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Video transcript:
2025 felt like a firehose of criticisms and misrepresentations of the LDS faith, so in this video, as sort of a cathartic “year in review,” I’m going to rank 2025’s top 10 criticisms or attacks. We’re going to start with the mildly annoying and work our way up to the completely outrageous. As a very loose guide, I’ll also be rating them based on impact, accuracy, and topical messiness. There is a deeper purpose to this, which we’ll get to, but for now let’s jump right into…
Number 10: We’ve gotten two seasons of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives in 2025 — one in May and one in November. I binge-watched both of them. It’s about 20 hours of my life I’ll never get back.
As far as impact goes: 5 stars. This show has become shockingly popular. Accuracy: Two stars — largely because most of the women in this series are not actually active, believing members of our faith to begin with. The term “Mormon” is largely just used as clickbait to bring in viewers.
Topical messiness, or in other words, how difficult is it to untangle the claims they make about the Church: It’s not too bad. 1.5 stars. When Secret Lives does bring up the Church, it’s usually a pretty superficial treatment of the issues. I get the sense that most everyone understands that this is reality TV and not to be taken too seriously. It makes our list, but relative to some of the other stuff we’re about to see, I only found it mildly frustrating.
Number 9: We’re going with Nathan Apffel’s September appearance on the Shawn Ryan show. The episode was called “Nathan Apffel – Inside the Dark World of Megachurches and Corrupt Pastors.”
Impact: 1.5 stars. Even though this interview got more than 1.3 million views, it was 3 hours long, and he only talks about the Church for 6 or 7 minutes. So the content about our faith is somewhat diluted by a bunch of other stuff. When he does talk about our faith, he does get some pretty basic things very wrong, which was fairly frustrating. I’m going with 1.5 stars for accuracy. Here are just a few examples.
Those mistakes are not particularly hard to untangle, but he spends most of his time talking about his issues with Church finances — there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to the finances of a worldwide organization, so I’m giving this a topical messiness rating of 3.
Number 8: The February 2025 release of Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke
This was produced by Hulu, and thus had a pretty big reach and impact. I’ll give it 3 stars.
4 stars for accuracy. I think there was some good investigative work here, and good storytelling, but I do think they tried to kind of portray the Church in an inaccurate and sinister light, so I had to take a star off for that. For example, [play clip about perfectionism claims].
Topical messiness: Similar to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, there really wasn’t a whole lot of talk about the Church in this one. It was primarily a cautionary tale about social media and who you trust to be around your family. 1 star.
For number 7, we’re going with Redeemed Zoomer’s April YouTube video, “Every Heretical ‘Christian’ cult explained in 8 minutes.” It’s got 1.7 million views, but the host also talks about a variety of other faiths in the same video, so I’m going to give this 2 stars for impact. As far as accuracy goes, he gets some things right, some things are heavily muddled or misleading, and some things are blatantly wrong. 2 stars. Here’s a clip. [insert clip]
1.5 stars for topical messiness. It was a lot of the same old stuff — Mormons aren’t Christians, nobody ever saw the golden plates, the angel Moronee, etc. Fairly easy to untangle.
Number 6 is the Netflix show released in January 2025, American Primeval.
Pretty big impact. It was a series with some big names on a major streaming platform. 4 stars. 2 stars for accuracy. In the series, they perpetrate 3 massacres. One of them is based on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the other two are completely made up. Here’s a clip.
Topical messiness: I’m giving this one 3.5 stars. This show is not a documentary, and it doesn’t tell you what is based on real history and what isn’t. So it takes a good amount of homework to unravel that. That said, if you can approach this show as if it takes place in the Church history multiverse on a version of earth where Brigham Young is the big bad villain — if you go into it understanding that a lot of this stuff never happened, then I actually think American Primeval was a pretty solid show. It’s just frustrating that a lot of people are going to take it at face value.
Number 5: This September article from the Wall Street Journal. Impact: 2.5 stars. The Wall Street Journal is a huge newspaper. That said, it was just one article; it wasn’t a multi-season show on a major streaming platform. It was just a frustrating blip in the news cycle. The article spends a lot of time just listing controversial topics that some people struggle with, but it doesn’t dive particularly deep into them. Simply listing those topics is not inaccurate, so I will give 4 stars for accuracy.
The frustrating thing about this article was simply how one-sided it was. There were a few believing LDS creators that were interviewed for this article, myself included, but we ultimately got very little representation, which I think created a very lopsided look at what’s going on. And it leaves people with a lot of homework to do on some pretty involved questions. Topical messiness: 4 stars. It was also really disappointing to see one of the most respected outlets in the country publish a photo of a church critic and former member dressed in our sacred temple clothing. Not cool at all.
