Fawn McKay Brodie (1915–1981) was a Mormon-born historian from Utah best known for writing No Man Knows My History in 1945, one of the first major biographies of Joseph Smith. Brodie came from a prominent LDS family, allowing her access to restricted and controversial primary sources about Smith’s life. Her book treated him as a charismatic and improvisational religious leader shaped by the culture of early nineteenth-century America. The work was enormously controversial within Mormonism and led to her excommunication from the LDS Church in 1946. In the 1990s, reading her book was grounds for formal religious discipline.
The title No Man Knows My History came from a remark by Smith himself. Brodie used the phrase ironically, positioning the book as an attempt to reconstruct the human, political and psychological dimensions of Smith’s life outside devotional mythology.
Brodie later wrote books on Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon and others. She married Bernard Brodie (1910–1978), a prominent Jewish-American military strategist from Chicago often associated with early nuclear deterrence theory and RAND-era Cold War strategy. Their marriage itself represented a significant departure from the expectations of elite Mormon social life at the time.
Hugh Nibley (1910–2005), a classics professor and Mormon apologist at Brigham Young University, wrote a famously dismissive 1946 response titled No, Ma’am, That’s Not History.* One of the twentieth century’s most influential defenders of Mormonism, Nibley wrote about apostasy in intensely personal terms, often treating ex-Mormons less as intellectual dissenters than as psychologically wounded or morally compromised figures.
Be kind, or else
After years of trying not to think too much about Fawn Brodie, Hugh Nibley and the emotional atmosphere surrounding Mormon female dissent, it becomes difficult not to notice how familiar the modern culture of “be kind” feels. I considered easing the flow of Mormon and ex-Mormon cultural dissection, but I’m on a roll and my growing disinterest in the liberal interpretation of “be kind” is hard to ignore at this point, especially when it increasingly seems to mean: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, I’m going to dox you and get you fired from your job until you learn kindness.”
As a cultural writer, if telling the truth occasionally requires being less “nice,” if it requires expressing thoughts and feelings the American left now classifies as “unkind thoughtcrime,” then I simply won’t participate in your increasingly strange social experiment-cum-authoritarianism. Sorry, not sorry.**
The eternal family as social operating system
It’s interesting that cultural critique has become so taboo at precisely the moment we finally possess the data and analytical tools to ask much deeper questions about how cultures actually function. We can now examine how specific but somewhat indescribable groups like Mormons or the LDS differ from other Christian cultures, how certain practices and social incentives tilt entire systems toward particular behaviors and conclusions, and how communities quietly reproduce values they rarely articulate directly.
One particularly fascinating input variable in Mormonism — what you could also call a “constant,” given the structural role it plays in the system — is the requirement that anyone hoping to ascend the cultural hierarchy, and the literal Heavenly hierarchy, exist within a stable marriage. This is not merely a social preference hovering in the background. The institution formally reinforces marriage itself through temple worthiness interviews and leadership structures that place enormous emphasis on marital status, domestic stability and family presentation.
“Families Are Forever” is not metaphorical branding. It is an enforced and materialistic theology. Once born and sealed into a lineage of parents, siblings, grandparents and dead relatives stretching backward indefinitely, you can never fully escape — ahem — I mean, you will never be alone. Ahem — I mean, they will always be “watching over you.”
The religious logic of never letting go
This creates many interesting cultural artifacts and one particularly interesting tension. When family is understood as eternal and community becomes the primary — and, ahem, rather materialistic — metric by which a “life well led” is measured, rejection itself can become impossible to understand. The men who run this religious machine are, in many cases, individuals who have probably not experienced meaningful rejection — romantically or otherwise — since high school. They married young, stayed embedded within the same social structure and continued accumulating spiritual, familial and social legitimacy simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, this tends to produce a worldview in which rejecting people feels not merely unpleasant, but the ultimate taboo — unless, of course, they smoke, drink alcohol, or commit some other dietary faux pas. The genuinely disturbing things are often hushed up and, somehow, considered worthy of redemption after lengthy repentance protocols.
This also helps explain why Mormonism, despite its reputation for conservatism, has produced such a strong liberal Democrat and LGBTQIA-affirming strain within the church and especially among educated ex-Mormons. In many ways, the progressive Mormon instinct is simply the theology of eternal belonging translated into therapeutic modern language. The conservatives may retain stricter doctrinal positions on sexuality and marriage, but the liberals arguably won the cultural and PR battle because the religion already contained a deeply embedded emotional logic that framed exclusion itself as suspect. “Families Are Forever” turns out to blend quite naturally with contemporary ideologies growing alongside social media and the surveillance state.
The problem is that assumed social permanence stabilizes hierarchy to a stifling degree. The person at the top of the family structure is rarely meaningfully challenged because the structure itself treats the family unit as spiritually fixed and morally sacred. Even neglectful or emotionally absent fathers can retain their elevated status indefinitely, while lower-ranking family members are expected to absorb disappointment and continue performing cohesion. In my own social strata, children were often treated as effectively independent the moment they turned eighteen — emotionally, financially and otherwise — yet the symbolic authority of the patriarch remained intact regardless of how much practical responsibility he had actually assumed.
Apply that same logic not only to family structures, but to romance. An earnest young Mormon man develops feelings and becomes convinced that, owing to certain tingling sensations in his loin, a girl is actually a sort of pre-authorized future family member. At that point, you begin arriving at a system where boundary confusion and stalking behavior can disguise themselves quite convincingly as a mission of mutual salvation.
