in the language of his January 1838 letter to his brother Warren, would be reduced at his trial to vague allegations that he had attempted to destroy Joseph Smith’s character. He had also resisted what he viewed as church control over his economic and political decisions. The charges that resulted — selling lands in Jackson County without authorization, urging lawsuits, neglecting meetings, treating the Church with contempt — were not theological. They were political and economic.
Cowdery’s relationship with Joseph Smith and the church’s leadership deteriorated in the mid-1830s, and in 1838 he was excommunicated with several other prominent Missouri leaders amid a leadership struggle with Smith. … [He] expressed his concerns of Smith’s relationship with Fanny Alger, a teenage maid living with the Smiths in Kirtland.
— “Oliver Cowdery,” Wikipedia
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cowdery
Cowdery was not alone. David Whitmer was excommunicated the same day. John Whitmer and W. W. Phelps had been excommunicated the month before. Lyman E. Johnson was disfellowshipped. Within weeks, after Sidney Rigdon delivered his infamous “Salt Sermon,” implying that dissenters had no place in the Saints’ community, a vigilante group known as the Danites forcibly drove the excommunicated men out of Caldwell County. The pattern was already legible in the first generation: when senior leaders raised inconvenient concerns, the disciplinary apparatus answered them. Excommunication, in its earliest application, was not yet purely silencing — but it was already an instrument that the institution could turn against its own founders when they questioned the trajectory.
Cowdery’s case is also a case study in restoration done belatedly. He spent ten and a half years outside the Church practicing law in Ohio and Wisconsin. In November 1848, he was rebaptized by Orson Hyde at Mosquito Creek near Council Bluffs, Iowa, having spent the intervening years insisting that his testimony of the Book of Mormon was unaltered. His return demonstrates that nineteenth-century LDS discipline was at least theoretically reversible — that the door, however heavily closed, was not yet welded shut. As later cases will show, that flexibility has not always survived into the twenty-first century.
❦ ❦ ❦
II. The Biblical Standard for Church Discipline
Before any meaningful evaluation of LDS practice can be offered, the standard against which it is measured must be set forth. Traditional Christianity, drawing on the New Testament and the consistent witness of the early Fathers, maintains that church discipline serves three intertwined purposes — and only those three. The first is the spiritual recovery of the offender. The second is the protection of the congregation from the contagion of unrepentant sin. The third is the preservation of the Church’s witness to the watching world. Conspicuously absent from this triad is any concern for the institutional reputation of the Church as such, or for the protection of leadership from criticism. Those motives, where they appear in church history, the New Testament uniformly condemns.
Matthew 18: The Master’s Pattern
Jesus Himself provides the master template in Matthew 18:15–17. The progression is graduated, deliberate, and aimed throughout at reconciliation. The offended party first goes alone to the offender. If unsuccessful, two or three witnesses join. Only if those efforts fail does the matter come before the assembled church. Even at the final step, the goal is not punishment. It is the recovery of the brother. The instruction to treat the unrepentant as “a Gentile and a tax collector” — formal exclusion from the community of believers — is itself a missionary posture. Gentiles and tax collectors are people Christ came to save.
Biblically speaking, excommunication was an aid to redemption; it was to lead to repentance. The intent of excommunication was not to expel the person from the Christian community forever but to restore the wayward member to the place of fellowship. By showing the erring member the gravity of their sin, excommunication was to highlight the way to salvation.
— Crosswalk.com, “3 Things That May Surprise You about Excommunication”
Source: https://www.crosswalk.com/church/pastors-or-leadership/things-that-may-surprise-you-about-excommunication.html
1 Corinthians 5 and the Yeast in the Loaf
Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians is the New Testament’s most concentrated treatment of formal church discipline. The Corinthian church was tolerating a man living in incest with his father’s wife. Paul’s response is famously severe: deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Yet read carefully, the passage cuts in directions modern institutions rarely want to follow. The discipline is for the brother who claims the name of Christ but persists in conduct even pagans recognize as scandalous. It is not for the person who raises uncomfortable historical questions. It is not for the woman who suggests the priesthood might be open to her. It is not for the scholar who publishes findings that make the leadership uneasy.
Furthermore, Paul’s stated rationale is the protection of the assembly from the leavening influence of unrepentant sin — “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” The discipline is for the body’s holiness, not the leader’s comfort. And, crucially, when Paul writes his second letter to the Corinthians, he turns immediately to the question of restoration. The discipline has worked. The man has repented. “Forgive and comfort him,” Paul writes, “so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. … Reaffirm your love for him” (2 Cor. 2:7–8). This is not how the LDS practice has typically functioned for those excommunicated for apostasy in the modern era. There is no analog to Paul’s eager call for restoration when the criticisms have been theological rather than moral.
