Mormonism Explained: The Weirdest Things Taught by the LDS Church

The 11 CRAZIEST Things Mormons Are Taught

1. There was a war in heaven before you were born

According to Mormon theology, you existed as a spirit before you were born. Not in some vague metaphorical sense. You were a literal spirit child of heavenly parents. Yes, plural. God apparently has a wife, but we'll get to that.

Before Earth was formed, all of these spirit children were hanging out in a premortal existence when a massive war broke out. On the one side, Jesus pitching a plan where humans would come to Earth, be given free will, and earn their way back to God. And on the other side, Lucifer pitching a plan where everyone would be forced to obey, and nobody would be lost. God went with Jesus's plan. Lucifer threw a tantrum, rallied a third of all the spirits in heaven to rebel, lost the war, and those rebellious spirits became demons.

So Earth is basically now a test that you agreed to take before you were born, but conveniently can't remember agreeing to. Not sure how exactly Joseph Smith knows this, but don't question it.

2. God has a physical body

In traditional Christianity, God is nowadays usually seen as a spirit: immaterial, omnipresent, and beyond physical form. Mormons reject that entirely. According to LDS scripture, specifically Doctrine and Covenants 130:22, the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's.

This comes directly from Joseph Smith's claim that he literally saw God the Father and Jesus Christ standing in front of him during the First Vision. Two separate physical beings with bodies, which raises some questions. Does God eat? Does he sleep? Does he stub his divine toe on cosmic furniture? Does he poop? And if he has a body of flesh and bones, where exactly is he keeping it?

Which brings us to number three.

3. God lives near a star called Kolob

According to the Book of Abraham, another text Joseph Smith claimed to translate from ancient papyri, there is a star or planet called Kolob that sits nearest to the throne of God. The Book of Abraham describes a hierarchy of celestial bodies with Kolob governing the others and operating on God's time, where one day equals a thousand Earth days.

Now, before you think that this is some kind of fringe teaching, it literally appears in LDS hymns. "If You Could Hie to Kolob" is an actual Mormon hymn that you could hear sung in chapels to this day. The church has been a bit vague about whether Kolob is literal or symbolic, but Smith certainly wrote about it as though it were a real place.

And if you're wondering about those Egyptian papyri that Smith claimed to have translated before the Rosetta Stone allowed us to decipher hieroglyphics, when Egyptologists finally actually got their hands on them, they turned out to be standard Egyptian funerary texts. Common, run-of-the-mill, having absolutely nothing to do with Abraham or Kolob or anything that Smith claimed they said. But sure, let's trust the man's astronomy.

4. The Garden of Eden was in Missouri

Forget Mesopotamia, forget the Tigris and Euphrates. According to Joseph Smith, the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri. He claimed this through divine revelation, teaching that Adam and Eve lived in Missouri, and that after being expelled from the garden, they migrated to a place called Adam-ondi-Ahman in nearby Daviess County. The site is still considered sacred in LDS theology. People go there and have religious experiences.

Now, I've been to Missouri. My mom is from there. It's a beautiful state. But if God was going to put paradise on earth, I feel like he could have done better than a landlocked patch of the Midwest. And if Eden was in Missouri, what happened to the angels with the flaming swords guarding the entrance? Did they move to a gated community in Kansas City, perhaps?

5. Jesus visited the Americas after his resurrection

According to the Book of Mormon, after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended in the Middle East, he popped over to the Americas and visited an ancient civilization called the Nephites. He repeated much of the Sermon on the Mount, established churches, performed miracles, and hung out for a while. Although somehow there's no record of this, and Christianity, I guess, never really caught on over there.

This is one of the absolute core claims of Mormonism. The entire second half of the Book of Mormon revolves around it, and it would be an extraordinary claim even if we had a shred of archaeological evidence for the Nephites. But we don't. Not a single artifact, inscription, city ruin, weapon, or piece of DNA evidence has ever confirmed the existence of these people. The Smithsonian Institution has actually had to issue statements clarifying that they do not use the Book of Mormon as a scientific guide. They got so many inquiries that they had to put it in writing.

6. Native Americans descended from ancient Israelites

The Book of Mormon tells the story of families from ancient Israel who sailed to the Americas around 600 BCE and became two major civilizations: the Nephites, which we just talked about, and the Lamanites. For most of Mormon history, which albeit is very short, Native Americans were explicitly identified as Lamanites, direct descendants of these Israelite migrants. LDS missionary work among indigenous people was even called Lamanite missions.

There's just one problem. Genetics. DNA studies have overwhelmingly demonstrated that Native American populations descended primarily from Siberian and East Asian populations who migrated across the Bering land bridge thousands of years before the Book of Mormon timeline even begins. There is zero genetic evidence linking indigenous Native Americans to ancient Israelites.

Faced with this glaring problem, the church quietly changed the introduction of the Book of Mormon around 2007. Instead of saying that the principal ancestors of the American Indians were the Lamanites, they changed it to say that the Lamanites were "among" the ancestors of the American Indians. One tiny surgical edit to a foundational claim that the church had taught as gospel for over 170 years, and they hoped nobody would notice.

7. Humans can become gods

This one is huge. According to Mormon theology, faithful members who follow all of the ordinances and live righteously can eventually achieve exaltation, becoming gods themselves and ruling over their own worlds. This teaching comes straight from Joseph Smith, who taught that God himself was once a man who progressed to godhood. The idea is summarized in a famous couplet by fifth LDS president Lorenzo Snow: "As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be."

