Part II: What Broke
Chapter 5: The Church Was Built On PR As Much As Revelation
Mormons are often better than average people. I do not mean that as a sentimental concession. I mean it as part of the criticism. The church forms many people toward service, sobriety, family loyalty, sacrifice, neighborliness, optimism, and a willingness to show up when life is unglamorous. That goodness is real. It is also the institution's best alibi.
The church has always survived by turning human material into sacred story. The first great myth of the tradition, the First Vision, now looks to me like a lie: an origin story doing what origin stories do, making authority look discovered rather than built. It gave the movement a scene of pure divine selection. It made Joseph Smith not merely a charismatic religious improviser, but the boy chosen by heaven before the church existed.
This is not an incidental problem. Joseph Smith was not transparent about revelations, marriages, authority claims, revisions, and inventions. He rationed the truth. The revelations authorizing polygamy were not publicly acknowledged in his lifetime. He was not only afraid of being seen. He was doing shameful things out of sight, and secrecy was part of the system. The modern church refined that inheritance into something smoother and more respectable, but the reflex is old: protect the story that protects the authority.
"Public relations" is not superficial in a church built on fragile sacred claims. PR becomes theology by other means. The institution learns which facts to foreground, which to bury in footnotes, which to release only when forced, which to frame as faith-promoting, and which to surround with enough context that no ordinary member can tell whether anything serious has been admitted. It learns to sound candid without surrendering control.
The PR works partly because there is real goodness to display: stable families, missionaries, welfare projects, disaster relief, casseroles, choirs, temples, and smiling people who sincerely feel blessed. None of that proves the authority claims, but it creates an atmosphere in which the claims feel morally credible. The institution borrows trust from the goodness of its people, then uses that trust to protect claims those people were not allowed to inspect honestly.
I know this from the inside, because for a while we were the content. My wife and I were once invited to a church photoshoot in San Francisco so the media team could gather material for social media. They interviewed us both. I talked about prioritizing family over work; she talked about keeping the Sabbath day holy. We were exactly what the institution needed us to be: young, sincere, photogenic proof that the claims produce good lives. Years after we had both stopped believing, after the marriage the camera loved had ended, her interview was still airing during breaks in General Conference. The church was still broadcasting a believing family that no longer existed. I do not think anyone checked. Why would they? The content was never about us. It was about the claims, and PR does not ask its smiling people for updates.
Even the church's public Christianity can feel like branding as much as confession. Mormons are deeply into Christ, so I understand why they insist on the word Christian. But Mormonism is also different enough from the rest of Christianity that the insistence can feel, to outsiders, like a bait and switch: familiar symbols on the map, then a room full of Mormonese and kind people with a quiet desperation to rebaptize the world. There is charm in that. There is also strategy.
Members are asked to give the church their whole lives: marriage, money, sexuality, family structure, time, identity, conscience, and the language they use for God. In return, the church often gives them managed truth. Not usually theatrical falsehood. Something more refined: omission, delay, half-answers, strategic vagueness, institutional memory loss, apologetic fog, and staged candor. The church does not need to say, "Lie." It has nobler words. Protect faith. Avoid contention. Do not rehearse doubts. Trust the brethren. Stay in the boat.
A church cannot safely host every honest conversation about itself if the institution's authority depends on the conversation ending in its favor. So it rewards smoothness. It prefers people who can know more than they say, absorb complexity without changing the public message too much, and preserve confidence.
For a while, I translated. When something sounded too strong, I softened it privately. When a leader overclaimed, I supplied nuance. When history looked bad, I made room for mystery. When testimony language exceeded what I could defend, I redefined knowledge. When the institution sounded more certain than honesty allowed, I did internal repair work so participation could continue.