Galatians 6:1 and the Spirit of Gentleness
Paul’s instruction to the Galatians frames everything that follows in the Pauline corpus on church discipline. “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.” Restoration is the verb. Gentleness is the manner. Self-watch is the posture. The whole motion of the passage runs against any disciplinary practice that frames the offender as an enemy of the institution rather than as a brother to be recovered.
Perhaps the most striking thing about excommunication is that it is rooted in the love of Christ. … Although it is a way of discipline, this discipline is rooted in the church’s desire for the individual to experience the love of Christ.
— Crosswalk.com, “3 Things That May Surprise You about Excommunication”
Source: https://www.crosswalk.com/church/pastors-or-leadership/things-that-may-surprise-you-about-excommunication.html
The Categories That Warrant Discipline
It is worth being concrete about what the New Testament actually identifies as warranting formal church discipline. The catalog is narrower than many modern applications suggest. Paul names sexual immorality, idolatry, slander, drunkenness, swindling, divisiveness, and unrepentant heresy that strikes at the apostolic gospel itself — the kind of teaching that denies the resurrection or the deity of Christ. The list is dominated by sins of conduct and false teaching about the gospel proper, not by criticisms of the leadership, scholarly disagreements about church history, or differences over secondary questions of polity and gender.
When traditional Protestant churches have applied discipline well, the same pattern has held. A person caught in adultery is patiently approached, then witnessed, then placed under formal censure if necessary, with the elders’ explicit aim of seeing them repent and return. A person who teaches that Jesus did not rise bodily from the grave is corrected, given opportunity to repent, and only formally separated from the church if they refuse — and even then, the prayer is for their return. A person who writes a controversial book about the founder’s life, however, is not treated as an enemy of the gospel. They are answered with a better history. They are engaged on the merits. They are not excommunicated.
❦ ❦ ❦
III. A Practice Bent by History
From the early Far West years to the present, LDS excommunication has been characterized not by a steady, principled application of the founder’s design but by a strikingly inconsistent practice that has reflected, in each era, the institution’s anxieties of the moment. A brief survey will make the pattern visible.
Brigham Young and the Frequent Use Era
Under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, excommunication was used liberally and often for offenses that would never have qualified under any New Testament standard. Members were excommunicated for refusing to migrate to Utah. They were excommunicated for marrying outside the faith. They were excommunicated for opposing the practice of polygamy and, after the 1890 and 1904 Manifestos, for continuing to practice it. They were excommunicated for refusing to acknowledge Brigham Young’s continued authority during the Reorganization disputes. The discipline served as a boundary marker between the Utah Church and its rivals — a function that, while institutionally explicable, has nothing to do with the New Testament’s restorative purpose.
Apostle Richard Lyman, 1943
The twentieth century opened with high-ranking excommunications becoming rare. The discipline of Apostle Richard R. Lyman in 1943 for what church records described as “unlawful cohabitation” — an extramarital affair — was a notable exception. What is significant about Lyman’s case is what the institution did with him afterward. He was rebaptized in 1954. He remained married to his wife. The discipline functioned, in his case, more or less the way the New Testament intends discipline to function: as a costly but recoverable correction in service of restoration. The contrast with later twentieth-century cases is sharp and not flattering.
Fawn Brodie, 1946
Less than three years after Lyman’s excommunication for sexual sin, the Church held a bishop’s court in absentia for a young biographer in New Haven, Connecticut, who had not appeared, would not appear, and had committed no offense recognizable to either New Testament or American Protestant tradition. Fawn McKay Brodie’s offense was that she had written No Man Knows My History, the first significant non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, published by Knopf in 1945. Her uncle, David O. McKay, was an apostle and would later become Church President; she was patrician Mormon stock; her grandfather had been president of Brigham Young University. None of that protected her.
In May 1946, Fawn Brodie was living in New Haven and only a few weeks away from giving birth to her second child when she received a summons from the New England Mission of the LDS Church to answer charges of apostasy. … The summons letter accused her of asserting “truths which deny the divine origin of the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the Priesthood and of Christ’s Church through the instrumentality of the Prophet Joseph Smith, contrary to the beliefs, doctrines, and teachings of the Church.” Brodie did not answer the letter and did not appear before the tribunal. Less than a month later, a bishop’s court officially and summarily excommunicated her from the Mormon Church as a heretic.
