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★★★★★

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This is a place for dialogue about 'Christians vs Pharisees: Choosing sides and how to fight for them in the Mormon Civil War' and other collaborations like 'The Loyal Opposition' where Peter Bleakley has teamed up with Nemo the Mormon. At current rates of decline in active membership the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will functionally cease to exist in Europe, most of the rest of the world and several regions of the USA in the next 10-15 years, so radical reforms need to happen now if it is to survive, and it may already too late. The vast majority of members have already left the Church globally, including 80% of the young people raised in it, and recently leaked data has revealed that in my homeland of the UK and the Republic of Ireland we are down to less than 15% of our members active and it is falling fast. The stats across the rest of Europe are similar. I will be discussing not only what the General Authorities and local leaders and members have to stop doing and saying to choose Christian Mormonism instead of Pharisee Mormonism (and stop trying to teach and practice both at once and failing), but also the positive changes that need to happen radically and fast to have this amazing religion with so much positive potential survive and thrive in the real world of the 21st Century. What do you think it will take?

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Check latest episodes from Mormon Civil War podcast

MORMON CIVIL WAR EPISODE 16 - RESISTANCE, PROTEST AND STILL FIGHTING FOR A BRITISH MORMON UTOPIA - A PERSONAL JOURNEY

2025/12/21

In this presentation from the recent 2025 Sunstone UK symposium I review my version of the journey hundreds of thousands of Latter-day Saints have walked from passionate enthusiasm for this religion to astonished disillusionment, yet still not able to entirely walk away. I talk about some of the amazing, forward thinking and potentially world changing yet simple ideas in the best of Mormon thought, with a particular focus on the superstar LDS intellectuals who I have only recently discovered were instrumental in personally converting and mentoring my LDS ancestors, starting exactly a century ago with the conversion of my Great Grandmother Jeannie Bleakley by James Talmage in 1926. They embedding a religious worldview in my family culture that many of us who resonate with the best bits of Mormonism mourn for as we watch the beating heart of this potential world religion leave the dying institutional Church as it bleeds out… and then discover that it continues to live on in the thriving online and personal communities of the LDS Church in Exile. As always, my message is that you were never stupid to have loved this religion and its remarkable potential, and you are not stupid to be disappointed and exasperated at how badly it has screwed up, becoming everything it taught us in Primary and Seminary to avoid and oppose.

MORMON CIVIL WAR EPISODE 15 - MODEST PROPHECIES FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS

2025/09/15

After 5 years of the Mormon Civil War podcast, I team up with Gene Judson and Randy Watts of Latter Daily Digest to make infallible prophecies about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will continue to change over the next 5 years.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 12 - THEISMS AND THE SUPREME BEING

2025/01/05

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this final conversation Paul shares his conclusions about the Godhead that the text of the Book of Mormon actually describes, and it’s nothing like the ‘Fullness of the Gospel’ deity the LDS Church thinks it is telling us to believe in. We also talk about the what a final judgement may involve when administered by a merciful deity who is rooting for us to learn and grow and become like them.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 11 – MORMON MYSTERIES

2025/01/04

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this penultimate episode we try to make some sense of 5 of the biggest conundrums in Mormon theology: 1 - How is God male and female? 2 - Who actually is Jehovah in the Temple Endowment? 3 - Disentangling who is what in the several different Mormon Godheads 4 - Who exactly is who in the world planning scene in the Book of Abraham? 5 - The nature of the Atonement of Christ. Mormon Doctrines can be a lot wilder than even I imagined. And along the way Paul says something so profound and comforting I have already made a meme of it.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 10 – THE GLORY OF GOD

2025/01/03

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues As we continue to ponderize how to integrate the religiously ideal with the real in our normal lives, Paul and I discuss what it means to base a religion on the glory described in Mormon scriptures of truth, light and freedom to think for yourself rather than Lucifer’s religion of militaristic acclaim for conquering and controlling other people. What a Mormonism of open minded curiosity and respect for science blesses you with compared to the miserable and lonely certainties of judgmental fundamentalism, even if it seems less secure.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 9 – TEMPLE PRIESTHOODS

