Good-faith lawsuit? LDS church in fight with podcaster over Mormon name

Church sues excommunicated member over Mormon Stories podcast but John Dehlin says name free for all to use

Trademark changes and copyright infringement disputes take many forms. Dunkin’ Donuts changed its name to Dunkin’ because Donuts did not suggest the vigorous, on-the-go attitude the coffee company wants to project.

But what happens when a church changes its name, but former adherents continue to use the original term in ways it may not like?

In April, the Church of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, filed a lawsuit against John Dehlin, an excommunicated sixth-generation member, to prevent him from calling his podcast Mormon Stories and branding it in ways that mimic copyrighted church branding with the “intent to capitalize on and increase confusion”.

The 200-year old church stopped using “Mormon” to describe itself or its members in 2019, when the church’s leader announced that the Lord had commanded it drop the title. Only the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or “the church” or “Church of Jesus Christ” would now be correct.

Then president Russell M Nelson told members that the “Lord has impressed upon my mind the importance of the name he has revealed for his church” and that continuing to use “Mormon” would be “a major victory for Satan”.

“We’re not changing names. We’re correcting a name,” Nelson added. “Some marketers change names hoping to be more successful – that’s not our point. We’re correcting an error that’s crept in over the ages.”

The nomenclature change, as any rebranding might, rippled through the organization. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as it was known since 1929, in downtown Salt Lake City, was renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. The songs remained the same. The church’s “I’m a Mormon” advertising campaign and the Mormon Channel were also changed.

But now the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is suing four podcasters, including Dehlin’s Mormon Stories, over continued use of the now-abandoned name, arguing that the church largely controls the word “Mormon” because it had long used the term and remains associated with it.

“The lawsuit is part is an extension of the church’s policies to emphasize the move away from the nicknames Mormon and Mormonism ,” said Patrick Mason at Claremont University, who specializes in the study of the Latter-day Saint movement. “The church leadership and membership really want to emphasize the church’s Christian bona fides, and the Church of Jesus and Latter-day Saints points to that in a way that Mormon and Mormonism does not.”

The issue, he says, speaks to “a perennial question of whether the church can be included within the broader Christian family and one that we saw litigated recently in the Department of Defense’s categorization of chaplains. So, this is a live issue for the church and its members. They feel it acutely and really want to emphasize that Jesus is at the heart of its practice.”

In the lawsuit, the church accused Dehlin and Mormon Stories of “intentionally and willfully” displaying copyright imagery, including after Dehlin agreed to alter the imagery, dropped the logo’s light rays and swapped the navy blue font used by the church for orange.

The church claims that the podcaster forced it to take legal action after Dehlin refused to “take the actions needed to sufficiently address the confusion”.

The timing of the church’s lawsuit is curious, Mason points out, because while Dehlin’s criticism of the church and the tone of his podcast has been a thorn in the side of the church, the name of the podcast had not been an overt concern.

“It makes sense within the broader context but why now and not five or eight years ago is curious,” he said. “The irony, as plenty of people have pointed out, is the church is litigating over the term Mormon during the same era that it doesn’t want to be associated with it.”

In a legal response last week, Dehlin, who has a history of criticizing the church, indicated that he and his organization were not backing down, and accused the church of weaponizing trademark and copyright laws to silence him and his podcast.

In a statement posted to the Mormon Stories website, the organization said its response “highlights the troubling inconsistency between the LDS church’s years-long effort to publicly distance itself from the term ‘Mormon’ while simultaneously urging the United States Trademark Office to renew its ‘Mormon’-styled trademark registrations”.

“The LDS church does not own the word ‘Mormon,’ and it should not be allowed to use intellectual property law to control how people discuss Mormon culture, history, doctrine, or lived experience,” said Dehlin. “This case raises important questions that extend well beyond [the] Mormon Stories podcast.”

The church is well-known for reaching for secular litigation against former members, while refraining from it to settle disputes with existing members.

Dehlin, a former graduate of Brigham Young University, was ex-communicated by church leaders in 2015 for disputing “the nature of our Heavenly Father and the divinity of Jesus Christ”, making statements that the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham were “fraudulent and works of fiction” and rejecting that the church was “the true church with power and authority from God”.

Dehlin has claimed his support for same-sex marriage and women’s equality in the church was also a factor in the church’s decision. The church disputes that claim, but a 2017 leak of internal church documents showed that Dehlin was on a church list of people and organizations that the church leaders considered to be “leading people away from the gospel”.

Others have claimed that the act of suing Dehlin and Mormon Stories is likely to draw more attention to the term “Mormon” that the church seeks to change than if it had stayed quiet. The term, Dehlin’s lengthy counter-claim contends, “belongs to the public – including the members of the over 400 different Mormon sects currently existing nationwide that trace their heritage back to the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith”.

He claims that “no single church owns the rights to the words Christian, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. Similarly, the LDS church’s actions raise serious first amendment concerns that impact more than Mormon Stories. Hundreds of organizations, churches, businesses, websites, podcasts, blogs, and commentators use the word ‘Mormon’ descriptively.”

The effort to shift away from “Mormon” or “Mormonism” is not new. It was always considered a slang term for the church, which was originally called the Church of Christ and only later the Church of Latter-day Saints.

Similar efforts to shift away from “Mormon” came in 1982, 2001 and 2011. At each, the Book of Mormon and the Mormon Trail remained effective. But the effort may be intensifying, in part because Mormon is also used to describe splinter or fundamentalist groups that practice polygamy.

“It’s an ongoing challenge for the church,” Mason says. “There are so many Netflix or Hulu and other kinds of shows about fundamentalist Mormons so the church really wants to distinguish itself and stand out from those other groups, who are called Mormon as well.

“It’s a little bit tricky and especially at a time when TV shows tend to gravitate to the salacious and scandalous aspects of Mormonism. But the church wants to define itself and one way to do that is to emphasize the full and accurate name.”