— James Reston, Jr., Washington Independent Review of Books
Source: https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/features/the-mormon-excommunication-of-fawn-brodie-why-banishing-the-famous-biograph
The Brodie case set the pattern for what would become the modern response. The offense was scholarship, not overt sin. The process was formal in appearance but effectively predetermined; she was tried in absentia and excommunicated within a month. The institution’s aim was plainly to defend the official story: the Improvement Era dismissed her work as built on “doubtful sources,” Hugh Nibley answered with his famous No, Ma’am, That’s Not History pamphlet, and the bishop’s court supplied the final seal. Brodie never came back. Her book, however, stayed in circulation and, like a classic Streisand Effect, the attempt to suppress it arguably helped make it more durable and better known. More than eighty years later, Knopf still sells roughly a thousand copies a year. That alone ought to prompt reflection on whether excommunication has functioned as restorative discipline, as the handbooks claim, or more often as reputational control that can rebound against the institution itself.
The September Six, 1993
If the Brodie case set the template, the events of September 1993 perfected it. Within a span of weeks, six prominent Latter-day Saint scholars and writers were excommunicated or disfellowshipped: Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides. None had committed adultery. None had embezzled. None had denied the resurrection of Christ. Their offenses were intellectual — feminist theology, careful historical research, advocacy for women’s ordination, criticism of leadership patterns, and the publication of an anthology titled Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. The September Six became, almost overnight, a generational hinge in Mormon studies.
The 2023 thirtieth-anniversary roundtable in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought makes the magnitude of the moment visible. As the editors framed it in introducing the issue, the September Six excommunications produced a “lost generation of Mormon studies” — promising young scholars who pivoted away from Mormon history because they had watched their predecessors’ careers and faith journeys destroyed. Mormon historian Taylor Petrey writes of professors who, in the late 1990s, declined to encourage talented LDS students into doctoral programs in Mormon history precisely because they had “learned the lessons of September 1993.”
I was a high school senior in September 1993, when Lavina Fielding Anderson, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides were disfellowshipped or excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. … My professors had learned well the lessons of September 1993. … In the late 1990s, the prospect of ushering me, an eager and faithful young LDS undergraduate, to a doctoral program to study Mormon history would have seemed tantamount to pushing me out of the trenches and sending me across the demilitarized zone to a doomed fate on the other side.
— Taylor Petrey, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Fall 2023
Source: https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-september-six-and-the-lost-generation-of-mormon-studies/
The institutional cost of the September Six is harder to measure than its human cost, but it is real. A faith that disciplines its scholars produces fewer scholars. A faith that punishes inquiry produces less inquiry. A faith that responds to internal critique with excommunication signals to its educated rising generation that the price of intellectual integrity is the loss of one’s spiritual home. The September Six were not, as the Church often suggested, marginal voices that would be replaced. They were, as scholar Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has argued, the people who should have been writing the books and leading the scholarly organizations of the next thirty years. Their absence is a wound that has not closed.
The Hamula Anomaly, 2017
On August 8, 2017, the LDS Church issued a brief statement: James J. Hamula, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy and the executive director of the Correlation Department — the institution’s doctrinal nerve center — had been excommunicated. The statement specified one thing only: that the action was not for apostasy. The hush surrounding the case was unprecedented for a man of his rank. As historian Gregory Prince put it at the time, the move was “like a Cardinal in the Catholic Church being defrocked.”
What makes the Hamula case theologically significant is not what was said but what was selectively unsealed. The Church publicly insisted on confidentiality while simultaneously volunteering the information that the excommunication was not for apostasy or disillusionment, leaving the reading public to assume sexual or financial misconduct. The institution’s selective transparency revealed a hierarchy of concerns: it was apparently more important to protect the Church from rumors of leadership defection than to honor its own stated commitment to confidentiality on behalf of the disciplined member. As your present author argued in his earlier essay, “The Sealed Verdict,” the Hamula case exposes the institutional logic at work — a logic that consistently subordinates the dignity of the disciplined individual to the reputational interests of the corporate Church.
Related: https://novus2.com/righteouscause/2026/03/10/the-sealed-verdict-speculating-on-the-mysterious-fall-of-james-j-hamula/
❦ ❦ ❦
IV. The Modern Punitive Pattern
If the Brodie and September Six cases established the template of using excommunication against scholarship and dissent, the past decade has shown the practice metastasizing into a tool deployed almost exclusively against critics with public platforms. The progression is worth tracing in detail because the cumulative effect of the cases is greater than any single one of them.
