If John Dehlin Could Change the Mormon Church | @CultstoConsciousness | Ep 1718

John Dehlin has been excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for nearly a decade. Yet on a recent episode of Cults to Consciousness, host Shalise Ansola noted something that must sting the Brethren in Salt Lake City. Dehlin has shaped more institutional policy than the current prophet. This is not hyperbole. It is a documented pattern of cause and effect that raises uncomfortable questions about who actually holds moral authority in modern Mormonism.

Background and the Weight of Silence

Dehlin built his platform through Mormon Stories Podcast, a digital archive that has become a lifeline for questioning members. He approaches the church not as an enemy but as an institution that sold him a bill of goods. He left not because of personal trauma, he explains, but because he discovered the historical record did not match the Sunday School narrative. His critique centers on what he calls fraud by omission. Members commit two years of missionary service, ten percent of their lifetime income, and their entire social identity to an organization that never disclosed Joseph Smith’s polygamy to fourteen-year-old girls or the racial curse theology embedded in its scriptures.

The church’s current strategy, according to Dehlin, relies on geographic arbitrage. While North American membership stagnates, growth concentrates in Africa, where limited internet access and economic precarity allow the same historical obscurantism to work in 2024 that worked in Utah in 1954.

What Reformation Would Actually Look Like

If Dehlin held the reins, the church would face a reckoning it has spent two centuries avoiding. The reforms are specific, radical, and legally terrifying for a corporation sole.