2025/01/02

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this meaty episode we explore all kinds of aspects of what taking the LDS temple endowment’s promises seriously can unlock for autonomous, ordained men and women empowered to free themselves from authoritarian control by General Authorities and instead replace them as the democratic, equal ‘Quorum of the Anointed’ Joseph Smith originally established. We reflect on what Community of Christ has pioneered in making Common Consent actually work as a leadership and decision-making philosophy. What President Russell M. Nelson said when challenged by journalists to have more inclusive leadership of the Church, and what they did to heroic Elder Ronald E. Poelman of the Seventy when he dared to teach this model of mature autonomy separating the institutional Church from the true Gospel in General Conference in actual 1984. You couldn’t make it up.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 8 – CHAPEL PRIESTHOODS

2025/01/01

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In the first of a 2-parter we start to learn what Paul Toscano means by ‘Chapel Priesthoods’ and ‘Temple Priesthoods’. After a much more sophisticated beginning, how did the LDS leaders establish a male-only, correlated bureaucracy that tightly controls every expression of priesthood authority and blessing? And is there any way for an asphyxiating Church, and particularly women, to escape its iron grip?

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 7 – JOSEPH SMITH: GOOD OR EVIL?

2024/12/31

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues How do you solve a problem like Joseph Smith? Can a master manipulator, con artist, skilful storyteller, sexual predator, financial fraudster, and destroyer of printing presses also be a prophet of God? The Apologists for the LDS Church have had to concede enormous amounts of territory in recent decades to acknowledge his many flaws, but is their rather weak pleading to ‘give Brother Joseph a break’ by saying we cannot know his true motivations, and that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’, really a good enough excuse? Surely God could have chosen someone much less conflicted and controversial than HIM for such an important job? Joseph was more successful than many religious founders, but he also sowed the landmines of Mormonism’s failure to become a world religion from the start. …BUT… he also gave us scriptures about change, accountability and democracy that could have neutralised a lot of that damage if his successors had applied them. We grapple with it all… and we just about save ourselves from being blood-atoned by Magnificent Maven and the Feminist Mormon Housewives.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 6 – MYSTICS, PROPHETS AND MANAGERS

2024/12/30

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this episode we wrestle with the conflicting qualities required of the leaders of a religion. Ideally they need to balance a mystical sensitivity for the divine, a calling to challenge society to do better and champion the interests of the poor and oppressed as social justice warriors, a duty to protect and pass on sacred rituals, and the ability to manage practical day to day administrative and financial matters. Is it possible for anyone to have all these skills? How have we ended up with a leadership oligarchy that only seems to care about being, and promoting, managers, yet isn’t even very competent at management? Is it their fault? Or simply inevitable when the Common Consent checks and balances on power commanded by the Church’s constitution in the Doctrine and Covenants have been abandoned so, as warned in those scriptures, the LDS General Authorities have mostly become absolutely corrupted by absolute power with no accountability? Have any real prophets made it to the top of this system to give us hope? How can we do better?

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 5 – SCRIPTURE AS VISIONARY TEXT

2024/12/29

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this episode we dive into the challenges and frustrations of interacting with a religious text. If it is not accurate, literal history, why should we still bother with the Book of Mormon as metaphorically or religiously useful literature? After all, we can learn dozens of profoundly helpful and ‘true’ life lessons about self-sacrifice, love, courage, compassion, salvation, ethical complexity and what to do with power from The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Shakespeare, The Handmaid’s Tale, Battlestar Galactica or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels. And those are much more beautifully written and fun to follow than most of the Mormon scriptures.

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 4 – REVELATION: INSIGHT TO THEOPHANY

2024/12/28

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this episode, with reference to powerful visionary experiences of his own and his ancestors, Paul explores the simultaneous relationship between the real and the figurative in the visions and encounters with the divine that lead people to begin or believe in religions. We may struggle to tell the difference between dreams and visions, but do we need to?

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 3 - IMAGINATION VS FANTASY

2024/12/28

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this third of 12 conversations we discuss how to have a rational faith. What is the difference between using our intellectual reasoning and imagination rooted in all available evidence and lived experience to construct and evolve a belief system personally or collectively, and a much less credible religion based on fantasies disconnected from evidence and science? And I ruminate on the pros and cons of Paul’s couplet ‘Theology Can’t Save Us. Love Saves Us.’