Kate Kelly and Ordain Women, 2014
Kate Kelly was a public-interest lawyer who founded Ordain Women in 2013. The organization’s stated purpose was modest: to advocate for the ordination of women to the all-male LDS priesthood. Within a year, Kelly was facing a disciplinary council. She was excommunicated in June 2014. The local stake president who tried her case acknowledged that her offenses were not sexual, not financial, not denominationally heretical in the historic sense. They were the public organization of an advocacy movement around an unresolved question of LDS polity. The discipline’s purpose was unmistakable: to deter other women from organizing similarly. The fact that the Church chose to discipline the founder of a public movement rather than engage the underlying question on its theological merits is itself a telling diagnosis of the institution’s posture toward internal reform.
John Dehlin and Mormon Stories, 2015
Six months later, in February 2015, the Church excommunicated John Dehlin, a doctoral psychologist who had launched the Mormon Stories podcast in 2005, when he was still an attending member of the Logan, Utah, congregation. Dehlin’s stated motivation for the podcast was pastoral. As he told Slate magazine in May 2026, he had become alarmed during his graduate work in psychology by the mental health of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints, many of whom were depressed or contemplating suicide; he wanted to allow members to participate in the Church with what he called “informed consent.” Over a decade of podcasting, he had become one of the most prominent public commentators on LDS history, doctrine, and contemporary controversy.
His excommunication file, when leaked in 2017, contained a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Church leadership that named multiple individuals and organizations accused of “leading people away from the gospel.” Dehlin was on the list. The framing was not pastoral. It was adversarial. The discipline was not a graduated Matthew 18 process aimed at his restoration. It was the conclusion of a strategic assessment. As the recent Salon coverage of the 2026 lawsuit notes, the Church has long had institutional difficulty leaving Dehlin alone — a fact that, in itself, raises uncomfortable questions about whether his 2015 excommunication functioned as a true closing of the door or as the opening salvo in a longer campaign of attempted suppression.
Natasha Helfer, 2021
Natasha Helfer was a licensed sex therapist whose published views on pornography, masturbation, and same-sex relations had drawn the attention of LDS leadership. In April 2021, local leaders held her disciplinary council in Kansas — though Helfer lived in Salt Lake City — without her presence, because she refused to turn off her cellphone, which contained notes she intended to consult during the proceedings. She was excommunicated. The procedural irregularities were severe enough that two religious-liberty scholars used the case as the basis for their April 2021 Religion News Service essay arguing that modern LDS discipline had moved decisively away from the procedural protections Joseph Smith himself had built into the founding revelation.
Jana Riess, the prominent LDS columnist for Religion News Service, summarized the lesson of the Helfer case with unusual bluntness:
I’ve stated before in this column that I find excommunication to be not only a theologically barbaric practice but also one of dubious utility. It doesn’t come from the example of Jesus. It also doesn’t work. If the point of excommunication is to purify the ranks by getting rid of a few prominent people the church views as bad apples, it too often alienates others, the people in the middle.
— Jana Riess, Religion News Service, April 23, 2021
Source: https://religionnews.com/2021/04/22/mormon-excommunication-need-not-be-present-to-win/
Nemo the Mormon, 2024
On September 30, 2024, British YouTuber Douglas Stilgoe — known online as “Nemo the Mormon“ — was excommunicated by a disciplinary council held in Oxford, England. Nemo’s offense, as multiple observers noted, was the public scrutiny of LDS leadership that had defined his channel for years. He had publicized direct email correspondence with then-Apostle Dallin H. Oaks. He had attended a Texas city council meeting opposing the construction of an LDS temple. He had repeatedly questioned, on his channel, the integrity of leaders’ public statements. He had stated his desire to remain an active member while pushing for reform. The disciplinary council removed his membership anyway.
Nemo’s case is particularly clarifying because his subsequent YouTube commentary — including the recently uploaded video “The New Dark Direction of Mormonism,” — articulates from the inside what observers have long argued about the Church’s disciplinary trajectory. Reflecting on the calling of Clark G. Gilbert as the Church’s newest apostle in early 2026, and on the simultaneous elevation of Dallin H. Oaks to the Church presidency, Nemo offered the following analysis:
If the former surgeon Russell M. Nelson was known for his narcissism, then we may ask ourselves what will define the presidency of former lawyer Dallin H. Oaks? I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that a legalistic approach to rules, a focus on the traditional family, and somewhat of an authoritarian bent are beginning already to define his presidency. … Between his pretty overt calls for people to mistrust outside information and his appointment of Clark G. Gilbert, it would seem the Mormon church is heading down a dark and insular road of conformism and the enforcement of orthodoxy.
