The 2021 Mormon Purge Continues: TikTokkers Neesha and Kyle Brost - Mormon Stories 1422

The 2021 Mormon Purge: Why TikTokkers Became Targets

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened spring 2021 with a coordinated suppression campaign against vocal members testing institutional boundaries. While mental health advocate Natasha Helfer faced excommunication in Kansas for supporting LGBTQ+ rights and sexual health education, another couple five states away received identical summons. Neesha and Kyle Brost, the married creators behind the TikTok channel "Challenge Faith," discovered that posting 60-second videos about church history and personal doubt qualified as apostasy worthy of disciplinary councils. Their case illustrates the widening scope of what church lawyers and leadership now classify as threats to the faith.

Background: From Model Mormons to Disciplinary Targets

The Brosts represent a demographic particularly threatening to the church’s controlled narrative: young, temple-married, social media fluent, and historically literate. Kyle grew up between divorced parents in Alaska, where at age 18 he served as a branch president while technically still a priest, an anomaly that required special permission but demonstrated his early institutional utility. Neesha spent her childhood in Liberty, Missouri, ground zero for Mormon restoration geography, where she absorbed the faith’s founding mythology while her family navigated economic precarity and divorce.

Their paths converged at Brigham Young University Idaho, where they married and began building the orthodox life that ward directories celebrate. Yet both carried hairline fractures in their testimonies. Kyle returned early from his mission in 2014 suffering from ulcerative colitis, a medical condition that leadership interpreted through a lens of worthiness rather than pathology. Neesha maintained her rule-following facade while privately reframing her childhood devotion as a survival mechanism rather than spiritual confirmation.

Documented Evidence: The Machinery of Exclusion