This is for subscribers to the Salt Lake Tribune.
There are several important points made in this article.
Overall, the solution to the problems mentioned, such as balkanization, is the pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding instead of pursuing adherence to one particular point of view on every issue. Church leaders talk about "unity in diversity."
In my view, members have always been encouraged to do their own research. That's why we "seek learning even by study, and also by faith" (Doctrine and Covenants 109:14) and "study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people." (Doctrine and Covenants 90:15)
In many cases, trained historians have ruined their own reputation by promoting their own favored narratives instead of collecting, preserving, and presenting accurate historical research. That's how we ended up with the SITH and M2C narratives.
In 2014, Latter-day Saint apostle David A. Bednar rose in front of a packed Marriott Center at Brigham Young University and issued a call for church members to embrace social media as a tool for spreading the faith’s teachings everywhere an internet connection can be found.
“Beginning this day,” Bednar said, “I exhort you to sweep the Earth with messages filled with righteousness and truth — messages that are authentic, edifying and praiseworthy — and literally to sweep the Earth as with a flood.”
These 3 adjectives - "authentic, edifying and praiseworthy" - guide most faithful LDS social media.
More than a decade later, it’s fair to say that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have delivered, leveraging existing accounts and launching new ones to share their testimonies and go post-for-post with naysayers about their beliefs and practices.
But Bednar may have gotten more than he bargained for.
Seems like Elder Bednar's request to "sweep the Earth as with a flood" remains aspirational. LDS podcasts are found mainly in the US and in English.
As the ecosystem of Latter-day Saint content creators has exploded in recent years, so has its clout, with some influencers reaching levels of stardom previously experienced only by top church leaders.
People used to quote Hugh Nibley more than most church leaders.
“They get quoted in Sunday school,” Latter-day Saint historian Ben Spackman said, “and referenced by seminary teachers.”
Teachers have always quoted popular authors and speakers, not only church leaders.
This may be especially true for podcasters and YouTubers (the line between the two is increasingly blurry in today’s video-driven world), who have taken advantage of the longer format of those mediums to go beyond responding to outside criticism. Whether interpreting scripture, weighing in on culture wars or critiquing fellow members, these creators are defining what it means to be an upstanding Latter-day Saint.
That's a good point, if only because these podcasters are modeling how Latter-day Saints can behave and speak. But the variety of perspectives the article discusses contradicts the idea of "defining" what it means to be LDS.
Get Mormon Land newsletter. Explore the news and culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints every Thursday.
Those definitions, however, don’t always align.
“Podcasts,” Spackman said, “...represent an unveiling of the intellectual balkanization of the church.”
"Unveiling" is a good term for this because LDS have always had a variety of opinions. It's unlikely that any two LDS agree on everything. Whether "balkanization" is a good term is more debatable because by giving voice to a variety of views, the podcasters expose LDS to more diversity, which cures balkanization.
(Ben Spackman) Scholar Ben Spackman notes that Latter-day Saint podcasters and YouTubers now find themselves being quoted in church meetings.
The church’s own official YouTube channel, meanwhile, has become just one of many voices. And while still influential, with 2.5 million subscribers, it is, as Purdue digital humanities scholar Spencer Stewart observed, “no longer the central place where the main conversations are taking place.”
Good point, because conversations can't really happen on that channel.
The growth of ‘#proLDS’ content creation
When “Keystone” podcaster David Snell first fired up his mic in 2017, he felt a bit like a lone voice in the wilderness.
“There were not a lot of Latter-day Saint creators out there,” said Snell, who got his start on the hugely successful “Saints Unscripted.” “It was somewhat lonely for a while.”
Good point. I started my first blog around 2016. It took a long time to get my first 1 million page views. Now there are over 4 million.
Not anymore.
Exactly how many shows defending the faith have emerged is hard to say. New names enter the arena all the time, announcing themselves with the hashtag #proLDS. Stewart estimates the number of church-friendly YouTube channels jumped from just under 100 in 2010-2014 to nearly 200 in 2015-2019 and more than 430 in 2020-2025.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Add in the number of critical platforms, and the overall tally of these channels dedicated “solely to Mormon-themed content” rises to more than 700 during his research period.