— Nemo the Mormon, “The New Dark Direction of Mormonism”
Nemo points to specific evidence that this is not idle speculation. Oaks’s first major address as Church President at Brigham Young University urged students to surround themselves with people who believe and to dismiss “speculation and false information in podcasts and on social media” — a stark in-group/out-group framing that any pastor trained in the traditional Christian tradition would recognize as the rhetoric of institutional self-defense rather than gospel proclamation. Clark G. Gilbert, meanwhile, comes to the apostleship from his role as Commissioner for Church Education, where his tenure was marked by the 2022 implementation of a hiring “loyalty oath” for BYU and other Church Educational System employees — a policy that, as Nemo notes, “goes beyond established questions of belief and behaviour” and asks candidates to affirm whether they have ever said anything that would lead others to doubt the doctrines or teachings of the Church.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s reporting on the Gilbert tenure was equally pointed. The paper documented BYU staff complaints that Gilbert had “pushed a doctrine of obedience over personal choice, sowed an environment of distrust and negatively affected some students, especially women and members of the LGBTQ community.” From an orthodox Christian perspective, Nemo’s response to this is theologically incisive: “Now obedience over choice, doesn’t that sound exactly like Satan’s plan?” — a reference to the LDS framing of the pre-mortal council in which Satan is said to have promised universal salvation through compelled obedience while Christ defended human agency. The irony is sharp. The Church that defines its own pre-existence narrative around the principle of agency now disciplines its critics for exercising it.
Landon Brophy, April 2026
The most recent excommunication of a public LDS critic occurred just one week before this writing. On April 27, 2026, Landon Brophy — a former bishopric member and co-host of the Mormonish podcast — received a registered letter informing him of his excommunication. The Salt Lake Tribune covered the story on May 1. Brophy’s offenses were, like those of his predecessors in the long line stretching back through Nemo, Helfer, Dehlin, Kelly, and the September Six, intellectual and public rather than moral and private. He had criticized the Church on his podcast. He had questioned its authority structures. He had publicly raised difficult historical and doctrinal issues. The Church responded as it has now responded for thirty-three years: not with engagement, not with patient pastoral correction, not with restoration, but with severance.
Source: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/05/01/utahs-mormonish-podcaster-ousted/
The cumulative pattern is impossible to ignore. From Brodie in 1946 through Brophy in 2026 — eighty years of formal Latter-day Saint discipline — the institution’s most consistent application of excommunication has been against critics, scholars, and public dissenters. The pattern is so consistent and so contrary to the New Testament’s restorative pattern that it requires explanation. The most parsimonious explanation is that LDS excommunication has functioned, in practice, as an institutional mechanism for the management of dissent, not as the pastoral instrument of recovery the handbooks describe.
❦ ❦ ❦
V. From Excommunication to Litigation: The Dehlin Lawsuit
If the period from 1946 to 2024 demonstrated the Church’s increasing willingness to use ecclesiastical discipline against public critics, the events of April 2026 mark a decisive escalation: when the discipline failed to silence, the Church reached for the courts.
The April 17 Federal Complaint
On April 17, 2026 — eleven years after Dehlin’s excommunication — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through its intellectual property arm Intellectual Reserve, Inc., filed a federal trademark and copyright complaint in Utah against Dehlin and his Open Stories Foundation. The lawsuit alleges that the Mormon Stories podcast has infringed on Church-owned trademarks — chiefly the word “Mormon” itself — and on copyrighted Church photographs used in promotional materials. The complaint specifically targets the podcast’s blue “light-rays” logo, asserting it was “calculated to imitate the Church’s logos by using confusingly similar color, font, and other design elements.”
On April 17, the church filed a lawsuit against the makers of Mormon Stories, a popular ex-Mormon podcast, alleging that they had used church trademarks and copyright materials with the intention of confusing individuals and causing them to “access Defendants’ content mistakenly believing it comes from or is affiliated with or endorsed by the Church.” Some of the contested imagery is highly specific, including the Christus rendering and copyright photographs; some of it is much broader, like “blue” and “all colors and orientations of the Light-Rays Design mark.”