Mormonism entered the internet age at exactly the moment American culture was shifting away from harsher forms of religious proselytizing and toward softer therapeutic language centered on belonging, kindness and emotional safety. The church adapted almost perfectly to the emerging logic of early internet and social media culture, marketing itself through images of stable families, suburban order, cheerful young couples and emotionally available community life. Long before lifestyle branding became the dominant language of the internet, Mormonism already understood how to sell belonging.
Women get bouncers and stipends
Women in Mormonism occupy a more complicated position than the outside caricature allows. At the upper levels of what you might call “High Mormonism” — parallel to High Anglicanism — the atmosphere can resemble a Jane Austen adaptation filtered through suburban America and venture capital. Marriage is not merely romantic or religious. It’s financial, dynastic and infrastructural.
Old Mormon families operate through interlocking networks of capital, reputation and institutional influence, with certain surnames carrying weight across Utah business, politics, philanthropy and real estate. Salt Lake City is dotted with the naming rights of Mormon dynasties — the Eccles family being one example — and social legitimacy circulates through marriage, kinship and church proximity in ways outsiders often underestimate.
Within this structure, women are protected in exchange for performing the feminine role the system rewards: attractiveness, likability, fertility, emotional management and social cohesion. The rewards can be substantial. Houses appear. Investments materialize around marriages and children. Women receive status, childcare support, community infrastructure and a form of soft social security through the family network itself.
The result is that many wealthy liberal Mormon women move through life encountering little disagreement or confrontation. Open conflict threatens the emotional atmosphere, and the emotional atmosphere is one of the religion’s primary products. So the “edgy” conversations remain within upper-middle-class Mormon consensus: why single women in their thirties with cats are bleak but somehow validating, why Satan is destroying America through drugs and IPAs, and other manageable anxieties that provide smugness and don’t disrupt the “good vibes.”
Eternal families, eternal networks
The hierarchy thus produced is not merely religious but informational. A culture built around eternal family structures, reputational management and tightly interdependent community life develops a natural interest in surveillance, record-keeping and systems of mutual observation. Mormonism has always been unusually administrative in this regard: genealogies meticulously tracked, relationships formalized, membership monitored and social standing woven directly into both earthly and Heavenly legitimacy. In a system where family cohesion and public morality function as forms of spiritual capital, visibility itself becomes culturally important.
Part of what makes Utah culturally fascinating, then, is how naturally this worldview intersected with the rise of networked computing and early internet infrastructure. The University of Utah played a foundational role in ARPANET-era computing research, while old Mormon family networks became deeply embedded in banking, telecommunications, software and institutional infrastructure throughout the American West. The same culture that emphasized interlocking families, centralized records and coordinated community management also proved unusually comfortable building systems organized around information flow, visibility and long-term institutional continuity.
Once you notice the overlap, the whole thing begins to feel less accidental. A religion organized around eternal connection, hierarchical networks and permanent social legibility entered the internet age unusually well prepared for it. Many of the same families and institutional structures that shaped Utah’s religious and financial culture also helped shape parts of the software and technological infrastructure underlying the modern West.
The hierarchy, in other words, reproduced itself through new mediums without fundamentally changing its underlying logic: the pervasive, faintly passive-aggressive conviction that a sufficiently regimented family structure can produce a kind of surveillance-based Heaven on Earth.
Escaping the bitter ex-Mormon stereotype with total disinterest
Brodie’s biography may have fueled speculation — and eventual confirmation — surrounding Joseph Smith and polygamy, but there were many more destabilizing or politically explosive episodes in early Mormonism she could have explored but didn’t. As much as there remains outrage surrounding her book about Smith, to me it still reads as celebratory, not unlike literary critic Harold Bloom (1930–2019) of Yale calling Smith a “literary genius” in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992). At the same time, the backlash against Fawn Brodie also helped produce a recognizable anti-progressive or liberal Mormon woman archetype: intellectually questioning, culturally sophisticated, suspicious of patriarchal authority, but still orbiting the Church and defining herself in relation to it. For years, that strain has attracted Mormon and ex-Mormon women trying to decode the culture they were raised inside.
The anti-feminist Mormon woman archetype created by the bickering between Brodie and Nibley has its uses. Maybe the gradual introduction and eventual “acceptance” of polygamy’s modern descendants (polyamory and legal sex work) was part of a planned and now coordinated effort to steer a certain valuable American demographic toward specific beliefs and behaviors, through aligned interests, institutional incentives, media narratives and social pressures that move in the same direction while presenting themselves as organic cultural evolution.
Hey — the Trump camp converted me into someone who accepts “fake news,” and I will probably never go back to my view of American culture or media again, much like Mormonism. After years of watching so many highly contrived narratives synchronize across journalism, academia, corporations, politics and social media, I no longer trust that social change emerges naturally or independently. All narratives start to look managed and negotiated between interests behind the scenes, including the story of my once-hero Fawn Brodie.
Another question remains: Why are there no surviving photographs of “Joseph Smith,” supposedly a living prophet who existed right alongside the emergence of photography? Why does his story resemble so many other prophetic archetypes to a T? And how exactly does Mormonism connect to the nineteenth-century Freemasonry interest in constructing an indigenous religion for America?
* Cringe…
** I said cum in a cultural critique essay… lol.