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 2 - IDEALISM VS PHYSICALISM

2024/12/27

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this second of 12 conversations we explore the ultimate theological conundrum: If religion and Gods are real rather than a human invention to help us cope with our own inevitable deaths, how are we to bridge the gap between our existence as limited mortal animals trapped in a brief space-time continuum or timeline with a beginning and an end, and the existence of a God that is eternal and is not limited like that? And how can we and a God have both imperfect and mortal and perfectly eternal aspects of ourselves as part of our natures at the same time? Quantum physics and theology are both pointing to lots of ways this could be real… but why even care when the religion that taught us about God and our immortal souls in the first place is doing all 17 of the things New Testament Jesus specifically commanded religious leaders never to do?

MORMON CIVIL WAR: THE CHRISTMAS TOSCANO DIALOGUES DAY 1 - MORMONISM VS CHRISTIANITY

2024/12/26

Peter, Paul and Mormonism – The 12 Days of Christmas Toscano Dialogues In this first of 12 conversations we explore some of Paul's journey to excommunicated September Sixer and beyond as one of the very few people even trying to be a proper theologian in Mormonism. We start to chew on what Mormonism has to offer Christians who have been wrestling with the nature of God and humans for 2000 years, and consider how to hold fast to what seems good while not being afraid to dump the rest in a religion that has at least 5 different versions of its Godhead in play.

MORMON CIVIL WAR EPISODE 14 - THE MORMON SCRIPTURES THAT COULD WIN THE 21ST CENTURY - SUNSTONE UK SPECIAL

2024/10/25

I grew up in an LDS Mormonism ready to take on the world, fill the world and rescue mainstream Christianity from its fundamental doctrinal flaws. Fearless about an intellectually defendable thoughtful faith and fizzing with big ideas about people, Gods, and our destiny in the stars of a vast universe that could keep up with the expanding realms of everything that science and science fiction could imagine, as well as modern social and political developments towards the supremacy of democracy and the empowerment and self-actualisation of every individual. The Big Ideas and the scriptures they are found in are all still there, but the practical delivery of that vision for the future has been a tragic and catastrophic disaster. Join me as I explore why, and perhaps rekindle a New Hope for what Mormonism can offer the galaxy.

Podcast reviews

Read Mormon Civil War podcast reviews

4.9 out of 5

88 reviews

★★★★☆

TapirWrangler 2024/12/28

Good on his own, but not a good interviewer

Peter is brilliant and insightful on his own, but when he has a guest on he talks over the guest and rambles on an on about his own ideas. I was excit...

★★★★★

mmmm6677 2023/01/14

A must listen

I’ve listened to this podcast multiple times while walking. I look forward to many more.

★★★★★

Happy98403 2022/09/21

Brilliant!

I love this podcast. It’s intelligent, fun, encouraging and long—and I like long listens. Thank you, Peter Bleakly for creating such a delightful po...

★★★★★

meeble pie 2022/06/27

PB is a rockstar

When he posts I’m like a kid on Christmas morning. It’s so refreshing to hear from someone who makes so much sense. Thank you Peter!!!

★★★★★

old lady with issues 2022/06/02

Brad Wilcox

the Brad WilcoxTalk in Alpine made me angry, this one adds more fuel to the fire. For him to say that people who don’t have religion aren’t good peop...

★★★★★

D&Spc 2021/06/25

FLIPPIN’ AMAZING

Jam packed with information on Mormon leadership hypocrisy, Peter Bleakley delivers a master class. There is so much here it requires concentration to...

★★★★★

nfykbv123 2021/06/10

Great humour ...

In the face of great peril. Please don’t get flushed down the golden toilet! You’re a gas man. I’m moved to investigate if only I could join and suppo...

★★★★★

UtahCountyScott 2021/06/08

Intelligent and thoughtful

Critical analysis of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints…MORMONS. You can listen to well reasoned analysis and will find yourself nodding in a...

★★★★★

alybrad723 2021/06/06

Can’t rate this high enough!

Peter is insightful and informative, and I love hearing his take on issues facing the LDS church today. He is humorous and poignant both. Can’t wait f...

★★★★★

AllomancerJak 2021/05/08

I’ve listened to it 3 times.

Cohesive, logical arguments that offer validation and advocate for change. I love this podcast and eagerly await the 7th episode.

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