— Slate, May 2026
Source: https://slate.com/life/2026/05/mormon-stories-church-lds-lawsuit-trademark.html
The Church’s public framing emphasizes that the lawsuit “does not concern the content of the podcast.” Read carefully, the institutional press release insists: “This case concerns branding choices that incorporate church-protected names and design elements in ways that may lead people to believe the podcast is produced by or affiliated with the church when it is not.” The framing has the virtue of being a coherent legal theory. It has the disadvantage of being substantively implausible, given the most cursory examination of the podcast’s actual content.
The Substantive Implausibility of the Confusion Argument
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte cuts to the heart of the credibility problem in the Church’s claim. Mormon Stories episode titles include “Joseph Smith Pursues Teenage Girls in Nauvoo” and “Graduated BYU and Resigned Immediately.” The lawsuit itself, ironically, contains testimony from listeners that demonstrates the brevity of any confusion. “It only took one episode to know it was absolutely not friendly toward the church,” said one quoted listener. “I quickly realized,” said another, that the podcast “was anti content.” These quotations are not buried in the discovery file. They are in the Church’s own complaint.
What the lawsuit reveals, more clearly than any institutional press release could, is that the underlying motivation cannot be the genuine fear of consumer confusion. Twenty-one years of Mormon Stories have not produced a meaningful constituency of confused listeners. As Dehlin himself asked in his response: after twenty-one years, why now? The answer, when one steps back from the legal forms, is not difficult to discern. The Church’s mediation demands during the pre-litigation phase included, according to Dehlin, the request that he remove “Mormon” from his website domain entirely, never use the word in any future internet project, renounce all trademark rights to “Mormon Stories,” and concede that the Church owns all rights to the word “Mormon” itself. These are not the demands of a party seeking modest disclaimers to address consumer confusion. These are the demands of a party seeking to terminate an enterprise.
Now the LDS church is suing Dehlin and his popular “Mormon Stories” podcast using a surprising legal argument: that the show, which he launched during the early days of podcasting in 2005 and is openly critical of the church, is violating the church’s trademark rights. … The church denies that the aim of the lawsuit is to silence a popular maverick whose content is widely disseminated by critics of Mormonism. … But they can’t be surprised by the widespread public scoffing at the denial.
— Amanda Marcotte, Salon, April 29, 2026
Source: https://www.salon.com/2026/04/29/mormons-will-regret-suing-an-ex-member/
The Pattern Made Visible
The Dehlin lawsuit matters not as a self-contained legal episode but as the visible outcome of a long institutional pattern. When a church excommunicates a man in 2015 and is still pursuing him in court in 2026, the discipline of 2015 was not, by any reasonable standard, restorative. When the same church demands that the disciplined member “never initiate any future internet project using the word ‘Mormon,'” the institutional purpose at stake is not the holiness of the body but the silence of the critic. When mediation fails because the demands amount to brand surrender, and the institution proceeds to a multimillion-dollar federal lawsuit, the resemblance to the New Testament’s vision of church discipline has been entirely lost. What remains is a corporation defending its trademark portfolio against a former member it cannot reach in any other way.
The lawsuit exposes a deeper theological contradiction: by what authority does any church claim ownership over the words and images of the gospel itself? The complaint points to trademarks on “the Christus,” the Book of Mormon name, and even “all colors and orientations of the Light-Rays Design mark,” but the irony is hard to miss: the LDS Church’s most recognizable visual icon is itself a near-direct adaptation of a sculpture owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark. As we argued in our essay, Restoration or Appropriation? How Mormonism Borrows Its Bible, Its Art, and Its Credibility from “Apostate” Churches, that kind of borrowing sits awkwardly beside any claim to exclusive spiritual originality. From a Protestant Reformation perspective — indeed, from any tradition that takes the priesthood of all believers seriously — it is deeply troubling to see a church use the secular courts to police ownership of its own symbolic vocabulary. Christ did not trademark His parables. Paul did not patent the cross. The early church did not register the Chi-Rho. The impulse to defend institutional brand is a modern, corporate reflex, and it sits uneasily beside a claim to be the restored New Testament Church.
Our earlier essay “When a Style Guide Becomes a Liability,” published April 27, 2026, has examined how the Church’s own published linguistic guidance — including its long-running campaign to discourage members from using the word “Mormon” at all — undermines its current trademark posture. The argument from that piece bears repeating here: when an institution spends a decade officially distancing itself from a term, then reaches for federal court to assert monopolistic control over that same term against a critic, the most plausible reading is not that the institution has discovered a sudden need to police consumer confusion. The most plausible reading is that the lawsuit is, as Salon and others have suggested, an instrument of suppression — the legal continuation of the disciplinary impulse that excommunication began.
