Skip to main content
Some links on this page are Amazon affiliate links. We may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

The Peacemaker Summit and an Attempt to Silence Mormonism's Critics

Image
By Mason

 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 is dozens of people proclaiming their faith and their witness towards them, rather than dozens of detractors...we see and hope for a future where we flip the script and we can control in large part that algorithm online.

 -Travis, from The Holy Rebellion


That’s not engagement. It's attempted censorship. Instead of answering criticism, the strategy is to make it harder to encounter at all... and top LDS content creators seem to be fully on board. This includes Maddy Packer, Jasmin Rappleye, David Snell, Lauren Yarro and 12+ other creators


The Summit as Mobilization

The Peacemaker Summit is being presented as a creator-focused event, but the underlying purpose is  mobilization. Attendees are being recruited into a coordinated effort with a clear narrative objective. Produce content. Be consistent. Hide the critics.


Why This Matters Now

The Peacemaker Summit hasn’t happened yet. That’s precisely why this deserves attention now, not later. These creators need to be called-out on this morally questionable  goal. 

Once large-scale saturation campaigns are normalized and praised as “balance” or “peace,” they become harder to challenge. The information environment shifts, and people lose access to the full range of perspectives without realizing it.

This isn’t about silencing faith. It’s about whether a faith community should organize around obscuring criticism instead of addressing it. There’s a moral difference between sharing what you believe and intentionally crowding out what others say.



Category:

Comments

  1. AaronJanuary 12, 2026 at 4:06 PM

    Don't forget when they initially included a $500 package for a "VIP evening devotional" that none of the other keynote speakers knew about!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mormon Blood and the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstein Letter

By Mason
With the recent release of nearly 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files, there have been several connections made regarding Jeffery Epstein paying tuition for several students at BYU. The most notable of which is presented in what is known as the Esther Cohen-Tizer-Epstien Letter.    Some are questioning the authenticity of the letter, but some clues seem to point us to a woman named   Esther Cohen .  Lets look at a few connections. Note that these connections are not an attempt at making any accusations and are simply connections made through publicly available information. I will be updating this page as I find more information. EFTA00129111  Reference to the Seven Bowls School of Nutrition From Esther's website: alchemyofnourishment.com (Update March 04, 2026: The site seems to have been taken down) She began studying nutrition as a teenager: Which also seems to align with her site. Alchemy of Nourishment Along with the claim of residing in Colorado Alc...
2 comments
Read

The "Mormon" Trademark is About to Expire

By Mason
 The request for Mormon Stories to rebrand has spread quickly through Mormon spaces. Followers learned that om November 14th 2025, the LDS Church had reached out with claims that the podcast was infringing on the “Mormon” trademark. The demand leaned on the legal idea that the Church owns the word.  The request was shared on social media by @mormstories, but those posts seem to have been removed. Fortunately, copies of the email were  shared on reddit. But there is a significant detail sitting behind this entire dispute. The Church will have to renew the "Mormon" trademark in the 2026 to 2027 window.  Source: USPTO database When that time comes, they must prove that they still use the word “Mormon” in active commerce. USPTO rules are clear on this point. A trademark only survives if the owner can show that it is still printed on actual goods or services that are still being sold or distributed. The official guidelines spell it out at uspto.gov under “ Keeping your r...
3 comments
Read

The Temple Emphasis and Decline of Tithing

By Mason
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...
Post a Comment
Read

Where Did Joseph Smith Dig for Treasure?

By Mason
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...
Post a Comment
Read

The Peacemaker Summit, Part 2: Keynotes to the Kingdom

By
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read

Early Mormon Criticisms - 4: Fanaticism

By Mason
 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...
Post a Comment
Read

I Watched the Peacemaker Summit So You Don't Have To

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read

Early Mormon Criticisms - 5: The March of Mormonism

By Mason
 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...
Post a Comment
Read

Early Mormon Criticisms - 3: Delusions

By Mason
 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 - In 1831 Alexander Campbell published An Analysis of the Book of Mormon , one of the earliest full-length critiques of Joseph Smith’s new scripture. The piece first appeared as a review in Campbell’s periodical The Millennial Harbinger and was republished the following year, in 1832, as a standalone pamphlet for wider circulation. Campbell was a prominent religious leader and editor, and he approached the Book of Mormon as a text that needed to be tested, line by line, against the Bible it claimed to supplement. Unlike satirical responses such as Abner Cole’s Book of Pukei , Campbell did not parody Mormonism. He treated it as a serious theologica...
1 comment
Read

Are You Temple Worthy?

By Mason
Temple worthiness isn’t just about "good behavior" in Mormon teaching. It’s a gate that determines who qualifies for the highest blessings the religion offers. The church teaches that only people judged worthy can enter the temple, make covenants, and receive the ordinances that lead to exaltation, which is the belief that humans can become like God and live forever with their families in the celestial kingdom.  This makes worthiness interviews a spiritual checkpoint that can shape someone’s identity, their standing in the community, and even their hope for eternity.    Are You Worthy to Enter a Mormon Temple? Are You Worthy of the Mormon Temple? Yes No Restart Enter the Temple
6 comments
Read
e
Link copied!