There are more all the time, too.
Many of these shows, he noted, are “obscure,” boasting only a handful of subscribers. But growing numbers have amassed followings in the tens, even hundreds of thousands.
“The COVID-19 and post-COVID era,” Stewart said, “has seen an explosion of Mormon and LDS content creators…[focused on] an LDS audience.”
There is an explosion of all types of content creators, of course.
A top-down church embraces bottom-up medium
There’s a clear underlying tension to all of this.
The church is, as Stewart put it, “accustomed to controlling its message.” Even when it seeks to collaborate with (and pay) influencers, the church’s sophisticated and expansive public relations apparatus takes control of the resulting content, posting it on its own channels. YouTube and podcasting, in contrast, are, Stewart added, “chaotic.”
Another great point, although "chaotic" seems more judgmental than descriptive. The channels are diverse but generally in the mainstream.
Oklahoma State University’s Rosemary Avance, author of “Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age,” stressed this point.
“The practice of podcasting…[is a way] for everyday Mormons to define Mormon identity,” she said, and to do so within a church “that has long been a very hierarchical, bureaucratic, top-down organization.”
There is evidence, though, that the institution, with its uniform hymnals, manuals and even meetinghouse art, is learning to live with, and perhaps even embrace, this democratic medium.
Elder Bednar's original message is not often repeated. Instead, we hear more warnings about the Internet.
In the beginning of the surge of Latter-day Saint content creators, Snell said, he got the feeling that leaders were wary of their grassroots efforts to brand the faith but believes that discomfort is wearing off.
“Broadly speaking,” he said, “the institution of the church is starting to realize that there is a community here that is eager to speak about faith and to teach about faith…and the power that can come along with that.”
Rather than viewing one another as competition, Snell perceives online apologists as a united front eager to support one another’s successes and weather the criticisms hurled their way.
After all, he said, “we’ve all got the same goal, and that is to bring people to Jesus Christ.”
The role of influencers in a prophet-led church
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Top church leaders at the October General Conference. Tikla Fife, co-host of the popular “Ward Radio,” sees guidance of from the male leaders as a godsend.
Asked if he perceived a possible tension with the elevation of individual content creators in a church led by a prophet, Snell said it depends on the types of messages being promoted.
“If people are pointing at creators who are pointing at Jesus, then I don’t have a problem with that at all,” he said. “But if they’re pointing at creators who are peddling their own personal speculation or being a little bit careless in the way that they talk about things, I could see that as being problematic.”
Podcasters and other influencers are meant, he said, to be the “water boys” and “cheerleaders,” supporting whatever calls the coaching staff — i.e., top church leaders — feel inspired to make.
Tikla Fife, co-host of the popular “Ward Radio,” a rowdy roundtable production in the style of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” agreed. She noted that, while the church has always had popular speakers and writers, the “unregulated” world of social media means some have been elevated that she believes shouldn’t be (Fife specifically cited “therapist voices,” whom she accused of using church membership “as a way to build trust and then lead their audiences away from the principles of the gospel”).
But Fife, an ardent defender of the church’s patriarchal structure, described the presence of a prophet not as a tension for Latter-day Saint content creators but as a helpful guardrail.
This is an important point that non-LDS Christians overlook.
“Because our general leadership is so structured and so clear, we have an easy touchpoint to check in on [regarding] the things we are learning in other places,” she said. “That is incredibly unifying. I feel for Christians who have no prophet.”
Disagreement within the #proLDS media ecosystem
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Even today, members sometimes debate which teachings originated with church founder Joseph Smith, left, and which came from Brigham Young, his immediate successor.
Still, debates have crept into the community of content creators supportive of the church.