Related: https://novus2.com/righteouscause/2026/04/27/when-a-style-guide-becomes-a-liability-the-lds-churchs-own-words-in-the-mormon-stories-case/
❦ ❦ ❦
VI. Nemo’s Dark Direction: The Trajectory Made Public
The transcript of Nemo the Mormon’s recent video “The New Dark Direction of Mormonism” is, in a sense, the unsanctioned but indispensable companion to the Dehlin lawsuit. Where the Slate, Salon, and Salt Lake Tribune coverage examines the legal mechanics, Nemo articulates from inside the LDS tradition the theological and cultural shift that makes such a lawsuit predictable. Several themes from his analysis deserve sustained engagement.
The Recommend-and-Report Loyalty Apparatus
Nemo’s analysis of the 2022 BYU and Church Educational System hiring policy is, in its way, the most damning section of the transcript. Under the policy, candidates for hire — and existing employees who opt in — must hold a current temple recommend, and bishops are instructed to share with hiring authorities concerns they may have about recommending the member for employment. The contrast Nemo draws with the Paul Adams case in Arizona is theologically piercing:
Now, isn’t it fascinating that in cases like Paul Adams in Arizona, the church will fight tooth and nail for clergy penitent privilege. And yet when it comes to who they let work in their schools … they are actively seeking to undermine it by requesting that bishops report concerns directly to church leaders. It would seem that they don’t want the legal authorities informed when the contents of a bishop’s interview reveals harm being done to a child, but when the content of such an interview reveals any hint of unorthodoxy by a member of the church’s school faculty, then all of a sudden they want to break the privilege of their interview.
— Nemo the Mormon, “The New Dark Direction of Mormonism”
From a traditional Christian standpoint, the disparity Nemo identifies is not merely procedurally inconsistent. It is morally incoherent. A church that defends pastoral confidentiality when the protected content is the abuse of a child, but pierces it when the protected content is theological dissent, has revealed something profound about its actual hierarchy of values. The institutional priority is not pastoral integrity. It is institutional uniformity. The same logic that produced Brodie’s excommunication in 1946 and the September Six in 1993 has been operationalized into the routine HR procedures of the Church’s flagship university.
The Insular Counsel
Nemo’s transcription of President Oaks’s first BYU address as Church President quotes him telling students: “Surround yourselves with people who believe.” The line is not, by itself, scandalous; pastors throughout the centuries have urged believers to seek out edifying community. What gives the line its particular weight is its institutional context. Oaks delivered it as part of a broader warning against “speculation and false information in podcasts and on social media,” with the explicit suggestion that members should not be “persuaded by false or inaccurate information.”
The biblical model of pastoral counsel runs in nearly the opposite direction. Paul instructs the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). The Bereans of Acts 17 are praised — not censured — for their habit of examining the apostle’s teaching against the Scriptures. Jesus repeatedly engaged His critics on the merits, including those who were openly hostile to His ministry. The New Testament’s posture toward outside information is not credulous, but it is also not the defensive insularity that would have a church president telling university students to dismiss commentary they have not heard. A faith that requires its members to be sheltered from criticism is, by that very requirement, signaling something about the durability of its own claims.
Mistakes and Apologies
Nemo’s most striking observation is the juxtaposition of two presidential statements. Russell M. Nelson, in 2018, said: “The church doesn’t seek apologies, and we don’t give them.” Dallin H. Oaks, in earlier remarks Nemo notes, has acknowledged that “there have been times when members or leaders in the church have simply made mistakes.” The two statements are not formally contradictory — but their juxtaposition raises a serious theological question that any biblically informed Christian must press: what is the doctrine of repentance in an institution whose senior leaders publicly admit to mistakes but whose institutional posture is one of refusing to apologize?
The Bible has very little patience for organizations or individuals who acknowledge sin in the abstract while declining to repent in the concrete. The whole prophetic tradition — from Nathan confronting David to John the Baptist confronting the Pharisees to Paul confronting Peter — assumes that real repentance produces real, named, public turning. The same standard cannot be selectively applied. A church that demands public confession from its excommunicated members while declining ever to issue a corporate apology for, say, the 1946 excommunication of Fawn Brodie or the 1993 actions against the September Six is operating on a double standard that neither Scripture nor common moral sense will support.
