Post-Mormon Media: Past, Present, and Future!

This is a short presentation I gave as part of the panel “Who Gets to Say What Former Mormons are Like?” at Sunstone 2024, organized by Chino Blanco, which was a reprise of the panel of the same name that I organized in 2012.

When I set off for BYU in 1989, I had already stopped believing in Mormonism. The Internet as we know it didn’t exist, so I hoped to meet like-minded heathens by joining the “Student Review” — which was kind of a junior version of Sunstone. Unfortunately, the Student Review was full of well-meaning believers who sincerely thought that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had their best interests at heart and could be improved from within.

No disrespect intended — I wish such folks the best of luck! — but it wasn’t what I was looking for, so I didn’t really find my community. Instead I white-knuckled through it, finished my four-year degree in three years, then left for New Jersey, and from there on to France.

I had left the church and even left it alone!

But that doggone Internet! In the early aughts, message boards were taking off as one of the first types of social media, and sites like “Recovery from Mormonism,” “Exmo Social,” and “Further Light and Knowledge” (a.k.a. FLAK) pulled me back in. For the first time, I had the opportunity to connect with people who had experiences with Mormonism that I could relate to. I could finally laugh with people who weren’t offended by ridiculing the absurd parts of our shared experience — and I could commiserate with people who had been hurt in the same ways by the sexism, bigotry, and forced conformity of our shared former culture.

It was a welcome connection to my past that I enjoyed while I was building a happy new future — in a completely different direction — with my new young family in Europe.

The message boards got me thinking about my Mormon experiences and allowed me to compare my experiences with those of others — which inspired me to write “ExMormon: nine-and-a-half novellas about growing up Mormon and leaving the church.” That, in turn, got me interested in blogging and in the Mormon Lit community.

In 2007, some friends from “Further Light and Knowledge” (a.k.a. FLAK) decided to start a community blog called “Main Street Plaza” and invited me to join, since I was already active on my personal blog “Letters from a broad…” I had misremembered the history as if Hellmut Lotz and Solistics had gotten it rolling before I joined, but, nope, in preparation for this panel, I went all the way back to the beginning of the blog and found that I had written the first post, “Calling all Cultural Mormons”, inviting the post-Mormon community and everyone else who is interested in Mormonism to our new community blog.

Within the first year I took over the web hosting myself. Conveniently, being a software and DevOps engineer in real life, I happened to have some hobbyist servers in the cloud to host websites on.

The first decade of Main Street Plaza was a really wild ride! In those days, blogging was the hottest thing in social media, and as the faithful LDS bloggers created the Bloggernacle, we post-Mormons had our corresponding blog network called “Outer Blogness”.

One of our notable regulars was Dr. Ryan Cragun, who you may have heard of because of his 2023 paper about how Mormons are no longer a majority in Utah. One of his earlier LDS research works was a 2009 post he wrote as “profxm” on Main Street Plaza about how LDS Inc. owns .7% of Florida.

Main Street Plaza helped me connect with a great community of Exmo and Post-Mo authors, and I found that I actually really enjoy reading people’s manuscripts and giving feedback. Holly Welker, who has written and edited a number of books related to Mormonism, suggested that we former Mormons should consider ourselves “Mormon Alumni.” I like that framing because I do see Mormonism as something that was part of my formation, that I learned some things from, and then finished with — like school. So, with Donna Banta, Monya Baker, and Johnny Townsend, we started Mormon Alumni Association Books.

MAA Books is sort of a website and sort of an indie publisher. In fact, we have a vendor table at this conference for you to peruse! And if anyone listening here has a manuscript or an indie-published book and you’d like some feedback on and/or a free publicity page on the MAA books site, please contact me. I know the site has gotten a little dusty, but we’re hoping to dust it off and liven it up.

Another notable contributor from the early days of Main Street Plaza was Chino Blanco — a.k.a. Jason Echols — who organized this panel — thanks Jason! Jason kept us posted on Mormon-related current events and helped originate our two long-running series of awards: “The Brodie Awards”, and the “William Law X-Mormon of the Year”. Jason came up with the names of both of these, and made the original graphics for them, which I still use.

The Brodie Awards started as a parallel to “the Niblets” — which were the awards handed out by the Bloggernacle, named after Hugh Nibley.

The funny thing is that I actually sincerely wanted to win a “Niblet” myself. I’m pretty sure I got nominated a couple of times. I never saw myself as an enemy to the faithful blogs. I felt that Main Street Plaza and Outer Blogness were an extension of the same conversation. When I commented on the faithful blogs, I tried to keep my comments respectful and constructive. But even though I saw myself as a positive contributor to the conversation, the Bloggernacle didn’t agree. Being the friendly atheist — who doesn’t hate you and just wants to hang out and agree to disagree — is almost worse for them than trolling because it challenges their narrative more.

So, during one of the nomination threads of the Niblets one year, Steve Evans, one of the top Bloggernacle guys, wrote that there were no Niblets to be awarded to the likes of Chanson and Chino Blanco — me and Jason that is. I’m not one to try to crash a party that I’m not invited to, so we decided to throw our own party, and the Brodies were born!

Ironically, then Niblets died out after just a few years, but — 15 years later — the Brodies are still going strong! Blogging started losing popularity with the advent of Facebook, but that’s not what killed the Niblets. They just had too much infighting, and couldn’t agree on who should run them and how they should be run. Here’s where we see the advantage of the fact that exmos and post-mos actually do tend to “leave the church alone” a few years after leaving it. The Brodies got a lot of attention — especially at the beginning — but literally no one ever tried to fight me for control of them. If they did, I would welcome their help and collaboration.

Personally, I’ve posted the nomination threads, organized the nominations into categories, posted the polls, and congratulated the winners every year since the Brodies began in 2009. But the real work is done by the people who get out there and nominate all of their favorite works from the past year — including their own works. I follow a lot of LDS-interest content, and I always add my own nominations, but I’m old and I don’t always have my finger on the hottest new content. That’s where the young people and the people who have freshly left the church come in!

Then I try to massage the categories to try to ensure that everyone has a chance of winning. What that means is that I try to subdivide categories that have too many nominees, and I try to move nominations around so that a given content creator doesn’t have multiple works competing against each other in a single category.

Note that the categories change every year, depending on what gets nominated. This is a feature not a bug. I want people to get recognition for what’s hot now, and not just for being the one who’s still doing whatever was the big thing in 2009.

So if you want to win a Brodie Award, here’s the trick: Find the best thing you created and posted in the past year. Then find two other works — ideally by two other creators — that kind of fit into the same category. Then post your proposed category with its three nominees in the nomination thread (which always appears on Main Street Plaza in early December). Unless your nominations represent some sort of obvious trolling, your category will be included in the voting. (But be aware that additional nominees may be added to your category.)

Ideally, nominating people for Brodie awards is a way to get additional exposure for yourself and for your fellow content creators! The Brodie Awards have been a fun way for me to stay connected with the wonderful community of ex- and post-Mormons, and I hope it helps others stay connected as well!