To the alarm of many, some have grown skeptical in recent years that faith founder Joseph Smith, despite overwhelming evidence, practiced polygamy or introduced the temple liturgy, instead ascribing them to his successor Brigham Young. Heated exchanges have erupted over what constitutes reliable scholarship. And some have grown distressed over the criticism lobbed by others at “the brethren.”
Even more telling may be the growing self-selection by audiences into various camps, a phenomenon Spencer Stewart, the Purdue humanities scholar, recently uncovered as part of a nearly decadelong observation of Latter-day Saint podcasting.
Church leaders have spoken about "unity in diversity."
Curious to know what shows shared listeners, the researcher cross-analyzed which YouTube users were commenting on which channels — a proxy for who is viewing them, since subscriber lists are private. The results, based on millions of comments, suggested that a once largely uniform audience has started to split into separate communities gathered around two types of shows.
It would be useful to see the data to support the idea that the audience for all these podcasts was once "largely uniform" but no longer is.
The ‘faithful core’ vs. ‘faithful alternative’
One shortcut for understanding these two subgroups of YouTube channels, what Stewart has labeled the “faithful core” and “faithful alternative,” is zeroing in the shows in each camp that “anchor” them — that is to say, generate the most discussion in their comment sections.
These are the giants within a world of some 260 channels, per Stewart’s count, whose overlapping audiences gravitate to their (generally) mainstream topics and voices. Those include faith-promoting conversion stories, Sunday school lessons that hew closely to church publications and church history deep dives taught by professors of church-owned BYU — and sometimes church leaders themselves.
These topics and people aren’t wholly absent from the “faithful alternative” podcasts, of which Stewart identified 175 in all. But while these voices perceive themselves to be faithful and orthodox, they are more willing to critique the church on cultural issues. Past friction points include the church’s COVID-19 response and support for the vaccine, its ongoing collaboration with the United Nations and the 2024 hiring of a new public relations boss deemed too liberal.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Then-church President Russell M. Nelson receives the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. Vaccination, which the church not only supported but also advocated, remains a sticking point for some members.
At the same time, many in the “faithful alternative” space take strong stands on questions in which the church itself remains officially neutral — like the location of civilizations described in the faith’s foundational scripture, the Book of Mormon, and partisan politics.
Another major player in this “faithful alternative” space is “Cwic Media,” the platform of anti-woke crusader Greg Matsen, who in the past criticized BYU for being too liberal.
Running headlong into culture wars is common in this space. So, too, is disdain for the “elites.” Many (although certainly not all) show little deference to expert scholarship (a point of chagrin for some trained historians, including Ben Spackman). Instead, they place a great deal of faith in members’ ability to “do their own research” and unlock for themselves the mysteries of the scriptures, history and signs of the end times.
Members have always been encouraged to do their own research. In many cases, trained historians have ruined their own reputation by promoting their own favored narratives instead of focusing on accurate historical research.
A Latter-day Saint reformation
Rosemary Avance, the media studies scholar, pointed out that religious individuals are always “internalizing and interpreting” their own versions of their faith tradition. That part, she said, is not new.
What is new is the public nature of it all. By choosing a show agenda, selecting guests and setting the tone of an episode, Latter-day Saint podcasters and YouTubers are amplifying their version of the faith with which anyone can engage.
This may lead to LDS becoming "of one heart" as they pursue clarity, charity and understanding instead of a dogmatic catechism.
Avance compared the current energy behind this ever-growing landscape to the Protestant Reformation, when the printing press exponentially expanded who was able to contribute to the marketplace of ideas surrounding Christianity.
“Now we have the internet,” Avance said, “and people are able to do that in the case of Mormonism. …It’s definitely an uncorrelated world.”
The question, then, is the degree to which these different versions continue to diverge over time.
Given the trajectory of the groups to date, Stewart believes it may be only a matter of time before the “faithful core” and “faithful alternative” find themselves more and more isolated from one another, a Venn diagram that ultimately splits into two different circles as their overlapping audiences disappear.
This is why the pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding is fundamental.
And that, he said, may just be the beginning.
Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
Tamarra Kemsley
Dylan Eubank