❦ ❦ ❦
VII. Conclusion: Discipline as Deflection
The argument of this essay can now be stated plainly. The Latter-day Saint practice of excommunication, as it has actually functioned across the past eighty years, has progressively departed from the New Testament’s restorative pattern and has come to operate as an instrument of institutional self-protection. The shift is visible in the cases the Church has chosen to discipline, in the procedures it has employed, in the public targets it has selected, and now, with the April 2026 Dehlin lawsuit, in its willingness to extend that disciplinary impulse beyond the ecclesiastical sphere into the federal courts.
The traditional Biblical view of church discipline, as outlined in Matthew 18, 1 Corinthians 5, 2 Corinthians 2, and Galatians 6, has three non-negotiable features. The discipline is graduated, beginning in private and escalating only when the private appeal fails. The discipline targets unrepentant conduct or fundamental denial of the gospel proper, not the careful work of historians and the legitimate questions of laypersons. And the discipline aims at restoration, with the door visibly open and the institution visibly eager to welcome the repentant brother or sister back. None of these three features is reliably present in modern LDS practice. The discipline is rarely graduated; the September Six and Brodie were tried within weeks of becoming targets. The targeted offenses are heavily skewed toward intellectual dissent rather than New Testament scandals. And restoration, in the modern era, is largely fictional — Brodie never returned, the September Six largely never returned, and the public face of post-2014 disciplinary action has been the prevention of further dissent rather than the recovery of the disciplined member.
What the Church has, in effect, built is a corporate brand-management apparatus dressed in pastoral vocabulary. The internal documents leaked over the past decade — including the 2017 PowerPoint that named Dehlin alongside other organizations “leading people away from the gospel” — show the institution thinking about discipline in strategic and reputational terms, not pastoral ones. The 2022 BYU loyalty oath shows the discipline migrating from the membership council into employment policy. The 2026 federal lawsuit shows it migrating further still, into intellectual property litigation. At every stage, the public-facing language of restoration has thinned, and the underlying logic of suppression has thickened.
The question this leaves for honest observers — including thoughtful Latter-day Saints, who in many cases are the most discerning critics of these patterns — is the question Jana Riess posed in 2021 and the question Nemo asked from another angle in 2026: who does this practice actually serve? It does not serve the disciplined member, who is rarely restored. It does not appear to serve the wider Church, whose continued and accelerating membership losses suggest that excommunications of public critics produce, if anything, the Streisand effect rather than the desired silence. It does not serve the witness of the Church to the watching world, which sees in these episodes an institution defending its reputation rather than its gospel.
Whom does it serve, then? The most charitable answer is that it serves a leadership culture that has come to believe — perhaps through the unfortunate habits of a long succession of corporate-trained executives — that the institutional brand and the gospel itself are coextensive. The least charitable answer is that it serves as a deflection of scrutiny from a controversial past. The truth, as is so often the case, lies somewhere between. But neither of those answers describes the New Testament’s vision of church discipline. Both describe something else.
From a traditional, biblical Christian perspective, the appropriate posture toward our Latter-day Saint neighbors is not triumphalism. It is a sober concern, expressed in love, on behalf of friends and family members and fellow citizens whose religious tradition is under genuine institutional strain. The trajectory Nemo identifies — toward conformism, insularity, and the enforcement of orthodoxy through escalating mechanisms of pressure — is not a trajectory anyone should celebrate. It is a trajectory that, if extended, will produce more Brodies and more Septembers and more Brophys, and the cumulative human cost is real. The members in the middle, as Riess put it, are the ones who watch all of this and quietly conclude that the institution they were raised in is not safe for honest questions.
The biblical Church, by contrast, has always been a place where honest questions are met with patient answers, where dissent is engaged on the merits, where discipline is rare, restorative, and reluctant, and where the open door for the prodigal is not just rhetorical but real. We pray for our LDS friends — for those still inside, for those recently disciplined, for those quietly drifting, and for those who, like Dehlin and Nemo and Brophy and Helfer, have used what platform they have to call the institution to account. May the gospel they actually need find them. May the Church find them what they actually need. And may the One who came not to break the bruised reed nor quench the smoldering wick draw them at last to the table at which He, and not any institution, presides.
A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy
In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar—capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross‑referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author’s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.
Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI‑generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer‑reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found—and they were found—corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.
That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader—whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here—and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.
Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny—and neither does this work.