The most elaborate translation I ever performed was from a pulpit. A few years after my mission, in our California ward, I was asked to speak on revelation, and my angle was that we could learn to receive revelation the way prophets do. I built the talk from an unimpeachably faithful source: the account, written by Spencer Kimball's own son, of how the 1978 revelation on the priesthood came about. Reading that paper, I had felt something I was not supposed to feel. President Kimball had grown up assuming the ban was right and stood prepared to defend it to his death. He spent three years asking dozens of people why the policy existed, managing holdouts one by one, waiting for a unanimity that a single objection would have postponed. The answer came not as a voice but as his own objections gradually dwindling in significance. What I was reading was an institution slowly outliving its own prejudice and calling the relief from heaven — and the church got its revelation when the men who would have vetoed it were gone. I did not say that over the pulpit. I said the approved version. I kept every fact and spun its meaning, quoted the praying and the fasting and the temple visits, and trusted the congregation to hear devotion where I had read bureaucracy. Nobody objected. Every sentence had a faithful citation. I sat down feeling clever and a little sick. For twenty minutes I had felt what it is like to be the church: to doubt and to run good PR at the same time, and to be good at it.
On my way out of the meeting, a black member of our ward caught me. He could not speak at first. He was choking back tears, and it took him a long time to squeak out a thank-you. I was surprised, and grateful to have been some comfort, and quietly rearranged. I had written the talk to smuggle history past the congregation. He had heard the history itself, and his tears showed me what it weighed — the pain black members still carried, decades after the church caught up to its own conscience. He left me with more questions than confidence. The talk I had built to manage my doubt ended up feeding it.
The strange thing is that the talk's real thesis was the part I still believe. Revelation is not reserved for prophets, I told them. We are prophets for our own lives. Walk to the edge of the light, and then a few steps into the darkness. I meant every word, and years later I took the sermon's advice, and it led me out the door.
All that translation can feel like maturity. History is complicated. Leaders are human. All traditions have shadows. Angry simplicity can be unfair. All true. But nuance can become a waiting room where integrity goes to sleep. If thoughtful members must repeatedly translate the church's public claims into defensible private meanings, the problem may not be their lack of faith. The problem may be the claims.
A religion can preserve real goods and still be untrustworthy. It can make people better and still lie about itself. It can teach service and punish honesty. It can give the world something valuable and lose its right to govern adult consciences. Mormonism deserves credit for the people it forms. It also deserves heat for converting their goodness into proof, loyalty, and cover.
The kindest defense of church leaders is that they were ordinary men of their time, trying to be good and sometimes fumbling. I accept that defense. It is also a quiet abdication of the church's own claim. A church led by living prophets should be the one institution that runs ahead of its century — first to see through the great inherited sins, not last. On race it was not ahead. It absorbed the prejudices of its converts, dressed them in doctrine, and held the door against black members until 1978, long after the supposedly wicked world had repented first. Meanwhile it introduced sins its converts had not thought to commit — polygamy in one century, polished institutional spin in the next. Ordinary men of their time deserve patience. Men claiming revelation invite a harder question: what did revelation see first? A church that trained its members to live comfortably with managed truth has little standing to warn them about a marketplace built on managed truth. The warning may even be right. But the mouth has made it easy to ignore.
Leaving Mormon PR does not make a person immune to PR. This is one of the sadder post-Mormon patterns: someone painfully sees through the church's spin, frees himself from it, and then devotes himself to lies with better branding. Religion is not the only industry that launders desire into truth. Politics does it. Markets do it. Wellness does it. Technology does it with a clean font. A person can escape one managed story and walk into another, especially if the new one flatters him for being too smart to be fooled by the old one.
I have loved too many Mormons, and been one too deeply, to pretend their goodness is fake. But their goodness is the institution's favorite hiding place. Criticize the church and you will be answered with its people — the casseroles, the choirs, somebody's saintly grandmother — as if tenderness for them settled the question of it. I was the smiling content. I gave the spun talk. I know exactly how good faces get used, because mine was one of them. So: charity for the people, scrutiny for the institution, and no more letting the first stand guard over the second.