Mormons point to verses like Psalm 82:6, "Ye are gods," and Romans 8:17, "Heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ," to support this, though mainstream Christianity interprets these passages rather differently. The modern LDS church still teaches eternal progression, but leadership has become noticeably squeamish about the phrase "You get your own planet." But hey, at least I see why Mormonism is so popular now. You get to be a god and you get your own planet, so why not?

8. Secret temple handshakes are required to get into super heaven

If you want to reach the highest level of Mormon heaven, the celestial kingdom, attending church and being a good person isn't going to cut it. You need to go through the temple endowment ceremony where you learn specific signs, tokens, and handshakes that are supposedly required to pass by the angels guarding the pearly gates.

Now, these rituals bear a striking resemblance to Freemasonry, and that's not coincidence. Joseph Smith became a Mason in March 1842, and he introduced the temple endowment ceremony just seven weeks later. Many of the signs, grips, and penalties in the original endowment were nearly identical to Masonic rituals. The church has since modified some of the more controversial elements. In 1990, they removed the penalties involving symbolic throat slitting and disembowelment, but the core structure remains.

So to recap, the all-powerful creator of the universe who flung galaxies into existence and engineered the laws of physics requires you to learn a secret handshake in order to slip past the pearly gates. The same way you might expect to get into a middle school treehouse.

9. Dark skin was a divine curse

This one goes from just weird to genuinely harmful. The Book of Mormon explicitly states that God cursed rebellious groups with dark skin so that they would be loathsome to others. 2 Nephi 5:21 reads, "He had caused the cursing to come upon them. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God caused a skin of blackness to come upon them." Just wow!

For over a century, this theology was used to justify a ban on Black members holding the priesthood or participating in temple ordinances. Brigham Young doubled down on this, tying it to the curse of Cain and suggesting that Black people were less valiant in the pre-mortal war in heaven. These weren't fringe interpretations. They appeared in church manuals and official teachings well into the 1960s and '70s.

In 1978, the church finally reversed this priesthood ban, conveniently around the same time that they were facing mounting civil rights pressure and trying to expand into countries with predominantly non-white populations. Brazil, for instance, was building an LDS temple, and the ban was becoming an international embarrassment. A 2013 church essay officially disavowed the earlier racial explanations, calling them the products of their time. But the Book of Mormon verses, those are still in there, unedited.

10. Brigham Young taught that Adam was God

Brigham Young, the second prophet and president of the LDS church, repeatedly taught something known as the Adam-God doctrine. In an 1852 sermon, he declared that when our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden, he came with a celestial body. He is our father and our God.

This wasn't a one-off slip. Young preached this publicly for decades. Adam was God the Father. He came to Earth, helped create Eve, fathered humanity, and was the same being Mormons prayed to. The problem: this directly contradicts the rest of Mormon theology, the Bible, and the Book of Mormon. By the early 1900s, the church started pretending that it never happened. Modern LDS leaders called it a misunderstanding or a speculative teaching. It was never formally repudiated. It was just quietly buried, which is a recurrent pattern that you'll notice.

11. There are Quakers on the moon ...and the sun

Joseph Smith reportedly taught that the moon was inhabited by people about six feet tall, dressed like Quakers, who lived to be nearly a thousand years old. This was documented by early LDS figures like Oliver B. Huntington, who recorded it in his journal. And it didn't stop at the moon. Some early Mormon leaders took it a step further and suggested that the sun was also inhabited by advanced beings.

Now, to be fair, these ideas weren't unique to Mormonism. In the 19th century, speculation about life on other celestial bodies was surprisingly common. But most people updated their beliefs when, you know, we actually went to the moon and found it to be a lifeless rock covered in dust. The church, however, simply stopped talking about it. No retraction, no correction, just silence. Which again seems to be the LDS church's preferred method of doctrinal cleanup.

The pattern

There are countless others we could cover here. We haven't even touched on blood atonement, holy Mormon underwear, the claim the Bigfoot is Cane, or the Mormon church's stance on polygamous relationships that you're bound to people after you die. And it gets pretty crazy.

Here's one of the most wild things about this. Many of these teachings are still taught today. Others were quietly abandoned when science, genetics, civil rights, or basic human decency made them too embarrassing to maintain. And the church's strategy for dealing with the ones that they dropped is almost always the same. Don't acknowledge you were wrong. Just stop talking about it and hope that the next generation never finds out.

But that's the problem with religion in the information age. You can't just bury inconvenient teachings anymore. The internet remembers, courts remember, journal entries remember, and people remember, log it, and will continue to hold your feet to the fire.

It's not just Mormonism, either. Every religion builds its authority on the claim that its leader speaks for God. But when those leaders teach that the moon is full of six-foot Quakers, that dark skin is a divine punishment, and that Adam is secretly God, maybe it's worth asking: at what point should we stop giving these claims the benefit of the doubt?

A postscript on silencing critics

One more thing worth flagging. As I was finishing this piece, I saw that the Mormon church is actually suing a fellow content creator. If you're familiar with the YouTube channel Mormon Stories, John has been having Mormons and ex-Mormons on to share their stories and talk about the Mormon church. Oftentimes it gets the church a lot of negative publicity, simply because of the negative stuff that the church does. Alyssa Grenfell, an ex-Mormon, did an interview with John about how the church is suing him and the case they're filing in order to try to silence him.

The Mormon church is a multi-billion dollar organization with over 200 lawyers on its legal team, and it's trying to send a chilling effect through the content creator community, trying to silence anyone who shines a negative light on it. They've listed John as one of their number one enemies of the church.

What I'm hoping is that this backfires into a Streisand effect, where it gets more people watching, subscribing to, and supporting his work. Because the lesson here is the same as the lesson running through this entire list. The instinct to bury what's inconvenient, whether it's a doctrine or a critic, doesn't work the way it used to.

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