Our number 4 slot goes to the University of Cincinnati fans chanting “F the Mormons” at the BYU/Cincinnati football game in November. Impact: 3.5 stars. It made national news. Almost everyone heard what happened. What I think made this even more impactful was that ahead of the game, the Church donated 27,000 pounds of food to the University of Cincinnati food pantry — the single largest donation in the pantry’s history. And then they chant “F the Mormons” at the game. Not a good look.
Accuracy: I dunno. 1 star? It looks like they really missed the mark here. I think they were trying to disparage the opposing team, but instead of chanting about BYU, they chanted about an entire world religion. There were probably “Mormons” in the University of Cincinnati student section. To make matters worse, this chant came on the heels of the massacre of Latter-day Saints at their meetinghouse in Michigan. One couple who survived the attack was in attendance at the Cincinnati game. Can you imagine what that must have been like for them? And if you can’t, feel free to pause and read this post they made about their experience.
Topical messiness: We’ll go with half a star. This was nothing more than an insult, but it’s sad that so many people would be OK with it. Would it be equally as acceptable to chant something similar about Jews? Or Muslims? Or Catholics? Probably not.
Our number 3 slot goes to evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll, who has had a lot to say about Latter-day Saints in past years and in 2025.
3 stars for impact. Accuracy: 1 star. From what I’ve seen, what he has to say about Latter-day Saints is largely just a lot of recycled inflammatory rhetoric. It’s just extra disappointing to hear a pastor use his platform to tear others down.
1.5 stars for topical messiness. He did help produce a digital book called “Are Mormons Christian?” which might have introduced some deeper critiques, but it has been deleted from his website. Another Evangelical pastor by the name of Kyle Beshears lauded the book as “basically a string of basic factual mistakes… a misrepresentation of LDS Christology, historical errors about the Pearl of Great Price, and several claims that don’t match what LDS texts actually say. Anything helpful in the booklet was buried under sloppy, rushed, and careless work.”
But what’s especially frustrating about this is that this is not just a TV show that comes and goes. This is a pastor who is frequently and actively teaching his followers (who are not few in number) that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a demonic cult. He talks about missionaries riding their bikes to Hell. He used our scriptures as a doorstop and called them toilet paper. He stirs the pot and incites people against us, which I just don’t think is productive. When you actively teach that a group of people is demonic, how long before people start to treat those people like demons? And how long before that becomes a justification for inflicting actual harm? That’s what I worry about.
Number 2 on our list of most frustrating attacks is the Peacock docuseries that came out in November, “Surviving Mormonism,” with Heather Gay. Impact: I’m giving this 2 stars. I might just be out of the loop, but I feel like I really have not heard a lot of chatter about this show. It’s certainly no “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” in terms of reach. Rating the accuracy is tough just because the information that is presented is very one-sided, and impossible in some cases to verify. But within the realm of what is verifiable, there was a lot said that was just off-the-wall wall blatantly incorrect. 1.5 stars for accuracy. Here’s a clip from our response.
Topical messiness: I’m going with 4.5 stars on this one. This show dealt with a lot of abuse cases that are obviously very personal and very involved. And a lot of information about them, at least from the Church’s perspective, is totally confidential. Unraveling each side of all of these scenarios would be extremely difficult. But looking at the overarching theme, abuse is abhorrent. I think the Church is doing a lot right in its effort to deal with it, and I think there are also things we can do better.
Number 1 of course, has to be the September Michigan massacre itself, which we referred to earlier. This is really where the rubber meets the road. This is where talk turns into action, and it resulted in one of our meetinghouses being burned down, and a handful of Latter-day Saints being gunned down. His motive? According to the White House press secretary, the shooter was simply “an individual who hated people of the Mormon faith.” 5 stars for impact.
Accuracy doesn’t really apply here. This attack wasn’t with words; it was with bullets and fire. That said, someone who met the shooter less than a week before the attack reported that he talked about “standard anti-LDS talking points that you would find on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook.” So I’m guessing that he was operating under a number of false assumptions.
Topical messiness: 1 star. I don’t think this is a particularly hard topic to untangle. As far as we know, this was simply a guy filled with hate who did a terrible thing.
You guys, when Latter-day Saints are portrayed as demonic, violent, hell-bound heretics so often, is it really surprising that things like number 1 happen? The blame for this atrocity falls squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrator, but when his hate for a group of people is bolstered up by the “standard anti-LDS talking points” found on social media, maybe creators need to start reevaluating what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. I’m not saying that nobody can ever disagree with our faith or criticize us — I’m just saying we need to find better ways of having those conversations. I hope that’s a lesson we all can learn from 2025.
Now, we’ve done deeper dives on a lot of the topics we’ve covered in this video. The latest was probably our review of Surviving Mormonism. Go check it out if you haven’t yet. I’ll see you there.