Lucifer's Lantern

The U.S. Department of Defense recently found itself at the center of an unexpected religious controversy after restructuring the way it categorizes faith groups within the military. In an effort to simplify its system, the Pentagon reduced more than 200 religious affiliation codes to just 31 broader categories. The initial version of the new list grouped many denominations under explicitly Christian classifications, including Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Orthodox Christians, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however, appeared outside those Christian categories. miltary.com The reaction from many Latter-day Saints was immediate. ABC4 Utah Utah politicians publicly criticized the change, church members voiced their frustration online, and critics of Mormonism pointed to the classification as evidence that even the federal government did not view the faith as Christian. Facing mounting criticism, the Department of ...

I recently started putting together xmormon.org , a sister site to luciferslantern.com. The focus of the site is pretty straightforward: collecting the stories of ex-Mormons throughout history and building a resource center for people who have left the church. The basic premise is that people have been leaving Mormonism since the earliest days of the church. If you’ve left, or you’re in the middle of figuring out what leaving means for you, you’re not the first person to walk that road. You won’t be the last either. Because I'm impatient and want to get this ball rolling, I’m using Wikipedia’s Creative Commons license to get initial articls poated. This license allows existing articles to be copied and adapted as long as the license requirements are followed. From there, I’m giving each article a more standard format, then adding context, cleanup, and workikg to add original material over time. I’m just one guy, so this seemed like the most realistic way to start building the site ...

A review of General Conference discourse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reveals an interesting shift. Temples have always been mentioned more often than tithing, but the gap has widened dramatically in recent decades. References to tithing appear to be steadily declining, while references to temples have skyrocketed. The question is why. Data was pulled in 2024 from www.lds-general-conference.org  The 2020 dataset sees a large decline in both Tithing and Temple references due to only being halfway through the decade In the nineteenth century, church leaders spoke openly about tithing because the church needed money. The institution faced repeated financial strain. The Panic of 1893 damaged the Utah economy, and federal legislation such as the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 resulted in the confiscation of church property. Under those conditions, leaders frequently urged members to contribute financially. That urgency faded once the church stabilized its finances. In...

 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 - This article titled “The March of Mormonism” was published on July 1, 1831, in the Lockport Balance , a western New York newspaper printed by J. Mills. It appeared at a transitional moment in early Mormon history, just as Joseph Smith and a core group of followers were relocating from New York to northeastern Ohio.  Less than a year after the publication of the Book of Mormon in March 1830, the movement had shifted from a small regional body in the Palmyra–Manchester area to a community organizing migration around new revelations. The immediate scriptural backdrop to this relocation appears in Doctrine and Covenants 37 (December 1830...

Click here  for part 1! Following some initial audio/visual difficulties (which drove my professional A/V friend crazy), the Peacemaker Summit finally got underway with some introductory remarks by Marla Gale, the event sponsor, then by Travish Lish and Christian Williams, the co-owners of The Holy Rebellion social media accounts. What followed over the next several hours were eight keynote addresses and a lunch break. Alternatively, skip to the end to see my final thoughts. In summarizing and evaluating each speaker , I'm employing the rubric below (I am a teacher, after all): Does the speaker... have a consistent thesis related to the stated mission of the conference? clearly articulate an application of content creation online? rigorously demonstrate an actionable metric for peacemaking? utilize a high-quality and engaging presentational format? Christian Williams: "The Accusatory Fog & Two Ineffective Responses" @theholyrebellion Christian begins his address the ...

If you're like most people, you didn't even know this was happening; and, like a good sneeze, it was gone by the time you realized it. (Be warned: there's a lot of YouTube and Instagram posts linked in this article.) Who is The Holy Rebellion? If you're not familiar with The Holy Rebellion , they're a pair of LDS business investors and influencers from Utah - Travis Lish and Christian Williams . In an interview with Greg Matsen of The Cwic Show online podcast, the boys at The Holy Rebellion describe how the y came up with their Instagram handle (and I'll highlight some interesting statements): So we, starting at from that point - this was probably four, five, six years ago even - but we just kind of started meeting...and over time, it became clear that the only thing - our biggest mutual interest was the gospel of Jesus Christ ...and we were talking about Paul and how Paul was just unashamed...and we concluded that if we want to be like Paul, we have to find th...

 In recent years, growing public concern about how abuse allegations have been handled within the Mormon church has raised a difficult but necessary question: how much responsibility should individuals place in institutional systems to protect children? For many (not all) Utah residents, there has long been an assumption that reporting concerns to ecclesiastical leadership is sufficient. Yet repeated allegations and investigative reporting have reminded the public that institutional processes within the church may  not always result in immediate reporting to civil authorities.  Most people assume that only teachers, doctors, social workers (or a church hotline) are required to report child abuse. In other words, "someone else will handle it." And yet the Utah law itself presents us with an entirely different expectation that should have been the cultural norm this entire time. It places the duty to report suspected abuse to the proper authorities directly in the hands of...