Lucifer's Lantern

 This series looks back at how early critics of the church reacted to the rise of Mormonism. Some mocked it, others warned against it, and a few tried to make sense of it. Each post features a historical excerpt and some brief context to show how critics viewed the new faith as it was unfolding.  -The full series can be found  here - The article titled “Fanaticism” was published on February 11, 1831, in the United States Gazette , a Philadelphia paper with national circulation. It reprints material from the Painesville Gazette , reflecting local reports from northeastern Ohio rather than direct investigation by the Gazette itself. The author is unnamed, consistent with early-19th-century newspaper practice, and the tone reflects mainstream Protestant skepticism toward emerging religious movements. The piece focuses on Kirtland and nearby areas in Geauga and Cuyahoga counties at a very early stage in Mormon development, less than a year after the Book of Mormon’s publica...

Recently , the LDS church announced updated guidance on the "approved" list of Bible translation for use in local congregations, spanning both English and international language versions. You can find the specifics of this guidance in the LDS General Handbook . The Updated Narrative On January 6, 2026, an interview was hosted by BYU to highlight the updated LDS Bible recommendations: Josh Sears, Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture [L]anguage just keeps evolving. That's a natural thing. And that's nothing to be afraid of. That's just how language works. And we see out throughout history that as language gets of the scriptures gets too far removed from what people are speaking, there's always a need to update and modernize ... So, when the announcement came about the handbook updates that were going to be more flexible and allow for a variety of translations to work alongside the King James, it didn't really surprise me because to me this was aligned ...

 In October 2012, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially lowered the minimum age for missionary service. Before that change, men could begin at age 19 and women at age 21. The update allowed men to start at 18 and women at 19, a major shift in how young Latter-day Saints approached their early adult years. That change dramatically increased missionary numbers, with applications skyrocketing in the weeks after the announcement and women making up a much larger share of those who served.   For more than a decade after that update, the rule stayed the same. Women could serve at 19 and men at 18, with women serving 18-month missions and men serving two years. In November 2025 the Church again changed the rule: the minimum age for women to serve was lowered to 18, equalizing it with men.  What made this new policy notable wasn’t just equality in age; it was the statements that came with it.   In a January 2026 interview with the Church’s own Deseret News, Presid...

 An upcoming event called the Peacemaker Summit , organized by The Holy Rebellion , is being promoted as a gathering for faithful LDS creators. The organizing vision for this event is explicitly about displacing critics of the faith by flooding social media platforms with coordinated, high-volume pro-Mormon content. That goal deserves scrutiny. My initial reaction to the original video The Stated Aim: Outnumber the Critics Travis Lish and Christian Williams from The Holy Rebellion have been clear about their motivation. They believe critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dominate online spaces and that faithful voices need to overwhelm that presence. The solution being proposed is to create enough volume to hide criticisms from search results.  ... our goal is 1 billion views per month  collectively  as Latter Day Saint creators. Imagine a world where when you search Mormon or LDS or Joseph Smith  across any platform, what you would see...

It looks like the topic of horses and the Book of Mormon is going to crop up every few months like a nasty case of eczema, so I feel it’s worthwhile to summarize the debate as it currently stands. There's another post on this blog  about more recent research, but it always goes back to the (in)famous analysis done by Matthew Roper and his colleagues at BYU, John Clark and Wade Ardern, all the way back to 2005. But first, let's look even further back.  What the Book of Mormon Said The word “horse” appears 14 total times in the Book of Mormon in the context of domesticated livestock, with half of those references being connected with pulling chariots of war. Both Lamanite and Nephite peoples equated these horses with those described in Isaiah 2:7 and 5:28, which Nephi expressly quotes in his own record (compare 2 Nephi 12:7 and 15:28), with no distinction made between them. The horses of the Americas, per the Book of Mormon, are intended to be the same in form and function to ...

Before Joseph Smith was known as a prophet, he was known locally for treasure digging. An article written by Dan Vogel   mapped out the physical locations connected to that earlier phase of Smith’s life. Drawing from court records, affidavits, neighbor testimony, and later reminiscences, Vogel was able to place Smith on specific hillsides, farms, and riverbanks across western New York and northern Pennsylvania. Show Dan Vogel's Full Article (If you have issues on mobile, you can read the full document  here ) The article itself is a valuable asset to anybody who wants to understand the treasure digging activities of Joseph Smith. However, due to the design of the maps provided it may be difficult to immediate tell where the digs took place. Which in my opinion, may limit the sharing of his research. As such, I took it upon myself to update the map in Google Earth using Dan Vogel's research as my guide. This gives us a bit of clearer idea of w...

  This article appeared in 1904, during the height of national scrutiny surrounding the LDS Church and the U.S. Senate investigation into whether Apostle Reed Smoot should be seated as a senator. At the center of that inquiry were questions the public had debated for decades but rarely heard addressed in sworn testimony.  What actually happened inside the Endowment House ?  What oaths were required?  Do the oaths conflict with civic loyalty, democratic norms, and basic transparency? The reporting below relies on testimony given under oath to the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections and presents the claims exactly as they were reported to a national audience. This was not written as theology or internal instruction. It was written as political journalism, aimed at informing a non-Mormon public that largely had no access to temple ceremonies and relied on secondhand descriptions. THE WASHINGTON TIMES DECEMBER 14, 1904 MORMONS TAKING OATHS OF ENDOWMENT HOUS...