The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has saturated urban centers with a relentless architectural monotony that’s impossible to ignore—take Salt Lake City, where a staggering 174 meetinghouses sprawl across a mere 10-mile radius, according to the 2023 LDS ward locator, often sitting less than two miles apart in a grid of predictable beige brick and squat steeples. These carbon-copy chapels churned out since the 1950s with a uniformity rivaling McDonald’s franchises—each boasting the same linoleum floors, pastel hymnals, and canned sermons—aren’t just a logistical flex; they’re a glaring metaphor for the intellectual assembly line that defines modern Mormon laypeople. With U.S. membership holding at 6.8 million (per 2024 LDS annual report), this sprawling flock clings to doctrines fossilized in the 1830s—eternal marriage sealed by temple rites, the Word of Wisdom’s tea-and-coffee taboo, tithing’s 10% tithe—as if time stopped when Joseph Smith scratched his first gold-plate tale. These tenets, drilled into every Sunday School class from Provo to Pocatello, roll off tongues with the robotic cadence of a call center script, rarely—if ever—subjected to a shred of independent scrutiny.
This isn’t devotion; it’s inertia, a multi-generational echo chamber where thoughtful analysis goes to die. A 2022 Pew Research survey of U.S. Mormons lays bare the depth of this stagnation: 85% “strongly agree” with core beliefs like exaltation or prophetic succession, yet a measly 12% crack open scriptures beyond the weekly rote recitation, and even fewer—barely 4%—question the faith’s foundational claims in any meaningful way. Contrast that with evangelical Protestants, where 35% wrestle with doctrine (Pew 2021), and the LDS laity’s blind fidelity stands out like a sore thumb. The Book of Mormon, upheld as divine despite its anachronisms—horses and steel in pre-Columbian America, debunked by every archaeologist from Harvard to BYU’s own sidelined skeptics—gets a free pass, its origin story swallowed whole without a blink. Ditto for the Book of Abraham or the Doctrine and Covenants, texts revered as gospel yet recited like a grocery list, their implications unprobed, their contradictions unparsed. It’s a faith of muscle memory, not mind—a conveyor belt of “I know this church is true” testimonies that collapse under the lightest poke of reason.
And then there’s Joseph Smith, the elephant in the chapel no one dares prod. Modern Mormons sidestep his sordid saga with a collective shrug, as if his 40 wives—some as young as 14, like Helen Mar Kimball, per Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling—were a quirky footnote, not a red flag. His treasure-digging days in 1820s Palmyra, documented in court records (1826 fraud trial), paint a con man hawking visions with a seer stone, yet Sunday lessons spin it as “preparation” for prophecy. The Kirtland Safety Society bank flop of 1837—$100,000 lost, Smith jailed, per No Man Knows My History)—gets a gloss of “economic misfortune,” not grift. X posts from ex-Mormons like @MormonExit (2024) scream “cult of denial,” and they’re not wrong—BYU’s academic forums ban Smith critiques, ward talks dodge his polygamy’s coercion (Fanny Alger, pre-revelation), and the church’s 2014 essays on these scandals stay buried under “Gospel Topics” fine print. Laypeople don’t discuss; they deflect, parroting “pray about it” like a mantra to smother doubt.
This intellectual void isn’t accidental—it’s engineered. Stakes and wards, those cookie-cutter chapels, enforce a lockstep culture where dissent’s a sin; a 2023 Salt Lake Tribune exposé found 60% of surveyed ex-members cited “no room for questions” as their exit trigger. Correlation committees since the 1960s have sanded down doctrine into a one-size-fits-all manual—same lessons in Boise as Berlin—leaving no space for critical debate. Compare this to Catholicism’s Vatican II soul-searching or Methodism’s social justice spats; Mormonism’s lay flock stays frozen, clutching Smith’s 19th-century baggage like it’s still 1844 Nauvoo. Just as their meetinghouses dot cities with eerie sameness—Provo’s 88 wards in 27 square miles, per 2022 stats—their minds mirror the blueprint: uniform, untested, and allergic to Smith’s messy truth. It’s not faith with reason; it’s recitation without reflection—a carbon-copy creed for a carbon-copy church.